Social witness advisory
panel: an affinity group?
By James D. Berkley, The Layman, January 28, 2009
BERKELEY, Calif. – On its second day of meeting last Friday, the Presbyterian Church (USA) Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP) gave indications of being an affinity group that has somehow found a way to pursue its agenda with denominational funding.
Other affinity groups organized around a specific viewpoint, such as Presbyterians Pro Life or the Presbyterian Lay Committee, must obtain funding through donations. They enjoy no staff paid by the denomination, no church funds to cover travel and meeting expenses, no inroads into General Assembly matters and business. But the ACSWP benefits from all the advantages of full denominational support.
The ACSWP certainly receives some of its tasks from the General Assembly, and it is constituted to be an advisory committee to serve the Assembly’s needs. It even reports back by bringing business to each General Assembly. That structure, however, only minimally affects the committee’s history of launching grandiose projects born out of its own socially liberal ideology and enthusiasms. The ACSWP has become adept at channeling its energies in ways it chooses to go, rather than strictly limiting itself to the needs and stipulations of the General Assembly.
Some would say that the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy functions mainly as a network of privilege for the roughly 20 percent of the denomination’s members who hold liberal or progressive theological views on social action. Progressives largely populate the committee. Liberal-dominated presbyteries submit General Assembly overtures that maintain a flow of business for the ACSWP. Reports get envisioned, researched, written and vetted by teams made up of friends of the ideology. Then the committee’s work rides to victory at largely complacent General Assemblies through the advocacy of enthusiastic backers and well-placed ACSWP “experts” with voice and influence in committees and on the plenary floor. Such slanted ACSWP work perpetuates itself and the committee’s partisan viewpoints.
On Friday, January 23, as the ACSWP conducted its business, such an arrangement stood out in several instances.
Assembling a study team
ACSWP will be writing a recommendation on HIV/AIDS for the 2010 General Assembly, and this meeting was the occasion to report on forming a study team to research and draft the report. Although evangelicals comprise about 40 percent of the denominational membership, the committee leadership apparently intended to include only one evangelical on a team of seven or so for this project. Two ACSWP members reported on trying to locate an evangelical to be on the team, but as ACSWP member John Knapp reported, “People who had the expertise didn’t have interest, and people with interest didn’t have the background necessary.”
The upshot was that the team will apparently be populated entirely with – and this is no surprise – persons from “all the networks” that typically produce the liberal-slanted work that characterizes ACSWP’s output. The resulting ACSWP study probably will not speak for a majority of the church but rather for the interests of a narrow affinity group of social-action aficionados.
Doing whatever it takes to get what you want
Vernon Broyles, a volunteer staff member of the Office of the General Assembly, told of a tactic from a few years back that demonstrated the ability of well-placed insiders to accomplish what they desire. He was explaining that much of the staff apparatus for involving the denomination in controversial social-action projects had been dismantled in previous downsizings. The denominational program arm – the General Assembly Council – simply didn’t have the budget to add a staff person to handle immigration-law matters. Apparently people as a whole weren’t keen on donating mission dollars to employ an attorney.
But social activists on staff and in key roles really wanted that staff attorney to be hired. “The imperative nature of having someone” was clear, according to Broyles. However, “the only way to fund that was to put that person under per capita and increase [the General Assembly] per capita [apportionment] slightly.” In other words, the tactic used was to bend the purpose of per capita and just “tax” every congregation a little more per person in order hire this attorney that people wouldn’t willingly fund. It was an end run around the mission budgeting process, yet the position remains to this day as a testimony to the ability of insiders to engineer whatever ends they desire.
Riding hobbyhorses
In 2000, General Assembly asked the ACSWP to update a previous paper on the “Nature and Value of Human Life.” For a number of reasons, the committee has not yet seen fit to fulfill that mandate. Through a tortured process full of disappointments and excuses, the updated draft now stands at about 110 pages, when about 20 to 30 pages are desired. What’s more, the committee is still at odds on how the draft should be focused and pared. Perhaps by General Assembly in 2010 – a decade after the assignment was made – the committee may possibly produce the update.
One group within the ACSWP wants the paper to focus on a pet way of approaching the subject matter. It was termed “the hermeneutics of suspicion” at a previous meeting, but at this meeting, members were talking about “the hermeneutics of suspicion and replacement,” whatever that addition might mean. This new method must be all the rage in the academic circles habituated by some ACSWP members, and so this is the direction they argue the revision should take. Such actions make it appear that these members are treating a committee of the PCUSA as if it were their own affinity group formed to serve the ideological dictates of people just like themselves. In this case, at least a couple of members around the table questioned such a plan’s practical utility for the whole church.
Chasing momentary enthusiasms
Two other business items illustrated how committee members use ACSWP time and resources for their own brainstorms and discoveries. First, the committee heard a report on inner-city youth violence, delivered by two Christian leaders living and working on some tough streets. George Cummings, pastor of United Community Church in Oakland, and Charles Tinsley, a Presbyterian chaplain in a nearby juvenile detention facility, gave moving testimony of the need to minister to lost and violence-prone youth.
What this talk caused, however, was an immediate committee plunge into thinking that the committee and ultimately the denomination ought to plow enormous energy into focusing support for urban mission work. Apparently there is no problem the ACSWP hears about that it can restrain itself from pursuing, as if it had expertise and credibility beyond what is common to congregations and individual Christians who have labored in the field for decades.
There was another example of momentary enthusiasms. ACSWP member Lewis Mudge, a lively minded retired academic, had a brainstorm that the time is ripe for the ACSWP to counsel the world on justice just as a new “post-meltdown global economic order” is likely to arise. Liberation theology, with its emphasis on economics “from the underside” and a “preferential option for the poor,” would play a big role in the envisioned counsel.
Mudge’s ambitious and amorphous “oikonomics” idea, as he termed it, caught hold in the ACSWP without the group “systematically evaluating the feasibility of it,” as fellow ACSWP member Bill Saint suggested. Not once did anyone stop to ask, “Should we attempt this?” or “Can we do this, with everything else already on our plate?” or “Do we have the expertis
e to do it well?” or “Has General Assembly ever asked us to do this?” No. Mudge’s present enthusiasm looks like it may become the next nearly impossible project that the ACSWP attempts.