Friday afternoons are usually a good time for me to visit the ill, counsel church members or fine-tune my sermons, but at the end of a workweek earlier this month, I found myself spending several hours assembling a thick stack of documents. Three members of Fairfax Presbyterian Church had lodged a formal complaint against the church's governing board for allegedly mishandling a mortgage refinancing, and I needed to gather materials to mount a defense. I resented the time and effort being eaten up, but I knew that the issue had to be taken seriously. This case was heading down an increasingly popular path of conflict resolution -- a formal trial in the courts of the church.

As in our society at large, litigiousness has taken hold in Protestant denominations across the country, and it is causing some serious ripples. I'm fortunate that my case has been a relatively simple administrative one. But elsewhere, clergy and other church leaders find themselves in ecclesiastical courts over far weightier matters -- from questions of theology to issues involving sexuality -- and many are facing a charge one might have thought had gone out with witch burnings: heresy.

Yes, heresy trials are making a comeback, affecting congregations and lives in profound ways. Examples abound: An elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church lost his position after teaching evolution at a Michigan college. A Lutheran pastor from Brooklyn faced heresy charges for consorting with "pagans" after taking part in an interfaith gathering with Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus at Yankee Stadium in New York after Sept. 11, 2001. A Methodist minister in Omaha, charged for performing gay marriages, was convicted by a church tribunal and relieved of his ministerial credentials. The Methodist bishop of Chicago was recently cleared of heresy for saying he did not believe that the resurrection involved the resuscitation of Jesus's physical body. And in my own denomination -- the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) -- the Rev. Stephen Van Kuiken of Cincinnati, who was accused of heresy and blasphemy for marrying same-sex couples in violation of church law, was removed from the ministry on June 16.

There are now, in fact, more than 25 disciplinary cases pending in the Presbyterian Church alone, many more than we've seen at one time since the 1920s. What's behind this sudden rash of litigation? "In some respects, [it] reflects our society's common resort to formal litigation as a grievance process," observes Craig M. McKee, a Terre Haute, Ind., attorney and my fellow trustee in the National Cathedral Association. "A lawsuit is increasingly the way we communicate to others that 'we mean business.' "

Yet at bottom, all of these cases, whether they arise over Christology or sexuality, reveal an ongoing, and growing, tension -- the tension between diversity and purity. Proponents of diversity want to accept a broader range of sexual orientations and theological perspectives, while believers in purity want to enforce traditional morality and theological clarity.

Such tensions are tricky because they don't break down clearly into right and wrong, or good vs. evil. As I look over my congregation, I realize that this diversity-purity dichotomy is a balancing act, one that is constantly being performed by church members and myself. Part of my job as a pastor is to be open to new understandings of sexuality and theology, and to share these developments with my congregation, but at the same time I am charged with being a guardian of traditional truths and a dispenser of clear guidance. It is difficult for me to know how much to preserve and how much to change. I want the church to be a strong supporter of traditional marriage, for instance, but I also want it to make room for gays and lesbians who feel anguish because their monogamous relationships are not recognized. At times I feel as though these heresy trials are being staged not only within the courts of the church, but also within myself.

"There is no doubt that the U.S. is undergoing cultural change," says Dean Hoge, a professor of sociology at Catholic University. He points to rapid immigration, growing pluralism, new sensitivities about ecumenism (especially since 9/11) and ever-increasing acceptance of homosexuality -- of which the Supreme Court's ruling last week, overturning Texas's ban on sodomy, is being seen as just the latest manifestation. Hoge does not find it surprising that church members take opposing positions on the problems created by such change, but he believes, as a Presbyterian, that the best way for faithful Protestants to find their way is "through deliberation, debate and votes of national groups, not through the courts."

Using church courts to adjudicate these matters is certainly expensive and time-consuming. The case here at Fairfax Presbyterian has been a diversity-purity issue in the sense that it has pitted people who want new ministries and mission projects against those who want to preserve an original mortgage payoff date. It has demanded months of work by staff, elders, committee members and attorneys in the church. But our efforts are a small fraction of the total effort being mounted nationally. Church consultant and Episcopal priest Loren Mead has seen again and again "how debilitating to presbyteries and other judicatories are the interminable legal hassles."

