Skip to main content

PC USA Church Votes against 'Holy' Marriage

Share This article

The Presbyterian Church USA has voted to allow gay marriage.

The denomination's general assembly voted Thursday in favor of redefining Christian marriage as the union of "two people" not just "a man and a woman."

The group also voted to allow pastors to preside at gay weddings in states where same-sex marriage is legal.

A majority of the church's 172 regional presbyteries must approve the decision to redefine marriage -- a process that could take up to a year.

But Thursday's vote was overwhelming with 429 votes to change the definition of marriage and only 175 against it. 

Those who oppose the move are urging caution.

"We are laying hands on something that is holy, that God has given us, so we need to be sure any changes we make are in accord with God's will revealed in Scripture," said Bill Norton of the Presbytery de Cristo in Arizona and New Mexico.

And the conservative Presbyterian Lay Committee decried the votes held in Detroit as an "abomination."

"The General Assembly has committed an express repudiation of the Bible, the mutually agreed upon Confessions of the PCUSA, thousands of years of faithfulness to God's clear commands and the denominational ordination vows," the group said in a statement.

Since the PC USA voted in 2011 to allow gay ordination, 428 of the denomination's more than 10,000 churches have either dissolved or left for other more conservative denominations.

Share This article

About The Author

CBN
News

CBN News is a national/international, nonprofit news organization that provides programming 24 hours a day by cable, satellite and the Internet. Staffed by a group of acclaimed news professionals, CBN News delivers stories to over a million viewers each day without a specific agenda. With its headquarters in Virginia Beach, Va., CBN News has bureaus in Washington D.C., Jerusalem, and elsewhere around the world. What began as a segment on CBN's flagship program, The 700 Club, in the early 1980s, CBN News has since expanded into a multimedia news organization that offers today's news headlines