LOUISVILLE—Whenever the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP) meets, one can count on copious consideration of a cornucopia of concerns. The committee’s summer meeting at the denominational offices in Louisville, June 20-23, proved to be no exception.
Several massive papers destined for next year’s General Assembly are in the works. As some of these have been moving with glacial dispatch, one would think that ACSWP would focus on pushing its existing workload forward. Unless it received a direct request from General Assembly (GA), one would think that ACSWP would refuse to add anything more to its already full plate. One would be wrong.
On Thursday, ACSWP members reviewed rambling, unfocused proposals from their leadership for not one but two further policy papers aimed at enormous, Gordian-knot subjects-post-war Iraq (and the Middle East in general) and post-Katrina New Orleans (and economic justice in general). The projects seem precariously timed, with little opportunity for them to be adequately conceived, staffed, researched, written, and vetted prior to scheduled draft approval at the next ACSWP meeting in October.
GAC Executive Director Linda Valentine (right) addresses ACSWP June 21 in Louisville. Other key staff leaders listening in include (from the left) Rhashell Hunter, Director of Racial Ethnic & Women’s Ministries; Sarah Lisherness, Director of Peace and Justice, and Vernon Broyles, Public Witness Representative. |
The idea of ACSWP biting off yet more mouthfuls to somehow chew and swallow appeared to amuse even some denominational staff veterans. “We looked [at the New Orleans proposal] and said, ‘Man, they’re nuts!'” quipped Susan Ryan, Coordinator for Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. She spoke it in humor, but the amazement at ACSWP’s grand ambition was both spontaneous and genuine.
“I can’t imagine anyone pulling together this draft,” commented ACSWP member Gloria Albrecht about the Iraq proposal. She called it “confusing” and “broad.” Albrecht has experience with such matters, having served as the consultant for the controversial “Families in Transition” paper that the 2003 GA sent back to ACSWP for an overhaul.
But ACSWP often seems to generate its own work, and these proposals were no exception. Often, the committee is able to persuade the General Assembly of a need for a report. Then ACSWP sits back and graciously “accepts” GA referrals of the self-generated business. The tactic is a handy piece of work that manages to keep ACSWP occupied and—at least for some people—its existence justified.
In this case, however, there was not even the formality of a GA request. The rationale for the new policy papers was even thinner: the fact that Iraq and New Orleans were still in the news and have somehow gotten stuck in someone’s craw at ACSWP. Therefore, Presbyterians will perhaps receive a couple of hastily written, America-scolding, indubitably controversial papers to wrestle with at GA in 2008. And as a result, pastors everywhere will once again most likely need to answer pained questions from their parishioners: Why is it that we Presbyterians seem to have a corporate death wish? Why do our national bodies have this compulsion, year after year, to produce political pronouncements that are sure to insult and alienate the very church members in whose name (and with whose funds) those pronouncements are made?
On Thursday, the papers were merely proposed, and ACSWP had further opportunity to decide wisely to refocus the projects or even to decline them. However, in further discussion later in the meeting, ACSWP decided to tackle both papers, as if it were lacking in subjects to keep it meaningfully occupied the next few months!
Serious Questions
In other business, only seven of a possible twelve ACSWP elected members were present at this meeting, providing only a bare quorum. Three members had conflicting responsibilities, and now two slots are vacant. Elder Larry Palmer, at times a rare contrarian voice of reason, has resigned after only a year of service. That leaves two vacancies to fill: a minister and an elder.
ACSWP member Bill Saint asked two top General Assembly Council (GAC) staff leaders basically the same question: “When an organization gets a cut in staff and budget, the challenge is how to right-size the program,” he began. Any existing program has commitments, interest groups, and constituencies, he noted, and therefore it is “not always easy to readjust the program so that it is the size commensurate with budget and staff.” Is there any such tension here in the GAC staff, Saint asked, and what’s being done?
Curtis Kearns, the Executive Administrator with staff oversight over groups like ACSWP, answered: “There’s probably less [tension] this time than there has been in the past, simply because this restructuring is more drastically different than any that went on in recent history.” Because GAC had set priorities and a lot of enterprises were crippled or cut, reportedly there was less grousing about whose programs took the pain.