Right now, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is being forced to respond to allegations filed by a single individual , a Reston attorney named Paul Jensen, who is responsible for a majority of the current cases in the denomination. He is demanding that presbyteries across the country discipline more than 20 ministers who have allegedly disobeyed church law. The first of these cases to go to trial was Rev. Van Kuiken's. The blow his removal has inflicted on him and his congregation is a stark reminder of how high the stakes are in each of these cases. A married man with children, Van Kuiken has now lost his job. Should he ever want to be a Presbyterian minister again, he would have to go through the ordination process from scratch. Still, he remains convinced that the issue of same-sex marriages is not going to go away.

It is certainly the right of every church to enforce its laws and require that its clergy conform to certain doctrines. Attorney McKee argues that denominations or churches with a judicial process in place, whatever its nature, must respect that structure. "It would be misguided and wrong to abolish or limit those processes to avoid controversy," he says, for peace does not come through putting limitations on the grievance process. He predicts that the Episcopal Church, for instance, "may well find itself in the throes of a painful, bitter, even embarrassing debate" when its General Convention meets next month to decide, among other things, whether or not to approve the election of a gay bishop by the diocese of New Hampshire -- but it will conduct the debate in the context of its code of laws.

The basic problem with law enforcement in the Christian church is that Jesus Christ himself was no legalist. He frequently broke established purity laws to minister to outcasts in his own society. Pastors like Van Kuiken argue that they are being faithful to Jesus when they break with tradition to marry gays and lesbians, and in many cases they have the full support of their congregations. Van Kuiken's 280-member Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church is about one-third gay, and it has long been committed to the full participation of homosexuals. While Paul Jensen certainly had a legal right to file an allegation against Van Kuiken, his complaint was not grounded in the convictions or experiences of Van Kuiken's Cincinnati congregation.

There is also the question of how best to define purity in a religious tradition that is constantly reforming itself. Susan Andrews, the pastor of Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, observes that over the course of biblical history, the understanding of religious purity has changed. For example, the prophet Isaiah contradicts the purity codes of Leviticus and Deuteronomy by including in the religious community two categories of people who had been excluded before -- "foreigners" and "eunuchs" (Isaiah 56:1-8). Those who had once been excluded on ritual grounds are now included because they honor God in their actions and relationships. "I believe that our purity battles today do not adequately reflect the unfolding notion of purity in scripture," Andrews says. "A purity of law turns into a purity of love, embodied in the gracious and hospitable ministry of Jesus Christ."

So the tension being felt by Christians today is not simply a pull between diversity and purity -- it is also a tug between different definitions of purity.

Of course, such doctrinal debates are anything but new. My colleague Fred Lyon, interim pastor of Brown Memorial Park Avenue Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, claims that "heretics, not infrequently, are prophets ahead of our clarification curve." Looking back on recent "heresies" such as the ordination of women and divorced people, he sees that progress occurred precisely because heretics forced us to clarify our faith. The root of the word "heresy" is a Greek word meaning "to choose," which is, of course, what religious people are challenged to do in any era.

Still, I wish this process of choosing and clarifying could go on primarily in local congregations, instead of the courts of the church. A congregation's members are in the best possible position to determine what constitutes appropriate ministry. I'm happy to report that my own judicial case was resolved when my congregation discussed the refinancing issue and voted to approve the work of our governing board. This led to a withdrawal of the complaint last Sunday, and so, for now, I can return to a focus on preaching, counseling and visiting the sick.

But if these matters continue to be taken to court, I fear that our churches will lose their attractiveness to a new generation. In my church, I see young people attracted by lively worship services, thoughtful discussions and opportunities to engage in exciting mission projects, and at the same time becoming confused and disenchanted by church fights. People can be well served by genuine debate about what Christ's teachings mean and how to apply them, says McKee, but if Christians take actions designed to exclude and punish, "the church will be viewed by an already skeptical world as cruel, hypocritical and irrelevant."

After all, people come to church to find a community of love, spiritual growth and sacrificial service, not a stained-glass version of our litigious secular world.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

Henry Brinton is pastor of Fairfax Presbyterian Church.

Author's e-mail: hgbrinton@aol.com

Link to Henry Brinton's Washington Post Articles Index Page

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