TO RESPOND BY EMAIL savepcusa@gmail.com
Like a member of the Westminster Assembly, who many years ago declared, "O God, we beseech Thee to guide us aright, for we are very determined.
A COMMENT ON THE BLOG CONTENT FROM A FELLOW CLERGYMAN -
Their power to hijack this venerable denomination is because the powers that be hold all the property, from real estate to paper clips; properties purchased by the godly stewardship of local congregations but claimed, by a Book of Order action, by denominational bureaucrats and their loyalist followers. That is the leverage of the bureaucrats in the presbyteries and in Louisville. The action was passed in 1983 without knowledge or compliance of the congregations. At that time there were approximately 4 million Presbyterians; 1.8M now and that's a generous number since so many simply let their names ride on the rolls.
Perhaps a class action by the congregations against PCUSA.
*PLEASE BE SURE TO SEE MORE LEGAL INFORMATION IN THE FOOTNOTES OF THIS BLOG POST.
Great article, Paul
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To all members of PCUSA:
I
will be succinct.
THE PROBLEM
Our Church
has been hijacked
by secular
political activists!
Since John Calvin and John Knox the purpose
of a Presbyterian form of church government is to put the decision making
authority in the hands of the membership and their elected representatives.
That
authority has been usurped. The General Assembly functions more like a
corrupt secular bureaucracy, subject to activists and lobbyists,
than a presbytery.
Decades
ago the Presbyterian Church intentionally
reflected the nature of the matrix in which the church functioned.
Our culture was sane then. Now the culture is pathological, and
PCUSA has begun reflecting that pathology. The church needs
to transform the culture, not imitate it.
The PCUSA elitist usurpers are consistently making policy for the Presbyterian Church USA that reflects secular values and secular political motives.
These policies are
opposed by the
vast majority of the membership.
ONE SOLUTION
Bringing the authority of the membership back into the decision making process is necessary to stop the decline in membership and correct the
politically motivated excess of the last few decades.
I propose a first step solution to this crisis in Presbyterian
Church USA by calling for an advisory referendum on all existing and future
church policy.
The results of a denomination-wide “one member, one vote”
referendum would not be binding on the decisions of the General Assembly. Assessing the opinions of the membership
is not a step toward changing Presbyterianism into
Congregationalism. Asking
members what they think does not change church government. However, it would provide a clear indicator
of the distance existing between the wishes of the
members and the decisions of the General assembly. The only objection to
such an Advisory Referendum would be that PCUSA does not want to know what the
members think, or they don’t want the membership to know how alienated the
PCUSA bureaucrats are from the membership.
I am confident that such a referendum would make it obvious
that the wishes of the membership are distinctly different from the decisions
of the General Assembly.
When those differences become obvious, the General Assembly would
be morally obligated to correct church policy to more accurately reflect the
wishes of the membership or face the consequences of diminishing the
Presbyterian Church even more then the damage already done. The PCUSA leadership has presided over a
dramatic loss of membership. Our church
is in extreme danger and may cease to exist unless PCUSA policy and attitudes
are quickly changed.
The new policy decisions should also be subject to a “one member,
one vote” advisory referendum.
CALL TO ACTION
Please share with your congregation’s
Pastor, Elders and your Presbytery.
“And this week,
the 1.7 million member PCUSA suffered a meltdown, authorizing clergy
to conduct same sex unions, reaffirming its commitment to largely unrestricted
abortion rights, and voting to divest from (or no
longer invest in) three firms doing business with Israel.” Published in The American
Spectator, from an article entitled "Presbyterians
Become the Silly Church" -
There are over 10,000 PCUSA congregations - 172
Presbyteries and 16 Synods- We need volunteers to help get this
information to all PCUSA members - Please contact - savepcusa@gmail.com
~~~~
PRESBYTERIANS BECOME THE SILLY CHURCH
A dying
mainline church speeds its decline.
