Category Archives: social media

222nd General Assembly Of The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

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It is safe to say that in the coming week most American Presbyterians will have their General Assembly in session. Pardon the alphabet soup, but this next week will see the General Assemblies of the PC(USA), a concurrent GA by the CPC and CPCA, then the PCA, the EPC, and the RPCNA. (Technically that last one is a General Synod.) There is also the distinct likelihood that there will be three live streams going at once so figure out your viewing schedule now.

logo+pcusaFirst up is the 222nd General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in Portland which begins on Saturday 18 June and finishes a week later on Saturday 25 June. There is no question that this will be a momentous and memorable meeting. Even before a single vote is taken we know that the denomination will come out of the meeting with their first Co-Moderators, a new Stated Clerk, and a road map – if not solid decisions – related to reorganizing the national offices to reflect the changing reality of the church in these current times. In addition, it is anticipated that the Belhar Confession will be added to the Book of Confessions and the celebration will begin for the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Confession of 1967. And that does not even begin to scratch the surface of all the other business that is out there.

The source for information on all this business is, as usual, the on-line PC-Biz system. However, it has been given a new look and a bunch of us have been putting it through its paces and helping to squash bugs. (You are welcome.) And the tech wizards behind it have been very responsive to our reports. Now we will see if it can handle a couple thousand simultaneous users.  And the PC(USA) event guide for the Guidebook App  is back as well. There are Android and iOS apps and it can be viewed in a web browser.

There is a docket posted and you can also find the schedule, reports overtures/business items on PC-Biz as well as all the Constitutional documents, the Manual of the General Assembly, and other useful items on the PC-Biz Resources tab.

ga222-circle-colors-vector-fin_small150The Assembly will begin with the usual formalities on Saturday, but this year in the morning. The opening worship with celebration of the Lord’s Supper is scheduled for 11 AM local time and will be live streamed. Congregations are encouraged to gather in their churches and join in the worship. Formal business will begin at 2 PM in the afternoon followed by the election of the Moderator Saturday evening. Sunday is worship in churches throughout the Portland area and a plenary session and receptions in the afternoon. Committee work begins in that evening and it will run through Tuesday evening. During that time PC-Biz is the place to find out what the committees are doing with the pieces of business near and dear to you.

The meeting moves back to plenary on Wednesday afternoon and then it is a mad push to get all the business done by Friday night or in the wee hours of Saturday morning. But one of the realities is that there is no real schedule of when particular committees report until later in the week when committees have finished their business and they are assembled on the docket like a jigsaw puzzle. The final Saturday morning session is highlighted by worship and the closing business formalities.

Opening worship and plenary sessions should be live streamed and the viewer can be found embedded in the GA 222 Home Page.

The tracking utility on PC-Biz is the best place to follow business. While the PC(USA) does have a general Twitter account (@Presbyterian), the General Assembly feed (@presbyGA) usually provides more play-by-play. There is also the Presbyterian News Service on Twitter (@PresbyNews). The hashtag for the meeting is #ga222.

News items will also appear on the GA222 web page as well as the Presbyterian News Service feed. There is also a Facebook page, and the daily news sheet is now electronic.

There are numerous entities of the PC(USA) that have Twitter accounts and you might want to watch the hashtag or check the list I compiled in a post a while back.

For individuals of note let me start with the two Co-Moderator teams: Jan Edmiston (@jledmiston) and Denise Anderson (@thesoulstepford), and David P. Parker (@DavidPParker) and Adan Mairena (@elburque). The other office to be decided is for Stated Clerk and you can follow J. Herbert Nelson (@jherbertnelson). The other candidate is the Rev. David Baker and while he promotes himself as strong in social media in his LinkedIn profile, I can not find a Twitter account for him. I will keep looking. Moving on to Moderators of previous assemblies we can begin with Bruce Reyes-Chow who tweets at @breyeschow and @brc_live. The immediate past Moderator, Neal Presa, can be followed at @NealPresa. And the Moderator finishing up his term, Heath Rada (@heathrada), is there as well. And the current Vice-Moderator, Larissa Kwong Abazia can be found at @LarissaLKA, and a previous Vice-Mod, Landon Whitsitt (@LandonWhitsitt) would definitely make the list. And not to be overlooked is the Executive Director of PMA Tony De La Rosa (@tonydlr). In this list of individuals let me throw in the Director of Operations, Thomas Hay (@DirOfOp) and also a true GA Junkie in his own right, Andy James (@andyjames). And fair warning that both of them are heavily involved in the Assembly so it is entirely possible their time will be spent on things other than tweeting. Finally, the Church of Scotland ecumenical delegate is the Rev. Derek Browning (@DerekBrowning2) who, besides being a parish minister, is also their General Assembly’s Business Convener – something like an associate stated clerk – and therefore a polity wonk in his own right. I am looking forward to his insight and dry wit. He will also be tweeting at the curated account @churchscovoices.

UPDATE: For live tweeting you might want to check out L3 UMD. For color with a degree of snark (yes, some of us need this during the meeting) you can follow Jodi Craiglow.

Out in the press corps, keep an eye on the Presbyterian Outlook on their website (pres-outlook.org) and Twitter (@presoutlook) as well as their special correspondent Leslie Scanlon (@lscanlon).

I will be at the meeting as well. I plan to live blog the plenary sessions here as well as posting more information about specific areas of business. The Outlook has posted three articles I wrote for them on business coming to the Assembly related to Elders and Councils, Non-geographic Presbyteries, and Synods. I do plan to tweet extensively but not completely during the Assembly. So here is my plan: My regular Twitter handle – @ga_junkie – will be used to cover major events at all the Assemblies and the Synod that will be under way. So read carefully as to which meeting the hashtag is for. I will use my secondary, and confusingly named @gajunkie handle (note – no underscore) to cover the PC(USA) exclusively. And if someone is planning to live tweet the Assembly let me know and I will point people in your direction.

button222Finally, my bit of levity. First, I will once again be passing out my “I’m A GA Junkie” buttons. Find me if you want one. Also, the Bingo Card is available for the meeting. In addition, I have targeted four concepts that I will keep a score board on how often they are mentioned in plenary. While giving away the phrases and concepts might bias the results and/or encourage people to use them, I will put them out anyway. They are:

  1. Any reference to the Rev. Fred Rogers, aka Mister Rogers
  2. Misquoting the recent When We Gather At The Table Report. (You can see my caution in the related blog post.)
  3. References to the membership decline in the denomination.
  4. Comments about a certain presidential candidate as a Presbyterian, or not.

