Dear Mr. Duggan,
Thank you for your comment.
First, readers should know you are one of the elders of Tenth presently on Session.
Second, did you listen to this podcast? If so, why not acknowledge my deep firsthand knowledge of Tenth’s history of covering up sexual sin, as well as my involvement in forcing your session and presbytery to repent of their coverups? Instead, you simply accuse me of making “guesses.”
Note that I haven’t published my hundreds of emails and documents of correspondence following our Commission’s meeting with your session and the years of wrestling with your session which followed, including formal disciplinary charges against you (Session) with Philadelphia Presbytery which resulted in presbytery censuring your session and former top pastor, Phil Ryken. Your session has proven their betrayal of their sheep over and over again, and now everyone knows it with the GRACE report. So no, I have not gone beyond what I know. I have written less than I know.
Dear brother, there is a radical difference between an investigation and filing charges. You blur the distinction by referring to the investigation as if that satisfies the Biblical injunctions and the requirements of your Book of Church Order. Maybe your blurring of this radical distinction is something you don’t understand? On the other hand, maybe you do understand that distinction and prefer to confuse the sheep by equivocating over the difference.
From love I will assume the former and ask you to read and consider sending the following letter under your own name to your Presbytery’s stated clerk:
Dear Pastor Egli,
My name is (John Doe). I’m a member of the Session of Tenth Presbyterian Church.
It appears to me our presbytery might be unintentionally complicating the TE Liam Goligher matter. Here we are two months after multiple court documents have exposed Pastor Goligher’s pleading guilty and paying a fine to satisfy criminal charges which had been filed against him for his sexual conduct with one of our deaconesses in the back seat of a car in a public park. Yet his formal pastoral relationship remains in force!
Our congregation just held a meeting to request you correct this by terminating his call as our Senior Minister, but really I’m wondering why you and the other members of Philadelphia Presbytery haven’t obeyed our Book of Church Order in its simplicity and dignity by filing charges two months ago? Our Book of Church Order Rules of Discipline read:
If anyone knows a minister to be guilty of a private offense, he should warn him in private. But if the offense be persisted in, or become public, he should bring the case to the attention of some other minister of the Presbytery. (34-3, 4)
Goligher’s offense has been very “public” for two months now. It was your responsibility—indeed the responsibility of every member of Phildelphia Presbytery—to file charges against Pastor Goligher two months ago.
Had you done so, our congregation would not have had to suffer through the last two months of talk and fear and insecurity. You men of presbytery would have informed us you were leading; that you had filed charges against Pastor Goligher and would see through the formal disciplinary process required by our Book of Church Order. Also, that in the interim, the presbytery’s authority had suspended him from office.
So very dignified. So honoring to God. So protective of the sheep. So faithful to the brother caught in sin. So healing to the deaconess who is his victim, as he and she admit in their pleas of guilt before the Pennsylvania judiciary, and payment of fines.
Here is the process from our Book of Church Order which you could have been following over the course of the past two months, thereby putting the fears of our congregation at rest:
Presbytery as a whole may try a judicial case within its jurisdiction …or it may of its own motion commit any judicial case to a commission. Such a commission shall be appointed by the Presbytery from its members other than members of the Session of the church from which the case comes up. The commission shall try the case in the manner presented by the Rules of Discipline and shall submit to the Presbytery a full statement of the case and the judgment rendered. (Chapter 15-1; Ecclesiastical Commissions)
Given Liam’s abdication of his call and actions since December 1, I think it unlikely he will submit to presbytery summons to formal judicial process specified above. Concerning church discipline, failure to answer a summons and appear to hear the charges is the very definition of contumacy (32-6) and the next step for teaching elders defying their presbytery is as follows:
When a minister accused of an offense is found contumacious he shall be immediately suspended from the sacraments and his office for his contumacy. Record shall be made of the fact and of the charges under which he was arraigned, and the censure shall be made public. The censure shall in no case be removed until the offender has not only repented of his contumacy, but has also given satisfaction in relation to the charges against him. (34-4)
Finding Liam guilty of contumacy and suspending him from the the Lord’s Table and his office would automatically dissolve his pastoral relationship with Tenth. Our congregation would be spared the pain of having to call for this dissolution. You and Pastor Goligher’s fellow presbyters would have removed this burden from us.
This would be both a sadness and kindness to Tenth, bringing some much-needed resolution to what has, on top of the G.R.A.C.E. Report’s release back in November, seemed like interminable pain with no end in sight.
It may be that, facing a declaration of contumacy and suspension, Liam would finally admit his sin. If so, there would be even more resolution, although a disciplined resolution as again specified in our wise Book of Church Order:
When a minister, pending a trial, shall make confession, if the matter be base and flagitious, such as drunkenness, uncleanness, or crimes of a greater nature, however penitent he may appear to the satisfaction of all, the court shall without delay impose definite suspension or depose him from the ministry. (34-7)
This has been drawn out too long, in my judgment, and I hope you will not consider me impertinent to suggest the above be speedily accomplished. To rehearse the facts:
The evidence already in hand strongly confirms Liam’s guilt. Consider 1) Liam’s and Susan Elzey’s respective police citations for “engag[ing] in sexual activity” in the back seat of an SUV in a public park; and 2) court records showing that, a week later, each party pled guilty, in court and under oath, and paid the financial damages. If their sworn pleas were insincere, each lied to the magistrate and about each other, and before God.
Also consider Liam’s written statement read by a representative of our Session after worship on December 3. The pronouncement reiterated Liam’s tall tale of the 2014 incident to the congregation, a spin that failed to acknowledge the nature of his behavior to which he pleaded guilty—that he was violating the Seventh Commandment with Deaconess Susan Elzey, a married mother of three confirmed covenant children, and his neighbor in Haddonfield.
Yes, I do understand the heavy nature of formal judicial process. Yet our Constitution has been written and we have sworn to uphold it for such a time as this. If I may be of any service to you or my fellow church officers, please ask.
Your obedient servant,
Respectfully,
Pastor Goligher has already pled guilty and paid his fine for committing adultery with one of his sheep. You and your fellow elders of Tenth need to force the presbytery to charge the man and force him to admit his guilty once more—this time not in civil, but ecclesiastical court. If being charged once more, he repudiates his earlier admission of guilt, then demand his fellow presbyters find him guilty of contumacy and suspend or remove him from the Lord’s table and church office.
Love,