Some "Ha Ha Ha" to lighten things up.

After all this serious stuff, NPH thinks you need a laugh.

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Chris Erdman on The GA

Chris Erdman has a really good post about the Presbyterian situation over at his blog, Odyssey. Here's a money quote:

    "We have a case of people seeing what they want to see and impugning
    intent without really listening. People are looking for a Trojan Horse
and     in doing so have created one of their own making. We are in the midst of a new “fog of war” and when such a fog comes very few can see
clearly. In fact, we start seeing ghosts and monsters and hear
frightful sounds that tell us more about ourselves than what’s really
going on on the ground."

NPH spent an hour after worship yesterday dispelling the fog for members startled by shouts of "monster!" and "ghost!"

   

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An Illustration

The ad in Saturday's Kansas City Star in opposition to the actions of the PC (USA)'s General Assembly decision to maintain ordination standards and reaffirm the responsibility of local bodies to ordain their own has one decisevely telling element: a quotation of Judges 21:25, "In those days there was no king in Israel, and everyone did was was right in their own eyes."

Renewal groups within the denomination have produced this illustration as a kind of talking point for conservatives. NPH thinks it points up precisely the difference between the victimized alarmist conservatives and the rest of the church. The reference is of course to a collection of individuals in pre-regal Israel all doing their own thing. The implication is that the PC (USA) is now akin to a mere collection of individuals who have sanction to do what is right in their own eyes.

Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the GA's actions further bound members of the PC (USA) to one another and to a set of standards for ordination. More loosely, the assembly's actions asserted the binding character of the "essentials" of Reformed faith and polity upon those who would be ordained as officers.

Opponents of this action have a deeply flawed view of the situation and their role in it. They claim the objective, morally privileged, position of Biblical adherents relentlessly set upon by a relatavistic mass of faithless liberals out to assert their political agenda. It's a view of matters that makes the facts almost impossible to discern.

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Yeah, Well, We'll Just Go Buy An Ad Then

NPH knows that only some of our readers are affiliated with a church community, and even fewer of them are a part of the Presbyterian church community in the U.S.A. (and even fewer of them are in Kansas City). NPH is not a blog about the church.

However, NPH is a blog the convergence of faith and media, and the questions that arise as a result. So when we discovered today that colleagues in the Heartland Presbytery, the regional body to which NPH's church belongs, had purchased a 3/4 page ad in the Kansas City Star, we we bristled.

The ad is a self-enclosed box with a body of text in front of the PC (USA) insignia, and is headed with the words, "Local Presbyterians Oppose Weakening of Ordination Standards." The ad then lays out a version of what happened at the PC (USA)'s General Assembly last week that is, if not inaccurate at points, then incompletely presented. The effect of it is to say the denomination is in schism, that it has departed from Biblical standards and from traditional Christianity, and that it will be abandoned by the church worldwide.

Any NPH reader who has taken in our comment on the GA's actions will recognize the fault of such statements. But be that as it may, the real problem NPH has is that tomorrow, while our church is trying to celebrate our church's ministry with children through our VBS, we will be dogged by panic-stricken congregants who demand to know why our denomination has renounced God, the Bible, and the Church.

We can't help but feel hard put to by our colleagues, if not a little betrayed. They claim to affirm wholeheartedly the anti-division sentiment so strongly conveyed at the General Assemby, and yet they can hardly wait to do something that can only perpetuate division.

And let's not overlook the key aspect of this situation: that the church in America, far from being the marginilized community of witness found in the New Testament, has the cultural and material resources to use the media industry for airing inter-ecclesial disputes. What, after all, did these evangelism-minded churches and pastors think outsiders would think, reading this ad? Do they expect this "valiant" statement (they really used that word) would make people want to run to their churches?

NPH is flummoxed.

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Reviewing the Headlines

A Google News search uncovers these leads to stories discussing the PC (USA) decision to maintain ordination standards and emphasize the primary role of churches and presbyteries in applying those standards:

Associated Press: "A Presbyterian Church (USA) national assembly voted yesterday to let local bodies that wish to have homosexuals serve as clergy and loy officers do so, despite a denominational ban on homosexual ministers."

