Greetings,
   In looking over my blog entries I am noticing a couple of things that I thought I posted but I guess I missed.  My apologies for this.

   One of these items is a statement from the board of directors of the Presbyterian Lay Committee dated September 6, 2006, titled "A call for Presbyterian decency and order."  The statement speaks out against the strategies outlined in the PC(USA) legal memos on property and the juxtaposition of these memos at a time when the stated clerk was promoting the PUP report.  The board writes:

On the one hand, Stated Clerk Kirkpatrick publicly called for Presbyterians who differ to "endeavor to outdo one another in honoring one another's decisions." He endorsed task force recommendation seven, asking all church members to acknowledge their traditional Biblical obligation, as set forth in Matthew 18:15-17, Matthew 5:23-25, and in the Rules of Discipline in the Book of Order, "to conciliate, mediate, and adjust differences without strife" prayerfully and deliberately (D-1.0103) and to institute administrative or judicial proceedings only when other efforts fail to preserve the purposes and purity of the church."

On the other hand, in January 2006, while Stated Clerk Kirkpatrick was publicly advocating such peaceable procedures, his office was privately training presbytery executives and lawyers in closed-door meetings to take aggressive, pre-emptive legal actions against local churches whose ministers and sessions might be prayerfully and openly seeking to discern the Lord's will regarding their continuing association with the Presbyterian Church (USA) in light of recent General Assembly actions.

The statement concludes with a call for church-wide denunciation of the legal memos and strategies.