For retiring Detterick, evangelism has been his unheeded message
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, April 18, 2006
John Detterick says he plans to play golf – lots of it. Who can blame him for wanting to hit something?
John DetterickFor nearly eight years, Detterick has calmly – often with a winsome smile – served as the executive director of the General Assembly Council. It’s a well-paid job – salary and benefits are more than $200,000 – but it’s not cushy.
Nonetheless, he has kept his poise through withering criticism, much of it undeservedly directed at him, and has maintained an air of peacefulness despite denominational turmoil. At times, he was stern, and even fired some high-level employees, but he didn’t publicly display bitterness when some council members and Louisville employees second-guessed his decisions and angrily criticized them.
Time for his successor
On May 23, the council’s Executive Director Search Committee will announce its nominee for his successor. If the council agrees, the nomination will go to the 217th General Assembly, which will decide who sits at his desk the next four years. After clearing out his office and offering some suggestions to his successor, Detterick and his wife will be off to retirement in New Mexico.
“I’m going to learn how to play golf,” he told The Layman Online with a grin – of relief? Fore!
“My heart sang when you accepted this job,” former GAC member Alfred Warren, a retired General Motors executive, told Detterick soon after the 1998 General Assembly elected him to his first four-year term. Detterick was re-elected in 2002.
As a businessman, Warren was among those impressed by Detterick’s credentials, including five years as president of the Board of Pensions of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Before he brought his skills to serve the denomination, Detterick compiled a big-time record in banking and finance, including a stint as president of the Sears Consumer Financial Corp., the administrative umbrella for the Sears banks, Sears Mortgage Corp., Sears Consumer Finance and the Discover Card. In the secular world, he was highly respected.
Roots in evangelical church
Detterick had other strengths, including his membership in Wayne Presbyterian Church in Wayne, Pa., where he served as elder. Before, during and since his time at Wayne, the congregation, now 2,300 members, grew steadily. Giving has been strong. Wayne has been a church noted for commitment to evangelism and its father-son pastoral leadership: John T. Galloway Sr. from 1948-73 and John T. Galloway from 1993.
Thus, it should have come as no surprise that Detterick repeatedly urged the General Assembly Council to make evangelism its priority. On paper, he succeeded, but the real commitment was not much thicker than that paper. While he has served as the council’s executive, resources were spread widely. Issues like peacemaking, justice, ecumenical work, pacificism, political activism, interfaith dialogue, trying to achieve “unity in diversity,” gay rights and abortion support drained energy and dollars. They also widened the divisions in the church.
Detterick surely discovered that the PCUSA was not going in the same direction as his former congregation.
Membership, money losses
During Detterick’s tenure, the denomination’s membership will have decreased by 375,000 if projected losses of 65,000 for 2005 and 85,000 in 2006 are on target. There have already been two major cuts in staff at Louisville, Ky., the headquarters for the denomination, and Detterick and the staff are preparing the paperwork for a third cutback stemming from a projected $9.1-million revenue decline for 2006-2008. During its April 26-29 meeting in Louisville, the council will approve a budget for that stretch to be presented to the 217th General Assembly.
“My biggest job,” Detterick said when he was nominated for his first term, “may be to help the GAC decide what issues not to attack. We can’t handle them all. The GAC will have to determine what should be at the top of the list. Then we need to do those things well.”
He was prophetic. The council couldn’t “handle them all” but tried. There were high-profile stumbles. The council could have squelched the flap in 2000 over the Peacemaking Conference in which a Presbyterian minister named Dirk Ficca, the keynote speaker, asked the rhetorical question, “What’s the big deal about Jesus?” The council added to the controversy by adopting a statement that Jesus was Lord and Savior “for us” – well below the traditional standard of Reformed Christianity that views Jesus as King of kings and Lord of lords – fully sovereign as “the way, the life and the truth.”
That cost money and bickering for two years before the General Assembly proscribed what the council failed to do: acknowledge that Jesus is Lord and Savior for all.
Ruckus over NCC bailout
Another ruckus occurred in 2002 when the National Council of Churches – virtually doomed financially – came begging for life support. The council anted up, and while Detterick never publicly criticized the ecumenical body that gets little support from most of its own member denominations, it was obvious that he wasn’t a big fan of the bailout. Nonetheless, he caught much of the flak from evangelicals over the bailout.
What he said then was typical Detterick diplomacy: “I can make a general statement about the NCC,” he said. “The NCC has parts, namely Church World Service [a humanitarian aid and relief agency], that are important to the church. Church World Service does many good things. There are other parts of the NCC that have struggled and aren’t working as well as they should.”
