Jerry Andrews oral history, 2017.

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  • speaker
    Okay. So why don't we start talking about your childhood? You were born in Detroit? Is that correct?
  • speaker
    Yes, Detroit, born and raised. I was never outside the city limits for more than two weeks until I went away to graduate school. So all I knew was the west side of Detroit. It's all I cared to know, it was a big world and it was just fine with me. I went to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and in my teens my parents had moved from Assemblies of God Church to a significant large downtown conservative evangelical UPCUSA church, Ward Church Detroit, which is now the flagship of the EPC. So every this colors the way I go about my life and the way I think. But every Sunday school teacher I had is in another denomination and my parents have been and several other members of my extended family that that move made a division in the family. And that was forming, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church at the time of my ordination. That church affirms me, continues to, I'm their golden boy. They follow my ministry, they love. It's about 5000 member church now and affirm the evangelical presence in the PC(USA), but for their own sake they thought they had to make a different decision. It's now a suburban church. And so the feel of it is even different than what it was, a downtown church. And I grew up downtown Detroit.
  • speaker
    So that was in the fifties?
  • speaker
    The fifties. I graduated from high school in 1970. They so it was in the late sixties we began attending Ward several warm memories. I don't have any negative ones of either home or church, in the expression of faith in my life. At age nine, I gave testimony to my parents that I and my cousin Johnny got saved at the Pentecostal Boys Camp by a traveling evangelist chalk artist of all things. And Johnny now runs the largest youth ministry in Southeast Michigan on behalf of the Assemblies of God but was in Assemblies of God Church I went to to right near Tabernacle, which is now also a megachurch in the suburbs of Detroit, was Old Line Pentecostal. Jimmy Swaggart was a guest in my home growing up. My dad was a union electrician, which meant he was rich so he would have a home that could have a table big enough to have people to invite over. And my sister and I were raised with 22 foster children in our home not all at the same time. So it had a feeling of a big house. And I look at it now and I doubt this thing was 2000 square feet, but back then it felt like a big home in our neighborhood. And so there were healings. And I tease my cousins that the church we grew up in there was whooping and hollering and rolling in the aisles, and that was the organized part of the worship service. Then the Holy Spirit showed up and who knows what was going to happen next. But it wasn't until I started attending the Presbyterian church with my parents and I heard a pastor open a big floppy Bible at the Sunday evening service and say, This is what it says, this is what it means, and here's how we should think about amending our lives that I thought I was watching a miracle, that God was in a role he was speaking, and that there was a sense of of this is a miracle. This is proof of a living god. The rest of that stuff that I'd witnessed was entertaining. It was important. I don't deny it. It just didn't connect with me. This did right time, right place. God knows what God is doing and does well at it. And then not long after that, the thoughts I had when I was young that my dad, who everyone admired, admired the pastors. My mother's brother was one of them in this church I grew up in that. That's an admirable thing to do because it kind of struck me that they don't actually work for a living and my dad actually worked for a living. So if you could somehow get a paycheck and not work for a living, has it worked out that way for me? This is a lot like work. The call to ministry in our family is my Uncle Sonny, who was one of the pastors of this Assemblies of God church would come and get my dad at dinnertime. My dad actually had real skills. They would go to the poor people in the church and the neighborhood. Dad would install a new furnace or fix their furnace or their washer dryer. And my Uncle Sonny, he would be there praying with the family. There's nothing shy about Jesus with these Pentecostals. So I thought those were the two things you could do when you grow up. You could be on a dirt floor in a semi basement in a home in Detroit in January, where it's 20 below, underneath the furnace, hoping it doesn't blow up in your face. Or you could be sitting in a kitchen talking about Jesus while you're eating pie.
  • speaker
    So did you go with your dad and your uncle on some of these?
  • speaker
    I went these things. I witnessed this. I think I made the better choice. I love my dad, but I decided Uncle Sonny had made a better choice about what to do for a living.
  • speaker
    And what what led your family to move from the Assemblies of God to the Presbyterian Church?
  • speaker
    I had to ask my parents. It wasn't clear to me what they were doing at the time. Everybody, every Christian that we knew was a Pentecostal Christian. And we do a lot, this is a big church, there's a thousand people in this church. And my mom had gone to Bible College and had been exposed to, yes, very conservative still, but a more word centered faith and just felt that this was more sustainable. I don't know that she used that word. I doubt it, but I think that's what was going on. Dad was a little harder sell on this. Again, he was a leader as my mom was in the church of it was the church of their youth. They had both grown up in that church as well. Both their families. My grandparents had started this church. So it was a tough decision, frankly. And people did not think that they knew any Presbyterian Christians and that that might not actually be the case that there were such things out there. But in the end, I think the thing that I, I know I heard this that explained it best to me was they were done with worship services being cheerleading rallies, rather than in places where one is formed by the word. Having said that, it was true in the Pentecostal church, which was very warmly evangelical through a lot of affinities, and in the Pentecostal church, which was loudly evangelical, they wouldn't use the word evangelical, they would just say Pentecostal that the most precious moments were standing next to my father in a pew and hearing him sing of his unashamed love for his savior. That those are the moments where the faith got passed on. The shape of the faith would be different for me with an education and entirely in a reform tradition. My dad became a Presbyterian elder and appreciated it more and more and more all the way through his life. But the faith got passed on, I think, in those moments when I, and I admired my dad deeply, in part because I think I knew everybody else did. And I knew he wasn't cool. I knew he wasn't like me and didn't understand me and my friends and my generation. But that was really beside the point. This was an admirable man and he loved Jesus and would sing about it. So what's not to mimic about that? So that that formed the evangelical heart. For me, the mind would be shaped differently. My dad is not a college graduate, my mind would be shaped differently than that. In that church moved to the suburbs where it is actually a couple moves in the suburbs after that. My mom led the Missions Society for the Evangelical Presbyterian Church for a while and my dad is he since has passed, but he's kind of a bowl elder of that church. And people still, you know, I'm still Percy's and Thelma's boy when I go back there at age 64, maybe I have my own name. One one would hope, but no, not yet. Not yet. So all of that might have been troublesome to my parents. It wasn't to me. I looked around. I had learned some things. I noticed fairly early on that there was an issue about women in leadership, in the Presbyterian Church. There wasn't in the Pentecostal church. A third of the pastors were women, two thirds of the evangelists and there are a lot of evangelists are women. Almost the whole missionary force are women. I didn't know there was an issue. And so for me, Mainline, though, I think for some folks that means progressive and broad. For me that meant stuffy, narrow and kind of elitist, and that part of it wasn't attractive. I still feel those parts in our own denomination and they haven't become any more attractive though I'll bet I mimic almost all of that now by default. But Mainline has never meant broad to me. I experienced a greater breadth in a Pentecostal environment in my youth. Talked a lot about that, it formed and shapes me. I don't have any doubts about it, but I knew by the time I was in seminary that it was not my future, it was not my fit, that my appropriate response was going to be gratitude for God and gratitude to those people who taught me to love Jesus. Somebody else is going to teach me how to do that. And that worked. I went to a Bible college, which was, at its worst a fundamentalist boot camp, at its best exposure to some really godly women and men who themselves practice the faith in quiet and and sustainable ways. Then I was at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and that was that was surprisingly a broadening experience for me and very welcome.
  • speaker
    So I was I looked up William Tyndale College where you went, which is closed since and I was fascinated that their their motto was in essentials, unity and nonessentials, liberty and all things charity. And I'm wondering if that had any meaning for you then when you were a college student, because it seems like it's shaped, informed a lot of your life's work.
  • speaker
    Yeah, I was on a phone call this morning from someone from the other tribe in our Presbyterian church and with with great integrity. I don't have any doubts about it, said no Jerry this this event will be in the center and I know that that means not where I would like for it to be because they think the center is in a different place than I do and the college I went to. That's a great slogan. I think it's a it's been very helpful to a lot of people, a lot of places. But like everything else, the trick is in so what are the essentials and what are the nonessentials? And in that environment, it was surprisingly large number of essentials in that Bible College. There was something like this at work. They're all gone now. And so I can't ask what I should have asked when I was younger. It was a it was a Dallas Theological Seminary satellite. Everybody who wanted to go get a a master's degree or a doctorate degree was to go from there to Dallas. And that part of it's never attracted to me, in part because when I walked into a class called Acts and the Pauline Epistles, which is really dispensationalism 101 the professor handed me a copy of Calvin's Institutes and said, Jerry, you go to war Presbyterian. They're not committed to a dispositional way of thinking and living out the faith. It's more like this. I want you to have an open mind in my class, and expectations will be the same of you as everybody else. But your commitments are here in this book, and this is a person who probably doesn't read Calvin's Institutes. Nonetheless, I decided then that my pastor and others who were on the board had worked out some deal for Presbyterian students. You don't make Baptists out of that. Please, though, Baptists are, you know, who make the school. And then there were other moments like that along the way. And so my identity as a reformed thinker and disciple was being formed sometimes in places that weren't reformed. Trinity tried to pass itself off as reformed from time to time, but I think all they meant by that was Calvinist thinking in their soteriology. But their theology proper and all that, frankly, by my theology teacher was a Dallas teacher. It was the weakest department in the seminary at the time was theology of all things. But I had some great, great teachers. I had Carl Henry, who I think invented the world word evangelical and everything else associated with it. I had J. I. Packer for Reform Theology. I had David Wells. I had this wonderful, wonderful faculty that I was exposed to. So that was a broad need. And that was the first time that academics and wanting to be at my best, because there was a benefit to me and my calling it it first kicked in it didn't actually kick in even in college, it never kicked in. My mother will assure you, in public schools in Detroit, it never kicked it. I didn't take a book home until my senior year of high school, never took a book home, didn't do homework at home. You know, that's why they give you ten minute passing periods so you could do your homework. And and because of physics in my physics, science class had embarrassed me in front of the class. And had did done so intentionally. For all I know, he was brilliant to get me motivated. Or he was just a mean person. I still don't know. But it made me so mad. I went home. My dad knew stuff. My dad knew physics. My dad knew calculus. So I got a tutorial from my dad and went back in to make sure I would never be embarrassed again. That's the only thing that ever motivated me was my reputation. Which is pretty thin motivation, until seminary then I thought there was actually something out there. There's a whole body of thinking by a lot of bright people over many years, and then the interest in the early part of church history, in part because I didn't like the theology that was being offered to me by my contemporaries as contemporary. But the ancients actually thought theologically. Somebody said that Gregory of Nyssa thinks in pages. Most of us try to think in paragraphs, and some of us that are worse thinking bullet points. But he thought in pages. And when I read him, I thought, yes, you don't get this until you get to the end this is one thought. And it took a whole afternoon to get the one thought. But it's more precious and more powerful than the bazillion other ones that I'm capturing in rapid fire by other readings. So that that secured my focus. And that focus never changed.
  • speaker
    So you were under you were under care and preparing for ministry in the Presbyterian Church while you were at Trinity and.