The LA Times: "The nation's largest Presbyterian group, meeting in Birmingham, Ala.,
approved the new policy that enables local and regional church bodies
to approve the ordination of gays and lesbians on a case-by-case basis."

UPI: "The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA approved a
resolution Tuesday that would allow regional bodies to ordain
homosexuals as ministers."

Reuters: "The largest U.S. Presbyterian Church body approved a measure on Tuesday
that would open the way for the ordination of gays and lesbians under
certain circumstances."

Cox News Service: "A divided General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) on Tuesday adopted a provision that allows congregations and local presbyteries to ordain non-celibate gays and lesbians."

Here's the thing. The words "gays," "lesbians," and "homosexuals" appear nowhere in the recommendations that the GA adopted. Admittedly, everybody in the church knows that when you talk about ordination standards, that's what you're talking about. But NPH wants to emphasize that the standard that was affirmed, the standard that local ordaining bodies will have to wrestle with on a case-by-case basis, is about "fidelity" and "chastity."

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Media Carta

NPH has always been challenged by Adbusters. It's a foundation-supported publication that asks the difficult questions about our mass media system that mainstream media outlets can't ask: who controls what gets on the air? What rights to citizens have in relation to broadcast media? What effect is our mass media environment having on our ability to think rationally and live responsibly? The Media Foundation, which publishes Adbusters, describes itself like this:

"We are a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters,
students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new
social activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple
existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will
live in the 21st century."

While NPH has always admired the publication and what it aims to do, we've also been a tad put off at times by the extremism of the thing. Of course, the foundation's aim is extreme--toppling existing power structures isn't a middle way, last time we checked.

Here's the next big thing from the Media Foundation: The Mental Environment Movement. The centerpiece of M.E. is the Media Carta, a treatise on media ownership, use, and governance that is straightforward and demanding. Also employed by M.E. is a series of television spots, all of which were rejected by the networks to which they were submitted (you can hear the rejections on the site).

Here is an example of somebody trying to do something with media advertising that media advertising simply can't do. All of the rejections say, in effect, "We can't run ads that tell people not to buy things and to turn off their televisions. We can't offend our sponsors." What Adbusters wants to do with these ads (raise public awareness and challenge corporate culture) is impossible in the present media environment. The internet will allow the ads to be seen by a different kind of audience, but only the kind of audience that already agrees, the kind of audience who goes looking for it.

These spots make no effort to disguise the fact that their values are at odds with the values of the larger culture, and that's precisely why they'll never see the broadcast light of day. But NPH respects what they're doing, moreso than we respect attempts to cozy up to the larger culture so as to whisper in its ear. That may "raise interest," but it lacks integrity.

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Ooh, Let's Stay Together

NPH's Mother Kirk is going to be in the media for the next couple of days, and not for its ads. At its General Assembly yesterday, the church acted to adopt the recommendations of a task force to keep an ordination standard pertaining to sexuality in the church constitution, while allowing local ordaining bodies to apply that standard in individual cases. The story you may read will say that the church has "opened the way for the ordination of gays and lesbians under certain circumstances." The story you should read will explain the bedrock Presbyterian principle that, "Ordaining and installing bodies, acting as corporate expressions of
the church, have the responsibility to determine their membership by
applying these standards to those elected to office" (Adopting Act, 1729).

NPH is pleased. He read the task force's recommendations (which were published nine months ago) as was convinced by their authors that this is a faithful and courageous direction to go. Opponents of the recommendations contend that maintaining a church-wide standard while allowing local bodies to apply those standards will create a "balkanized" church, not a nationally unified one. Many people who rose to speak against the recommendations appealed to clarity and clearly-defined boundaries as reasons to keep the application of ordination standards out of the hands of ordaining bodies, which strikes us as shortsighted. NPH thinks of Jesus' debate with the real religious folk in the temple, the one where they questioned him on all the controversial matters of the day (divorce, the emperor tax). Jesus' answers were hardly the boundary-defining, clearly-demarcated principles that are so desirous among many in today's church; they were ambiguous (Give to Caesar what is Caesar's . . .), and they placed the larger burden of interpretation and application on the hearer. Jesus declined to issue a dictum and said, in essence, "You figure it out."

NPH thinks that the Presbyterian Church is taking a step towards more faithfully figuring it out.

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