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Living in the Body: What General Assembly Called Us To Be and To Do
A Plenary Dialogue between Cynthia M. Campbell, President, McCormick Theological Seminary, and Douglas A. Nave, Esq., Member of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York at the Covenant Network Annual Conference - 2006, Broad Street Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
November 10, 2006
Cynthia
We are very grateful to be here today and to talk with you about living, in these new days, into what we are called to be and to do as church.
Our Moderator has just spoken with great eloquence about who we are called to be: to be the church of Jesus Christ, the community of Christ’s body in the world, witnessing to the reconciliation that God gives the world in Jesus Christ, and demonstrating – by our lives, as individuals and corporately – the gospel of God’s love for the whole of creation.
It is our conviction that one of the ways we demonstrate the gospel is by our commitment to unity and community and fellowship, out of season as well as in season. Many in this world contend that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, are forces for division, destruction and even evil. We are committed to the opposite, that God has called us to be forces for life and hope. Our vision of church is a place that welcomes all in the name of the One who welcomed all. That’s what we think it means to be this church.
Doug
One of the great privileges of being a lawyer is being able to listen to wonderful speakers like Cynthia and our Moderator and then bring everything down to a dry, technical level that sucks all the life out of it.
We all know that one of the major subjects of discussion in the church these days is what was known at General Assembly as “Recommendation Five” – the fifth recommendation of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity. That’s the one that clarifies how we conduct our ordination examinations, and the one that has been the focus of our conversations in the months following G.A.
I would like to start this presentation by calling us back to the first four recommendations that came before Recommendation Five. In fact, The Outlook has set up a table out in the narthex, and they’ve got a new issue that talks about these very points. I’d encourage you to pick up this issue of The Outlook and read it. One of the articles in it was written by Blair Monie and Kate Kotfila, who chaired the Ecclesiology Committee, and they call these first four recommendations “the forgotten four.” The forgotten four.
It’s important not to forget those four, because as we move to Recommendation Five, “we can’t get there from here” unless we go through Recommendations One, Two, Three and Four. So just briefly to remind you what those are:
- Recommendation 1: We need to stay together. We need to witness to the reconciling power of Jesus Christ in our lives as the church.
- Recommendation 2: We need to build community together. We need to worship together. We need to study together. We need to undertake projects and collaborative work together.
By the way, I’m calling these “recommendations,” but they were adopted overwhelmingly by General Assembly, with 91% voting for them as “strong urgings” to the church. So again: Stay together, build community.
- Recommendation 3: Find our common ground. Find our common ground. You know the story: What the members of the Theological Task Force realized as they worked together over five years – people from the far left, people from the far right, and every place in between – was that they had these profound points of agreement about the nature of their faith and the role of Jesus Christ in their lives. Find our common ground.
- And finally, Recommendation 4: Pursue dialogue in joint discernment. We’ve been debating for a long, long time. These days, we get into rooms and we just holler at each other. We’re like a dysfunctional radar. You know how a radar works: It sends out a signal, the signal bounces back, the radar receives that signal and interprets it. We’re all real good at transmitting, but not very many of our radars are receiving. We need to figure out how to be working radars – to work together, to listen to each other, to discern and dialogue together.
Those are “the forgotten four.” I can’t think of anything more important.
Cynthia
Those “forgotten four” highlight the second half of the theme of this presentation: What we’re called to be and then what we’re called to do. Those four recommendations are four of the things we are called to do together. We’re called to live together and to make a life together in the midst of difference and similarity.
We think one of the places where this comes together is around decisions about candidacy, ordination, and installation. These critical moments are the intersection, where our values, who we say we are called to be by God, intersect with how we will actually live together in community.
I want to back up for a minute and suggest that this whole process of discerning who has the gifts for ministry, examining candidates – that is, talking with them about their understanding of the Christian faith and of leadership and service, making a judgment about their fitness and readiness – is not a twenty-first century problem. It’s not even a twentieth-century problem. It’s not a sixteenth-century problem. It is an issue that began with the very life of the church itself. Discerning who would lead and serve is as old as this form of religious faith and faith community. Examination for ordination is a process that the community goes through under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to discern who God would have lead and serve within the life of the community. It is the responsibility of the community – the sacred, precious and very difficult responsibility – to make those decisions year in and year out.
