Family paper draft meets GA deadline
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, February 27, 2004
After an 11th-hour review and some minor changes, the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy has met the deadline for submitting its proposed social policy on families to the 216th General Assembly.
Peter Sulyok, the staff director of the advisory committee, told The Layman Online this week that the document would be sent today – the deadline – to the Office of the General Assembly.
That schedule meets the requirement that social policy proposals be submitted at least 120 days before the convening of the General Assembly. The 216th General Assembly will meet in Richmond, Va., June 27-July 3.
Sulyok said the only last-minute changes were to recheck footnotes and ensure that they were appropriately placed in the document – a tedious task in view of the numerous revisions and relocation of text. At last count, the 50-page document had 140 footnotes and four pages of bibliography.
In the end, during its final telephone conference, the committee decided to place its theological review and recommendations at the beginning of the document – contrary to the suggestion of one of its members, Ronald Stone.
Stone, a retired professor of Christian ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and an elder at East Liberty Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, opposed including any theological review – contending that the committee’s assignment was sociological and not theological.
He raised his objections at the last meeting of the advisory committee, which was held in January in Louisville, Ky., the headquarters city of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Revisions made during that meeting followed Stone’s suggestions and pushed the theological material to the end of the document. They also followed Stone’s recommendations to delete portions of the theological material that was prepared by the denomination’s Office of Theology and Worship.
But after subsequent conference calls among committee members and its staff, the theological material was restored to the front of the document and few of Stone’s editorial deletions were incorporated. When final votes were taken, Stone abstained from voting on the motions to 1) place theology first and 2) whether to approve the whole report. The committee’s majority voted in favor of both motions.
Stone’s thinking represents how the full Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy has developed its social policy on many issues – with a liberal social agenda and little theology.
That was the case when the committee produced its first proposed family policy to the 215th General Assembly in June 2003. The General Assembly rejected the paper and told the advisory committee to rewrite it and to call on the Office of Theology and Worship for theological grounding.
The 2003 paper was so open-ended that it could be interpreted as concluding that cohabitation, same-sex couples and unwed mothers were just as acceptable as family units as married heterosexual couples.
In the process of getting the document from its status at the conclusion of the advisory committee’s meeting in January to the final draft, there were some behind-the-scene discussions by denominational leaders – including staff – over the dilemma posed by Stone’s recommendations.
They emphasized that the paper would be dead on arrival at the 216th General Assembly unless the advisory committee grounded the family policy in the denomination’s Biblical, Reformed and confessional tradition.
Stone and some other members of the committee were strongly opposed to that strategy. He made that opposition clear in a comment about out-of-wedlock sex and his own family practices. “I raised four children.” He said. “I would never teach them to be chaste. That means a virgin. I always taught them to be responsible. Every pastor I talk with tells me the people who are not married are not virgins. I don’t believe we need that language. I don’t think that’s the common Presbyterian practice. I don’t think we want it in our document.”
This isn’t the first time that the advisory committee got a rejection slip for its initial report. The 1998 General Assembly rejected a report titled “Building Community Among Strangers” because it suggested, among other things, that Jesus was just one of many gods, along with Gaia, Buddha and Allah.
Commissioners also rejected a paper on euthanasia that raised the question of whether Jesus, by dying on the cross, committed suicide.
The “Building Community” paper was dramatically revised and later approved by the General Assembly. The revision of the paper on euthanasia has not been completed.
Besides including the contributions from the Office of Theology and Worship, the advisory committee enlisted Alan Wisdom, an evangelical who works with the Institute on Religion in Democracy and Presbyterian Faith in Action, to help revise the family paper.
During the 215th General Assembly, Wisdom was one of a group of people who drafted an alternative to the advisory committee’s 2003 paper. That alternative, which emphasized that the Biblical model for Christian families is a traditional family, was approved by a General Assembly Committee, but not by the full General Assembly.