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I'd like to be totally candid and just lay open my heart about where I think we are as a denomination in the wake of the 217th General Assembly. Though I have been called a leader of "moderate evangelicals" in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), I also speak as a 30-year old whose passion for Christ makes all church politics seem a distasteful waste of time, as immersed in it as I am. In the wake of the General Assembly's recent decision to localize the determination of essential requirements for ordination, I have been receiving lots of advice. Many conservatives feel pressed with the question of whether or not we should be staying in or leaving the PC(USA). This inner turmoil results from the fact that after debating for more than thirty years about whether to ordain persons who are sexually active outside of marriage, the recent Assembly's action was the first time our denomination's policies have actually changed. By passing a new authoritative interpretation of our church's Constitution, it would appear that we have given local governing bodies the license to ordain and install individuals who live in open violation of the church's standards.
I'd like to be totally candid and just lay open my heart about where I think we are as a denomination in the wake of the 217th General Assembly. Though I have been called a leader of "moderate evangelicals" in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), I also speak as a 30-year old whose passion for Christ makes all church politics seem a distasteful waste of time, as immersed in it as I am. In the wake of the General Assembly's recent decision to localize the determination of essential requirements for ordination, I have been receiving lots of advice. Many conservatives feel pressed with the question of whether or not we should be staying in or leaving the PC(USA). This inner turmoil results from the fact that after debating for more than thirty years about whether to ordain persons who are sexually active outside of marriage, the recent Assembly's action was the first time our denomination's policies have actually changed. By passing a new authoritative interpretation of our church's Constitution, it would appear that we have given local governing bodies the license to ordain and install individuals who live in open violation of the church's standards. Given this shift in our policy, some would like me to come out and say we have a mandate to leave the PC(USA). On this view, the Assembly's unprecedented accommodation to secular American culture represents a fatal compromise from which we as a denomination cannot recover. It is also believed that we as church members and officers are implicated in the grievous sin of the denomination, such that choosing continued participation in this church is choosing participation in sin, which is unconscionable. On the other hand, some have insisted that I declare as schismatic any attempt to leave the PC(USA), asking instead that I lift up the biblical exhortations to bear with one another patiently as we maintain the visible unity so vital to a faithful witness to Christ in the world. Those who hold this view insist that we must take the unity of the church seriously, and they believe that leaving over the Assembly's action on ordination would be tantamount to cutting a limb off of Christ's Body. So what to do? Both approaches have some truth. Yet ultimately I find both unconvincing and overly simplistic. One of the biggest barriers to clear thinking in the PC(USA) is that nobody really agrees what the PC(USA) is. One of the great unasked and unanswered questions in our denomination is also one of the most foundational for the topic at hand: what is the PC(USA) anyway? In what would we stay? What would we leave? We need to be explicit about what we are talking about before we can faithfully assess our respective commitments to it! Some, especially liberals, tend to equate the PC(USA) with the universal Church of Jesus Christ, at least rhetorically. The Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church, though theologically diverse, was particularly fond of this approach. The title of the Task Force itself conflated the PC(USA) with the universal Church. Of course, the Task Force was talking about the peace of the PC(USA), not that of Christ's Body as such. And yet during the Task Force's work, all of God's promises about the peace, unity, and purity of the Church in the New Testament were arrogated to the PC(USA) as a denomination, thereby providing the foundational principles for the whole work of the Task Force. The best example of this way of thinking is the statement of the Task Force in its mid-term report, when they implied that anyone who even considers leaving the PC(USA) is in danger of severing his or her relationship to Jesus Christ! In other words, if you leave the PC(USA), you would be leaving Christ's Body and so Christ himself. This is theological silliness. We share ministers with other denominations, and when our ministers go to serve with the Lutherans, we don't say they are leaving the Body of Christ. The broken western church is a complicated mess. It is shattered into thousands of pieces, and the most we can say is that parts of the PC(USA) participate in the Body of Christ. We cannot say that we are the Body of Christ. Leaving the PC(USA) would not in itself sever my relationship to Christ or necessarily mean I have left the Church. The stakes are not that high, and accusations of "schism" are typically overblown. The other, equally unhelpful approach to identifying the PC(USA) is preferred by many conservatives, and that is to equate the PC(USA) with its institutional structure or its non-profit status. In this view, the PC(USA) is an entity that has existed only since the 1980s and commands no particular loyalty. As long as the institutional structure is helpful, we should stay and use it. When it becomes an impediment to life as an individual Christian or as a congregation, then we should go elsewhere to find a more helpful institutional framework. If we take this approach, there are very few spiritual implications of leaving the PC(USA). There are only legal complications. So what are we? What is the PC(USA) and how does the answer to this question inform my relative commitment to it? There isn't an easy answer, and asking professional theologians doesn't help either. I've tried that, and they don't agree with each other. Part of the difficulty is that a "denomination" is a not a biblical category, so however we chart a way forward we will be drawing on related biblical principles and then trying to make the contextual adjustments to an era radically different