Atlanta minister joins race for GA moderator
The Layman Online, March 29, 2006
The Rev. Joan S. Gray, a member of the Greater Atlanta Presbytery and a former member of the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission, has become the fourth candidate for moderator of the 217th General Assembly.
Gray, who was nominated by the presbytery after it elected her a commissioner to the General Assembly, says she was urged by her presbytery executive to run for the office.
“To tell you the truth, the idea never entered my mind before that,” she told The Layman Online. “I was reluctant. I didn’t see myself as a moderator.” But after prayer and discernment, she said she concluded, “It’s not about me. It’s about my sense of call.”
Gray was ordained in 1978. Until recent years, when she began to accept calls only to congregations needing interim pastors, she had served congregations in the Presbyterian Church US as associate minister and pastor.
She became a member of the PCUS General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission and remained on that body after the PCUS reunited in 1983 with the United Presbyterian Church (USA) to form the Presbyterian Church (USA). At one point, she served as the moderator of the Permanent Judicial Commission.
Gray is the fourth candidate for moderator. She joins the Rev. Kerry Carson, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Conrad, Iowa; the Rev. Tim Halvorson, of Faith Presbyterian Church in Cape Coral, Fla.; and the Rev. Deborah Block, pastor of Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Milwaukee, Wisc.
Carson is an evangelical and pastor of a Confessing Church; Halvorson describes himself as a centrist; and Block, a former co-moderator of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, has been among the leaders of Presbyterians who work to repeal the denomination’s prohibition on ordaining practicing homosexuals.
Gray didn’t place herself in any given category. She said she needed a few days to prepare for The Layman Online her thoughts about how she would serve as moderator.
A graduate of Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga., Gray is the co-author of a book titled Presbyterian Polity for Officers. Gray served on the Provisional Constitutional Committee that devised the PCUSA’s constitution.
She has taught courses at Columbia, Johnson C. Smith Seminary and Princeton Theological Seminary. She is a former moderator of the Greater Atlanta Presbytery.
Gray’s husband, Bill Gray, is a lawyer, a Presbyterian elder and a member of North Avenue Presbyterian Church in Atlanta.
She says her interests include walking “for exercise and to keep in touch with nature;” reading two newspapers, devotional material and the Bible “nearly every day;” cooking and travel.
The presbytery’s endorsement of her candidacy described her as “a healing leader whose desires and abilities would allow the church to clearly hear other leaders and would help to point the church into a spiritual renewal that would allow the church, with the help of God, to become its best self.”