In the Presbyterian Church, we talk about examination as having essentially three parts.
First of all, the larger church, whether it is through the voice of a session or of a presbytery, is to discern the character of the individual. Is this person a person of character, whose life itself gives witness to the love of God and the grace of Jesus Christ?
Second, we are to examine. We are to discuss, with persons presenting themselves with a sense of God’s call, their Christian faith and their views. This is particularly clear with respect to the ordination of Ministers of Word and Sacrament. Presbyteries are to discuss someone’s views with respect to theology, Bible, sacrament and governance.
And finally, the governing body is to discern fit. Is this individual rightly called to this particular place? Not all of us are called to every place in ministry, and it is the job of presbyteries and sessions to discern the fit between this particular call and the individual.
Now, our constitution sets standards by which these examinations, these moments of conversation and discernment, will be conducted. And it is our commitment as a denomination that those standards are set by us as a whole, by the General Assembly and the presbyteries, through writing and amendment of the Book of Order. It is important to remember that it is not up to local governing bodies to set standards, or to impose their own unique standards in their region. It is rather to our collective life as a whole that we look for these standards that will shape and form our life together.
Doug
Okay, down another level of legal technicality. I’m reminded of the story of the visitor to the parochial school who was going through the lunch line, taking things off the buffet, and got to the dessert section. There was a nice bowl of apples and a sign that said, “Please take only one. God is watching!” This person went a little bit further down the dessert line, and there was a nice plate of cookies. And somebody had put up a sign that said, “Take all you want – God is watching the apples.” We can get so wrapped up in technicalities and rules that we miss the big picture, can’t we? But it is important to think carefully about what makes up the picture.
General Assembly reminded us that the whole church establishes our standards for ordained service, and then sessions and presbyteries apply them. Applying our standards is a two-part process. The first part is deciding what the standard means – we’re going to talk about that a lot this afternoon. The second part is deciding how that standard applies to the individual being examined for office. Interpretation and application. Now, there is some conversation between General Assembly and the presbyteries and sessions when they interpret our standards, because ultimately if there’s an interpretive issue – “What does this standard mean?” – General Assembly can issue an authoritative interpretation that binds the church. But as a general rule, every time a candidate comes up to be examined, the ordaining body itself must consider a question: If this standard is being applied, what does it mean? What does it mean in the context of this ministry, and what does it mean given the manner of life and the statement of faith of this individual?
Standards are important. The church sets them, presbyteries and sessions apply them . . . and candidates sometimes depart from them. Candidates depart from them for two reasons. One, they fail them because we’re all fallible human beings. Our standards come from scripture, so we have very high standards as a church. We take them very seriously; but we also recognize, given the depravity of human nature, that none of us meets our standards perfectly. General Assembly focused on a second way candidates depart from our standards, which is through the assertion of principled objections – that is, scruples. What happens when we’ve agreed on what a standard means and the candidate says, “I can’t comply with that”? We’ll be talking about that a bit later.
So there are two parts to the examination process. Part one is standards – what are they, what do we need to consider, and what do they mean? And part two, where the interpreted standard is being applied, may involve scruples. Standards and scruples. It’s very important to remember both of those words, because right now many in the church are talking only about “scruples” and they don’t really understand what that means, but they know it sounds bad. It’s not even really an English word, when you talk about somebody “scrupling” – scruples aren’t supposed to be a verb. Nobody knows what this means. But let’s start back and recognize that we have two things, standards and scruples.
Cynthia
This leads us to a question, more specifically, what are the standards? I must say, since General Assembly I’ve been working my way through this question, and coming back to it again and again. I’m curious as I read overtures or actions by presbyteries that say, “All of the standards in the Book of Order will be mandatory, and there will never be exceptions.” That leads back to the question, exactly what are the standards?
Some of the standards I think are spelled out in G-6.0106a, which says, “In addition to possessing the necessary gifts and abilities, natural and acquired, those who undertake particular ministries” – now parenthetically, we are talking about all three ordained offices – “should be persons of strong faith, dedicated discipleship and love of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. Their manner of life should be a demonstration of the Christian gospel in the church and in the world.” That’s essentially the core of the standards, the definition of what is required, the overarching standard for ordination. G-6.0106b, which we’ll talk about in a minute, goes on to further define that; but it is within the context, I would argue, of G-6.0106a.
