Buchanan, John
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| - | Well, John, thank you very much | 0:01 |
| for agreeing to be interviewed, I appreciate it. | 0:02 | |
| If you could just say your full name. | 0:04 | |
| - | John Buchanan. | 0:06 |
| - | Thank you. And are you lay or clergy? | 0:09 |
| - | Clergy. | 0:12 |
| - | Great. And your denominational affiliation? | 0:13 |
| - | Presbyterian Church USA. | 0:15 |
| - | Great. And John, when and where were you born? | 0:17 |
| - | I was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania. | 0:21 |
| - | Okay. | 0:23 |
| - | January 30, 1938. | 0:24 |
| - | Great, thank you. | 0:26 |
| And where did you go to graduate or divinity school? | 0:27 | |
| - | I went to Chicago Theological Seminary | 0:30 |
| and the University of Chicago Divinity School, | 0:34 | |
| which when I matriculated were under the auspices | 0:36 | |
| of the Federated Theological Faculty | 0:40 | |
| of the University of Chicago. | 0:42 | |
| And it fell apart the first year I was there, | 0:44 | |
| so I finished up at the Divinity School. | 0:47 | |
| - | Oh, okay, interesting, all right. | 0:50 |
| What work or ministry were you doing | 0:52 | |
| at the time of Reimagining? | 0:54 | |
| - | I was the pastor | 0:57 |
| of the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. | 0:59 | |
| - | And what work or ministry did you do after Reimagining? | 1:02 |
| - | Well, I continued at Fourth Church until 2012, | 1:06 |
| January, when I retired, and in the meantime, | 1:11 | |
| I had taken on the job of Editor and Publisher | 1:13 | |
| of the Christian Century Magazine in 1999. | 1:17 | |
| And I just finished that up this January. | 1:20 | |
| - | Okay, well thank you, that's great. | 1:23 |
| Well, I know you were involved in the writing | 1:26 | |
| of the General Assembly Council Review on Reimagining, | 1:30 | |
| so I thought, if you could just tell me a little bit about | 1:33 | |
| your memories of what led to the writing of this document. | 1:36 | |
| - | Well, I was, I didn't have much awareness, | 1:41 |
| a vague awareness of the Reimagining conference, | 1:45 | |
| I was not in on that at all. | 1:48 | |
| But I was aware that it was going on, | 1:50 | |
| and I began to hear, I began to hear rumblings | 1:52 | |
| from the right side of the church, | 1:55 | |
| and in any event, I was elected a Commissioner | 1:59 | |
| of that General Assembly, and the moderator, David Dobler, | 2:00 | |
| confidentially to his everlasting regret, I think (laughs) | 2:04 | |
| - | (laughs) | 2:08 |
| - | Asked me to chair the committee. | 2:10 |
| Turned out David and I didn't agree on much, theologically, | 2:11 | |
| but he asked me to chair this committee on the review | 2:14 | |
| of the General Assembly Council, and that was the committee | 2:17 | |
| that was to deal with the overtures | 2:18 | |
| coming from the presbyteries of the church | 2:21 | |
| regarding the Reimagining conference, | 2:24 | |
| and that's how our system works. | 2:26 | |
| I recall there were like 52, almost an unprecedented number, | 2:30 | |
| of overtures coming to the General Assembly, | 2:34 | |
| ranging all the way from mild rebuke | 2:37 | |
| to white-hot anger, and wanted everybody to be fired, | 2:39 | |
| and all that, anyhow, it was a very stressful time. | 2:43 | |
| And that's how I got involved. | 2:47 | |
| So I went to the Wichita Assembly to chair the committee | 2:48 | |
| with a briefcase full of correspondence. | 2:52 | |
| I began to hear, as soon as the word got out | 2:56 | |
| that I was gonna chair that committee, | 2:57 | |
| I began to hear personal letters, mostly negative, | 2:59 | |
| some quite angry, quite unkind, almost appalling. | 3:03 | |
| - | Mmm, mm-hmm, how would you account for this backlash, | 3:10 |
| or these reactions? | 3:17 | |
| - | Well, I've been Pastor of a city church | 3:19 |
| right in the middle of Chicago, and aware of cultural winds, | 3:22 | |
| and I just think what's going on across the church | 3:24 | |
