Task force members indicate commitment to unity may trump ban on gay ordinations
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, July 6, 2005
MONTREAT, N.C. – Two members of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity say their unity is more important than their differences over whether the denomination should ordain practicing homosexuals.
The Rev. Jack Haberer, pastor of Clear Lake Presbyterian Church in Houston, and Barbara Wheeler, president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City, said their friendship had grown despite those differences.
Haberer, who was a leader in past campaigns against ordaining homosexuals, and Wheeler, who has been on the other side of the issue, spoke during Presbyterians For Renewal’s July 1-4 Christian Life Conference at the Montreat Conference Center.
During the seminar, Haberer traced his own understanding of the need to maintain unity through the lens of Amos 3:3. He recalls that the King James Version suggested the verse – “Can two walk together except they be agreed?” – was a rhetorical question that demanded a no answer. But, Haberer said, he found a better translation in the New International Version: “Do two walk together unless they have agreed to do so?”
Haberer and Wheeler both said they had agreed to walk together, a common theme of the Theological Task Force, which has spent much of its time in the past four years building relationships among its members.
“Unity is more than sitting around a campfire singing Cum-ba-ya,” Haberer said. “It seems the heart of God would have us move in the direction of unifying the church.”
Speaking of liberals and evangelicals, Haberer said, “We are better together.” Later, he said, “I am a better pastor … because I have been engaged in learning mutually with others with whom I have some disagreements…. I believe I would do harm to separate myself from them.”
He said his opponents in the ordination fight have “turned out to be pretty decent people. They also quoted a lot of Scripture.”
Haberer recalled a pulpit exchange he had with Laird Stuart, pastor of Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco and, like Wheeler, an ardent opponent of the PCUSA’s constitutional clause that prohibits the ordination of practicing homosexuals and adulterers.
After his sermon, he said, a worshiper who was a member of Jews for Jesus, an evangelical Messianic group, greeted him. Haberer said he asked why the man was attending a church led by a liberal pastor. “He said, ‘I come here because I hear the gospel every Sunday morning.'”
Stuart, who unsuccessfully sought to be elected moderator of the General Assembly in 2002, once declared that “Paul was wrong” in his admonitions against homosexual behavior.
Haberer said he concluded that some of his foes on the ordination issue “are not as bad as I had thought.” “A division of the house would bring terrible consequences,” Haberer said. In a schism, some members simply disappear and attend no church, he added. “I call it the shrapnel effect.”
Haberer said that, in the years prior to his becoming involved on the task force, he was a member of two theological dialogue groups. One was a covenant group in his presbytery that met once a month. The other was a theological dialogue group established by the denomination’s Office of Theology and Worship that met for more than two years. From his dialogues with these groups and with the theological task force of which he has been a member for more than four years, Haberer said he became “pretty convinced that what we do hold together was enough for us to want to be together in Jesus Christ, and of the fact that the church was not at a point of irreconcilable differences that made us two denominations, two churches, two different religions, as some have reported, or claimed or said.”
Haberer emphasized that he has found his disagreements with liberals in the denomination to be relatively minor, certainly not at the level that would warrant division. “In fact, in those contexts and then again in the theological task force, I have realized that from those with whom I have been in these kinds of fellowships, that most of them hold to Biblical authority in a way pretty comparable to how I do as an evangelical …”
“I came to realize that most of those with whom I have been involved in those conversations and in the theological task force are folks that are deeply committed to theological faithfulness, and that means to Calvinism, to Reformed theology, to a Biblical faith, that they do believe that Jesus Christ is the only savior of sinners and the Lord of all. Most of them – not all, but most of them – hold to a very high view of sexual purity relatively sort of perceived [sic] that they’re not saying that justice/love rules or that any two adults in mutual agreement can have sex together, but that in fact something approximating the covenant of marriage ought to rule in all relationships that have any kind of intimacy, that at least these two folks have the intentions of fidelity and monogamy for as long as they would live.”
Wheeler said she had become friends with Haberer after discovering “the depth and sincerity of his Christian faith,” a quality she found to be true of some gays and lesbians as well. “What a friend we have in Jesus,” she added.
She said she was “deeply attracted” to serving on the theological task force and that she doesn’t want to “belong to a denomination that edges out its gay and lesbian members.” The best chance to prevent that from happening, she said, was through the task force.
Wheeler traced the task force’s studies that focused on church history and theology. “We read carefully prepared works by other people … We came to realize the variety of perspectives out there is greater than expected…. There are very few questions that can simply be answered yes or no.”
“I want a church where both Jack and I can hold on to our own convictions about the truth of the gospel,” she said. “I also want a church in which Jack and I can hold on to each other.”