Media Coverage
Leader says RCA faces unexpected crossroads
By Matt Vandebunte
The Grand Rapids Press
June 19, 2005


Disagreement over homosexuality must not be allowed to paralyze the Reformed Church in America, the denomination's top official says.

One day after church leaders defrocked a former seminary president who presided over his daughter's homosexual wedding, the Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson on Saturday cautioned them not to lose sight of more-important issues.

The RCA's primary focus, he said, should be accomplishing a 10-year goal of starting 400 new churches.

"We are unexpectedly at a crossroads, where the priority of our call to common mission is being tested," Granberg-Michaelson told delegates at the denomination's General Synod in Schenectady, N.Y.

"We can decide that fighting over issues related to homosexuality is our most important task, and proceed down that road. Or we can keep the main thing the main thing, while agreeing to an honest and discerning dialogue over differing perspectives."

The speech came on the heels of a denominational trial Friday of the Rev. Norman Kansfield by RCA ministers and elders gathered at Union College for the annual conference.

Delegates voted by a 2-1 margin to discipline Kansfield for presiding over the June 2004 wedding of his lesbian daughter. They then decided in a closed-session meeting to suspend him from serving as a minister. Kans-

field in March was ousted as president of New Jersey's New Brunswick Theological Seminary.

Kansfield could not be reached for comment Saturday. Church critics have been asked not to comment publicly, one pastor said.

Kansfield's daughter called the controversy "a great sadness for our denomination."

"In this action, we have made a grave mistake," said Ann Kansfield, a seminary graduate who has been asked to lead an RCA church in Brooklyn, where she serves as an unordained pastor. "In so doing, we have left not just a little bit of the church out, but a whole third. Not every congregation is like some of the congregations where the accusers serve."

Delegates will talk more about homosexuality in coming days, as several proposals are on the docket to amend the church constitution. Some regional groups of churches, called classes, want to prohibit gay ministers and gay marriages.

Though the 284,000-member RCA is based in New York City, 77,700 members live in the Great Lakes Regional Synod, composed mostly of Michigan.

Granberg-Michaelson, a Kentwood resident the church's general secretary, fears the homosexuality debate will steal time and energy as the RCA tries to meet its growth goals.

"Let's provide a pastoral place for this conversation, and not ongoing judicial confrontations," he said.. "We have no right to close our hearts and our doors to those on society's margins whom Jesus would invite to dinner."

A proposal by a group of Grand Rapids churches that has spoken against homosexuality would require the general secretary to be elected every four years, to make sure the position represents "the thinking and heartbeat" of the denomination. Granberg-Michaelson has filled the post for 11 years.

The RCA has struggled with declining membership, and Granberg-Michaelson called for the church to pursue a more multicultural presence. He also wants to streamline church bureaucracy.

Officials admit that the 10-year growth plan will bring "deep, painful change," but fear that a lack of action will bring "slow, painful death."


ecclesia reformata, sed semper reformanda