Monthly Archives: January 2009

Current Presbyterian News From Ghana

As I follow Presbyterianism globally, or at least in regions that I can read the news reports, I have regularly found the Presbyterian branches in Ghana a point of interest and a source of inspiration. First, and most helpful, they are well covered in the press, especially on-line versions. This may be for the second reason, and that is that the leaders are regularly saying interesting things to the population of the country as a whole from the pulpits. I get the impression that the church is “relevant” while being the body of Christ and proclaiming the Gospel.

So, this is another one of my occasional posts of news from Ghana that encapsulates several interesting stories.

Regarding national news, the last time I posted on Ghana was just before their national elections on Sunday December 7. In the presidential election that day there was no majority winner so a runoff was held on Sunday December 28. (I didn’t see any similar news items about what would happen to worship services that day so I figure it was probably a repeat of December 7.) In the runoff Professor John Evans Atta Mills was elected president and he was sworn into office on January 7. He has a candidate web site worthy of any politician and it continues to be updated now that he is in office. According to the bio on the web site he is a law professor with degrees from The University of Ghana, Legon and Stanford. He began studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London before being selected as a Fulbright Scholar to Stanford. He has served in several government posts, including being elected as Vice President of Ghana. At one time he also played on the Ghana national hockey team. Accounts describe him as deeply religious (Methodist according to Wikipedia) and Aaron at I must follow, if I can has a picture of him and the ESV Bible on which he was sworn in.

While there was tension and uncertainty in Ghana about the elections they went smoothly, and there was a lot of encouragement for this from religious leaders, including the Right Rev. Yaw Frimpong-Manso, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, who is quoted as saying:

Let us pursue our partisan agenda in the
framework of national unity to engender peace and tolerance in our
country. We must be true to ourselves at all times when debating
issues, accepting the obvious facts and ensuring that our criticisms
are just, fair and constructive. Put Ghana first, keep the peace.

Best wishes to all in the new administration.

There have been a series of short news pieces about the Presbyterian Church of Ghana promoting various causes. These include the Chairman of the West Akyem Presbytery encouraging people to get involved in the promotion of Primary Health Care. A district minister encouraging Ghanaians to have an attitude toward work in the new year that takes into account the betterment of the country as a whole and helps the new government’s policies and programs for socio-economic development. He is quoted as saying “All and sundry have a stake in developing Ghana and we should not fail in our endeavours.” And before you think that this is disassociated from the Gospel, there is a news report about the Bible Study and Prayer Group of Asante Presbytery which, as part of its four day convention, issued a “call on Christians to renew their commitment to the propagation of the gospel.”

There are a couple of other stories as well about the church’s support for education and a local congregation’s gift to prisoners at Christmas. All of that in the last month. As I said, there never seems to be a lack of news items about Presbyterians in Ghana reaching out to their country in positive ways.

I would end with one final news item about the church being involved in a property dispute, but not in the same way we are seeing here in the states. According to Joy Online local landowners are encroaching on a school. The article does not have a lot of specific details but as I read the story it appears that at a school owned by the government, but possibly operated by the church, is having problems with surrounding landowners using the land around the school, jeopardizing a playground. The situation appears to be complicated by unclear title to the property, the article saying:

Mr Kofi La-Opare, Senior Presbyter of the Church, said the Social
Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) passed the land on to the
Church but was reverted to the land owners, sparking unending
litigation between the church and the landowners.

But the Moderator of the General Assembly has addressed the landowners and strongly urged them to let the school use the land.

So that is a summary of the recent news. We will see what the coming months hold.

Further News And Comments On The Developing Controversy In The Church Of Scotland

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My thanks to the Rev. Ian Watson of Kirkmuirhill and his blog Kirkmuirhillrev which has been a great source of information in this controversy. Also, my apologies for not realizing that two of the blog entries I cited in my first post were essentially identical, and the second was copied from Rev. Watson’s original. I have added a clarification to that post.

Rev. Watson has a second post with some more information on the matter, pointing us to an article in The Sun. In that article there is a quote from an unnamed worshiper who says [italics in the original]:

“What he does outside the church should be his business and nobody else’s.”