There are other requirements for ordination that have to do with education, with passing certain examinations, and the like. They’re all found in Chapter 14. Those I take to be somewhat different than standards.
The other standards for ordination, I think, are the ordination vows themselves. That’s the other critical place where we ask people in good faith and conscience to answer in the affirmative. Four of them have to do with theological affirmations. We ask, do you trust in Jesus Christ as Savior, do you accept the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ and God’s word, and then: “Do you sincerely receive and adopt the essential tenets of the Reformed faith as expressed in the confessions of our church, as authentic and reliable expositions of what Scripture leads us to believe and do, and will you be instructed and led by those confessions as you lead the people of God?” [G-14.0207c, G-14.0405b(3)]
Now, the verbs that seem especially important, as I think about these standards, are “receive,” “adopt,” “instructed” and “led.” It’s important to notice what they do not say – they do not say “affirm,” “believe,” or “hold without exception.” They say, “receive” and “adopt” (that is, take into one’s understanding and one’s life), and then be “instructed” and “led” by them. They become guides. That is what one is to affirm: that you understand yourself to be “instructed” and “led” by this large constitutional and confessional history as you lead the people of God.
The question that is coming up in the life of the church relates to the “essential tenets” to which our ordination vows refer. It’s worth pausing and noticing that for some time now, the church has resisted an attempt to spell out a specific list, to say, “Okay, here authoritatively are the ten essential tenets.” There’s perhaps a guide to that, early on in the Book of Order [G-2.0500], but it is a suggested way of expressing the Reformed faith.
The Adopting Act of 1729, when this language actually came into our life, said that those things are “essential” which, when violated, would mark a disagreement so fundamental that we would not be able to share Communion with each other. To say something is “essential” means that disagreement about it would make it impossible for us to share the Lord’s Supper, to be in communion with one another.
In my own theological judgment, the “essentials” of the Reformed tradition that are most important are those that are the “essentials” of the Christian tradition. We are Reformed Christians, a form of Christianity, not a religion unto ourselves. That is why the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are the fundamental foundation upon which all the rest of the Book of Confessions rests. The standards really begin with these very big-picture statements. Given those, we live within a community of discourse and interpretation and faith that is the Book of Confessions.
We’re going to talk about what happens when one has a disagreement with those texts.
Doug
While Cynthia was reading the Book of Confessions and the Book of Order, I was reading lesser things. One of them actually was a very interesting sociological study by Michelle Wolkomir – I’d recommend it to you. It’s called Be Not Deceived. It came out earlier this year from Rutgers University Press. Michelle Wolkomir is a sociologist. She’s not a Christian, she’s Jewish. She’s not gay or lesbian. But she is really intrigued by the existence of the Metropolitan Community Church, which is a predominately gay and lesbian church, and Exodus, which is a program to try to “bring people out of” homosexuality.
What intrigued Michelle Wolkomir are the commonalities between these two groups. She noted that they both come from conservative evangelical roots. They both address themselves to the same problem, which is the meaning of homosexuality in Christianity. They both address themselves to the same people, gay and lesbian people and their families. They both use the same kinds of methodologies to address this question – they have small group meetings, they share their faith experiences, and they study scripture together. And interestingly enough, both of them tend to locate their problems in a church that is unjustly hostile: the MCC says that scripture has been interpreted in unrealistic and hostile ways, while Exodus tends to say that the church imports a unique gravity of sin against homosexuality which is not warranted.
So they’re very similar programs. Yet with all of these commonalities, they come out in diametrically opposed places. The MCC says, “God made you gay or lesbian, and that’s good – celebrate, worship and live as faithful GLBT Christians.” And Exodus says, “Faithfulness as a Christian means leaving the gay part behind.” Now how do they do that? That was Michelle Wolkomir’s question. She doesn’t come out with quite so interesting a solution or analysis as she has in pointing out the basic, interesting contradiction here.
What I took away, of most interest to me, was realizing how much similarity there is in the faith experiences of these two groups, faithful Christians all, and how differently they land on this one issue that can split the church if we’re not careful. When we start thinking about our standards for GLBT people, it may be helpful to think about the MCC and Exodus, and remember that faithful Christians can come out in very different places on this one issue.
