It provides daily meditations ("Strength for the Journey"), plus news and reflections on the news.

It’s worth a visit, and return visits.  Go to http://tamfsatga.typepad.com/

One recent addition is a reflection on the election of the Rev. Joan S. Gray as Moderator

[from TAMFS, posted 6-9-06]

TAMFS’ Response to "A Season of Discernment: The Final Report of The Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church"

The National Board of That All May Freely Serve presents the following statements of foundations and purpose as reflections on the recommendations of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. We owe a debt of gratitude to Elder Scott Anderson, who has served faithfully as an openly gay member of the Task Force. Scott’s generosity in an extended conversation with members of That All May Freely Serve has made it possible for us to present our statements with insight and appreciation for his work and that of the other members of the Task Force. We commend Scott for his service, dedication, and witness. His modeling of the infinite hospitality manifest in the radical love of Jesus is a model we seek to follow. Along with Scott, we name here all the members of the Task Force who have presented us with this opportunity for prayer and dialogue together as we move toward a truly just and fully inclusive church:

The Rev. Mark Achtemeier, Elder Scott D. Anderson, Dr. Barbara Everitt Bryant, Dr. Milton J Coalter, The Reverend Victoria G. Curtiss, Dr. Gary W. Demarest, Dr. Frances Taylor Gench, Dr. Jack Haberer, Dr. William Stacy Johnson, Elder Mary Ellen Lawson, Dr. Jong Hyeong Lee, Dr. John B. (Mike) Loudon, Mrs. Sue Mallory, Elder Joan Kelley Merritt, Dr. Lonnie J. Oliver, The Reverend Martha D. Sadongei, Elder Sarah Grace Sanderson, Elder Jean S. (Jenny) Stoner, The Reverend JosÉ Luis Torres-MilÁn, Elder Barbara G. Wheeler, Dr. John Wilkinson

Essential to the work and core values of That All May Freely Serve is the conviction that there can be no second-class membership for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) people in the full work and worship of the Presbyterian Church (USA). The National Board of That All May Freely Serve is sincerely grateful for the efforts of the Theological Task Force as it has thoughtfully and prayerfully written its report. Our response to the Theological Task Force and its work offers respect and appreciation for their achievement but disappointment for what was left unsaid and undone.

That All May Freely Serve holds up the Task Force's affirmation of the constitutional provisions of G-6.0108 a. and b. These provisions are firmly rooted in "The Adopting Act of 1729" and the "Plan of Union of 1758." The principle and practice of "scruples" is steadfastly based on the right and responsibility of the governing body that ordains and/or installs a candidate. That governing body is the ultimate deciding body in judging whether or not the candidate has departed from the essentials of Reformed faith and polity and thus worthy of being ordained and/or installed to an ordained office.

Our polity makes it clear that the General Assembly establishes the ordination standards that are to be held in common across the denomination. In alignment with that fact, we uphold the principle of Presbyterian polity: presbyteries and sessions are given responsibility and authority, as succinctly summarized in G-6.0108, to decide what candidates may or may not be ordained and/or installed by that particular governing body. That All May Freely Serve cites Amendment G-6.0106b as an aberration set within the context of this rich and historical principle of Presbyterian polity. For this and many other reasons G-6.0106b must be deleted without delay. It is fully within the right and power of this Assembly to do this, and it is our prayer and fervent hope that the Spirit will call this church into justice through the actions of this Assembly to approve Overture 02.

What disappoints us in the report of the task force and its recommendations is that the exclusionary practices of this church continue to be tolerated as part of a timeline for the promise of peace, purity, and unity. Such a position at any level of our government or in any recommendations is tantamount to accepting the inherent violence in the exclusion of the LGBT faith community as an acceptable price to pay. That All May Freely Serve can never acquiesce to any recommendation, amendment, or other provisions that prolong marginalization of our LGBT family. We work and pray for an awakening in our church that finds its prophetic voice with a resounding "No!" to any practice that continues the oppression and dehumanization of our LGBT brothers and sisters.

Still, we stay and work tirelessly for a season of justice sooner, rather than later. We welcome and invite full and open dialogue with our brothers and sisters who may share different views. However, we ask all to hear us when we say there can be no pause in our work until G-6.0106b is deleted from the Book of Order. We are bound by our conscience, our calls, and the lives of those we serve to reject any moratorium in the furtherance of this mission.

There can be no rest for us until our LGBT family worships and works in this church with the same rights as our heterosexual sisters and brothers. Peace, purity, and unity can only be achieved when the doors in this church are taken off their hinges opened widely so that all may freely serve. Only then will we be able to embrace one another in the wonderful diversity of our Creator and be faithful servants to the baptism we share as members of the Body and Church of Jesus Christ.

