GHOST RANCH, NEW MEXICO—As one who regularly observes the meetings of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP), I get to concentrate on the committee’s ideas and dynamics as it meets. Since I am not a participant, I am free to scrutinize all that goes on. At times I learn something useful, as if I had attended a graduate-level seminar. It is not rare, however, to observe some rather radical, odd, or even startling attitudes and ideas.
View of the Agape Center’s courtyard from the ACSWP meeting room. Ghost Ranch architecture fits in with both nature and the Southwest’s Spanish heritage. |
The one recurrent and most obvious reality is this: the ACSWP is terribly unrepresentative of rank-and-file Presbyterians, because it is exceedingly narrow in its theological and social perspective. Missing is a fair representation of members who are socially and politically conservative. Although 40 to 50 percent of PCUSA members are theologically conservative and evangelical, the makeup of the committee does not reflect that fact. We know that 41 percent of Presbyterians are theologically conservative and 53 percent are Republicans. But the glaring lack of conservative voices cuts deeply into the ability of the ACSWP to address issues constructively. The committee remains a clubby subset of Presbyterians that is prone to progressive groupthink.
But I have written that before. What else did I observe in the wild at Ghost Ranch?
Soup Kitchens Are Bad
Marsha Fowler provided the opening devotion for the four-day series of meetings. Fowler, a professor at evangelical Azusa Pacific University in Southern California, is a minister member of the ACSWP. She spoke on Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats. At one point she broke out with a startling and quite heartfelt revelation: “I hate soup kitchens!”
The students from Azusa Pacific regularly serve at a gospel mission, but Fowler will not join them. “I cannot ladle soup,” she declared, “because it perpetuates poverty.” She is firmly set on ending poverty rather than feeding the hungry. And besides, such service “seems part of noblesse oblige,” she claimed. It furthers a power structure in which those who do something good exercise power over those who receive and are thus subjugated.
Fowler asserted that “to be a ‘sheep nation’ [as opposed to a ‘goat nation’] is to be kenotic”—the biblical Greek term for self-emptying. Apparently, Fowler would expect everyone to be as empty of privilege as possible—and removed from even charitable activities that might make them look superior to those helped. The devotion ended with an extended time of silent prayer “to be suspicious of ourselves,” as Fowler put it.
When Seriously Overworked, Add More Work
“My one regret is that I think we as a team are understaffed,” began Ron Kernaghan, one of the ACSWP co-chairs. Kernaghan is a professor and administrator at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California. He felt the ACSWP has too much to do, given the staffing level it is allowed by the denomination.
“I am concerned about overwork of staff,” agreed the other co-chair, Gloria Albrecht, a religion professor at the University of Detroit/Mercy. “How many hours a week are you working?” she asked the staff, rhetorically. “The ACSWP has written policies about work, and woe be to us if we neglect our own policies!”
For a group whose typical submission to General Assembly includes a section assigning itself more work, the ACSWP certainly sighed a lot about how much work it is supposed to do. But Bill Saint, an elder member from Washington, DC, had a lament-busting solution. “One way, when you sense you don’t have enough staff, is to add staff,” he began. “But another solution is to reduce work!” Cutting back to a more reasonable set of tasks has been a recurring theme for Saint.
This time, however, Saint found a logical-minded ally in new ACSWP member Mike Castronis, a pastor from the Charleston, South Carolina, area and a member of the General Assembly Mission Council. “I would agree,” he chimed in. “All across GAMC, we were blessed not to have to reduce staff recently . . . . This has been a difficult time.” Castronis was well aware of the pressures in every department to add staff and programs, and the ACSWP isn’t more special than any number of other ministries also fighting overload but enduring reduced staff. He knows the extraordinary effort it took to balance the budget and not require staff cuts this year.
But it is hard to restrain zealots, and the ACSWP is certainly zealous about chasing every ball thrown its way. Before long, Kernaghan lamented how ignorant most Presbyterians are of social-witness work. He then suggested a solution: that ACSWP team with theological educators to offer a social-witness class for undergraduates and seminarians. Apparently if they really want to, overworked groups with overworked staff just add more work for themselves!
Bill Saint asked about the financial implications of such an undertaking, and Mike Castronis reminded the ACSWP that this would add to the workload of the staff. Retired seminary professor Lewis Mudge even grumped that already “our seminary classes in social ethics typically do not use ACSWP materials, and I’m not sure why that is so.” (Might it indicate that perhaps students aren’t longing for more instruction by those whose prior materials have produced either a giant yawn or major outrage?)
The questions and comments were to no avail. The ACSWP members liked Kernaghan’s idea and voted to “approach theological educators of Presbyterian social witness and urge them to co-sponsor with us a task force to look into the feasibility of creating an intensive church-wide academic course on the social witness of the Presbyterian Church.”