  • speaker
    Went under care as a seminary student. Detroit Presbytery. They were wonderful to me. They were. And it took an effort for them to be wonderful because my home church was leaving the denomination, forming another denomination and taking others in Detroit Presbytery with them. St. Louis and Detroit and Denver became the first hubs. And because Ward Church with others left Detroit Presbytery. So it took a remarkable amount of grace and probably trust on their part to be so good to me. The liberal bias was there. By then I knew that that wasn't me, that wasn't going to be my future, that I just couldn't actually figure out in the beginning with how these people tick and every once in a while it's a mystery to me still. But that wasn't going to be me and. So I they they pressure is not the right word. They counseled me to finish my seminary career at McCormick. I did not want to do that. I wanted to walk out with a Trinity degree. I had worked hard for it. I mean, finally I was working and you had to work hard or you don't walk out with a degree at Trinity and bargained that I would go an extra year and did a ThM at Princeton with the extra year. But I already knew my academic pursuits and I wanted to study with Bruce Metzger and Charles Fritsch and Karlfried Froehlich and others who did and only when I got there, did I discover Georges Florovsky the Russian Orthodox priest who, Jim McCord was the president of Princeton and he kind of favored me and told me that he thought Florovsky had actually died at least ten years earlier, but nobody had the moral or intellectual standing to tell him, and he just kept showing up in teaching courses. And this is a guy who was so old, he had his books confiscated by the Communists in 1917 when they went into his manse as an Orthodox priest. And it just I think he and Origen and Clement went to kindergarten together and I took verbatims as classes. Meanwhile, the students, just the two of us for a whole year and just took verbatims because what are you going to do with this information except to stockpile it? And he's got to be gone. And he died. I was his last student. That's probably my biggest bragging point. As a student. I was Florovsky's last student, which may mean nothing more than I killed a guy who after he had me decide, what's the point anymore of this, this is not working. Or I was the pinnacle of his hopes and dreams.
  • speaker
    Yes.
  • speaker
    There's a whole Florovsky society out there, I don't want to admit to them that I killed their idol. So but the move from Princeton to from Trinity to Princeton was with two other Trinity people, both of whom stayed, did their Ph.D. and have been teaching all their lives. Michael Holmes and Dennis. The three of us were friends there. Trinity was a great experience, first time away from home. And so Chicago became familiar to me, did a long internship in a left of center church. They were very, very good to me. I was a shock to their system. They it's like, really, you got just an education. Tell me one more time what you actually believe about stuff. And so I think I was a surprise that hopefully not that big a disappointment.
  • speaker
    And they were a surprise to you also?
  • speaker
    In a way, liberals I knew were in textbooks. What I didn't know was that real people would actually say those things that were in textbooks. And there was a difference, too. This was Highland Park, which is in North Shore. There is a wealth and affluence there that I was not accustomed to in my neighborhood, in Brightmoor, in Detroit, and so that I began to associate wealth with liberalism, which sometimes is association, sometimes not. And here's people who didn't actually work for a living. I'm sure they did, but I couldn't figure out what it is they did for a living, and they just weren't scrappy about things. Again but they were very good to me. I mean, they were just wonderful. And and it was a be a required experience if I'm going to be a pastor in the PC(USA) it's going to be as a minority evangelical in a larger left leaning environment, that that's the dynamics and politics are going to change from one season to another. But that's good. That's going to be there. This is not going to become an evangelical denomination.
  • speaker
    So why did you choose not to go with the EPC when your home church was leaving the denomination?
  • speaker
    I thought leaving was actually a false move. I thought it was quitting too soon not that I had a strategy or was somehow more hopeful. I'd like to think I was more hopeful. But maybe I can't I can't imagine that I was wiser than my elders. But I just thought it was a false move that if Jesus hasn't given up on what was in the UPCUSA, what, I'm more cool than Jesus? I have more of a right to be offended by nonsense. And what, in my opinion, is departure from the faith than he is? I don't have a lot of humility. This really wasn't about if I gained any, it would be later. Where, you know, who am I to always think my judgment is absolute and therefore my judgment alone should make my actions righteous. But I just couldn't figure out that if Jesus was investing in this, why wouldn't I? And it has always this is not fair tell that you need to say that upfront. But it has always struck me leaving having an element of cowardice in it. Do we actually think the gospel and faithlessness do we actually think the gospel is so impotent that it won't have its effect? Or are we so unsure of ourselves that? Come to think of it, we don't know if it's the gospel, but let's go someplace where we will never have to ask that question of ourselves again. Neither one of those strike me as attractive.
  • speaker
    And so what's your understanding of the of the reasons why the churches left?
  • speaker
    I know why my home church left, the property issue was coming up and they saw land grab, they saw a vindictive spirit. They thought that their future was going to be put in jeopardy. I think it was the 78 General Assembly was in Detroit. I was just finishing my seminary degree, went, I did not sit with my pastor to keep a distance, but I saw him at Cobo Hall that this is this is all this is where you go to see hockey games and every Motown artist. And I saw my pastor up there, I saw the report on homosexuality. The majority report was generally positive about homosexuality. And the minority report, which in the end won, that I call it the Gillespie-Huffman report won at that one. But I saw my pastor shake his head and that's when he made his decision that this is where this is going to go. We cannot go there. Everything that I have built over a 30 year period of a pastor, including buildings, you know, in a congregation, this will be lost. So and now we can actually see the move being made about property to make supposedly what was implicit now explicit by writing it in the Constitution. That's what prompted them. The word was that it was about women in leadership but Ward had had women elders since the fifties. That was not the issue. So I take them at their word. That was their issue, that that's why they made their move. It was not particularly controversial. One of the churches I remember I was away when they did the voting on this and and all that I was in Beaver-Butler Presbytery when the wording for what we call the trust clause came up, I led the presbytery discussion on it with the hopes that I could persuade people to vote for the clause if I knew that it was going to be used the way that it's been used, I would not have done that. It's being used in illegitimate ways. It is being used in a way where the attitude, I think, is, is that a schism has happened because a congregation has voted to leave to another denomination and you to find the true church. I can't think of anything that denies reformed ecclesiology more quickly than trying to discern the true church and defining and then defining it as loyalty to a denomination, Calvin and Knox are spinning right now. And we actually every EP that I talked to, with the exception of about 12, actually thinks that's the definition of a true church. They have as if they haven't read the Scots Confession about the preaching and sacraments, said that you can have a church in division and yet be true. What do you think the Reformers had? What do you think Augustine had? But anyway, so they. Ward Church made its decision based on that. I still didn't think it was the right move. The trust clause was put in place to put have a chilling effect on maverick pastors who because they didn't get the M.R., ministerial relations appointment, they went and got camps and said, I'm taking my ball and leaving. And we would say, Oh, no you don't, it's not your ball. I think that's right. But what I see now doesn't strike me that way. It's not schism when a church leaves, Ward Church was not in schism. We have in our Book of Order a provision of how the church can ask its presbytery to be dismissed. The Book of Order does not tell us how to do schism any more than the Book of Confession tells us how to do heresy. This is how congregations are transferred from one place to another. It can represent a whole lot of sadness. It can represent unfaithfulness. It can represent faithlessness. It can represent a lot of bad things when that move is made. But it is not of itself, therefore, a schism. And those congregations ought not to be treated so roughly as they are. More and more, I think so. Anyway, the that's colored my sense of where the ECO formed that some as much as possible protection and cover should be provided for them. Though it was a decision that I did not agree with and that I could not encourage. It was a decision that they could make faithfully. I wasn't the shepherd of their flocks. I was kind of the shepherd of the flock and saw it kind of break apart and have a continued sadness about that. But their their move is legitimate and is not to be punished.
  • speaker
    So we're jumping ahead there I want to come back around.
  • speaker
    Yeah.
  • speaker
    I know. Because your life is so intertwined. All of these.
  • speaker
    I talk a lot, kind of forget the question and just keep going. That was very kind of, you, well said, well said.
  • speaker
    No, not at all you so you finished up and your year at Princeton. Did you have at that time a desire to continue on for a Ph.D. after doing you ThM?
  • speaker
    Yes, and I was encouraged. I was encouraged to do so. And I'm bragging now, but I was encouraged to do so by people that I'd loved. Norman Victor Hope meant something to me. He was in church history and Bruce Metzger meant something to me, and they both asked to do it. And they both used the phrase, I'm sorry for it, the Ph.D. is a young man's degree. That was their phrase, like, Don't think you're going to return to this. Do it now. And both of both would be willing to take me on. And frankly, the two people I left Trinity with, I think Michael might have gone straight into the PhD program. Dennis did the ThM, then went right into their Ph.D. program. But that was the year of courtship with Lois and Lois and Jason and Rachel. It was a package from the very beginning, and it was very clear if I wanted Jason and Rachel, I had to marry Lois. That was just the way this is supposed to work out. And I couldn't wrap my heart around the idea, Hey, come marry me. Live in married student housing for the next, I don't know, ten years of your life and grow up on a campus that's not a campus and just that didn't feel right.
  • speaker
    Now was Lois living in the Princeton area or how did you?
  • speaker
    No Lois lived in the Chicago area, Libertyville, we had we met in Minneapolis which is home to her her one of her best friends is one of my best seminary friends turned out to be cousins. We were invited to the same Memorial Day picnic, I don't know, maybe 40, 50, 20 somethings, 30 somethings there. I'm standing with my friend at the end of the day and said, I met that couple, I met that guy, I met that gal, I met that family, I met her. I think her name was Lois and her two kids. I didn't meet her husband and my friend said, Well, there is no husband. And I said, Oh, oh, oh. And having all of the social skills necessary, just being just a really suave guy, I ran over to the car, knocked on the window, she rolled it down and I said goodbye to Jason and Rachel because I just didn't have the courage to say to address her directly. Now that my heart was moving as fast as I could run, I drove home from Minneapolis. My friend and his wife drove me home from Minneapolis to Chicago. And by the time we got to Chicago, we didn't talk, but they knew what was going on. I decided that what it would look like to grow old with all of us and that this was going to be a good thing and frankly it was going to be the only thing. I had my work cut out for me. Lois did not know my name and wasn't really sure she had met me, and so I kind of had my work cut out for me at that point. And being the coward that I was, I invited her to go to a Six Flags music park with my youth group at the end of my internship. This was my last week at Trinity, and her kids could come and wouldn't this be great? And she figured out pretty early on that I wanted this to be a date, though I hadn't actually proposed going with my youth group on a date, and that was middle of June. We met over middle of June. She visited me in Detroit on the 4th of July, and I proposed and I did not get a yes. She swears that she did not say no. I thought I heard one. Because there's yes and there's everything else. And yes, with whatever the answer was, there was no yes in it. It was something like, Well, that's interesting. Guess we know where you are in relationship. Well, that would give us a lot to talk about won't it, not that you're a great conversationalist sure that'll give us something to talk about now won't it? And when she visited me in Princeton that fall I thought I was going to get a yes. And so I asked. So it might be timing. It was also a possibility. It was just location. Don't propose in Detroit, propose in Princeton, that's my words of advice. So for 40 years, this has worked out.
