Sacramento becomes PCUSA meeting center to offset penalties
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, September 22, 2005
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – When the General Assembly voted in 2004 to leap past a 2005 G.A. and begin biennial meetings in 2006, it left Sacramento in the lurch. California’s state capital city would have hosted the commissioners in 2005.
That decision also left the PCUSA facing cancellation penalties for having signed contracts to hold the 217th General Assembly in Sacramento that year.
The good news, Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick told the General Assembly Council this week, is that the PCUSA is reducing or maybe eliminating those penalties by holding a number of meetings in the city that has been mining gold from tourists since Sutter’s Mill in the 1800s.
“We had all kinds of contracts with Sacramento,” Kirkpatrick said. “But we have been able to have meetings here and we are able to use money for mission, not paying penalties.”
Kirkpatrick, who supported the proposal to have the General Assembly meet biennially, said that he nevertheless has had some G.A pangs. “There’s something about being a stated clerk and not having a General Assembly in 14 months,” he told the council.
But he said he was excited about the 217th General Assembly meeting in Birmingham, Ala., in June of 2006. “I do think this business of having an off-year from the General Assembly has proved to be a blessing to the church … an off-year for coming up with ways to come together for renewal.”
He said he has seen signs of renewal, including the final report of the denomination’s Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity, which he strongly praised. The report calls for no change in the denomination’s constitutional “fidelity/chastity” ordination standard or the Authoritative Interpretation that undergirds it.
However, the report also says presbyteries alone should be responsible for determining a candidate’s fitness for service as a church officer. That includes deciding whether the ordination clause is an “essential” that forbids ordaining practicing homosexuals.
Kirkpatrick focused, however, on anniversaries that will be celebrated at the Birmingham General Assembly.
“Next year, we will celebrate the 300th anniversary of the founding of Presbyterianism in America,” he said. He spotlighted others: the 75th anniversary of the ordination of the first woman as an elder in the mainline denomination; the 50th anniversary of the ordination of a woman as a minister in the mainline denomination; and the 100th anniversary of a merger of some Cumberland Presbyterians with the mainline denomination.
Kirkpatrick focused on Cumberland Presbyterians, whose remnant are in two denominations, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America.
Both of those denominations will have joint sessions with the PCUSA’s General Assembly in Birmingham. “We’re not meeting together to have reunion,” Kirkpatrick said, “but to make a step toward reconciliation.”
The last time the PCUSA had a reunion was in 1983, when the southern and northern mainline denominations reunited after having been separated since 1861. Since that reunion, the PCUSA has lost 25 percent of its members.