Two congregations emphasize their defiance of church law
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, August 6, 2002
The leaders of two Presbyterian congregations have written open letters declaring that they have not and will not abide by the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA).
“I have participated in the ordination of elders and deacons who are self-affirming, ‘unrepentant practicing homosexuals,’ and I have officiated and condoned worship celebrations of same-sex unions that are, in every important respect, Christian marriages,” A. Stephen Van Kuiken, pastor of Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, said in his letter.
Leaders of South Presbyterian Church in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., followed up with a letter supporting Van Kuiken and the Mount Auburn leaders.
“On March 8, 1992, we ordained elders and deacons including, for the first time, those who were self affirming, unrepentant, practicing homosexuals,” the South Church letter said. “There have been other ordinations since that time, and our boards currently include such individuals. Joseph Gilmore, Susan De George, and our clerk of session presided on these occasions for worship. Since 1991, our ministers have conducted services of worship joining lesbian and gay persons in same-sex unions, which are, in every important respect, marriages: two hearts declaring themselves home to each other, before God, with gratitude.”
Both letters claimed that the congregations’ leaders were not violating the Constitution because they were exercising their constitutional right of “conscience.”
The declarations by Mount Auburn and South Church have become increasingly bold as leaders of the denomination have declined to enforce the constitution. Despite a constitutional requirement that officers of the church confine their sexual activity to marriage (between a man and a woman only), a provision that was upheld by a 3-1 vote of presbyteries, nearly two dozen congregations nationally have declared that they will ignore the standard.
By saying that union ceremonies for homosexuals are “in every important respect, Christian marriages,” Mount Auburn and South Church also are defying the finding of the highest court in the denomination, the General Assembly’s Permanent Judicial Commission.
In a case that involved the Dobbs Ferry congregation, the court said sessions were permitted to authorize services to bless same-sex couples. But the court said that those services must not be considered marriages or include elements that are similar to marriages. Furthermore, ministers who bless same-sex unions, the court said, must not endorse sexual relations between same-gender couples.
During the trial of the South Church case, Joseph Gilmore, the pastor, declined to say that the same-sex unions he had conducted were the equivalent of marriage. But in the South Church letter that he signed recently, he is unabashed in declaring his intention to continue performing such “marriages.”
In a disciplinary action filed against him by Paul Jensen, a Virginia lawyer, Van Kuiken was accused of violating his ordination vows and renouncing the jurisdiction of the PCUSA. “Quite the contrary, my actions are in obedience to God,” he said. “I am a prisoner of conscience on this matter.”
He said he accepted the call to Mount Auburn because it is an inclusive congregation, “a lively group full of imagination, love and intelligent, honest searching for God. We have many precious children who have two mommies, two daddies or, like my family, one of each. We are bound together in love and ministry, and as their pastor, I cannot and will not forsake them.”
He said the continued existence of G-6.0106b – the ordination standard in The Book of Order – “constitutes an injustice. Its very presence is an oppressive and intolerable weight upon many. The persistent threat of judicial action intimidates many progressives, gay and straight alike, into varying degrees of silence and secrecy.”
Van Kuiken expressed dismay that the 214th General Assembly in June, to which he was a commissioner, did not call for yet another referendum on G-6.0106b and that the General Assembly court said same-sex unions could not be considered the equivalent of marriage. “It is simply cruel to offer celebration of a loving, caring and committed same-sex relationship but to prohibit sexual intimacy in that relationship,” he said.
The South Church letter called the ordination standard “barbed wire around the hospitality of God. … Three decades of corporate insistence that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) folk are somehow less of the human mystery than non-LGBT persons has produced enough deception and injury within the body of Christ.”
The letter also said, “It is our position that the refusal to follow G6.0106b and allow the inclusion of LGBT folk in the full work and worship of our church can be debated no more than one’s God-given right to breathe. The courts and debates have been used by too many to harbor ongoing pain, while maintaining the status quo. We adamantly refuse to be complicit in such a strategy.”