The Layman – December 2004 Volume 37, Number 5 – Posted December 28, 2004

Do you feel the pain? Brace yourselves, brothers and sisters, we have been pushed to the brink. We’re going to talk about pain, a subject that the pro-homosexual lobby in the Presbyterian Church (USA) has foisted upon us to induce guilt. They believe they have cornered the market on pain. Not so. First, though, consider the lamentation of Doug Oldenburg, who was the moderator of the denomination’s 210th General Assembly. Oldenburg champions the ordination of practicing homosexuals. He tries to use pain to leverage Presbyterians out of their Biblical tradition. Here’s what he said in the afterword to a Covenant Network booklet that includes 40 stories about Presbyterians who had been “exiled” from the denomination because our constitution doesn’t recognize homosexual marriages or ordain practicing homosexuals: “So sad! So very sad! These are stories of incredible pain.” Oldenburg has presbyopia. He is near-sighted. He doesn’t feel – or doesn’t want to feel – the pain of other exiles who have left the once-thriving PCUSA because of its loss of Biblical conviction. We lost 45,668 members in 2003 and 1.85 million since 1965. Did those exiles, many of them belonging to a generation of Presbyterians who were known as the “People of the Book,” feel no pain as they departed? We wrangle unceasingly over whether the Bible means what it says when it speaks of homosexual practice being outside the will of God. Do Presbyterians who hold to the truth that has been entrusted to them feel no pain when they’re accused of being ignorant and bigoted just because they stand firm on the Words of Scripture? We watch the secular and religious media sneer at the PCUSA after a denominational delegation exercises incredibly poor judgment and meets with a known terrorist group in Lebanon. To add insult to injury, two of the contingent lauded the terrorists. How do you explain that to a Sunday school class without excruciating pain? We learn that our stated clerk has been elected president of an ecumenical organization that repeatedly condemns capitalism. While many of us know that our lifestyles are not as simple as they should be, we find it painful that the highest-ranking officer in the PCUSA, a denomination that has $8 billion in investments, would renounce the generous capitalists who made that possible. And so it goes. The pain felt by many – thousands more than the Covenant Network’s 40 case studies – is like that pain that precedes death. The PCUSA, America’s largest Presbyterian denomination, the repository of a marvelous legacy, the church that evangelized the remote parts of the world, is not-so-slowly dying. So, we who have been its members, who have been baptized by its ministers, who have placed our dead in its cemeteries, who have experienced joy in its sanctuaries celebrating our weddings, our children’s weddings and their children’s weddings, who have borne one another’s burdens and joys, are enduring enormous pain. There is no glee in watching the collapse of the Presbyterian Church (USA). It brings to mind another moment of pain, the verse that we all learned as children: “Jesus wept.”

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