Question f - Follow, Love, and Work

1. The Confessions

W-4.0404 f.—Will you in your own life seek to follow the Lord Jesus Christ, love your neighbors, and work for the reconciliation of the world?

As the third question introduced, the confessions are a resource for the church’s unfolding understanding of what it means to follow the Lord Jesus Christ, love our neighbors, and work for the reconciliation of the world. For Presbyterians, and particularly for those who are ordained as deacons, ruling elders, or pastors, the confessions are lived. Through study of the confessions, we gain insight into the historical moment for each of these statements of faith, as well as learn about who we are called to be as followers of Jesus Christ. Some confessions, particularly the Confession of Belhar and The Confession of 1967, as well as The Theological Declaration of Barmen, are important because they stated the convictions of the Christian faith in the face of a controversy or proclaimed the identity of the church during great social change. We believe that God continues to work. It is a “Reformed obligation to confess the faith in each time and place.”^[1]

Even though we do not live in apartheid South Africa, or in the rapid social change of the 1960s United States, we believe that Christians of different times and places are able to provide a witness to one another.

The Confession of Belhar

The Confession of Belhar arose from The Theological Declaration of Barmen in conversation with the realities of apartheid South Africa. It was adopted in 1986 by the Dutch Reformed Mission Church in South Africa, and then by a series of churches in South Africa and the United States. This moment in the life of church is one of particular shame, as the church was integral to the creation and maintenance of apartheid, much as the church has been integral to the colonization of what came to be called the Americas, and as it has been a central player in the creation and justification of Native American removal and cultural genocide, chattel slavery, and Jim Crow laws.

Unity is not just meant to be spiritual and a matter of worship practice, but also tangible. Unity must be real and cannot be achieved if legal separation exists.

This confession is relevant today because separation persists through less blatant legal, economic, and cultural means. It took two efforts in the PC(USA) to include this confession in our Constitution, which speaks to the divisive nature of race in the United States. However, to follow Jesus, love one’s neighbors and work for reconciliation demand we acknowledge the real and powerful divisions between us.

The Confession of 1967

Following decades of conflict over doctrine and essential tenets of the faith, dispensationalism, the fundamentalist-modernist conflict, the advent of neo-orthodoxy, splits and mergers, the church determined it needed a modern confession, after an overture to the PC(USA) came asking for updated language for the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Naturally, there was a great deal of controversy over the new confession. Revisions were made, including a concession that created a new item on personal morality (in regards to sexual behavior and relationships), and the modifications made the confession more likely to pass and be accepted.

The confession is divided into sections on reconciliation and equality, in the context of racial discrimination, international conflict, persistent poverty, and gender equality.

2. Reconciliation

The confessions are not simply historical documents. While they arose from specific circumstances, we as a community believe they continue to contribute in a meaningful and ongoing basis to the life of the church, and, indeed, the world. Nor are the truths of the confessions confined to our Sunday morning lives. We who are Presbyterians, particularly as those who have taken ordination vows, believe they shape the entirety of our lives.

Reconciliation has the potential to become a watered-down nice term for getting along. It might mean a white congregation and a black congregation swap preachers once a year. It might mean two people in a broken relationship struggle to come back together.

When my brother and I fought as children, our mother insisted we talk through the conflict. She mentioned to me recently that it was painful for her to make us do that because we had hurt each other, and “talking it out” required we verbalize how we had been hurt and how we had inflicted that hurt. As the eldest and more verbal child, I tended to say things that hurt. My brother quickly grew to be physically stronger than I was and inflicted hurt in other ways. But regardless of how difficult it was, our mother kept it up because she believed that it was better to say the wrongs out loud than allow them to simmer, at least in the long run as we developed into adults and as two humans in a lifelong relationship.

My brother and I did not have structural advantages and disadvantages. The kind of reconciliation called for in the confessions is much more serious than two little ones working through a conflict. This is because the confessions speak to times and places where the conflicts are happening in the midst of structural oppression, resulting in some groups having legal, cultural, theological, and economic advantages, and others navigating society with the inverse disadvantages.

It is too easy for us to look at the contexts of the Confessions of Belhar and 1967 and believe we live in such different times that the confessions are unnecessary, hold no sway over our lives, or just do not apply. But consider these facts in just three of the modern-day issues of God’s people:

Incarceration

The causes of incarceration are not about inherent levels of criminality. Black Americans are more likely to be incarcerated in part because black neighborhoods are more heavily policed than white neighborhoods, due to segregation and persistent beliefs resulting in biased policies and procedures. Black people are also more likely than white people to be stopped by police. In fact, black drivers are three times more likely than white drivers to be stopped, even though white drivers are more likely to be carrying something illegal.^[5]

Creating Illegality

When my white Jewish great-grandparents arrived in the U.S. from eastern Europe, and my Japanese great-great-grandparents arrived in the U.S., they came before “illegal” was a term used to describe the processes of migration.

