[ note: appologies for not posting this first report sooner. My connection to internet was interrupted by a lightening strike which destroyed my dsl modem. Had to wait for a new one. - Al Wilson, site servant]
From General Presbyter, Rev. Joy Kaufmann:
We Have a Moderator!
“Nothing is too hard or too wondrous for God!” So says new moderator, The Rev. Bruce Reyes Chow, 39, new church development pastor of a “funky, urban, multiethnic, multigenerational church in San Francisco, The Mission Bay Community Church.” He went on to say, “…if the church steps out in faith rather than clinging to survival, to be more intent on being faithful than on being right, to be together based on our common covenant in Jesus Christ rather than by property or pensions, then we will be able to live into a future in which we are a vital and vibrant presence in the world.”
The Rev. Mr. Reyes Chow was one of four candidates for moderator. Each made a brief opening statement, and each was nominated by someone who knew the person well. Then commissioners asked questions. Each candidate for moderator answered all of the questions. After a full hour of questioning, the commissioners voted. The Rev. Mr. Reyes Chow won on the second ballot Saturday night, with 390 votes or 55%.
Reyes Chow said he wouldn’t have run for moderator if he didn’t believe God has great things in store for and through the Presbyterian Church (USA). As he visited various groups meeting at lunches and dinners on Sunday, he also said he would welcome invitations to come visit in presbyteries, especially those that invited him cooperatively with neighboring presbyteries.
Wonderful Worship at Two Sites Simultaneously
Numbers were the driver, causing the Committee on Local Arrangements in San Jose to provide two sites for Sunday’s communion service. There was no one site big enough to hold everyone. But the net result of worship in two sites was wonderful!
Usually the numbers of persons in the big “convention center” Sunday service of worship are so overwhelming that the persons at the pulpit appear as specks in the distance. This morning’s worship at two venues, with satellite uplink, allowed every participant to be close to the chancel – close to The Rev. Joan Gray, out-going moderator, as she preached; close to the magnificent choirs, one in each space; close to the persons who presided over the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. There was both the feeling of soul-stirring uplift one can receive in a large Christian worship gathering, as well as more of a sense of intimacy than is usual at General Assembly worship.
The Rev. Ms. Gray preached on John 13:34-35; 15:9-17, “I have given you a new commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” She described those persons in churches who are easy to love… and those who are less easy, even downright difficult, to love. But she said, Jesus calls us to love one another. This is a commandment, not a suggestion. So Jesus is serious when he tells us to love one another. In a world where we tend to “clump up” in like groups, Jesus calls us to pour ourselves out as he poured himself out on the cross for us. Joan Gray pointed out that “this commandment rubs our nose in what it really means to be a Christian.” And because “God makes a way where there is no way, it is possible to love those God gives us in the church. Do we want it? Yes!”
For those persons, worshipping in one sanctuary or the other, where major parts of the service did not physically take place, the satellite uplink made it seem as if we were all in the same space. Joan Gray was “sent” from one place to the other by satellite, as were all of the various mission personnel who were commissioned. We shared prayers for all our military chaplains currently serving. We also read the necrology of all the ministers who have entered into larger life since the 2006 General Assembly.
The service ended with the benediction, “And now go out into the beauty and blessedness of this day, knowing that God is in your head and in your heart, on your left and on your right, behind you and ever-before you – loving each of you as if there was but one of you to love! Go justly, go mercifully, and go humbly in the living presence of Jesus the Christ! Halleluia! AMEN!”
Vice Moderator Elected
The Rev. Byron Wade, pastor of the Davie Street Presbyterian Church of Raleigh, NC, was elected as Vice Moderator of the General Assembly on Wednesday, June 25. In a moving moment, the new Moderator, The Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow looked on as The Rev. Mr. Wade answered the installation questions in the affirmative, pledging to do his very best “with God’s help”.
Both our new Moderator and Vice Moderator are youngish – 39 and 45 – both are married, fathers of young children, members of racial-ethnic groups, born and reared on the West Coast, and tremendously excited about serving the Presbyterian Church (USA) in a national capacity. Both appear to be men of deep faith and genuine conviction that God sent the Christ to save us, granting us the Holy Spirit through whose actions we are enabled to be the church.
But the differences between the two stop here. Bruce Reyes-Chow serves a new church development in San Francisco that is multigenerational and racially diverse. Wade serves a 140 year old congregation in Raleigh.
