Gray asks General Assembly Council: ‘Why do we need a denomination?’
By Paula R. Kincaid, The Layman Online, September 28, 2006
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – “Why do we need a denomination?”
That’s the hard and scary question Moderator Joan Gray said she heard floating around since her election in June by the 217th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Gray said she has a “substantial and long list of answers to that question.”
But she told the General Assembly Council on Wednesday that “living into that scary question may be one of the ways God wants us to live into the new things God wants us to do.”
She began her report by reading from Isaiah 43, concerning God doing a new thing. “I am convinced,” she said, “that God is doing a new thing in our midst, and a sign of this for me is that the former things are passing away.”
Gray noted that the ways of being a denomination are passing away, “some so slowly that we hardly recognize it, and others very fast.”
She said any person with a computer can access a universe of resources, programs and relationships without looking to the national office for those things.
“I myself have lived among the things that have passed away rather successfully through 30 years of ministry,” she said, adding that she is an expert on a book [the Book of Order] that is very quickly being abridged, and ” a lot of what I learned will be obsolete.”
Her natural reaction to this, Gray said, is “resistance and trying to rebuild the former things. … This is when the cross of Jesus Christ rises up to confront me and comfort me.”
“It is the idea that in dying we are born into new life,” she said, “and it is as the old things pass away that all will become new.”
Gray said the question then became “What shall we do?” She lifted up words that had been spoken earlier in the week: “The most crucial thing right now is not structure and program and how and what. The crucial things are attitudes and ways of being, transparency, accountability, and listening, and listening, and listening. And acting out of faith rather than fear.”
If she had a magic wand to wave over the PCUSA, Gray said, she would wish that every pastor, every session, every governing body, every campus ministry, every social witness organization that is connected with the church,, and others would “spend a month meditating and living into John 15:5, and I would start with the last phrase of that verse: ‘Jesus said without me you can do nothing.'”
“We need to live into what it means to be nothing before you get to ‘abide with me and bear new fruit,'” she said. “There has to be deconstruction before there can be construction.”