Two days ago, I opened an envelope from Louisville to find a copy of a new occasional paper from the Office of Theology and Worship: William Weston’s Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment. I cringed. Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment? So I began to read, and my fears were confirmed. “It is time to rebuild the church’s Establishment,” he writes. “Decency and order require it.” (p.12)
Weston’s thesis is this: The anti-establishment attitude of the 1960s is what led to the decline of the denomination. Our preoccupation with political correctness (“a straightjacket for the church” p.12) has removed from power the “tall-steeple” pastors who should rightly lead the denomination, and thus contributed to the PC(USA)’s lack of influence and authority in society. The solutions: remove representation rules, “abolish all the current advisory delegate categories”, and reinstate the core of tall-steeple pastors who lead the Presbyterian Establishment.
How much longer will we continue trying to preserve Christendom? This paper seems to me to be an example of the church failing to rightly interpret its context: Christendom is over, and the national structure of the denomination is never going to have the authority it thinks it once had. Weston certainly does have some ideas which would benefit the church: actual parity of ministers and elders, smaller presbyteries, smaller (or non-existent) synods. But the very term “Presbyterian Establishment” connotes a desire to preserve the institution for the institution’s own sake. Do any of the suggestions in “Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment” really help the church adapt to its context in the mission field of post-Christendom North America? Are there better ways to renovate the PC(USA) than by re-roofing a building whose walls are crumbling?
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