A retired pastor friend of mine from the Lutheran tradition
is fond of saying, “the word ‘Lutheran’ is an adjective and should never be
used as a noun. And the word ‘Christian’ is a noun and should never be used as
an adjective.” There’s wisdom in those words. In our context the same can be
said of the word ‘Presbyterian’. We could probably stand to be reminded that we
are not baptized as Presbyterians, but baptized as Christians- as people who
are claimed as Christ’s own and called to follow him as his disciples. In the
same way we don’t properly belong to a ‘Christian’ church, we belong to God who
gathers us into a community of Christians that are called the church. Maybe
this all sounds like semantics to you, but I think it may have some pretty
important implications as we seek to discern how the Holy Spirit is moving
among us to draw us into the mission of God in the world. You see, if we view
ourselves as ‘Presbyterians,’ that noun becomes a label that potentially
divides us from others in the larger body of Christ. Such labels invite us to
retreat into a kind of clubhouse mentality, or invite others to marginalize our
witness by distinguishing us as something not quite Christian, or not Christian
in the right way, i.e. their way.
This summer, while y’all are enjoying the 4th of
July holiday, I will be gathered with Presbyterian Christians from around the
United States in Pittsburgh. Our regional council, the Presbytery of Prospect
Hill, has asked me to be our Presbytery’s teaching elder commissioner for this
year’s assembly. On the one hand it is a great honor. On the other hand it is
kind of a pain. It is an honor to be chosen and given a seat in the discernment
of our mission as a national church body. It is a pain because Presbyterian Christians
have proven over the centuries to be a contentious lot, and this year’s
assembly will be no exception. Two churches in our area have already expressed
a desire to be dismissed from the PC(USA), citing their unhappiness over
changes to the Form of Government ratified from the last General Assembly,
specifically the standards for ordaining those in ordered ministries such as
Deacons, Ruling Elder(the session) and Teaching Elder(pastors). It will be a
pain because difficult subjects will be discussed and voted on, and a media not
particularly well-versed in the nuance of the discussion, or the Gospel, will
invariably over-simplify some issue and splash a general misrepresentation in a
headline that will be all many people will read or see regarding the subject.
This will lead to hard feelings born of too little information and rash
declarations about the state of the church, or more close to home, the state of
the Presbyterians.
But this is what Presbyterian Christians do. We gather in
Assembly, commissioning one teaching elder and one ruling elder from each
Presbytery across the country to discern together God’s will for us. We do not
have a hierarchy of bishops and archbishops to make decisions for us. We do not
have a free-for-all where individual congregations do as they please. We
practice our faith as Christians who are accountable to one another for
listening together to God’s Word for us as to how we might most faithfully
embody the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It should come as little surprise to anyone
that a gathering of this many believers from wide-ranging cultural and
theological points of view yields some measure of disagreement. General
Assembly is not some faceless bureaucracy, it is me and you, and others like
us. Our way of deciding and disagreeing may be Presbyterian in its nature, but
our way of handling those disagreements should be modeled after the kind of
grace and peace that is shown to us in Jesus Christ. Jesus does not abandon us-
EVER. We need to be careful about following the spirit of this age in which we
are encouraged to dismiss those who hold a contrary opinion. Such behavior is
antithetical to the good news of reconciliation through Christ.
I think what makes it all so difficult is that, while our
representative form of democracy is modeled after the Presbyterian way of doing
things, there is one significant difference. In civil governance, those in the
State or National assembly are elected to represent the will of the people. But
in the church, commissioners are asked to listen for the will of God and to
vote according to their conscience as it is informed by the Holy Spirit. So
when the congress acts, they act on behalf of the people. That’s a big deal.
But it’s a much bigger deal to take action on behalf of God. Whatever the outcome
and headlines from this year’s assembly, I hope you will do one thing that is
decidedly Presbyterian in nature- take the time to study what truly took place
and listen to those who were there- so that if someone brings it up, you know
what you’re talking about. What could be more Presbyterian than that?
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