PCUSA News Service revises story about moderators
The Layman Online, October 18, 2001
The Presbyterian News Service has revised a story that originally said the Committee of the Office of the General Assembly had “authorized a budget to be used to train a team of former moderators to visit with churches that plan on joining the Confessing Church Movement.”
Instead, the revised story said, “COGA authorized the moderator and stated clerk to issue an invitation to former moderators to be available to sessions and presbyteries considering withholding funds or withdrawing from the denomination. Such service will be on a volunteer basis.”
Alexa Smith, a writer for the denomination’s official news agency, said her original account was based on a source who had always been reliable in the past. She said she revised the story after Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick sent her an E-mail. Smith told The Layman Online that she did not re-contact her original source to seek to verify that information.
Jerry Van Marter, coordinator of the Presbyterian News Service, said Smith has “never had trouble with her source before.”
The Layman Online published a story based on Smith’s original account. The decision to use the former moderators in some fashion came after Moderator Jack B. Rogers issued another stinging criticism of the Confessing Church Movement.
Rogers also indicated in Smith’s story that he believed the Confessing Church congregations were ill-informed. “I feel bad for the hundreds of churches that are getting (drawn) in … not knowing what they’re getting into,” Rogers said. Once again, Rogers repeated his accusation that the Presbyterian Lay Committee had commandeered the Confessing Church Movement.
The revised working of the former moderators’ “voluntary” mission is that they would focus on persuading local sessions from cutting off per-capita funding, which pays for the denomination’s General Assembly, General Assembly Council, Office of the General Assembly and programming staff.
While, according to the e-mail from Kirkpatrick to Smith, the Confessing Churches are not a target of the moderators’ visits, several Confessing Church congregations have publicly announced that they have diverted their per-capita allocations into other ministries.
Summit Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania, the first Confessing Church, has diverted its per-capita to a ministry to help AIDS-infected babies, for example. Several other congregations also have announced that they are temporarily withholding per-capita contributions.