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Note #7853 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

Feud for thought
03303
July 30, 2003

Feud for thought

ACSWP hears from critics of embattled paper on U.S. families

by Evan Silverstein

SACRAMENTO, CA - The Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP) last
week heard from two prominent critics of a controversial policy paper on the
changing nature of American families.

During a July 24-27 meeting here, the committee heard from the California
pastor who introduced an alternate paper during this year's General Assembly
and from another author of the substitute statement, the leader of a
conservative Presbyterian think tank.

ACSWP's 45-page paper provoked contentious debate at the 215th Assembly of
the Presbyterian Church (USA) and gave rise to the two-page substitute
drafted by members of the National Issues Committee.

The committee approved the substitute, but the full GA voted to send both
documents back to ACSWP for more work.

ACSWP was instructed to consult with the PC(USA)'s Office of Theology,
Worship and Discipleship, "strengthen" the policy paper and report back to
next year's Assembly in Richmond, VA.

The committee, which develops social policies for GA consideration, had urged
the church in its paper - Living Faithfully with Families in Transition - to
commit to being an inclusive community that values many forms of family,
including those "with members of homosexual orientation."

Detractors said the ACSWP paper was based on "flawed" theology and sociology;
diminished the importance of the traditional two-parent family; and elevated
non-traditional families, including those involving unmarried partners and
same-sex couples, to moral equivalence, in violation of scripture and of
Christian morality.

The Rev. Marjorie Working, a member of the National Issues Committee who
introduced the substitute report, told ACSWP during the Sacramento meeting:
"I really urge you ... as you rewrite your policy, to think of ways that the
church can nurture and support people who are willing to commit themselves to
family life. A father and a mother are the ideal that God has held up for
us."

Working, associate pastor of El Montecito Presbyterian Church in Santa
Barbara, CA, conceded that families of other kinds also "can nurture," but
warned that there are groups that call themselves "family" and say they "love
one another, but they really do not work towards the building up of the
church and Christ."

Working and a handful of fellow committee members wrote the substitute policy
paper with the assistance of Alan Wisdom, who directs Presbyterian Action,
one component of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a conservative
think tank in Washington, DC.

Wisdom argued for a policy that includes a stronger endorsement of marriage.

Noting that the ACSWP paper includes a research finding that 77 percent of
adult Presbyterians are married, he told the committee: "The fact is that
marriage is a very important institution for members of our church. And of
course, if you include Presbyterians who are formerly married and might hope
to be married (again), or whose parents are married, I mean it's a huge
number of people who have a vital stake in marriage. So I think it should be
a more major focus (of the report)."

 Members of ACSWP met by conference call earlier this month with
representatives of the denomination's theology and worship office, who will
help revise sections of the family paper having to do with scripture and
theology.

According to the Rev. Peter Sulyok, the ACSWP coordinator, the revised
document will be reviewed by a yet-to-be-named panel of ACSWP representatives
and others from around the church.

The proposed policy on families, written in response to directives from
Assemblies in 1997 and 1998, documents the changing structure of family life
in the United States, including increasing numbers of single-parent
households, families in which children are raised by grandparents or other
non-parent relatives, and domestic partnerships other than marriage. It holds
that families of many kinds can raise children faithfully and responsibly.

The substitute paper defines marriage as a "civil contract between a woman
and a man," and says that, "For Christians, marriage is a covenant through
which a man and a woman are called to live out together before God their
lives of discipleship."

	   Mental illness policy

ACSWP also approved a prospectus describing the work of a soon-to-be-formed
task force that will explore the subject of serious mental illness and
recommend a comprehensive church policy on ministering to people who suffer
from such illnesses.

Copies of the prospectus, which outlines the specific topics to be covered by
the policy, will be sent to the PC(USA)'s 173 presbyteries, probably in
September. The presbyteries will then forward a one-page summary to each of
the denomination's more than 11,000 congregations.

ACSWP will later seek feedback on the prospectus and nominations of task
force members.

"The Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy encourages the whole
church's involvement in this development of social witness policy," Sulyok
said, "with the intention of raising awareness of issues surrounding serious
mental illness, and with the hope of making the church a more welcoming place
for those affected by these illnesses."

Sulyok said the committee hopes the group can meet in early 2004 and finish
its work by mid-2005.

The 211th General Assembly (1999) directed ACSWP to develop a mental-illness
policy for presentation to the 217th Assembly in 2006.

	      Globalization

ACSWP approved two papers on globalization that will be published as the
final two installments of a series of four papers examining issues related to
globalization.

One of the newly approved papers, "Globalization and Culture," was written by
Ruy O. Costa of Billerica, MA, a former ACSWP committee chair. The other,
"Globalization and the Environment," was compiled for ACSWP by Robert L.
Stivers, a professor of ethics at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA.

In his paper, Stivers concludes that, while economic globalization "promises
increasing material affluence to those who adopt its assumptions," it gives
rise to "very real abuses (that) stem from basic, taken-for-granted
assumptions about nature."

ACSWP was directed to monitor global trade issues by the 1996 Assembly.

	    Cross-fertilization

The social-witness committee got together in Sacramento with the Advisory
Committee on Racial Ethnic Concerns (ACREC) and the Advisory Committee on
Women's Concerns (ACWC).

This was the third time in about three years that the three committees met
simultaneously, according to Sulyok.

The groups held separate business sessions, but joined for meetings with
representatives of local ministries and justice-related groups.

Participants said joint meetings provide good opportunities for members of
the committees to get better acquainted and learn more about each other's
work.

"I've always felt that (meeting jointly) is really absolutely critical,
because it's very, very easy for the left and right hand to kind of lose
track of who's doing what," said the Rev. John Spangler of Marietta, GA, an
ACREC member. "These three groups have a basic common agenda ... the justice
issues of the life and ministries of the church. It's just critical that they
sit down and share those points of commonality and are not duplicating
things, but are supplementing each other."

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