Former PCUSA employee defends two fired from staff By John H. Adams The Layman Online Wednesday, December 15, 2004 Mary Ann Lundy, who lost her job with the Presbyterian Church (USA) after getting the denomination to sponsor and help finance the 1993 Sophia-worshiping Re-Imagining Conference, has taken up a new cause. She is now trying to rally her friends and current employees of the PCUSA staff at the denomination's national headquarters in Louisville to protest the firings of Kathy Leuckert and Peter Sulyok. Lundy, who went to work as deputy general secretary of the World Council of Churches soon after she lost her PCUSA job – "I was fired up," she quipped – compared the plight of Leuckert and Sulyok to the backlash that occurred after the Re-Imagining Conference. Now retired from the WCC, Lundy wrote a letter that was posted on the Web site of the Witherspoon Society, an independent group of self-described "progressive" Presbyterians. She compared what happened to Leuckert and Sulyok to her situation after The Layman published a report about the Re-Imagining Conference in 1993. Lundy's letter denounced "the unfairness of holding only staff accountable for an event which involved elected leadership, for the use of scapegoating in order to appease critics of the church, for 'wimping out' instead of standing firm when there is criticism of faithful and courageous action; in short, the sacrificing of national staff when the going gets rough!" The Re-Imagining Conference of 1993, in which Lundy and other PCUSA staff members were deeply involved, caused an enormous backlash from the pews that reduced contributions to the denomination by millions of dollars. The 1994 General Assembly declared that the Re-Imagining movement went beyond the bounds of Christian faith. John Detterick, the executive director of the General Assembly Council, fired Leuckert, his top deputy, and Sulyok, the staff leader for the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy [ACSWP], shortly after some of the committee members met with Hezbollah during a Mideast trip. Detterick has not disclosed his reasons for firing the two, but he said recently that it was not related to the Hezbollah meeting. However, Lundy said she believed the firings of Leuckert and Sulyok were related to the Hezbollah trip. "The background for the decision is the last General Assembly when action was taken to study the possibility of divestment of stock in corporations that are involved in the Israeli demolition of homes and buildings in Palestine," she said in a letter to "friends." "So far only study has taken place and no action, but Jewish religious bodies and political organizations have registered their opposition and made threats against the PCUSA headquarters and more recently to burn churches. "In the fall of this year the Committee on Social Witness Policy, staffed by Sulyok whose supervisor is Leuckert, made the decision to travel to the Middle East on a fact-finding mission. They spoke with leaders in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Israel and spoke with pro-Palestinian groups. At least one Israeli official declined to meet with them. Though they were instructed not to meet with the media, one elected member did so and an uproar ensued, whereupon Peter and Kathy were abruptly fired. Ironically, this happened 11 years to the day after the Re-Imagining Conference!" A number of Lundy's statements in the letter were erroneous. The General Assembly did not call for the "possibility" of divestment – it called for actual "selective phased divestment of funds in multinational corporations doing business with Israel." There was no mention in the resolution of limiting its scope to companies that are involved in the demolition of homes and buildings in Palestine. Furthermore, no Jewish religious bodies or political organizations have made any threats against the PCUSA headquarters. To the contrary, most have said that the PCUSA's one-sided policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a threat to their own efforts for peace in the region. The denomination has reported only one arson threat: an unsigned, handwritten letter that included a swastika – normally regarded as an anti-Jewish symbol. Lundy concluded her letter by urging her friends to write to Detterick "protesting his action and to the Chair of the General Assembly Council who is Nancy Kahaian, particularly asking for a hearing for the staff members and an investigation of John Detterick's action." The General Assembly Council has decided to conduct an investigation.

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