05317
June 16, 2005

Deathbed confession

‘New Wineskins’ spokesman says it’s time
for PC(USA) remnant to ‘get our affairs in order’

by Jerry L. Van Marter 

EDINA, MN — A seminal thinker in the New Wineskins movement said neither schism nor congregationalism is a solution to the “fatal illness” he believes is afflicting the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

     “The best thing we can do is take a resurrection approach, affirming that God takes us from brokenness to death to new life,” the Rev. Clark Cowden, evangelist presbyter of San Joaquin Presbytery, told more than 300 people gathered here for the first New Wineskins convocation. “The loving thing to do — what we do pastorally with those with a terminal illness — is to get our affairs in order, celebrate what we have been and done, and prepare for the new future that God has planned for us.”

     Borrowing freely from a decade-old “Presbyterian Presence” study conducted at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Cowden said the “regulatory model” of church organization, which dates to about 1960, has played itself out.

     That model, characterized by centralized mission planning and corporate-style governance, “was once a highly effective bureaucracy, capable of delivering goods and services to congregations and presbyteries,” Cowden said, but “the current structure of the church is, in important ways, dysfunctional.”

     Dissatisfaction in the church, he said, has reached the point where “it is breeding ever more dissatisfaction — and that’s a cycle we have to get out of.”

     The New Wineskins movement has its roots in the Presbyterian Coalition and the Confessing Church Movement — two traditional-orthodox organizations within the PC(USA). The Rev. David Henderson of West Lafayette, IN, the New Wineskins moderator, said the structural dysfunction is symptomatic of intractable disagreements  between traditionalist/orthodox and “modernist/progressive” Presbyterians in three areas: theology, ethics and the purpose of mission.

     Structural changes must be made in the context of those disputes, Henderson said. “One, or even two, out of three isn’t enough, if we are to faithfully recreate the church as the body of Christ,” he said in brief remarks following Cowden’s June 15 presentation at Christ Presbyterian Church here.

     To that end, New Wineskins has developed a document with three emphases — essential tenets of faith (www.newwineconvo.com/tenetskin.doc), ethical imperatives (www.newwineconvo.com/imperativeskin.doc) and a constitution (not available online) — to be discussed, debated and voted on during the three-day convocation by “delegates” from churches that already have endorsed it.

     Then what will happen?

     “We can say definitively that we don’t know — we have no idea,” Henderson admitted. “We don’t want to be one single step behind God, but we don’t want to take one step ahead of Him, either. We’re trying to identify those things God is making clear and how to live with them, however uncomfortably.”

     Henderson outlined three possible strategies, while insisting that “New Wineskins has never been about strategy, but about vision.” He said the document could be submitted to next year’s General Assembly as an overture; the New Wineskins movement could become a “church within the church” for the congregations that endorse the documents; or the movement could “split off” from the PC(USA).

     Cowden described the current circumstance as “the nowhere between two somewheres,” or “the neutral zone.” The old order has collapsed, he said, and the new order hasn’t yet emerged, “and the result for us is incredible uncertainty … like an aerialist between trapezes, or Linus (of the Peanuts comic strip) while his (security) blanket’s in the laundry.”

     In the face of such stress, Cowden said, people go in one of two directions: “They try to return to the way it used to be, or they will seek out the nature of the new future. In neither case do the roadmaps exist — we are the new map-makers.”

     He said the church’s present predicament is “ripe with creative opportunity.” Recalling the first two centuries of the U.S. Presbyterian church, when it was marked by minimal structure and an emphasis on evangelistic mission, he said: “We have done it differently before — we can do it differently again. Wouldn’t it be great if our system was one that encourages people to try new things, to encourage innovation?”

     Perhaps the model for what the church has been going through for the past 40 years, Cowden suggested, is the Israelites’ sojourn in the wilderness with Moses.

     “The ‘neutral zone’ is time when necessary redefinition and reorganization takes place,” he said. “Maybe God led Moses in the wilderness for 40 years to get 400 years of Egypt out of their heads, so they’d be ready for the promised land.