Moderator continues attack on Confessing Church, Lay Committee
Updated, November 1, 2001
Jack Rogers, moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), has accused the Presbyterian Lay Committee of lying, commandeering the Confessing Church Movement within the denomination and seeking to “take over” the denomination.
“I think there are grounds for charges being filed” against the leaders of the Lay Committee, Rogers said. He did not indicate whether he preferred that the charges be brought individually or against the 24-member board of Presbyterian elders, men and women, from across the country.
“I think there is going to come a moment of reckoning because the Presbyterian Lay Committee has political designs,” he said.
Rogers told the audience in the Presbytery of Salem in North Carolina on Oct. 22 that The Layman “lied” in a July editorial when it declared that some actions of the 2001 General Assembly were apostate because those actions abandoned traditional Christian beliefs.
“The claim that we did not confess our faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is also a lie,” Rogers added. “I had that bunch on their feet at least six times doing it.”
Several times during the 2001 General Assembly, Rogers led commissioners in recitations from The Book of Confessions – but not in conjunction with a discussion of issues or votes when commissioners failed to affirm that Jesus Christ alone is Lord and Savior for the world or when they voted to ask presbyteries to delete all standards of sexual behavior from the denomination’s constitution, which could allow the ordination of self-affirming, practicing adulters and homosexuals.
‘War on the Presbyterian Church’
Rogers claimed that Robert L. Howard of Wichita, Kan., chairman of the board of the Presbyterian Lay Committee, had declared “war on the Presbyterian Church.”
Rogers was in the audience when Howard, who is a member of the board of the Presbyterian Coalition, made a presentation during the final day of the Coalition’s Oct. 1-3 Gathering VI at First Presbyterian Church in Orlando, Fla.
He said Howard told the crowd that, “We’re going to take over and radically downsize the administration” of the PCUSA. “We’re going to urge congregations – he was urging congregations – to withhold both per capita and mission funds and said that any congregations that did not agree with what he called Biblical ordination standards would be allowed to leave with their property or they would be disciplined.”
“Now that’s a political program and nobody said a peep,” Rogers charged. “The Layman’s got a lot of money. They’ve got a lot of power. They have a medium and so they are controlling the direction.”
Rogers is challenged
During a discussion that followed the moderator’s presentation, a minister who served as a commissioner to General Assembly challenged Rogers’ assessment of Howard’s presentation and his characterization of the Confessing Church Movement.
“We can all evaluate something differently,” Rogers answered.
He said the church and pastors “that get into that [the Confessing Church Movement] in a kind of naïve way, thinking this is just a way of stating our faith, do not understand the political ramifications of this, that this is heading towards a massive breakup of the Presbyterian Church as we know it today.”
The moderator also was asked why he continues to issue blistering attacks against the Confessing Church Movement and the Presbyterian Lay Committee, but never criticizes church liberals who call for open defiance of the denomination’s ordination standards.
“I find troubling your silence with regard to the More Light Churches who are not only saying we’re going to defy the constitution but also are sending letters out nationwide urging churches to defy the constitution on ordination standards,” another minister told Rogers.
“I wasn’t even aware of the letters,” Rogers said.
But he said he was familiar with the question. “Someone said to me, ‘Why aren’t you criticizing people on the left as much as you criticize people on the right?’ I suppose, humanly speaking, one reason is that people on the left aren’t doing anything mean to me. People on the right certainly are.”
Rogers, who has publicly proposed that the church should provide gay couples the “moral equivalent of marriage,” has been widely applauded by the More Light Update, a publication of the denomination’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered lobby; and by The Gay Blade, a newspaper distributed among homosexuals in Washington, D.C.
View has changed
Throughout his speech, Rogers repeatedly pictured himself as being in the center of the church. He even denied ever having stated an opinion on whether the denomination should ordain self-affirming, practicing adulterers and homosexuals.
Until recently, Rogers was a member of the board of advisors of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, an organization whose leaders have publicly stated that the Network’s sole purpose is to remove G-6.0106b – the “fidelity/chastity” ordination standard – from the Book of Order.
He also has asserted several times that he changed his views on ordination of gays several years ago when he concluded that the Bible had not said what he thought it said.
Barmen parallel denounced
Rogers, who has written a book on Presbyterian creeds, bitterly denounced those who cite the Theological Declaration of Barmen as justification for the Confessing Church Movement. He said the situation and times are altogether different from Nazi Germany.
“I am deeply offended by the idea that anyone would compare the present state of the Presbyterian Church to the German Evangelical Church in the 1930s,” Rogers said. He cited Hitler’s takeover of the church, appointment of an atheist as an administrator and a clause that excommunicated anyone with Jewish blood.
Rogers challenged on Barmen history
But after a person in the audience challenged Rogers on the history of Barmen – asserting that it was a declaration for the church to remain faithful to Jesus and not culture or other lords – Rogers grudgingly admitted that there were parallels to today. Even so, he asserted, the situation in the PCUSA is not nearly so serious as it was in Nazi Germany.
“To suggest that the state of the Presbyterian Church now is like the church in Germany in the 1930s is so exaggerated as to be bearing false witness,” he said.
He defended himself in response to a Presbyterian News Service report that first said he wanted the Office of the General Assembly to form a committee of former moderators “to prevent churches from joining the Confessing Churches.”
Instead, he said he wanted the moderators to “talk with churches that are thinking about leaving the denomination, to talk with them about what they would lose and the rich resources of the denomination.”
Rogers said he does not object to the three tenets of the Confessing Church Movement – that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior for the world, that Scripture is authoritative for life and faith and that God’s holiness standards should be the rule today.
“I think most people in most Presbyterian churches believe that. They certainly believe in the substance of those three propositions. What I don’t believe in is the politics that are getting attached to it – namely, that these three statements are becoming the criteria by which we hire and fire people in the Presbyterian Church.
“I think a lot of pastors are either unaware of or are just not paying attention to the political undertones of that. They just want to say good things.”