PCUSA OK gay pastors 

                                                                                                                                                                       Vol. XIV, No. 7 August 2001

On 15 June the Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly voted 317 to 208 to (1) remove a fidelity-in-marriage or chastity-in-singleness requirement from the book of Order, (2) nullify a 23-year-old official position forbidding ordination of noncelibate homosexuals, along with related church court rulings, and (3) make ordination standards a matter for local governing bodies.

It wasn’t only a setback for conservatives. Members of the Confessing Church Movement wanted the assembly to reaffirm Jesus Christ as Lord of all and the only way to salvation. Their concern, expressed in proposed overtures (resolutions) from presbyteries in Pennsylvania dn California, was based on what many evangelicals contend is “creeping universalism” in the PCUSA. Keynote speaker Dick Ficca, a PCUSA minister, argued at a major PCUSA conference last year that there are other ways to God besides Christ.

Comment: [The above is quoted from World magazine, 30 June 2001, p. 26. You may reach World at 800-951-6397.] The PCUSA has been moving rather steadily in a liberal direction for many years and is not to be confused with the much more conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). This selection illustrates how the cancer of liberalism has infected once solidly Christian denominations and, by contrast, to demonstrate how thankful we should be that God rescued the Southern Baptist Convention from following the same path ... which it was already far along before the Conservative Resurgence. TCP