Academics, Not Practitioners, Are the Real Experts
In dealing with new papers to research and write, the ACSWP was brainstorming who would make good members for study teams. Not surprisingly, there wasn’t a clarion call for faithful, effective, evangelical practicing pastors and leading elders. With many evangelical churches serving as hotbeds of highly successful ministries of all sorts, one would think that naturally ACSWP would look that direction, at least for some of the team members. Not so.
In fact, it quickly became apparent that co-chair Gloria Albrecht in particular had an enormous preference for academic “experts” in various fields and major prejudice against practitioners who actually work in a field and do so with great knowledge, faith, and effectiveness. For instance, when trying to identify team members working on an HIV/AIDS study paper, Marsha Fowler suggested adding to the study team “a person from a pharmaceutical company or someone knowledgeable about drug therapies.”
Bill Saint noted that typically ACSWP might get some radical critic of AIDS drug manufacturers from the academic world, but “that isn’t what we want.”
But that is what Gloria Albrecht wanted. “I guess I object to the idea that someone from the pharmaceutical industry would be included,” she asserted, with her bias against businesspersons and practitioners standing out like a sore thumb.
“We looked at what is missing” in the HIV/AIDS plan for a cure, argued Saint, “and what is missing is the financial resources.” Saint favored “someone who understands and comes in not wanting to shoot down the whole drug industry because it is evil.”
Fowler agreed, adding that it should be “someone with knowledge of the availability of drugs and costs.” So now Saint and Fowler sought expertise and balance, but Albrecht discounted those factors.
“I would suggest that we leave that open,” Ron Kernaghan offered diplomatically. “If we could find someone, that would be a plus. But clearly we don’t want a lobbyist.” Members agreed. Bill Saint then cited a recent situation where ACSWP had worked with church members on the Smithfield Packing project. These members, some of whom worked for Smithfield and some for unions, had a great combination of a love for the denomination, a heart for a Christian solution, and valuable knowledge gained by actually working in the industry.
“Some people working for industry do have the ability to separate company interests from responsible judgment,” Chris Iosso observed in conclusion.
With red-rock cliffs in the background, the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy began its work for the 2010 General Assembly at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico August 14-17. Left to right: (front row) Donna Bradley, Mike Castronis, Belinda Curry (staff), Christine Darden, Gloria Albrecht, Esperanza Guajardo, Marsha Fowler, Bonnie Hoff (staff), and Chris Iosso (staff); (back) Bill Saint and Lewis Mudge. Attending the meeting but not in the photo: Ron Kernaghan, Jean Demmler, and Vernon Broyles (staff). |
But a similar situation arose again in discussing a new study on gun violence. Wanting to assemble a diverse study team, members suggested perhaps an ex-offender, a non-lobbying “gun-sports aficionado,” and—the red flag for Gloria Albrecht—a police chief or community-relations officer. “We have to learn to have a little suspicion,” cautioned Albrecht about the police officer suggestion. “A lot of people cannot assume that the policeman is their friend.”
Obviously, balance for her does not include people with intimate knowledge from working within a profession or trade. Albrecht is much more comfortable suggesting academic types, such as sociologists, social psychologists, and ethicists. That bias against practitioners with business knowledge and street sense easily leads to reports filled with academic quirks but little of practical help for pastors and churches.
Being “Advisory” Is Unsatisfying if You Ache to Advocate
The ACSWP is set up by General Assembly to be an advisory committee, not an advocacy committee. It is intended to research various social-witness matters and return its best advice to the General Assembly. Then when something from the ACSWP gains General Assembly approval, the General Assembly Mission Council implements it. “Historically, the committee has seen its role as a committee that advises General Assembly, not interprets policy,” according to co-chair Ron Kernaghan.
It is obvious, however, that what the ACSWP would really like to do is to push its ideological advocacy, not simply offer advice and leave it at that. It just cannot leave well enough alone once it has fulfilled its intended role of presenting the General Assembly with its best thinking on a subject. The ACSWP would like to drive the response and lead the follow-up, as well.
Make no mistake: At General Assembly, the ACSWP is hard at work advocating its various resolutions. It has an Advice and Counsel Team that writes up communications that go directly to commissioners as part of their official papers. In addition, the team also makes itself quite prominent in key committees as expert resources. Similar to any special-interest group’s activists or to overture advocates (but with far more official opportunity to be influential), the ACSWP representatives actively work in General Assembly committees and with commissioners to get ACSWP viewpoints adopted. Officially, the ACSWP resource persons are to confine their work to providing information when asked. In reality, energy also flows into advocacy. For instance, for the major business item concerning Israel and Palestine at the last General Assembly, the final resolution that displaced several presbytery overtures was ACSWP written and promoted.
At this meeting, the itch to advocate became apparent in reports by the subcommittees on Interpretation and Communication and on Advice and Counsel. Interpretation and Communication wanted to make use of justice committees in presbyteries and synods to advocate the ACSWP message. Reporting for the subcommittee, Christine Darden, an elder from Hampton, Virginia, suggested writing press releases after meetings, detailing “some of the things accomplished.”
