The Limits of Polity in Making a
Just Church
James Hudnut-Beumler
Dean, Vanderbilt Divinity School
An Address to the Witherspoon Society
General Assembly Luncheon on June 10,
2001
I am here to talk about the bad news that
impedes the spread of what you
Witherspooners call the "whole gospel" in our church. I was
asked here, I suspect, because I've been associated with something
called the regulatory agency thesis in describing contemporary American
denominational life. The thesis in a nutshell is this:
1. The era of rising resources and expectations from
the progressive era through the middle 1960s gave us national
denominations modeled on the large-scale national corporation.
2. The constriction of resources since that time has produced
denominations modelled on the regulatory agency. A regulatory agency
exists primarily to control the behavior of other actors, to assure
outcomes by compelling others to act as one would have them act.
3. Our denominational meetings and processes have thus become, too
often, exercises in attempting to compel and control where we no longer
trust our abilities to convince. We prefer law and polity, to preaching,
teaching and programing.
I could spin out the implications of the thesis in
some detail, but I want to start in a quite different place than when I
agreed to come here. My spirit has been laid low by recent Presbyterian
Outlook reports that some Presbyterians, in the wake of the defeat
of Amendment O, say that perhaps the time has come for a confessing
movement within the church. Clearly they think that those who would
oppose Amendment O must be an apostate church. They pattern their plans
for righteous resistance upon Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the
Barman Declaration. But I tell you that only sex-obsessed and fearful
Americans today could equate loving Jews with hating gays. Only we
American Christians would confuse resisting Hitler with rejecting our
own brothers and sisters in the faith. And only in this consumer
capitalist obsessed land would members of this church ignore the call of
sister churches in the ecumenical movement to declare economic injustice
a cause for a status confessionis while doubting that those of
us in this room know who Jesus Christ is.
Barman was about following Jesus as Lord.
So then, I say, let us follow Jesus.
If we did, our declaration might read something like this: "We
reject as false doctrine the belief that sexual orientation can separate
us from the love of God and fellowship of Christ's disciples."
Our new Barmen might say, "We reject as false doctrine the belief
that the American nuclear family is the only acceptable way for two or
more Christians to live together in a household."
"What would Jesus do?" That's a favorite question of the
evangelicals and fundamentalists, but it's a question to which this
whole church pays mostly lip service.
I ask you what would Jesus do if he happened upon a group of people
about to stone a woman today? Just as before, Jesus would ask,
"Why?"
Those gathered might say: "Because she is a lesbian, who wants to
be a Presbyterian Minister!"
What would Jesus say? The same thing he said before, "let the one
who is without sin throw the first stone. Has no one condemned you?
Neither do I." All of us Presbyterians need to get on Jesus's side.
Stoning today happens on the floor of presbyteries that think up
overtures to be used to get at lesbian and gay Christians and their
friends. Stoning happens in committees and preparation for
ministry--when people say, "we think you are called to ministry,
but our hands are tied by the Book of Order." Stoning happens when
Presbyterians round up a posse to "get" Dirk Ficca, or the women's program of
this church.
I believe in doing things in order--but I do not believe in unjust laws.
It seems to me we have proliferated clauses and paragraphs in our
Presbyterian polity that amount to unjust laws because they stand for a
kind of legality that Jesus and the prophets sought to overturn again
and again.
Something is going very wrong in this church, and I believe that our
propensity to think that salvation is to be found in getting the Book of
Order just right is a major part of the problem. Right, left, and center
are preoccupied with the politics of polity at the expense of
reconciliation, proclamation, love and mercy. We've been seduced by the
false promise of regulatory power.
Last fall, I changed Presbytery memberships and was asked the following
question in the floor examination:
Some people are saying that the problems we are having surrounding
questions of sexuality and ordination in the church are all rooted in
the earlier decision to force congregations to accept women as elders.
That is, because congregations could be bound by the polity against
their conscience of the time, factions within the church are now trying
to bind the consciences of others on the current issue at hand. Do you
believe we made a mistake in the late '70s and early '80s to force
inclusion of women in all sessions of all congregations?"
For a moment, I knew what Jesus felt like when he was asked, "Is it
lawful to heal on the Sabbath?"