Now why is that important? Well, that’s important for several reasons.
One is because we’re trying to decide whether our disagreements about sexuality are “essential”. That’s what Cynthia was talking about. Are they so important that they render us incapable of Communion with each other?
A second reason is because part of the debate we’re having in the church today is misplaced. I hope you all know – if you don’t, please, please, please focus – the church has always, as long as we've been talking about this, has always welcomed GLBT people into ministry. Always welcomed. Our debates are about sexual practice, not orientation. And the question is: Do GLBT people need to be celibate?
If you ever feel like the church is too hostile, that it rejects persons, it’s important to go back to the 1978 statement that started all this. The 1978 General Assembly said that GLBT people can bring special gifts of ministry because of their life experiences. We welcome GLBT people in the ministry. But we do have this hang-up about practice.
One of the big questions that you’re going to see debated for the next couple of years in this church is: Assuming our standards prohibit same-sex practice – it’s a big assumption, we’ll talk about that, but let’s assume that for the moment – and somebody says, “I’m a gay Christian, I believe that my sexuality is a gift of God. I live responsibly in a life-long partnership and I will not comply with that standard, I don’t believe it’s right” – can the governing body nevertheless ordain that person? The question, if you want to put it in its starkest terms, is: While we all agree that we can disagree on matters of belief, can we disagree on matters of practice? Or do the people being ordained have to agree to comply with our rules of behavior?
Now, there are differing views in the church on that. It’s a very important question. But I would like to hold up three things as you think about that question.
The first is from our Historic Principles of Church Order, grounded in the Westminster Confession. Section G-1.0304 of the Book of Order – please write it down – says, “There is an inseparable connection between faith and practice.” If you believe something, you practice it. If you’re not practicing something, you don’t really believe it. John Calvin said the same thing. He said, “We have a doctrine not of the tongue, but of life.” We live what we believe. And Jesus Christ said the same thing: “By their fruits you will know them.” It is theologically bankrupt, in my view, to say that you can separate belief from practice. If we respect freedom of conscience in matters of belief, we must respect freedom of conscience in matters of practice.
Now, there are limits. You will hear about a case relating to women’s ordination called the Kenyon case. Walter Kenyon presented himself for ordination as a minister to the Pittsburgh presbytery in the 1970s. He told the presbytery, “I will not participate in the ordination of women. I won’t do it.” And the presbytery said, “Okay, welcome into the fellowship.” Some pastors of churches sued, and the matter went up to the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission. The GAPJC ruled that Mr. Kenyon could not be a minister in the Presbyterian Church. And that happened again in another case several years later, in the southern stream of Presbyterianism, known as the Hambrick case.
(By the way, while I’m talking about cases, let me do a quick pitch. There’s a CD out in the lobby – you notice I’m holding up things for you to look at, because we need resources, we need informed people; there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Please pick up a copy of these legal resources. They have all the cases people keep talking about, and if you read the cases, you’ll learn a lot.)
You have these two cases where the GAPJC said, “If you’re not going to ordain women, you can’t be a minister.” Well, there were two other cases that people forget to cite, the Huie case and the Simmons case. The last one is the Simmons case, from ’85. In those two cases, the pastor said, “I don’t think women should be ministers, and I intend to continue teaching that women shouldn’t be ministers, but if my presbytery instructs me to ordain a woman, I will participate in that service.” The presbytery said, “Welcome aboard,” and people sued. But the GAPJC said that this person – the same minister in both cases, Rev. Ellis – could be a minister.
What was the difference? The difference, as the GAPJC said, was that it is a function of the ministerial office to participate in services of ordination. It is a function of the office. If you want to have the office, you must be ready to perform the function. It’s not a matter of personal practice; in all four of these cases, the individuals were going to teach that women should not be ordained. They were acting on their beliefs. However, in two cases, the individual said that he would do what the ministerial office required in its functions, while the other two individuals said no. And that’s the distinction that we draw. You can declare a scruple, in our view, as to matters of both belief and practice. But if you’re standing for office, you must be prepared to perform the functions of the office. (continued)