The General Dissembly
Can the Whole PCUSA Really Fit Under This Pup Tent?
by Harry L. Chronis
One-for-three. Hit for that average (.333) in -major-league baseball this summer and you could win a batting title. But if you’re a deeply divided old-line denomination like the Presbyterian Church, USA, and you desperately need to score the trifecta of “Peace, Unity, and Purity,” going one-for-three, or even two-for-three, gets you nowhere. Sadly, that may be all for which the PCUSA can reasonably hope when our biennial General Assembly (GA) meets in Birmingham, Alabama, June 15 to 22.
Ahead of the Wedge
“ Peace, Unity, and Purity” (PUP, for short) is the name and aim of my denomination’s church-wide task force, assigned by the 2001 GA to address the causes of our crisis—we’ve been -hemorrhaging members (about 40,000 per year through last year) and laboring under mounting budget deficits for a decade or more—and report to the upcoming GA.
The task force was charged to lead us in “discernment of our Christian identity.” This assumed that we still shared one, i.e., that somewhere ahead of a great “wedge” of polarizing disagreement—most threateningly in (as the task force’s mandate specified) “Christology, biblical authority and interpretation, ordination standards, and power”—there remained some unchasmed ground for all of us to stand on.
Nevertheless, a “wait-and-see” attitude prevailed in most camps, traditional and progressive, with little besides the putatively diverse composition of the task force to sustain it. It wasn’t really diverse; progressives predominated, as usual.
But our “Nicene faithful” could trust—we thought—a minority of appointees with known commitments to mere Christianity. One of these, Gary Demarest, a strong Evangelical voice, co-chaired the task force.
Late last summer, the task force unanimously signed off on their final report and parted as friends. But as soon as their fifty-page product began to roll, a chunk at a time, off the website, it became apparent to everyone that it was, as the report itself acknowledges in other terms, no “wedge-buster.”
Unity at Any Cost
What the report is, is an appeal for unity at any cost. Entitled A Season for Discernment, it pleads for the church simply to lock arms against the “wedge” and to keep doing, only better, what we have been doing for the last thirty years: talking and praying our way through what have seemed increasingly to be irreconcilable theological and ethical differences until they transmogrify into something else.
Harry L. Chronis is the pastor of White Rock Presbyterian Church in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He credits his father George H. Chronis and his sister Lisa E. Chronis for their very helpful suggestions. The quote from Robert Wilken is taken from his review of Andre LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur’s Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies in the May 1999 issue of First Things.
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