  • speaker
    Okay. So so you you're married, you're finishing the ThM and.
  • speaker
    Yeah, I took a first call in Beaver-Butler. I didn't even know there was a western Pennsylvania at the time. And I'm downtown Detroit, Lois's suburbs of Minneapolis. We went to a rural area, literally far more cows than there were people. The men were easy for me to understand. They were union workers in the steel mills and power plants on the Ohio River. The women were a little bit harder. I thought the world they were wonderful, wonderful people. But their world was small. Their conversation they weren't small people. But their world was small because they are big hearted people and I had to catch up to them. I wasn't as generous a person as they were and if I'm going to be their pastor, I at least need to try to equal their grace. So I had to work on that. I had to work a lot on my personal skills. I had to work on being a person for others, which is fairly foundational for a pastor. Give me a library. And no phone. What other needs are there? That worked up until now. And I knew that and if I may be very specific about my history with God, I knew this when I was graduating from seminary that my peers were ahead of me in connecting with people, not all of them, but many of them were in a. I knew what pastors did for a living and that I was not up to it. I maybe could've preached my way out of a paperback, but I wasn't going to be up to it. So I asked God to whatever it is God needed to do to make me the person He's called me to be, that he had the freedom to do that. I still look back and I think that was a remarkably courageous prayer because I thought I knew. I thought for sure I knew how God would answer. He would kick the stuffing out of me. This is how God works on you. And you know, the powder has to take the clay all the way down to reform it. And so some tragedy in my life. So I just thought I was going to be reshaped, but that the call was to serve the shape I was in would not work. That was my judgment. I don't know. People tried to intimate that to me. And so I was building on that. But I don't remember those signals that would also be part of the problem. Like people give signals, how's that my problem? And so two or three years into that first pastorate, you realize this is going wonderfully, wonderfully well. They think it's the golden age. It was a church that celebrated its 200th anniversary while I was there, as the first Protestant church west of the Alleghenies.
  • speaker
    So Mill Creek?
  • speaker
    Mill Creek United Presbyterian Church of Hookstown.
  • speaker
    And you were there?
  • speaker
    78 to 86, so eight years, which is a fairly long pastorate for a little small rural church. There were 200 members and 175 in worship. It was a different era about how people connected with their church and the intensity of their convictions and commitments and we prospered. There had been 30 people that worshiped the Easter Sunday before I came and 330 people on Easter Sunday when I left. So it was a time of growth, but was a time of growth generally. There's not a lot to brag about, but we did well together and they still remember it as the Golden Age. Not fair to all those pastors in the last 30 years that have have come after me. I need to remind them from time to time at the. At the time we did not think it was golden. You thought I was awfully young and. And brash and trying to make your rural church into an urban church. And like my home church, which had 5000 members and this was we didn't think of this as a golden age. We just thought this is a lot of hard work that we had a reward for it. I knew at the time the work was being rewarded. That encourages me to work hard and I was with farmers I'd never seen except for my dad had never seen my work so hard. If they milk cows at 4:30, I was to be up at 4:30 doing whatever it is pastors do at 4:30 and that's just the way it is. Which was difficult because I went to bed about 2:00 because I read late at night after we put the kids to bed. That was the great time to read. But so it was it was a wonderful time. They were wonderful to our kids and it was a time of growth for them, a time of growth for me, a time of throwing myself wholeheartedly to the Beaver-Butler Presbytery, which, yes, was conservative, but it was a different it wasn't what I grew up with. I would call it traditional. It was a simple piety. Missions, global missions, mostly oriented. I accused all these farmers in my church of wanting to be liberals, but just couldn't pull it off. So my first year we were going to boycott Nestlé because they encourage women in third world countries, especially Africa, to quit breastfeeding and use their formula, which makes them a profit and make their kids thin. And so I explain this to the farmers. Yes, that's wrong. How could anybody justify this? Yes, big corporations do that. We know that. We work for Jones and Laughlin. We work for the power plant. All the suits are evil, you know. These are people without ethics. That's how you become a suit. And it's like you got to pass a test and all that. And they want us to do what, again, well the denomination would like for us to not use Nestle products, not even like their candy bars. Well as it turns out, they have a lot of products. And here's the whole list. They look at the list and go and Nestle's going to change their behavior because we're not going to buy their products anymore? I go, yes, I think this is meant to intimidate. It's meant maybe also for us to be a little less guilty by participation. But even by then, I think I just I thought that wasn't going to ever be a persuasive argument to me that I'm in the world, I participate. You can't withdraw. You just you can't pull it off. Some symbols, some time, some tokens for some reasons are valuable. But, you know, divesting is the modern equivalent to the medieval siege. It's actually a meanness in it and it doesn't make the person more righteous. And no, I don't actually think Nestlé's going to know that we made this move. And you still want us to do it? Well, we could try, could we? And there was this. No, I don't think we're going to try. It's what else you got? So, you know, did I miss my opportunity? Did they miss their opportunity? Who knows about those things? But there was a you say starving kids in Africa. Yes, I know there's a paternalism in that kind of phrase even. But you say that and it's what can we do? So I to me there was there was then and still is a learning now about how to begin but not of and to me the mainline church. This is my critique. I stole the line from Douglas John Hall, who I think was describing the United Church of Canada that the mainline church has pulled off the impossible. We have somehow managed to be of the world but not in it. We're actually no different from it and we're irrelevant to it, which I think kind of goes hand in hand. And that's always a challenge. And in serving now I know I'm jumping ahead again it, but serving a conservative and evangelical church the evangelical agenda of of save as many as you can the world going to hell in a handbasket they got but I want to tell them it's actually not going to hell in a handbasket. It's going to be redeemed by the savior. And it's not an exchange program. It's a change program that the almighty is on and the reformed agenda is engagement with the city. Why else is the the most effective evangelist I have in my church is the director of the San Diego Symphony? And that's simply because of the position, but because of his heart for Christ. He goes to the city. He's he's not the church choir director, which would be very, very welcome, intimidating, frankly, very intimidating, but it'd be very welcome. But because his call is to invest in the city, if Christ has not grown weary with his own world, so why would we grow weary that the world that he has made? That he has so loved now and so that's, all along for 40 years it's been a struggle. And yes, mostly in conservative evangelical churches in a left leaning denomination that gets the reformed agenda of full engagement, I think more clearly than it gets the agenda of and people do have souls, you know, and introducing him to the savior. It's not a secondary exercise.
  • speaker
    You started something earlier that you'd ask God to kick your butt into shape.
  • speaker
    Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. I forgot the favorite part of the story.
  • speaker
    Yeah.
  • speaker
    The church was going well, I thought. Actually, this is working out well. I was required to be in every home, every year. That was part of the pastor's job written out. I was to inquire into the state of religion in every home, every year. I didn't have any idea what that meant. For the most part, they didn't have any idea what they meant. But it was a good idea nonetheless. So I told them we would. I would take a question or two out of the Westminster Confession. We would talk about matters of faith and learn together. That would be brief. It's now 40 years later. Nobody remembers that time being brief by the way they thought that went on forever and ever. But I would ask, how how are you? How how are you with your savior? How are you with each other? How's it going with you and your church? And tell me the things to pray about and I'll pray about these things for you and for your family. Until you tell me to pray about something else. But I will never stop praying for you. And I will know these are the things so you have to tell me. Or you're going to make a fool of the pastor before his own God that I'm praying for somebody to get a job and they got one 18 months ago, you know. So they got that put the pressure on them and me to be faithful to each other. In some sense, I'll have to say it also feels like it was the last time I was a pastor. I've been running a small business ever since with a distinctly religious mission that that can fill out a day, back that I was the staff there was there was no business of the church. There was there was the business of the pastor with the people of God. Richard Baxter's Reformed Pastor, was a sufficient guy, didn't need a second word. Now I need a lot, it's the only book I still read on a subject. So I thought that the pastorate was going well, the relationships were going well. They did love me. They were awfully good to me. I think they loved Lois and the kids and they tolerated me sometimes. But they loved me. I learned to love them. Hey, this is working. How did this happen? Well, I loved Lois. I loved Jason. I loved Rachel. Sada came into our family before the end of our first year of marriage, and I just decided to be the real mother from hell on her behalf. I kind of missed out on Jason and Rachel's first years. They were five and three when we married, four and two when we met, and went back and just invested in Sada and loving family with my dad had done this. I had the perfect model and my dad had done this. And this is this is how you measure yourself to the extent that you can be your own judge. If I've succeeded everything else and I fail at home, I fail and the others can't compensate for it. So I saw it. I had a good model for it. I wanted it. It was good. It came, is natural, the right word? But it came readily. That is how God answered my prayer. I became a person who could connect with other people because, well, I was given a family. So instead of kicking the crap out of me, he gave me the most blessed parts of my life, which are my family. That's how he taught me to be a pastor that can actually connect to love and be loved, to be open with and to listen to and enjoy other people. Which makes Jesus. My conclusion is Jesus is better at me than me. I couldn't figure out how to pull that off. And he knew from the beginning how to pull it off.
  • speaker
    So how did that did that experience shift your understanding of who God was and how God works?
  • speaker
    Yeah, if I had to put it in some theological terms, I probably did not pick that up from my Presbyterian pastor. I probably picked that up from my Pentecostal beginning that God knocks people down to lift them up. There's an important truth in that, read the stories of the Bible. People get knocked down in order to be lifted up and to know the power of God, strength being a perfect and weakness kind of thing. But there was also a different a different people. The Pentecostals that I grew up with again till I was about 15, were lower middle class. They'd been down, Detroit. My mother grew up in the neighborhood of the church. My dad not far from the neighborhood of the church where we were at. My mother lost two siblings in her youth that had she been, they'd been born on the other side of the tracks wouldn't have been lost. And there was there was a sense of life is hard. To me, nothing was more representative of them than their choice of songs. There are singing about heaven and crossing over. And I'll fly away and leaning on the everlasting arms. And this train is bound for glory kind of songs, were as heartfelt as anything they could sing. You never hear that in a Presbyterian church. It's just, frankly too good here and don't want to leave it. Don't want to lose it. Just a very different sense. Whenever I'm in Africa, in Egypt, Ghana, Congo, places where I've spent some significant time. The piety is the piety, even even if it's a reformed church. It's the piety of a people who easily imagine it to be better and long for it. And that, at the heart of it, is an acknowledged absence. The people who talk about Jesus the most are the people who have such a sense of his absence and therefore are willing to articulate in song a desire for his presence, which will only be then and there in its fullness. And therefore, why would you sing it? You can't find that in a Presbyterian hymnal?
  • speaker
    No.
  • speaker
    The doctrine of the second coming is an embarrassment to us, I think. Don't know what to do with it.
  • speaker
    That's interesting. So you describe to me that this first period of time is work hard, earn the right to be heard.