Now, I want to set aside the fact that this controversy is about sexual orientation and speak generally about this quote. I also realize that I am taking this quote out of context, not that there was much in the original article.

What condition is the church in if we don’t care about people’s lives outside of church? The quote seems to convey the modern attitude that religion is a private affair and how it interacts with our lives the other 6.75 days of the week is no business of anyone else. I find this particularly ironic coming from a member of the Church of Scotland. While the CofS has since adopted the Westminster Confession of Faith as a principle standard, regular readers of this blog know my affection for the notes of the Kirk (Church) in Chapter 18 of the Scots Confession (emphasis mine):

The notes of the true Kirk, therefore, we believe, confess, and avow to
be: first, the true preaching of the word of God, in which God has
revealed himself to us, as the writings of the prophets and apostles
declare; secondly, the right administration of the sacraments of Christ
Jesus, to which must be joined the word and promise of God to seal and
confirm them in our hearts; and lastly, ecclesiastical discipline
uprightly ministered, as God’s word prescribes, whereby vice is
repressed and virtue nourished.

The church is not about an hour on the Lord’s Day but it lays claim to our whole lives. And the church is not just the kirk session keeping watch on us, although they have primary responsibility for ecclesiastical discipline, but the whole covenant community caring for each other.

OK, down off soap box.

Back to the specifics of this particular controversy: The article in The Sun quotes the locum preacher at Queen’s Cross Church, The Rev. Mike Mair, as saying: “Queen’s Cross elected [The Rev.] Scott [Rennie],
with a trivial number — like ten out of 200 — voting against him.”

In addition, an article in The Courier provides a bit more background on Rev. Rennie (interesting to see the ties back to U.S. seminaries):

Mr Rennie was born and raised in Bucksburn in Aberdeen.

He served as assistant at Queen’s Cross church before winning the Scots Fellowship to study for a masters in sacred theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

He returned to the UK in 1999 when he was called to be minister at the [Brechin] cathedral.

He is on the Church of Scotland’s taskforce on human sexuality and is treasurer of OneKirk—a network of ministers and members of the Church of Scotland working for an inclusive, progressive church.

He is working towards a doctor of ministry degree at Aberdeen University and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania.

The information from Rev. Watson is that this call is being protested so we will see how it develops. In addition, he adds that Forward Together, the evangelical network in the CofS, has not commented yet.

Update: First, Forward Together has now issued a statement expressing their concern about the call of Rev. Rennie. Second, thanks to Reformed Catholic for his comment below with information about the cooperative D.Min. program Mr. Rennie is in.

Controversy Over A Pastoral Call In The Church Of Scotland

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Within the last week a controversy has developed in the Church of Scotland over a minister who has received a call, with the presbytery concurrence, to an open pulpit in Aberdeen.

At its meeting on January 6 the Presbytery of Aberdeen, by a vote of 60-24, sustained the call of the Rev. Scott Rennie to the Queen’s Cross Church. The controversy is that Rev. Rennie is an openly practicing homosexual in a public enough way that his call may be the first to be challenged because of his lifestyle. (The Rev. Ian Watson, in his blog Kirkmuirhillrev states that Rev. Rennie is the first gay man to be called, while a news article from the Evening Telegraph quotes an unnamed CofS spokesperson that Rev. Rennie is not the first.) It is expected, according to these sources, that some in the minority will challenge the appointment to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, possibly putting the call on hold for five months. Two years ago the presbyteries of the Church of Scotland rejected the blessing of same-sex civil partnerships. In his blog Coins for Change, Boris Delahoya describes a bit more about the process ahead.

[Correction: I missed the fact that Ian Watson’s and Boris Delahoya’s blog entries are essentially identical (I did see that they were very similar). In the comment below Rev. Watson clarifies that he is the original author of the material.]

