Renewal groups vary approaches but may fuse after 217th GA
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, May 26, 2006
Evangelical groups in the Presbyterian Church (USA) are preparing their post-217th General Assembly meetings by talking across the table and two of the groups have decided to meet at the same time in Atlanta.
The Presbyterian Coalition announced today that it will move its planned meeting from Chicago to Atlanta on August 17-19 so that some of its members will be able to observe what transpires at the meeting of the new Presbyterian Global Fellowship.
The mission group will meet at Peachtree Presbyterian Church and the Coalition will meet at North Avenue Presbyterian Church.
Jerry Andrews, co-moderator of the Coalition, said a third group, the New Wineskins Initiative, was also invited to change its meeting date and go to Atlanta. But Andrews said NWI could not change the date (July 19, Tulsa, Okla.).
Andrews told The Layman Online that he had been involved in conversations with leaders of Presbyterian Global Fellowship and the New Wineskins, as well as a group called NEWPCUS, which recently removed its Web site because of misunderstandings about its role and its appeal to a rigorous Reformed theology.
He noted that all of the groups have “different trajectories,” but that they could become fused, depending on what happens at the General Assembly and what course of action the groups plan to take.
All of the groups have long expressed concern about the direction of the denomination for numerous reasons. The hot-button issues this time are the General Assembly’s 1) consideration of a task force’s proposal to allow ordaining bodies the leeway to decide whether to ordain practicing homosexuals and 2) overtures calling for the repeal of the constitutional prohibition against ordaining practicing homosexuals and the authoritative statement that undergirds that standard.
None of the renewal groups has flatly proposed that Presbyterian congregations leave the denomination. But they are seeking to give Presbyterians, as Andrews describes it, a fellowship and action base other than the denomination.
A capsule look at the groups:
- 1. With the denomination’s mission in sharp decline, the Presbyterian Global Fellowship is encouraging evangelicals to share resources and commitment to global mission that may be independent of the denomination. It also encourages “designation of all giving by congregations toward the most effective, accountable and biblically faithful mission efforts, within the Presbyterian family and elsewhere.” Peachtree Presbyterian Church, the largest congregation in the PCUSA with more than 8,400 members, and 13 other churches are identified as the “inviting congregations” for the August meeting.
- 2. The New Wineskins Initiative now includes more than 100 congregations whose sessions have approved a vision statement, a draft constitution, essential tenets and ethical imperatives. NWI envisions returning authority to local congregations, networks of congregations, a national governing body and the use of the Westminster Confession and its catechisms as the confessional standard.
- 3. NEWPCUS has essentially served as a think-tank for theological reflection and church polity that would embrace the orthodoxy of historical Reformed theology.
- 4. The Presbyterian Coalition has a board of directors and two co-moderators, but there is no membership per se. Its events are open to evangelicals – and non-evangelicals as well – and they attract crowds proportionate to the issues being discussed. More than 1,000 Presbyterians attended Coalition gatherings when evangelicals were mapping their strategy for defeating efforts to repeal the ordination standard; 200 and fewer attended when the issues were less intense.
In addition, a group of 22 Presbyterians, including many who overlap with the other renewal efforts, recently issued “An Appeal to Presbyterians and Congregations within the Presbyterian Church (USA),” a document that has been endorsed by more than 800 congregations and individual Presbyterians. The appeal is to remain faithful in local congregations and wait until after the General Assembly for a response to the commissioners’ actions.
A silent, but key player, in all of the renewal efforts are members and pastors of the Confessing Church Movement within the PCUSA. With 1,315 congregations, it is also the largest. Many of the ministers and lay leaders of the confessing congregations are deeply involved in the other renewal movements. But, as a whole, the CCM currently has no structure, officers or staff to call meetings or issue pronouncements.
Andrews, who says he likes to take a broad view of the various renewal movements, said he believes all should continue on their current courses and that, at some point, they might come together.
He was asked about some of the efforts, including whether he considered Presbyterian Global Fellowship’s mission plan to be tantamount to forming a mission agency separate from the PCUSA. If so, might the denomination view that as a breach of covenant with cause for disciplinary action, similar to the excommunication of J. Gresham Machen, a militant evangelical seminary professor, because he started a mission board separate from the denomination’s?
“I’ve thought somewhat about the parallel to that,” Andrews said. “But today I don’t think you can get kicked out of the PCUSA for anything. You’re pretty much here until death.”
In any event, Andrews said there is reassurance in the various evangelical movements even if their aims are varied and sometimes unclear. “There is a fellowship, a sense of being involved in something beyond the congregation and the PCUSA.”
Andrews, the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Glen Ellyn, Ill., also commented on the New Wineskins. He said he has talked to NWI’s co-moderators – Dean Weaver and David Henderson – and raised some concerns about NWI’s theological statement. Andrews said he believes the statement is a good general statement about what constitutes “mere Christianity” but that he hopes it will be strengthened with more Reformed depth.
And he said the NEWPCUS group needs to continue – even without a Web site – to challenge Presbyterians to engage in “rigorous Reformed theology.”
He said his current assessment of all the renewal groups is that none of them is inclined to leave the denomination. But he wonders what he will say to church members and congregations if the 217th General Assembly, through one means or another, decides to abandon its prohibition against ordaining homosexuals and the Biblical principles supporting that constitutional rule.