 Brazilian church leader rebukes presbytery, welcomes Williamson as preacher, speaker The Layman Online Wednesday, February 4, 2004 The leader of the Presbyterian Church of Brazil has rebuked the Presbytery of Western North Carolina, calling its invalidation of Parker T. Williamson's ministry with the Presbyterian Lay Committee an act of "deep sorrow."
On Jan. 31, the presbytery rejected Williamson's ministry as not being "consonant with the mission of the presbytery in light of the character and conduct of the work." It also granted him member-at-large status, which Williamson denounced as "an oily compromise." After the vote, he informed the presbytery that, because of "many irregularities" in the proceedings, the Presbyterian Lay Committee would be filing a legal complaint against the presbytery in the church courts. The Presbyterian Lay Committee, meanwhile, vowed to continue "to inform and equip God's people" despite the presbytery's action. In a Feb. 3 telephone call to the offices of the Lay Committee, Morais, executive secretary of the Supreme Council of the Presbyterian Church of Brazil (stated clerk), expressed the "deep sorrow of Brazilian Presbyterians" over the actions of the Presbytery of Western North Carolina. Calling from Belo Horizonte, the capital city of Minas Gerais province, Morais invited Williamson to address hundreds of leaders and seminary students during a week-long fall celebration. Morais asked Williamson to place a special emphasis in his addresses on "liberalism's threat to the integrity of Reformed Christian faith." Williamson will speak to 300 pastors and elders each morning and 700 members each afternoon during the week, Morais said. He also will speak to students at one of the denomination's eight seminaries. The Presbyterian Church of Brazil is a rapidly growing body of Reformed Christians. Morais has served his congregation in Belo Horizonte for 25 years. When he began his ministry there, he said his province only had 13 congregations. That same province, he said, has grown to 148 congregations and more than 600,000 members today. In 1999, the Presbyterian News Service characterized the Presbyterian Church of Brazil as "an unabashedly conservative million-member denomination, the fruit of the first Protestant missionary forays into Brazil more than a century ago. [It] broke its ties with the Presbyterian Church (USA) in the 1970s." In the spring of 2003, the Witherspoon Society criticized the Presbyterian Church of Brazil as "fundamentalist," and said its leaders had "purged its seminaries of their progressive professors and students." Those "progressives," according to the Witherspoon Society, then formed their own denomination, the United Presbyterian Church of Brazil. |
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