At one point during this
week’s General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the hundreds of
delegates, known as commissioners, gleefully bounced scores of red
balloons in the air. At another point, they collectively broke into dance,
confirming that most Protestants, especially if they’re old, white and Anglo,
don’t look so great wiggling around. (Here’s a video, for
mature viewers only.)
Mainline Protestantism,
at least in its official curia, has been liberal for nearly 100 years. But for
most of that century it was a thoughtful, dignified liberalism that still
roughly adhered to historic Christianity’s moral architecture, even if it no
longer upheld the core doctrine. But the yonder years of stately Protestantism,
at least in the old Mainline, are largely over. And this week, the 1.7 million
member PCUSA suffered a meltdown, authorizing clergy to conduct same
sex unions, reaffirming its commitment to largely unrestricted abortion rights,
and voting to divest from three firms doing business with Israel.
The church’s
redefinition of marriage, by a 71-29 percent vote, got the most attention,
although it was anticlimactic. Sexual liberalism captured the denomination in
2010, when the PCUSA voted to abandon its expectation of monogamy in marriage
and celibacy in singleness for its clergy. Since then, hundreds of
congregations have quit, organized conservative resistance largely has stopped, and the 2012
General Assembly was expected to authorize same sex unions, but fell short. In
just the last two years, the PCUSA lost nearly 200,000 members, a rate, which
if continued, would mean no more PCUSA in less than 20 years.
In fact, the exodus from
the PCUSA after the marriage vote may increase for congregations and
individuals. Many exiting PCUSA churches have joined the Evangelical
Presbyterian Church, while others helped create a new denomination called the
Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. Despite the impact on denominational
finances, PCUSA elites, committed more to the Left than to the church’s health,
seem mostly indifferent.
Those elites mostly
backed divesting from three firms doing business with Israel, namely
Hewlett-Packard, Caterpillar, and Motorola, which ostensibly facilitate
Israel’s “occupation.” The PCUSA has voted for anti-Israel divestment before,
in 2004, which created such controversy, internally and externally, that it
revoked its stance in 2006. Anti-Israel zealots inside and outside the church
were relentless, and in 2012 divestment fell short by only two votes. This
week, it passed by only seven votes, a remarkable margin, given the ongoing
exodus of conservative church members. Some prominent liberal Presbyterians
spoke against it, but their pleas were insufficient.
A radical Presbyterian
study guide, “Zionism Unsettled,” denouncing Israel as an Apartheid state in
recent months, generated much uproar, especially from Jewish groups. It was
thought that the backlash against that resource might help defeat anti-Israel
divestment, but the opposite may have been true. Commissioners perhaps felt
moderate by voting against the extremist study guide while supporting
divestment, which supporters naturally insisted was not anti-Israel, but merely
pro-peace. The PCUSA is now the only major U.S. denomination divesting against
Israel, with even the Episcopal Church and far-left United Church of Christ
having declined the honor.
By contrast, the
Presbyterians overwhelmingly backed a Cuban campaign to get delisted by the
U.S. as a state sponsor of terror, fulsomely praising Cuba’s ostensible
solidarity against terror. Cuba sí, Israel no!! For good measure, the General
Assembly also condemned U.S. drones, leaving one to wonder whether
Presbyterians will soon have more political stances than church members.
Getting far less attention was the PCUSA General Assembly’s
overwhelming rejection of legislation that urged a “season of reflection” on
the denomination’s support for abortion-rights, including its long-time membership
in the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), which opposes any
restrictions on abortion. Liberal Mainline Protestantism, starting in the
1960s, began its first major break with traditional Christian ethics by
embracing abortion rights, discarding traditional notions about sacred human
life in favor of radical autonomous individualism. The Mainline’s support for
abortion and implied hostility to large families, now compounded by its
redefinition of marriage and divorcing of sex (gender) from marriage, have all helped to create a culture where the
typical Mainline congregation is now largely gray-headed, and has few if any
children.
Of course, some media
reports will hail the PCUSA’s ostensibly courageous shift leftward as heralding
the irresistible tides of history and representing Christianity’s future. But
after about a half century of continuous decline, neither the PCUSA nor any
Mainline denomination can be seriously seen as any barometer of mainstream
religious trends, not in the U.S., and even less so around the world.