| reflects a deep, deep divide in our culture, | 3:28 | |
| nowhere more eloquently expressed | 3:32 | |
| than in the current campaign, | 3:35 | |
| but it was certainly beginning then, | 3:35 | |
| a deep separation between the worldviews | 3:39 | |
| of the left and the right, | 3:42 | |
| and an increasingly fragile place to being a moderate, | 3:45 | |
| to be in the middle. | 3:49 | |
| So, I think Reimagining just kind of tied into that. | 3:50 | |
| It's certainly complex, and it eludes easy analysis, | 3:55 | |
| but institutions were coming apart at the seams, | 4:01 | |
| and people were beginning to distrust | 4:06 | |
| anything that resembled a structure, | 4:09 | |
| a hierarchical structure. | 4:13 | |
| And all that was beginning to ferment. | 4:14 | |
| Well, that's gotten into the church, | 4:16 | |
| and unfortunately, there were opportunists on the right | 4:17 | |
| who were waiting, I think, for an opportunity | 4:22 | |
| to really lash out at the denominational structures | 4:24 | |
| and leadership, and I mean specifically, | 4:28 | |
| the Presbyterian Lay Committee, | 4:33 | |
| and their appalling newspaper, The Laymen. | 4:35 | |
| And this just, I don't like the euphemism, | 4:39 | |
| but hit them in their sweet spot. | 4:44 | |
| It could not have been more perfect, | 4:45 | |
| so they grabbed that and just launched | 4:48 | |
| an all out attack on leadership in the church, | 4:52 | |
| and anyone who was involved in that, of course, | 4:57 | |
| was in that thing, anyone who even was apologetic about it, | 4:59 | |
| or at least understanding, was subject to all kinds | 5:03 | |
| of suspicion and abuse. | 5:08 | |
| Anyhow, it was a moment in time that needed a flashpoint, | 5:10 | |
| and this, Reimagining, unfortunately, | 5:13 | |
| Reimagining gave it to them. | 5:15 | |
| That's my retrospect. | 5:19 | |
| - | Yeah, sure, sure. What about Reimagining | 5:22 |
| made it the perfect sweet spot? | 5:24 | |
| - | Well, the right had convinced itself | 5:28 |
| that the Presbyterian church had gone off the rail, | 5:30 | |
| theologically, and we had bought into the new morality, | 5:33 | |
| anything goes, and theologically, into relativism, | 5:38 | |
| that there are no absolutes, | 5:44 | |
| and that even doctrines precious to the Orthodox | 5:46 | |
| in the church, such as substitutionary atonement, | 5:52 | |
| and the literal accuracy of the Bible, | 5:55 | |
| and the virgin birth, and the bodily resurrection, | 5:59 | |
| the right suspected the law that was beginning | 6:03 | |
| to shake loose from the heart of the Presbyterian church. | 6:05 | |
| In a sense, the Presbyterian church was reflecting | 6:08 | |
| theological roots and reimagining the sense of the Word | 6:10 | |
| and thinking through some complicated issues | 6:14 | |
| in the face of modernity, and the right said, | 6:17 | |
| "no, no, no, no, no, we don't wanna rethink anything, | 6:19 | |
| we know the truth, it's been handed down to us", | 6:24 | |
| and arguments over. | 6:26 | |
| So when Reimagining, just the very notion of reimagining, | 6:28 | |
| I think, got stuck in their craw. | 6:31 | |
| Who needs to reimagine if you already know | 6:36 | |
| exactly what the truth is and what the rules are, | 6:39 | |
| and what the ethics mean, and morality. | 6:41 | |
| If you already know what the truth is, | 6:43 | |
| you don't need to reimagine it. | 6:44 | |
| - | Yeah. What was the process of writing this report like? | 6:45 |
| What do you recall about that? | 6:51 | |
| - | It was a huge, huge thing, you know, | 6:52 |
| I don't mean to overdramatize it, you know, | 6:55 | |
| outside the world, the little tiny world | 6:57 | |
| - | (laughs) | 7:00 |
| - | It's no big deal, | 7:02 |
| which I have to continue to remind myself, you know, | 7:03 | |
| you get your blood pressure up and your gut overblown, | 7:05 | |
| and you come home and no one gives a damn. | 7:08 | |
| - | (laughs) | 7:10 |