  • speaker
    Yeah. It was also true of a presbytery where people like Ken Hall, who became moderator of the General Assembly, just, if mentors too strong a word maybe, but care for me and invested in me and brought me along to serve on committees. Someday you'll be the chair of the MR, which I was. Someday you'll be the trustee. And you'll be in the right room at the right time. I'm listening to my mother now, whose favorite book is Esther. And who knows? But for such a time as this, you were appointed for this hour. You're at the right table at the right time and when decisions are being made that are of importance. And I'm going to think some of them are more important than other people are because of an evangelical set of evangelical convictions that work in me, that your word will be welcome. So earn the right to be heard. You don't yell anything. Who wants to hear those kind of people? And I thought that that advice was literally given to me, earn the right to be heard. Maybe they knew with the Trinity degree I was ready to take on the world and win any debate. I'm still waiting for somebody to ask me about the federal view of sin, it just hasn't come up, pastoring thousands of people still hasn't come up once. I'm so disappointed they lied to me that this was not the burning issue of to America. But I was so ready. They they, you know, I was trained to be an apologist for evangelical faith. And I'm glad for that training. Very glad for all of it. But that was not the way to go forward, or, frankly, to be influential, to have a strategy. Nor was it good manners. So where there was bad manners, I was with Presbyterians now. Pentecostals, you don't worry about manners. With Presbyterians apparently you do. And that was true. I moved we moved to Chicago after eight years. This is for Lois's work. She became the director of staff development for the public schools, allowed me to go back to school to work on a Ph.D., did three interim pastorates by appointment of Chicago Presbytery. Again, it was still earn a right to be heard. Was in the presbytery for 25 years on three different occasions. I was to be nominated to be the moderator of the presbytery. It's not competitive elections. And three times I declined, I just didn't think with that position had anything to do with transforming people's lives, but I ran in almost every other committee of Chicago Presbytery because I see good work could be done there and it was still a earn a right to be heard for the first part of it. Then for me, around the years 92, 93, 94, it struck me and a little bit of Chicago Presbytery, they were very, not a dysfunctional presbytery, too big, but not a dysfunctional presbytery and good leadership all the way through that nobody's actually listening to anybody. So earning the right to be heard has a more limited value with the season when people only talk with their own and about the other, and that a division was taking place and that what I had experienced was a one party system and evangelicals were invited to the party was now becoming more difficult because more hostile environment and the party needed to organize and if it needed to shout from time to time, we needed to shout, certainly to talk nonstop, I thought. So I with others in time formed the Coalition. And that would be the voice for the evangelical witness. Try to make it as united as possible. A lot of difficulties with a lot of preceding organizations, but for the most part were able to speak a similar word in a similar way to the church to help the church if they wanted our help. And that could be, well yes one day and no the other day and could forgive the source on one day, couldn't forgive the source of the wisdom on the other day, but that it would allow the church to be at their best, be at its best if it wanted to be. And so that that witness was offered in a in a more difficult in a two party system. And a two party system was never good for a church or a marriage or anything else. And so those were harder days. Those were days where I jumped into the deep end of the pool in Presbyterian politics, the invitation was from a group that was just forming called the Genevans, that at its heart was the transition between earn the right to be heard. They had most of them were executive presbyters in the former PCUS, they were men and women who had been elders and pastors in churches in the days of segregation and had been on what passes for the progressive end of it, but were not about too impressed with mainlines of progressives as those two words actually belong together. But they they had put at risk their callings, their careers to extend for helping to aid in churches and society. Integration in time when that was the calling of the faithful and had paid a price and and as was true if you just EP is a really good spot to be if if the pastor isn't and these were good people and then after the merger had and had been formed, their hopes for faithfulness to the church began to fade somewhat.
  • speaker
    So it would have been who were some of these people? Who were you involved with there?
  • speaker
    Yeah. You know, first for me was Bill Giles. Bill Giles was the EP of Sheppards Lapsley. Bill was not a Southerner. Bill. I did my internship under him at Highland Park Church in Chicago. I think Bill would say it this way. I know he would. Bill didn't have an evangelical bone in his body. When I knew him as a student, he he was just really good to me and I was his first intern ever. And all the rest of his interns also came from Trinity. But Bill was not that. Bill was a Pennsylvania Presbyterian, kind of traditional in his piety, colored within the lines, a good pastor. Bill was never a cautionary tale to me, but I also knew that I did not share his temperament or perspective, and that when I had my freedom, I would call it differently. Having said that, I never called anybody in my first pastorate and asked for advice except Bill. And sometimes it was Bill what would you do? Only to know. Okay, that's one way. Now I know what I will do won't be the same thing. Sometimes it was right. I would never have thought that I would do that. And every once in a while his tone of voice was, just exactly what did you do to get yourself in this much trouble? Didn't we go over this once? And just always good to me. Bill had become a Genevan he had been persuaded by his other executives in the in the Southern Church, or what was the continuing of the PCUS. That the merger had put the church several steps to the left as they experienced it, and the former PC USA parishes and presbyteries, and that this was not going to work out well for the church. So they organized. And the organizing principle was to help a process, to be fair. They saw evangelicals at a disadvantage. They were not evangelicals. You some of them pretty close, but the majority of them, you call them an evangelical and you're just as likely to be hit as anything else. Like we know what evangelicals are. These are the revivalists. That's not us. That's PFR. What before that had been the Covenant Presbyterians. That's Joe Rightmyer. That's not our tribe. These are not our people. Nevertheless, those people need to get their act together in order to provide a witness to this church. Because back in the day in New York and Atlanta and now Louisville are an organized party. It is it is the left. The evangelicals are right. They're not whining. Everything is an away game. And they need we need to help build a more level playing field. So it was primarily a General Assembly oriented group that worked with sometimes against the State Clerk's office to provide a level playing field for commissioners where decisions would be made. And the the controlling mantra was wholeheartedly believed by this group of people that given enough time and all the right resources and an open and fair process, Presbyterians tend to make the right decisions. Well, if you're an evangelical, you already know what the right decision is fair process or not. That sounds pretty good to me. Plus, you've already experienced to some extent it's an away game. The general, you know, the essentially what they said to the renewal groups PFR, the Layman Presbyterians Pro-Life, Outreach Foundation, Frontier Fellowship, Medical Benevolence. I can't remember, 23 different groups said the left is organized. It's called Louisville. There was no Covenant Network back in those days. The left was organized. You need to get organized. We are not you. But we will call you to organization. Don't form an organization, but organize. We will moderate your meetings and hopefully moderate you. And that. So my my my first experiences, Bill invited me to come. David Snellgrove was the EP at St. Andrew's. Mort McMillan was the stated clerk for South Alabama, Barry Van Deventer, the EP for Charleston Atlantic. Bill Smith was probably already the synod executive for Mid-Atlantic. Bob Taylor, the MP for Foothills. I'm forgetting half, but that's just from memory. Al Ruth was the EP in Denver and Ken Working was the EP in Santa Barbara, the EPs had made common alliances. There were others. They're all. Oh. They're all, on average, about 20 years older than me. I was 30. I was 40 when I first connected with them. So they were late fifties to late sixties, most of them. So a generation or half a generation ahead of me, there were only a couple that were my age in that group. Some others were placed in different places in the church. I looked at my notes from the Genevans when I was putting them all together. I write seating charts, so I was learning names. So I can tell you where every one of them were seated. And then I can tell you not quite verbatim, but who spoke first, what they said, who spoke second, those kinds of kinds of things. And they did get the leadership. This was Parker Williamson from The Layman, which was always a problematic presence. They thought, I couldn't figure out why it was so problematic. If he comes up with a bad idea, tell him it's a bad idea. But people had had history with The Layman and The Layman had gone after some of these Genevans in earlier rounds. PFR was Joe Rightmyer, Presbyterians Pro-Life was Terry Schlossberg, the originators of the Outreach Foundation Frontier, Harold Kurtz and Bill Bryant and others were there at the table at one, there were five former moderators of the GA, I'm going to forget them all, but or would become David Dobler and Marj Carpenter and all that. That was that was all kind of these renewal groups and people some sense of common mind. And yes, there was an issue that none of us thought was the issue, which doesn't mean our judgment is right about that, but we still are not convinced that was the issue, that was the presenting issue. And time will still tell if that's the issue. Now that the church has made up its mind on it wrongly, we think even unfaithfully we think, is there something remaining? Yeah, we think there's we haven't even got at it yet. So, of course, the Genevans were still kind of in that earn the right to be heard. I mean, you said the right commissioners, like the right commissioners, send them, let them read everything, hear all sides, and we'll help you write reports. We'll help you write the reports. We'll have debriefings in the evening that we'll try not to skew. But yes, it will sound very different than briefings of the evenings that Stated Clerk sponsors, because we think those are skewed. Of course, we're the center. We just think the center is in a different place than other people think the center is. And that's all very self-serving. But we have that sense about ourselves. Did not keep a membership list. This was a group of 15 people. I think I've named ten of the 15. Arnold Lovell was teaching at Union in Richmond at the time. Most, half of these people have passed. I don't know anybody who's still in active ministry but me, that was the Genevans, as their primary sense of Who am I in all of this? We said for a long time, we'll never organize, we'll never have officers. In fact, there was a moment at which we had to have them and we stuck with them after the 96 at the 96 General Assembly in Albuquerque. Jim Brown was not renewed as executive director. He, in an interview with the press, said this was the work of the Genevans. Well, to be clear, there was no Genevan that was disappointed by his not being retired. If we had had the influence to do this, we would have done this. Marj Carpenter was the the moderator that appointed all of the captains. Four of the 16 committee heads were Genevans. There's only 15 of us. Good grief. And we're four of the 16, including review. And so he tried to out and it was kind of a of Jim Andrews the stated clerk could at the name of the Genevans says it has the smell of magnolias about it. This is bad, but they're all from the South. I think they all went to kindergarten together, if not married one another. They all kind of knew each other. The good old boy network really was in some ways a fascinating network. They really did know everybody. They only went to two schools Union and Columbia, but they all knew everybody. That was not true where I was from Pennsylvania, didn't know anybody from Illinois kind of thing. So they they. I was I was the moderator of the Genevans, David Snellgrove was the vice moderator, In time Bill became the the synod executive for Living Waters. After him David Snellgrove had become that and there was there was just kind of a course of life for these people and this other church and they made alliances with Yankees and with evangelicals because they had to make alliances and they were the only people that could see some of this as they did. They were often perturbed when the Coalition began to form, by the harshness of the tone, the advocacy of it, that they could not enter into. They didn't. For the most part, they did not.
  • speaker
    So were you part of the Coalition from the beginning? The Presbyterian Coalition?
  • speaker
    Yeah when the Genevans called the group together, I was part of the group that called the group together. Jack Haberer, who then was a Clear Lake outside Houston. Vic Pentz was at Houston first. Dave Peterson was already at Memorial Drive. Doug Harper was at St. Andrew's and Dave McKechnie. There are no churches in Houston that don't have 3000 members, and so those four or five churches became the funding source for the Coalition. Jack was their point person. And it it began several meetings with Genevans as Genevans and Coalition as Coalition and all of those meetings, I was Genevan.
  • speaker
    And what was the purpose of the Coalition when it was organized?