There are a couple of interesting nuances to this story which I am not seeing dealt with in the press reports. The Press and Journal, states that the Rev. Rennie is/was married and has a daughter with his wife. The first is the probable fact that his sexual practice was heterosexual at the time of his ordination. Therefore, the ordination is not an issue but rather the call based upon his present lifestyle. The second nuance is that the news story lists his marital status as “separated” not divorced. Scottish terminology or law may be different than here in the states (please let me know if it is) but being engaged in a sexual relationship with someone other than your spouse before a divorce is finalized is generally not considered an appropriate lifestyle for an ordained officer of the church regardless of the orientation of the relationships. (Although it seems to be sometimes overlooked if you are discreet about it.) If the protest is filed it will be interesting to see if and how these details play into it. Very little of the presbytery discussion has been reported so far.

In a related development, Adam Walker Cleaveland, on his blog pomomusings, recently posted on “The Bible & Homosexuality: Enough with the Bible Already,” which you can probably imagine from the title got a lot of comments, both on the blog and elsewhere. Now there is a well written counter argument, whether or not it was intended as a direct response, by Dr. Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary.

PC(USA) Presbyteries Considering Ecumenical Statements

California Supreme Court Decision: Denomination Controls The Property

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The California Supreme Court decision has been issued: In a unanimous decision on the outcome they upheld the appellate court decision which found in favor of the national Episcopal Church and against the local churches. The majority found that under “neutral principles of law” the property resides with the denomination because the churches agreed from their founding to be part of the greater church and abide by their documents. (The appellate court used “principle of government” in its reasoning.)

The majority decision, written by Justice Chin, goes on to present the legal rational for this finding. In a very interesting concurring and dissenting individual opinion Justice Kennard says, and I paraphrase here, “I agree the higher church body gets the property, but you are really stretching California law in finding for neutral principles when this should be based on principle of government.”

So we basically have a unanimous decision, but a 6-1 split on the legal reasoning.

Now some details, and I’ll quote extensively from the very readable introductory summary to the decision.

Near the beginning of the summary it says:

When secular courts are asked to resolve an internal church dispute over property ownership, obvious dangers exist that the courts will become impermissibly entangled with religion. Nevertheless, when called on to do so, secular courts must resolve such disputes. We granted review primarily to decide how the secular courts of this state should resolve disputes over church property.

State courts must not decide questions of religious doctrine; those are for the church to resolve. Accordingly, if resolution of the property dispute involves a doctrinal dispute, the court must defer to the position of the highest ecclesiastical authority that has decided the doctrinal point. But to the extent the court can resolve the property dispute without reference to church doctrine, it should use what the United States Supreme Court has called the “neutral principles of law” approach.

The decision summary continues with this important paragraph, the one Justice Kennard takes issue with:

Applying the neutral principles of law approach, we conclude that the general church, not the local church, owns the property in question. Although the deeds to the property have long been in the name of the local church, that church agreed from the beginning of its existence to be part of the greater church and to be bound by its governing documents. These governing documents make clear that church property is held in trust for the general church and may be controlled by the local church only so long as that local church remains a part of the general church. When it disaffiliated from the general church, the local church did not have the right to take the church property with it.

Within the full discussion the majority say that important in the reasons they were favoring neutral principles is because “that is the [U.S.Supreme] court’s most recent on this subject and, hence, is of critical importance to the instant dispute.” They also quote the U.S. Supreme Court decision about the dangers of neutral principles including that it requires a court to examine church documents, such as a constitution, for a trust clause but the court must avoid deciding based on any associated doctrine in the document. And the decision notes that this is the first case the state supreme court has had to consider neutral principles since its development.

Related to this the decision notes that the Appellate decision in this case criticized previous appellate decisions because those decisions used neutral principles when the state supreme court’s previous rulings had used principle of government. This current decision responds:

We disagree. As explained in the Court of Appeal opinion containing the most thorough examination of this question… the principle of government method… and the neutral principles method… are not mutually exclusive, but can be reconciled. In any event, this court unquestionably has authority to adopt the neutral principles approach. [citations removed for length]

This makes it sound like another reason the majority went with neutral principles was to help set the record straight on the previous decisions.

