Metherell: ‘Overall, I am pleased with the outcome’
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, March 20, 2003
Dr. Alexander F. Metherell fell short of his druthers.
But the Laguna Beach, Calif., physician-engineer, who initiated the petition to require the moderator to call the 214th General Assembly back into session to consider constitutional defiance, was not entirely disappointed.
“Overall, I am pleased with the outcome,” he told The Layman Online after he learned that the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission had dismissed a remedial complaint to require Moderator Fahed Abu-Akel to call the meeting.
The decision by the highest court in the Presbyterian Church (USA) was announced Wednesday, following a trial on March 17.
“The decisions were not easy for the commissioners to make and both sides won some and lost others,” said Metherell, who attended the trial and was the complainant’s star witness. He complimented members of the court and counsel for both sides. “Everything was done decently and in good order,” he said.
Paul Jensen, the lawyer who represented the session of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Canton, Ohio, in its complaint against the moderator and Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick of the PCUSA, called the decision “a tremendous victory – not a total victory, of course, but one we celebrate.”
“In the court’s unanimous denunciation of the moderator’s (and hence the stated clerk’s) tactics, we have a powerful weapon in our arsenal should the commissioners to the 215th General Assembly request it be recalled to confront the constitutional crisis that has been exacerbated by the Stated Clerk’s earlier abandonment of his duties,” Jensen added.
The Office of the General Assembly released a statement that took no note of the court’s criticism of the moderator’s actions.
That statement said in part: “Commenting on the commission’s ruling, the Moderator said, ‘ I ask the church to join me in lifting up in prayer those who are in disagreement with this decision, as well as those who are in agreement with it, hoping that we will be reconciled to one another.'”
In his statement, Metherell said, “I thought that the members of the commission conducted themselves with complete fairness. The numerous rulings that were made by the Moderator of the Commission were done with complete impartiality. The Committees of Counsel for both sides did their jobs with integrity and high professional standards.”
Noting that the court upheld the complainant’s claim that the moderator acted improperly when he “implored” commissioners to reconsider their decision, Metherell quoted from the court’s order to dismiss the case – that the complainant failed to prove “by a preponderance of the evidence that the moderator’s actions changed the response of any of the requestors.”
Metherell acknowledged that providing sufficient evidence to support that part of the complaint was “a difficult task to accomplish given the limited number of witnesses willing to testify for the Complainant.”
He said the “most important part of the decision which went against the Claimants is the ruling by the commission that requests made by the Requestors may be changed up till the time that the Moderator actually calls the meeting. Claimants argued that the deadline beyond which requests cannot be changed is when the required number of requests are delivered to the Moderator.
“At that point … the Moderator must remain scrupulously neutral, but there is no prohibition against other officers of the church trying to persuade the Requesters to change their minds which they have ruled they are free to do up till the time that the Moderator issues the call for the meeting.
“The problem is that PJC did not set a time limit for when the Moderator must issue the call once the verification process is complete. This leaves the system wide open for manipulation of the minority calling for the meeting. The Moderator could delay indefinitely the time when he issues the call thereby defeating the intent of this ruling.”