Dear friends,

Hopefully we can put into words what has been going through our minds these last few weeks and months. First, those of us in the New Wineskins who have left the PCUSA want to ask your forgiveness if we have been short with you, less than encouraging in our conversations, or down right neglectful of your needs and feelings. It has been a busy time for us. The process of preparing our congregations, dealing with the issues concerning property, and attempting to keep our local ministries going has been all-consuming. Once our course was set on departing from the PCUSA it became an energy sapping, time-absorbing endeavor; ministry suffered, our personal lives suffered, free time became a stranger, and we became caught up in the legal and ecclesiastical wranglings necessary to make a move. Once the end was reached we breathed such a sigh of relief that it was finished, that we were taken aback by the fact that everybody else was not out here with us. Doesn’t everybody see the necessity of this? Don’t all members find ministry frustrated by their ties to the PCUSA? The process of leaving did tend to make us somewhat “self-focused.” We seek your forgiveness.
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by Jim Henkel, pastor of North Benton Presbyterian Church, North Benton, OH

In response to the growing number of congregations that are choosing to disaffiliate or to request dismissal from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the team of Andrew Purves and Mark Achtemeier contend that: “In leaving [they are] either … making the fearful judgment that Jesus Christ [has] wholly abandoned the proclamation and sacraments of the PC(USA); or, [their] departure from a church where Christ [is] still present would suggest that Christ’s presence is not enough to establish the church’s hope for the future! Such a separation effectively proclaims that the hope of the church must lie elsewhere than Christ’s reality and reign, perhaps in the supposedly superior moral purity and theological righteousness of its leaders and members” (this and all the italicized quotes that follow are drawn from Mark Achtemeier and Andrew Purves, On Unity: Jesus Christ, The Hope of the Church, Presbyterian Outlook, 10/29/2007, www.pres-outlook.org).
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