Dissent or Defiance

It has been a month since I wrote anything for this blog. For a while I took it to a private status, allowing only a handful of family and a few trusted friends access to it. I sought the counsel of several friends and a professional colleague who are wise and have a perspective on my situation that I lack. I am too close to it to see its full dominion. I also see it through the eyes of fear and anger. These are two primal emotions that reside in our reptilian brain. Each has the effect of narrowing one’s thoughts and obscuring clear thinking.

My motivation for making my blog private was primarily anger and resentment. You see, the congregation I have served for ten years is considering a change of denominational affiliations. The presbytery I belong to formed a “team” to try to see how serious this congregation was in its expressed desire to leave the Presbyterian Church it now belongs to and transfer to another, more conservative Presbyterian Church. My consistent posture in this situation is to remain neutral where possible in order to try to facilitate a constructive dialogue. In terms of the advisability of the congregation to stay or leave, I have disciplined myself to suspend a personal judgment.  I can see a justification for leaving and a valid justification for staying. It is a decision the congregation will live with for many years after I move on.  I have made it redundantly clear that I will not be their pastor after should they vote to leave. Fact is I will not be their pastor after they vote to stay either.

 My presbytery has authority to remove me from the position I hold in the congregation I serve. This can be done as an administrative act and not a disciplinary act. The difference between the two is that the first has few safeguards while the second affords the minister all the rights of an accused person. If a commission of the presbytery determines that my voice in this blog constitutes open defiance of the rightful authority of the presbytery, I am in error. They would conclude that I have, de facto, renounced the jurisdiction of the presbytery and thereby set my ordination aside. If it is determined that any statement made in this blog, or in my newsletter articles, in sermons, or in comments witnessed in public forums are covered under my exercise of free speech and the right to voice a dissenting opinion then I am protected from discipline. The deciding principle lies in the subjective distinction between dissent, which is protected speech, and defiance which has some dire consequences.

The chair of the Response Team assigned to “work with” the congregation I serve in order to ascertain the degree of the congregation’s dissatisfaction with the PC(USA) requested certain documents, encouraged to do so by the General Presbyter; they are copies of my last five sermons, three years of my weekly newsletter articles, and they had already freely granted themselves access to this blog.  There are over one hundred blog entries. The blog software records all the times someone access a given blog entry. It seems they are interested in fewer than ten blog post. What follows is the one that might rightly justify, in the mind of some, evidence that I moved from dissent to defiance.

“Those who lead the Presbyterian Church (USA) adhere to doctrines that are gravely erroneous. They preach an implicit universal salvation – by endorsing the plan of salvation of every religion or none at all as a way to please our God. They practice “spirituality” straight from the witches of Endor. They advocate the sacrifice of infants as though to the god Moloch. Not by placing children in the glowing hot arms of this detestable false god, but my burning these precious little ones with salty water or inserting a knife in the back of their heads as they emerge healthy and fully developed through the birth canal. They deny the Trinity by reciting a hundred metaphors in the place of a personal triune God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.”

These words were not part of a sermon or a newsletter article. They were not addressed to the members of the congregation I serve – there may be less than five members who follow this blog. The intent of this blog is clearly stated under its title. There is no intention behind the expressed thoughts in this blog to convince anyone of anything. It is an outcry of my tortured soul. Truth be known, my primary audience is my own soul and mind of my Savior to whom I turn for comfort. Everyone else is welcome read over my shoulder, or not.