| - | Anyhow, what was the question again? | 7:12 |
| - | Oh sure, what was the process of writing that report like? | 7:15 |
| - | OK, well, the process of writing it came at the end | 7:18 |
| of a very extensive process. | 7:22 | |
| I chaired and moderated a committee of about 60 people, | 7:23 | |
| diverse people, chosen by computers, | 7:24 | |
| so it was completely over the wide spectrum, | 7:28 | |
| geographic, age, gender, and theology, | 7:31 | |
| and attitudes about anything. | 7:35 | |
| So, the first job was to make this into a workable group | 7:37 | |
| in a very short period of time, | 7:43 | |
| so we did that, and I had to rely on people | 7:44 | |
| who know more about group process than I do, | 7:48 | |
| and I was smart enough to let others lead this part of it, | 7:51 | |
| and we did, we kind of got people to talk, | 7:54 | |
| and got people to trust one another. | 7:56 | |
| So I then chaired the committee, | 7:58 | |
| we took these overtures, we bundled them | 7:59 | |
| into four or five different categories, | 8:01 | |
| so we didn't have to deal with all 52. | 8:04 | |
| And we began to talk about it, | 8:06 | |
| and it became clear that on the committee | 8:07 | |
| were people who were fiercely offended and opposed, | 8:10 | |
| and were there for the sole purpose | 8:14 | |
| of prosecuting the case, and making sure | 8:18 | |
| that we condemned the Reimagining people | 8:20 | |
| and the conference and fired everybody responsible. | 8:23 | |
| One of the things that really shocked me | 8:27 | |
| was a young man, I'll never forget him. | 8:29 | |
| I think he was a seminary student somewhere. | 8:32 | |
| He was the voice of the right-wing, of the lay committee, | 8:35 | |
| and I saw him repeatedly, in our breaks, | 8:41 | |
| as soon as we took a break from the committee, | 8:45 | |
| these two guys in the suits and ties | 8:47 | |
| would collar this guy and walk him down the hallway, | 8:50 | |
| and were obviously getting information from him | 8:54 | |
| about what was going on in the committee, | 8:57 | |
| and pumping him up to stick his foot in the, | 8:59 | |
| stick his wrench in the gears every chance he got, | 9:02 | |
| which he did, repeatedly. | 9:05 | |
| Just an anecdote, that young man, five years later, | 9:09 | |
| wrote me a letter, apologizing and almost confessing | 9:14 | |
| for what he had done, said it was just a terrible mistake, | 9:18 | |
| and he was sorry he had done that. | 9:20 | |
| - | Wow. | 9:22 |
| - | But, so, that's how crazy it got. | 9:23 |
| So eventually we kind of, we held public hearings, | 9:28 | |
| and so the whole assembly was invited | 9:32 | |
| to kinda weigh in, and a couple hundred, hundred fifty, | 9:34 | |
| two hundred people, came and testified. | 9:37 | |
| And we made them alternate between pro and con, | 9:39 | |
| and it began to be pretty apparent | 9:41 | |
| that opponents were deep and fierce. | 9:43 | |
| But a really nice, positive thing began to emerge, | 9:48 | |
| kind of a more moderate voice, | 9:54 | |
| that was not so critical, not so bad. | 9:57 | |
| Anyhow, about half and half. | 10:02 | |
| So, after a couple days of this, we finally came down to | 10:04 | |
| what are we gonna say about it? | 10:07 | |
| So, as moderator, I had to learn this | 10:10 | |
| from a wise mentor a long time ago. | 10:13 | |
| I said, "OK, now everyone in the room's gonna say something, | 10:16 | |
| I don't want anybody to not participate. | 10:18 | |
| We want to hear every voice. | 10:20 | |
| I will do this as long as possible." | 10:23 | |
| I took the microphone, I went over and I asked, | 10:25 | |
| I got on my knee and leaned in front of each person | 10:26 | |
| sitting around that table, and put the mike in their face, | 10:29 | |
| and said, "we want to hear what you're feeling | 10:32 | |
| and what your response to this whole thing is." | 10:34 | |
| Well, I thought I would take like a half an hour, | 10:37 | |
| it took like two or three hours, | 10:39 | |