And so I am looking forward to an exciting week in Portland but wishing the important action around American Presbyterian branches got spaced out a bit more.

So time to finish packing and see you in Portlandia in a few hours.

A Closer Look At Denominations And Twitter

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My musing about Twitter accounts that I posted a week ago started a bunch of conversations and got me looking at it a bit more closely. Now fair warning – that post was the beginning of a look at the diversity of a denomination by thinking about how many different “voices” there are coming from that branch. Ultimately I want to find a way to categorize those voices on a diversity spectrum but a  couple of metrics I have tried already did not pan out. However, in casting the net a bit wider, that is in bringing more denominations into the data set, an interesting relationship appeared.

As we drill into that data a brief reminder about the data set. I was looking for official Twitter accounts from a denomination. My original list from the PC(USA) included the primary account, agencies, committees, periodicals and news sources. It did not include what I characterized as commercial project-specific accounts – like the Glory to God Hymnal and the Feasting on the Word series – as well as not counting seminaries and conference centers. As I move on to other denominations I will stick to these same parameters even though some have seminaries and conference centers with much closer oversight by their highest governing bodies. In addition, I am choosing at the onset of this analysis to include the inactive, duplicate and periodical accounts.

In this search for denominational Twitter accounts I found one more for the PC(USA) and have added that to the list in the original post and annotated it as an update. For the rest of the usual American Presbyterian branches I have these that I found:

ARPC – 32,000 members (from current issue of The ARP)

RPCNA – 7,000 members (from current issue of The ARP)

OPC – 31,122 (from Statistician’s report to 2015 GA)

No official Twitter accounts found

PCA – 358,516 members (from Clerk’s summary of 2015 GA)

EPC – 149,527 reported (from statistical report to 2015 GA)

BPC – 3500 members (Wikipedia)

No official Twitter accounts found

ECO – 60,000 members (report from 2014 Synod meeting)

Cumberland – 72,370 members (2015 GA Minutes Statistical Reports for 2014)

CPCA – 7676 members (2014 GA Minutes Statistical Reports for 2013)

No official Twitter accounts found

So if we take these and plot Twitter accounts versus membership what do we get? Here is the graph.

twitter_1

That’s a pretty nice trend line there — all the data give a correlation of 0.990. Tough to beat that. But those who regularly deal with statistics will notice a couple of issues.

First and foremost the trend line is highly leveraged. That is to say that you have a lot of data on the left and then a really, really long space until you get to the PC(USA) on the right. When calculating the trend that isolated data point can dominate and pull the trend line to itself. Compared to the actual number of 39 Twitter accounts the trend line predicts 39.06 accounts. Yes, there is the clear possibility of leveraging.

Second, even the data point for the PCA is a bit isolated there away from the cluster. In a sense, we have the statistics of small numbers with three meaningful populations: the PC(USA) point on the right, the PCA point in the middle and the cluster containing everyone else on the left.

However, looking at the data and the trend line it still seems to be a decent fit. Yes, the PC(USA) has leveraged it but the predicted 9.11 accounts for the PCA is still reasonably close to the actual 10 accounts. So let’s test the leveraging.

Dropping the PC(USA) point from the linear regression and fitting only on the lower nine points, including the PCA, the correlation drops to 0.827. So there is a correlation drop indicating some leveraging but that is still a respectably strong number. But have a look at the plot…

twitter_2

So if the trend line is only based on the lower nine data points and then extrapolated out four times that distance to predict the PC(USA) value, it only over-estimates by 1.54. This is starting to look like a more robust relationship.

Having now had a look at the data let me tell you that what I found is significantly different than my expected outcome. You might have noticed that a bit of my bias crept into the last post regarding the PC(USA) having a high number of Twitter accounts. As I was compiling that list it seemed to me that the church had gone wild in creating accounts.  Well, when viewed from the perspective of number of accounts per thousand members (that would be 0.024 accounts/member for the trend line if you care) the number is right in line with everyone else. They just happen to be four times larger than the next largest branch so the number of accounts is four times larger.

From a statistical point of view I went into this expecting that I would never be able to plot this on a linear line. I was expecting to have to fit it to a log scale on the number of accounts axis. Furthermore, from past experience I also expected the leveraging to be more dramatic and the extrapolated line to miss by a wider margin. So I share this little experiment to document something that truly surprised me when I took a close look at it. And furthermore, the decision of which accounts to include and which to exclude from the count was made at the beginning and carried through the analysis. It would of course be interesting to try this again with other subsets but I have not tried those and will leave that for another day.

Now, what we can say is that the number of accounts that the PCA and the PC(USA) have are completely in line with each other and generally with the smaller churches as well. While the smaller branches scatter a bit more around the line the trend is generally evident in that cluster.

What we can not say is whether, from an administrative and social media point of view, the PC(USA) and maybe the PCA have too many Twitter accounts. There is a statistical relationship here but that does not tell us whether the number of accounts per member helps or does not help get the message out. Furthermore, this relationship does not answer any questions about the consistency or coherence of the message in social media or the diversity of the branch as a whole.

Some of my preliminary thoughts are what this might mean for scaling relationships of institutional structure and self-similarity as a means of probing institutional development. In particular, it might be an interesting on-going study to see how accounts might be added as ECO becomes larger and how accounts might go dormant as the PC(USA) scales back its operations.