Anyone reading that statement would have realized the irony. Church World Service, which was under the umbrella of the National Council of Churches, raised its budget independently through community events called CROP Walks. The NCC issue had little to do with the relief agency, except to siphon off money for its administrative costs. The NCC itself squandered revenue, drained its reserves and had questionable accounting practices, according to an outside audit.
But, Detterick, being a consummate team player, followed the lead of Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick, the PCUSA’s top booster of the NCC and the World Council of Churches, and never criticized the grandstanding of Robert Edgar, the NCC president, or Edgar’s baiting comments suggesting that the NCC would invest some of its money – when it regained health – in the Presbyterian Foundation. No such thing has happened.
The $500,000 bailout
The NCC wrangled $500,000 out of the denomination – just for the bailout. That was on top of more than $2 million the PCUSA provided that same year in money and in-kind services, including paying for employees to work for the NCC. Quietly, Detterick let it be known that the annual General Assembly Council allocation to the NCC went down slightly in later years.
But so did other things. In 2002, with the PCUSA facing another in a series of financial shortfalls, missionary assignments – at one time a high point in the denomination’s worldwide evangelism – were cut by 10 percent. Generally, other programs were cut by the same percentage. Detterick, again emphasizing evangelism, mildly expressed his dissatisfaction with the across-the-board reductions.
Back in 1998, Warren, the businessman member of the GAC, gave Detterick some advice. He urged the new executive to resist being drawn away from his primary duty of managing the Presbyterian Center.
“One of the problems with the former executive was that he did not see the staff enough to let them know that they would be held accountable for their actions,” said Warren.
Travel and issues
Detterick followed that advice for a couple of years, but later embarked on extensive travel with Kirkpatrick to visit presbyteries and synods, travel abroad, and to make personal calls in the $40-million campaign for missions and new church development, which, after four years, has spent more money than it has raised in cash contributions.
He also co-signed letters and papers with Kirkpatrick and General Assembly moderators that his critics objected to. One was a Kirkpatrick-Detterick statement on President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
“The admitted infidelity and lying by President Clinton are not only a violation of his marriage vows and the confidence of friends and colleagues,” they sternly said together. “They are also a violation of that sacred trust with which the nation’s highest office is endowed, and he must be held accountable for his actions.”
But the letter writers could not leave it there. Kirkpatrick and Detterick added, “Our particular faith tradition suggests that public officials who fail to tend the ‘widows and orphans’ under their care are under at least as great condemnation as any who err in their personal behavior.” Thus, they portrayed Clinton’s infidelity as less serious by suggesting that there may be presidents who sin more egregiously. Some readers of their statement probably got the hint: Sexual permissiveness is nothing compared to cutting back the rising costs of welfare programs. Nathan wasn’t so generous with Israel’s King David after his affair with Bathsheba.
Repairing the damage
On another occasion, though, Detterick tried to repair the damage caused by the Presbyterian News Service, which decided not to take note of the death of Dr. Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ. Bright’s worldwide evangelical ministry had resulted in thousands of conversions around the world, particularly in Africa.
The news service declined to run a story about Bright, contending that he wasn’t a Presbyterian – but he was, in fact, a member of First Presbyterian Church in Orlando, Fla.
“Our prayers and sympathy are with the Bright family,” Detterick said in his statement. “We ask for God’s tender mercy upon them. And, we thank God for the ministry that Dr. Bill Bright founded and his years of service to the Church. Through his love and enthusiasm for Christ, Bill Bright brought millions of people to Christianity. I hope that Dr. Bright’s constant refrain of ‘I’m rejoicing’ will echo in our hearts and remind us that God is good, all the time.”
In a denomination that spawned a small women’s campus program called the National Network of Presbyterian College Women – an organization that once promoted Sophia worship and lesbianism – Detterick alone of Presbyterian leaders signed the statement honoring Bright, the founder of the largest campus Christian ministry in the world.
Numbers became important
Before he took the job in 1998, Detterick told the members of the search committee that, “Assessing the health of the Presbyterian Church (USA) is not about number of members, or churches, or size of budgets. It is about how well we proclaim the good news and feed the poor.”
However, at the 215th General Assembly (2003), Detterick acknowledged that numbers do count. The theme of that assembly was “A House of Prayer for All People.” Detterick injected a note of reality: “I suspect we all share a dream of the Presbyterian Church becoming a house of prayer for all peoples. … Unfortunately, we are becoming a house of prayer for fewer people.”
“What’s going on? What’s God up to?” asked Detterick. And then he returned to his message. “Church growth is an indicator of how well we share the gospel,” he told the commissioners. “Let’s all just be about growing the church, and see where God takes us.”
Detterick, often seeming like the odd man out, kept telling the old mainline PCUSA that its lifeblood was the good news of Christ – even if that fell on deaf ears.