Patching Up a Family Feud

By Richard N. Ostling

Northern and Southern Presbyterians are ready to reunite

Just 45 miles from Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began on April 12, 1861, clergy and lay delegates from the Charleston, S.C., area assembled last week in the small, red-carpeted sanctuary of Bethel Presbyterian Church in Walterboro. The issue under consideration there and at similar gatherings across the South: whether to end the Presbyterians' own North-South schism, which dates from the Civil War. After an hour of genteel debate, the Walterboro meeting voted for reunion, 42 to 41.

The two denominations voting on reunion are the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (P.C.U.S.), most of whose 829,000 members live in the South, and the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (U.P.C.U.S.A.), which has 2.4 million members nationwide. The so-called Northern branch has long wanted to unite with the Southern, and not one of its presbyteries (regional groupings of local churches) has voted no so far. Under the Southern church's constitution, a negative vote by only 16 of the 61 presbyteries would kill the merger. But the narrow approval in Walterboro last week raised the Southern Presbyterian vote to 35 to 7, making passage of the historic proposal virtually certain. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), to be formed in June, will become the nation's fourth largest Protestant body.*

The Presbyterian division in 1861 was an inevitable result of the Civil War, which also split other denominations, notably the Methodists and Baptists. Over the decades, the Southern church has been more conservative than the Northern, particularly on social issues, but in recent years those differences have begun to soften. The Rev. J. Randolph Taylor of Charlotte, N.C., Southern co-chairman of the joint committee that wrote the reunion plan, says that Presbyterianism was "a family that was split mainly by culture, politics and war. Slowly we've come to realize that we need each other."

Not all Presbyterians agree. Since 1969, when the current merger negotiations began, each church has suffered schisms as disgruntled conservatives packed up and started their own small denominations or joined other existing churches. Both Presbyterian branches have also suffered a steady drop in membership. In all, the Southern church has declined by 129,000 adherents and the Northern church by a disastrous 778,000, or one-fourth of its total membership.

The joint committee that prepared the merger plan had several delicate issues to contend with. For example, their proposal had to assure black Presbyterians that they would not be hurt by the merger. Racial tensions underlay the historic split, and the reunion would have been seriously flawed if blacks protested the agreement. Despite decades of separation and suspicion, says Taylor, "the amazing thing is that black Presbyterians are saying, 'We're going to trust you one more time.' " Another key issue was the policy of the Northern church requiring local congregations to elect women as lay elders. When adopted by U.P.C.U.S.A. in 1979, the rule led to a schism, and it is unpopular in the South. "A congregation has the right to choose its own officers," says the Rev. J. McDowell Richards, a retired P.C.U.S. seminary president and a member of the reunion committee. The pact gives P.C.U.S. congregations a 15-year grace period in which they can apply for annual exemptions from the rule. Women activists within the United Presbyterian Church resent this provision, but decided not to oppose the reunion plan.

The major difference between the two churches involves doctrine. The faith of Southern Presbyterians is summed up by the Westminster Confession, laid down in 1647 by an order of the English Parliament. Since 1967, the Northern Presbyterians have broadly accepted a number of creeds as their standards of faith, in addition to the Westminster. The effect, to conservative Southerners, has been to make more ambiguous the church's basic beliefs. The committee required a stricter doctrinal vow for future clergy but also agreed that the reunited church would write its final confession of faith only after the merger. Southern conservatives agreed because they won another, far more significant compromise. The plan includes an "escape clause" that allows Southern congregations, but not Northern ones, to leave any time between 1984 and 1991, with their church properties, if they are unhappy with the merger. This clause guaranteed sufficient conservative support to pass the reunion plan.

James Andrews, the Stated Clerk (chief administrator) of the P.C.U.S., says that for Southern congregations the bailout provision is "an invitation to play five years of hardball to see if we can make this church work. If not, then we'll just kiss one another goodbye." Southern conservatives will be watching closely as leaders decide how presbytery lines will be redrawn, what the new confession of faith contains, how many conservatives get important jobs in the staff reshuffle ahead, and how much cash goes to evangelism and how much to controversial secular causes. Another question is where to put the consolidated church headquarters. The U.P.C.U.S.A. is in New York City and the P.C.U.S. in Atlanta.

The voting patterns so far show that a majority of Southern Presbyterians basically agree with the Rev. John M. Miller of Hilton Head Island, S.C., who argues that opposition to merger now is "a feudal expression of longing for a past that can never be." Adds Richards, 80, a patriarch of the Southern denomination: "The church is under attack in so many quarters that we can't be divided. We've got to sacrifice the things that aren't essential in order to get together." --By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by B.J. Phillips/Atlanta

* After the Southern Baptist Convention (13.8 million members), United Methodist Church (9.5 million) and National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc. (5.5 million).

With reporting by B.J. Phillips/Atlanta This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.