  • speaker
    To unite the evangelical voice in the PC(USA) to as much as possible be a coalition of everything that preexisted, that could build, reach toward the center. To the extent that that could be done successfully, and present a united witness on several issues of the day.
  • speaker
    Oh, were there what were those issues?
  • speaker
    Well, homosexuality and ordination was the most frequent. With one exception, we didn't bring it out. So we'd like to think ourselves as innocent of it. But we were ready for a fight on that one. And quite frankly, I think it needs to be said that the issue helped unite us. The generation ahead of me, the evangelical pastors knew each other existed. I think the primary relationship was competitive and distant. That's the way it seemed to me as a 30 something, watching a bunch of 50 and 60 somethings actually not operate together in the same room. But when Clayton Bell and John Huffman, Texas and California, and these two are not the same temperament. And these two are very good friends of mine became very good friends of mine. John's father was my associate pastor at Glen Ellyn for so many years, and John's mother is who Lois wants to grow up to be someday. They since they have since both passed, but when they could call a meeting together then they could actually get people together. They could call the leaders of the renewal organizations together and say, Listen, there has to be some public. Where do you think your money comes from? And that was in the room, too. It comes from Highland Park, it comes from St. Andrews, Newport Beach. And we need to do this. We just can't scatter and yes some things need to be resolved or simmer down between us. Evangelicals aren't any more monolithic than any other group that's a coalition. Jack served for three years in that capacity. Beginning then there was the thought we have to form in that we have to form a board. Clayton agreed to lead the board, though Clayton's leadership was, I'm going to use the word figurehead, but that was something important. There had to be somebody who could call a meeting and Clayton could call a meeting. Clayton had earned the credentials in the evangelical community because his church split. He'd lost 3000 members that went next door, built a PCA church that still competes with Highland Park, and that he had helped, though most of his associates had left him and that that earns Clayton the right doesn't help it doesn't hurt being Billy Graham's brother-in-law, but or in our terms, being Ruth Bell's brother. That doesn't hurt at all to have credentials. But by that year I was leading all the meetings and moderating all the meetings. David Dobler was very much a part of it as well, but it was moving a little bit from one generation to another, then we formed a real board. And I was the only I was the last, never was a yes vote. I was the only remaining no vote on this is not a necessary move for us to make, form a board kinds of things you heard today, classes of people and all that kind of stuff, knowing full well, as soon as we did it I would now be the chairman of a board and the chairman of the board might have a more maybe more powerful organization, but but the whole does not have more power for having made this move. And yes, this is also about power, the power to influence, the power to persuade, the power to make stick, the power to amend what we need to amend and to speak to our troops about how they speak and things like that, and that this was going to be you move from a mission to a more inward focus. Yes. Every sociologist in the world thinks that that's inevitable. Quit trying to resist it. Just manage it. Well, I tried to resist it. And I have a romantic view, we could have pulled it off, but who knows? In the end we didn't pull it off. We organized. And I knew. I also knew at that moment that I was going to be the chairman of the board and they knew it. And then that was that was true since forever, except with the idea that after every six years through two, three year terms you had to rotate off for a year. I moderated through till Genevans. The heights of Genevans was 95 to 96 to 99. By 99 I was chair of the Coalition and we knew when I also made that move that would bring the Genevans to an end, that the voice was not going to be a voice of advocacy, not a voice of how do we level the playing field that that card had been spent to the extent that it bore some fruit it already bore it, those people weren't going to go away. We could do that individually, but the energy was now going to go to toward a coalition of advocacy groups to be an advocacy group, we were more than advocacy group. But we were that, too. We were also a refuge and a place that tried to think forward about, So what if we win everything? We're still a denomination right, left or center that still is in need of a savior and what we're going to do about that one? Which is kind of a big subject, too. And so but that was a transition by then, then now I've made the transition from earn the right to be heard, to go at it, shout if you have to, and not be embarrassed by that. And there were probably moments, I don't think I have any doubts about, probably should have been a little bit more embarrassed by some of the shouting, but we thought we had to hear it. So we hosted gatherings. First of all, it was in 96, so I'm just Genevans are kind of at their peak, the the General Assembly passes Amendment B, which is a prohibition that was never in writing before. Courts have backed it up, but we saw them weakening. And so we had advocated for it. And yes, we had worked toward, you know, the committee chair was a Genevan, Roberta Hestenes, the two people who wrote Amendment B, I knew I put them together in the same room and said, write this, not this, but write something they wrote the this, that kind of thing. So that there was there was a lot of work on that. And yeah in our mind, we were still balancing the playing field because all the wording was coming from Louisville staff itself, sent a powerful, powerful influence at the General Assembly. But maybe there's no way out of that. Maybe that's not bad behavior. But it wasn't welcome. It still is not. For me it's still not welcome. If I can share one instance in early, it was probably already 2001. No 2000, whatever 2001. I and Bill Giles. This Bill Giles, I was saying, never had an evangelical bone in his body, became executive director of the Coalition and became the person who sent all the word out about what all evangelicals that Bill Bill moved during his 40 years of ministry. Bill and I went to Louisville. I think it was my first time there, sat down with Cliff Kirkpatrick, the Stated Clerk, and John Detterick, the executive director, and said, We would like to talk to you about this upcoming General Assembly win, lose or draw. There's a lot to lose here if evangelicals perceive that the playing field is not fair. John was particularly solicitous, not a political animal, just didn't even know why anybody what prompt such a thing. It does help that you have a retired synod executive sitting next to you while you're making your appeal, saying most of the general stuff, the General Assembly staff, rightfully, we should take on any presbyter and any argument that any presbyter offers and compete against it if we think we're wrong. But why are we competing as the General Assembly? First of all, it's it's it's an insult. We pay their salaries and wants to pay a salary of somebody you now got to work against? That just doesn't work out. Our side I know should be better, but that's just not going to work out. Well, you had the response was well what are they doing? I said, Well, mostly talking. What would you like? Well, I'd like for them to speak when spoken to, to resource committees. That's the Constitution. That's right. They resource them. They do not need them. Frankly I prefer they not train them, but I can't actually offer an alternative to that. We'd be glad to train them. But you should not accept our offer. And until I and John Buchanan and the Covenant Network had been formed by then, until we can agree on how to train them together and why you would even give this to the two leading advocacy groups that I'm sure you should forfeit it, but speak when spoken to. And John said, Well okay, I'll tell my staff. Don't when the chair of committee calls on you to say something, be ready. Don't be stupid. I said, you know, we need the resources. But I don't need their direction. Let the presbyters, the commissioners work this out. That's what they've been called to do. And then right after I said I may or may not have a vote, but level playing field. And plus, as the General Assembly was in Louisville, I said this this by its very nature is in an away game. Just kind of emotional is an away game for evangelicals and you don't even have to fly your 400 out of your 600 staff members out there. They all live here. They're just going to be there. Cliff didn't quite get the message. Cliff is an easy person for me to be with. My opinion. Cliff was always influenced by the last person he talked to, which is why I scheduled my meetings after John Buchanan had talked to him. But the last person Cliff talked to was his staff and his staff was not in our opinion fair minded. The agreement was, for instance, instead of telling committee chairs how to squash minority reports, it is a legitimate parliamentary procedure so that their voice that they thought did not get a fair hearing in a committee or a fair hearing and was not approved, may still yet be heard. There's this provision protected, maybe even teach how it can be done. And yes, you report out votes that it was a 40 to 10 vote that excuse it, but rightly so. The wisdom of the committee is with the 40 not with the ten. But what were the arguments do you want them to be, do you have to reinvent the wheel on the floor? This is my report. So take more time. They take less time than being a committee of the whole. And do you really think that on these issues, because it got voted one way in a committee that the floor is not going to offer an alternative, really? So, agreed, Cliff and John agreed that the training of committee chairs we will not discourage the writing of minority reports. Indeed, we will teach how it's going to happen. After that I was named a committee chair by Syngman Rhee to lead the Theological Issues in Institutions. So I go to the training Zane Buxton, a very close friend a very good friend of mine from the Chicago days, worked for the General, worked for Cliff worked for Office of the General Assembly, gives his report and stands up and says, Now there's a possibility that minority reports will be offered. Here's how you diminish the possibility of that. Discourage it and make sure as few as possible of these ever reach the floor. Detterick sitting in the front row, I'm like, in the third row, he looks around and goes, Cliff, just this is standard operating procedure. We don't want minority reports. We're trying to control the General Assembly and control in a good way too like clock. But now and and John spoke with Cliff. I mean, I was trying to figure I was beginning to figure out these conversations really don't go somewhere. And the following day, Zane said, you know, actually, we might want to encourage minority reports if and then. And they did it. Well, that's the level playing field. General Assembly staff write minority reports when it doesn't go their way. Literally sit down and write and hand them to commissioners and say, offer this as a minority report. And minority reports, you can't invent stuff that wasn't in the committee. You know, bring it up there. You can't bring it up here. So be sure to bring it up there. General Assembly staff were offering that kind of advice to what they thought were the right ideas and with the right people. And this is not an away game. This is a this is a level playing field. You only get to play it once. Then you go home and you're never going to be commissioner again, all these elders, especially. So it was that sense that the Coalition just, you know, we'll teach people how to do minority reports. We will we will formulate talking points. And if somebody doesn't want to say it on the microphone say it, it doesn't said, frankly, we'll start training people before general assemblies and pre General Assembly meetings. I think we're always in Chicago. Again, just a place to be and I was there and we could go into a General Assembly with 600 commissioners and have identified 150 and met with 100 of them before we showed up. Every trick we learned, Covenant Network learned. Every trick Covenant Network learned, we learned. Again there were too many things that we didn't do, like we're not parallel or mirror organizations. And, you know, it's a whole other subject about our relationship with the Covenant Network. And there is one of interest, I think, to people was of interest to me all along. These are people I knew before we decided to go to our corners and people. What's the point of being in the PC(USA) if you're going to pretend you're just the Evangelical Presbyterian Church in your own tribe? I could have done that without all the headache when I was young.
  • speaker
    Yes. You started talking to everybody early. I mean, by what, about 98, 99, you were hosting conversations between not just Covenant Network, but some other groups and Coalition individuals at your Glen Ellyn Church, right?
