Pittsburgh and the Presbyterian Church

It’s fitting that the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s General Assembly will be meeting in Pittsburgh, beginning on Saturday.  It’s fitting, not just because Pittsburgh, per capita, has more Presbyterians than any other city, and not just because it will be the first time that the national decision-making body will meet in the ‘Burgh since 1959.  In many ways, the character and composition of Pittsburgh and the PC(USA) are similar.  Here are three.

First, Pittsburgh is more like a compact collection of towns than a single city.  Because of the rivers and the hilly terrain, and because of immigration and settlement patterns, the city is made up of many neighborhoods, each with a very distinct personality.  Shadyside and East Liberty may be right beside each other, but they are about as different as night and day.  A few years ago my stepdaughter lived in Bloomfield, which is nice.  But if she lived about a half block in one direction, she would have been in Garfield.  And that would have kept us up at night.

In the same way, our denomination is becoming more like a collection of neighborhoods than a unified church.  It’s not enough to say that you’re a Presbyterian to have a sense of kindred spirit with each other.  We reserve judgment until we know which “neighborhood” you’re from.  Where do you stand on ordination issues?  What’s your perspective on the authority of Scripture?  Are you more concerned about social justice or morality?  In my opinion, recent changes in our denomination have made it easier for us to identify with our neighborhoods.  The new Form of Government allows each presbytery and session to establish its own manual of operations.  So things that are “normal” in one part of the church are unheard-of somewhere else.  Just like, in Pittsburgh, Homewood is completely different from Fox Chapel.  Second, our standards of ordination are now determined more fully by the local ordaining body (session or presbytery) than by national standards.  The potential now exists that someone who is an elder or minister in one Presbyterian “neighborhood” won’t be recognized as such in another one.

Second, the adage “You can’t get there from here” applies to the roads of Pittsburgh.  There’s no neat checkerboard of streets and avenues, like you’ll find in cities built on pancake-flat terrain.  The roads in Pittsburgh follow meandering streams, skirt steep slopes, and accommodate every other geographic challenge that they find.  To make matters worse, the locals have their own names for these highways, which you’ll never find on a map or a road-sign.  If you want to travel from downtown to Monroeville, “everyone knows” that you take the Parkway East.  Everyone, that is, except for the highway signage people, who call it I-376 East.  You won’t find the Tenth Street Bridge between the Ninth Street and the Sixteenth Street Bridges; that’s where the Veteran’s Bridge is (also known as I-579).  Confused?  Don’t worry; you will be.

Once again, Pittsburgh and the PC(USA) have a lot in common.  Sure, we have a labyrinth of confusing bureaucracy, just like any other large organization.  It can be infuriating, as groups seem to work at cross-purposes, oblivious of what others are doing.  But the issue runs more deeply than that.  Some of us have such deeply entrenched convictions that “you can’t get there from here,” if you don’t have the same beliefs.  We’ve lost the ability to see eye-to-eye with each other.  Roads that should connect us only seem to drive us further apart.

But there’s a third way that Pittsburgh and the Presbyterian Church are similar.  For all of their differences, Pittsburghers share a common identity.  We’re proud of who we are, and there are many things that rally us together.  We commiserate over the potholes that spring up faster than PennDOT and the city can fill them.  We’ve all enjoyed summer days at Kennywood Park.  And of course, there are the Steelers.  It doesn’t matter if you come from Manchester or Regent Square or Mount Lebanon; chances are there’s at least one Terrible Towel in your house.  Any differences that we have with each other pale in comparison to the way we all feel about “The Mistake on the Lake” (i.e. Cleveland) or Baltimore, the city of purple pigeons.  If you’re from Pittsburgh and don’t have at least a little bit of Black and Gold in your blood, you’re a rare exception.

I’ll leave it for you to decide: is this something that we Presbyterians have as well?  Do we have a common identity, a common devotion, that trumps anything that disconnects us from each other?  We say that we do: that the saving grace of Jesus Christ and our devotion to our Lord is the guiding principle of our lives and of our church.  But is that how we live?  Is that how our commissioners and delegates will deliberate next week?  Will they interact with the love and respect of brothers and sisters in Christ?  Will they recognize and appreciate each other’s desire to further the kingdom of God?  For all of our sakes, I hope so.