The Rev. Tolokun Omokunde, a member of the Presbytery of New Hope, as is The Rev. Wade, says of him, “In a way, Rev. Wade is ‘old school’. He believes in the whole family going to Sunday school and church together, and he models that….He is an earnest believer who’s not ashamed of the gospel.”
Both the Moderator and the Vice Moderator will travel the country for the next two years, meeting with members and ministers of our congregations.
Ecumenical Stance a First in Decades
Commissioners overwhelmingly affirmed a denominational ecumenical stance for the first time in decades. The two predecessor bodies – Presbyterian Churches called “north” and “south” colloquially – each had ecumenical stances, once from 1975 and the other from 1981. But since Reunion in 1983, our current denomination hasn’t had such a statement.
The commissioners voted to affirm the following as appropriate positions for Presbyterians (USA) to take in relation to our Christian brothers and sisters in other denominations.
• Together with Christians in every time and place, Presbyterians confess belief in one holy, catholic and apostolic church.
• The Nicene Creed’s marks of the church are not accomplishments of human performance of objects of human striving, as if the church depends on our efforts. The unity of the church is a gift of its Lord.
• By God’s grace, the holy catholic and apostolic church is one. And yet the one church is divided, fragmented into distinct traditions, communions and denominations that live in various degrees of estrangement from one another. In turn, each part of the church embodies tensions in its own life that threaten to divide the one church yet again. These divisions do not eradicate the church’s unity, but they obscure it, impairing common witness and weakening common mission.
• The one church is not a theological abstraction; the divided church is not a sociological necessity. The unity of the church is both God’s real gift and God’s effective calling. Thus the one church of Jesus Christ, established by God in the power of the Holy Spirit, is called to break down dividing walls of hostility that separate churches from one another and to build up the fullness of communion that binds churches together in common faith and witness.
• As an expression of the one holy catholic and apostolic church, the Presbyterian Church (USA) has never been able to live in comfortable detachment from other churches.
• The Presbyterian Church (USA) seeks patterns of visible unity in a variety of ways. We enter councils of churches.., we establish relationships of full communion with other churches…, we explore possibilities for living out common faith and witness in covenant communion…, we participate in mission golvally with ecumenical church partners, and in mission nationally with regional councils, local associations, and neighboring congregations…, we engage in bilateral and multilateral dialogues with other churches and traditions in order to remove barriers of misunderstanding and establish common affirmations…, we work for the reunion of separated churches in the Presbyterian and Reformed family…, and we reach out to unfamiliar traditions and associations of churches.
• In God’s grace the one church has been given gifts to “equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.”
• The Presbyterian Church (USA), in gratitude for God’s grace and mercy, commits itself to faithful use of God’s gifts in search for the fuller expression of the visible unity to which we are called.
Various Good Things from the Committee on
Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations
One of the committees that did excellent work at the 218th General Assembly (2008) is the Committee on Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations. This committee did the kind of work that often goes unnoticed… until you need back-up for good conversations and activities you are doing in your own community. So here is a little bit about five good things this committee recommended to the GA commissioners, and those commissioners then voted into place.
1) They called for tolerance and peaceful relations between the Christian and Muslim communities, at the invitation of 138 Muslim scholars in an open letter called “A Common Word Between Us and You”.
Most of the named recipients of the letter, issued on October 11, 2007, were frankly from the Christian communities most familiar to those in the Muslim world. They include such persons as His All-Holiness, Bartholomew I, Patriarch of Constantinople and New Rome; His Beatitude Theodoros II, Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa; His Beatitude Maxim, Patriarch of Bulgaria; His Beatitude Chrisostomos, Archbishop of Cyprus; His Holiness Pope Shenouda III, Pope o Alexandria and Patriarch of All Africa on the Apostolic Throne of St. Mark; His Holiness Abune Paulos, Fifth Patriarch and Catholicos of Ethiopia, Echege of the See of St. Tekle Haymanot, Archbishop of Axium; and His Beatitude Mar Dinkha IV, Partriarch of the Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East.
Other recipients named are more familiar to us. They include The Most Rev. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury; The Rev. Mark S. Hanson, Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the President of the Lutheran World Federation; Rev. George H. Freeman, General Secretary of the World Methodist Council; Rev. David Coffey, President of the Baptist World Alliance; and the Rev. Setri Nyomi, General Secretary of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. It is through the last person named that the invitation to support toleration and peace has come to our own denomination.
2) They voted to enter into a covenant relationship with the Korean
Presbyterian Church in America. As the two denominations live into this covenant, we will consult with those who already have experience in working with persons and groups from the KPCA. This document will be sent to all the presbyteries for ratification.
