Presa elected moderator of the 220th General Assembly
By Paula R. Kincaid, The Layman, June 30, 2012
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Photo by Bob McAnally of Sevierville, TN
Moderator of the 219th GA Cynthia Bolbach presents Presa with the moderator’s cross. PITTSBURGH, Pa. — The Rev. Neal Presa was elected as the moderator of the 220th General Assembly on the fourth ballot cast by commissioners. Candidates must receive more than 50 percent of the votes cast to be elected.
On the final vote, Presa received 52 percent of the vote, or 338 votes. On the final vote the other candidates received:
- The Rev. Robert Austell 22 percent or 144 votes
- The Rev, Randolph “Randy” Branson, 2 percent, or 13 votes
- The Rev. Sue Krummel, 24 percent, or 158 votes
In his speech before the election, Presa said that Presbyterians have become anxious about what happens next.
“How is it that we read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and use our faith as a weapon of mass destruction … We have become a church marked by constant disagreement,” he said. “Jesus’ prayer in John 17 was that ‘they will be one as we are one.'”
“I am committed to the unity of the Presbyterian family,” Presa said. “God holds all of us together in Christ through the Spirit. It’s called grace — God’s amazing grace … tonight, in this week, let us as a 220th General Assembly trust in God’s amazing grace to take us through.”
His vice moderator is the Rev. Tara Spuhler McCabe, who performed a same-sex wedding ceremony of two women on April 28, 2012 in the District of Columbia in violation of her ordination vows.
Presa said in a recent press release that he learned about McCabe’s officiating the wedding of two women after she notified him that The Layman was working on a story. “Tara confirmed to me that she signed the marriage license, and conducted a ceremony for the two women in accordance with the laws of the District of Columbia at a restaurant.”
However, Presa said that McCabe’s actions do not affect his desire to see her serve in the second highest office in the denomination. “I knew when I asked Tara to serve as my vice moderator candidate that she and I had different positions on same-sex marriage. And even as she told m
e last week that she officiated the ceremony in question, I expressed my disagreement with her actions, but was equally adamant in my conviction that it is precisely the difference which we hold and which we both embody that the 220th General Assembly and the Presbyterian Church needs in this time and into the future.”
During the question and answer time, Presa addressed the same-gender wedding issue.
He said that “For me, same-sex marriage is not an issue. These are people.”
“As an officer of the church I hold to the constitution and as you all know and is public knowledge my vice moderator candidate signed a wedding certificate for two ladies,” he said. “This is not an abstract issue, this is real.”
Presa said that he expressed his disagreement with McCabe, and she with him, but “because of our of 11 year friendship we are moving forward out of love for Jesus Christ. I dream for us moving forward as the PCUSA, not with judicial cases, but us to live in that tension — live with that tension — and the Holy Spirit is at work in all of our lives.”
In answer to the question “what personal initiative you will take to bring people who are different to Jesus? What is your commitment to carry the paralytic to see and know healing in Jesus?
Presa began by saying “together we stand, divided we freak out.” He said that his presbytery — Elizabeth — dismissed its first congregation to ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians recently. He said that throughout the conversations between the presbytery and session “we came to a mutual discovery that the particular congregation is leaving — not because they see we are apostate or unorthodox — but because they could not live with the broadness” of the PCUSA.
Presa said that a “key character of being community is giving people that space — to discern and decide if they want to leave, even if we don’t want them to.”