The
battle between the Light and the Dark is challenging the Presbyterian
Church (USA) just as it is challenging our society, a new director of
the Presbyterian Lay Committee says.
“Our denomination faces the same challenge that human culture
worldwide faces,” Kerry A. Fraas said. “It’s very simply
the struggle between true faith in Jesus Christ versus secular humanism.
Kerry A. Fraas
“The PCUSA,” he said, “is gravely divided on the
question of the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the authority of the Bible.
Significant leadership in our denomination wants to espouse the
relativistic values of popular culture, while the lay leadership and a
significant minority of clergy have the view that there is an absolute
truth – and that truth is a person, Jesus Christ.”
That is why, he said, that “it is humbling to be called to
leadership on the Presbyterian Lay Committee and join in their important
work at this crucial time in the history of the body of Christ.”
Fraas is an attorney from Elizabeth, Pa., just south of Pittsburgh.
Through his firm, Kerry A. Fraas & Associates, he serves as the
solicitor for local, county, school district and township governments,
as well as a community college. Fraas received his bachelor’s
degree from Dickinson College and his juris doctorate degree from
Dickinson College School of Law.
He and his wife, Chris, have two daughters: Kerry Ann, 23, who is a
Fulbright Scholar in Western European Studies working in Vienna on
research regarding reforms in the Austrian welfare state; and Martha,
21, who is serving as an intern in the office of U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum
while attending Thiel College, from which she will graduate in 2006.
Fraas is a member of Mt. Vernon Community Presbyterian Church in
McKeesport, where he is an adult Sunday school teacher, chairman of the
Mission and Outreach Committee and music leader for the worship team. He
also has served as a counselor at the church’s summer camp.
Outside his church, Fraas has served as a commissioner to Pittsburgh
Presbytery and participates in a regional Presbyterian renewal group. He
is a member of the board of the Greater Pittsburgh Community Leaders
Prayer Breakfast.
Fraas said he grew up attending a Presbyterian church, although his
family members were “sporadic attenders. My faith was peripheral to
my life. After a classic Eastern liberal education in college and law
school, I became a firm agnostic.”
Despite his profession of agnosticism, Fraas said he “realized the
emptiness of that belief system.” Later, he said, “I asked God
into my life and Jesus revealed himself to me in a dramatic way. I
decided to throw in my lot and life with him.”
That dramatic way, Fraas said, was a turning point in his life.
“Jesus Christ appeared to my brother and me in a radiant presence,”
Fraas said. “The things that were revealed to me then showed me
that I could not deny his reality. I could choose whether or not to
follow him, and that there was an entire spiritual realm that was not
all good.
“I was confused and afraid,” he said. “A few days later,
I was given a Bible and suddenly the truth of the Scriptures leapt off
the pages in a way that it never had before because I knew now that
Jesus Christ was real. Sitting alone at my kitchen table, I decided that
I would throw my life to him – not knowing the full ramifications
of that decision.”
Since then, Fraas said, he has become “intimately familiar with the
primary issue of Scriptural authority and the political, procedural,
social and cultural battleground on which it is being played out.”
In the process, he said, the time “has been filled with amazing
grace and can be summarized as a process of surrendering more and more
to Jesus and a dying to myself.”
As part of that process, Fraas devotes the earliest part of the morning “praying
and meditating in a darkened room by myself or in the fields behind my
home. I have relevant materials to reflect on, and find that this
process is essential to get through the week.” Always, he said, he
is “trying to seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit at all times. I
frequently fall short, but I try.”
With that ongoing preparation helping him to understand “the
serious doctrinal issues dividing the denomination,” Fraas said he “decided
to remain a member of the Presbyterian Church (USA) rather than to
worship in another body. I will stand and fight in whatever way God
directs me to uphold the authority of His Word, the guidance of the
Spirit and the name and person of Jesus Christ.”