| and stuff came out that was just amazing. | 10:40 | |
| How deeply this scares me, and how, in my childhood, | 10:44 | |
| blah, blah, blah, people were weeping. | 10:51 | |
| It became to be pretty clear that the vast majority | 10:53 | |
| of people around the table were not sympathetic | 10:57 | |
| to the attacks of the right at all. | 11:00 | |
| And while we thought we needed to respond in some way | 11:03 | |
| that at least had, would earn some respect from the right, | 11:06 | |
| I thought my job was to make sure | 11:12 | |
| the Presbyterian church didn't break in half. | 11:14 | |
| People were truly frightened that this thing | 11:17 | |
| would be a great rupture, a great cyst. | 11:19 | |
| So, after that was all over, the leadership team | 11:22 | |
| got together and kinda crystallized some ideas, | 11:25 | |
| and we developed an outline, and I went to my room | 11:28 | |
| and wrote, I wrote the thing overnight, | 11:30 | |
| I finished it up in the early hours, | 11:32 | |
| and got it back to someone who was going to type it for me, | 11:35 | |
| and they typed it and got the thing back in my hands early, | 11:38 | |
| Don reviewed it and corrected it. | 11:41 | |
| We had it out by the time the Assembly convened. | 11:44 | |
| - | Wow. So just so I'm clear about this, | 11:48 |
| did this occur at the Assembly meeting | 11:50 | |
| in Wichita, Kansas, this is where this was happening? | 11:52 | |
| - | Yes, it did, yes it did. | 11:55 |
| - | OK, mm-hmm | 11:56 |
| - | While it's a hundred and five degrees outside, | 11:57 |
| this howling hot wind, the most miserable time in my life. | 11:59 | |
| - | (laughs) I didn't mean to interrupt. | 12:07 |
| So it was brought, and what happened | 12:07 | |
| once it was brought to the General Assembly? | 12:09 | |
| - | Well, everybody had it, and it became pretty clear | 12:12 |
| that people really liked it, and the right, | 12:14 | |
| because we said, they're big on boundaries, | 12:16 | |
| the Lay Committee, they're big on boundaries. | 12:20 | |
| And so, we found, to keep them at least from walking out | 12:24 | |
| and killing the church, let's say, yeah, | 12:29 | |
| theology has boundaries, it's not just open season | 12:32 | |
| for whatever anybody feels like saying, | 12:36 | |
| we do work within a set of strong beliefs, | 12:38 | |
| that create a kind of field in which we can talk. | 12:44 | |
| But the report, I tried to find it, I'm sorry, | 12:49 | |
| I couldn't even find it, but the report | 12:53 | |
| pretty much tried to say that, we're sorry, | 12:54 | |
| Synod people, but a lot of things want reimagining | 12:58 | |
| are the things that the churches have done | 13:02 | |
| over and over again, and that we have a love for this church | 13:05 | |
| and its tradition that allows for lots of diversity. | 13:08 | |
| We're a big tent, always have been, | 13:12 | |
| that's the beauty of presbyterianism, | 13:15 | |
| and we wanna leave a church | 13:17 | |
| that remembers that to our children. | 13:18 | |
| So the assembly, for whatever reason, | 13:20 | |
| a miracle of somebody, was almost united. | 13:23 | |
| - | It was, yeah. | 13:26 |
| - | Never unanimous about anything. | 13:27 |
| The vote, after the vote, people stood up and sang | 13:30 | |
| the Doxology, and it was a wonderful moment of unity, | 13:33 | |
| and I'm not sure that the church has had | 13:37 | |
| anything quite like it since, | 13:38 | |
| and I don't take any responsibility for it, | 13:40 | |
| I just happened to be in the middle of it. | 13:41 | |
| But it was a fine moment. | 13:44 | |
| - | Mm-hmm, yeah. And a very, that's pretty amazing, | 13:47 |
| given the feelings at the time. | 13:51 | |
| - | Yeah, and the people on the right who had been harshest, | 13:53 |
| and who later were even more harsh to me, personally, | 13:56 | |
| on the issue of the ordination of gay and lesbian folk, | 14:00 | |
| even those people came and said, "thank you for your work", | 14:04 | |
| and on and on, it was a moment. | 14:07 | |
