Top Ten Religion News Stories of 2012

December 27, 2012 By 5 Comments

Catholic bishops testify against Obamacare

According to the Religion Newswriters Association, the top religion news story of the year was the way that religious leaders responded to the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre. But they’d already voted on their Top 10 prior to that. So, here are the Top 10 Religion Stories of the Year, from the RNA:

1. U.S. Catholic bishops lead opposition to Obamacare requirement that insurance coverage for contraception be provided for employees. The government backs down a bit, but not enough to satisfy the opposition.

2. A Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life survey shows that “nones” is the fastest-growing religious group in the United States, rising to 19.6 percent of the population.

3. The circulation of an anti-Islam film trailer, “Innocence of Muslims,” causes unrest in several countries, leading to claims that it inspired the fatal attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya. President Obama, at the U.N., calls for toleration tolerance of blasphemy, and respect as a two-way street.

4. Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith turns out to be a virtual non-issue for white evangelical voters, who support him more strongly than they did John McCain, in the U.S. presidential race.

5. Monsignor William Lynn of Philadelphia becomes the first senior Catholic official in the U.S. to be found guilty of covering up priestly child abuse; later Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City, Mo., becomes the first bishop to be found guilty of it

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Presbyterians Reject Same Sex Marriage

July 7, 2012 By 24 Comments

Yesterday, at their General Assembly, the PC(USA) followed the United Methodists and rejected a proposal to change the definition of marriage in their official book. According to the responses I got on Twitter, some see it at the last stand of older and more conservative Presbyterians, while others think it was a last ditch effort to keep large, white, conservative congregations from leaving for the new ECO denomination. It seems that the oldy-but-goody pedophilia argument came up.

By Associated Press, Published: July 6

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) narrowly rejected a proposal to revise the traditional definition of marriage on Friday, a year after it struck down a barrier to ordaining gays.

The Presbyterian General Assembly, meeting in Pittsburgh, voted 338-308 against changing how marriage was defined in the church constitution from a “civil contract between a woman and a man” to a “covenant between two people.” The assembly also rejected measures that would have affirmed a traditional definition of marriage or sought more theological study of the issue.

The AP adds this little dig to the story:

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Watching Denominations Implode

July 5, 2012 By 30 Comments

It’s summertime, which means it’s the time for denominations to have their annual clusterf meetings.

The United Methodists already had theirs. At the 11th hour, a deal for new governance, allowing increased participation in denominational affairs for younger clergy, unraveled. They also reaffirmed their stance against gay clergy and gay marriage.

The Presbyterians are currently meeting (for 8 days — seriously, 8 days?!? — over the 4th of July(!)). They don’t seem to want young delegates, and the vice moderator resigned just a few days after her election, citing “pervasive, poisonous activity” in the PC(USA). You see, she solemnized the marriage between two women, in Washington, D.C., where that kind of thing is legal.

And now the Episcopalians have begun their meetings, and they’re arguing about the way that they come up with the budget. The same sex issues are on the agenda for later in the week. Steve Pankey has a valuable post on the generational divide that vexes his denomination, and I think the rest as well.

I’m watching all of this from afar, via the tweets, blogs, and Facebook posts of many dear friends — friends who are committed to these bureaucracies in spite of their sins. I don’t begrudge my friends their loyalties, and I take no joy in the inevitable in-fighting that these denominational meetings engender.

Honestly, I think it’s all pretty sad, and I know it really hurts many people involved. It also costs millions of dollars to have these meetings — money given by earnest church members. Money that could be spent on the mission of the gospel.

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Leaving a Denomination with Honor

June 25, 2012 By 7 Comments

 

This may be the worst denominational logo ever.

Jason Stellman recently left the Presbyterian Church in America, a conservative, Reformed denomination that is the home to the likes of Tim Keller, R.C. Sproul, Tullian Tchividjian. Stellman was an ordained clergyman in the denomination who, from the looks of his resignation letter, took his ordination vows very seriously.

He left, he writes, because of two growing and gnawing doubts. The first:

I have begun to doubt whether the Bible alone can be said to be our only infallible authority for faith and practice, and despite my efforts (and those of others) to dispel these doubts, they have only become more pronounced. In my own reading of the New Testament, the believer is never instructed to consult Scripture alone in order to adjudicate disputes or determine matters of doctrine (one obvious reason for this is that the early church existed at a time when the 27-book New Testament had either not been begun, completed, or recognized as canonical).

And the second:

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When Should a Church Schism?

May 21, 2012 By 27 Comments

I took a lot of heat from my Methodist friends last week for suggesting that young clergy forsake the denomination and go do something new. Let me be clear: I don’t expect one single Methodist clergyperson or seminarian to jump ship because I blogged about it. Puhleeze, people.

I will reiterate something: It is virtually impossible to see the dysfunction of a system when you’re inside it. Ask anyone who’s married to an alcoholic; ask a prison guard; ask Michel Foucault. Sometimes Often it takes an outsider to speak truth into a system. Also, dear Methodists, to appease your anger, here’s a picture of me washing Methodist feet:

That being said the Presbyterians are facing challenges of their own. The closest church to my house is Christ Presbyterian, a large PC(USA) congregation, the pastor of which has been at the forefront of the Fellowship of Presbyterians, a group of primarily large, conservative, white, suburban churches. The Fellowship is launching a new denomination, the Evangelical Covenant Order.

