A DIFFERENT VIEW OF THE
215TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY

By David Garnett,
Minister Commissioner from East Tennessee
and Pastor of Powell Presbyterian Church

In Denver I got the funny feeling that our church has been taken over by lawyers. The majority of the work we did together struck me more as legal work than spiritual work. We spent most of our time poring over carefully worded overtures from the Presbyteries, making changes, proposing amendments, substitute motions, and the like, trying to nail down everything with words.

But even as we did that, I was having doubts. Do we really think that everything CAN be nailed down with words? And do we really WANT everything nailed down? What makes us so afraid to leave room for mystery and wonder and awe? Is this endless yearly wrangling over words really the best use of our time as a national assembly?

The process of nailing everything down with words seemed to me too much like Congress at its worst: too many interest groups overinvested in the process, too much political and parliamentary maneuvering, too many people, of all stripes, trying by their own power and cleverness to remake the church in their own image. You expect the church to be somehow more, purer, above all of that.

For so long now, words, logic, rationality — the life of the mind — have been the strong suit of those in the Reformed tradition (which includes the Presbyterian Church), but now I wonder if we’re at this time in our church's history when all that is failing us, if we've reached together the limit of words to effect real change, and that what we need in the church, at least for a while, right now, is something from a different tradition, something beyond words.

I kept wondering in Denver: where are the mystics in our church? I see plenty of lawyers. Where are the artists, the dreamers, the lovers? I wonder if our time would have been better spent sitting in silence together, praying silently, creating empty spaces, hospitable spaces, where we could make room for each other in all of our differences and passions, giving up that terrible need we all have to some degree to control others instead of love them, and then breaking down into twos and three and fours and telling the Biblical stories and our own stories, and listening to music and poems and dreams, and pondering art, and connecting and networking with one another, sharing our dreams and joining our dreams with others.

I got the feeling that we are really stuck as a national church in a pattern of behavior that is not serving us well, not moving us forward together. It's a pattern that keeps bringing out our divisive polarities, instead of appealing to a much more important and much more abundant life-giving unity that we share.

I kept wondering what would have happened if we had gathered in Denver, for once, with no agenda, and let the Spirit work on us and lead us in new ways. It would have been awkward, of course, uncomfortable, maybe even chaotic, but I wonder if we're at that point as a church, where something wild and risky needs to happen to break us loose of the death-dealing pattern in which we are stuck.

I did have a fabulous moment, a mystical moment, as I listened to all these different Presbyterians, with all of their different opinions, influenced by all their different personal stories, this vast spectrum that is our church today, and I thought to myself that I really loved all these people and needed them all, and that I couldn't be a Christian in this world without all of them, and that my life would be so much less without them. I sensed that all of them had something of the truth to share that I needed to hear.

But then I had another moment when I thought: how tough it is to be one church. You see it more than ever at General Assembly. We've become this sprawling, big tent of a denomination where all kinds of people find a spiritual home, people with all kinds of different personal histories that dramatically affect their reading of the Bible and of faith and of life, and it's tough to live together with all those differences, to make room for everyone.

But somehow that's what we've got to do, that's what we are called to do, and I suspect that it's going to take something more than spending our time each year trying to nail everything down with words.