3) They strongly approved a document of Mutual Recognition of Baptism with the
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. This document will be sent to all the presbyteries for ratification. Study materials will be prepared for use in our congregations.
4) They approved wholeheartedly a Covenant Agreement with the Moravian Church.
This will enable us to work on orderly exchange of ministers, mission partnerships and invitations to one another to share in governance and communal life.
5) Finally, they approved strongly a Presbyterian-Episcopal Agreement, with the
comment that, given our already cordial relationships, we should give special attention to mutuality in language regarding church governance (translation into real people’s English – talk about bishops in comparison to how we do things) and worship practice.
Now, if we Presbyterians could just get along with one another, perhaps God through the Holy Spirit will grant us the grace to learn better how to show visible oneness in Christ to the world around us with our ecumenical partners and even through our interfaith dialogues.
Gradye Parsons Elected Stated Clerk
The Rev. Gradye Parsons easily won election as the new Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church (USA) on Friday, June 27, 2008. The vote break-out is as follows:
Parsons 405
Jones 176
Koster 110
Tarbell 21
Mr. Parsons will take up the tasks of the Office of Stated Clerk upon the departure from that office of The Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, recently voted Stated Clerk Emeritus. That will occur later this evening (Friday) or tomorrow before noon when the 218th General Assembly ends. [Note: An Issue of PCUSA News has an article on this election. Click here to go to it. ]
Miscellaneous Good Things from GA
Our own elder commissioner, Leeanne Gill-Peters, penned one of the proposals coming from The Committee on Youth. This committee, using a process of discernment prior to using Roberts Rules, was highly effective in generating items for the good of the whole church. One of these items was the proposal put into writing by Leeanne.
The GA commissioners approved the following items suggested by the Youth Committee:
• Direct the Office of Ministry with Youth to provide a DVD, part of which we
saw during GA, to all congregations (helpful hint – the DVD is terrific! Please
watch it when it arrives.)
• Create materials recommending and giving guidance about how to provide
mentors for youth in the church.
• Create a Youth Ministry Task Force with a majority of youth members (this is
the one on which Leeanne worked!)
• Refer various other matters to the task force.
• Change the name of Youth Advisory Delegates (YADs) to Young Adult Advisory Delegates (YAADs).
The Committee on Worship and Spiritual Renewal, also a committee that used a process of discernment and idea generation prior to working through Robert’s Rules, recommended two items approved by the GA commissioners. One was the request that the moderator affirm our common faith in Jesus Christ prior to each vote. Another was, “A Call to Seek God for Spiritual Renewal of the Church”, which overwhelmingly passed. This item invites each congregation and presbytery of the PC(USA) to gather in times set aside for spiritual renewal. We are encouraged to seek God’s will through personal prayer and community worship, through meditation, confession, forgiveness, fasting and prayer. It is always appropriate to follow such practices, but most especially as we discern God’s will for our congregations and middle governing bodies in these challenging times.
The Assembly concurred with the Committee on Church Growth and Christian Education on two programs of church growth. One, called “A Strategy for Church Growth for African American Congregations” is just that. The other was a resolution called “Grow God’s Church Deep and Wide”. It includes a DVD with various Commissioners lifting up ideas from their local congregations that have helped the congregations grow in faith (and sometimes in numbers.) You can go to deepandwidening.com for more information. You might want to also check www.pcusa.org/goodnews
The Presbytery of Grace sent an overture requesting the Office of General Assembly to produce resources related to adolescent sexuality. After much conversation and several failed amendments to the main motion, the motion passed the Assembly.
The commissioners unanimously endorsed “An Invitation to Expanding Participation in God’s Mission”. This document, also known as the “Dallas Covenant”, comes from a broad-based group of mission minded folks meeting in Dallas, TX earlier this year. They crafted the statement now know as the Dallas Covenant to encourage themselves and all the rest of us in mission coordination and cooperation. If you want to sign on to the Dallas Covenant, google search it or search it on the PCUSA website. Sign-on options for individuals and groups are available.
While denomination-wide studies show we all want to support more missionaries, we don’t want a fifth special offering to be the mechanism whereby we do that. So the offering failed, but the sending of additional missionaries (more than 200 for the first time in years) was approved and enacted with the commissioning of missionaries at this past Sunday’s service of worship.
