A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. Olive Regina Anstice is an elder at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Guelph, Ontario, and has been appointed to the National Committee set up by the Moderator following the discussion on the Live The Vision Report at the General Assembly.
I have been asked to repeat for you what I said at the General Assembly. I realize that some people were offended by what I said, but I was sustained and encouraged by several who clearly shared my perspective.
I want those of you who were not present to understand that I made my comments in response to the Reverend Harry Waite’s Report on the Live the Vision Campaign. I prefaced my remarks by sharing with the Moderator and my co-Commissioners my concern that, if the Report is accurate, much of our earlier discussion seemed to me to have been peripheral. “Fiddling while Rome burns,” I believe I said. Perhaps a modern metaphor would have been more appropriate: were we overly concerned that the windshield wipers were working, when the engine is running down?
I stated my personal fear that I would be judged simplistic or simply not caring about my Church – neither of which is true. Nor (as Assembly had earlier spent time in discussion on justice issues) is it true, I assured him, that I do not care about justice.
Indeed, I would like it to go on record here that at times I am consumed with that! If we have been the recipients of God’s love in Jesus Christ then we neither have, nor should desire, the option of being uninvolved in God’s world. But our motivation is crucial. The source of our caring and often the only protection from being overwhelmed or burnt-out is surely not to be found in the awful nature of the need but in the burning force of God’s love encapsulated in Christ and reflected through us.
So with those preliminary comments, I will share the remainder of my statement insofar as I can recall it. I hope that by God’s grace, it might prove the starting point for ongoing reflection and discussion.
The Reverend Waite’s Report may enable the Presbyterian Church in Canada face up to two matters which I think it is failing to recognize and/or address.
The first is the changing nature of its composition. Many people, including myself, have come into the local congregation from other denominations (in my own church I suspect the percentage is at least as high as one-third of the membership). We have done this for a variety of reasons: sometimes theological, sometimes personal, but – whatever the reason – our needs are being met in that particular congregation. Hence our allegiance to it. If our needs were not being met, we would probably not stay. Some have already moved on, but do not make the mistake of thinking that that automatically means that they are failing in their love for Jesus Christ. Many of them love him with every fibre of their being! (I do want to add that my own congregation is vital and alive and we are blessed with two fine ministers who are complementary to each other and form a good team).
The second point I want to make, however, is that when I look outside my own congregation at the “Presbyterian Church in Canada” (and I believe I said that this may come as a surprise to the staff and to people who have been born and brought up in a Presbyterian context), then I see a great deal of confusion about what is distinctive about Presbyterianism. There is confusion because we are not taught what is distinctive.
But I think that the reason for the confusion goes much deeper than that: there is not now any clearly articulated and practised theological consensus around which we can unite (and I did stress that I was not talking about a challenging equilibrium – which an earlier speaker had implied or said had to be expected and presumably discounted – in my opinion that is always inevitably present where you have a lively faith).
I said that what I was talking about, and about which we had to ask ourselves and come to some decisions, were:
> are we, or are we not a confessional church? (I could have added that I doubt whether many of the non-clergy people at General Assembly have heard much about the historical Confessions leave alone read them.)
> are we or are we not rooted in Scripture? I said that we kept on hearing a great deal about the need to be loving but that I similarly hear that from my humanist friends (that is not to say, of course, that it is not important). I wanted to know why we rarely even referred to the less palatable biblical issues of sin and judgment?
> are we a church that, as a church, is committed to pray? If so, why don’t we pray when we get together? Again, I said that I was not referring to the formal prayers that are used at various times. The previous evening some of us had been the guests of the Toronto Chinese Presbyterian Church: we had begun with them presenting us with a list about which we all were expected to pray and when that was concluded we began on another list! We had a simply wonderful evening because by the time we all sat down together to a meal, we were friends in Christ and talking about real issues that mattered to us!
> do we, or don’t we, believe in the necessity of personal redemption? This was not an academic issue but had profound practical implications. I reminded the General Assembly that earlier, time had been spent debating the amount of a tithe which was to be interpreted as five per cent in these difficult economic times? That would not even have been considered if we recognized the extent of our indebtedness to God. Everything we have comes from God and surely the “tithe” in Scripture is talking about the minimum expected in giving thanks not the maximum!
> what is our understanding of the laos: the “people of God”?
Surely we have to try to address these issues and strive to resolve them! Part of the pain is that, however they are resolved, we will lose some. But we must address them and I personally hoped that the Reverend Waite’s arresting report would give us the courage to do so. Because if we don’t, I personally see very little hope of any change because there is no agreed upon consensus outside the local congregations to which their members can appeal (and, from which, I might add, they might gain a sense of unity.)