After THIRTY YEARS, Still Unfinished Business in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)

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The upcoming June 2024 Presbyterian Church in America General Assembly (PCAGA) marks thirty years since the Rev. Dr. Edwin P. Elliott Jr. was censured on the floor of the 1994 PCAGA for reporting in the Christian Observer (CO) that “Concerned Presbyterians” told the CO of financial improprieties in regard to $5.8 million of designated funds for Mission to North America (MTA) and Mission to the World (MTW) that had been diverted to the Presbyterian Investors Fund (PIF), later Cornerstone Ministries Investments (CMI), for purposes other than for where the donations had been designated. To its credit, MTW began an effort to reclaim the missing MTW funds, but queries to the PIF about the mishandled MTW funds were “…Met with a stone wall of resistance” and “{u]nanswered  letters, unanswered phone calls, and misinformation from agencies outside the [PCA]” [1]

The 1994 PCAGA censure included a demand that a retraction of the article be printed including a statement from Kennedy Smartt. The CO published said “retraction” in a later issue. The 2008 bankruptcy filing by CMI, and the eventual settlement of the debts of $132 million to 3500 entities, mostly PCA members and churches, for a few pennies on the dollar, more than justified Dr. Elliott’s concern with these financial improprieties in 1994 of $5.8 million that ballooned fourteen years later to $132 million in the CMI bankruptcy.

The facts regarding the PIF/CMI debacle are well documented in my 2011 CO article “Unfinished Business for the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)” available at:

https://christianobserver.org/unfinished-business-for-the-presbyterian-church-in-america-pca-2/

Dr. Elliott died in October of 2009 after being slandered, libeled, vilified, and persecuted for fifteen years by a significant number of PCA Teaching Elders (TE) and Ruling Elders (RE) who participated in, enabled, and went along to get along with this unchristian behavior toward Dr. Elliott and the CO. To date, there has not been a single retraction by any of the guilty parties, and not one of the PCA TEs involved in the PIF/CMI swindle, termed a “Ponzi scheme” by one of the parties to the bankruptcy proceedings, have been held accountable by the PCA or the relevant church courts.

It is far beyond a reasonable time for the PCAGA to retract the 1994 censure and to apologize to Dr. Elliott’s surviving children and grandchildren for the travesty of church court “justice” done by the 1994 PCAGA.

Bob Williams, Managing Editor, Christian Observer and Presbyterians Week

[1] From the August 10, 1994 CO response by letter of Dr, Elliott to a letter from Dr. L. Roy Taylor of Reformed Theological Seminary, Jackson, Mississippi