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| TeSelle comments on Overture 01-39 -- a
strange way of "strengthening Presbyterian social witness"
Received on 3/28/01
Published here on 4-7-01
The Savannah Presbytery overture (01-39) has the
strange title "On Strengthening Presbyterian Social Witness at the
General Assembly Level." It looks very much like the product of
cooperation with the conservative Institute on Religion and Democracy,
which says in a recent fund-raising letter that it has been working with
presbyteries to move the PC(USA) in a conservative direction and change
the culture.
The rationale is that there has been a "proliferation of
overlapping General Assembly programs" to address a variety of
social needs. The overture would direct the General Assembly Council to
evaluate the effectiveness of various programs of social witness
(fourteen in number), and eliminate funding for at least three
of the programs. The criteria would be the Great Ends of the Church and
the recent GAC ranking of programs in relation to "evangelism and
discipleship."
The operative norm would probably be (f), the demand
that "their work preserves the truths that Presbyterians together
affirm, being always guided by Holy Scripture, our church's confessions,
upholding the Book of Order, and keeping within the mandates of
the General Assembly." This is exactly what the programs already
do, as anyone can see by reading the Presbyterian Social Witness
Policy Compilation. But the mention of Scripture, the confessions,
and what Presbyterians "together" affirm is a prescription for
constant reconsideration and debate.
The programs listed are these: Advisory Committee on Social Witness
Policy; Peacemaking Program; United Nations Office; Washington Office,
Racial Justice Policy Development Office; Advocacy Committee for Racial
Ethnic Concerns; Social Justice Office; Mission Responsibility Through
Investment; Church & Society; Presbyterian Health,
Education, and Welfare Association (PHEWA); Advocacy Committee on
Women's Concerns; Hunger Program; Self-Development of Peoples; and
Global Awareness and Involvement.
Anyone who knows these programs knows that they have clearly defined
tasks and have developed ways of relating to each other. They have come
into being for different reasons. The "advocacy committees"
were mandated at the time of Reunion in 1983 to ensure that women's and
racial ethnic concerns were honored. PHEWA is a partnership of long-time
service organizations. Peacemaking and Hunger came into being as a
result of General Assembly initiatives, and they are not only
self-financing through special offerings but widely popular throughout
the church.
The Savannah proposal, if it were implemented, would not only require a
new round of evaluation (and then arguments about the validity of the
evaluation); the call to eliminate at least three of them seems almost
designed to create dissension among the programs and their supporters.
The unspoken model of some of the denominational budget cutters seems to
be that the national staff should be modeled on the congregation, rather
than serving as a complement to it. This is the foot cutting off the
hand, or the ear the nose. And that Pauline metaphor may help us
understand the whole effort to trim social witness agencies, too.
The overture implies that it is in the area of social witness that
budget reductions are needed and that other areas of General Assembly
mission do not need similar scrutiny and pruning. At a time when funding
for many of these programs has already been decreased, we fear the
further mischief that this new proposal would cause, driving the church
away from public witness and service and into a narrow kind of old-time
religion.
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