Five PUP members face interrogation by Coalition
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, May 9, 2006
Five members of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity will face an all-day interrogation Wednesday in Chicago.
The event is scheduled from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in the Ramada Plaza Hotel near O’Hare Airport. Three members of the board of directors of the Presbyterian Coalition will question task force members Gary Demarest, Mark Achtemeier, John “Mike” Loudon, Barbara Wheeler and Joe Coalter.
The Coalition has already issued its judgment on the task force report to the 217th General Assembly. It called the report a “huge bomb of surprise” and said recommendations 5 and 6 in the task force’s proposed authoritative interpretation were “not a viable means of producing their goal of unity. It can’t. Those who proposed, established, and voted to keep the ordination standards in the constitution are now uniformly and publicly opposed to allowing those standards to be made nonessential.”
The Coalition also has promoted a statement written by Presbyterian renewal leaders, who declared that the task force report, “Taken as a whole, … constitutes a blend of truth and error that, if adopted, will undermine the church’s purity and exacerbate the denomination’s disunity. Indeed, it will promote schism by permitting the disregard of clear standards of Scripture and the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA).” Nearly 900 Presbyterians have endorsed that statement.
Critics of the task force’s proposed authoritative interpretation say it would allow ordaining bodies – sessions and presbyteries – the right to decide on their own whether the denomination’s prohibition against ordaining homosexuals is an “essential” of the Reformed faith.
The task force’s report has generated a flurry of overtures to the 217th General Assembly, which will meet in Birmingham on June 15-22. Most oppose the task force’s recommendations.