Task force team to draft final report – going where?
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, March 7, 2005
DALLAS – The Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity wound up its three-day meeting on March 4 – half of which was in executive session – by announcing that some members will prepare a draft of its recommendations for consideration at its next meeting in July.
Asked by The Layman whether the task force had established any direction for the report during its executive sessions, Gary Demarest, co-moderator for the panel, said it had not. He insisted that no decisions were made during the closed meetings.
However, Demarest did say that the task force had selected a writing team to prepare the draft, but he would not reveal the members who will be on that team. He did not regard the selection of a writing team as a decision. The members of the writing team will be announced later in a task force news release, Demarest said.
Task Force member Barbara Wheeler, seeking to emphasize that task force members had not made any decisions during its private conversations, said the task force members will meet in open session in July to vote up or down the recommendations of the writing team.
The task force did make one decision in open session during the March meeting. It agreed by consensus to meet for a single day in Chicago in August to approve a final draft report. English, Spanish and Korean translations of the final draft will be prepared for presbyteries and local congregations, which will be given the opportunity to respond.
The final report, with responses, will be presented to the 217th General Assembly, which will meet June 15-22 in Birmingham, Ala.
The General Assembly voted in 2003 to allow the task force an exemption from the denomination’s open-meeting policy. At that time, Demarest and others said they had not sought the General Assembly’s exemption, which requires a two-thirds vote before excluding the press and observers from the meetings.
But the task force has increasingly used the closed meetings to prevent the press from quoting its members on what they have to say about the controversial issues on their agenda. The March 2-4 meeting was the most extensive use of the exemption since the task force received that authority.
The 213th General Assembly in 2001 voted to establish the task force to “lead the church in discernment” on four issues: Christology, the authority of Scripture, ordination standards and power.
The momentum for creating the task force grew out of a “third-way” movement in the denomination that focused on the opposition by homosexuals and their allies to the PCUSA’s constitutional standard that prohibits the ordination of practicing homosexuals.
Based on earlier discussions that were in open sessions, the task force appears to be leaning toward a compromise that would allow presbyteries and sessions to ordain as church officers men and women who are in “committed, monogamous” same-gender relationships.
But a compromise would still have to face a churchwide referendum. Already, the PCUSA has voted three times on the issue:
- In 1996, 55 percent of the presbyteries approved the “fidelity/chastity” clause for inclusion in the constitution – G-6.0106b in the Book of Order.
- In 1997, nearly two-thirds of the presbyteries voted to affirm that standard by rejected an earlier compromise.
- In 2001, nearly three-fourths of the presbyteries rejected a proposal to repeal the “fidelity/chastity” clause.
The only official report the task force has made was its interim report to the 216th General Assembly in 2004. That report focused on Christology. Using selected verses from the first three chapters of Ephesians, the task force declared that Jesus alone is the church’s peace, unity and purity.
The interim report included a statement that drew widespread criticism – “The implication of the biblical teaching is clear: Christians cannot even entertain the notion of severing their ties with sisters and brothers in Christ without also placing themselves in severe jeopardy of being severed from Christ.”
Recognizing that they made an assertion that seemed to suggest that Presbyterians who leave the denomination, either individually or collectively, were in danger of losing their salvation, the task force backpedaled slightly during one of their open sessions in March.
But they did not make any changes in open session.