Presbyterian Mission Agency Board hears powerful preaching from one of its own

Stated Clerk and Co-Moderator send their greetings and good wishes for the difficult work ahead

by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service

The Rev. Kevin Johnson preached to his fellow Presbyterian Mission Agency Board members Thursday. (Photo by Rich Copley)

LOUISVILLE — Like the Apostle Paul, when the Rev. Kevin Johnson was a child, he thought like a child. But even then he had the good sense to ask his mother and the people at his church plenty of questions — much the same way Muhammad Ali did in a taped interview Johnson played for his colleagues on the Presbyterian Mission Agency Board Thursday.

As a child, “I depended on others to tell me who Jesus is,” Johnson said during the devotion he led to open the Board’s fourth session together. “It’s been 50 years since Muhammad Ali made that video … but color still matters on the streets and in the courts, in our theological conversations and biblical interpretations.”

As a child, Johnson said he embraced “without hesitation” Bible verses including “Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”

“Now I question the implicit bias of the purity of white and only white,” he said. “Now that I’m an adult, I speak for myself.”

“I would use different words, and Jesus gives us that choice,” Johnson said, when the Lord asks the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?”

“Children of God always have a voice and a choice,” he said. “Who do you say that I am? Jesus gives us the opportunity to speak for ourselves.”

“Now that I’m an adult, I speak for myself,” Johnson said. “Where I am, Jesus, there you are. If my house catches on fire, if I have to run out buck naked in the cold of winter, I’d still be able to say without a doubt, ‘He’s my rock, I know he’ll never let me down, he’s a jewel that I have found,’” Johnson said, switching from the spoken word to song. “I love to praise his holy name. That’s who I say he is. Let the church say ‘Amen!’”

And indeed it did.

The Rev. Gregory J. Bentley, Co-Moderator of the 224th General Assembly (2020)  is the pastor of Fellowship Presbyterian Church in Huntsville, Alabama. (Contributed photo)

The Rev. Gregory Bentley, Co-Moderator of the 224^th General Assembly (2020), had the difficult task of following Johnson’s rousing homily.

“I’m grateful for what God is doing, in and with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.),” Bentley said. Like the disciples crossing the Sea of Galilee, he said we may be asking Jesus — in the words of the King James Version — “Master, carest thou not that we perish?”

“We are asking, ‘Carest thou not that we are losing membership, that we cannot meet in person to have General Assembly, that we are facing he challenges we are facing?’” Bentley said. “Yes, the challenges are real. They are undeniable. But as we travel these pandemic times, Jesus is in the boat with us. I could end right there,” he said with a smile. “That’s all we need to know.”

He said he and his fellow Co-Moderator, Ruling Elder Elona Street-Stewart, are “all in with the Matthew 25 vision. We made it the centerpiece of our standing (for co-moderators) together.”

“We feel it’s a vision for such a time as this, and we lift it up wherever we go, in every interaction we have,” Bentley said. The ultimate goal, he said, is to get “every congregation, every presbytery and every synod involved.”

Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson, II

The Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the PC(USA), the Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson, II, told the Board that while there’s a time to rest, “there’s also a time when resting becomes difficult because so much around us represents unrest.”

But there are also “serious messages of hope, and the Presbyterian Mission Agency is certainly part of that.” Nelson said he appreciates the “collegial relationship” he and the Rev. Dr. Diane Moffett, president and executive director of the PMA, have established. “We are seeing ways we can come together to do faithful work, because in Christ there is no east or west,” he said, finishing the first verse of a well-known hymn, “in him no south or north, but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide Earth.”

“That’s where we are in this period. What does it mean,” the Stated Clerk asked, “to walk together and not grow weary?”

“Creating ministry as we move along — for me it’s deeply biblical,” Nelson said. Often Jesus “didn’t know where he was going or what he would encounter, and he had no practice on what to say,” Nelson said. “Something deep within his spirit” allowed him to minister, to “run the devil away. It comes from believing deeply what God can do and how God can use us.”

Healing our racial divide “is the challenge of the 21^st century,” Nelson said. “God gave us all these different hues that we might learn to bring our hearts and minds together.”

We are “challenged to be the church,” he said, because “we still see the marginalization of women” and children in classrooms during the pandemic “who have no business being there. Their lives are being put on the table every single day.”

Desperate people have run out of unemployment payments “and are begging churches to help them. We are in a dire, dire space right now in the United States of America. Yet we are called to deal with the country’s struggles and problems and to offer hope and possibility to those who are outside the United States. We are right where we need to be: busy, busy, busy.”

“We in the Presbyterian Church have to close ranks and get beyond our demarcations and all our wrangling, all the madness that has kept people away,” Nelson said. Either we’ll “walk together and not grow weary, or we will die on the vine.”

“Don’t be afraid,” Nelson told the Board. “Thanks for the work you continue to wrestle with. We are brothers and sisters, held together at the hips to do the work of faith.”

“Forget OGA and PMA. Forget all our human-made and dictated demarcations. We are the body of Christ, and that’s how we must live in this time in our history.”