
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 6, 1990                   TAG: 9006060471
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A/12   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: SALT LAKE CITY                                LENGTH: Short

PRESBYTERIANS OK DOCUMENT ON EQUALITY

The corporate merger of the northern and southern branches of the Presbyterian Church in 1983 has become a theological merger.

Cheers rang out at the Salt Palace in this Mormon heartland after commissioners to the 202nd General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) approved a new statement of faith Tuesday that combines traditional Christian beliefs with contemporary concerns for the environment and sexual equality. The vote was 499-25.

"For the first time, this denomination speaks for itself as a theological body. That to me is of epochal significance," said the Rev. Douglas Harper, a Houston pastor who served on the drafting committee.

If the document is approved by two-thirds of the denomination's 177 regional presbyteries and again by the 1991 General Assembly, it will become the 11th statement of faith in the 2.9 million-member church's Book of Confessions.

The new statement of faith is the denomination's first since the merger healed a 122-year-old split dating to the Civil War and the slavery issue.

The confession also likens God to both a mother who will not forsake her nursing child and a father "who runs to welcome the prodigal home."

On the environment, the confession says humans deserve God's condemnation for the way they "threaten death to the planet entrusted to our care."

Some church leaders said the confession is vital for the denomination, which has lost a third of its members in the past quarter century amid criticism it lacked a strong identity.

by CNB