Rev. Dooling presented the substance of this paper to the Commissioner’s Committee on Catholicity which dealt with COCU at the 208th General Assembly in 1996. Rev. Dooling was an overture advocate supporting the Presbytery of the Plains and Peaks’ overture calling for the PCUSA to withdraw from COCU. It is used with permission.
Shortly after I was ordained in 1968, twenty-eight years ago, the very first job that I was given was to review, with a committee of elders, the original COCU proposal. The acronym, COCU, in those days stood for Consultation on Church Union. It was a plan for the organic merger of several mainline denominations. So, during the last quarter century COCU, and some other folks in this room, and I have grown old together.
And, in light of the fact that it has taken us so long to get where we are, the question my presbytery wants you to consider is this: is COCU an idea whose time may just have come and gone? This is made increasingly evident by Mr. Andrews’[the PCUSA stated clerk] remarks yesterday afternoon, that the world into which we are moving is one in which centralized authority will increasingly fail.
Lots of things about COCU have changed over the past 28 years. Some basic concerns have not changed. The Episcopal Church, for instance, says that the church exists only where there are bishops who alone are able to ordain women and men to ministry. They continue to require Presbyterians to participate in a rite during which a bishop can validate my ordination by laying hands on me and praying the proper prayer over me. This, of course, begs the question: what about all those things that I did as a minister during the last 28 years?—all those baptisms and weddings, all those communion services—were all of those somehow invalid?
None of the other COCU denominations require us Presbyterians to have bishops or to have our ministries “RECONCILED” in order to consider our ordinations to be valid—none of them. Now, the standing Committee on COCU has publicly assured us time and again that this rite of reconciliation is NOT really re-ordination. But, several years ago over lunch, when I asked a prominent member of the COCU standing Committee, Horace Allen, why the prayer in the reconciling liturgy is to be prayed silently, he chuckled and said, “That’s so that you can think what you want to think, and the bishop can think what he wants to think.”
The inference, of course, was that the bishop gets to think that he is re-ordaining us but we do not have to concur. When I pointed out that this approach seemed to lack a certain degree of moral and intellectual integrity, the gentleman just shrugged his shoulders and chuckled again and said, “Well, that’s the way it’s going to have to be in order to make this thing work.”
But, interestingly while the COCU standing Committee has continued to propose this somewhat strange method for squaring the circle of our different understandings of ordination, the Episcopal Church has not bought into it. It appears that they have the same problem with it that I do, that it does not treat either of our traditions honestly and fairly. In a report to the 1994 House of Bishops (which meets only every three years), the Episcopal standing Commission on Ecumenical Relations said that the rite of reconciliation is “FLAWED.”
They said that their tradition has been treated superficially and that the documents do not provide, “sufficient theological basis for the covenanting acts.” In plain language, they said that the rite of reconciliation as proposed in the COCU documents is little more than smoke and mirrors designed to be all things to all people and that to participate in it would be to compromise both their tradition and integrity.
Now, the House of Bishops did not heed the recommendation of their Commission and withdraw forthwith from COCU. But, according to a friend of mine, a retired Episcopal bishop, until we Presbyterian ministers agree openly and without hesitation to be re-ordained by validly consecrated bishops, Episcopal participation in COCU is functionally a dead letter. So, the bottom line is that what you are being asked to do is to recommend to this Assembly a series of radical changes to our constitutional tradition that will alter forever the nature of Presbyterian governance. You are being asked to do it notwithstanding the fact that even if we provide for the consecration of Presbyterian bishops the COCU proposal may still be fatally flawed because the rite of reconciliation lacks integrity and the House of Bishops will continue to reject it as currently proposed.
That’s what my grandfather used to call, “buying a pig in a poke,” which is always unwise. And in this case, it is particularly unwise because, as the Overture that I represent points out, we do not need an organizational structure and official sanction from on high in order to make an ecumenical witness. You know and I know that we are already doing it right alongside the Episcopalians in every one of the cities and towns in which we live, all across America, indeed, and all around the world. Methodists and Presbyterians and Episcopalians and Disciples and Lutherans are already working together usually right alongside Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics.
You know it and I know it, because we participate in it. You know and I know that we do not all have to live in the same house in order to be a family. The price that Presbyterians are being asked to pay in order to move into the same house is simply too steep and dear. This is particularly true in light of the fact that we have absolutely no documented assurance that it will be enough and that even more will not be required in the future to close the deal. Furthermore, the Presbytery of Plains and Peaks wants you to know that we believe that the existence of denominations is NOT, as some would suggest, a scandal to the gospel but rather a sign of the wonderful diversity of God’s people.
Moreover, putting the words “Church of Christ Uniting” under the words “Mountain View Presbyterian Church” on our sign out on Garfield Avenue in Loveland is not going to lure anyone off the bus or win anyone to Christ. All it will do is create more meetings for God’s people to attend and more costly bureaucratic structures for God’s people to support in lieu of mission. It will promote the clericalization of the church, which is a fancy way of saying, that there will be less and less power in the hands of the laity where we Presbyterians have always said it ought to be.
This paper first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 2, No. 6 (Nov/Dec 1996).
