Lay Committee Acquires Papers Showing PCUSA Anticipates Major Division
by Jim Brown
September 15, 2006
(AgapePress) - - The Presbyterian Church (USA) is being accused of taking "draconian" measures against local congregations that are considering leaving the denomination. The Presbyterian Lay Committee has obtained confidential strategy papers created by lawyers from the denomination's headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, advising area officials how to grab the property of local dissenting churches. The so-called "Louisville Papers" also advise Presbyterian officials how to oust the ministers of dissenting churches and how to get rid of their governing bodies. The documents advise Presbytery officials to play hardball with these churches by filing civil actions against them, freezing their bank accounts, changing the locks on their buildings, and defrocking their ministers.
Meanwhile, the papers obtained and made public by the Committee suggest to those Presbyteries filing civil claims against dissenting parishes that they try to get an Episcopal judge rather than a Baptist judge. The reason for this, according to the strategy documents, is because Episcopalians understand church hierarchy better than do Baptists.
Pastor Parker T. Williamson, CEO of the Presbyterian Lay Committee, says he initially thought the "Louisville Papers" were a hoax when they were delivered to his office anonymously. He compares the current state of the PCUSA to the KGB during the last gasp of the Soviet Union, and he calls the denomination's latest strategy "a power play by a failed bureaucracy."
Williamson says the denomination needs to "repent and turn its eyes toward the Lord and return to the Word of God." If the Presbyterian Church USA will not do that, he contends, "it is going to go down the tubes, and no property grabs and pension grabs and all those things are going to save it."
Ironically, the Lay Committee official notes, while PCUSA lawyers were formulating their legal strategy, the Stated Clerk of the denomination was urging church officials to seek peaceful resolutions to their theological differences. However, he questions whether theological differences is an applicable description when it comes to what the church has become.
Presbyterian Church officials are trying desperately to keep the denomination together, Williamson observes, but "they don't have any theology to hold it together because they don't affirm what scripture teaches." And without any biblical theological basis to "hold the churches in the corral," he says, the denominational leadership is "rapidly losing any governance that can hold them together."
Williamson believes the Louisville Papers indicate that the PCUSA is fracturing very quickly. And in an August column for The Layman Online, he noted that a straw poll taken at a recent Presbyterian Coalition conference showed high levels of ambivalence among participants, with slightly more than half choosing separation from the denomination over various compromise and reform alternatives.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