In situations like that, I've tried to learn to fall
back on telling the truth and so I said this: "It seems to me that
we were indeed so interested in the just goal of full inclusion of women
in all ministries of the church that we did in fact use the Book of
Order to force a policy upon churches and people who are resistant
to the change.
"We won the polity battle in the early 1970s and again
in the time of Reunion, but perhaps we lost something important along
the way. Concerned as we were to have the change, to experience full
inclusion everywhere, we really did not love our brothers and sisters in
those conservative churches enough to care about changing their hearts.
We settled too easily for changing their behavior. We took up the
implements of Presbyterian force -- the Book of Order and the
Permanent Judicial Commission -- and we abandoned the quest for hearts and
minds."
Now fundamentally, I do believe that we need some rules. From the very
beginning of the Reformed tradition, there's been a recognition that one
use of the law is to teach us our duty. I believe that had I been
ordained 10 years earlier I would have voted for Book of Order
amendments that made the inclusion of women in all church bodies
mandatory. I believe that the principle of inclusion deserves the
support of law.
Yet over time, I have come to accept that it is far more important that
the principle of inclusion live than that it be writtenjust as it's
more important to be able to actually eat a meal at a lunch counter and
be accepted by the lunchroom personnel than it is to have a federal law
mandating desegregated accommodations. You only really want to have a
meal where you're welcome, and not just tolerated.
I use that last example deliberately, because there
are two issues that will define the near-future of the Christian
churches and they are the acceptance of all people into the fellowship
of the church and the way Christians relate to people of other faiths.
The struggles ahead may be nearly as difficult as the struggles well
under way for racial and gender justice in the church, but the question
that ought to be before us is: "What are we going to do?
What are we going to do to try to assure that the Presbyterian churches
become known as places that try to be as accepting as the Christ who ate
with sinners, talked with Samaritan women, and apparently worried not a
bit about ritual purity?
What are we going to do to make sure that the church of tomorrow isn't
best known as a gathering of frightened people who excel at shunning
people defined as "other"?
I suggest that whatever we do ought to be principally in the form of
what goes on between General Assembly's and between Presbytery meetings.
I do not mean more lobbying for the votes taken at those meetings, but
rather as gracious acts of resistance in the form of being the church,
in being welcoming fellowships no matter what the current Form of
Government says, for our final authority is the word of God revealed in
Christ.
Progress, if it is to be found, will be found on the
human scale, among people who come to know and trust one another as
disciples of Christ.
There are signs of hope. Most conservative churches I visit have gay and
lesbian members they sort of know about and welcome as
individuals, just as they do in their families; and sometimes they even
knowingly elect these people to their sessions. This creates an anomaly:
some of the same people who welcome others in workplaces in
congregational settings turn around and vote on amendments to exclude
the categories of humanity from which they come as a matter of policy.
Increasingly, people who vote against stances of acceptance of people of
other faiths find themselves with grandsons named Mohammed, whom they
love and accept as children of God.
Our work in the years ahead is to exploit those anomalies of acceptance
in one sphere and rejection in another. Presbyterians have a remarkably
difficult time being homophobic and zenophobic close-up. Familiarity
brings out the best in the Christian character. The work of the
progressives in this church is, I believe, to help all Presbyterians
apply lessons learned locally to national level polity to encourage
people to vote with hearts transformed instead of with fears consuming
their generous instincts.
I came home late from a conference last week but just in time to put my
six-year-old son Adam to bed. Out of the blue, he said to me,
"You're a heterosexual." I said, "Yes, what make you say
that?" He said, "Mom's a heterosexual, too, that's when a man
and a woman want to live with one another for life. Gay is when two men
want to live with one another for life, like uncle Kirk. And when two
women want to live with one another for life its called
"les..."something I forget."
My son learned this open and unbiased acceptance of people's sexual
orientation from his mother, a Presbyterian minister, after he and his
sister asked what the meaning of "Gay" really was. To him, the
way people are is as natural as there being butterflies and frogs.
I hope for, and pray for, and intend to work for a Presbyterian church
that does not try to take away the simple open-hearted acceptance my
child has learned.
To enter the realm of God, it is said, you must become like a child.
Can this church learn that lesson?
I hope so. My son needs a place from which to follow Jesus his whole
life.
So do people you love and care about.
So this week, do what you can to make this a more just and loving
church. But with lovingkindness and imagination, pursue that agenda
throughout the coming year as well.
