Dr. Jack B. Rogers is Moderator of the 213th
General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). A resident of Pasadena, California,
Jack and his wife, Sharee, are active at Pasadena Presbyterian Church.
Scripture: Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-16
1) As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling
you have received. (2) Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one
another in love. (3) Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of
peace. (4) There is one body and one Spirit-- just as you were called to one hope when you
were called - (5) one Lord, one faith, one baptism; (6) one God and Father of all, who is
over all and through all and in all. (7) But to each one of us grace has been given as
Christ apportioned it. (11) It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets,
some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, (12) to prepare God's people
for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up (13) until we all reach
unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to
the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. (14) Then we will no longer be infants,
tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and
by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. (15) Instead, speaking
the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is,
Christ. (16) From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting
ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.
- Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-16
It's good to be home! Since being elected Moderator, I have traveled to 19 churches,
nine presbyteries and one synod, seven conferences, eight Assembly-related committees, and
two seminaries, with one more Monday. I have written nine short pieces for denominational
publications, and set an example as Moderator by being first to contribute to four good
causes. I am about one-third of the way through the year.
The letters and emails now number not in the hundreds, but the thousands. They range
from loving and laudatory to cursing and condemnatory. I try to read them all. It is
possible to answer only a very few.
I have met many wonderful people, and admired the ministry being carried out in
churches large and small. I am experiencing now what I knew intellectually, that most of
our churches are small. Seventy members is a good-sized church in Utah, and Vermont, and
most of North Carolina. I have been in 15 states, some of them several times. In October,
I will have been home a total of 6 days out of 31, including this weekend. Sometimes my
time at home has been only overnight.
I was in Louisville, at the Presbyterian Center, on September 11. If I had to be
anywhere at that time of tragedy, except at home, I was glad I was there. I want to tell
you how very, very proud I was of the national staff and the volunteers in the building on
that day of crisis. They immediately went to work to provide resources for our
congregations and governing bodies.
I became a spokesperson for the church in a way that I would not have been had I not
been there. Within minutes, the media people asked me to write a prayer, which they put
out on the internet.
The Theology and Worship staff put together a service of hymns, prayers, and Scripture
readings. I was there with two former Moderators working on the Task Force on the peace,
unity, and purity of the church that has recently been announced. The three of us were
asked to lead a service of worship in the Chapel at the Presbyterian Center. It was full.
Wall to wall people, and spilling out into the hall. When Freda Gardner began to read the
23rd Psalm, everyone began to recite it aloud from memory. There was a sense of
solidarity. Afterwards I met the TV and print media who were there. An AP reporter asked
me: "Why did you do this?" I replied that two things seemed clear: "We knew
we needed God. And we needed each other." It seemed the most natural thing to want to
be together to share our shock and grief. We worshiped and witnessed.
Then everyone went back to work. People were on the phones, and email, and fax,
contacting the congregations in the hardest hit areas, offering assistance. Presbyterian
Disaster Assistance was immediately brought into action. World Wide Ministries was in
touch with our mission personnel overseas. Theology and Worship was responding to requests
from pastors about how to interpret these events to their congregation and to parents
about how to interpret them to their children. Before the day was over, Cliff Kirkpatrick,
who was in Geneva, Switzerland, and John Detterick, and I, had issued a pastoral letter
that went out to all of our presbyteries to be distributed to our congregations.
In a time of crisis we reach down deep inside ourselves to find resources to meet the
challenge. For me, and for many in our church, those resources are found in the wisdom of
our Confessions. The Heidelberg Catechism, Question 1: "What is your only comfort in
life and in death?" Answer: "That I belong -body and soul, in life and in death
- not to myself, but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ." We drew on that resource
when we wrote A Brief Statement of Faith, the newest statement in our Book of Confessions:
"In life and in death we belong to God."
We have a strong, vital denomination, with committed and compassionate leaders. The
first lesson of September 11 is that we must stand united. That is what Paul is saying to
the Ephesians in chapter 4 verses 2 and 3: "with all humility and gentleness, with
patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of
the Spirit in the bond of peace." I preached for Joanna Adams at Trinity Presbyterian
in Atlanta. She told that in those first days when we were all transfixed in front of our
TV sets, there was a strip of announcements of canceled events running across the bottom
of the screen. One from the law courts said: "Arguments canceled, today and
tomorrow." Would that it applied to the church as well!