But it is a very interesting relationship and I put it out there for any social media theorists or practitioners who might be interested in this sort of thing. As I said, I was surprised by the proportionality, robustness and consistency of the relationship. I welcome any of you that are interested to continue pondering with me what possible implications there might be.

Musings On How Big Is The PC(USA) Big Tent – Part 1: Herding Cats?

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So I got this research idea over lunch today: I have been considering ways to quantify how big the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) tent really is and I thought that maybe Twitter accounts might be one metric. I am not sure how well this actually does what I want but it was an interesting experiment and so I thought I would share it as a musing.

The idea started when I was thinking about the articles I write as previews for various general assemblies and including the official social media links in the article. There is usually an official Twitter account for the denomination, maybe one for the GA itself, sometimes a news account, a couple of official individuals and typically a ministry agency or two. Check out the Presbyterian Church in Ireland post if you want a good example and one I consider typical.

But thinking about the PC(USA) I knew that it had a bunch more accounts so I started compiling a list. Here is the list of what I found in about an hour of searching. I was surprised at how many different official Twitter accounts the PC(USA) has. Besides the general official one (@Presbyterian) I found the following 37 (in no particular order):

[Update: The above list was one lunch-hours work. As I find more I am adding them here:

These additions are not reflected in the numbers discussed below. /Update]

Please note that this does not include churches, presbyteries or synods. I did not include accounts for wrapped-up special projects like the MC Commission or the Glory to God Hymnal. It does not include any seminaries or conference centers like Stony Point or Montreat. No affinity groups like APCE or alumni groups like YAV Alumni are in the list. And no individual accounts for officers of the denomination’s entities. It does include both the old and new Presbyterian Foundation accounts as well as two inactive Presbyterian News accounts of different vintages. It also has some periodical publications like Call to Worship, Presbyterians Today and the Mission Year Book for Prayer (which appears to have gone inactive). As I was compiling the list my criteria for inclusion if I did not recognize the entity was whether it had a web page URL that began with pcusa.org or presbyterianmission.org. But to be clear, some that I know are PC(USA) entities have their own branded web URL’s like 1001 New Worshiping Communities with www.onethousandone.org. You are welcome to argue with my include/cut line but the list is massive enough that one or two inclusions or deletions won’t change my musing about it.

Big tent? You have to admit that there is certainly something for everyone in those 38 Twitter accounts – although I am a bit disappointed to see the Evangelism account has not been active for almost four years so that pulls one edge of the tent in a bit. The list can be reduced a bit by removing the six inactive accounts and the three that I see as direct sales accounts (Store, WJK Books, ThoughtfulChristian, but not Giving Catalog). That still leaves 29 active Twitter accounts that cover the wide range of areas the PC(USA) is in. And it should be remembered that some of these represent multiple accounts in the same entity, such as Theology and Worship having a Twitter account for both general items as well as one dedicated to their periodical “Call to Worship.” It is also interesting to observe that neither of the two big top divisions, the Office of the General Assembly and the Presbyterian Mission Agency, have stand-alone accounts but both tweet under the most general @Presbyterian account.

Some thoughts…

With so many sub-areas it does raise questions about the church. There is so much going on has the PC(USA) spread itself too thin, especially in light of declining membership? Do each of these areas end up as its own constituency and so the Big Tent ends up covering a multitude of separate groups with little mixing between them? With limited resources do these different areas compete for scarce resources or does their social media outreach provide the means of providing resources for their ministry?

As the title of this piece implies, when I looked at this list and from my knowledge of the activity on social media, I had to wonder if managing this large assemblage was akin to herding cats. How much does each area define its own mission, goals and objectives versus how much do they work together on a set of well-defined goals and objectives that are related to the mission of the body as a whole? Is there coordination of these accounts around common themes and events or does each sort of work its own themes out and focus on its own activities?

A quick test of this: The next churchwide event is the Big Tent event at the end of the month. I went through the 29 active Twitter feeds and looked to see how many had some reference to Big Tent since May 1. Some had numerous references, some had only one and sometimes that was a retweet. But in total I found 13 of the 29, almost half, had at least one mention of this summer’s churchwide event. I am not sure if that is good or bad but it does suggest there is not strong coordination across the entities regarding churchwide priorities.

OK, I will leave it at that for today. I saw a bunch of other points on which I could collect future data that might make interesting metrics of the big tent nature of the denomination. Maybe I will have time to chase some of those further at a later date. But for now, on to other things.

2015 General Assembly Of The Church Of Scotland

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Church_of_Scotland_Logo

Tomorrow morning the 2015 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland will convene in Edinburgh and will meet for the following week. This promises to be an interesting Assembly with a couple issues the will probably have a significant future impact on the Kirk on the docket.
So if you are interested, here is some helpful information to follow along with this Assembly.

  • There will be live streaming of the proceedings and you can connect to the stream appropriate for your device from the media page.
  • Most of the Documents pertaining to the Assembly are linked from the General Assembly Publications page. This includes the Proceedings and Reports volumes, known as the Blue Book in several different electronic formats including the traditional PDF as well as MOBI and EPUB formats for your eReaders. There is also a separate Order of Proceedings as well as the Daily Papers which will contain late-breaking changes. There is an option to subscribe to notifications of new documents being posted. In addition, there is a General Assembly App with versions for Apple iOS and Android.
  • Reports are also available individually from the Reports and minutes page.
  • If you need to refer to the documents about how they do this decently and in order most of those are linked from the Church Law page, although it is disappointing to see that the essential An Introduction to Practice and Procedure is under revision and not available.
  • A brief order of the docketed events and reports can be found on the General Assembly 2015 page.
  • And from the media page there will be regular daily updates in print, audio and video if history serves. And as always, hosted by the Rev. Douglas Aitken.

What we all want to know of course is how to follow along on social media and there will be no lack of that. You can begin with the Church of Scotland’s official Facebook page.

