 In Brief Can court official appeal his case? By John H. Adams The Layman Online Tuesday, May 27, 2003
There were more than enough signatures on the petition to require the moderator to call the General Assembly back into session. But the Office of the Stated Clerk sent out a "validation" request asking the signatories, in effect, Do you really mean it? Several commissioners said no, so the stated clerk scratched them from the petition. Kim's Brethren concluded that was appropriate. Yim would love to take back his signature that landed – unintentionally, he pleads – on a commissioner's resolution that is at cross purposes with a court member's obligation not to take sides in ongoing church cases. But the fact, your honorables, is that Yim DID sign the resolution. His alibi is: Oops. Yim explains: He was trying to find someone to sign his own commissioner's resolution (it takes two signatures to meet entry requirements). A nice lady by the name of Diane Gibson was nearby and they quickly agreed: She'd sign his, if he'd sign hers. Yim's resolution would not have been a conflict of interest. It was a summons to prayer. He confessed that he didn't read Gibson's resolution, but never thought it would pose a problem. It did – maybe not technically. Unlike petitions that call on commissioners to consider a constitutional crisis, the stated clerk's office doesn't require a second vote on commissioner's resolutions. The resolution that Yim unintentionally signed was approved Monday by the Committee on Church Procedures and Ministry and passed on to the full General Assembly. It took sides in a new heresy complaint filed against a minister who is trying to transfer from North Carolina to serve a church in Palo Alto, Calif. The resolution lamented the hardship wrought upon that minister – whose status is in limbo until the charges are resolved – just because he allegedly declared that he didn't believe Jesus rose bodily from the dead. Bad doctrine, the resolution suggested, doesn't rise to the level of causing a minister inconvenience in his job move. Yim did not know what he had wrongfully wrought until he showed up, well after the committee action, in the committee's meeting room. The Layman Online approached him for a photograph, finding it unusual that a court official had signed the resolution. "What?!" Yim gulped. He declared that he would immediately go out and confess to others that he had committed a grievous error. But he said it would be useless – since the committee had already acted – to try to convince the stated clerk's office that he had unintentionally signed the resolution that deals with a matter that some day may come before the court he sits on. Behind closed door warnings Commissioners to the 215th General Assembly gathered in committees Sunday night behind closed doors to receive, in some cases, stern warnings from committee leaders. In one of the closed meetings, Kenneth Thorson of the Presbytery of the James, the moderator of the Committee on Health Issues, told the other members that he would not tolerate any expressions of anger or combativeness. A member of that committee later quoted Thornson as saying, "If any commissioner of this committee does that, I will ask the commissioner to leave the room. If the commissioner does not leave the room, I will call the authorities and have that commissioner removed." A member of the National Issues Committee quoted the committee's leader as warning committee members to "keep your discussions within the committee. Be careful about 'outsiders.' Don't talk with people who are not members of the committee about committee business. Watch out for 'special-interest' groups." At the meeting of the Mission Coordination and Budgets Committee, one of the commissioners was chastised by the moderator for asking too many questions. A committee member quoted the moderator as saying, "You are to come into this room with no opinion regarding the business before this assembly." And a youth advisory delegate from the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta, who received a copy of a letter signed by 2,700 Presbyterians opposing the PCUSA report on families, told about being advised by denominational officials not to pay attention to "special-interest" groups. The delegate said she refused to read the letter because of that advice. Are conservatives Christian, too? It was, for sure, an unintentional gaffe, an unintentional slight. Commissioners laughed when she uttered it, an understanding laugh. But it took two laughs before Susan Andrews, the new moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA), realized what she had said. She was answering a question during the moderator's forum. "We have a community crisis," she said. So far, so good. "We have lost trust, we have lost patience and we have lost hope." Discouraging words, but hardly laughable. The she called "for intentional dialogue between conservatives and Christians." That's what spawned the laughter – a nervous sort of laughter. Andrews looked stunned when they laughed. Someone on stage informed her about her gaffe. She issued a retraction: "Conservatives and liberals!" |
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