While at General Assembly I met two of the other three Presbyterian Stated Clerk candidates - other than Grayde Parsons, with whom I had worked. Back at work Friday, I watched some of the Stated Clerk election on the PC(USA) Web site on live streaming audio. Gradye Parsons was already the nominating committee's nominee. But he won the seat - I suspect - in his responses to some of the candidate Questions and Answers. Gradye talked about his work with the Peace, Unity, and Purity committee (which he served like the review committees that we both served), when proponents and opponents of gay ordination finally accused each other of being indifferent to God's will and reached a place where they understood each other better and agreed on a path for the denomination. Asked about fear, Gradye also referred back to scripture he had already talked about - about the disciples being terrified as they sat in a boat in a lake during a terrible storm - and were surprised to find Jesus asleep. Gradye hinted that this was a metaphor for the denomination's situation, when every congregation - no matter what size - fears that they're a few months from closing. Gradye interpreted the story as an exercise in faith: Get in the boat. Cross the lake. There will be a storm. You will not die.
And Gradye (a former presbytery executive in Holston Presbytery, in far easter mountainous Tennessee) went on to win the Stated Clerk election on the first ballot, with more than half of the vote, and will succeed his boss of 10 plus years, 12-year Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick.
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