Guest commentary by Don Meeks, The Presbyterian Outlook.
Editor’s note: This piece is written in response to a recent guest commentary column by Steve Wilkins. You can read that piece here.
Steve, my heart aches too. Yet in the aching I have learned to rejoice.
My heart ached when I left my theologically diverse seminary community. Gone were the shared meals and engaging conversations (and pick-up basketball games!) with Southern Baptist and United Methodist and PC(USA) and PCA and Assemblies of God colleagues. Yet even as my heart ached in our parting, I rejoiced knowing we were united by a larger commitment to proclaim and serve Jesus Christ in our various callings and denominations.
My heart ached when I left the church of my first call in small-town Kansas after only three short years. This was the church that had taken a risk and called me, fresh out of seminary. They laid hands and welcomed me into ordained ministry. They put up with my BIG ideas and fumbling pastoral calls and way-too-long sermons. They loved me, and my young family, so very well. When the call to leave came, our hearts ached together. Not everyone understood why we were leaving, but they trusted us and loved us by letting us go. But even with aching hearts, we celebrated together what God had done in and through and among us. With an aching heart, I rejoiced as they sent me to Colorado to love and serve a big church with a small-town heart.
My heart ached again when after five years of fruitful ministry I was called away from that big Colorado church to the church I now serve in suburban northern Virginia. A rich season of ministry had bonded me deeply with the staff and members as we labored for Christ and weathered the challenges of a building project. Again, not everyone understood why we were leaving, but they trusted us and loved us by letting us go. My going away party was staged as a mock “funeral” with staff, friends and family in attendance. This funeral served as a witness to their appreciation and to the reality that our departure was a kind of death. We all knew our relationships would never quite be the same once we left. But with an aching heart I rejoiced as they sent me back home to Virginia with vision and passion and love.
My pastoral heart has ached over those who have left our congregation because we were not conservative enough … or because we were too conservative. Even in this I have learned to rejoice, trusting that God sees beyond my vision for someone else’s life. That the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church” is bigger than any congregation or denomination.
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Even if the PCUSA as an institution or corporate entity does absolutely nothing, even if Portland is another exercise of denial of reality and institutional absurdity. The OGA-177 Presbytery-15 Synod, 10 theological seminary matrix will collapse due to its own bulk, heft and institutional rot. That is demographic destiny. It is unsustainable in any economic reality the PCUSA chooses, or not.
What happens next I feel will be a slightly altered or modified structure. Far less top-heavy, far less costly and maybe with a different take on matters of property in trust or per capita. Who knows.
On the other hand this is the PCUSA. There are entrenched vested interests, ruling elites, tribal entities that have done quite well and thrived under the current system or model, and they will fight to the last tooth to preserve the old or current system.
For those who do love and care for the PCUSA for whatever reason this is indeed a very troubled time. And yes it will drive some to tears. But here is where the real tears start. The Board of Pensions of the PCUSA does not exist on an island or a place of never-never land, totally immune from the slow motion collapse of the denomination. In the world of pensions, annuities, insurance, actuarial algorithms run for 100 years of risk and reward planning. At some point the collective bills of clergy who served in a 4 million denomination become due in one of 500K. Number and math do have consequences, and that is when the real tears start.
The remnants harbor the illusion, “We’re in the money.” The law of economics requires income to maintain.
People lack the will to sustain the moral demands of the Lord, Jesus Christ, the Father who sent him, even the fundamental tenets given Moses by God, The Ten Commandments.
An issue that has become one of the defining questions of the day is, “At what point are people entitled to decide which rules they are going to follow and which they intend to either ignore or modify to fit their own judgement?”