Our weekly suburban paper, the Edina Sun, covered the first meeting about the potential switch at Christ Presbyterian:

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My 2012 Predictions

December 21, 2011 By 13 Comments

Every year, I visit the Doug Pagitt Radio Show to give my predictions about the upcoming year in religion.  I did so on Sunday, and here are my 2012 predictions:

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Rejected Anti-Gay Ad

July 8, 2011 By 8 Comments

David Brauer reports that the Minneapolis StarTribune has rejected an ad placed by the Presbyterian Lay Committee, a conservative group within the Presbyterian Church (USA):

According to Committee president Carmen Fowler LaBerge, “The Strib indicated that if we would scrub the reference in our ad to sex within marriage and scrub the reference to the Bible, they would reconsider running it. Those edits would have so substantively changed the ad as to render it meaningless.”

LaBerge says the ad ran in big-city papers such as the Los Angeles Times (right), Wall Street Journal, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dallas Morning News, Denver Post, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Charlotte Observer, Orlando Sentinel, Houston Chronicle, Richmond Times-Dispatch and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Here’s the ad in question:

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Pomomusings Calls the Presbyterian Question

February 26, 2011 By 9 Comments

The long-expected divorce in the Presbyterian Church (USA) seems to be imminent, with a group of the fifty biggest, wealthiest, whitest, and most conservative churches in that denomination attempting to start something new.  This “Fellowship” will be a strange Venn Diagram for a denomination — in a video posted this week, one member of that Fellowship explained that this group would be in relationship with churches within the PC(USA) and from other denominational groupings as well.

It’s no surprise that more progressive elements within the PC(USA) are skeptical.  Adam Walker-Cleaveland, for one, talks about the 300 pound gorilla in the room: that these churches should probably just leave the denomination, but they would then likely lose their buildings and property (although I seem to recall that the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of a local church and against the Episcopal Church denomination in a similar case).

Adam thinks these churches are trying to have their cake and eat it to, and he challenges them to just leave:

If you think the PC(USA) is deathly ill…leave. But don’t try and concoct an anti-connectional scheme that will let you break away and create a “differentiated sub-set within the whole” yet still remain within the denomination and keep your vast properties and millions. If your beliefs and convictions lead you to surmise that breaking away from the PC(USA) is what your community needs to do – then so be it. Each presbytery is working through how it’s going to deal with the property and financial issues of such decisions; work with your presbytery, accept your fate and move forward.

via The Presbyterian Fellowship: Let us Break Away but Keep Our Property & Millions… – Pomomusings.

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Presbyterians: Two More Years of "Talking" about Same Sex Marriage

July 9, 2010 By 43 Comments

The StarTribune reports:

Hours after giving their blessing to ordaining noncelibate gays and lesbians, leaders of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) declined late Thursday to change the church’s definition of marriage, in effect refusing to allow same-sex marriages within their denomination.

If the proposal had been approved, the church’s definition of marriage would have changed from a commitment between “a woman and a man” to “two people” and allowed church weddings in states that have legalized gay marriage.

The late-night decision to table the proposal and subject it to two more years of study caught many delegates at the denomination’s gathering at the Minneapolis Convention Center by surprise, and there was a stunned silence as delegates absorbed the action.

What I don’t understand is how that body can approve gays and lesbians to serve as ordained clergy, but not allow them to get married.  Yes, I understand that they will require celibacy — that’s their answer.  But it’s not an answer that makes much sense.

UPDATE: This makes even less sense.  Also from the article:

Hours before the surprise shelving of the marriage measure, the assembly approved changing the denomination’s ordination policy to make noncelibate gays and lesbians eligible to become clergy. The vote was 373 to 323.

Get that?  I don’t.

Filed Under: christianity in america, glbt, same sex marriage Tagged With: , 43 Comments

A Paean to Bruce Reyes-Chow

July 8, 2010 By 2 Comments

Bruce Reyes-Chow, outgoing moderator of the PC(USA)

I’m currently in Sewanee, Tennessee, speaking at the School of Theology here at the “University of the South” (confident, aren’t they?).  But back at home, several of my friends are gathered with their fellow Presbyterians at the 219th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA).  For the two years preceding this meeting, Bruce Reyes-Chow has been the moderator of that denomination, and his tenure ended earlier this week in Minneapolis.

Now, I’m no proponent of denominationalism.  As I’ve written, I think they served their purpose, and now they should go away — or at least be dramatically reformed (and by this I mean on the order of what Wesley did to Anglicanism or what the Mennonites did to the Reformers).  In fact, I think that denominations, as they now stand, are bad for the gospel, and that’s because I think that bureaucracy is bad for the gospel.

However, if someone is going to take a denomination like the PC(USA) into the future, its going to be Bruce (and others like him).  I watched his tenure begin two years ago (while I was on the Church Basement Roadshow!), and I’ve gotten to share the dais with him a couple times over these two years.  And I’ve been nothing but impressed with the honesty and candor with which his has spoken to his Presbyterian compatriots.

So, from this outsider, I say: Huzzah, Bruce, on a job well done!  May all denominational leaders follow your example in the years to come…

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