  • speaker
    Yeah. Part of it was I mean, this has to do as much with their grace, if not more than ours, the grace of their heart. This is an overstatement with lots of exceptions, was if they didn't want to put up with us, they could safely ignore us. They were the larger party in a way we thought we were for 25 to 40% of the whole. That's that's Hassall, Harry Hassall, the Witness for Biblical Morality. Old news but 1991, 3000 sessions signed on out of 10,000 that's was actually signed on that they were 10 to 15% of the whole, but that this whole muddled middle had all affinities with that rather than with us. This might have been where they were coming from, but it wasn't where they were going to go. And the General of the General Assembly staff provided the identity and the mission of the church for this group. It was always here. You know, our one of our lines my lines is quick name of the evangelical employed in the Louisville staff. And the answer was zero. Gary Demarest for a brief shining moment, who was the only person in a 30 year period that actually knew how to spell evangelism and Jack Rogers before he decided he wasn't an evangelical or frankly we decided he wasn't an evangelical, was probably as much our decision as is, there was a lot of unhappiness with that. Not all Jack's fault at all. And there it was, just John Huffman told me this when I was just entering, that he had observed John's, I don't know, got ten or 15 years on me, so he's like a half a generation ahead of me and again, a family strong family connection. So we spent a lot of time together that if you're a progressive back then we use the word liberal and you want to fulfill Christ's calling in your life, an office in Louisville or being an EP is a great spot to get done what you think Christ wants to get done, which is to effectively mobilize the people of God for community and social change. You need a mimeograph machine in the Office of the General Assembly, a letterhead, access to the or whatever it is you think you need. That's what you need. If you're an evangelical, what you think you need to fulfill kind of the evangelical calling of Christ in our lives. You should need a pulpit and probably a session. Which is why we pastor the largest churches in the denomination and have no representation in Louisville. And they are Louisville and pastor so few of the large churches in their denomination. That's kind of self-selecting by theology and therefore sense of calling, well there's some wisdom in that. Some wisdom in that. I had to learn early on a little bit of humility and quit complaining about the ineffectiveness of the General Assembly and its staff to focus on the things that matter like evangelism or actually be effective at justice, not just talk about it, but have completely lack imagination for what I'm talking about. What would effectiveness look like? General Assembly offices don't save anybody. What kind of an idiot thinks that a bureaucrat in Louisville converts people? And I had, you know, until until Roger Dermody and Eric Hoey, you know, who I had no imagination that somebody could prompt, inspire best practices, exchange and organize a denomination toward an evangelical, there are more ends to the church than evangelical ones. But actually, for the first time, we organized toward an evangelical end. But I lack the imagination for it. And we could complain for years that, I don't know, $15 million was given to evangelism, but nobody saw a penny of it. Nobody was ever evangelized by it. But we never have any vision for, give me $15 million, give it to pastors and elders and churches. Probably plan new churches. That's what you do with 15 million. Don't give it to Louisville, good grief. No fault to Louisville, that's not the place to do that. So there was a there was a sense that we'd gone to our corners in our ecclesial locations, churches, large churches in particular, and offices. When, the Pew. Yeah. Presbyterian Panel, I don't think it was Pew, I think it was Presbyterian Panel, came out with are you very conservative, conservative, in the middle, liberal, very liberal, whatever, and what's your ecclesial location? The only people who were very liberal by self-identification were executive presbyters and General Assembly staff, oh and people who, none of whom receive a paycheck from a church. When I was in Chicago Presbytery, 248 ministers of word and sacrament. 100 of them receive a paycheck from a church. That's why I could never win a vote in Chicago. Now, some of those 148 people were faculty at Wheaton College. But for the most part, there was this whole other cadre of people out there that by their sense of calling who Christ is and who the church is and what we've been called to do are not investing primarily in parishes, which fits, if not traditional, an evangelical traditional way of I can't get the work done. Christ calls me to be without a pulpit in the session. Might be some other things, but not a whole lot of other things. I have no idea what I'm doing. I was the head of the search committee that that called the executive presbyter to San Diego just now. And then had to say to somebody that I, I had grown to know and love, I respect your judgment. That's why I invited you. You take this job, I will stop respecting your judgment. Like, who would want. Who would want this? Well, that's a failure of imagination. There really is a job to do and there really is calling there. And so so I could identify, I won't name them. But I can I can I can identify all 12 evangelical executive presbyters out of 173. There was a time when it was 19 out of 173. Just a sense of different calling, the the the sense also at that moment of speaking to other people became more important. For a long time, I described my job as calling all the evangelicals together, setting the table but not the agenda, talking to Louisville leadership and talking to the progressive tribe. That that was my calling, didn't need to be everybody's calling, but that this is how I would invest and that we need. I felt that these were important things that needed to be done. You can't ask Louisville to be held accountable for what you think is right if you've never actually expressed it or heard them out on why they would go about their business differently. Just presume worse motives or something or lack of motives. And the left, whatever we could do to minimize the demonization, to eliminate the misunderstandings, to make the differences clear but not more painful than they needed to be, that this was worthwhile work. And so that became an investment, that's probably an under told story, in part because we insisted to some extent. But it wasn't a hard argument that these are not these are open meetings, but they're not public meetings. That this is not though it's for the sake of the church. This is not the church at work. This is some of us at church in the work. And that it would be a presumption for me to speak for all evangelicals. Nobody ever voted gave me the vote to speak any more than we've ever asked the Stated Clerk to speak for all of us. He can only speak to us, general assemblies can't speak for us. But I need to keep reminding my conversation. Nope, nobody's taken your voice and said, This is what we agree with. They just can't do it. They forget that annually or biannually now, but they actually can't do that. Don't worry about it. It didn't happen. They can speak to you and then you can decide to hear what you want to hear. But please hear it out and make your decisions based on your convictions. An open mind, not an empty mind that kind of works out well. So these these things bore some fruit, never the fruit that I think any of us wanted, in part because we wanted different fruit. We would love to have persuaded them of the righteous righteousness of our cause. They would prefer to persuade us of the unimportance of our cause that, I'm kind of mimicking one person here. But, Jerry, there's not that much difference between us. I'm a yes. You're a no on this one issue before the church, take that out of the way. We're not in disagreement about anything. I'm thinking I can't find the area of agreement between you and me on anything that's before the church. It's not contested. Every contest we go to different microphones. The only exception in that whole. If I threw myself into this and began to in the mid the early nineties, 25 years ago, the only the only difference is Israel Palestine. That's the only one where half the people at this microphone go over there and half from there come over here. And you can't predict based on progressive, evangelical what microphone people are going to line up.
  • speaker
    So what were you talking about at those meetings? What were you or praying about or the Bible study? What was?
  • speaker
    Yeah, I can tell you one, several come to mind and two continue today, the early ones that almost all the other ones had no significant sustaining power in them, they came and went, then another was tried, another was tried. They were hard. They were negotiated. The ones now are not hard, nor does it take a lot of negotiation to even get in the same room at the same time. One was even called within an hour of the meeting, but it couldn't happen. Everybody had flown into Chicago I'm hosting in my home Covenant Network, That All May Freely Serve, and More Light, I think those were the three organizations. Pick somebody to call me to say, Jerry, this is really bad manners. We are so, so, so, so. Tell Lois. We're so, so, so sorry, but we can't show up. This is our team. You pick someone on your team that we won't sit down with. You can't come. And, you know, I wrote back, you know, we lose on this. First of all, we're just as capable of pulling a stunt like that. It was a stunt though it was sincere. It didn't feel good on our end, but we're just as capable of doing it. And we're going to go ahead and be, you know, we're not going to say you can't come if you change your mind, show up late. Wrote them a note, saying that the the wine is gone, the foods in the freezer. We could organize it another time. We talked about how how does the church make change? Who's we argued about whose stories, the under told story. They thought the under story was that of the gay person who comes out and is unwelcomed by the church. There at the font. There at confirmation. There at the table, but not there at the time of ordination that there's an exclusion. That that's an under told story. We thought we'd heard nothing about that story since day one. We thought the under told story was the person whose sexual orientation was same gendered, but who thought that Scripture still invited them to lead a life amended from that. Whether that was an agreement with change for most of us did not think that that was the way forward. I think that's right. Most of us probably did not think that, it would have been nice, but that there was an invitation, I invite every 17 year old to live celibately. If a 17 year old can pull this off, almost anybody can. And did I ask an easy thing? No, but I didn't ask it. It was asked of me. This is what we do. And yes, apples and oranges and you know, who knows? All the differences that have to be accounted for in one series of statements and arguments, but we thought that was the under told story. We thought the under told story was in part that as far as we know, and we made it public and it wasn't contested, that the church that gave flat out the most money to an AIDS network in their city. The pastor was a member of the Coalition board. The church was a Coalition church that the church in our system that has the most openly gay people worshiping in it week in, week out, 200 to 300 openly gay people. The pastor and the congregation are a Coalition board membership church that the idea that our way excluded people from the table. We argued that the table was the communion table, not the table of decision making. Jesus wouldn't recognize one of those things, we shouldn't put, invest so much in it. But that table that was not exclusive, nor did the people who heard us preach the gospel, heard us preach the gospel, think that they were being excluded. And that's the under told story, that this is not about exclusion, even as a practice. And clearly that's not what we want. And to be really honest, we're working hard to make sure that we're not excluding. It's very self-serving what we're doing here that we can, with integrity, go forward with this whole fellowship of the PC(USA) some moves will make it possible for some of us to go forward together. We're worried about our inclusion. We're not trying to, nor do we think, in effect, that we are actually excluding anybody. No, that's painting probably too romantic a view if you are affecting the life of the church. But at the same time, the Covenant Network is putting up pictures of Matthew Shepard in General Assembly committee meetings and saying Jerry's exclusive policies are in alignment with that, that the the the brute the brutal killing of Matthew Shepard. It's like we need to sit down and talk about that one, that's bearing false witness against a neighbor. You have every right to think I'm about as wrong as can be and as self-serving as possible. My reading of Scripture and that I'm just trying to I don't know advance my white male straight privilege or whatever it is you think my sin is probably just flat out bigotry, but that's bearing false witness against a neighbor. The church has a right to a moral stance without being accused of murder. So those are the conversations would center around that those would be hard very hard conversations when we Pannenberg? There's a quote from Pannenberg that says that a church that goes that normalizes gay relationships is no longer a church. We didn't use that. They thought, the leadership of the Covenant Network thought that that suggested that they were not Christians, that that's what we were saying. So, you know, there's at a meeting was a breakfast meeting was. Can you back off of that? Yeah, we probably can because the fact matter is if we make this move we'll still be a church. It won't be much of one, but it will still be one, and frankly the PC(USA) we're not much of one right now either. You know, some point how much is there to lose? But so those meetings would do that. The one there was one I think I hosted all three events. It was. Five and five Covenant Network was Laird Stuart and Deborah Block, who were called moderators. Pam Byers, Executive Director. Mitzi Henderson from That All May Freely Serve. And Michael Adee, who was More Light. My team was myself and Anita Bell co-moderators of the Coalition. Bill Giles, our executive director Terry Schlossberg, who was executive director of Presbyterians Pro-Life. And Parker Williamson from The Layman. So I've decided that whether I'm going to win or lose an argument, I'm going to have the brightest team in the room, although all everybody that I named are bright people. We did papers and exchanged them. How did we. How did we. How did we go from no to yes on divorce? Part of our responses, we said yes to divorce. We permit it. We I can't. There's no self affirming in this or sense of God's calling. And how do we go from a no to yes on women? And maybe we would