That All May Freely Serve (TAMFS) affirms with thanksgiving the modeling of growth in trust and gracious forbearance among the members of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. Their growth in Christ-like charity and community with one another, in spite of and through their diversity and conscientious disagreements, is evident in their final report.

At the same time, we recognize that their growth as a community of faithful Christians is the result of the intimacy of their life together seeking to discern with responsible integrity the will of Christ Jesus (G-4.0301 d.) for themselves, and they hope by extension, for the Presbyterian Church (USA). In responding to their final report, TAMFS, no less than the members of the Task Force, must do so with responsible integrity as we seek to discern the will of Christ Jesus for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) members of the Body of Christ, which is the church.

As we seek to discern the will of Christ, we, no less than the Task Force members, affirm that we must do so with a self-critical humility acknowledging our own propensity toward the self-righteous idolatry of our own systems of thought and action whenever we presume to possess all truth. However, responsible integrity leads us to speak that truth by which the Holy Spirit binds us to Christ’s authority as the sole Head of the Church and thus frees us "…to live in the lively, joyous reality of the grace of God." (G-1.0100 d.)

It is in recognition of our need for humility that we affirm with the Task Force members that Christ Jesus is the sole source of our peace, unity, and purity within the church universal, and the PC (USA) in particular. Our response to the final report of the Task Force is therefore rooted in the following affirmations.

"Obedience to Jesus Christ alone identifies the one universal church and supplies the continuity of its traditions." (BOC, 9:03)

"God…has made Christ Head of the Church, which is his body." (G-1.0100 1.a.)

"It belongs to Christ alone to rule, to teach, to call, and to use the Church as he wills." (G-1.0100 1.b.)

"Jesus Christ is the living God present in common life…" (W-1.1003 c.), the living "Word of God" to whom the Scripture, the preaching and the sacraments bear testimony (W-1.1004), such that "insofar as Christ’s will for the Church is set forth in Scripture, it is to be obeyed." (G-1.0100 1.c.)

This obedience to Jesus Christ alone "…is the ground of the church’s duty and freedom to reform itself in life and doctrine as new occasions, in God’s providence, may demand." (BOC, 9:03)

In discerning Christ’s will for us we take seriously the warning and admonition of our Directory for Worship that "there is no peace without justice and that wherever there is brokenness, violence, and injustice the people of God are called to be peacemakers…." (W-7.4003). For this reason we humbly and conscientiously disagree with the conclusion of the Task Force members that "God refuses to live on one side or the other…" (Report, p. 6.) of the great social conflicts of humanity involving national, racial, class, ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation boundaries. The words of Reinhold Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society help us discern the will of Christ contained in the Scriptural witness and the confessions of God’s covenant people. "…A social conflict which aims at greater equality has a moral justification which must be denied to efforts which aim at the perpetuation of privilege." (Niebuhr, p. 234.)

Scripture, the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ, the living Word of God, contains an astonishing volume of material that undeniably focuses on the questions of hunger, justice, and the poor. This biblical witness leads us to affirm that God exercises a preferential option on behalf of the poor, the oppressed, the powerless, and the disinherited. From the formative liberating act of God, who sees the affliction and hears the cries of oppressed slaves and takes action to free them (Ex. 3:7-8a); to the powerful prophetic tradition demanding that "…justice roll down like waters…" (Amos 5:24); to Jesus’ parabolic praise for the incessant persistence of the poor widow demanding justice (Lk. 18:2-7); we discern Christ’s will for us.

"Let us not grow weary in well-doing for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart." (Gal. 6:9)

Consequently, we consider conscientious and passionate advocacy calling the church to acts of justice as neither detrimental to the peace, unity, and purity of the church nor legitimately characterized as a strategy that offers a win-lose option only. (Report, p. 6.) Rather, it is persistent acquiescence to injustice that abandons the peace of Christ and deprives the church of unity with Christ, who alone supplies the church’s purity of intention and action. Agreement that is achieved out of weariness of conflict is a false, often coerced, peace. "…Peace within the church at the expense of faithfulness is the peace of a corpse…." "Agreement is not always a sign of obedience, but may more likely be a sign that we do not care very passionately about a particular issue." ("Historical Principles, Conscience and Church Government," p. 9.)

We affirm and commend to all who seek justice and full inclusion for LGBT members in the church the wise use of Presbyterian polity that provides a means for redress of grievances and reform of injustices through the democratic legislative "process of overture, amendment, and vote of the presbyteries." This process is one of the limited ways whereby LGBT people and our straight allies can access power in order to challenge the church in obedience to Jesus Christ "…to reform itself in life and doctrine as new occasions demand." The long persistent legislative struggle to secure for women full access to the ordained offices of the church is a clear example of church reform through the legislative process. We believe it would be negligent and unfaithful of us if we were to abandon this legislative process and did not continually encourage presbyteries to make the General Assembly aware of the need to be just and fully inclusive of LGBT people by calling for the deletion of G-6.0106b.