| - | Yeah, yeah. Actually, I found the report | 14:11 |
| in one of the archives, and so I've looked through it. | 14:14 | |
| So I know it's been a long time, but you're right, | 14:17 | |
| it affirmed dialogue and ecumenical conversations. | 14:20 | |
| It described it as a theological crisis. | 14:24 | |
| And you may not remember this, but I wondered if you, | 14:27 | |
| there was language about how it went | 14:29 | |
| beyond reformed boundaries, and it talked about | 14:31 | |
| how Sophia was different from the one triune God, | 14:34 | |
| and I'm wondering if you recall how that language developed? | 14:37 | |
| - | Well, it was pretty clear to me that | 14:45 |
| we were gonna run into a buzzsaw | 14:47 | |
| if we didn't say something like that. | 14:51 | |
| That the notion of Sophia as wisdom, | 14:55 | |
| as possible part of the Godhead, I mean, | 14:57 | |
| I understand all that, but most people don't, I think. | 15:02 | |
| And most people find that language different, | 15:05 | |
| or odd, or eccentric. | 15:09 | |
| Here's a little anecdote that you might love. | 15:13 | |
| My dear wife who's not theologically trained, | 15:15 | |
| but is the wisest theologian I know, | 15:18 | |
| organized a group of women at Fourth Presbyterian Church | 15:21 | |
| and had a retreat called Sophia Lives. (laughs) | 15:23 | |
| - | Wow. (laughs) | 15:25 |
| - | And formed a little group of fifteen stuffy old | 15:29 |
| presbyterian women that really got into it, | 15:32 | |
| turned into be great, great fans of Reimagine. | 15:34 | |
| - | Wow, I do love that. That is great. (laughs) | 15:37 |
| - | In fact, we still have the sign somewhere (mumbles) | 15:42 |
| We still have that sign somewhere. | 15:52 | |
| - | I love it. | 15:54 |
| Well say thank you to your wife, OK? | 15:55 | |
| - | I sure will. | 15:57 |
| - | (laughs) And I assume, just 'cause, you know, | 15:59 |
| it's so helpful to talk to you and get background on this, | 16:02 | |
| there was also a statement about affirming presbyterian | 16:04 | |
| standards criticized and ridiculed at the conference, | 16:07 | |
| and I assume it was a similar thing, | 16:09 | |
| that that helped to get, yep, yeah, | 16:11 | |
| - | People, doing statements like this, | 16:15 |
| that have to be spread in front of | 16:20 | |
| 500 or some odd delegates, | 16:22 | |
| you can't be doctrinaire, you can't, it seems to me, | 16:24 | |
| this is a little preachy now, sorry, | 16:30 | |
| you can't accentuate the given divide. | 16:31 | |
| You've gotta say, "all right, if we're gonna stay together | 16:37 | |
| as a body here, everybody's gotta give a little bit." | 16:39 | |
| - | Right. | 16:44 |
| - | And so this report may not reflect 100% | 16:45 |
| of what I feel or what anybody else feels, | 16:47 | |
| but in point if I could get the thing through | 16:49 | |
| without doing further damage to the church, | 16:52 | |
| I mean, something's gotta compromise a little bit. | 16:54 | |
| - | Right. | 16:57 |
| - | So, I think people were willing to do that. | 16:57 |
| - | Yeah, yeah. And it sounded - | 16:59 |
| - | And there were women on this committee | 17:01 |
| that didn't want to, they were as adamant and fierce | 17:03 | |
| in their advocacy as the other side was, and yet so, | 17:07 | |
| leading that, somebody's gotta do a little wiggling. | 17:12 | |
| - | Yeah. I'm just, I mean, I'm just amazed | 17:17 |
| that this managed to, given all the different sides there, | 17:20 | |
| how did this manage to get through the committee, | 17:24 | |
| and then almost unanimously get approved? | 17:27 | |
| - | Well, I don't know. | 17:31 |
| I have no more clarity now than I did at the time. | 17:33 | |
| But I think the process was thorough, | 17:35 | |
| the process had integrity, I think trying to the committee, | 17:37 | |
| some of whom came very distrustful of leadership, | 17:40 | |
| and assumed I was just a tool of the denomination, whatever. | 17:45 | |
| The committee at large came to trust us, | 17:48 | |
