Dear Editor:

With Amendment 01-A having gone down to a clear defeat, it is also clear that Jack Rogers should consider resigning, for the sake of the peace and unity of the church he is charged to represent. It is important to know when to persevere and when perseverance does more harm than good.

Implicit in the word "moderator" is both the word "moderate" and "mediator". Rogers has been neither. Rather than being a bridge builder between the opposing sides, he has been a bridge burner. His unabashed advocacy on A has likely worked against the very cause he supported. Perhaps, if we take his self-identification as a conservative evangelical at face value, it is an example that it is often easier to go from one extreme to another rather than doing the hard work of balancing competing truths to find the middle ground. We need people in leadership who are willing to work for a genuine middle ground and not ones who are, in effect, wolves in sheep's clothing.

Jesus, in calling Christians to love one another, doesn't ask us to agree with one another. He doesn't ask us to even like one another. But he does call us to unconditionally accept one another. In launching attacks not on the theological position but on the persons of his perceived opponents, Rogers has lost sight of this fundamental truth of Christianity. Both sides have been guilty of this but because of Rogers' position, he bears a particular responsibility for alienating us, one from another. I've heard from others that he is a well-intentioned and caring person, but at some point we have to say "by their fruits you shall know them".

But we need to recognize Rogers as part of a larger problem in our church. Our wounds are largely self-inflicted. We are suffering from a problem shared with our larger society - a lack of leadership at the highest levels.
Leadership in the church requires a vision that expands the boundaries of faith, but that pulls rather than pushes. It requires a vision that is radically inclusive - there is a place for people of widely different opinions but firmly rooted in the traditions and scriptures of the church. It is a vision that can maintain the tension between the dignity of the individual while being equally committed to the community as a whole.

Good leadership requires impartial administration of discipline and justice, recognizing that justice administered any other way becomes indistinguishable from tyranny.

Good leadership calls for an ear tuned to the voice of the people. They are responsible not to one faction or other, but to the whole. It also listens in the understanding that few things will anger people more than knowing that their voices are not being heard.

Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King were both examples of how leadership might and ought to be done in a Christian context. Lincoln refused the demands of the abolitionists on the one side and the accomodationists on the other. He held two principles inviolate: the "right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and the integrity of the Union, recognizing that without the latter, the former might also cease to exist. King spoke out of the historical and existential sufferings of his people, but he also articulated a vision for Blacks that refused to see them as victims and a vision for our country that had room even for his bitterest opponents.

We are in need of leadership that can be simultaneously passionate and dispassionate, committed, but flexible, visionary but concrete, that can keep a sense of perspective while others around them have lost such. We need leadership that, as King once said, is both tough-minded and tenderhearted. We in the church often do well at the latter and fail miserably at the former.
Our leadership today at best sometimes seems only resolved to be irresolute, at worst unabashedly partisan with visions both short-sighted and narrow. The question for us today is do we want to continue this way? Do we want to be a reflection of a society that seems to have lost its way or to be a beacon to it?