from that of the New Testament Church. In any case, here is my best attempt at defining what we are: The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is a covenant community of congregations that since the 18th century has been called to embody particular charisms as a witness to Christ and in service to the larger Church as it participates in God's mission. By calling us a "covenant community" I mean that we are bound together by a common faith and mission, with congregations in relationships that ultimately extend back to the first half of the 18th century. It means that we are more than our non-profit status, more than our bureaucratic structure. There are deep relationships, covenantal memories, and a spiritual legacy that continue to shape who we are. We are a community of roughly 11,000 congregations who share a history of ruptures and reunions, joys and trials. Our bond contributes to the unified witness of the Gospel: we are 11,000 congregations together. And yet we cannot consider the foundation of our covenantal relationship to be a landmark of redemptive history. Though we are in covenant relationship with one another, the "covenant" that gives us our distinct denominational identity is not the New Covenant in Christ. To claim we are the community of the New Covenant would be to drift back into claiming we are the universal Church. Rather, the covenant that gives shape to the PC(USA) is much more humble. Our denominational identity is shaped by our agreement that the Reformed doctrines of sovereign grace give us a biblical description of our relationship with God in Christ, and by our commitment to live together according to Presbyterian principles of church order. These are the things that brought our congregations together and through which God built up our denomination. These are the particular "charisms" -- spiritual gifts -- that God has blessed us with and through which we can be a blessing to the Church universal and to the world. These two aspects of our covenant -- our confessional foundation and the ordered nature of our life together -- have been expressed respectively in our Book of Confessions and our Book of Order, which together with the Bible make up our "Constitution." They are intended to be an expression of our denominational identity and an instrument for maintaining it. Yet for a while now the meaningfulness of the PC(USA)'s Constitution has been eroding. Theologically, we have lost our rootedness in the Reformed doctrines of sovereign grace both to pan-denominational evangelicalism and to theological liberalism. And with respect to our polity, bureaucratic relations have often replaced the spiritual rule of elders, and our "connectionalism" has been eaten away by various forces: from the steep decline of denominational loyalty to the recent Assembly's decision to allow something as central as sexual morality to be a matter for local determination. The Reformed confessions were relegated to a secondary status long ago (in practice). And now our Book of Order is following suit. And so here we are. There is no sense in covering up reality. Let me suggest something that may sound a bit dangerous: there is a certain freedom in our present circumstance, a freedom out of which God might end up bringing some good. In some ways the Assembly's decision on ordination finally admits in theory where we have been in practice for quite some time. And staring reality in the face can be a revelatory experience. One thing revealed is that we are free to no longer look to our constitutional documents or our higher governing bodies as the primary means of giving expression to the unity and identity of our covenant community. We might recover their ability to serve that role, but in the meantime we ought to admit what the P.U.P. Task Force knew well, namely that the higher you go in our governing bodies the less representative those bodies become. (Honestly, it is hard to get past the fact that the P.U.P. Task Force was careful to make their recommendation to change our ordination policies in a form that could be passed by one vote of the G.A., without requiring votes of the 173 presbyteries!) Indeed the substance of the Assembly's action on ordination itself encourages greater local control and admits the weakness of our national identity. Maybe that in itself should diminish the sense of being morally compromised by the Assembly's decision (a concern of many evangelicals). We can express our identity locally with confidence and integrity and need not feel defined by the unrepresentative actions of the Assembly. And we can do much more. Having been encouraged to assert ourselves locally, we can do so in ways that will give alternative and ultimately more unified expression to our covenant community. It is about the relationships -- congregation to congregation, and gatherings of elders and pastors. We find ourselves in a time where the institutional modes of maintaining these relationships are failing, and we need to develop new patterns. For instance, even if some use their new local license to shrink from the global church by considering sexual morality a non-essential requirement for ordaining officers, we are free as an evangelical movement to expand into rather than shrink from global Presbyterianism. While we work to restore proper order in our own denomination, we are free to be faithful: we are free to build new relationships and expand the covenant community. We will be exploring these opportunities at www.pfrenewal.org and www.presbyterianglobalfellowship.org . What is the PC(USA)? We are a covenant community of congregations called to live out the distinctives of our Reformed heritage in and for the 21st century. We can now see that enforcing our national "Constitution" will not in the short term be a primary means of enabling our community to live out of its own ideals. Perhaps the Spirit will breathe on our congregations and presbyteries to enable authentic Reformed life to emerge from the grassroots. We are living such a life in many places. Let's build new patterns of relationships to nourish and support each other and provide new modes for the unified witness of our covenant community. If you leave the PC(USA), I won't call you schismatic, you can still be part of the Church, and your relationship with Christ will likely still be intact. But we will miss you, and our covenant community will be the weaker for it. So, for the sake of the covenant community, I urge you not just to stay, but to become a part of the expanding movement. Michael Walker is executive director of Presbyterians for Renewal and is a Ph.D. candidate in Reformation studies at Princeton Theological Seminary.
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