I've been out of the parish and holed up in a carrel long enough that the MDiv students now know more about church politics than I do. The Belhar Confession has come up several times in Theology II this semester, a class in which I am a TA. Turns out that the Presbyterian Church (USA) is voting this year on whether or not to add it to our Book of Confessions. I didn't know what the Belhar Confession was, so I had to look it up. (Shorter Belhar Confession: Apartheid is a sin).
In this afternoon's section, in which we were considering the relationship of the Church to society and reading the Confession of 1967 in that context, one student asked why there was any opposition to the Belhar Confession since the Constitution already contains a document that condemns racial discrimination, namely C '67. Another student replied that some people fear that Belhar is a trojan horse for approving gay ordination.
Sigh. This is pure guilt by association. And faulty logic:
Some people who support gay ordination also support the Belhar Confession.
I do not support gay ordination.
Therefore I cannot support the Belhar Confession.
No, I don't think it follows either.
I suppose one could argue that since our Book of Confessions already condemns racism, why add another confession that does the same thing? But the thing about a Book of Confessions is that you have multiple documents treating the same subject. For instance, a majority of our confessions contain expositions of the Ten Commandments. Should we get rid of all except one? No, because there is value in the particular treatment that particular documents give to a given topic.
That said, I have a feeling that amending our constitution in this way is just one more symbolic gesture. Presbyterians are surfeit of symbolism, but what we need are deeds, not words. Despite our formal and seemingly endless endorsements of diversity, the Presbyterian Church (USA) remains overwhelmingly white, middle class and on the far side of 55.
One student quipped that the Confession of 1967 would have been a much more prophetic document had it been the Confession of 1957. Too right.
And that makes an interesting point about our consideration of Belhar. There's a whiff of Donatism at work here--establishing one's contemporary purity on the basis of the purity of one's ancestors. Only the Donatists had real martyr ancestors. We Presbyterians invent them by endorsing their words ex post facto.This gets us perilously close to those Pharisees whom Jesus condemned during Holy Week--the ones who decorated the tombs of the prophets of yesterday while stoning the prophets of today.
Somewhere I read that the chief predictor of a congregation's multiculturalness isn't its denominational affiliation but whether or not it was established before or after 1970. So it seems to me that if we want a truly diverse church we need to A. Establish new churches and evangelize young adults (who don't have the hangups about interracial worship and marriage that their elders do), and B. Train pastors to transform congregations imprinted by the segregationist culture in which they were founded.
That takes more than amending the constitution. That takes money. Big money. "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."If we care about breaking down barriers, to say nothing about making disciples, we'll put our money where our mouth is.
It also takes a willingness on the part of presbyteries to ordain and authorize people to work in new, creative and unorthodox ways to make disciples and found congregations.
I take it that either the money or the creative thinking is lacking given that the denomination has planted but 20 new congregations in the last five years. Whether we adopt Belhar or not (and let me be clear--had I been able to attend my presbytery meeting I would have voted for it), we are not a denomination that cares much about either making disciples or creating a multicultural church. Deeds, not words, tell the story. "Ye shall know them by their fruits."
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