have taken out race if we'd been able to go further. But it broke down in the third meeting when there were papers exchanged and conversation was more than polite, it could be could be very difficult, which is the point, polite, mainline politeness will only get you so far. But it broke down when we said, now we're going to talk about let's agree to talk about why you based on these three samples, why you think you can go from a no to yes with the same hermeneutic, ecclesial, biblical, etc. And we think you apply the same faithful hermeneutic of the church and the no remains a no. And they said, No, actually we don't want to be in a room where you are saying why gay folks should not be ordained in the Presbyterian Church. Quite. It was never about marriage. I read an article one time that we might be better off if that had been the way the question was asked the first time. Like who gives a, who gets ordained? Anyway, as if that's the issue of the day, though, it would be representative of a lot of things in the church, but and so you can say at the end it broke down, but it had some value. We knew each other. We were able to call each other up. We were able to say, Really? There was one brief moment where Pam Byers and I talked and then John Buchanan and I talked about hosting Covenant Network and Coalition at the same time, a day of overlap, a couple of days apart on either end, and mostly because we couldn't get our act together, the Coalition. They've always been better organized. Their meetings are 18 months ahead, ours are six months ahead. Maybe we couldn't get our. So it didn't pull off. It might not been able, that might have been too tough a sell on both sides. At the opening, our first meeting was in the fall of 96, Amendment B passes in August. We call the meeting for September. We gave ourselves six weeks to pull off a meeting together because we thought the war was going to be fought in the presbyteries and that we were not up to it, Louisville was going to be up to it, but we could actually pull this one off. Louisville's not in every presbytery. We'd actually won a General Assembly vote. I was there working with committees, but we needed to do precinct work for the first time. There was something actually to do, so I hosted the meeting in Chicago. I wasn't the leader, I wasn't a figurehead. I wasn't even, leader would be too much. But I hosted it at a smaller convention center by O'Hare, provided the event coordinator, and made it work. And I reviewed the notes. I called all the speakers to invite them in to confirm it. And it was Huffman and Hestenes and Dobler, the usual suspects and made it work. And we invited John Buchanan, who was the moderator of the General Assembly to come and bring greetings. And John, as always, was gracious and well-mannered. John, I look up mainline encyclopedia and I see John's picture there, which is a good thing. And John talked about civility and he talked about we're in disagreement, but people can be in disagreement and go forward. It's a painful year for John. I have no doubts that he's the moderator and the most significant piece of business to come out of it really was unhappy for John. They organized the following year when they passed Amendment A and to reverse the success of B. Called a meeting. John hosted it at Fourth, invited me to speak. I spoke to the Covenant Network and invited them into committed, sustained conversation and said our evangelical convictions will require that that conversation have open Bibles or anything else you want, but there will be open Bibles, so there's not that much to talk about. Our hope for such a sustained conversation dwindles quickly without it. This is our common commitment. This is the sole arbiter of between us. Well, that's not that's heard more readily on the evangelical side than on the progressive side. I'm not sure all of what they think, but I think they thought the Bible was an away game in the same ways that we thought the General Assembly's were an away game. There was a oh, there was 2000 years, if not more, of a hermeneutic in place whose conclusions came to a different end than there's did, how does one simply write a brochure and undo all of that? Where all we had to do is remind people that you ain't got no allies before this last generation that here's the biblical witness, in the words of Walter Brueggemann, would ask a Covenant Network gathering by a person who was frustrated at the microphone that hadn't really addressed it. He thought the person in the pew thought, What does the Bible say about homosexuality? And Brueggemann says, Well, it's against it. We think that's pretty close to a final answer for how the church should respond. They think that's an opening volley on how the church should respond. So the hermeneutics are very different. And that, we feel was never worked out, that this conversation never gave sufficient attention to people with seminary educations and a common commitment to Reform Tradition, though understood somewhat differently that they would engage and that this would be our arbiter, that the position of integrity would be in agreement with, informed by not just kind of recognized that long ago, far away. People did say those things without and that was a kind of society we wouldn't approve of. And frankly, they were the ancients. What did they know? That the that we were never successful and invited people to sustain conversations about that. And part of the problem was us, we were not an attractive conversation partner. We we thumped when we should have listened. There were moments of that. Nonetheless, no evangelical ever wants to admit the Bible's an away game, it is every time we open it. This was written at me as much as for me, but those were, that's why I don't think of Covenant Network and Coalition as mirrors of one another. Entirely different set of dynamics. Some things were the same. I could talk to their leaders who could be frustrated by their most liberal members who, if they spoke first, nobody could argue for a more moderate position because that would look too compromising and do you care about justice or don't you? And then now, now how you answer that publicly? Where I would be leading meetings of the most conservative or any creed member, there's a lot of difference sometimes between the two positions would say this and that would just take the air out of the room for the moderates who, if they said something in disagreement, would sound weak, compromising, and what? You don't care about truth anymore? And those human nature is human nature, no matter how you regroup. Well, I didn't think then the sense of the room in a Coalition gathering is a different than the sense of a room in the Covenant Network gathering. The sense of the board meetings are a little bit more alike, but I think that those are largely different. The way we talk, who we talk to, how we talk, those are not alike. And we do have a tendency all along to talk past one another. They would tell stories, we would quote Scripture. Of course, we felt very righteous about that.
  • speaker
    And they felt very righteous with their stories.
  • speaker
    That's what. So this isn't about people Jerry? Yes. You know, that was that was the response. Yeah.
  • speaker
    So I find that interesting that you're describing a church where you've shifted from on earn your right to be heard, where there was a sense that maybe there was some common ground to this period in the church. Where really it's factionalized, though people have spoken about the sense of. And then you kind of mentioned into it, there's this huge middle.
  • speaker
    Mm hmm.
  • speaker
    That didn't really have a voice because both. Both ends that the evangelical conservative end and the liberal end on the other side that are just really loud and shouting at one another.
  • speaker
    Mm hmm.
  • speaker
    So there's a lot of shouting going on, and not a lot of. And that's the only way to be heard is to be factionalized.
  • speaker
    Yeah. But I want to say, one illustration of that, that we were not too bothered by the shouting because we thought that we'd been spoken down, that the only voice until we shouted was the other voice, that a quiet voice was not going to be heard. That can be awfully self-righteous in just a split second for anybody to do that. But we did that when when things like PUP came up. That was that was when when the General Assembly approved PUP. That was the first time.
  • speaker
    Peace, unity, purity.
  • speaker
    Yeah. Yeah. Well, when that first came out, that was the first time I thought I could lose this one. I didn't think I was going to lose before that. I thought I'd never win at Louisville. Then there was a time in which was a lot of significant evangelicals in leadership in Louisville, I never imagined that I'd worked and prayed for it. But I didn't think was going to happen. I thought I was not going to lose this one. Hear my voice. I was not going to lose this one. But when PUP there's no more sure marker of a split in the denomination than a General Assembly appointed committee that comes back with a unanimous recommendation, it's overwhelmingly accepted by the General Assembly. The church has never survived five years after that moment. That's just a false move. And that some in leadership in the church were advocating this as a way to finally resolve and go forward together. Just like they said, just like in the twenties and thirties. We didn't go forward together. We split. It's the largest unhealed wound in Presbyterian. Yeah. You can decide you don't like OPC. There's not enough of them to worry about. I live in Southern California. There's OPC everywhere. There's an OPC seminary here in Westminster. These are some of my best pastor friends. These are wonderful people. These are people with whom I agree on a lot of things and disagree with a lot of things. They're glad to tell me the same is true of their thinking about me, but it's an unhealed wound. Why we would celebrate that? Because evangelicals are expendable. A way forward together doesn't mean together. That that was the ecclesial move to marginalize and exclude, 1729 Adopting Act was celebrated. That settlement didn't last five years. Now you could argue that only when a church get so desperate and there's nothing to do, do they make this move and it doesn't help them any. But to cite it as glorious, if we could boldly go back to the twenties and do the same. Wouldn't that work out fine? The moderate expression of the minority voice now come up with the unanimous then coalition appointed none of the people on PUP. We would have appointed none of the people on PUP. We think that was intentional. That it was good people, not for a moment saying they're not evangelical and not that they're not colleagues and allies. Yet alone friends and for the most part, better people than me. But they are never who we we never sent them into a room before. We would never send them into that room. We weren't asked, three successive moderators decided who evangelicals were and who spoke for them. A couple of them I never met, never heard of. How could this be so late in the game? So that the we had predicted, John Huffman had put in writing that the result the recommendation would be unanimous. The General Assembly will receive it overwhelmingly and then they will sing Kumbaya. And one, two, three, the General Assembly literally sang Kumbaya like, John did his master's degrees in the twenties, the fundamentalist split. We've just seen this play out. Now there may be no way out of it, but that's not the way out of it. And the offense was that it was celebrated. So that's when I thought, okay, this isn't going to work out. This isn't going to be decided by votes. This is going to be decided by marginalizing. And I'm sure there are epitaphs about evangelicals that are very true that I don't want to hear. But some of us would be liberals by now if we had met one. And there's nothing in the way about the way the mainline goes about its work that strikes us as liberal. It's never felt generous to us, not that we haven't earned some marginalizing along the way, but it's never felt generous to us. So there was a fence in that. To us. And then I thought, okay, this is this is not going to work out well. And then it didn't, that, you know, we can we can decide if that's schism or if that's split or if that's division or just a bump in the road or whatever. But now for me, the calls to unity are can the remnant hold together? That's not a call to unity. If, EP, if all the split Ps aren't in the room. EPC and PCA, OPC and ECO-P, if the split Ps aren't in the room, this does not sound like a call to unity to me. It sounds like a call to circle the wagons and they're the them, you know, until all the sons and daughters of Calvin get in the same room at the same time in North America, nobody has the right to call it a General Assembly. That's not a joke. Now, OPC ain't going to walk into the room with us anytime soon, like the next millennium. Maybe they won't do it. But all of our ecumenical leanings are to the left, I don't begrudge that that they lean that way, but the lean to the right has never been developed. The RCA in the CRC, a little bit. But the PCA? I don't know, we're still mad at them? They're all dead now. OPC? Their grandchildren are dead now. This is a different group who are more willing to think about with a different degree of breadth and freedom for others. Again, the OPC is not going to not going to bind themselves into the same polity as us. I just, I don't know that they need too. But that Cliff would tell me that he would send an annual letter to the OPC. Inviting them to send a representative. Ecumenical representative. They're not ecumenical. It's called fraternal. It's maybe not the right word, whatever the right word for sibling is not male bias, but fraternal, this is not ecumenical. Roman Catholic is a ecumenical. OPC is fraternal, but you'd have to be an evangelical probably to have that perspective. The which doesn't make it right but it's a hard sell, that he would send a letter to their stated clerk saying you're warmly invited. Person would write back we could not come because the we had determined in our minutes that the PC(USA) is a formal apostasy from the true faith, once delivered for all, and we'll not be sending a representative, sincerely in Christ, Bob, or whatever that would be sincerely in Christ Bob. It's like, okay. Okay. Well we both have a lot of work to to go on this one, but that's that sense of, of acceptable loss that the most we can muster is. Wasn't that sad that they felt they needed to do that? They did. We really they were welcome. An irony in this is I think of evangelicals as a less communal people than I think of the progressives, we're the ones that in some instances are willing to defend rugged individualism, conservative social temperament sometimes goes along, where the progressive social temperament is almost always communal as the bias. Nonetheless, when progressives leave the church, they do it one at a time. When Evangelicals leave the church they do it community at a time and the response to be again be punitive toward these congregations lacks integrity. I don't think it can be justified.
