In the coming months, ministers and elders in all 173 Presbyteries of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) will vote on a series of amendments to the PCUSA constitution.

These amendments would radically change our denomination—and not in a direction that you or I would want.

Presbyterian Action for Faith & Freedom is committed to doing its part to stop these amendments. Voting on the amendments has already started. It will continue through the first half of next year. We have every reason to believe that these amendments can be defeated in the presbyteries. But we have to act now.

Amendment 10-A would remove from our Book of Order the expectation that church officers practice “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness.”

Amendment 10-1 would replace our entire Form of Government in the Book of Order.

Amendment 10-2 would insert into our Book of Confessions the Belhar Confession, a 1980s manifesto for leftist liberation theology.

Any one of these three amendments would be a serious concern. Taken together, the three pose an unprecedented challenge to Presbyterian faith and practice as we have known it. Are you and I ready to respond to that challenge?

Deleting the “fidelity and chastity” requirement would be a decisive step away from the consistent teaching of the Scriptures. It would leave our denomination with no standard for sexual conduct. No longer would Presbyterians call one another to uphold God’s good plan for marriage as the proper channel for human sexual desire. As in the chaotic biblical time of the Judges, everyone would “do what is right in his own eyes.”

The proposed new PCUSA Form of Government, much shorter and looser than the time-tested one that we now have, would remove all sorts of protections against abuses. It would give presbyteries greater license, for example, in removing a minister from his pulpit.

The new Form of Government would also mandate a limitless inclusiveness, “guarantee[ing] full participation and representation in its [the church’s] worship, governance and emerging life to all persons or groups within its membership.”

The Belhar Confession, if adopted, would become by far the most political document in our Book of Confessions. The authors of Belhar were right to condemn the racist apartheid system in 1980s South Africa. But they went much further and espoused a liberation theology based on class warfare. The church “must witness against all the powerful and privileged who selfishly seek their own interests and thus control and harm others,” Belhar demands. It authorizes endless political crusades as “the church must witness against and strive against any form of injustice.”

These three amendments could deal a severe blow to our denomination. They would prioritize a politics of inclusiveness and “justice” above the “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” that have traditionally bound us together. They would turn the church more into an aggregation of “persons and groups,” each going its own way and claiming its own equal rights, rather than a disciplined body of believers holding one another accountable to Christ’s commands.

Is this the direction that we want to go as Presbyterians? I say no. And I know that many others, including friends like you, would join me in saying no. That was the conclusion of an August gathering of PCUSA renewal leaders that I attended.

The 100 or so at that meeting in Chicago agreed that we needed to mount a coordinated campaign responding to these three amendments.

Presbyterian Action is a full partner in the Presbyterian Renewal Network’s 2010-2011 “Reclaim Biblical Teaching” campaign. Our particular contributions come in two areas: spotlighting marriage as the centerpiece of Christian teaching on sexuality, and challenging the liberation theology espoused by the Belhar Confession.

In the debate over the “fidelity and chastity,” we must do more than stand against homosexual and other non-marital relationships. We must say what we are for—the relationship that fulfills God’s intentions for human sexuality and brings God’s blessings to parents, children, and the community. That relationship is marriage.

Lifting up marriage has been our theme in Presbyterian Action. It’s why I wrote my IRD paper on “Is Marriage Worth Defending?” It’s why we followed the work of the Special Committee on Civil Union and Christian Marriage so closely. It’s why we championed the bold, biblical minority report out of that committee. We want Presbyterians to acknowledge God’s good gift of marriage, and to understand how different it is from all other relationships. That’s why “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness” must remain the standard to which the PCUSA holds its leaders.

Fortunately—or perhaps providentially—PCUSA churches have been invited to study marriage over the next two years. The 2010 General Assembly sent out for study both the majority and minority reports from the Special Committee on Civil Union and Christian Marriage. We in Presbyterian Action plan to use this opportunity to remind church members of the unique value of Christian marriage.

Presbyterian Action will be providing resources to facilitate this study of marriage. Already, several of my writings on marriage are among the materials being distributed by the “Reclaim Biblical Teaching” campaign. I have laid out a side-by-side comparison of the majority and minority reports on marriage that should be very useful to churches conducting the study. IRD/Presbyterian Action board member Sue Cyre and I are working on a study guide.

There is no other organization in the PCUSA that is focused on affirming marriage in the way that Presbyterian Action is. Likewise, there is no other organization that directly confronts the leftist liberation theology expressed in the Belhar Confession.

From their founding in the 1980s, Presbyterian Action and the IRD have challenged the emphasis on politics, the tendency to divide society between oppressors and the oppressed, and the demands that the church get in line with every self-proclaimed liberation movement of the oppressed.

Presbyterian Action has a record of effective advocacy in the PCUSA. At the 2010 General Assembly, we saw success on both of our major goals. We aimed to defeat the attempts to redefine marriage, and those proposals were turned aside. We sought to obtain a Middle East policy statement that was more balanced between Israel and the Palestinians, and the assembly commissioners made extensive amendments that achieved that result.

On both issues, prospects looked bleak early in the assembly. But we and our friends stayed steadfast in our witness to marriage and Middle East fairness. And God, by means that we did not anticipate, delivered some remarkable victories.

You may have read the story of these General Assembly turnabouts in the IRD’s Faith & Freedom or on its website here and here.

I am confident that today’s battles on the three amendments are winnable too. We know from research surveys that most PCUSA members support the biblical teaching on marriage and sexuality. Most members would not support a politicized liberation theology. The challenge is simply to inform the ministers and elders who will vote on these amendments, and to make sure that they do vote.

If we clearly communicate the many reasons to preserve the “fidelity and chastity” standard and to avoid bringing liberation theology into our Book of Confessions, I believe that presbytery commissioners will wisely reject the amendments.

Alan Wisdom has served since October 1994 as Vice President of the Institute on Religion & Democracy. While serving as IRD Vice President, Alan also served as Director of Presbyterian Action for Faith and Freedom (formerly called Presbyterians for Democracy and Religious Freedom

Alan is an elder at the Georgetown Presbyterian Church and a member of the Global Mission team of the National Capital Presbytery. He received his B.A. in history, English, and Spanish from Rice University in Houston, Texas; then did two years of graduate work in history at Princeton University; he received a second B.A., in education, from the University of Maryland. For more information about Presbyterian Action, visit http://www.theird.org/Page.aspx?pid=231

[Editor’s note: Some of the original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid, so the links have been removed.]