Observations on a broken trust By Sylvia Dooling President, Voices of Orthodox Women Volume 35, Number 3 Posted June 3, 2002 In the late ‘50s, when I was a teen-ager growing up in Southern California, the city of Los Angeles had a curfew. On Friday and Saturday nights, promptly at 10 p.m., every television station would break to an announcer who would speak the same words and ask the same question: “It’s 10 o’clock. Do you know where your teen-ager is?” Most of the time, my parents did – or at least they thought they did. But, to no one’s surprise, I failed at one time or another to fully and completely disclose where I would be. Of course, I always told the truth before I left the house – just not necessarily all of it. On those occasions when my parents found me out, the fragile thread of trust between us would be broken. And, not surprisingly, when they set an even stricter curfew because I had not told all of the truth, my immediate response would be, “You just don’t trust me!” Which, in fact, was the case. It took me a long time to figure out that trust is not an entitlement. It has to be earned. And even when earned, it can be broken again. In the opinion of Voices of Orthodox Women, Presbyterian Women has broken trust with the women of our church by failing fully to disclose how it uses mission money. In 1997, $100,000 of Presbyterian Women’s Birthday Offering was given to the Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence to create “Love – All That and More” – a series of three videotapes on gender roles, sexuality, dating, relationships and love. The series was released in 2001 and was advertised in the July/August edition of Horizons magazine where it was touted as an “excellent tool for parents or other educators who would like a well-rounded discussion on dating and love.” The “Love” curriculum included three study guides – one for use in secular settings, one for Jewish educators and one for Christian educators. Of the curriculum, Horizons said, “The focus is always on the opportunity to grow and learn how to seek and develop a mature, respectful and loving relationship with another person.” The problem with the “Love” curriculum is that both the videotapes and the Christian facilitator’s guide endorse an ethic that legitimizes heterosexual relationships outside of marriage, along with bisexual and homosexual relationships. The series reprises an ethic that used to be referred to as “justice love.” In 1991, however, the 203rd General Assembly in Baltimore rejected “justice love” when it overwhelmingly refused to adopt a report by the Task Force on Human Sexuality titled, “Keeping Body and Soul Together.” For Presbyterian Women to enthusiastically fund and endorse the “Love” project – no matter how well intentioned – is to go against what they know to be the clear policies and standards of our church. It is to endorse behaviors that the Bible condemns, that the confessions of our church rebuke and that ignore a morality that has been reaffirmed time and again by our general assemblies and presbyteries. The Birthday Offering was begun in 1922. Each year, Presbyterian Women celebrate their birthdays by donating a number of pennies equal to their age. Historically, the Birthday Offering has been used to fund a long succession of wonderful mission projects, both at home and around the world. And the expectation of the women of the church is that their gifts will continue to be used to uphold and extend “the faith once for all delivered to the saints,” and to minister to the real-world needs of God’s children around the globe. So, the question is this – how did all those pennies given to fund Christian mission get invested in a sex-education curriculum that undermines the policies and standards of the church? Well, according to “The Manual For Presbyterian Women,” it is the Presbyterian Women Creative Ministries Offering Committee that selects the projects to be funded with the Birthday Offering. This committee is made up of representatives of the Churchwide Coordinating Team, the Congregational Ministries Division, the National Ministries Division, Worldwide Ministries and staff from the Women’s Ministries Program Area. The decisions made by the Creative Ministries Offering Committee then are reviewed and endorsed by General Assembly staff. So, to a large extent, it is people whose salaries are paid by the church who have either actively promoted or passively concurred with the decision to invest mission money in a project that chips away at the policies of the church that they ostensibly serve. Even more problematic, perhaps, is the fact that we no longer can assume that we know what we mean when we use the word “mission.” For most women of the church, “mission” means extending the gospel and compassionately meeting the needs of men, women and children around the world. Presbyterian Women, however, defines the word differently. For Presbyterian Women, mission is primarily advocacy. Advocacy is “cause centered” and usually promotes politically correct social issues. In this case, the particular advocacy issue is the prevention of sexual and domestic violence. Is the prevention of sexual and domestic violence worthy of the support of Presbyterian Women? Absolutely – if it is addressed from a Christian and Biblical perspective. But in the case of the “Love” curriculum, the proposed answer to sexual and domestic violence is the adoption of an ethic that the church has officially rejected. What a waste of mission money! What a disservice to the young people who deserve to hear the truth about how God expects us to use the gift of sexuality! Trust has been broken. But trust can be restored. Therefore, the Board of Directors of Voices of Orthodox Women calls upon the leaders of Presbyterian Women fully and completely to disclose how they intend to invest money that is given by the women of the church for the mission of the church. Sylvia Dooling is the president of Voices of Orthodox Women.

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