On Twitter the starting point is the Kirk’s main feed at @churchscotland and the official hashtag #ga2015. The church’s official publication, Life and Work, is also a good source for information on the web, on Facebook and on their Twitter feed @cofslifeandwork. In addition, while it is a personal account, you can follow the editor, Lynne McNeil, at @LifeWorkEditor. Similarly, the Church of Scotland Youth will likely be tweeting at @cosy_nya and now there is a an account for the NYA Moderator, currently Rachel Hutcheson, at @NYAModerator.

In suggesting personal accounts to follow, let me start with two individual accounts that are worth following as the Assembly gets rolling. The first is a past Moderator of the Assembly, the Very Reverend Lorna Hood. After ending her term as Moderator she has really taken to Twitter and is always a good read at @revlornascot. The second person is Seonag MacKinnon, the head of communications for the Kirk, who tweets on her personal account at @seonagm.

In suggesting other personal accounts let me begin with the Rev. Peter Nimmo of Inverness who is a commissioner this year and always a good source of information at @peternimmo1. Others I regularly follow from the Kirk include Darren Philip (@darphilip), Alistair May (@AlistairMay) and Michael Mair (@MichaelMair) who is working with the youth reps. Two more that are always interesting are another past Moderator of the Assembly the Very Rev. Albert Bogle (@iTalker) and Glasgow theologian Douglas Gay (@DougGay). I will update with more as the Assembly gets under way. UPDATE: I would add Marc Falconer (@marcfalconer81) to the list and he is also blogging the Assembly.

Once again the Assembly will have its annual Heart and Soul festival on the Sunday afternoon of the Assembly week that will again be happening in Princes Street Gardens near the Assembly Hall. For those of us not in Edinburgh we look forward to seeing pictures, both on the Church of Scotland Facebook page and a gallery to be posted after the event. It is also worth noting that the Living Stones theme and the picture of people forming the cross see on the Heart and Soul poster are being used in a number of other places for this Assembly.

Concerning the business before the Assembly there is a nice summary of each report on the Life and Work site. One of the initiatives that was just kicked off ahead of the Assembly meeting is a recruitment effort to get more people training for the ministry that is titled “Tomorrow’s Calling.” Got to give props on that solid Presbyterian double meaning. It includes a national media campaign to recruit ministers and you can see the six-minute video on the Tomorrow’s Calling web page. In addition, it has its own #tomorrowscalling hastag on Twitter.

The Church and Society Council will be bringing a report which touches on many areas including economic and social justice in Scotland and continues the concern for tax structures and economic issues within the region. Their report has an Appendix with additional readings and reflections on Common Wealth? Sharing through tax and giving. In addition, they celebrate and encourage the continuation of the high political engagement seen in the Independence Referendum last fall.

Finally, the issues of Same-sex Marriage will be coming back to the Assembly after the presbyteries approved new language that, while affirming the traditional view of marriage, allows congregations to have more flexibility in extending a call to a same-sex partnered pastor if they chose. This legislation requires a final approval by the Assembly. In addition, concerns have been raised whether ministers will be able to exercise religious freedom on conducting marriages and if that would withstand a legal challenge. The former is docketed for Thursday and the latter for the opening day, although that is just a report with no further action requested.

So that is what I see at the moment. As things develop I will try to update here or blog about them. But as always, our prayers and best wishes are with the whole of the Assembly for their meeting and Spirit-led discernment.

The Latest US Religion Demographic Data

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Ah, the Siren Song of new data…

In case you were not on social media yesterday the Pew Research Center released their new report on American’s Changing Religious Landscape and it is all over the interwebs from national mainstream media, to local news outlets, to the religious news sources to bloggers to the people in the pew. And don’t worry if you have missed it because it probably only quantifies what you already know. I like the way Derek Rishmanwy put it on Twitter:

The cool thing about Pew numbers is how versatile they are; bloggers can wear them with triumph, grief, & multiple shades of schadenfreude!

And a nod to Andrew Wilson and his tweeted observation:

Ironic, a few days after the UK discovered just how inaccurate polls can be, to see so much excitement / distress in the US over … a poll.

All that to say, I initially thought I would just look at it and say “Nothing to see here. Move along folks.”

But remember that my mantra is “I never met a data set I didn’t like,” so casting caution to the wind I jumped into the fray. Now join me as I drill down into a very small piece of the data released with this report.

First, in the event you have not taken a look, let me give you the bullet points everyone else is focusing on. Between the last survey in 2007 and this one in 2014:

  • The proportion of the population identified as part of mainline denominations has dropped 3.4% from 18.1% to 14.7% of the population
  • At the same time those classified as part of evangelical Protestant churches has dropped 0.9% from 26.3% to 25.4%
  • There was a 1.2% gain in non-Christian faiths (now 5.9% of the total population) and a 6.7% gain in what they identify as Unaffiliated which has grown to 22.8% of the population.

Now, Pew favors reporting in percentages since they are most interested in the proportional interplay of groups. But it is instructive in this case to convert this into absolute numbers. So in 2007 the estimated population of the U.S. was about 301.6 million. By 2014 it had grown to 318.9 million. Using the above numbers that means that the mainline decreased from 54.6 million to 46.9 million. However, in an absolute sense the number of evangelical Protestants grew from 79.3 million to 81.0 million.

OK, now my two biggest pet peeves about this data set. (Yes, this data set pushes the limits of meeting data sets I didn’t like).

  • The basic categories for Protestants are mainline, evangelical and historically black. In other words, if you are not the first or the last you must be evangelical – that mushy category that is tough to define. So, for example, you are combining into a single group those that subscribe to the Westminster Standards with those that have “No creed but Christ, no book but the Bible, no name but the name Christian.” I think this classification could be a bit more granular.
  • The category Unaffiliated is similarly a catch-all, at least at least as I look at it. The category includes Atheists (3.1% of the population), Agnostics (4.0%) and Nothing In Particular (15.8%). Furthermore, the Nothing In Particular are further divided into Religion Not Important (8.8%) and Religion Important (6.9%). Jack Jenkins over at Think Progress dissects this corner of the classification a bit more.

