Paul K. Hooker

Sunday, 4 July 2010: Minneapolis, MN

It's been a little more than 23 hours since the 219th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) elected its new moderator, Elder Cynthia Bolbach of National Capital Presbytery (Washington DC area). I couldn't be more delighted with the choice.

I've reached the age where GA moderators are more often my contemporaries than my seniors. That's a shift that comes with mixed emotions. On the one hand, it means I'm getting older - perhaps not the most pleasant prospect to contemplate. On the other, it means that, more and more, the people who come to this office are my friends.

Certainly this is the case with Cindy Bolbach. Just two weeks shy of four years ago, I met Cindy in a hotel in Louisville, KY. She and I and ten others had just been appointed as the Form of Government Task Force, charged by the 217th GA (2006) to create a revised Form of Government for the church. The moderator for the task force hadn't been selected. But of the people gathered around the conference table, it was clear that one - a corporate lawyer named Cindy Bolbach - had all the skills for the job: a good grasp of the church's life, a fine sense of the Book of Order, a patient way of listening to argument, a quick mind for assessing personalities, and a wonderful, wry, self-deprecating sense of humor that sparkled in the corner of her eye and hinted that she wasn't quite telling you everything she was thinking. We elected her co-moderator that day, and she holds the job even now. There has not been a single day in the last four years that I have regretted that choice.

What I saw four years ago, the General Assembly saw last evening. Cindy was one of a near-record SIX candidates for moderator (the most I can ever recall before is four), but she was alone and without real peer. Her answers to questions were kind, humble, and at the same time sharp and incisive. One commissioner asked her about her views on changing the definition of marriage from "one man and one woman" to "two people." Cindy affirmed her sense that the church was not ready to make that change. But then she said, "I wonder, who does more damage: Larry King, whose been married to seven women and divorced from them all, or [a gay man she knew] who's been with the same partner for sixty-two years?" She didn't need to say more; she'd raised and illustrated the dilemma we are facing as a church and as a society perfectly.

I hope to be able to get Cindy to be a speaker and preacher for our presbytery. I hope you'll be able to benefit first hand from her gentle wisdom and cleverness. But mostly, I hope you'll be able to see what I saw in her four years ago: the definition of what it means to be an elder in the Presbyterian Church.

More to come tomorrow.

Paul