Church court case filed against clerk, moderator
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, January 21, 2003
The session of Westminster Presbyterian Church of Canton, Ohio, has filed a complaint with the highest court in the Presbyterian Church (USA), accusing Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick and Moderator Fahed Abu-Akel of failing to fulfill their constitutional duty to call the 214th General Assembly back into session.
The complaint was hand-delivered to Joyce Evans of the stated clerk’s office in Louisville, Ky., about 3:30 p.m. EST Tuesday. The clerk is the denomination’s chief constitutional officer.
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.
The complaint by the Canton session also disputes the interpretation by the clerk and the moderator. The complainants say the two Presbyterian leaders “devised a plan whereby they would claim that 120 days’ notice was required before the meeting could be held, and that therefore the special session was improper because it would be held on the eve of the 215th General Assembly. In furtherance of this conspiracy, a letter was sent to each of the 57 commissioners, asking each to reconsider their request for a special session, notwithstanding the fact that the Book of Order does not allow for such a request to be withdrawn.”
Metherell was not involved in the remedial complaint. The attorney representing the Canton congregation’s session is Paul Rolf Jensen of Reston, Va., who has personally filed several disciplinary complaints against church officers who have publicly declared their defiance of the Constitution of the PCUSA. The minister of Westminster Presbyterian is William Pawson.
Contradicting an assertion by the stated clerk, Metherell told The Layman Online Tuesday that he has not requested that any commissioner’s name be withdrawn from the petition. He said he is not authorized to withdraw any of the names – and that neither is the clerk nor the moderator.
Metherell said he told the stated clerk that one commissioner had contacted him since Jan. 14 saying that he no longer wanted to be on the petition. However, Metherell said that commissioner acknowledged that he had made no such request in writing or by e-mail before Metherell presented the petition to the moderator at the meeting of the General Assembly Council.
“The petitions I presented as of January 14th are not rescindable. This is a clear attempt by the moderator and the stated clerk to get people to pull out. That is not permitted either by the Book of Order or any civil jurisdiction in the country.”
Metherell said the “so-called” verification process by the stated clerk was a “sham” intended to buy time and thwart a constitutional process.
While Gradye Parsons, associate stated clerk, had told The Layman Online that the verification process should be completed by Jan. 21, later developments – and slipups in mailing procedures by the Office of the General Assembly – have delayed the process by at least a week, Metherell suggested.