wfn.org | New 'hermeneutics of trust' is Bridgeman's legacy as GAC chief

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Note #7336 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

10-July-2002
02237

A likely suspect

New 'hermeneutics of trust' is Bridgeman's legacy as GAC chief

by John Filiatreau

LOUISVILLE - Six years ago, when the Rev. Jeff Bridgeman became a member of the General Assembly Council (GAC), the Presbyterian Church (USA) was in a sorry state.

"I came on the Council when Jim Brown was executive director," recalls Bridgeman, who recently wrapped up a yearlong stint as GAC chair. "There were such deep divisions then. ... It was just a season of suspicion. I heard somebody call it a 'hermeneutic of suspicion.'"

Hermeneutics is "the science and methodology of interpretation," especially of Scripture. In the deeply divided church of those days, every event, every comment, every coincidence, was interpreted through a lens of suspicion - and when people talked about the spirit moving in PC(USA) gatherings, they were apt to be talking about meanness. 

Onto this slaughtering floor sauntered Bridgeman, a 6-8 Californian with a surfer's blond locks and casual manner and a Jesus freak's wide-eyed vulnerability, saying things like: "Sometimes I think that if we were just polite to each other it would help a lot."

Lamb of God. Dude.

Bridgeman was part of the first "class" of GAC members after the method of naming people to the Council was changed.

"At this point the presbyteries, not the synod rep or anybody else, had a say in who came on," he says. "I never would have gotten through the synod. They didn't know who I was; I wasn't an insider. We got a lot of 'outsiders' into that class. ...

"I remember the people (on the Council) who were bleeding and wounded," he says. "They had been there since Shape and Form, they'd seen that, and through Re-Imagining. ... So it was time for new blood."

New blood soon to be old guard; outsiders soon to be insiders. Such now-familiar figures as David Bleivik, Peter Pizor, Donetta Wickstrom and Lynn Shurley became a core group that Bridgeman says committed itself (with the support of a number of people already on the GAC, among them Tom Lutz and Elizabeth Steffen) to changing the highly politicized culture of the General Assembly Council by doing business openly and above board.

Soon, however, Bridgeman found himself swept up in the "hermeneutic of suspicion," mistrusted by church liberals because he was an evangelical, mistrusted by the evangelicals because he was trucking with "the dark side."

"When you get elected to Council," he says, "something happens to you: You go from being 'us' to being 'them.' And you're automatically identified with that nameless, faceless place, 'Louisville.' ... One of the surprising things was, instead of people saying, 'Hurray! You're in the midst of it, you're making a change!,' I got this better-you-than-me kind of thing. And then this kind of suspicious look: 'You're one of them now.' ... Particularly in the evangelical camp, I was looked at with a lot of suspicion."

Bridgeman says he never felt so isolated as when he served on a task force that reviewed the programs of the National Network of Presbyterian College Women. Evangelicals felt betrayed when he joined others in the task force in deciding not to shut the program down, "bearing in mind that God is in the redeeming business." 

"I am so proud of how those young women have stepped up to the plate," he says now of the group, which had been criticized for its leftist politics and its identification with gay and lesbian causes. "They've taken the criticism, they're responded in really a good spirit, and said, 'We will fulfill these obligations, we will ... take your direction.' It was done with the intention that, if they succeeded, they would be healthy. It wasn't intended to destroy them; it was intended to make them whole. And it did. ...

"But I caught so much flak. I was so beat up by that stuff - by my own friends."

Bridgeman, who has been succeeded as GAC chair by the Rev. Barbara Renton, of Afton, NY, says much of the suspicion he encountered was focused on the national staff at the Presbyterian Center in Louisville. 

"There are probably a good number of staff people I would disagree with theologically, but they would give me their very best effort to serve me as a member of Council," he says. "As chair of the Council, I found John Detterick (the GAC's executive director) wanting to be my servant, I mean he wants to serve me, he has the mentality that I am his boss. Which is humbling. 

"And his staff is ready to come alongside of you and provide for you, and when you run up into a roadblock, into a misunderstanding ... there's bound to be someone who's going to step up and say, 'Let me help you, maybe this is the way to do it.' I have not run into anyone who has tried to sabotage what I was doing. ...

"I said this at the orientation this year, in Tempe, I told the new people: 'The staff are believers in Jesus Christ, they're committed to Christ, they're committed to serving Christ's church, and I go in trusting them, until they prove me wrong. And when you go in trusting them, they prove themselves trustworthy."

A year ago, when Bridgeman became chair of the GAC, it looked as if another season of suspicion was getting under way. The 213th General Assembly had plunged the church into another fracas over G-6.0106.b, the provision of the PC(USA) constitution that forbids the ordination of sexually active gays and lesbians. 

"There was so much animosity and fear," Bridgeman says.

The new chair saw his role in familiar, pastoral terms.

