LOUISVILLE – Should a Presbyterian delegation that went to the Middle East last fall have met with leaders of Hezbollah? And should two of the denomination’s national staff members who went on the trip have lost their jobs because of that meeting?

The General Assembly Council got right to the brink of discussing that on March 31 – and then went into closed session.

Earlier, the chairperson of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP), Nile Harper, had presented a report which said in part that when the PC(USA) dismissed Peter Sulyok, who had been the advisory committee’s coordinator, that dismissal “was carried out without a just cause or appropriate due process.”

Kathy Lueckert, the council’s deputy executive director, also lost her job in the fallout from the Hezbollah meeting.

The advisory committee encouraged the council to reconsider its personnel policies, which allowed the council’s executive director, John Detterick, to end Lueckert and Sulyok’s employment by “unilateral action,” according to the report...

...Two Presbyterians who made the 15-day fact-finding trip in October described some of what they’d seen and experienced – including the difficulty caused to the Palestinian people by Israel’s construction of a security barrier that’s intended to reduce suicide bombings but also is separating some Palestinians from their land, jobs and community...

...Edwards responded that Hezbollah – which the U.S. State Department has listed as a terrorist organization – also is “a significant voice” in Lebanese politics, and the advisory committee made a point of meeting with religious and political leaders all through the region. The political strength of Hezbollah was evidenced by a powerful demonstration in March, in which hundreds of thousands of Hezbollah’s Shiite supporters poured onto the streets of Beirut in support of Hezbollah’s connections with Syria.

“We went to listen to significant voices and Hezbollah is a significant voice in Lebanon,” Edwards told the council. Edwards said Sheikh Nabil Qauq of Hezbollah “gave a very warm welcome in the name of the God of Abraham, the God of Jesus, the God of Muhammad,” and quoted from Scripture several times during the meeting at a former detention camp in south Lebanon.

When the sheik was asked his advice about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, he asked that all television cameras and tape recorders be turned off, Edwards said. Then the sheik looked at the Presbyterians and said “he would ask that we would go home and read our Bibles, that we would pray, and as we got ready to vote that we would remember on the judgment day Jesus Christ would ask us if we had voted for justice,” Edwards explained...

After that, one of the Presbyterians, Ronald Stone, a retired professor from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, made a comment that was widely broadcast on Arab television and that many Presbyterians wish he had never said – telling the Hezbollah representatives that “as an elder of our church, I’d like to say that according to my recent experience, relations and conversations with Islamic leaders are a lot easier than dealings and dialogue with Jewish leaders.”

A few weeks before that, Edwards said, Stone had participated in a stressful discussion with Jewish representatives who disagreed with the General Assembly’s decision last summer to begin a process of selective, phased divestment in some companies doing business in Israel, and some of whom had called the PC(USA) anti-Semitic. Edwards called Stone’s remarks “an honest statement but a very politically naive statement” that was widely broadcast in Lebanon on the evening news...

That evening, back in Beirut, the people the delegation spoke with “were very pleased that we had gone to see Hezbollah,” and considered it “a great gesture” to building bridges of understanding, Edwards said...