Presbyterians vote for unity - includes related article on Mary Ann Lundy, former associate director of churchwide planning

Christian Century, June 29, 1994

IN PERHAPS its most significant action, the 206th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) refused to allow a controversial conference to split the church, but instead reaffirmed the denomination's sense of unity. The action was hailed by some as an important step toward healing a conflict precipitated by the church's participation in the feminist "Re-Imagining" conference last year. The PCUSA ended its annual General Assembly June 17.

In a near-unanimous vote, delegates approved a resolution saying that although the church supports efforts to improve and celebrate the status of Christian women, the conference went too far theologically in its efforts to "re-imagine" God in a feminist light. "This is a significant moment in the church's history," said John Buchanan, a Presbyterian pastor from Chicago and the leader of the GA committee that drafted the document.

Many delegates said the moment was more than just significant; they called it a watershed, a moment in which Presbyterians pulled themselves back from a chasm of irreconcilable differences. Some feared that the assembly might have been the last the church would hold before falling apart. At issue was an interfaith conference held in Minneapolis last fall designed to reimagine religion in a woman-friendly way. The conference was partly organized and funded by Presbyterians and was attended by 400 of the determination's members and two dozen of its national staff.

For some, the meeting was a long-overdue chance to shake off a percieved patriarchal mind-set in the church and celebrate the role and status of women in Christianity. According to others, it turned into something more like a New Age celebration of lesbianism and goddess worship that included sensual prayers and a rejection 6f traditional Christian teachings.

By the time the General Assembly convened on June 10, the denomination's national office had received more than 3,000 letters about the Re-Imagining conference, the majority of them negative. One national staff member, Mary Ann Lundy was forced to resign and numerous churches had decided to withhold funds from the denomination. Several had threatened to leave. "This is not a women's issue," maintained John Sloop of Virginia. "My associate pastor is a woman, my clerk is a woman and half my board of directors are women. We affirm the position of women. But this is an issue of faulty theology."

Throughout the week the women's conference was the main topic of discussion in the hallways and lunch counters at the Century II Convention Center in Wichita, Kansas. And the committee dealing with the issue ultimately spent about 50 hours wading through the concerns it evoked. The resolution the committee put to the assembly on June 16 rejected some of the theology expounded at the Minneapolis gathering, but acknowledged that such problems are bound to arise at conferences involving people of different faiths.

The committee rejected conference statements that seemed to ridicule traditional Christian teaching, but supported the Presbyterians who attended the meeting. It asked for new guidelines on spending denominational money at such events, but defended the actions of the officials who had helped planned and fund the conference. In short, the resolution gave delegates on both sides of the issue something to take back to their churches. "We had to find some common ground," Buchanan said.

After the vote, delegates broke into applause, hugged each other and then sang familiar hymns. for about ten minutes. Many of them had tears streaming down their faces. "Let the world know," declared the denomination's new moderator, Robert Bohl, "that this group of Christians really loves each other."

On another divisive issue the church close the path of ambiguity. Regarding homosexuality, the PCUSA voted to bar clergy from blessing same-sex unions but declined to impose a celibacy requirement on gay or single clergy. Dodging and weaving around the question of what role gays may play in church and society, delegates concluded the assembly with the issue still unresolved.

On June 15, delegates defeated a proposal that demanded "fidelity within the covenant of marriage or celibacy" as a standard for clergy and church officers be written into church law. Instead, the GA adopted, by a 357-17 vote, a resolution that said clergy, deacons and elders should demonstrate Christian faith and life "as defined by Scripture and the Confessions."

The original proposal, contained in a majority report by the Committee on Church Orders and Vocation, was widely perceived and debated as an effort to impose the celibacy requirement on gay clergy, despite protestations by the proposal's supporters that it was not an antigay initiative. "This was trying to legislate a variety of sexual behavior," remarked Jane Spahr, an openly lesbian minister from San Rafael, California, whose ordination had stirred much of the current controversy. "We, are not practicing sexual misconduct. Who we are is people who love people of the same sex."