If the Presbyterian Foundation and the General Assembly Mission Council (new name for the old GAC!!!) dispute the use of monies/interest monies in restricted funds, there is a new mechanism for adjudication. That is the newly formed “Restricted Funds Resolution Committee”. May we never need such a thing in this presbytery, but if we do, the denomination now has a good model.
A representative of Presbyterian Men was added to the General Assembly Mission Council (GAMC).
Jill Hudson and Marcia Clark Myers were elected as Associate Stated Clerks.
While a new office with full staff complement was not created to deal with sexual misconduct, resources are going to be made available, primarily through web-based means. There will also be 3 – 4 trained persons to staff a hotline to deal with cases of sexual misconduct, most especially when the Sexual Misconduct Ombudsperson is not available.
While generic non-geographic presbyteries were not approved, the Presbytery of Hanmi, a Korean-language and culture presbytery was reapproved. It is now 25 years old, and was judged to have served many Korean language and culture congregations wisely and well.
If every action with fiscal implications before this GA is approved, then the per capita will rise from $5.79 to $6.04. (Our presbytery just voted on a budget proposal that speculated the per capita would be $6.00. We’ll keep you posted as to final results!)
Form of Government to be Studied for Two Years
By Congregations and Presbyteries
The General Assembly, recognizing the worth of the Form of Government project, but also realizing that the current draft document is flawed in detail, recommends that document for study by the denomination. We will have two years in which to study the FOG report and give feedback about the document. The Form of Government Committee members are asked to serve during these two years as the recipients of comments from around the denomination. The Committee will also have additional persons join those who crafted the original document.
Please make sure to take any opportunities you have to read and comment on the document, including any our presbytery may offer in the near future. The Form of Government Committee members also covet your prayers as they seek to write a document under the guidance of the Holy Spirit that will well serve the denomination.
The document aims at two main purposes. First, it seeks to be a genuine constitution, not a mixture of constitutional concepts and “how to do” items that more appropriately can be written in manuals. Second, the document tries to give the church a missional polity, rather than a strictly regulatory polity.
A Few More Items from the Last Evening of GA
In a marathon session that lasted into the wee hours, the GA commissioners accomplished a lot.
By a vote of 5 – 1, they approved a new social policy stance, hoping to give “a message of hope for a fearful time”. The policy encourages persons who follow Jesus to “share more than they consume” and to “show compassion more than suspicion”, among other things.
They voted to be supportive of any legislative proposals that might lead to universal access to decent, affordable, safe housing for all persons.
They voted to study energy sources and to thank Presbyterians for their prayers, gifts and actions following the Gulf hurricanes of 2005.
They defeated changing the definition of marriage to include same-gender couples, but reaffirmed a long-standing commitment to equal protection under the law for lesbian and gay persons and reaffirmed the right of same-gender couples to civil unions and “thereby to all benefits, privileges and responsibilities of civil union.”
They asked for the writing of a new HIV-AIDs policy, and asked to have resources on “reproductive options” that “more adequately reflect the full spectrum of Biblical, theological and pastoral counsel” consistent with the policy of the 1992 GA report and the 2006 GA policy.
They voted to approve and distribute “Comfort My People: A Policy Statement on Serious Mental Illness”.
And, recognizing that nearly one-third of the 300,000,000+ citizens of our country are uninsured or underinsured, they voted to “endorse in principle the provision of single-payer universal health care reform, in which health care services are privately provided and publicly financed.
Clerk Rainey to Serve GA
Our own Stated Clerk, Dr. Virginia “Ginny” Rainey, was elected to serve on the Committee on General Assembly. Congratulations Ginny!
my impressions of the host city
by
Ginny
I can’t leave San Jose without mentioning the gracious people of San Jose. To get from our hotel to downtown, one takes a very clean and efficient light rail car. A local man explained to me how to buy a ticket and how to stop the train. Once I got there, there were smiling people to welcome us into the Convention Center. One night, a young Arab immigrant saw our Presbyterian name tags, and engaged us on the light rail in his halting English, telling us how much our religions shared and how much he and his friends longed for peace as we did. One night, my fellow parlementarian and I were on a tight schedule for dinner. We were seated in a very gracious restaurant, where the waitress made suggestions as to what would come quickly. When the dinners were slow to come out, she whisked them into "to go" boxes and gave them to us free because she was so concerned that she had promised to get us on our way. The servers in Joy’s and my hotel brought us fruit when we said that a heaping portion of red skin potatoes was more than we could eat for breakfast with our eggs.
They have made us welcome wherever we went.