Presbyterian dissent: opposition to Amendment B organizes

Christian Century, May 7, 1997 by Mark Oppenheimer

When the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) announced on April 1 that a majority of its 172 presbyteries had approved Amendment B to its Book of Order, making heterosexual marriage a precondition for sexual activity by an elder, deacon or minister, the opposition was not caught by surprise. And gay men and lesbians--and their straight allies--are not taking the news quietly.

"They thought this would close the matter for the Presbyterian Church," says Timothy Hart-Andersen, pastor of San Francisco's Old First Presbyterian Church, the oldest Protestant congregation in California. "But with the District of Columbia Covenant of Dissent, our own Covenant of Dissent, the Rochester Declaration circulating, and the coming vote in Milwaukee--it's had the opposite effect."

Hart-Andersen was summing up a series of actions that some Presbyterians have taken to weaken and, they hope, neuter Amendment B. The Covenants of Dissent Hart-Andersen mentions have been in the works since the church's General Assembly voted last summer to send Amendment B to the presbyteries for ratification. They are unofficial documents expressing a congregation's unwillingness to be bound by the amendment. Two have already been written, one coming out of Old First Presbyterian Church, the other written by the Stonecatchers (named to stand in contrast to stone throwers), a group of elders and pastors meeting in the National Capital Presbytery, which includes Washington, D.C., and its suburbs.

"We started the process in July, right after the General Assembly met in June and passed the egregious overture," said Madeline Jervis, pastor of Clarendon Presbyterian Church in Arlington, Virginia. "We started organizing to make statements, run ads, pressure people to vote against it. In December, when it became clear we might lose, we decided what kind of steps to take other than resign from the church, which we are not prepared to do."

Jervis's organization, which has "about eight to 15 regular members," then began to work in concert with the group at Old First Presbyterian. Hart-Andersen and friends had completed a document that they called a Covenant of Dissent. "When I faxed the San Francisco document to [the Stonecatchers]," Hart-Andersen recalls, "they liked the title, and for a day or two we thought of doing a joint statement. But to represent local manifestations of protest, we thought it would be more productive and truer to our grass-roots nature to encourage local sessions [churches] to do their own Covenants of Dissent " Jervis revises that history slightly, saying that the San Francisco document seemed too accommodationist. "We stole their title, but we didn't like the rest of it, so we wrote a different one."

While no sessions have yet voted to adopt a Covenant of Dissent, Old First Presbyterian is likely to do so; and on April 17 the Stonecatchers mailed their version to the 116 sessions of the National Capital Presbytery.

Will the "covenanter strategy," as Hart-Andersen calls it, catch fire? The dissenters see encouraging signs, perhaps the strongest of which is the 85 or so "More Light" churches--churches that pledge to ordain and call elders, deacons and ministers without regard to sexual orientation. There were 73 More Light churches as of the last General Assembly, and about ten more have come aboard since. On May 27 in Milwaukee, sessions of the Milwaukee Presbytery will vote on whether to become the first More Light presbytery.

The Covenants of Dissent and 1 More Light churches are only the most visible signs of resistance to Amendment B, which will take effect on June 21 at the close of the General Assembly in Syracuse. Though a majority of presbyteries approved Amendment B, it is not at all clear that a majority of Presbyterians support the measure. Just as a victory in the Electoral College could mask a presidential candidate's loss in the popular vote, so too does the presbytery count do little to clarify the actual level of support among the rank and file.

Furthermore, the Presbyterians have a resourceful way with theology. Everyone I interviewed was keen to place the battle on the plane not of personal animosity but of scriptural disagreement. "To not follow our consciences is to be in ecclesiastical disobedience," stresses Virginia West Davidson of Rochester, New York, a former vice-moderator of the General Assembly and now co-moderator for advocacy of the More Light alliance. A common allegiance to the Reformed tradition, some dissenters hope, will enable Presbyterians to reach a peaceful consensus on the matter.

And they may have reason to be optimistic. In trying to enforce a strict moral traditionalism, Amendment B revises the historic relationship between individual congregations and the national body. Doctrine may be the responsibility of the assembled PCUSA, but the right of the individual church to call and ordain its pastor is also at the heart of the Reformed tradition. Says Hart-Andersen: "Our problem with Amendment B is partly that it takes from the session one of its historic obligations: which is to decide matters of ordination, to interpret matters of faith in ordination." Which is truer to Presbyterianism: to obey the wisdom of the church body or to reach into that body's tradition of protest? Those dissenting from Amendment B hope that even Presbyterians uncomfortable with different sexualities may be wary of ceding any portion of a session's traditional freedom.