Members of the National Partnership: plainly speaking, you shot yourselves in the foot. Your secrecy aroused all kinds of paranoid speculation. You were authors of your own worst critiques. Going forward, open communication will serve you well in defending unfair characterizations of yourselves. I do not believe the National Partnership as an organization needs to cease to exist; it merely needs to be public and honest about what it is doing. My immediate maternal instinct may be to knock some heads together, but I do not believe you all to be vicious. Please pursue reconciliation with your brethren humbly and with contrition.

I think while I clean. I know that most normal people come up with good ideas in the shower, or mentally process through problems with a strong cup of coffee or after a good run. Alternatively, I find I do my best deep thinking while cleaning grout or scrubbing baseboards, which means that this past week I have deep-cleaned window sills, wiped down walls, vacuumed behind washing machines, and inordinately terrified my dog with the steam mop. What has transpired over the last couple of weeks in my denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, has weighed down my spirit and occupied my scarce mental bandwidth. Why would elders in the church purposefully deceive one another? If there was no wrong-doing, why was there such secrecy? How did anyone think this was a good idea? Who leaked the information? Was it ethical to do so? Who, if anyone, is in the right? How am I supposed to submit to leadership which seems to have no moral compass? My heart was heavy as I pondered this convoluted mess. As a result, my house is now immaculate, my head hurts, and my dog has been hiding under the end table for three hours.

The recent e-mail dump containing nine years’ worth of confidential National Partnership business has been dubbed #PresbyLeaks, which hilariously sounds like a terrible geriatric condition. A very well-organized clandestine political wing of our denomination has been exposed for being exactly what it is, despite many of us having been assured time and time again that the National Partnership was merely an exclusive fellowship organization akin to a type of pastors’ support group. I have seen many men betrayed, slandered, lied to, and lash out in anger on both sides this week and last. The situation is a colossal dumpster fire. I certainly am not shocked, but I am disappointed and a bit confused. The same question keeps repeating in my head: “Brothers, are we not Presbyterian?”

Earlier this year, James Kessler wrote an article entitled, “A PCA Worth Having.” Mr. Kessler opened his argument by stating,

“As the founder of the National Partnership, I’ve been careful to avoid the sense that I was creating a tribe in the PCA.”

I wonder, did it start out rather innocuously? Was it a group of friends who got together to enjoy their own comradery over a drink, who attracted others until the group grew past the confines of a room? Conversation moved to online groups where excitement brimmed, plans were made, emails were launched, and the National Partnership was formed. More were added to their number, and slots on various committees were filled to the extent that they could refer to whole presbyteries as NP presbyteries.

But something started happening. Amidst the calls to action to steer the ship, Kessler started warning against playing two-party politics, keeping one’s tone gracious, and spending too much time on empty rhetoric battles at the mic. There were some exceedingly pastoral warnings given against characterizations of the other side, and Kessler tried to gently discourage the proclivity to enter the black hole that is the endless back and forth of blog posts, Facebook comment sections, or Assembly floor speech duels. And yet, something of a tribe mentality had already set in. Men frustrated with their more conservative brethren started referring to the other side as “the fundamentalists” and “the unhealthy wing of the denomination.” A few choice examples show the level of partisanship that had been formed:

“The PCA gets plenty of things wrong, but I’m increasingly convinced that if there’s a group most capable of getting it right, it’s this group.“

“Riding the wave of culture-war, fear has created a strong voting block that has not only stilted our voice as an Assembly but helped to repopulate some of our committees, like the SJC, with less healthy expressions of our denominational body.”

“The last four years the GRN has worked, in my opinion, to amplify the volume not of the most vulnerable in our society but the most vocal anxieties in our denomination.“

 “They will take every inch we give them and then keep coming at us and trying to push us out. Our good will has been used against us for years. This will not stop now. They have hammered us three years in a row, all while we try to play nice and meet in the middle.”

Even David Cassidy, while publicly responding to the National Partnership email leak, lumped a large majority of our denomination into a group he labeled, “that other side” – of whom he was deeply suspicious and assigned sinful motives rather freely:

“My colleague and friend who coordinated this email list of other friends was wounded by this betrayal – and make no mistake about it, a betrayal is exactly what took place. It was sinful. It was also unethical. It’s also, given what I’ve come to know about some of the men who are part of that ‘other side’, hardly unexpected.”

Ouch.

So how did we get here? The short answer is simple: Presbyterians rarely like to act like Presbyterians. But the fact that we are Presbyterians generally means that we prefer long answers, so let’s get to it, shall we?

The first item which desperately needs to be addressed is the ethical nightmare of the entire situation. This is where I will likely have the charming experience of making all parties equally enraged. All emails were subject to a confidentiality agreement. One could quibble about the lack of legal efficacy if the receiving parties had not signed a non-disclosure agreement, but we are speaking about pastors here, and ethics should not have to be litigated to exist.

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