| the leadership team, myself, Jan Devries, | 17:54 | |
| Carolyn McDonnaugh, Cathy, I can't remember her last name, | 17:58 | |
| anyhow, we were the leadership team. | 18:02 | |
| I think they came to trust us, and that really helped. | 18:06 | |
| And the process of making sure every voice was heard, | 18:11 | |
| no one was excluded, no one gets to hide. | 18:15 | |
| That was a good moment, and when we kinda shared that, | 18:20 | |
| the spirit of that, with the gathered assembly, | 18:24 | |
| I think it was infectious. | 18:27 | |
| - | Yeah. And just so I'm clear about this, | 18:30 |
| this happened at the General Assembly. | 18:32 | |
| How much time were you all together to accomplish this? | 18:34 | |
| - | Oh my gosh, not long. I've been thinking about it | 18:37 |
| for six months, we came a day early, | 18:41 | |
| as often happens when there is controversy. | 18:44 | |
| We all checked in a day early, and spent 24 hours together, | 18:47 | |
| and turned it over to Jan Devries, who's just magic | 18:52 | |
| with process, and played games that, you know, | 18:55 | |
| I thought were stupid, I don't like that stuff. | 18:59 | |
| - | (laughs) | 19:00 |
| - | But it really worked, and it really got people | 19:01 |
| to open up to one another, so it ended | 19:04 | |
| about two and a half or three days beyond that. | 19:06 | |
| The committee met and had these hearings, and that was it. | 19:08 | |
| - | Wow. | 19:12 |
| - | Probably maximum two days, three, maybe three and a half. | 19:13 |
| - | That's amazing. Well, I'm wondering, oh, go ahead. | 19:17 |
| - | The committee's meeting, I mean it's meeting | 19:20 |
| from like 9:00 in the morning until 11:00 at night, | 19:22 | |
| with just breaks for meals, so it was | 19:24 | |
| a pretty significant investment of time and energy. | 19:27 | |
| - | Yeah, yeah. So looking back on this, in the end | 19:30 |
| do you think ReImagining made any specific contributions | 19:35 | |
| to Christian theology or liturgy? | 19:41 | |
| - | Absolutely, absolutely. | 19:43 |
| Yeah, I think it was one of the major steps | 19:46 | |
| in getting the church to break out of the sexist paradigm | 19:48 | |
| that it had been in for 2000 years. | 19:55 | |
| I think it was huge. | 19:58 | |
| It was part of the whole broader movement | 19:59 | |
| of feminist theology and it shook a lot of stuff loose. | 20:02 | |
| For a lot of the mainline church, it kinda reaffirmed, | 20:08 | |
| I think, the fact, I like to remember this | 20:16 | |
| and I like to say this at every opportunity, | 20:19 | |
| the church is always reimagining itself. | 20:21 | |
| If we stop reimagining ourselves, | 20:23 | |
| we stop listening to the living word of God, | 20:25 | |
| we stop listening to the world we're supposed to be serving. | 20:27 | |
| It doesn't mean we have to go off the rails | 20:29 | |
| and embrace, you know, voodoo, or whatever the hell, | 20:32 | |
| it's one of our fundamental theological responsibilities. | 20:35 | |
| And remember, we're doing it right now. | 20:40 | |
| Good lord, everybody's reimagining the church right now, | 20:42 | |
| trying to figure out where we're going next. | 20:45 | |
| But this was huge in terms of inclusive language, | 20:47 | |
| the inclusion of women into every aspect | 20:51 | |
| of the life of the church, and I like to think | 20:55 | |
| that we were part of the whole broad cultural revolution | 20:57 | |
| at the time, in that whole regard. | 21:00 | |
| And I think in a real way, opened the doors | 21:03 | |
| to sensible, long but arduous struggle | 21:05 | |
| about accepting gay and lesbian leadership | 21:09 | |
| in the lives of the church. | 21:11 | |
| Anyway, I just think it was an important moment. | 21:13 | |
| Not to be underestimated. | 21:16 | |
| - | Yes. And you made an important point | 21:18 |
| about reimagining going on today, and I would love to hear | 21:20 | |
| what does reimagining, and I don't just mean the conference, | 21:23 | |