I couldn't leave Louisville, as planned, on September 11. I was there until Friday, the
15th when planes started flying again. I couldn't get to Spokane, Washington, where I was
supposed to be preaching. I couldn't get back here to Los Angeles. But I could get to
Omaha. I was to be there the following week, meeting with three presbyteries. Sharee's
mother lives in the village of Bennington, just outside of Omaha, and she took me in. She
is the matriarch of that town. At 93, she still drives her car and goes to two or three
events a day. I can't keep up with her energy.
In Bennington, Nebraska, ecumenism is choosing between being Evangelical Lutheran and
Missouri Synod Lutheran. In deference to my limitations we went to Fremont to the First
Presbyterian Church where I brought greetings. Then we attended a family gathering.
When we got home, a neighbor was standing on the doorstep. She said: "Come over
for pie and coffee." There were three couples, and Gretchen and I. We were talking
about the tragic events of September 11. One of the women said: "What I don't
understand is how some of those terrorists could have been in this country four or five
years and not realized that our way of life is better and changed their minds." That
is the second, painful lesson of September 11. There are people in every country and every
religion that only see the dark side. America has many faults, and we have made many
mistakes in our foreign policy. We know these things and we try to correct them, but we
move on knowing the positive as well. When people only see the negative about others and
then cast their attitude in religious terms they are called "fundamentalists."
About 10 years ago Martin Marty, now retired Professor of Church History at the
University of Chicago, got the American Academy of Sciences to authorize a Fundamentalism
Project. Most people thought it was a waste of time. Who cares about fundamentalists? Now
Marty looks like a genius! His team has compiled about 10 volumes of research on
fundamentalisms worldwide.
Recently in an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Marty listed four common
characteristics of all fundamentalisms. First, they grow on soil that has been
conservative, traditional, orthodox. Second, they imagine that there was once an ideal
community in the past and that the modern world is a defection, a falling away, a
perversion of that ideal community. Many conservative people might share those first two
attitudes of fundamentalism. To be evangelical, or conservative is not to be a
fundamentalist. What distinguishes a fundamentalist is militancy.
George Marsden, in his book, Fundamentalism in American Culture, defines fundamentalism
as "militant anti-modernism." Fundamentalists believe that they must react. They
must fight a holy war against change. Those, of their own community who do not support
this holy war are called apostate. Their opponents are described as minions of Satan.
Fourth, these militant fundamentalists usually select a few features of their imagined
perfect past and make them absolute. This often is set forth as the necessity to believe a
few precisely worded doctrinal statements.
Our son, Toby, pulled off the internet the statement of Osama bin Laden that was
broadcast the day we started bombing Afghanistan. You can see all of these elements in it.
They are also reflected in the attitudes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
What is most painful to say is that we have a militant fundamentalist group within the
Presbyterian Church. The common fundamentalist themes can be found in the attitudes of a
group called the Presbyterian Lay Committee. The Lay Committee was founded 36 years ago to
try to change the Presbyterian Church into a body that would not deal with social issues
and that would interpret the Bible with a surface literalism.
Growing on the soil of a denomination that is conservative and theologically orthodox,
the Lay Committee idealizes the era in the 1920s when a fundamentalist party ruled the
church. In that period, everyone was forced to conform to five precisely worded statements
called the five essential and necessary doctrines. The Lay Committee has three doctrines
to which everyone must adhere in their particular wording. They want their statements to
become the basis for hiring and firing people in the church.
They declared our 213th General Assembly "apostate," unchristian. Both of the
main reasons they gave are based on false reporting in their newspaper, The Presbyterian
Layman, of what the Assembly did.
I mention this because the third painful lesson of September 11 and the weeks following
is that we must recognize and refuse to honor militant fundamentalists whether in the
world, or in our own denomination. We do not need ad hoc creeds that have a political
agenda attached to them. In Scripture and in our Book of Confessions, we discover that the
things essential to believe are those related to our salvation.
In Ephesians 4: 4-6, Paul outlines a creedal affirmation probably used to prepare new
converts for baptism. Paul declares:
There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your
calling, one Lord (Jesus Christ), one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who
is above all and through all and in all.
