I’m on a committee with the Presbyterian Church of Queensland (PCQ) that was once called the Public Questions Committee (PQC). For obvious reasons relating to our acronym (PCQPQC), we changed our name to the Gospel In Society Today Committee (if you get my GIST). This significant step represents a transition from being an initialism to being an acronym. So we should all rejoice on that front, but it also involved some gear shifts in terms of how the committee sees itself, and its function, within the church. We want to provide resources for people to think about issues from a Gospel framework, so they can participate, in an informed way, in our democracy. We write stuff (rarely) to speak as ‘the Church’ — but the real payoff, according to our philosophy, is in helping people understand current issues as they relate to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, as these events reveal both God’s plans for the world and the pattern for a good, flourishing, human life in this world.
The committee is full of people who are smarter than me (and often clearer than me too), and so its resources are worth checking out. There’s a newly minted page on the PCQ website featuring our first batch of ‘position papers’ on the Gospel, humanity, abortion, sexuality, and how we believe the Westminster Confession (a sort of theological guide for Presbyterian ministers) should shape the way we speak to governments, and what we say. I won’t link directly to those files because the URLs may change with subsequent updates.
Comments
Will these papers be going beyond the usual set of moral issues (abortion, sexuality) to more contestable political (but no less moral) issues like our treatment of refugees or our repsonsibility to address human induced climate change?
Yes. Or at least implications will be drawn from a paper like the humanity one to write a position paper on an issue like a refugee crisis. We’re writing the environment one now.
Good stuff.