Reminded of mandate, task force goes back to the future
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, July 25, 2005
DALLAS – Nearing the end of its four-year palaver, the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity went back to the future.
The Rev. Jong Hyeong Lee, pastor of Hanmee Presbyterian Church in Itasca, Ill., pushed them in that direction.
Lee noted that the 213th General Assembly’s mandate establishing the task force called for the group “to lead the Presbyterian Church (USA) in spiritual discernment of our Christian identity, in and for the 21st century …” But no mention was made of the church’s future in the three reports reviewed in Dallas on July 18-21.
On the last day of the meeting, Lee expressed a particular concern about the membership losses since reunion of the northern and southern streams of mainline Presbyterians in 1983. (The decline was from 3.2 million in 1982 to 2.4 million in 2004, or 25 percent.)
“What has happened to our denomination?” asked Lee, one of two Confessing Church pastors on the 20-member commission. “We need to deal with that issue. It seems like the General Assembly gave us a mandate. We didn’t follow orders.”
Lee offered his own idea about the membership problem: the ongoing discussion over ordaining practicing homosexuals and the notion that the denomination might consider committed, monogamous, same-gender relationships as permissible.
“For the church to accept it, same-sex marriage, we have a problem,” Lee said. “But I think God has given us the means to transform the world.”
Reminded by Lee that they had skipped a part of their mandate, the other members of the panel chimed in with a variety of futuristic observations and speculations, including demographic and ethnic shifts, the growth of megachurches that siphon off members, the need for inter-faith dialogue, economics, social issues, geopolitics, globalism, anti-Westernism, terrorism and violence.
Jack Haberer, pastor of Clear Lake Presbyterian Church in Houston, found a silver lining. “What I find very strange is that the Presbyterian model is the one that anticipates postmodernism. It rejects the hierarchal and factionalism and hungers for community … We can be profoundly effective.”
John “Mike” Loudon, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Lakeland, Fla., a Confessing Church, talked about a polarized world – even in Lakeland. “I’ve never lived in a community that is wealthier and poorer,” he said. “We need to pick up our tent and follow the shekinah [glory of God].”
William Stacy Johnson, an associate professor of systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, weighed in on the future by declaring, “I haven’t got the foggiest idea.” But he didn’t stop there. He said he was concerned about the need for dialogue between Jews, Christians and Muslims – who “are killing each other.”
“The answer is not pluralism,” Johnson said. “It is looking at one another’s sacred texts and finding ways to live together.”
“I’m also concerned about empiricism,” Johnson added. “The issue isn’t sex, but war and violence. We’re more concerned about gays that we are about torture.”
John Wilkinson, pastor of Third Presbyterian Church in Rochester, N.Y., who has been a leader in the Covenant Network, said secularism is on the rise in the Northeast. “Diversity is a catch phrase for lots of stuff,” he said, but there is still “lots of hunger in the world, hunger for meaning.” In this changing climate, he asked, “What does it mean to invite people to follow Jesus?”
Gary Demarest of Pasadena, Calif., who says he has officially joined “the ranks of the unemployed” after serving as the interim pastor at a number of congregations following his original retirement, had the most to say about the future.
Demarest cited a theme from David McCulloch’s 1776: “‘We don’t get to control the future.’ We bring to God what we can give and He will or will not use it. We don’t control the future and none of us will see the results of what we have brought.”
“The longer I live, I am feeling strongly the difference between knowing and trusting, and I’m learning to trust,” he added.
Referring to some of the issues the task force considered, Demarest cited the tension involved in “how you live out the church in a democratic context. When I’m a pastor, I want local option. I want to be autonomous. But when things are not going my way, I want a strong government.”
“Humanly speaking, I have no reason for optimism in the PCUSA,” he said. “But I’m not going to give into pessimism.”
Demarest cited a trip he once made with the late British journalist and Christian Malcolm Muggeridge and others. Muggeridge’s advice, Demarest said, was: “‘I think of myself as a pianist in a whorehouse and every once in a while, I smuggle in a measure of Nearer My God to Thee.”
Milton J. “Joe” Coalter, library director at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Va., offered the most succinct assessment of the future: “I don’t know.”