Our common belief is in a simple Trinitarian creed. There will never be unity in the
church if each of us attempts to add to the list of essentials everything that is
important to us. The essentials need to be very clear and very few.
There is a genuine danger of schism if The Lay Committee cannot achieve its objective
of tearing down the present church and putting its own fundamentalist church in its place.
Schism is sin. Calvin wrote: "There could not be two or three churches unless Christ
be torn asunder." My favorite seminary professor used to ask us, "If Christ is
divided, who bleeds?"
I have been studying the 18th and 19th century splits and reunions in Presbyterianism.
The most interesting learning is that in each case when we came together again it was
without resolving the issues over which we divided in the first place. We come together
when we realize that we are more whole, and authentic, as a church when we are together in
our diversity, rather than apart in an exclusive one-sidedness.
Let me read you two quotations from the Minutes of the reunion Assembly of 1870. The
Presbyterian Church had divided into two almost even halves in 1837. When they came
together again in 1870, this is, in part, what they said. "The Redeemer's Kingdom
would be promoted by healing our divisions." Reunion "buries the suspicions and
rivalries of the past with the sad necessity of magnifying our differences to justify our
separation." Sharee told me that she had read that in the week after September 11, in
Houston, Texas, 400 couples that had applied for divorce, withdrew their petitions and
decided to try again. That is a model for us as a denomination.
I called my friend, Bill Pannell, one night from Atlanta. Bill and I taught together at
Fuller, where he was professor of evangelism and preaching. His wife, Hazel, had had a
back operation and I wanted to see how she was doing. Bill came on the phone and said:
"Jack, people want to get back to normal. It is your job to tell them what is normal
in the church." What a good insight. Normal doesn't mean the way we've always done
it. A norm is a standard. I always told my students that the norm in our class was A+. The
average was usually something less, but the norm was what we all had to work toward.
What is the Church that we are called to be? John Calvin had two marks of the church -
where the word is truly preached and the sacraments are rightly administered. I see that
happening all over the country in Presbyterian churches large and small. John Knox was a
student of Calvin, who went back to Scotland and added a third mark to the authentic
church, "discipline." We would call it spiritual nurture.
At the reunion in 1983 of the northern and southern streams of Presbyterianism, we got
a new Book of Order. It has four new chapters at the beginning that give the theological
underpinnings of our governmental practices.
It begins with Christ as the head of the church, and gives the preliminary principles
by which we function.
Second is a wonderful chapter on "The Church and Its Confessions." Then,
there is a third chapter on "The Church and Its Mission." It contains what I
regard as two new marks of the church. The first mark of the authentic church is to be in
mission in the world. The second is to be a community of diversity. By including women and
men of all ages, races, and conditions the church is "providing for inclusiveness as
a visible sign of the new humanity." When Jesus prayed in John 17:20 that "all
may be one," it was not just an additional option. The purpose is evangelism,
"that the world may believe."
Being Moderator is a wonderful opportunity and a heavy responsibility. Sharee has been
able to travel with me about a week each month. We talk once or twice a day by phone when
we are not together. One evening she gave me a Bible verse that best describes my
experience: I Corinthians 16:9 - "a wide door for effective work has opened to me,
and there are many adversaries." The work is an opportunity for me, the adversaries
are part of the work environment.
I had hoped to be a bridge builder and mediator between the conflicting factions in our
church. I thought my background working with people of both conservative and liberal
convictions would enable me to relate to people on all sides. That has not proved to be
true.
One of the experts in the Constitutional interpretation section of the General Assembly
helped me by saying: "I have taken every conflict resolution course that the Alban
Institute has offered. The first principle is that you can't mediate a conflict to which
you are a party." My job, as Moderator, to interpret the actions of a General
Assembly that many view as controversial, has made me a party to the conflict in the
church. Since I cannot be a mediator, I have tried to spend my time as a truth teller.
Each time I finish a presentation on the state of the church I worry whether what I
have said is helpful. I would prefer to avoid controversy. I am comforted by returning to
reflect on the last few verses in our New Testament lesson: "We must no longer be
children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's
trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we
must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body,
joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is
working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love."
Speaking the truth in love, that is the goal! With your continued prayers, I'm going to
keep trying.