The Task Force chose as the title for its final report "A Season of Discernment." The Task Force indicates that "a season of discernment" is due in the church concerning the wearisome conflict involving ordination standards and the status of LGBT people in the church. We believe many within the LGBT faith community perceive this title and its seemingly implicit endorsement of a moratorium on legislative action seeking to delete an unjust discriminatory section from the church’s constitution to be insensitive to the lived reality of LGBT people within the church. We believe the church has had ample opportunity for discernment during the past twenty-seven years.

From the time "definitive guidance" was promulgated by the 190^th GA (1978) to the time of the 1997 ratification of G-6.0106b, the PC (USA) has consistently refused to be engaged in discernment about the issues that the presence of the real lives of faithful LGBT Christians raises for the church. The arbitrary legalism of G-6.0106b, rooted as it is in cultural fears and hostilities toward LGBT people, fails to seek the will of Christ for the church to be rooted in covenantal grace. This failure to engage in discernment about the destructive effects of the church’s treatment of its LGBT members has ruptured the peace, unity, and purity of the church.

Because there is an inseparable link between practice and faith, the church’s embrace of G-6.0106b, much more than being simply an embrace of aberrant polity, is an embrace of a distorted theology that damages the very soul and conscience of the church. Embedded in the detrimental impact G-6.0106b and "definitive guidance" have on our polity and our understanding of ordination is the violent systematic stigmatization of LGBT members of the church as a category of second class people dehumanized under the rubric of "unrepentant practicing homosexual." The PC (USA) as an institution has become oblivious to and thus adjusted to its abuse of power that violates the full equal humanity of its LGBT members. This abuse of power in turn distorts the whole church’s ability to act humanely and it becomes the enemy of the very people it is called to serve.

In the midst of the atmosphere of fear and hostility that "definitive guidance" and G-6.0106b have engendered toward LGBT members of the church, it has been LGBT members who most often have demonstrated extraordinary forbearance and selflessness in seeking to promote reconciliation within the church. Attempts at dialogue and interaction with those in the church who fail to recognize our full humanity have brought many of us face-to-face with cruel cutting remarks, inhumane and mean-spirited character attacks, threatened or actual disciplinary complaints and charges of heresy, as well as destruction of careers. At the same time, those within the church who have engaged in some of the most egregious attacks against our humanity have experienced no repercussions from the larger church for their actions. We regret the omission in the final report of the Task Force of these facts. We have a grave concern that the Task Force’s proposed "season of discernment" does not mention any plan to hold anyone accountable for inhumane and inhospitable treatment of LGBT people.

"In the long-term," writes Paul E. Capetz, "the church needs to reconcile itself with the fact that gay people require full equality and will not – should not – settle for…" second class status. "Gay people will never be reconciled to the church until the church is reconciled to gay people." ("The Gospel According to Matthew Shepard," Church & Society, May-June 2002, pp. 92, 93.) An unjust abuse of power is the cause of the rupture in the peace, unity, and purity of the church not LGBT members who are often accused of being the problem and disrupters of the peace. True reconciliation that seeks to restore peace, unity, and purity to the church is possible only between equals who mutually share access to power and work together to dismantle the abusive systems symbolized by the presence of G-6.0106b in the constitution.

The members of the Task Force, we believe, recognize that this atmosphere of fear and hostility must give way to a new atmosphere of mutual trust based upon openness that recognizes the full humanity of LGBT people and alike non-LGBT people within the church.

"…Having been forgiven by God, we are committed to forgive those who have wronged us and seek the forgiveness of those we have wronged. Because controversies over sexuality and ordination have been a special focus of the task force’s work, the task force has become aware of how much alienation and contempt many have experienced. The task force has heard a call to seek God’s forgiveness for our sin and our hurtful attitudes and actions." (Report, lines 238-244.)

"Many of us came to understand how alienating it is for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons to be regularly identified as a major threat to the peace, unity, and purity of the church." (Report, lines 367-369.)

Even as we pray that the Task Force’s hope that this new vision be the groundwork of engaging in constructive discernment might permeate the church’s heart and soul, we lament the missed opportunities of the past twenty-seven years that have caused damage to so many of our LGBT sisters and brothers and have caused many of them to leave the PC (USA) or to dismiss the church as irrelevant and hostile to their lives.

