They also raise issues about U.S. attitudes toward power and money. In all these areas, Weingartner said, what the international partners see “is often a cultural default that they experience as [American] arrogance.”

The passage of Amendment 10-A deleting the “fidelity and chastity” standard has strained Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) relationships with many overseas partner churches. But two leaders of PCUSA-related mission groups urged attendees at the Fellowship of Presbyterians gathering to maintain and deepen the relationships whenever possible.

“At a time when many of our global partners feel the PCUSA has turned away from them, you do not have to turn away from them,” pleaded the Rev. Rob Weingartner of the Outreach Foundation. Weingartner spoke together with the Rev. Bill Young of the Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship at an August 26 seminar during the Minneapolis gathering. The Outreach Foundation and Frontier Fellowship are independent organizations that cooperate with PCUSA World Mission in promoting international evangelism.

Much on the minds of seminar attendees was the recent decision of the National Presbyterian Church of Mexico to break its 139-year-old mission partnership with the PCUSA. In an “clarifying communiqué” in Spanish addressed to “the Presbyterian people of the United States of North America in general,” top officials of the Mexican church stated their conviction that the adoption of Amendment 10-A “separates them [the PCUSA] completely from loyalty and fidelity to the principles of the Word of God.”

They explained, “It was because of this decision [deletion of the ‘fidelity and chastity’ standard] that our National Presbyterian Church of Mexico did NOT consider it prudent to continue this relationship [with the PCUSA], so as NOT to accept NOR to be participants in what we consider to be sin and aberration in the light of the Word of God.”

The Mexican Presbyterians indicated that the relationship could not be restored until Amendment 10-A was rescinded. But they held out “open arms to maintain all kinds of fraternal relations, of work and joint collaboration, with all churches, presbyteries, and synods—not only in the United States of North America but also in any country of the world—that maintain their adherence, fidelity, and faith in the principles of the Word.”

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