c. 2006 Religion News Service

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. _ Several tense issues are boiling to the surface for the Presbyterian Church (USA) as the denomination prepares for its General Assembly, set for June 15-22 here.

The nation’s largest Presbyterian body has lost 1.8 million members since 1965. The Louisville, Ky.-based denomination recently announced a loss of 48,474 members in 2005, a 2 percent drop.

“It’s been trending downward, like many mainline churches,” said the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, who as stated clerk is the top official of the denomination. “Clearly we’ve been facing demographic shifts.”

The Presbyterian Church (USA) has 2.3 million adult confirmed members, and about 3 million members including baptized children. So the church is looking at other growth strategies, especially to immigrant groups.

At the last General Assembly in 2004, the church passed a statement calling for the study of divestment in U.S. corporations that play a role in building Israel’s security barrier _ such as Caterpillar. The denomination’s pension funds own about $3 million in stock in the company, which has sold earth-moving equipment to Israel.

“The commitment has been for the well-being of Palestinians, and the well-being of Israel,” Kirkpatrick said.

“It was one minor piece of a much broader strategy,” he said. “They did not vote to divest. They voted to consider the possibility of divestment.”

An investments committee identified U.S. companies that it said played a role in assisting Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. The committee has been negotiating with those corporations, he said. “Our goal has never been divestment, it’s been to change policies,” Kirkpatrick said.

Critics _ especially U.S. Jewish groups _ say church leaders are out of step with people in the pews. “They’re taking basically a pro-Palestinian, even worse, pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah, pro-terrorist groups stance,” said the Rev. Parker Williamson, a retired pastor and former chief executive of the conservative Presbyterian Lay Committee.

“It was a pretty one-sided approach,” said the Rev. Ed Hurley, pastor of South Highland Presbyterian Church in Birmingham. “Israel was likened to South Africa and apartheid and that’s not a fair comparison.”

South Highland has passed a proposed statement, or overture, also adopted by the regional presbytery for North Central Alabama, that calls on the General Assembly to rescind the action taken at the 2004 meeting.

Williamson noted that two Presbyterian (USA) delegations met with Hezbollah leaders in 2004 and 2005.

“They revealed where much of the leadership is heading on this thing, and it’s not where Presbyterians want to go,” Williamson said. “They are seeing Israel as the culprit. They see the wall Israel is building not as security but as a way to isolate and harm the Palestinians. They don’t consider that where the wall went up, there have been fewer suicide bombings.”

The denomination has a theological task force on the peace, unity and purity of the church that has also drawn significant attention as a possible way to avoid divisive debates on homosexuality.

“We have divisions over a lot of theological issues and we want to find a way to live in peace with one another, to preserve the purity of the gospel and unity in the church,” Kirkpatrick said.

A 1996 church law requires ministers to practice “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or chastity in singleness.” Two attempts to rescind that language _ in 1998 and 2002 _ both failed.

The assembly will again consider attempts to remove the “fidelity and chastity” language, but the task force has recommended that it remain intact, as well as language from 1978 that says “self-affirming practicing homosexuals” are not eligible for ordination.

Instead, the task force is proposing that local presbyteries have more leeway in deciding whether to apply those standards when approving ministers for ordination. The result, according to Presbyterian News Service, is that “some (church) bodies could ordain non-celibate gays and lesbians” to church office while others would not.

If the task force report is approved, church leaders doubt the assembly could successfully change the existing ordination standards.

The task force report makes such observations as, “The church should seek constructive, Christ-like alternatives to the `yes/no’ forms in which questions about sexuality, ordination, and same-gender covenantal relationships have been put to the church in recent decades.”

Williamson said it’s a morally equivocal document.

“I don’t see how it’s going to bring peace and unity to the church,” he said. “They say we’ve got to stop binary thinking, yes or no, right or wrong, good or evil. They say we want to be inclusive and not leave anybody out. Jesus Christ was pretty clear that some things are right, some are wrong, that there is truth and falsehood, good and evil. They want to blur the edges and be for everything.”

“Who would be attracted to a church that has no moral standards, no theological standards, that believes everything is true? Something cannot be both true and false. It’s like saying fried ice.”

(SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

In recognition of the 300th anniversary of American Presbyterianism, the PCUSA general assembly will be a joint meeting with the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America. Each denomination will have its own General Assembly, but they will worship together and have a number of joint presentations as a show of unity, Kirkpatrick said.

KRE/JL END GARRISON

(Greg Garrison writes for The Birmingham News in Birmingham, Ala.)

_ Kevin Eckstrom contributed to this report.

Editors: To obtain a photo of Kirkpatrick, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

NEWS STORY