GAC member comments on the recent meeting,
seeing greater unity than in recent years
[3-6-01]
One veteran member of the General Assembly Council
shared some reflections on the meeting held at the end of February.
Cathy Cummings Chisholm, who served as chair of the
Council a few years ago, was impressed by the overall tone of this
meeting. It was, she said, "totally different from the hostile,
contentious, emotionally-draining meetings from my first year or two on
GAC and the typical rounds of power plays and ego-battles."
She continued, "The division that is supposed to exist out in
the church is just not obvious at GAC. Diversity, yes. Disagreement,
often, and often quite pronounced. But not divisive or destructive. Not
personally antagonistic, but a great deal of respect and community. We
can do better in many ways, but I just kept thinking all week how far we
have come in less than 6 years and how much more we are a model for the
church of how a governing body can and should function."
Even in dealing with the protests and demands for
action on the address to the Peacemaking Conference last summer, the
consensus was that "we shouldn't be spending time on it." When
former Moderator Marj Carpenter offered that opinion the discussion came to an
end, with "really no disagreement within the council." The
unanimity of the group was shown clearly by the fact that a co-sponsor
of the motion was a strong proponent of the evangelical side of the
church, and the voice vote was unanimous -- with not a single No vote or
abstention.
In that discussion, she added, "Sara Lisherness
did an excellent job of summarizing the Peacemaking Program's process
for planning and evaluating conferences and putting it all within
context. Because they knew that the conference addressing faith in a
multi-cultural context would raise just these kind of issues, they were
very intentional about the theme of the preceding conference to address
Christology: 'Who do you say I am?'"
There have been reports of the Council's action to
provide funding for curriculum resources, which have implied that this
marked a failure of the church's educational programs. Chisholm sees it
in a much more positive light:
"One action which may be as significant as any is
that after years of demanding that those who publish curriculum and
educational resources follow a business model of being 'self-sustaining'
and then having to provide additional funds at the end of the year as if
they had 'failed,' we voted to switch our philosophy to that of
providing a service and budgeting the additional funds at the beginning
of the year. In effect, we are finally saying that Christian Education
and curriculum are vital parts of the mission of the PCUSA and that work
should be supplemented by mission funds, not just what they earn from
sales. Finally! After all, GA requires that we provide materials for
special topics and for specific constituencies (disabilities, Spanish
and Korean language, etc.) that are unlikely to produce a 'profit,' in
addition to producing good quality, affordable, denomination-specific
curriculum for all churches."
She also offers some perspective on the budgeting
process and the staff people who have been involved in it:
"We also approved a description of our budgeting
'process' and time-line so that what we do and how we do it is
information available to the church at large. (All these things you
would have thought we would have already done!) Again, a great deal of
credit goes to Joey Bailey, along with Kathy Lueckert and John Detterick.
We have a good staff team of faithful, effective leaders, committed to
working in partnership with each other, with the other agencies, and in
support of elected leaders."