Specific to that first bullet point though, Appendix B says:

Protestant respondents who gave a vague answer to denominational questions (e.g., “I am just a Baptist” or “I know I am Methodist but don’t know which specific Methodist denomination I belong to”) were placed into one of the three Protestant traditions based on their race and/or their response to a question that asked if they would describe themselves as a “born-again or evangelical Christian.”

OK, so if I am PC(USA), but don’t know or admit that I am PC(USA) and acknowledge to being born again, I get placed in the Evangelical Presbyterian category. Likewise, someone in another Presbyterian tradition that does not identify which one but does not consider regeneration to be technically the same as being born again, they would be placed in the mainline. To this point the report goes on:

Overall, 38% of Protestants (including 36% of evangelical Protestants, 35% of mainline Protestants and 53% of those in the historically black Protestant tradition) gave a vague denominational identity, necessitating the use of their race or their born-again status (or sometimes both) to categorize them into one of the three major Protestant traditions.

That appendix does list 16 different Evangelical Presbyterian categories that were reported, some of which were specific (exempli gratia: Presbyterian Church in America, Cumberland Presbyterian, Bible Presbyterian), some of which are ambiguous (does Reformed Presbyterian refer to the RPCNA or to the Hanover Presbytery?) and some are general catch-all categories like Ethnic Presbyterian and “Presbyterian, ambiguous affiliation.”

[I will note that the main report does have a two page section (beginning on page 30) on identifying evangelicals and they discuss how it can be by denomination (so Presbyterians are never evangelical), by the born-again test, or by a more detailed analysis of their beliefs. The latter is outside the scope of this report but they expect another report on that later.]

So in the report of data they group Presbyterians into three categories: the mainline PC(USA) and two Evangelical categories: PCA and everyone else. I found it interesting that in the population numbers reported in that appendix the size of the PC(USA) and the size of the Evangelical everyone else was the same with each being 1.1% of the population in 2007 and 0.9% in 2014. The PCA held steady at 0.4% of the population. For comparison purposes, if the PC(USA) had about 1.7 million members in 2014 and the US population was 318.9 million that means that only 0.5% of the population of the US was a member of the PC(USA). So based on the Pew results the adherents, or those who identify with the PC(USA), almost doubles when you consider how people self-identify or the survey classifies ambiguous answers.

Moving on to the detailed data, I will focus only on Presbyterians and refer only to the breakout pages for Presbyterians. There is one for Mainline Presbyterians generally and a subset for the PC(USA). Similarly, there is one for Evangelical Presbyterians and the subset for the PCA. So keep in mind that for the the general evangelical numbers, about half are the PCA. In addition, since I am not sure what a mainline Presbyterian who is not in the PC(USA) is I will simply focus on the PC(USA) data. But there is another 0.5% of the population that they classify as being mainline without being PC(USA).

And as I start this drill-down let me add this warning: I will be looking at small changes in some of the categories but my interest must be tempered with caution, or even skepticism, because the table of Margins of Error shows that for these sample sizes the margin is between +/-7% and +/-5.5%. That means that while many of the differences between the numbers below are interesting, very few of them are statistically significant.

So let’s start with Age.

I find it interesting that differences between all the Presbyterian categories were so similar in the 2007 survey. In general, they all had about 10% in the 18-29 age group, and 30% in each of the other age groups – 30-49, 50-64 and 65+. Yes, there are some slight differences but the pattern looks solid and there are uncertainty ranges (and the ambiguous classifications) to consider so I don’t get too concerned about that range.

Between 2007 and 2014 the PC(USA) and the PCA show very similar patterns of change in the age ranges. The youngest range stays the same, the 30-49 range decreases markedly ( -11% for the PCA and -9% for the PC(USA) ), the 50-64 range also remains the same and the 65+ range increases markedly ( +12% for the PCA and +6% for the PC(USA) ). The general evangelical as a whole shows less change in each category except that there is a marked increase in the 50-64 range ( +6%).

Gender composition

In terms of gender composition the PC(USA) remained steady at 45%/55% men to women. The PCA and the overall general evangelical both had a 5% shift from men to women.

Racial composition

Each of the groups became more diverse over the last five years with the PC(USA) dropping from 91% to 88% white, the PCA from 86% to 80% white and the general group from 88% to 81%.

For the PC(USA) the change was distributed over all the other categories with Black respondents increasing from 4% to 5%, Asian from 2% to 3% and Latino from 2% to 4%.

In the PCA it was a similar pattern for Black adherents with an increase of 5% to 6%. Asian members decreased from 4% to 3%. The biggest increase was in the Other/Mixed category jumping from 1% to 5% and a noticeable increase in the Latino category from 4% to 6%.

For the combined general evangelical category the Black percentage increased from 4% to 6%, the Asian from 3% to 5%, Other/Mixed from 1% to 4% and Latino was constant at 4%.

Income and Education

These two demographic measures appear to have some correlation as you might expect. For the PC(USA) the peak in annual household income shifted from the $50,000-$99,999 group in 2007 (37%) to the $100,000+ group in 2014. Actually, considering the margin of error the two bins are pretty close in 2014 with that lower bin having 29%. For education, the distribution is pretty flat in 2014 with just about 25% in each of the categories – High School or less, Some College, College, Post-graduate.

The interesting thing across all three classifications of Presbyterians for income is that it is bi-modal as they have binned it. In all the cases there is a lower peak in the <$30,000 bin. For 2014 the PC(USA) it is 24%, for the PC it is 27% and for the general evangelical it is 28%.

For the PCA and general evangelical the income distributions have their primary peak in the $50,000-$99,999 range with 31% in the PCA and 21% in the general. Likewise, the education peak for both groups is in the Some College bracket with 37% of the PCA and 35% of the general.

I suggested the income/education correlation, but another one comes to mind. Is the apparent correlation age reflecting the higher incomes in the PC(USA) does an older demographic with higher earning power or with more two-wage earner households account for that result.

