Pre-GA: Violence and values: The ACSWP report
by Leslie Scanlon
Presbyterian Outlook
Presbyterian minister James Atwood knows what it’s like to be shut down on the issue of gun violence.
A while back, while visiting a congregation in a community with multiple victims of a mass shooting, Atwood raised the question of how churches can get involved. “We shouldn’t be talking about that here,” one man responded hotly. “That’s a political issue, and it’s not appropriate for the church.”
That question – exactly how the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) should respond to the gun violence that claims 30,000 lives a year in the United States – will be put directly to the 219th General Assembly when it meets in Minneapolis in July. The Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP) is asking the assembly to consider a 20-page report from a study group that “challenges our society’s fatalism and numbness in accepting the highest gun death rates in the world.”
The report does not directly take a position on gun control, although the denomination has done so previously. In 1998, for example, the General Assembly called on Presbyterians to “intentionally work toward removing handguns and assault weapons from our homes and our communities.”
But this report attempts to present gun violence as a moral issue, and to call Presbyterians to action.
The ACSWP report, “Violence and Gospel Values: Mobilizing in Response to God’s Call,” asks Presbyterian to do what the man with whom Atwood spoke was unwilling to do: to speak out and get involved.
One of its recommendations “encourages the church at every level — from individual member to congregation, presbytery, synod, and national church — to become informed and active in preventing gun violence” and to provide pastoral care for victims of gun violence.
It calls on Presbyterian congregations to hold prayer vigils at places where gun violence has claimed lives, and to “if necessary, take non-violent action against gun shops and gun shows … known to sell guns that end up in crime.”
The report also encourages pastors to speak about guns from the pulpit — calling for “periodic preaching on gun violence” and “prayers for the victims and perpetrators of gun violence, and confession of our own complicity” in allowing such violence to continue.
And the report urges Presbyterians to support positions involving gun ownership that previous General Assemblies have approved. That would include limiting the acquisition of handguns for personal use to one per month, and requiring waiting periods with background checks and “cooling off periods” for all guns sold.
