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During June's General Assembly at the denomination's headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, delegates voted 317-208 to lift a ban on ordaining homosexuals. The action nullified a 1978 resolution prohibiting ordination of "self-affirming, practicing homosexuals." It also removed the requirement that ordained clergy are "to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness," which had been in place since 1997.

"In one stroke of the pen, the assembly threw out the church's historical position that sexual behavior is limited to a covenant marriage between a man and a woman," says Parker T. Williamson, chief executive officer of the Presbyterian Lay Committee, based in Lenoir, North Carolina.

But the resolution must be ratified by a majority of the 2.5-million-member denomination's 173 presbyteries. Last year the assembly voted to ban same-sex unions, but regional votes overturned the ban.

Newly elected moderator Jack Rogers, a retired San Francisco Theological Seminary professor, says it is appropriate for presbyteries to decide clergy ordination. At the national level, he says, the church should only establish standards on matters of salvation. Rogers, who called the debate on homosexuality the "Presbyterian civil war," believes the denomination eventually will agree that active homosexuals must be accepted into the clergy.

"The church went through the same thing with the role of women and slavery and segregation," Rogers told Christianity Today. In each case, "People believed the Bible taught one thing, and now everybody believes the Bible teaches something else."

Conservatives, meanwhile, have formed a Confessing Church Movement within the PCUSA (ct, June 11, p. 15). The movement adheres to three basic beliefs: Jesus alone is the way of salvation; the Bible is God's revealed Word; and marriage is the only appropriate relationship for sexual intercourse. By implication, joining churches indicate they will not install ministers who do not adhere to the beliefs. By the end of June, the Confessing Movement had signed up 538 of 11,200 PCUSA congregations.

Rogers says he is determined to keep the denomination together. The General Assembly voted 467-41 to appoint a 17-member "spiritual discernment" task force to undertake a four-year study on how to bridge divisions concerning "Christology, biblical authority and interpretation, ordination standards, and power."

Joe Rightmyer, executive director since 1995 of the Louisville-based Presbyterians for Renewal, is encouraged by the plans for a lengthy churchwide study. "For years all we have been talking about is homosexuality," Rightmyer says. "Now we have an opportunity to deal with each other theologically."

Many conservatives expressed regret that the resolution did not go further. A failed proposal said that Jesus alone is the "singular saving Lord." The debate on whether Jesus is the only way to salvation lasted for two hours.

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August 6 2001, Vol. 45, No. 10