Word: presbyterian
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...years ago that I'd end up studying religion. I would have told them they were many," she says now. The idea first came to her one holiday when she went home to visit her family in Pennsylvania and was dragged along with them to services at the conservative Presbyterian church she had attended as a child. Watching the minister, Stevens began to contemplate the multi-purpose role he held within the community: teacher, counsellor, administrator, tending to the needs of both young and old. She realized also that she had been performing all these functions since she left school...
...conservatives' main targets are the National Council of Churches, whose president is United Methodist Bishop James Armstrong, and the national bureaucracies of the council's key member denominations, particularly the Methodists and the United Presbyterian Church...
...policy field. The I.R.D. now issues a monthly bulletin, topical pamphlets and special publications like last week's 100-page response to critics in the Protestant Establishment, and it answers a growing flood of press and lay inquiries (2,500 since the CBS show). The key researcher is Presbyterian Kerry Ptacek, a onetime member of the Students for a Democratic Society. He says now that "a crisis in my own spiritual life had led me to leftist totalitarian politics." His present work is a reaction against that earlier commitment...
...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...
...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...