Switching and Retention

The last set of data I want to look at is the information on individuals switching denominations and the retention of members. For this we need to turn to the section in the full report beginning on page 32. Overall, 19.0% of the country grew up in the mainline Protestant church. In the survey the measurement is that 10.4% of the population has left, 6.1% have switch into the mainline giving 14.7% now in the mainline. For evangelical Protestants the numbers are 23.9% that grew up in it, 8.4% left, 9.8% joined and now 25.4% are in that category.

Looking at all Presbyterians, 3.0% of the population grew up in a Presbyterian church of some flavor. Those who have left make up 2.0% of the US population and those that have joined make up 1.1% for a current total of 2.2% of the population.

Now, returning back to that margin of error stuff – in compiling all this data is struck me that there are some interesting differences between these three groups, but based on the demographic data in the report these three groups of Presbyterians are not that different after all.

So where do we go from here?

One thing that struck me was the “the sky is falling” response. As I said in the early discussion there is nothing new about these demographic changes. A lot of attention is being paid to the Unaffiliated growth but this group comes in a number of flavors and I am not sure combining them gives much insight. Looking at the data my interpretation is that the Nothing in Particular category has now become the point for loosely or barely affiliated individuals to now identify with. As Ed Stetzer puts it in his helpful analysis

One of the primary reasons it appears as though “American Christianity” is experiencing a sharp decline is because the nominals that once made up (disproportionately) Mainline Protestantism and Catholicism are now checking “none” on religious affiliation surveys.

In the long view what is happening now is more of a pruning or consolidation. A vital core is still there for the church to move forward.

However, this consolidation does not seem to favor the mainline. There are enough theories as to why that is the case that I won’t go there now. But I think the same principle applies — there is pruning and consolidation going on with that branch. The key will be finding a central core and shared vision to organize around in the years ahead.

Can the mainline do that? It will be interesting to see. There is certainly a lot of pruning going on in the PC(USA) although you will get significant discussion as to whether there the mainline is the core that needs to be pruned or the part that is being shed in the consolidation. But with the Split-P’s the divisions come and reunion later comes as well. We will have to see which groups can develop strong cores or whether the declines will overtake them before they can.

I also wanted to add that for purposes of forecasting future trends grouping and reporting the data a bit differently would be useful. The primary example is the age data where the ranges are large enough that having a report with shifted age ranges so that individuals in the 2007 report are in the same group in the 2014 report would be useful. Even better, maybe a report with the age ranges reflecting the customary demographic groups – Builders, Boomers, Gen X and Millennials – could be considered. The purpose of course is to isolate the groups to see if they fit the oft-reported trends. Similarly, when dealing with something like household income it would be helpful to not just see it in the bins but also report the quartiles of the data.

So there are a few of the things I was chasing here. A couple other items jump out at me but this close to the opening of the Church of Scotland General Assembly convening that I want to chase those any further. Lots to think about here so something to return to later if times get slow. And there is always that report on Evangelical Protestants. But for now…

… On to Edinburgh

221st General Assembly Of The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

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We now approach a very busy week of General Assemblies. Hold on to your proverbial hats…

Leading off in the lineup is the 221st General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The gavel will come down to convene the meeting at 11:00 AM local time tomorrow (14 June) in Detroit, Michigan and it will run for one week until Saturday June 21.

The source for information is the on-line PC-Biz system. It can be access on the web at pc-biz.org. There are is also a PC(USA) event guide for the Guidebook App Android and iOS apps.

There is a docket posted and you can also find the schedule, reports overtures/business items on PC-Biz as well as all the Constitutional documents, the Manual of the General Assembly, and other useful items on the PC-Biz Resources tab.

The Assembly will begin with the usual formalities on Saturday afternoon followed by the election of the Moderator Saturday evening. Sunday is worship and receptions in the afternoon and then the Assembly goes into committees that evening. During committee time, which will run through Tuesday evening, PC-Biz is the place to find out what the committees are doing with the pieces of business near and dear to you.

Things open up again on Wednesday afternoon as the Assembly returns to plenary and than it is a mad push to get all the business done by Friday night or in the wee hours of Saturday morning. (What time will the buses stop running?) But one of the realities is that there is no real schedule of when particular committees report until later in the week when committees have finished their business and they are assembled on the docket like a jigsaw puzzle. The final Saturday morning is just closing formalities.

All of the plenary sessions will be live streamed.

The tracking utility on PC-Biz is the best place to follow business. While the PC(USA) does have a general Twitter account (@Presbyterian), the General Assembly feed (@presbyGA) usually provides more play-by-play. This will be the first GA for the Presbyterian News Service on Twitter (@PresbyNews). The hashtag for the meeting is #ga221.

News items will also appear on the GA221 web site as well as the Presbyterian News Service feed. There is also a photo gallery. (And I will probably need to adjust that link.)

In looking at my rapidly growing list of who will be tweeting from GA I am thinking that the best thing to do is to point you at Bruce Reyes-Chow’s Twitter list for GA221. Bruce himself tweets at @breyeschow and @brc_live. The outgoing Moderator, Neal Presa, can be followed at @NealPresa. And one of these three will be the new Moderator – Heath Rada (@heathrada), John Wilkinson (@johnwpcusa) or Kelly Allen (@kellysueallen). In this list of individuals let me throw in the Director of Operations, Thomas Hay (@DirOfOp) and a true GA Junkie in his own right, Andy James (andyjames).

Out in the press corps, keep an eye on the Presbyterian Outlook on their web site (pres-outlook.org) and Twitter (@presoutlook) as well as their special correspondent Leslie Scanlon (@lscanlon).

Besides the election of the Moderator, two other issues will be among the hottest of hot-button topics discussed, debated and discerned this week..

