Quartet conducts one-way show on task force report
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, September 23, 2005
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Four members of the denomination’s Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church proudly proclaimed their own unity in diversity and said their final report was intended to keep the Presbyterian Church (USA) from having another schism.
The audience for the presentation on Thursday night included members of the General Assembly Council, the Committee on the Office of the General Assembly, numerous denominational staff members and observers. It was a one-way show by the task force quartet, who neither invited nor fielded any tough questions about the task force’s recommendations.
Instead, after brief presentations by the four – Jenny Stoner, Gary Demarest, Mark Achtemeier and Barbara Wheeler – the audience was divvied up into small groups to consider two snippets from the final report and talk about them. That was to symbolize the task force’s own procedure of talking about issues, but rarely debating them publicly or framing their responses in open session.
Although members of the audience never got a chance to ask any questions, at the conclusion of the meeting they stood and heartily applauded the task force, which General Assembly Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick described as “one of the greatest gifts to the church.”
The most controversial portion of the task force’s final report is a recommendation that would permit ordaining bodies to decide themselves whether to abide by the denomination’s policy of prohibiting the ordination of practicing homosexuals. That policy was established in 1997 in a referendum of the denomination’s presbyteries and has been reaffirmed twice since, including a 73-percent margin in 2001.
Stoner, a former denominational staff member and moderator of the 213th General Assembly committee that recommended the establishment of the task force, focused on the panel’s evolution into “a strong supportive community of believers who love one another.” They learned, she said, to “relinquish control and trust one another.”
“We have found helpful ways to deliberate together without Roberts Rules,” she added.
Demarest, also a former denominational employee in evangelism and now a retired California minister, called the experience of serving on the task force “a remarkable spiritual journey.”
He cited four reasons the task force was different:
- 1. “We are a group of 20 people who were chosen because of our differences.”
- 2. “We were given the privilege by an overwhelming vote of the General Assembly solely for the purpose of discussing [in closed sessions] sensitive theological issues. We used that privilege judiciously. Could not have done the work we did without that privilege.
- 3. “The report will have been distributed nine months prior to the General Assembly,” which will meet in Birmingham, Ala., in June 2006.
- 4. “We voted unanimously to adopt a final report. The customary minority report was never proposed.”
Achtemeier, a member of the faculty of Dubuque Theological Seminary, also emphasized the task force’s proposing “a highly substantive report by a unanimous vote. We, the members of the task force, are convinced that God’s spirit has moved powerfully in our midst.”
He called the report a “a theologically-ground vision of a different kind of church … a proposal for a new church culture, a Biblically faithful ethos.”
“The stakes in this work are very high,” Achtemeir added. “The way Presbyterians have been conducting themselves in recent years is not sustainable. The church is not founded on our ability to agree with one another. God creates the church. Christian community comes to us as a gift of the spirit. God seals us together in baptism into one body with persons who are very different from ourselves. Turning to Christ involves embracing his body in all of its bewildering variety.”
“The fact that we are able to confess our faith together is enormously significant,” he said. “Christian brothers and sisters of good faith and are serious about Biblical faith. That doesn’t mean somebody is not mistaken in this conversation. What we are dealing with is disagreements among brothers and sisters in Christ and not a contest between believers and infidels.”
Achtemeier said the members of the task force “acknowledged our own complicity in the stereotyping and demonizing … and in bearing false witness about one another in the life of the church.”
Barbara Wheeler, the president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, said, “We are privileged by Christ to stay fused in one body.” Then she asked, “How might we move into the future holding on to each other and to our conscientious convictions about the truth at the same time? This is a special challenge for us famously fractured Presbyterians.”
Calling “choosing up sides, organizing, even splitting” a “bad Presbyterian habit,” Wheeler contended that “many people believe they have the truth by the short hairs and are so busy proclaiming it and nobody’s listening.”
“Our major recommendation,” said Wheeler, a member of the pro-homosexual ordination Covenant Network, “is that we remain together in one denomination.”
To maintain that unity, she said, the task force report calls for balance – both in having high standards and allowing ordaining bodies to decide whether the standards are essential and whether candidates for church office may depart from them.
The unanimous vote by the task force on the final report was “as close to Pentecost as I have ever come,” Wheeler said. She then called for the audience to meet in small groups and discuss two questions based on comments made in the report:
1. Question: What does it mean that Jesus is Lord?
“The Theological Reflection… demonstrates that a group of Presbyterians, chosen for its diversity, can affirm with one voice the core theological convictions of Christian faith, the Reformed theology that the PCUSA teaches, and the mission of the church to a rapidly changing world.”
2. Question: What is compelling about our Presbyterian identity?
“We were inspired by the power that the affirmation ‘Jesus is Lord’ and the traditional Christological formulas have to shape faith and discipleship in our day.”
After the two groups met for about 40 minutes on the two questions, Wheeler ended the presentation by saying, “The entire report has as its premise a sense of discernment. Life together in a discernment mode has potential. The purpose of discernment is to know.”
In its recommendations, the task force repeatedly uses the word discernment as led by the Holy Spirit, without reference to Scripture or the confessions.