Evangelical scholar named to writing team on families paper
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, September 26, 2003
Alan Wisdom, a soft-spoken scholar who has been critical of numerous studies and actions of the Presbyterian Church (USA), has been given a seat at the table to be part of the writing team that is revising a controversial PCUSA paper on families in America.
Alan WisdomNile Harper, chairman of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy and a retired minister who resides in Ann Arbor, Mich., invited Wisdom to join the writing team and Wisdom accepted the invitation during ACSWP’s meeting in Louisville on Sept. 23-24.
Wisdom, a research analyst for the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C., accepted the invitation.
The institute describes itself as “an ecumenical alliance of U.S. Christians working to reform their churches’ social witness, in accord with Biblical and historic Christian teachings, thereby contributing to the renewal of democratic society at home and abroad.” In its mission statement, the institute says it is “founded upon a recognition of the lordship of Christ over all of life. Our work is undergirded by Biblical faith and fidelity to the ancient ecumenical creeds of the Church.”
Wisdom, who is also director of Presbyterian Action, a subgroup of the institute, has already played a key role in persuading the 215th General Assembly to reject ACSWP’s document – titled “Living Faithfully: Families in Transition”– and call for a revision.
Before the 215th General Assembly met in May, Wisdom wrote a comprehensive criticism of “Living Faithfully,” and he was one of the witnesses who called for a revision of the document when he testified before an assembly committee.
He also helped write an alternative proposal, which became the committee’s majority proposal. In stark contrast to “Living Faithfully,” the majority report extolled Christian values in marriage and families and declared, “Christian families have the responsibility of teaching and practicing the beliefs and values that exhibit faithfulness to the God revealed in Jesus Christ in whatever culture they reside.”
The General Assembly did not approve either the ACSWP paper or the majority report. Instead, it referred both back to ACSWP “for further work to strengthen the policy statement. …” Furthermore, it directed ACSWP to get theological help from the denomination’s Office of Worship and Theology.
During the meeting in Louisville, Wisdom repeatedly noted that there are sharp differences of opinion among the members of ACSWP and its writing team about what direction the family report should take. But he offered hope that the paper might be able to accommodate both sides.
“I heard a bottom-line side from each side,” Wisdom said. ” I think it may be possible to accommodate these. From one side, the church recognizes there are multiple family forms. I also heard the bottom-line concern that all families be welcomed, none being second-class citizens. From the other side, there is a desire to affirm Scriptural teachings on marriage and parenthood and a desire not to convey moral approval on sexual relationships outside marriage. I think it’s possible to do all four.”
C. Eric Mount Jr., a professor of religion and theology at Centre College in Danville, Ky., also said there were bottom lines for both sides, but he did not know whether they would find common ground.
“What are the bottom lines of these two sides?” he asked. “On the one side, there is a concern that in our effort to uphold marriage, that Christianity itself has been one of the problems. It’s not true that if you seen one covenant you’ve seen them all. We need to be critical of what’s happening in Christendom. We have to be more discerning and nuanced.
“On the other side, this report poses for some people a time when the line has to be drawn about gays and lesbians. It’s a matter of saying we must affirm again that it is sinful for two people of the same sex to be sexually intimate. I don’t know whether there is any way to find common ground on this issue.”
Mount also gave his assessment of why the General Assembly called on ACSWP to revise its paper. “It seemed to me that when people [General Assembly commissioners] saw that the majority report was going to pass, they moved to send both papers back to ACSWP. What I heard is that ‘We didn’t get the whole report. We feel like we’re voting on something that we’re not all that familiar with.’ If the assembly as a whole had been well informed about the report, it might have been passed.”
The ACSWP task force on the families project has held one other meeting since the 215th General Assembly, and Wisdom was among a number of people who spoke at that meeting.
Also speaking against the paper was the Rev. Marjorie Working, a commissioner from the Santa Barbara Presbytery who was the leader for the majority report that Wisdom helped to draft. Working also attended the September 23-24 meeting in Louisville and made a number of statements urging the task force to emphasize Biblical faith in its revised report.
During the General Assembly, Working expressed her astonishment at the way that Gloria Albrect, the task force’s consultant on the families project, had answered a question during a hearing by the assembly’s National Issues Committee. Albrect, asked how the ACSWP paper advanced the kingdom of God, answered, “I don’t think we thought of it that way.”
Harper, the ACSWP chairman, agreed with Wisdom and Working that the revised paper on families “needs to have a strong Biblical and theological statement.” He also said, “The social science data need to be scrutinized and evaluated and more tightly interpreted. And we need a much stronger and clearer and substantive direction for the practice of ministry and programmatic implications for ministry, public policy and congregations.”
But Barbara Gaddis, a family therapist from Boone, Iowa, wasn’t convinced. She wanted the document to remain within the guidelines of the General Assembly’s original charge to ASCWP. “This paper was asked to come up with broad sociological data for the church,” she responded. Programming should be left up to the Congregational Ministries Division of the PCUSA, she said.