"I think my role as pastor has been very helpful to the Council," he says now. "I instituted prayer before all our meetings. We had a half-hour of prayer and bumped the agenda up a half-hour. We prayed from 8 to 8:30 every meeting. We prayed for the nation, we prayed for the church, we prayed for the GA, we prayed for issues, we prayed for people - and that's a remarkable thing: When you start praying for others, you cross all the boundaries; all the theological boundaries fall away. 

"When I minister to your hurt and you minister to mine, we start being the church, rather than just the institution. And that was my goal - for us to become the church while we did business. I also was very interested in having us remember what our foundation is, that it's all about Christ. ... And I was affirmed in that effort from across the aisle. Every side of the church said this was the right thing."

He didn't take on the job without some trepidation.

"I was a little anxious about how it would go," he admits. "I think there were people who were anxious about having this evangelical (as chair). ... I had seen places where my theological perspective shut me out of leadership. There's some people who won't give you the opportunity. 
The majority of people will; the staff will. I felt like, once I functioned with people, and they saw who I was and how I worked, and we did that with integrity, a lot of the problems disappeared."

Many people were surprised by Bridgeman's manner. "The image was, someone's going to beat me over the head with a Bible," he says.

Instead, he tried humor and persuasion. "That humor thing," he says, "you've got to go easy on that until people warm up to you and come to trust you. But we have laughed a lot this year." 

His charm and kindness have disarmed many who might have been adversaries. The Rev. Doug Oldenburg, a former moderator seldom likely to see eye-to-eye with Bridgeman (theologically or anatomically), once told him, "We need more warm-hearted evangelicals like you."

Asked about continuing dissension in the PC(USA), Bridgeman says: "The image of family keeps being helpful for me. I don't agree with everybody in my family. ... But I'm still related to them and we're still a family together, and if we've got to work through stuff as a family, then we're going to work through it."

Bridgeman counts among his mentors the one-time evangelical who became the lightning rod for PC(USA) conservatives fed up with the church's leftist leanings: the Rev. Jack Rogers.

"I'm here because of Jack Rogers," he says. "While I don't agree with some of the things Jack believes  he's still my friend, and he is still a mentor, and he's the one who pointed me in this direction. ... 

"And I feared for him when he said he was running for moderator. After his election, he said, 'Tell me what I need to do.' And I said, 'You need to go and talk to the evangelical side, because they're the ones who don't know what to make of you.' ... And bless his heart, he went to the Presbyterian Coalition breakfast, and do you know that nobody from the Coalition went and met him at the door?

"... I don't know whether the Coalition leadership didn't see (Rogers and his wife), or didn't want to see them, but I thought, 'This is too bad.' They did acknowledge them (later), and Jack got up and greeted everybody. But see, Jack took those initial steps  and there was no response from the other side."	

Now, Bridges says, he is anxious "to invest myself in the congregation again" -Santa Ynez Valley Presbyterian Church in Solvang, CA, where he has been pastor for 12 years - and to pursue a new passion: college ministry.

"One of the interesting byproducts of my sitting on the task force to review the National Network of Presbyterian College Women is realizing that we as a denomination have abandoned campus ministry," he says. "I realize there are college pastors and such, but it is so minimal in the larger scope. ... Local churches don't know what to do with college students. They don't know how to be open to them, respond to them. They'd like to, but they don't have a clue, so they don't."

Bridgeman's church started a ministry called Front Porch (PORCH: Presbyterians of Reasoned Christian Hope) at his alma mater, the University of California at Santa Barbara. "In six months it got ... so dynamic that we gave it to the presbytery," he says. "Our vision is that we will take campus ministry ... from Ventura to San Luis Obispo and beyond."

And there is something else he's especially excited about: "the birthing of a national pastors' conference" for PC(USA) ministers.

"Back in January, at the chairs and executives meeting in Louisville, we were trying to think 'out of the box,' and I said, 'What about a national pastors' conference?'" he recalls. "We were talking about biennial assemblies, and what do you do in the off year. And everybody got excited about it. ... And then everybody got depressed, because nobody had any money; nobody had any staff to do it. I said, 'Guys, wait; don't get depressed. Do you realize what we've just done? We've come up with an idea that's so big, only God can do it. Let's pray about it for six months, and when we get together in May, we'll see what God wants to do with it.'

"So, come May, it's at the top of the agenda (and) all the six agencies have approved giving money to it."

The first conference is tentatively scheduled for October 2003. Current thinking is that about 1,000 PC(USA) pastors will participate.

"It's not going to be 'Presbyterians on Parade,' and it's not going to be a Presbyterian promotion," Bridgeman says. "It's going to be, 'Let's nurture our souls and let's meet and fellowship with one another.' ... If that actually happens, I'll be so proud of that, I'll just be thrilled."

Bridgeman thinks the PC(USA) is on a positive track now.

"I don't think the church as a whole can go anywhere the leadership won't take it," he says. "And for a long time, the leadership of the church was bent on pursuing a particular political agenda. ... We have to keep working on telling the truth to each other in love, and working on reconciliation and working on apologizing and forgiving and moving forward."
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