  • speaker
    So you've chosen to stay. I mean, you were there in Glen Ellyn as the Amendment B was taken out of the Book of Order putting it.
  • speaker
    Actually, I just moved here.
  • speaker
    You just moved here?
  • speaker
    I came here in 09 and that happened in 10.
  • speaker
    Came out here and then the, you know, putting at the local congregation. Right? The ability to perform marriages and you've watched your brothers and sisters and other congregations decide to leave the denomination. Have you had to deal have that conversation here? With this congregation, about whether to stay or to go?
  • speaker
    Yeah, I. I don't have any doubts about it, though. You can't predict different scenarios. And I don't think my elders have doubts about it, that if another pastor had been here First San Diego would have left. Its sense of belonging is about as thin as possible, some sense of alliance with San Diego Presbytery, its sense of affinity to Church is not itself. Again, because of the size and the influence of this congregation at one time is more tied to Hollywood first than it is to the next church here in the presbytery, a different pastor who who would have been neutral on it, certainly a different pastor who encouraged it, this church would of made its request to leave. I don't have any doubts about that. The session deferred to me and the congregation deferred to the session on this. I didn't need to be overly persuasive. And I certainly didn't need to threaten. But I attempted to be persuasive and said, I'll be a no. No matter how this question gets framed, I'm going to be a no on. And there's a reason why I'm the only person in the room that doesn't have a vote. That's the way it's supposed to be. But citing unfaithfulness in the PC(USA) is not news. This is not going to persuade me. I have a severe judgment of the denomination as a denomination. I also have I think I'm required to have a sympathetic judgment. It is the Church of Christ. Yes, I think it's unfaithful. I think it was unfaithful before I got ordained. I'm not waiting for it to cross some line. I think I think a majority of my colleagues say their ordination vows about the confessions and the essentials with a wink and a nod. I guess I'll pay. I think it lacks integrity. I think it just hurts us across the board. And I think that progressivism as an idea, a practice, has just decimated our churches. I also think is for the most part, not being taught in our seminaries. Student bodies come with it a lot, but that our seminary faculties are more chastened. They're not exploring the edge to see how far they can go without falling off the cliff. They're trying to find the center, which is a much better and more faithful instinct. They won't define it the way evangelicals have the majority faculty in our seminaries. But exploring the center is the right direction. The Bible has its own power. Let it convince them like it convinced us, even if they decline to be convinced by us. We're not the tool that God uses in his hands. Primarily, his own word is this tool. That's the tool he used with us. Yes, it was through Sunday school teachers and our own parents. But that was the tool that was that that was the that's where the power lay. Now it lies, I think with when 2010 came, we lost members, money, and morale. We announced three or four months and if I'd do it over again, I would do it within three or four weeks. This is what the General Assembly has done. This is not what we have done. This is what we will do. And we will do it in a continued fellowship with the 10,000 churches around. And yes, your pastors in the midst of writing the theological standards for a denomination he's never going to belong to. And some of the people nationally that we most identify with are not going to be in the same denomination with us. We hope not, not in the same room, but not in the same denomination with us. When 2014 came along. I lost a couple of members, didn't lose much money, and didn't lose any morale in the church. This is what the PC(USA) does. We're not looking for wisdom from General Assembly deliverances and doings and not doings. So it's a little bit of expectation when the General Assembly meets it. I do not know. I have some big P Presbyterians here for whom Presbyterian is defined as this body of Presbyterians PC(USA). Maybe four families. Maybe four, maybe 2 percent. 3 percent of the whole. This would not have been all that costly to leave in terms of a split in the congregation. Nobody's got gone without some split, but some again it just whenever the scale is such that's difficult to no matter what you do. I am presbytery's representative to one of our churches who is in a process of discerning to to go or stay. I actually don't think that they know their own mind on this yet. After two years of working with them. They know my mind on it. It's obviously a conservative and evangelical church and they listen to me. They don't have to defer to me. I'm not even in their congregation. I'm not their pastor, but they are. They're ill. They are ill at ease and have a hard time figuring out how any joy can be restored when the affinities with the whole are so thin anymore. For me, it was never a question of, shall we stay? I think I can honestly answer it. I never asked the question. I think it's a false question. I think, Calvin never asked it. I think Augustine never asked it, to kick you out that's one thing, you know, after they decide they're going to burn you at the stake. Luther can, Luther can set up shop somewhere else. I'm not going to blame him for schism, but that's just that just ain't so. You know, all whatever all the arguments are lined up, they fall short of. There's a call in here. Some of it's very idiosyncratic. It's my calling, Jerry Andrews' calling calling in the PC(USA) to gather the evangelicals to form a faithful witness to the gospel within a church that sometimes loses its grip on the gospel. And we think the gospel loses its grip on the church to speak with some grace and steadfastness to the denominational leadership and to be part of conversations that help hold left and right together, with some sense of integrity, though the differences, we think are great, and they think not so great sometimes. But that's my calling. But and if everybody did the calling, we would not be in a better position. But if the calling of a congregation to serve its savior, where the Savior has called it to be in some sense of why isn't that here now? I find compelling to whatever is offered grass is greener on the other side. May actually be, I doubt it, but the least denominationally and ecclesially minded people that I have ever met in my life are now busy at work inventing a denomination after telling me for 20 years it's a post denominational world. They went out and made one. Well, you know, welcome to the real world. That's how that's how it works out. But yeah, it was never an internal thing for me. That's not to say that God can't speak a different word, produce a different calling, whatever. Who knows these things? But I have anxieties in life about what to do and how to lead. That was never one of them.
  • speaker
    So what was the denomination look like if it was being faithful in your in your sense of faithfulness?
  • speaker
    It would regain its ability to say no to its culture, it would quit being enamored of itself, patting itself on the back for having created this culture. Yeah. Witherspoon signed the Declaration of Independence and he wouldn't have signed anything by any General Assembly in the last 50 years. We created it, culture is now an adult child. It wants its emancipation from us. It should be given it. Our call is not to be chaplains to a culture that's divided against itself and at war with itself. There are seasons in the life of a church where you create culture and there are seasons in which you make all the countercultural moves, our calling now is to be an alternative community. We want to be the community that's being formed outside the church. The the most appalling moves are some General Assembly papers in which there's these vision statements of the Kingdom of God. It just doesn't look like the Kingdom of God to me, that I'm going to have to offer my own rebuttal. But we haven't had, with the exception of Israel Palestine, we haven't had a social witness policy statement that was not in full agreement with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in my 40 years. Sometimes the liberal wing of the Democratic Party is exactly right, and those that oppose it are exactly wrong. But for 40 years, we sold out that on the homosexuality issue. I thought that there was an opportunity for the Presbyterian Church to say no, to make its case, to take its bruises, for for doing that in a culture that so much wants to be like or whatever our anxiety is or be liked. Whatever. The if we could've had the ability to say no. We could have offered this community as a different community as the place of joy and love. And that that effort would be an effort that could reasonably expect God's blessing. Figuring out where the parade is going. Rushing to get ahead of it. Doesn't strike me worthy of the people of God. Not after people have lived and died in the faith. America's not that great. It may be better than everything else out there. But that's a pretty low comparison standard. The comparison was always the kingdom of God. And this does not compare well. And we we we mimic. I thought that I thought the church could be persuaded, testimony of the scripture was sufficiently clear. Never tried to persuade anybody that it was sufficiently important, that this was somehow what the Bible was about, but that it was sufficiently clear, that if we trusted the word to be healing, we would offer the word to our culture. I don't think we trust it. I think we trust us. I think we think we've aligned ourselves, even if less with the word, more with God by making this decision. I can't follow that logic. This is what God has said. These are His prophets. These are Jesus' prophets. These are Jesus' apostles. They speak his word. I don't know another word that this one. I think this one says these things clearly. So I think we missed our opportunity. We always have one that we've never taken up materialism. We could decide to be the alternative community that decides that wealth and happiness. The cause and effect relationship. This doesn't exist and that joy and wealth. That's that's not a, God rewards, wants us to be prosperous. Whatever it is we're supposed to learn from Abraham, we can learn from Abraham but that the call of God's people is never. And we live in a country where really, what is the second value if not the life that wealth brings you and and the ills for which it can protect you is not the primary value? I think that's what makes America America. And that won't survive the pearly gates. That won't get it. And we could be that. So we still have our opportunities. But having developed a hermeneutic that self-congratulatory because we're no longer at odds with our own culture and we're not the last American church to get on board with where the country went, that self-congratulation will really work against us when we try to say our next no. So we work, can I say we work. We work in the fellowship community now thinking seriously about what it means to build an alternative community. And if, not primarily for the sake of the PC(USA), but it could be if people wanted to learn from it. It's not just the best, best practices in missional and who can build more community gardens and move back into the neighborhood. It's that too, but it's to build the alternative community. Vaclav Havel's The Power of the Powerless speaks to that. Joe Small has done some really beautiful work on it. I, of course, think that if everybody read Augustine's City of God, all of the world's ills would be solved. At least all the Church's ills would be solved. Or to invest in the city of man because the Savior has not given up on it. But we build the City of God. We build an alternative community. It will have different histories, but it will occupy the same place in time. And that's just the hard work. And our generation isn't more challenged by it than anybody else, nor do we have an easier job of it, anybody else. And I think we just missed a wonderful opportunity. Hard one, nothing easy about it, but I think we missed that opportunity. I may not live long enough for us to see a second one.
  • speaker
    What gives you hope?
  • speaker
    There's a savior. And it's not the coalition. It's not the fellowship community. We are the saved that it's a, you get your choice in this universe. Apparently, either being the lover or the beloved. God has taken the role of the lover. I think we should just relish in the job of the beloved. And my job is not to love the church. It's not a bad thing. My job is not to love the church. Christ loves the church. My job is to be beloved by this savior in this church. And given the choice, the choice of tasks, it's the better job. So that's the hope. The things I know will be used, that I could be a fit instrument, that this adds up to more than sometimes what it appears to be. Maybe. But I think of it. I think I am at war for the soul of a people. A battle that started before me that will go on after me. And I have no doubts that when I meet my savior face to face? He will ask me such questions as you thought what? You, you actually said that out loud? Really? You know, I gave your parents the money to send you to school and that's what you came up with? And so, yes, you know, I know less, if not more so than others. But I will not be embarrassed that I have convictions. I won't be shy about Jesus in a church that struggles to be bold about the gospel.
  • speaker
    Do you have anything else you want to make sure we cover?
  • speaker
    Years of stuff. Years of stuff.
  • speaker
    I know we can probably do hours and hours and hours.
  • speaker
    Oh, I think we already have.
  • speaker
    I think. Yeah.
  • speaker
    But yes. Go ahead and turn it off.
  • speaker
    Okay.

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