 Denomination staff leader says Presbyterians are tired of fighting By John H. Adams The Layman Online Wednesday, June 6, 2001 LOUISVILLE, Ky. – John Detterick, executive director of the General Assembly Council, told the council's executive committee June 5 that he and Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick had received – "very loudly and very clearly" – signals from Presbyterians that they're tired of voting on and fighting over controversial issues. "There's a hunger and readiness to try to approach our differences a little differently," Detterick said. "There is a hunger to be more spiritual." He did not identify the specific issues that have caused the greatest dismay, but some of the chief contentions have been over:
The ordination standard – G6.0106b – requires single ordained officers to be chaste and married officers to demonstrate fidelity in their marriages. It precludes the ordination of self-affirming and practicing adulterers and homosexuals. Several congregations have announced their intention to defy the ordination standard if it continues in the Book of Order. And a number of congregations that have joined the Confessing Church Movement have begun – or threatened to begin – withholding payment of per-capita apportionments to support the work of the General Assembly. Detterick cited a growing opposition to a "continued regulatory approach" in handling dissensions and dissenters in the denomination. While he did not mention the ordination standard, Detterick's suggestion that a different approach is needed squares with a movement begun by some presbytery executives who have called for "a more excellent way." Instead of another up-or-down vote on ordination, they want the General Assembly to appoint a commission to conduct a four-year study of gay issues. Moderator Syngman Rhee also has called for such a study. Detterick said he drew his assessment of the mindset of Presbyterians from his and Kirkpatrick's visits to presbyteries and synods. He estimated that they had talked with 4,000 Presbyterians during those visits. "There is a deep conviction that the Holy Spirit is alive and well," he said. "The time is right. The church is right" for a change. Detterick referred to an e-mail he recently received from a Presbyterian who attended a communion service in the Presbyterian Center in Louisville, the headquarters of the denomination. During that service, the writer said she had "the feeling that maybe the General Assembly is going to listen to the Lord, and things will be different," Detterick said. "We have the leadership opportunity" to help bring about change, he said. "We can have an impact." During the first plenary session of the General Assembly Council, Kirkpatrick also referred to the visits he and Detterick had made. Kirkpatrick, too, mentioned "remarkable signs of what the Holy Spirit is doing" in "a dramatically different time than a generation ago." "There is a tremendous parallel between the situation we are in and the situation in the New Testament Church," he said. Using some of the Biblical accounts in Acts and I Corinthians, Kirkpatrick said the New Testament Church struggled to find unity in diversity, just as today. He used the phrase "unity in diversity" four times during his brief remarks and called on the General Assembly Council to "help build the Presbyterian Church as a New Testament Church." In an aside intended to be humorous, Kirkpatrick noted that a national meeting of funeral home directors was under way in another area of the Kentucky Convention Center at the same time that the council was meeting there. The response was soft, restrained laughter from leaders of a denomination that lost 35,000 members in 2000. |
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