Hudnut-Beumler

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.