Easter is a Fine Time for New Beginnings

I love my church. The members of the congregation are warm and welcoming, the pastor is a fine spiritual leader, the elders are sincere and dedicated. They are all really nice people – and that may be the problem.

Like nice people everywhere they look for the best in others and try to avoid rancor. So they continue to be in the denomination they have always been in — the PCUSA. It is far less stressful to continue than to confront the heresies of the denomination.

Me? I’m not so nice. Not that I’m mean or go out of my way to pick a fight, but neither will I avoid it if I think my integrity is on the line. In this case, every week I come across more information that the PCUSA has abandoned proclaiming the Word of God in favor of advancing a radical leftist political agenda. That is not what called me back to the church.

I came back to learn as much as I can about Jesus and salvation and to serve the Lord as well as I am able.  When I enter the sanctuary I leave my politics outside. This is a blessed time for worship and prayer.

So it is jarring when the leadership of the PCUSA claims to be speaking for me as it lobbies for its agenda. To whit –

A few days ago Commentary Magazine published an article with the headline, “Presbyterians Take Another Step Toward Hate for Israel.”  The first paragraph reads –

“As we wrote last week, the Presbyterian Church USA is faced with a choice about the future of its relations with the Jewish community and, indeed, the vast majority of Americans who ardently support the state of Israel. Unfortunately, rather than listen to voices of reason, church leaders have today taken another step toward approval of measures that place the denomination in favor of economic war against the Jewish state when their General Assembly Mission Council voted to recommend a report that calls for “selective divestment” from Israel.”

The Jewish news service JTA put it  –

“The executive committee of the 2.4 million member church voted Friday to pass a resolution endorsing a recommendation of divestment from Caterpillar, Motorola and Hewlett-Packard. The action followed a report released Sept. 9 by the church’s committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment that recommended divestment of companies it believes supports the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.”

They speak for 2.4 million members, and I am one of those. They will continue to claim to speak for me as long as I continue to be a member.

This is just the latest of a string of calumnies against Israel by the PCUSA. A few weeks ago Commentary published this –

“Institutions connected with the Presbyterians have become a font of anti-Israel invective that has crossed the line into outright anti-Semitism. In the course of promoting their anti-Israel policies, church leaders have engaged in rhetoric that seeks not only to delegitimize the state of Israel but also the Jewish community. The actions and statements of the church’s Israel Palestine Mission Network (IPMN-PCUSA) have been so egregious that the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella network of Jewish community relations groups, has been forced to go public with their complaints in hopes that ordinary Presbyterians will do something about the epidemic of hate speech springing from church activists.”

“…outright anti-Semitism.” Wow.

In my last post I described how the PCUSA betrayed the Roman Catholic Church by supporting an even more extreme mandate on free contraceptives than the Obama Administration had proposed. Think what you will about the merits of contraceptives, the faith community should be united in support of the freedom of all churches and church-based institutions to follow the dictates of their faith.

This principle transcends any one church or any one issue.  Earlier this year there was an effort in San Francisco to outlaw infant circumcision. This was a rabidly anti-Jewish campaign with literature featuring evil-looking hook-nosed Rabbis with big knives standing over tiny babies. Hatred of Jews (and Catholics, for that matter) is not rare in the United States. We don’t need the PCUSA adding to it.

Add to this the abomination of the PCUSA’s support for abortion. This is not a “pro-choice” position but a pro-abortion position. If it were pro-choice the PCUSA would be putting as many resources into adoption counseling and services as it does into abortion advocacy, but I can find very little if anything the denomination is doing to encourage pregnant women to consider adoption. The Board of Pensions has an “adoption assistance” program, but that is aimed solely at people who are covered by BOP benefits and aimed solely at families that want to adopt, not at prospective mothers who might consider adoption as an alternative to abortion.

Doing a Google search for “Presbyterian Adoption Services” or “Presbyterian Adoption Counseling” turns up a scant number of actual services, and the few that seem to be active, such as the Park Slope Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, New York, are affiliated with the PCA, not the PCUSA.

But more than that, the PCUSA advocates for taxpayer funding of abortion. That means even Catholic nuns would be forced to pay for abortions through their taxes.

I could add a very long list of other offenses committed by the PCUSA, but hatred of Jews, betrayal of Catholics, and complicity in the murder of tens of millions of God’s most innocent and helpless humans, is enough to convince me I can no longer be associated with this denomination.

Easter is a fine time for new beginnings.