Third person joins race for PCUSA moderator
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, February 13, 2004
Rick Ufford-Chase of Tucson, Ariz., has become the third candidate for moderator of the 216th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). His candidacy was endorsed by the Presbytery of de Cristo.
The new moderator will be elected as one of the first orders of business when the General Assembly meets in Richmond in June.
Rick Ufford-ChaseUfford-Chase is the founder of BorderLinks, an organization that assists migrant workers and opposes economic globalization and international trade treaties because of the “harsh consequences” for people trying to cross the U.S. border.
The PCUSA lists him as one of its mission workers. He says he has been involved in border issues since he began working with the Sanctuary Movement in 1987 to help refugees from Central America gain illegal entry into the United States. He has also run a restaurant with one of the women who gained asylum.
John Fife, moderator of the 1992 General Assembly and pastor of Southside United Presbyterian Church in Tucson, was the co-founder of the Sanctuary Movement. Before he ran for moderator, Fife received a felony conviction for harboring illegal immigrants.
Ufford-Chase is a member of Fife’s 200-member congregation, which is a More Light church in opposition to the PCUSA’s constitutional “fidelity/chastity” ordination standard.
The other two candidates for moderator are Rev. K.C. Ptomey Jr., pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tenn., and the Rev. David McKechnie, pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church in Houston.
Ptomey is a board member of the Covenant Network, which, like More Light Presbyterians, is working to repeal the ordination standard.
McKechnie is the pastor of a fast-growing evangelical congregation (4,300 members) affiliated with the Confessing Church Movement.
Ufford-Chase earned an undergraduate degree in psychology from The Colorado College. He says he spent one semester at Princeton Theological Seminary but dropped out to become a volunteer with Witness for Peace in Nicaragua. Witness for Peace was a political activist group committed to liberation theology, the Sandinistas and their leader Daniel Ortega, who later was deposed.
Ufford-Chase is a co-moderator of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, a founder of the Samaritans (an organization providing emergency assistance to migrants in the borderlands of southern Arizona), and a reservist as a nonviolent peacemaker in situations of conflict with Christian Peacemaker Teams.
Ufford-Chase and his wife, Kitty, have an 8-year-old son, Teo.