| I mean, what needs to be or is being reimagined | 21:26 | |
| in the church today? | 21:28 | |
| - | Well, I'm not much connected anymore. | 21:30 |
| I've been retired for five years, I'm 78 years old. | 21:34 | |
| So I don't get invited to places (laughter) | 21:37 | |
| where they're doing this anymore. | 21:40 | |
| The next church movement within the Presbyterian church | 21:41 | |
| gets together, and these are people | 21:45 | |
| a generation younger than I am, | 21:46 | |
| and they're seriously asking, what's next, | 21:48 | |
| do we need this structure, what kind of politics | 21:49 | |
| do we need to exist as a Presbyterian | 21:53 | |
| reform body going forward? | 21:55 | |
| Clearly the old structure is tired and worn out | 21:58 | |
| and the process is being reimagined right now. | 22:00 | |
| I was a denomination guy all my life, | 22:04 | |
| and every word I hear about is, | 22:07 | |
| the denomination is under radical change. | 22:09 | |
| Someone said decline, I won't use that word, | 22:12 | |
| we're just changing. | 22:15 | |
| - | And how would you characterize this change overall? | 22:19 |
| - | Well, it's part of the broader cultural rethinking | 22:23 |
| of how big organizations and big ideas | 22:29 | |
| actually work in the world. | 22:34 | |
| And I think it's part of a general rejection | 22:36 | |
| of the top down authoritarian notion | 22:39 | |
| of how things oughta be, and a lot of businesses | 22:44 | |
| came to this conclusion long before we did. | 22:48 | |
| We're always kinda last before we get it, | 22:50 | |
| but we put together a corporate structure | 22:52 | |
| in the 40's and 50's, so that we would look like IBM, | 22:56 | |
| and long after corporate America realized | 23:00 | |
| creativity exists not particularly top down | 23:02 | |
| but bottom up, and the job of structures and leaders | 23:06 | |
| are to enable people to be creative and become all they can, | 23:09 | |
| blah, blah, blah, I think we're finally getting that. | 23:12 | |
| - | Great. I wanna be respectful of your time. | 23:18 |
| I wanted to ask finally is there anything else | 23:22 | |
| that we haven't discussed that you would like to add? | 23:23 | |
| - | For what it's worth, and it may not be worth anything, | 23:28 |
| I didn't kinda grow up with a feminist sensitivity. | 23:31 | |
| I grew up as a person of my age, | 23:37 | |
| with a strong sense of what it meant to be a man, | 23:39 | |
| and what it meant to be a woman, and I've just reflected | 23:43 | |
| on the amazing journey I've been on, | 23:48 | |
| thanks to the strong women that I've encountered. | 23:51 | |
| We at Broad Street and Columbus, I hired a clergy couple, | 23:57 | |
| that was like, I don't know, 1976 or 7 or 8, | 24:02 | |
| anyhow, it was a real amazing thing to do, | 24:09 | |
| and that associate pastor kind of challenged me gently | 24:13 | |
| but kind of led me into the light about things | 24:19 | |
| as simple as inclusive language, and exclusive language, | 24:23 | |
| and what books I was reading, and who I was quoting. | 24:28 | |
| And brought to my attention how many wonderful, | 24:33 | |
| young, educated, strong women were sitting out there | 24:36 | |
| on Sunday and couldn't help but notice | 24:40 | |
| that every time I quoted anybody it was a man. | 24:43 | |
| And that my sermon illustrations were full | 24:47 | |
| of mountain climbing and football, | 24:49 | |
| and that turns a lot of people off. | 24:54 | |
| Anyhow, she was amazing. | 24:56 | |
| Her name was Barbara Beamers-Duet, by the way, | 24:59 | |
| she headed up the women's unit. | 25:02 | |
| - | Yes, I've encountered her name | 25:04 |
| - | She was just really remarkable in terms of | 25:07 |
| shining a light into my dark masculine side. | 25:11 | |
| - | And you were clearly open to it (laughs). | 25:19 |
| Well, thank you very much, I appreciate your time. | 25:21 | |
| I'm going to turn the recording off right now. | 25:27 | |
| - | OK. | 25:30 |