It is also important to point out that in response to the 1979 U.S. Supreme Court decision detailing neutral principles the California Legislature, in 1982, added a section to the California Corporations Code recognizing a denominational trust clause. And the decision reaffirms that under this California statute a hierarchical church can unilaterally impose a trust clause if “the governing instruments of that superior religious body so provide.” There is an argument in the Episcopal Church that the trust clause was not properly adopted in the first place. The court literally says that “it is a bit late” to argue that point.

It is also interesting that in the full decision the court points out that most of the decisions in other states have favored the hierarchical church.

In the separate decision, Justice Kennard writes of the majority’s reasoning regarding the California Corporate statute:

But that conclusion is not based on neutral principles of law. No principle of trust law exists that would allow the unilateral creation of a trust by the declaration of a nonowner of property that the owner of the property is holding it in trust for the nonowner. [citation removed] If a neutral principle of law approach were applied here, the Episcopal Church might well lose because the 1950 deed to the disputed property is in the name of St. James Parish, and the Episcopal Church’s 1979 declaration that the parish was holding the property in trust for the Episcopal Church is of no legal consequence.

But under the principle of government approach, the Episcopal Church wins because that method makes the decision of the highest authority of a hierarchical church, here the Episcopal Church, binding on a civil court. This result is constitutional, but only because the dispute involves religious bodies and then only because the principle of government approach, permissible under the First Amendment, allows a state to give unbridled deference to the superior religious body or general church.

In my view, Corporations Code section 9142 reflects the principle of government approach. That statute allows a hierarchical church, such as the Episcopal Church here, through its bylaws to unilaterally impose a trust on the
property of a local member parish. The statute does not state a neutral principle of law; rather, it creates a special principle applicable solely to religious corporations.

In my common sense way of thinking Kennard’s argument makes more sense to me as a path to ruling for the denomination.

Finally, a couple of polity and legal observations from this GA Junkie, who is not a lawyer.

1) It is interesting that neutral principles was the legal theory that prevailed because one of the internal arguments among PC(USA) denominational people was whether trust clause (neutral principles) versus administrative commission process (principle of government) was a stronger argument. At least in this state it appears trust clause prevails. Personally, I favor process. It seems so much more Presbyterian to me.

2) In reading through the detailed decision it seems to me that the court has tried to position its decision so that it will be upheld on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, should there be one. It seems that great effort is taken to lay out the legal history in U.S. Supreme Court decisions to show how this decision is completely compatible with that court’s
existing decisions. Maybe another reason the majority went with neutral principles. And being a lowly physical scientist by training, maybe this is what all legal decisions look like.

3) There are clear winners and losers. But one of the winners may be those churches which have been already been gracefully dismissed by their presbyteries. If principle of government had prevailed I could imagine an increase in the pressure to use PJC’s and AC’s at higher levels to chase down and pull back congregations dismissed by their presbyteries. This decision does, of course, only apply to California.

Lastly, I do expect a lot of spin and discussion on this. But out of all the responses, I appreciate the detailed and disagreeing analysis of an authentic church lawyer over at Anglican Curmudgeon. We will see what others have to say. Stay tuned…

Updates: A few details I missed the first time around…
1) The case is not over — If nothing else the cases are sent back to the trial courts. And if the local churches are unsuccessful there some are suggesting that it will be taken to the U.S. Supreme Court.

2) In comments that I am trying to decide suggest a true sense of victory or just making the best of this outcome, some associated with the local churches are happy the majority relied on neutral principles since that is how they were arguing their case. As the article from VirtueOnline says:

The California Supreme Court today ruled in Episcopal Church Cases that
church property disputes must be resolved by “neutral principles of
law,” not by civil courts merely deferring to the decrees of church
“hierarchies.”

This ruling has wide and favorable impact for
churches throughout California that seek to change their denominational
affiliation. While adopting this “non-religious” method of resolving
property disputes between churches, the Court seemed to defer to the
Episcopal Church’s alleged “trust canon,” which purports to create a
trust interest in church property owned by local congregations.

