Deep rifts over homosexuality have worsened among Episcopalians and United Methodists over the past year, and now the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is getting ready to continue its divisive debate over gay clergy.
The 2.4 million-member church's weeklong national legislative assembly begins Saturday in Richmond, Va., where liberals will take up new attacks against the church's strict law barring actively gay clergy and lay officers.
Conservatives will defend that law and, frustrated because some ignore it, seek a clampdown and new church leadership.
Gay activists and their allies have three proposals regarding the ban:
_A third attempt to repeal the 1997 law requiring officeholders to "live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness."
_A rewrite of that law to replace the man-and-woman phrase with "a covenanted relationship between two persons."
_A proposal backed by the Covenant Network caucus to drop another piece of church law that reinforces the prohibition on gay clergy.
Meanwhile, conservative caucuses such as the Presbyterian Coalition favor action to enforce church court rulings and keep active gays and lesbians out of office.
It may be that none of the measures will be approved, since an emergency task force on church "peace, unity and purity" has been assigned to dig into gay-related issues and report to the next assembly, in 2006.
That panel is seeking a way to hold the denomination together despite the gay issue and underlying disputes over whether the Bible's passages condemning homosexual activity apply under modern conditions.
Next Friday, delegates elect a "stated clerk" — the chief executive at the church's Louisville, Ky., headquarters — to serve until 2008. The seasoned incumbent, the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, was the sole choice of the nominating committee, but he is being challenged by three conservatives.
The three consider Kirkpatrick too wishy-washy on enforcement of the gay ban and say he has presided over decline. The church's net loss of 46,658 members from 2002 to 2003 was its worst since the denomination was formed in a 1983 merger between Northern and Southern churches that originated in the Civil War.
Active membership in 1983 was 4.2 million and has dropped by 1.8 million since.
The challengers to Kirkpatrick are:
_The Rev. Robert Davis, a one-time lawyer, associate pastor of a congregation in Escondido, Calif., and executive director of Presbyterian Forum, a think tank that favors Bible-based "renewal."
_The Rev. Linn "Rus" Howard, a pastor in Venetia, Pa., who lost a January bid to have his regional presbytery endorse "gracious separation" of the national church into two denominations, conservative and liberal.
_Alex Metherell, an engineer and radiologist from Newport Beach, Calif., who filed a petition last year ordering a special assembly to deal with those disobeying the gay clergy ban. The effort died when some endorsers rescinded support.
At a June 9 candidates' debate (which Kirkpatrick did not attend), Howard called his proposal a way to spur honest discussion of the ideological split, and Metherell said an eventual breakup of the church is inevitable unless Kirkpatrick is ousted. Davis opposed separation.
On Saturday night, delegates elect a moderator — the titular head of the church — to serve until 2006. Announced candidates are the Rev. David McKechnie, pastor of a conservative Houston megachurch; the Rev. K.C. Ptomey, a Nashville, Tenn., pastor and Covenant Network board member; and Rick Ufford-Chase, a social activist in Tucson, Ariz.
Other issues on the docket:
_Controversy over Avodat Yisrael, a "messianic" congregation in Pennsylvania funded by the church that combines Jewish traditions with faith in Jesus. Several bills call for a funding cutoff on such efforts and for a study of Jewish relations.
_Conservative attempts to further restrict the church's support for abortion rights.
_Fine-tuning of church policy on accused child molesters.