Justice committees

Advocacy committees vow to fight for justice issues

Historic parley of three committees ends with a vow to pressure GAC

by Jerry L. Van Marter, Presbyterian News Service

SEATTLE -- August 25, 2000 -- With the General Assembly Council (GAC) poised to pump more Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) resources into evangelism and church growth, three committees charged with holding up justice issues in the church vowed during an historic joint meeting here to press for more denominational support for women's and racial-ethnic concerns.

Members of the committees -- the Advocacy Committee for Racial-Ethnic Concerns (ACREC), the Advocacy Committee for Women's Concerns (ACWC) and the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP) -- decried attempts to suggest that evangelism and social justice are mutually exclusive.

The Aug. 17-20 meeting was the first-ever joint meeting of the three committees, all of which were created in 1993 as part of a downsizing and restructuring of General Assembly agencies.

Advocacy for women and racial-ethnic persons and the development of social policy have been activities of the PC(USA) for years.

In late September, the GAC will begin realigning its budgets to make more money available for evangelism and church growth. Those issues have been identified in church consultations as the GAC's top priorities. Earlier this summer, the council's executive committee decided that "discipleship" will be its focus in the coming year.

"Your work is hampered by the fact that justice and compassion come up lower on priority lists (than church growth and evangelism)," Kathy Lueckert, GAC's executive director, told the committee members.

"OK, so word has come back from the church that the highest priorities these days are evangelism and church growth -- inreach rather than outreach," said the Rev. Curtis Jones of Baltimore, chair of the ACREC. "This is a false dichotomy -- I don't understand how you can have evangelism without justice. This dichotomy is not consistent with the Gospel."

Jones told the group that it must "begin defining these terms in a way that puts justice in a prime position and calls the church to be prophetic" He said Jesus "could not have been who he was, had he geared his message to focus groups."

"Discipleship is justice," said the Rev. Nile Harper, an ACSWP member from Ann Arbor, Mich., who calls himself a left-wing evangelical. "Discipleship is justice. Economic development, housing, education, health -- these are justice issues that are discipleship issues. If discipleship is the flag the GAC's flying, then we must define discipleship in terms of these justice issues. To grow the church is to grow the community."

The Rev. Kirk Perucca, an ACREC member from Kansas City, the executive director of Project Equality, an organization that monitors and works for non-discrimination in the workplace -- said debates over the church's commitment to racial and gender justice "exemplifies the struggle for the heart and soul of the PC(USA)." Perucca called for resistance against "the desire of those who would keep more narrowly defining the circles."

"Every time a new circle is drawn, those who have historically been excluded -- those in this room -- are pushed farther and farther outside the circles," he said.

Joanne Sizoo of Cincinnati, the ACWC, sighed and said, "I fear that we have come to a time when we love justice more than we are willing to do justice."

All who attended the meeting seemed to agree that the allocation of resources is the real linchpin of the denomination's commitment to justice for women and racial-ethnic people. On issues ranging from minority vendors at the Presbyterian Center in Louisville to the staffing of the ACWC, the group found what it considered an alarming turn away from historic PC(USA) commitments to justice.

Of immediate concern to the ACWC is the issue of staffing. The Rev. Unzu Lee provided staff services to the committee part-time until she resigned earlier this summer.

Iris Quinones, an ACWC member from East Brunswick, N.J., said, "Coordination of these justice concerns will not happen unless each committee has full-time staffing." (The ACREC is staffed primarily by Alice Broadwater, the AA/EEO officer at the Presbyterian Center). "Committee members do not have the time and the resources to follow the issues and marshal the resources."

Lueckert told the committees frankly that their "strategy should be to try and get as much money as many different ways as we can." Kearns concurred, adding: "I'm here because we need to have discussions -- we have this job (ACWC staff) to fill, and we need to determine how to provide the resources to ensure that advocacy is its most effective."

Ernestine Cole told the committees, "We need to be clear about what we want--- a full-time staff person and administrative assistant for ACREC and ACWC." After reading the section on committee responsibilities from the GAC's manual of operations, she added, "We must say to the GAC, 'Here, you've given us this job -- now give us the tools to do the job you've given us.'"

Jones, the ACREC chair, noted that contributors increasingly want to designate mission funds to specific programs. "Restricted funds always wreak havoc on justice ministries," he said. "We're good at crying foul, but we haven't begun to design this church as we would have it. We need to be more proactive about what we see and what we believe needs to be done. My motivation in these three committees coming together is to work together to struggle against forces in the church that would take it . . . away from God's justice."