Presbyterian turnabout

Christian Century, July 4, 2001 by John Dart

PRESBYTERIAN MODERATOR Jack Rogers has an unenviable task over the next 12 months. As a part of the General Assembly's surprising recommendation, by a 317-208 vote, to allow gay and lesbian ministers, elders and deacons, Rogers was directed to write a pastoral letter to congregations "interpreting" the turnabout proposal endorsed by 60 percent of those who met in Louisville, Kentucky, in June. In addition, the new moderator must travel about the country, as is customary, to speak in many of the 173 presbyteries as they prepare to vote on whether indeed the denomination should remove barriers to ordaining gay and lesbian Presbyterians.

The church's progressive wing sees the General Assembly action as a breakthrough after a quarter-century of often-heated resistance. But some conservatives fear a falling away of members, even if the majority of presbyteries eventually reject and thereby nullify the General Assembly action.

"It is unthinkable that a majority of Presbyterians favor the removal of our ordination standards," said a joint statement by two conservative groups distributed only minutes after the June 15 decision. Delegates on the assembly floor were already warning of reverberations in the pews if the overture passed--continuing "rancor and polarization," "an emotional bomb [sent] to congregations where it will explode," and "a mass exodus of members of our congregations."

What will Rogers say to the PCUSA's 11,178 churches? Probably much of what he said at a news conference after the vote. A veteran of 30 past assemblies, Rogers characterized the makeup of the Louisville meeting as "the broad center" of the church--garden-variety Presbyterians, just regular folks out of our churches that didn't come here deeply precommitted to one position or another" Some spoke of changing their minds at the weeklong meeting, he said.

As a onetime evangelical seminary professor who is a board member of the liberal Covenant Network of Presbyterians, Rogers said, "I am rejoicing and weeping at the same time." He said he rejoiced with "the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Presbyterians because now they have hope that they might become fully included members of the church." And he said he wept for people who "absolutely, sincerely believe that the church has done a terrible thing today ... who really believe that the scripture is so clear that homosexuality is a sin."

Both sides feel victimized by the prevailing culture, he observed. The culture that conservatives bewail is typified by the mass media moving in a "more liberal direction." But he added that liberals bemoan the broader culture in America that, according to polls, says same-sex intimacy is immoral.

Rogers said that many Presbyterians fear that biblical tradition and Christian history are in danger of being jettisoned. Yet, Rogers said, "There are intelligent, devout Presbyterians who ... really believe they are reading the Bible correctly" when they derive from it an accepting gospel of grace that does not target one group of people as sinners. And rather than refer to 2,000 years of Christianity, he said, people should recall that for much of the last 250 years many Presbyterians believed African-Americans were to be excluded from the church and women were to be denied leadership roles, and both "were sinners if they didn't accept their God-given lower place in society."

Rogers is unlikely to be widely seen as a neutral ambassador of the denomination during his one-year, unpaid post as moderator. Though he wrote Claiming the Center: Churches and Conflicting Worldviews to stake out the middle, his position on homosexuality puts him in the liberal camp within a polarized church.

In that 1995 book, Rogers cited biblical scholars who argued that "texts which speak against homosexuality are not directed toward faithful, enduring relationships," but instead to "sexual practices in Near Eastern fertility cults and in Greek culture that allowed the systematic exploitation of boys by adult men." God's prime intent is for sexual relations between one man and one woman, he said, but some exceptions occur in the biblical record, such as multiple wives for Old Testament heroes. "Despite the general prohibition of divorce in the New Testament," Rogers wrote, "most mainstream Christians now understand that prohibition as an ideal rather than an absolute one that bars divorced persons from further ministry."

Rogers taught at the Southern California branch of the PCUSA's San Francisco Theological Seminary during the 1990s, and philosophical theology at the interdenominational Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena from 1971 to 1988. "One of Jack's great contributions to Fuller was his important mentoring of evangelical students for creative ministries within the PCUSA," Fuller President Richard Mouw told the CENTURY. "Needless to say, we are disappointed in the direction his thinking has taken on questions of homosexual practice," said Mouw, adding that the school still looks forward to friendly conversations "about the cause of Presbyterian renewal."