OGA sends response to complaint over call to reconvene assembly
The Layman Online, January 22, 2003
The Office of the General Assembly has issued a response to the complaint calling on the denomination’s highest court to order Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick and Moderator Fahed Abu-Akel to call the 214th General Assembly back into session within 60 days.
The response to the Jan. 21 legal challenge, filed by the session of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Canton, Ohio, with the Permanent Judicial Commission of the General Assembly, said:
- “The Office of the General Assembly (OGA) received today [Jan. 21] a remedial complaint against the OGA, the Committee on the Office of the General Assembly, the Moderator of the 214th General Assembly (2002), and the Stated Clerk of the General Assembly from attorney Paul Rolf Jensen, on behalf of the Session of Westminster Presbyterian Church, Canton, Ohio. The parties named above continue to abide by the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) as we continue to process the petition presented to the Moderator asking him to call a special General Assembly. We will appoint a committee of counsel to respond to the complaint.”
The Westminster session asked the General Assembly’s Permanent Judicial Commission to order Kirkpatrick and Abu-Akel “to cease all efforts to interfere with recalling the 214th General Assembly into session, and that the Permanent Judicial Commission of the General Assembly issue an order directing the appropriate respondents to immediately call the 214th General Assembly into special session not more than 60 days from January 14, 2003.”
The stated clerk and the moderator have contended that the Book of Order requires an interval of 120 days from Jan. 14 – when the moderator received a petition asking him to call the special session of the General Assembly – before such a meeting could be held. That interpretation has been strongly disputed by Dr. Alexander F. Metherell, the elder-commissioner to the 214th General Assembly who began the petition drive and presented the petition to Abu-Akel.
Metherell turned in the signatures of 57 commissioners – 31 elders and 26 pastors. Since then, two more ministers have notified him that they would like to have their names on the petition.