Reportedly many overseas Presbyterian churches, many of them now larger than
the PCUSA, are prepared to break ties with the PCUSA over its abandonment of
Christian sexual teaching. Some of them already have.
Jewish groups,
meanwhile, are justifiably indignant over the PCUSA’s anti-Israel divestment.
Hopefully their pressure can precipitate an eventual reconsideration, as
happened eight years ago. But Jewish groups sometimes inflate the importance of
Mainline Protestant actions, thinking of these once-influential churches as
they were 50 years ago, instead of what they are today, highly diminished.
Although church liberals
love to insist their policies appeal to the rising generation, all of the
available evidence indicates just the opposite. Liberalizing churches don’t
attract young people, who, even if themselves liberal, tend to flock to
churches they respect for not pandering to them. The same is true for racial
minorities, who largely avoid liberal Mainline Protestantism in favor of ethnic
or Evangelical churches.
Essentially, the PCUSA,
by its votes this week, resolved to become even smaller, older, and whiter,
creating a future that depends more and more on endowments instead of live
people. Despite the gyrating, balloons, and often-vacuous debates, followed by
wrongheaded votes, the PCUSA deserves some sympathy. It represents the faded
vestige of a once distinguished religious body that indelibly shaped America.
Rest in peace, PCUSA, and thanks for the memories.
~~~~
The Presbyterian Church
USA General Assembly has been making a lot of news on the same sex marriage
issue. But this vote has my eyebrows raised. The convention voted no on protecting babies
born alive after a failed abortion. From the failed motion:
1. Call for the
Presbyterian Mission Agency and member congregations
to enter a two-year
season of reflection upon the plight of children unwanted by human society,
both born and not-yet born, and to purposefully seek to enter the pure worship
of God by offering aid, comfort, and the Gospel to those responsible
for the care of our most desperate orphans (including those who survive
abortion procedures): parents, siblings, church and community leaders,
and the medical profession.
2. Direct the Moderator of
the General Assembly and the Stated Clerk to issue statements that
denounce the practice of killing babies born live following an abortion
procedure, such as was revealed in the Dr. Kermit Gosnell clinic in
Philadelphia.
There was more to the
motion, which supported a pro-life perspective. But it is breathtaking that
the Church wouldn’t
even agree to “reflect” on protecting the lives of born babies and denounce
Kermit Gosnell-style murders. This is akin to refusing to oppose
the terminal neglect of unwanted infants, even infanticide.
This isn’t a matter of
protecting “reproductive rights.” A baby that is born is no longer in his or
her mother’s body and thus nothing is being done to interfere with her privacy
or autonomy.
Peter Singer believes that
unwanted infants can be killed in the same manner as they can be aborted.
Apparently, so does the Presbyterian Church, USA.
~~~~
*The disposition of the church property is a
significant hurdle facing PC(USA) churches deciding whether to enter into a
"process of discernment," the PC(USA) required process before voting
to break from the denomination. PC(USA) claims that all church property is held
by the congregation in trust for the use of the church denomination. Some state
incorporation statutes, however, permit individual church congregations to
retain the church's real estate. The issue of contention is that the “Northern”
church had a clause in their Book of Order giving the denomination ownership of
real estate and other property. The “Southern”
church had no such clause. When the merger (reunion) was being negotiated
Southern congregations were very concerned about the property issue. Presbytery staff
members went to individual congregations and reassured them, "apply for
the exemption and your property will be safe." Local churches applied for,
and were granted exemptions by the Presbytery. Later, these churches were told
that they misunderstood the exemption. The final printed copy of the Book of
Order of the PCUS contained the phrase "all property is held in
trust" and the exemptions that were applied for and granted by
Presbyteries were void. Often, courts are finding that a thorough history of the
church and its denominational affiliation is paramount in determining ownership
of real estate and other property. . See, e.g., Highland Park Presbyterian
Church v. Presbytery of Grace, which is scheduled for trial in October 2014
