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InSights Opinions
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Written by Charles Partee
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Wednesday, 01 November 2000 00:00 |
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Marrying, as I did, a gorgeous redhead (there being no other kind) includes automatic induction into the League of Timid Men. This explains why I did not object when my lady wife announced that she was going to learn to ski so she could join our grown children on the snowy mountains. Actually, I was delighted to hear this decision since she had been contemplating learning to hang glide.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by James H. Smylie
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Tuesday, 31 October 2000 00:00 |
The PC(USA) General Assembly has declared July 2000-June 2001 the "Year of the Child." By a happy providence, this All Hallows Eve, Oct. 31, is also the 50th anniversary of the United Nation's International Children's Emergency Fund's "Trick-or-Treat" program.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by James A. Simpson
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Tuesday, 31 October 2000 00:00 |
Present at this year's General Assembly of the Church of Scotland was Roy Sanderson, our oldest surviving General Assembly moderator. When I asked this sprightly 93-year-old what he was doing these days, he told me he was taking a computer class at a college in East Lothian. I was full of admiration.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by Andrew Stehlik
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
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Editors' note: Andrew Stehlik of the Czech Republic recently served a year as a mission-partner-in-residence with the PC(USA) Worldwide Ministries Division in Louisville. He wrote about his impressions of the PC(USA) in the Czech Working Group newsletter for July 2000. The working group, created by the General Assembly Council in 1995, works closely with the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren to improve and expand the relationships between the two churches.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by Sherron Kay George
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
I resonate with William Saum's reminiscence of General Assemblies focused on "great issues confronting the church and the world." I lament with Saum that little at this year's Assembly reflected the enthusiasm of last year's cutting-edge report from the Church Growth Task Force, "Hey, I am doing a new thing . . . . Do you get it?"
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InSights Opinions
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Written by 212th General Assembly
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
The PC(USA) seeks to engage the church in faithful and vital global mission.
As Christians, we understand "Mission" to be God's work-centered in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and made real through the active and leading power of the Holy Spirit -- for the world God loves.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by John W. Wimberly Jr.
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
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Actions by recent General Assemblies of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) are beginning to force many of our members to consider a choice between God and our denomination. We are not alone. Other denominations are doing the same. If denominations continue to force their members to choose between their deeply committed personal religious beliefs and their denominational affiliation, the denominations will lose.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by G. Thompson Brown
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
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Today there are a number of conflicting accounts as to the status of Christianity in China. One persistent version begins with the assumption that an atheistic Communist government will not tolerate the presence of a true Christian church. Consequently, Christianity in China must be sharply divided between an "apostate church" -- represented by the China Christian Council which is supported by the atheistic government -- and the "true underground church," which is subject to continuous persecution and harassment.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by Aurelia T. Fule
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
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Two years ago I spent a semester teaching Christian ethics at Gujranwala Theological Seminary in Pakistan. Participating in the life of the Christian community in a Muslim country -- faculty discussion with Pakistani professors and others sent by the Church of Scotland, the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand or the United States, or one of the Korean churches; getting to know students, many of them women -- was a rich experience.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by Gustav Nelson
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
John Haberlin's "A Response to the Continued Membership Decline" has opened the door for a serious discussion of the continued membership decline in the denomination.
He suggests that we focus on attendance rather than membership for appraisal of church growth or decline.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by John Niles Bartholomew
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
Soon, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) will begin as new round of conversations with the Episcopal Church, focusing on the recognition of their office of bishop and our office of elder. We should make this an opportunity to clarify and strengthen our understanding of the eldership, for the sake of life within the Presbyterian Church.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by Gene Huff
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
While a gay legislator addressed a recent political convention, a delegate held up a sign which read, "There is a way out." The intended reference was that gays and lesbians can simply change by becoming heterosexuals. Regardless of how one feels about that advice, the phrase itself provides wise counsel for Presbyterians. Although caught in a seeming interminable struggle over the ordination of gays and lesbians, there is a way out for the Presbyterian Church (USA).
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InSights Opinions
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Written by James A. Simpson
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
"The spectacle presented by the indecent squabbles of priests of most denominations, and the unfairness and rancor with which they conduct their differences utterly repel me . . . . The Church's hand is at its own throat . . . . The Master of the New Testament is put out of sight."
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InSights Opinions
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Written by Sherron Kay George
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
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In 1993 the General Assembly adopted an insightful, prophetic document presented by Worldwide Ministries, "Mission in the 1990s." It offered five crucial challenges, all of which have as much urgency and relevance now for the PC(USA) as at the beginning of the decade.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by John T. Galloway Jr.
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
Over my ministry I've been called a conservative, a Communist, a secularist, an evangelical, a liberal, a Congregationalist and now lately a centrist. I'm getting calls from people saying, "You represent the center. Do something." A person cozies up to me at a meeting and asks, "What are those of us in the center going to do when the denomination splits?" I am hearing a plea that the ill-defined, nebulous center will miraculously rise up to hold our denomination together.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by Brent J. Eelman
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
The 212th General Assembly affirmed the fragile unity of our denomination by rejecting one of the Beaver-Butler overtures and by delaying for one more year consideration of the overtures dealing with sexuality and ordination. One can infer from their decisions the belief that Presbyterians are neither ready to divide the denomination nor to continue debating the issues surrounding sexuality and ordination.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by David Steele
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
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Long time pal Phil is retiring. I write, inviting him to join me in forming a senior step ball team. We were champs in seminary -- in the game where the batter throws a tennis ball against the Alexander Hall steps at Princeton and the fielders have to catch it before it bounces.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by John A. Tate Jr.
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
A professor friend at Union-PSCE some time ago sent me a tape recording of one of his classes. The visitor for the day was a Methodist bishop whose assignment was director of worldwide evangelism for the United Methodist Church. He described in detail his experience in his first parish in a small church in a poor neighborhood in Sydney, Australia:
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InSights Opinions
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Written by Robert T. Henderson
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
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There are some questions which need to be asked:
* Are denominations any longer viable? Or are they archaic? Or are they "The moral failure of Christianity?" (Richard Niebuhr)
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InSights Opinions
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Written by John Niles Bartholomew
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
There is an increasingly urgent voice in the church, calling for our governance to be more enabling and less regulatory. Chapter 14 of the Form of Government, which deals with ordination, certification and commissioning, is the most severe focal point for this frustration, and is a major source of the disconnect between congregations and the denomination.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by Sherron Kay George
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
Mission is not something done "to" or "for" others, but "with" others. We participate in God's mission in loving communion with: (1) the Triune God who empowers, sends and directs us; (2) one another in the local- global church; and (3) those to whom we are sent and those whom we receive.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by Laird Stuart
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
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In many ways the response to the General Assembly's call for Unity in the Midst of Diversity conferences is like Jonah's response to God's call to go to Nineveh. He did not want to go, neither do many of us. From what little evidence is available, it seems safe to say only a small portion of our presbyteries are planning Unity in the Midst of Diversity conferences.
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InSights Opinions
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Written by David Steele
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
That's the question I have been asking all my pals since I read the wonderful article in Sunday's paper by Henry Allen. He is a professor at the University of Maryland. In his honors seminar on meaning and culture he asks students with whom they identify in those classic cartoons: Wile E. Coyote or the Roadrunner?
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InSights Opinions
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Written by John Haberlin
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Sunday, 01 October 2000 00:00 |
As the church continues to focus on the shadow of the circling "membership" vulture, I would make a radical but potent proposal dealing with growth:
1. Focus on average attendance, rather than membership, for appraisal of growth or decline.
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