Because abusive power is the underlying, often covert, dynamic at the root of the unjust discriminatory standards of G-6.0106b and "definitive guidance," we consider it very disappointing and regrettable that the Task Force chose not to deal with the issue of power openly and head-on. Instead, power is contained in the Task Force’s discussion of polity in such a "nuanced" manner that it is not obvious that the issue is even being addressed. Such a low key and less than forthright discussion of power does not adequately take into consideration how insidiously LGBT people perceive that power is used to leverage privilege in order to deny us equal access to power, privilege, and responsibility in the church. The expressions of anger and outrage that many within the LGBT faith community have articulated toward the final report of the Task Force was in many ways predictable.

In the absence of any real acknowledgement of how the church has used power to keep LGBT people on the margins of the church’s life, recommendations 5 and 6 of the final report have been perceived as the use of power to leverage a position of privilege in order to short circuit the legislative process to change unjust ordination standards through overtures to delete G-6.0106b.

Recommendation #5:

We find absolutely no fault in the content of the constitutional provisions that are listed in the Task Force’s recommended authoritative interpretation (AI) to the 217^th GA. In essence the Task Force’s AI is being used to remind the whole church of long unbroken constitutional provisions that are already present and readily available for use by governing bodies and their candidates. However these provisions have often fallen out of view and lain dormant for many years. The Task Force readily admits that there is nothing new in the elements of their recommended AI. (Report, p. 33.)

The provisions of G-6.0108 a. and b. derive from the Adopting Act of 1729 by which a candidate for ordination might declare a scruple and the presbytery would determine if the scruple was in error or if it was not "essential and necessary in Doctrine, Worship or Government." The process of deciding essentials of Reformed faith and polity would not surface again in any significant way until the fundamentalist controversy of the early twentieth century. In the final report of the Special Commission of 1925 on the purity, peace, unity and progress of the church to the 1927 GA, this constitutional provision took front and center again as a means of dealing with the question: "What authority, if any, does the GA possess for declaring any article to be an essential and necessary one in a sense which renders its statement mandatory and applicable in all cases?" (Minutes of 1927 GA or PC (USA), p. 78.)

While the GA establishes the ordination standards that are to be held in common across the denomination, we believe that it has always been a firm principle of Presbyterian polity that presbyteries and sessions are given responsibility and authority, as succinctly summarized in G-6.0108 b., to decide what candidates may or may not be ordained and/or installed by that particular governing body. G-6.0106b is an aberration set within the context of this rich historical principle of Presbyterian polity. G-6.0106b is antithetical to this long historical precedent.

What was surprising to us was not the content of the recommended AI but the fact that the Task Force was recommending any type of legislative action to GA regarding ordination standards. Our understanding of the 212^th GA’s (2001) mandate for the Task Force was that it should seek ways to assist the church to discern its identity in the 21^st century in order to assist the church to deal constructively with the many changes that it would experience in the next one hundred years. It is important to remember that the same GA that created the Task Force also called upon the church to delete G-6.0106b in the full expectation, we believe, and that the acceptance of the full humanity of LGBT people in church and society would be one of the significant changes with which the church must deal in the 21^st century.

Like the members of the Task Force, we expect there will be changes in the church’s ordination standards in the years to come. We believe that responsible use of the democratic legislative process of the PC(USA) shall result in the removal of G-6.0106b and "definitive guidance" from our polity. It would seem more in keeping with what we perceived to be the Task Force’s mandate if Recommendation #5 had simply been lifted up and commended to the governing bodies for their consideration and possible use the already existing constitutional provisions enumerated in the recommended AI.

We do see a slight danger in seeming to be asking permission in the form of an AI to use an already existing constitutional provision. Although the situations are not exact parallels, we remember that New York City Presbytery asked the 1978 GA for "definitive guidance" about what it should do with a qualified candidate who was a self-affirming practicing gay man. The presbytery should not have asked for permission to do what the constitution already allowed it to do. The presbytery should have ordained its candidate if it decided it should do so. Then anyone who did not agree with its action would have had to file a remedial complaint.

Although we found the Task Force’s recommendation of a particular "legislative remedy" in the form of an AI to clarify traditional ordination practices to be surprising, we believe that had they stopped with that Recommendation and not proceeded to Recommendation #6 a., the final report would not have been met with so much anger and dismay by some in the LGBT community. Recommendation #6 a., when seen in the context of the absence of any forthright discussion of power, was itself perceived to be an abuse of power on the part of the Task Force. Their action was perceived as a use of privilege in order to undercut the current efforts of presbyteries to pass motions to send overtures or concurrences to overtures to delete G-6.0106b and adopt an AI declaring "definitive guidance" to have no further force or effect.

We have very distinct memories of GA commissioners using any excuse close at hand not to consider the merits of acting on the deletion of G-6.0106b, be it a long succession of calls for moratoriums on legislation or waiting for the pending report of a Task Force. The perception exists that the Task Force’s Recommendation will cause commissioners to the 217^th GA not to give due consideration to overtures and AI’s related to deletion of G-6.0106b and "definitive guidance" from our polity.