Open Letter to the Coalition

You may have suspected from reading what I contribute to this blog that I am bit wacky or, as I would say, radical.

Year after year, the coalition applies the very same tactics. Get the names of commissioners ahead of time. Flood them with materials that help them formulate their (what?) two minute speeches before a committee or their to exercise voices on the floor in plenary. Every evening your corps of cub reporters scurry back to a central location to deliver their news of the day with commentary. You try to get as many commissioners as possible to participate in this process.

You help them write commissioner resolutions and possible amendments or substitute motions. You help with minority reports on the committees that are reporting contrary to “our” way. You prepare commissioners for debates by providing talking points.

Now the revisionists have the same tactics. The great advantage they have is a killer. They have the good agency of the GA Staff and usually all the appointed committee chairs are sympatric to their ends – since the coalition seems to never (or rarely) have a sympathetic moderator. For pity sake, they even have the worship preachers in their back pockets – all but maybe one token moderate evangelical who usually delivers a message of mush in an effort to impress the liberal moderates that they are civil in their protests.

The Prolife group will pass out their daily bread newsletter – God bless them for at least getting on the streets where this fight is best carried out.

The charismatic’s, God’s favorite sons and daughters, have a Prayer Mountain to do spiritual warfare in a high place overlooking the convention centers. In the dozen or so General Assemblies I’ve attended and the two where I was a commissioners. I found myself being led to that sacred space.

Nicholas Cop was as the rector the University of Paris. On November 1, 1533,  he makes his inaugural address before the faculty. He had a shy but brilliant Greek language student help him write it. In that speech he says, "Blessed are the persecuted! Let us not be afraid of confessing the Gospel. Should we strive to please man rather than God? Should we fear those who can kill the body yet are powerless over the soul?" At that point, his career as rector ended and, had he not escaped Paris his life would have ended. Calvin, not yet prepared to go public as a Protestant, was later forced to flee for his life as well. His room in Paris was searched and many of his writing destroyed.

In October 18-19 – 1534, French protestants launch a placard campaign to publish the principles of Protestantism and protest the arrest of many of their leaders.

This is where the Coalition needs to go – to the streets, with placards denouncing the sham that is the General Assembly. How many tall steeple pastors or sophisticates in the PFR would put their hand to a placard and march in front of the doorways at the Assembly hall in Pittsburgh to protest the heresy that is promoted therein?

My oldest daughter and I attended the GA meeting in Columbus Ohio. We walk out, we had enough,  after a gentile debate on partial birth abortion, that we lost. In the car she was agitated and I ask her why. She said the debate was so polite and civil. Dad, they were talking about killing fully developed children as they leave their mother’s bodies. Someone needed to have screamed out, “This is wrong!”

Friends, in the spirit of the French protestants, it is time to march in the streets and scream, “This is wrong!”