Internally, the biggest question is probably the PC(USA) definition of marriage. Most everyone acknowledges that the definition given in the Directory for Worship (W-4.9001) is a bit of a problem since the part about marriage being a civil contract between a man and a woman is out of date in many jurisdictions. There are proposals to issue an Authoritative Interpretation to allow pastors to preform marriages in those jurisdictions. There are also overtures to change that section of the Book of Order. This has a long way to travel in the next week and a Book of Order change will require the concurrence of the presbyteries.

Externally, the headline issue is the return of a proposal to divest from three companies whose products are used to help Israel in their occupation of Palestinian Territory. This has been built up by interest groups on both sides and as of yesterday the ga221 hashtag was being flooded with tweets supporting divestment. At the 220th GA this was the closest vote of the Assembly with the divestment proposal failing in plenary by two votes. We will see what happens this year.

So we have a lot to look forward to this coming week. I, unfortunately, could not make a trip to Detroit work for me so I will be live blogging the live stream as I am able – trying to provide some color commentary to the play-by-play on Twitter.  As always, best wishes and prayers for all the commissioners and leadership as they deal with important issues but also so that they may not lose sight of the call to make disciples and build up Christ’s body in the minutia of individual business items.

Finally, in honor of Detroit and maybe as a metaphor for either the PC(USA) Book of Order, or the PC(USA) itself with its many splits and mergers, I leave you with Johnny Cash’s “One Piece At A Time.”

81st General Assembly Of The Orthodox Presbyterian Church

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I apologize for falling behind here, but I got so focused on following the PCI General Assembly that I did not keep up with the others. There are some very interesting dots to connect from that one, but that is for another time. But the GA season is about to get very busy — and you thought it was busy before. So here we go…

The 81st General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church began on 4 June in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at Kuyper College and will conclude this Tuesday, 10 June.

This GA does not have live streaming but we have the next best thing:
There is a tradition of very well done running daily reports for the OPC
GA and this year is no exception. So our thanks to the team of Daniel F. Patterson, Linda Foh and Stephen Pribble that are making it happen again this year.

The agenda and reports are not posted on line but you can access the Book of Church Order and the Standing Rules and Instructions of GA if you need background material.

Earlier this week one of the individuals following the GA, Chortles Weakly, tweeted “#OPCGA may be the twitterverse’s loneliest hashtag.” Well, it may be lonely but it is still worth following for this Assembly. Besides Chortles Weakly (@ChortlesWeakly) – who I should warn you has his own unique perspective (UPDATE: he has suggested that a better description is uniquitude) – I would also suggest tracking Camden Bucey (@CamdenBucey) and Muddy Gravel (@MuddyGravel).

Business so far includes the election of TE Craig Troxel (I believe of Bethel OPC of Wheaton, IL) as the Moderator and the statistical report which noted the slow but steady gains in membership (30,758 in 2013 from 30,555 in 2012).

Maybe the headline making the biggest news is an arrangement with the United Reformed Churches in North America for the OPC GA to meet jointly, or at least in close proximity, with the URCNA 2016 Synod to afford the opportunity to celebrate the publication of their joint Psalter and Hymnbook.

So we will keep watching and enjoying the tweets and the running updates from the OPC. But use this week to get your rest and take advantage of only one GA or Synod at a time. A week from today begins the peak week for American Presbyterians with five GA’s simultaneously in session on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. Stay tuned…

2014 General Assembly Of The Presbyterian Church In Ireland

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Just as the Assembly in Canada is wrapping up we shift our sights eastward again to Belfast and the 2014 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. The Assembly convenes at 7:00 PM local time today, 2 June, and runs through Thursday 5 June.  Some items to help you follow along.

There are plenty of social media contact points for the Assembly, beginning with the official Twitter account @PCIAssembly which in the past has provided a very helpful and comprehensive news feed on the actions of the Assembly. The outgoing Moderator, Rev. Dr. Rob Craig, has been tweeting at @PCIModerator. We will see if the new Moderator, the Rev. Dr. Michael Barry, assumes the account. (And look for Mr. Craig on his personal account @RobCraig54) The official hashtag for the Assembly is #pciga14 but the church has been promoting the hashtag #lifeinpci for dialogue and sharing about the life and work of the church.

Others to watch for interesting and useful updates include Alan in Belfast (@alaninbelfast), William Crawley (@williamcrawley) of the BBC Northern Ireland and I will add Rebecca McConnell (@PurpleRainPR). If you want an account with a little more, shall I say, bight, you can find some humor, satire and parody mixed with a bit of serious commentary at Presbyterian Ireland (@pres_church). UPDATE: Missed the announcement of the end of this account – see their announcement or Alan in Belfast for more.

Finally, I want to highlight PCI SPUD (@pcispud), the Youth Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. In addition to their report to the Assembly, they will have a SPUD Space in the Assembly building where they will be hosing their Fringe Event. In addition to being a conversation space, it will include events on Wednesday and Thursday and prayer space and prayer boards. I will be watching their Facebook page for updates and to see how this new initiative develops.

So our prayers are with the Assembly this week and Moderator Barry. Best wishes in your discussions and discernment.

2014 General Assembly Of The Church Of Scotland

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Tomorrow afternoon the 2014 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland will convene in Edinburgh and will meet for the following week. This promises to be an interesting Assembly with issues important to the church and to Scotland on the docket.

Here is helpful information to follow along with this assembly.

  • There will be live streaming of the proceedings and you can connect to the stream appropriate for your device from the media page.

  • Most of the Documents pertaining to the Assembly are linked from the General Assembly Publications page. This includes the three Reports volumes, known as the Blue Book but with a nice graphic cover this year. In addition to the traditional PDF the reports are also available in MOBI and EPUB formats for your eReaders. There is also an Order of Proceedings as well as the Daily Papers which will contain late-breaking changes. And there is an option to subscribe to notifications of new documents being posted. In addition, there is a General Assembly App with versions for Apple iOS and Android.

  • If you need to refer to the documents about how they do this decently and in order most of those are linked from the Church Law page.