“One of the things we emphasized was that this is a redirection of philosophy,” Kearns explained. “We moved from a program-based environment to an objective-based environment, and so the programs had to be consistent with the objectives.”
The GAC Executive Director, Linda Valentine, later offered some more insight when Saint cornered her with the same question. “When I first got here last year,” she began, “one of the things that was evident was that work was getting done…. Work that was stopped [when downsizing eliminated positions] was just taken on by someone else.” Valentine then commented on what a dedicated and ministry-oriented staff we have.
GAC staff and ACSWP members listen at ACSWP meeting June 21 in Louisville. From left: Rhashell Hunter, Director of Racial Ethnic & Women’s Ministries; Sarah Lisherness, Director of Peace and Justice, and Vernon Broyles, Public Witness Representative; Linda Valentine, GAC Executive Director; Bill Saint and Jack Terry, ACSWP members; and Elenora Giddings Ivory, Director of the Presbyterian Washington Office. |
But that picking up of supposedly ended programs may have a downside. “I’m not sure that we have stopped what we said we were going to stop,” she acknowledged. There is obviously plenty a denomination could possibly do. “We could be doing three times what we are,” she reckoned, and thus “we’ve got to be focused…. It’s a struggle doing more with less, but I also think there are great opportunities.” It appears that the hard and dirty work of downsizing prior to Valentine’s arrival has fortuitously allowed her to learn the job and manage the change during her first year, rather than bear the brunt of hostility for the change itself.
Ron Kernaghan, the vice-moderator of ACSWP and an administrator at Fuller Seminary, posed a difficult question for Valentine to answer. “Is there any place in the program where the increasing disparity [in the denomination]—that lack of consensus—is being addressed?” he asked.
Valentine seemed to talk around the question without much of an answer to give. But Vernon Broyles, a volunteer staff member in the Stated Clerk’s office who had lost his previous position in the GAC downsizing, jumped to her rescue. “There are two strains of people” in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Broyles began, “both being theologically grounded but coming to two different conclusions.” So far, so good for this longtime senior social witness official.
But then Broyles’s analysis took on a partisan tilt. “In the current environment, we’re trying to reaffirm our commitment to the Trinity, to Jesus Christ and his lordship, to polity,” Broyles contended about the staff leadership. “The reason for it is in part misrepresentation by some parts of the church and its leaders about what other parts of the church and its leaders think about church and polity.” In other words, according to Broyles, those evangelicals and others who express distress about the state of the denomination are willfully “misrepresenting” things. And he considers it to be his job to call out their error from his bully pulpit in the Stated Clerk’s office.
All Kernaghan could reply was something to the effect that “it is complex, and the complexity makes it even harder.” Apparently, the top brass thinks that the way to handle lack of consensus in the denomination is to blame anyone who disagrees with them. That was the only coherent answer given.
Caring and Incomprehension
The overall impression given by both the PCUSA staff and the elected and co-opted ACSWP participants is that they care deeply about the myriad causes they promote. These are not callous or thoughtless workers. No one seems to be only filling a slot.
The problem seems to be more an inability to fully embrace the far more conservative nature of the people in the pew, inadequately understanding this large segment of the PCUSA and failing especially to adequately hear or lend credibility to its concerns. In practice, the assumption seems to be that these disagreeable fellow Presbyterians just need to study some more ACSWP papers—the longer and more dogmatic, the better—in order to make up for their supposed Christian deficiencies.
Until ACSWP begins to operate with something even vaguely resembling fair representation of conservative or evangelical viewpoints, it will consistently fail at its task, misreading and misapplying Presbyterian belief and convictions, and alienating the rank and file in a misspent attempt to be “prophetic.” Until staff members such as Broyles concede that ideological opposites can be legitimate and insightful, too, and not careless or sinister deceivers, the staff will poorly serve a majority of the church.
It seems that ACSWP has ironically modeled in its own deliberations and actions the very theological disconnect for which Kernaghan was seeking Valentine’s solutions.
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