Local Presbyterians respond to revision allowing gay and lesbian ordination
After watching the ongoing schism within the Anglican church that was aided by fundamentalist conservatives in the US, the Presbyterian church makes a wise but cowardly decision by deferring this decision to local congregations.
A recent vote by the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) reversed a decades-old policy prohibiting the ordination of non-celibate gays and lesbians, an issue that has divided the Presbyterian Church for years.
“For the past 20 years the Presbyterian Church has been at war with itself,” The Rev. Dr. Ralph Clingan, pastor for Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church in St. George, said of the policy that has been contested four times since the late 1990s.
In 1996 the Presbyterian General Assembly voted to require ministers, elders and deacons to “live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or chastity in singleness,” according to an article that appeared in the Louisville, Ky. Courier-Journal.
The re-worded constitution, referred to by some as “the local option,” “removes a provision that flatly prohibits the ordination of sexually active unmarried Presbyterians as church officers,” according to the Presbyterian Church (USA) website but it does not force individual Presbyterian Churches to permit gays and lesbians to be ordained.
That decision is left up to each congregation.
“To me, it’s probably the best compromise we could come up with,” Clingan said.
The amendment takes effect July 10.