SACRAMENTO, CA - The Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP) last week heard from two prominent critics of a controversial policy paper on the changing nature of American families.

During a July 24-27 meeting here, the committee heard from the California pastor who introduced an alternate paper during this year's General Assembly and from another author of the substitute statement, the leader of a conservative Presbyterian think tank.

ACSWP's 45-page paper provoked contentious debate at the 215th Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and gave rise to the two-page substitute drafted by members of the National Issues Committee.

The committee approved the substitute, but the full GA voted to send both documents back to ACSWP for more work.

ACSWP was instructed to consult with the PC(USA)'s Office of Theology, Worship and Discipleship, "strengthen" the policy paper and report back to next year's Assembly in Richmond, VA.

The committee, which develops social policies for GA consideration, had urged the church in its paper - Living Faithfully with Families in Transition - to commit to being an inclusive community that values many forms of family, including those "with members of homosexual orientation."

Detractors said the ACSWP paper was based on "flawed" theology and sociology; diminished the importance of the traditional two-parent family; and elevated non-traditional families, including those involving unmarried partners and same-sex couples, to moral equivalence, in violation of scripture and of Christian morality.

The Rev. Marjorie Working, a member of the National Issues Committee who introduced the substitute report, told ACSWP during the Sacramento meeting: "I really urge you ... as you rewrite your policy, to think of ways that the church can nurture and support people who are willing to commit themselves to family life. A father and a mother are the ideal that God has held up for us."

Working, associate pastor of El Montecito Presbyterian Church in Santa Barbara, CA, conceded that families of other kinds also "can nurture," but warned that there are groups that call themselves "family" and say they "love one another, but they really do not work towards the building up of the church and Christ."

Working and a handful of fellow committee members wrote the substitute policy paper with the assistance of Alan Wisdom, who directs Presbyterian Action, one component of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC.

Wisdom argued for a policy that includes a stronger endorsement of marriage.

Noting that the ACSWP paper includes a research finding that 77 percent of adult Presbyterians are married, he told the committee: "The fact is that marriage is a very important institution for members of our church. And of course, if you include Presbyterians who are formerly married and might hope to be married (again), or whose parents are married, I mean it's a huge number of people who have a vital stake in marriage. So I think it should be a more major focus (of the report)."

Members of ACSWP met by conference call earlier this month with representatives of the denomination's theology and worship office, who will help revise sections of the family paper having to do with scripture and theology.

According to the Rev. Peter Sulyok, the ACSWP coordinator, the revised document will be reviewed by a yet-to-be-named panel of ACSWP representatives and others from around the church.

The proposed policy on families, written in response to directives from Assemblies in 1997 and 1998, documents the changing structure of family life in the United States, including increasing numbers of single-parent households, families in which children are raised by grandparents or other non-parent relatives, and domestic partnerships other than marriage. It holds that families of many kinds can raise children faithfully and responsibly.

The substitute paper defines marriage as a "civil contract between a woman and a man," and says that, "For Christians, marriage is a covenant through which a man and a woman are called to live out together before God their lives of discipleship."

Mental illness policy

ACSWP also approved a prospectus describing the work of a soon-to-be-formed task force that will explore the subject of serious mental illness and recommend a comprehensive church policy on ministering to people who suffer from such illnesses.

Copies of the prospectus, which outlines the specific topics to be covered by the policy, will be sent to the PC(USA)'s 173 presbyteries, probably in September. The presbyteries will then forward a one-page summary to each of the denomination's more than 11,000 congregations.

ACSWP will later seek feedback on the prospectus and nominations of task force members.

"The Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy encourages the whole church's involvement in this development of social witness policy," Sulyok said, "with the intention of raising awareness of issues surrounding serious mental illness, and with the hope of making the church a more welcoming place for those affected by these illnesses."

Sulyok said the committee hopes the group can meet in early 2004 and finish its work by mid-2005.

The 211th General Assembly (1999) directed ACSWP to develop a mental-illness policy for presentation to the 217th Assembly in 2006.

Globalization

ACSWP approved two papers on globalization that will be published as the final two installments of a series of four papers examining issues related to globalization.

One of the newly approved papers, "Globalization and Culture," was written by Ruy O. Costa of Billerica, MA, a former ACSWP committee chair. The other, "Globalization and the Environment," was compiled for ACSWP by Robert L. Stivers, a professor of ethics at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA.

In his paper, Stivers concludes that, while economic globalization "promises increasing material affluence to those who adopt its assumptions," it gives rise to "very real abuses (that) stem from basic, taken-for-granted assumptions about nature."

ACSWP was directed to monitor global trade issues by the 1996 Assembly.

Cross-fertilization

The social-witness committee got together in Sacramento with the Advisory Committee on Racial Ethnic Concerns (ACREC) and the Advisory Committee on Women's Concerns (ACWC).

This was the third time in about three years that the three committees met simultaneously, according to Sulyok.

The groups held separate business sessions, but joined for meetings with representatives of local ministries and justice-related groups.

Participants said joint meetings provide good opportunities for members of the committees to get better acquainted and learn more about each other's work.

"I've always felt that (meeting jointly) is really absolutely critical, because it's very, very easy for the left and right hand to kind of lose track of who's doing what," said the Rev. John Spangler of Marietta, GA, an ACREC member. "These three groups have a basic common agenda ... the justice issues of the life and ministries of the church. It's just critical that they sit down and share those points of commonality and are not duplicating things, but are supplementing each other."

Presbyterian News Service