And the press release from the Episcopal Church quotes the local churches lawyer, Eric Sohlgren:

What’s good about the decision from the perspective of St. James is
that the court has adopted a rule of neutral principles of law in that
church property disputes will be resolved by neutral, nonreligious
factors.

Interesting to see how this goes from here.

3) And on my commute home last night I heard one radio station give the following “teaser headline” that seems to miss the point of the “neutral principles:”

California Supreme Court rules for Episcopal Church in dispute over gay bishops and property

Looking Ahead To Monday

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It’s Saturday, but Monday’s coming…

The holidays are over, I’m still trying to keep Christmas in my heart and soul while recovering from New Years and the distraction of medical issues in my family over the break. I will need time to reflect on how “real life” intrudes into the divine. It seems like I should be seeing it the other way around since God takes the initiative. And my wife commented to me today that this is the first day she has really seen me since her father was hospitalized. (The situation is better, he is home, but the issues are not over and it will be a long road ahead for everyone.)

So, with the end of the holidays will come Monday and a return back to work. And with the return back from Christmas break we anticipate some news.

First, and scheduled, is the decision on the Episcopal Church Cases from the California Supreme Court. Notice was posted on Friday that the decision would be handed down at 10:00 AM PST on Monday. I have discussed this case before (see the tail end of this post) because even though this decision is specifically about Episcopal churches, it will set the “lay of the land” for all the hierarchical churches in California, including the Presbyterians. In light of that several Presbyterian entities submitted amicus briefs. The case was argued back in early October (my observations on the oral arguments) so now being close to 90 days the decision was expected this week. With the imminent decision the Anglican Curmudgeon has started a detailed series of posts on the cases and he promises to finish up with his prediction of the outcome. The first article is very good background piece, and the rest should be just as good. Even after almost 90 days I am sticking with my impressions from the oral arguments: I’m not sure if Neutral Principles or Principle of Government will specifically prevail but I’m still leaning towards Government. However, based on the tone of the jurists in October, I’ll stick my neck out that the hierarchical church will prevail in this one. (And from some of the arguments I could see the denomination prevailing even if a majority favors Neutral Principles.) I’ll post a brief summary as soon as I can find time in my work day to review the decision.

Second, and hinted at, is the appointments to the Special Committees, Study Groups, and Task Forces created by the last General Assembly of the PC(USA). In his Moderator Monday from December 15, GA Moderator Bruce Reyes-Chow gave an update on the appointment process and said he hopes to have it finished up “by the end of the year.” With the realities of the Christmas season I am not surprised that the announcement has not been made yet, but based on that goal I anticipate seeing announcements this coming week, maybe as early as Monday. And Bruce’s comment that “not everyone is going to be happy with all the choices made” and for people to “trust the Spirit” has raised my curiosity about their composition. Again, we await developments, maybe this week.

So my Christmas break is over. As I promised myself before the holidays I did some blogging but did not get consumed in any major analysis pieces. However, I’ve got a couple outlined and with breaking developments, and a slightly lightened work load with no teaching this quarter, I anticipate a resumption of my obsession with The Politics of Presbyterianism. So Happy (Gregorian) New Year (as opposed to the liturgical one was a month ago) and hang on for the ride.

Looking Ahead: What Are The Options?

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To close out the year, and look ahead to the next, here is a great look at the options available in our controversies…

Dave Walker, in a way that only he can with pen and paper, has graphically and concisely set out the options in our controversies. You can find his current post on the Church Times blog which has a link to the full cartoon from last May. The current post and the look back are occasioned by a new report on how to resolve that particular controversy.

One of the things I find when writing this blog is that our Presbyterian controversies are variations on a theme. In many cases the arguments and logic follow very similar lines, you just fill in a different point of contention depending on the Presbyterian branch you are referring to. While Dave is addressing a controversy in the Church of England that is not particularly Presbyterian, women bishops, the three options he illustrates still fit our debates. And while Dave doesn’t present any specifically new options, it is fascinating to me how universal the basic framework of our possible solutions are.

So enjoy Dave’s work. Dave, thanks for your contributions.

And to all, a Happy New Year.