Mike Castronis picked up on this. “Myriad people in the PCUSA are willing to interpret the work of ACSWP,” he began. “I can’t think of any issue we’ve talked about [here at this meeting] that the majority of the people in the denomination would not support. It’s time to not let a non-Presbyterian publication—we know they’re out there—interpret our work, when we can do it ourselves!”
After only one meeting, Castronis had adopted the ACSWP mantra: If people would only know what we do, they would support us! And since I am typically the only one attending and reporting on ACSWP meetings, it is apparently Presbyterian Action’s “non-Presbyterian publication” whose interpretation of ACSWP work needs to be supplanted by the ACSWP’s own spin.
Earlier in the meeting, co-chair Ron Kernaghan had detailed the work of the Advice and Counsel Subcommittee at the June General Assembly and had promoted plans for even stronger advocacy by the entire committee at the 2010 General Assembly. Kernaghan’s enthusiastic push for General Assembly attendance by all ACSWP members was strong enough that ACSWP Coordinator Chris Iosso noted with mock alarm that “immediately staff is worried about finances.”
Iosso also offered some needed clarity about the ACSWP ordinarily not getting involved in large-scale promotion of its work. “We can do convocations for up to 50 people or so,” he advised about meetings historically used by the ACSWP to gather input on items in process. “If you’re going over that, say to 300, you are into program, and that’s where we need to unite with the program part of the church,” which would be the General Assembly Mission Council program entities.
It is the work of the General Assembly to promote what the ACSWP has advised. But the ACSWP longs to be more proactive, more activist, more imperative than indicative. A “here is what we advise” stance just isn’t as exciting as a “you ought to do this” stance. The ACSWP would like to assume the role of pushing the things it is meant instead to simply offer. Such “mission creep” is only natural, but it must be averted.
Of Meetings There Is No End
The ACSWP plans to meet next in Detroit, October 16–19. By then, it wants to have a project prospectus pretty well completed for each of its five new projects. The October meeting ought to focus on putting together the working teams that will deal with those projects.
In 2009, the ACSWP will meet three times: January 22–25, perhaps in Berkeley, California; June 25–28; and October 15–18. The Berkeley site for January is being investigated but is not final. The sites for the other two meetings are not known yet, although Louisville remains a typical choice, to be close to staff resources.
The ACSWP also determined tentative dates for 2010, although the further the date, the more likely it is to change. A January 21–24 meeting will be held in Louisville, and this meeting would be used to finalize papers for the 2010 General Assembly. No site was chosen yet for an August 12–15 meeting, following a July General Assembly that year.
Perhaps We’ll Have a Resident, Hands-on Stated Clerk
The ACSWP picked up from Vernon Broyles a tidbit about the new Stated Clerk, Gradye Parsons. Broyles is a volunteer social-witness advisor to the Stated Clerk in the Office of the General Assembly. That office is experiencing a change in regimes, with long-time Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick retiring, and his long-time protégé, Gradye Parsons, assuming leadership of the office following his election by General Assembly in June.
According to Broyles, our new stated clerk may be resident in the office more of the time and may exercise a greater degree of hands-on leadership. Under Kirkpatrick’s leadership, Broyles explained, “Gradye’s job was to be in charge day to day,” because Kirkpatrick traveled a lot around the world in his ecumenical roles. Parsons’s job was to keep the office running, and he may be more inclined to continue that track. Broyles speculated that Parsons “will probably not be as much in the limelight as a speaker around the world.” However, Parsons will “maintain commitments that Cliff [Kirkpatrick] has represented these many years,” according to Broyles.
Broyles provided a glimpse into Parsons’s mode of operation and personal integrity. “One of my roles has been to advise the clerk about things [such as joint statements] to sign on to,” Broyles related. Broyles also ghostwrites drafts for letters or statements. Right off, Broyles’s concern about tobacco workers for R. J. Reynolds Company caused him to draft for Parsons a letter to the tobacco giant about the workers’ conditions, which Broyles compared to the tomato workers’ conditions in Florida.
It appears that the normal operating procedure under Kirkpatrick had the stated clerk routinely signing what Broyles wrote for him. Parsons, however, started out differently. He asked Broyles first to supply him with pertinent General Assembly policies that would inform his decision to sign and send the letter. Obviously Parsons intends to exercise his responsibility decently and in order, not routinely and on autopilot.
The difference in style between Parsons and Kirkpatrick was enough to cause Broyles to relate it to the ACSWP as a pertinent anecdote about what to expect with Gradye Parsons as Stated Clerk. It speaks well of Parsons—who, by the way, is recovering from recent heart surgery for an aortic aneurism and could use our prayers for speedy recovery.
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