My great-grandmother Kimiko was born in the U.S. and was therefore a citizen. When she married my great-grandfather Shuichi, who was not a citizen (because it was illegal at the time for Asians to become naturalized citizens), she was subject to a law that stripped citizen women of their citizenship when they married men ineligible for citizenship. She lost her citizenship rights, effectively becoming stateless from the time of their marriage in 1924 until 1952, when the McCarren-Walter Act changed how the U.S. treated migrants from Asia, and my great-grandfather was allowed to become a citizen. At the time, a set of laws known as the Alien Land Laws prevented Asian immigrants ineligible for citizenship from owning property. Additionally, they lost whatever they and their children had during World War II, when they were interned in a concentration camp in Arizona.

Contrast these accounts with some of my white friends’ stories. Their ancestors passed through Ellis Island, and were given the opportunity to go west and claim land from which Native Americans had been removed. They could become citizens, own property, vote, and begin accumulating wealth without the government removing their entire ethnic group and causing massive loss as a community.

Today, the immigration system has set up concepts for “legal” and “illegal” immigration. While legislation no longer expressly prohibits migration from China, or prohibits noncitizens from ever becoming citizens, immigration policies and processes have created virtually untenable situations for people seeking documentation for migration, and criminalizes people who, just a few decades before, could have crossed freely between countries.

Sexism and Gender Discrimination

Now that we see more women in positions of leadership, it is possible for us to be unaware of the ongoing gender inequalities in the church and in society. In 2016, the PC(USA) released a study showing stark differences between how women and men in the church experience discrimination.^[6] Eighty-four percent of women teaching elders report experiencing gender-based harassment or discrimination, whereas only 32 percent of men teaching elders report experiencing gender-based harassment.

Society continues to face ongoing inequality between men and women, reflected in pay gaps, wildly unequal representation among elected officials and top corporate leadership. Additionally, women continue to bear the brunt of unpaid labor in the form of elder and childcare, as well as household responsibilities.^[7]

3. Ordination

Ordination is not something that is easily given or taken away. It is a role that is special, and requires congruence in one’s entire life, not just church life. Those who are called to ordered ministry as deacons, ruling elders, and pastors have roles that are distinct, yet equally important in the life of the church and world.

To fully love our neighbors, we must work to grasp what it is that holds people back from abundant life, including the structural restrictions of racism, sexism, segregation, and xenophobia. As God acts for justice for those most vulnerable, so must we align ourselves with the God who calls and claims us in our baptism and also in our ordination. To follow Jesus is to seek reconciliation of the world, taking on the risk that he did. This goes beyond pulpit swaps, renting space to an immigrant congregation, calling a woman to be a pastor, or taking occasional mission trips to a reservation. This is about how we work against inequality throughout our lives: at church, at work, in our communities. This has implications for how and where we live, the policies supported by our elected officials, and how we deploy our own resources of time and money.

To be faithful in these instances could be very costly. This goes to show that ordination is not simply a matter of authority in a congregational or judicatory setting, but a call to live into the vows of ordination throughout one’s life. The solemn and public nature of the ordination service underscores the seriousness with which the office is to be taken.

These confessions provide an example of what it means to live faithfully, not simply inside the church, but as the church in the world. An argument central to the Confession of Belhar is that racism is antithetical to the unity of the church. Rather than bend to what society wills, such as legal apartheid, or systems and structures that maintain inequality between genders, we are called to address the violations of reconciliation and unity in the name of our faith. After all, we are not so distant from legal, cultural, overt segregation in both church and state, and we understand that people continue to experience segregation and inequality.

It is not enough to confess what we believe, but to understand what it means to be the church, more specifically, at particular times, for the “visible life of the church”^[1]. Accommodating social divisions is a betrayal of ordination vows, and ultimately a betrayal of Christ. Our ordinations call us to be faithfully different.

4. Additional Resource

Race and Reconciliation: The Confessions of 1967 and Belhar from the Being Reformed series published by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) https://www.pcusastore.com/Products/680854/race--reconciliation-the-confessions-of-1967-and-belhar-workbook.aspx

5. About the writer

The Reverend Laura Mariko Cheifetz is the Assistant Dean of Admissions, Vocation, and Stewardship at Vanderbilt Divinity School. She has served in theological education, social justice advocacy, and publishing. Cheifetz has participated in ecumenical service on behalf of the denomination and is a frequent writer for religious publications.

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