  • A brief order of the docketed events and reports can be found on the General Assembly 2014 page.Also note that sessions start 15 minutes earlier than in past years so those of us on the other side of the world will have to adjust.

What we all want to know of course is how to follow along on social media. You can begin with the Church of Scotland’s official Facebook page.

On Twitter the starting point is the Kirk’s main feed at @churchscotland and the hashtag #ga2014. The church’s official publication, Life and Work, is also a good source for information on the web, on Facebook and on their Twitter feed @cofslifeandwork. In addition, while it is a personal account, you can follow the editor, Lynne McNeil, at @LifeWorkEditor. Similarly, the Church of Scotland Youth will be tweeting at @cosy_nya and you also might want to follow along with their incoming clerk, John Haston (@johndhaston).

UPDATED 18 May: In suggesting personal accounts to follow, let me start with three individual accounts that are probably worth watching as the Assembly gets rolling. The first is the outgoing Moderator of the Assembly, the (soon to be) Very Reverend Lorna Hood who has just switched from an official to a personal account @revlornascot. We can only hope that the incoming moderator has as great of a change in heart as she had and begins tweeting, but don’t look for that this week. The second person is Seonag MacKinnon, the head of communications for the Kirk, who tweets for herself at @seonagm. Finally, even though he may not actually be at the Assembly in person, the Rev. Peter Nimmo of Inverness is at the Assembly and is a good source of information at @peternimmo1. I will expand this list as the week progresses.

UPDATED 18 May: If you are now checking after the opening weekend I would suggest you can get caught up with the daily updates from the Church of Scotland website as well as updates from Life and Work on their General Assembly page. In addition, the Photo Gallery on the Kirk website is now active.

Two less-business related highlights of the Assembly caught my attention. The first is the annual festival, Heart and Soul, that the Kirk sponsors on the Sunday afternoon of the Assembly week that will again be happening in Princes Street Gardens near the Assembly Hall. For those of us not in Edinburgh we look forward to seeing pictures, probably on the Church of Scotland Facebook page. The second item is that the Lord High Commissioner this year will be a member of the Royal Household, Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex.

And now what we all really came here for, the business of the Assembly. Here are a few of the business reports that may be of interest and will probably attract attention within and outside the church.

  • On Tuesday afternoon there will be a special session to discuss the Scottish Independence Referendum. This is not a business item in the sense that the commissioners will vote on a resolution one way or the other on independence. Rather it will be a time of public discussion with featured speakers followed by comments from the floor.

  • On Wednesday the Legal Questions Committee will bring their report regarding Ministers and Deacons in Civil Partnership. The report includes an overture in response to the direction of the 2013 Assembly to affirm the Kirk’s historical position while providing a path for churches and sessions to follow their conscience in the employment and ordination of same-sex partnered individuals. The legislation that is passed will then be sent down to the presbyteries for their concurrence under the Barrier Act. Before this report the Theological Forum will report on related discussions that have been held in the past year.

  • As always, the Church and Society Council, to report on Thursday, has a long report with a deliverance that takes up a wide range of relevant issues in 73 different points. Among the many topics covered in these points are Competitiveness in Sport, Families and the Church in the 21st Century, Food Security, Funeral Poverty and Living a theology to counter violence against women. And that is just a few of the topics the commissioners will consider.

  • The Youth Assembly will bring their report on Tuesday.

  • The Ministries Council will report on Monday. A centerpiece of their report is the shortage of ministers and those training for the ministry to meet future needs of the church. As their report says: 80% of the parish ministers are due to retire in the next 15 years. A variety of options will be discussed.

So there is a taste of the line-up for the next week. With the challenges facing the Church of Scotland and the Scottish people at this time it will be interesting to see what the commissioners think and what decisions they make. I will try to update throughout the week as the Assembly progresses.

So this is not just Stay Tuned, but Tune In…

Third Moderator Candidate For PC(USA) 221st GA (2014) — TE Kelly Allen

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This past week saw the endorsement of a third candidate to stand for the Moderator of the 221st General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) as Mission Presbytery endorsed Teaching Elder Kelly Allen of San Antonio. Rev. Allen has served as pastor of University Presbyterian Church since 2009 having served as the pastor of a United Reformed church in Buckinghamshire, England, and before that the pastor of two churches in Missouri. Her detailed bio on the church web site lists her education including a BA in psychology from Washington University, St. Louis, an M.Div. from Columbia Theological Seminary and a MA in politics and religion from University of Birmingham, England. On that bio page you can also find her Statement of Faith.

At this time she has a range of social media in place including her OnePager basic web page with the dedicated domain name kellyformoderator.com, a Twitter handle (@kellysueallen), and a Kelly Allen for GA Moderator 2014 Facebook page. She also has her regular blog “How I See Things.” And while the basic web page is a good intro to her, by the nature of the web hosting it might change but will not become much more developed. And the RSS feed on the web page is for her regular blog. Right now it appears that the best place to be reading updated thoughts on standing for Moderator will be the Facebook page.

Her tag line is “Hope-filled leadership for today’s church” and on the basic web page she develops this in three areas of “leadership commitments”: 1. A commitment to spiritual practice – the practices in the history of the church that have drawn us closer to God and to one another in communion. 2. A desire to build community among strangers – “our encounters with the ‘other’ reveal much about ourselves” and in meeting others where they are can we see an expression of the Kingdom of God. 3. A willingness to be bold and bodily witnesses to gospel values – how are we as Christians seen and heard in the world around us and who do we partner with to demonstrate the Gospel?

For more of her thoughts there is a three and a half minute video of Rev. Allen on her Facebook page talking about some of these ideas and her thoughts about the call. On a side note, you have to love the strategecially placed PC(USA) logo in stained glass behind her but she does lose style points for the trailing credits which still has the [enter name here] under the credits.

For additional coverage of her announcement there is an article from the Presbyterian Outlook.

And so, we wish Teaching Elder Allen the best as she prepares for the General Assembly meeting and add her name to our prayer list for all the candidates standing for Moderator.