Category Archives: Analysis

A New, Destructive, Earthquake Sequence In New Zealand

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I am sure by now you have all heard about the destructive earthquake that hit Canterbury and Christchurch, New Zealand, yesterday.  When I heard the news on the radio my first reaction was that it was a strong aftershock of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit that area last September, one month before the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand was held in Christchurch.  (The PCANZ message on the new earthquake.) That opinion quickly changed as the damage reports started to appear in the media.  So here is a brief summary of what I know now.

The earthquake struck at 12:51 PM local time and was located just to the south of Christchurch.  While the 6.3 magnitude is significantly less than the 7.1 magnitude earthquake that occurred in September, the earlier event was some distance away in rural areas where the lower population density and single-family residential construction significantly reduced the cultural impact.  At the present time there are reports and pictures of significant damage in downtown Christchurch.  The death toll is currently at 65 but that is likely to rise as rescue efforts continue.  There are even reports of the shaking producing breaks and ice chunks to separate from a near-by glacier.

Besides the size and location, there is one other difference in the two earthquakes which may have increased the damage in this one.  While not as important as the close proximity to the urban center, yesterday’s earthquake was compressional, moving the ground upward.  The September quake was strike-slip, moving the ground sideways.  We will have to wait for the survey data to know how much the ground moved upward, but my initial calculation is about six to eight inches near the fault.  Looking at some of the pictures I think I see some of this compression but without the full context and exact location of the picture I can not be sure.  There is also discussion about this being a shallower earthquake than the September event and therefore more destructive.  Since that depth is generally only a measure of the start point of the earthquake I am not sure this is really a significant difference.  The September quake may have started deeper, but because of its size broke all the way to the surface.  Until we have detailed source-time functions for this event it will be difficult to really know the impact of the depth.

The question is asked if the two earthquakes are related.  My response is very likely yes, but exactly how I am not certain yet.  The most likely linkage is that September’s quake made this new one more likely through stress triggering.  A quick back of the envelope calculation last night indicated a good possibility, but I need to get better numbers today for the geometry of both quakes to be certain since it initially appears to fall right on a dividing line.  The second guess is triggering related to visco-elastic relaxation.  I’ll leave it at that.

It is interesting how the media grabs on to these stories and runs with them.  Without negating the impact of what is now being called one of New Zealand’s greatest natural disasters, it is important to keep this in perspective with other earthquakes.  I have heard news reports call this earthquake “huge.”  Is it huge?  Consider in the last 13 months we have had the Haiti earthquake – 7.0 magnitude with an uncertain death toll between 100,000 and 300,000.  We have also had the Chile earthquake one year ago – with an 8.8 magnitude it was one of the ten largest earthquakes of the last century.

These two earthquakes in New Zealand are a remarkable parallel to a couple we had here in SoCal and that I use in my class as a comparison of risk and hazard, and the different ways we measure the “size/impact” of an earthquake.  Back in 1992 the Landers earthquake hit an rural area (we call it desert) outside Los Angeles. While it was a significant earthquake at 7.3 magnitude and widely felt in the LA area, because of its location damage was fairly limited and there were only three deaths.  Two years later in 1994 the Northridge earthquake struck within the Los Angeles metropolitan area (“The Valley”).  It was a major, but smaller, earthquake at 6.7 magnitude but because it was in the heavily developed area the casualties were higher at 60 (higher by some counts) and the cost of damage was about 200 times higher than Landers.  (In the billions rather than millions of US$).  Location, location, location!

The parallel actually goes a bit further.  While they occurred further apart in space and time than the New Zealand quakes and are not linked in the same way, the Landers was a strike-slip earthquake like the September quake, and the Northridge was a compressional quake like yesterday’s.

Again, I in no way want to trivialize the death and destruction of yesterday’s quake and the continuing aftershocks.  In putting this in a seismological perspective I encourage prayers for all those affected and the rescue workers who are putting in hard and extended hours to help them.  I also ask for prayers for all others around the world who are impacted by natural disasters in their countries.

Drilling Down In The Religious Life Survey — Is Church Attendance Really That Good An Indicator?

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I don’t know how many other bloggers post something and then spend the next 24 hours second guessing themselves.  In this case, one of my conclusions yesterday was nagging at me and in a sense of academic honesty I just had to know if in my treatment of the data I had fooled myself and any readers along the way.  So, being the geek that I am I decided to drill down into that one particular survey question to see what else there was to see.

The conclusion that was nagging me was the sensitivity or “high bar” of church attendance as correlated to the growth or decline of denominations.  As part of the analysis I combined some categories in the survey and did not discuss the actual numbers from the survey.  So to remedy that here is an expanded analysis of that single question.  Those who are squeamish over statistics or don’t feel particularly geeky might want to turn away now — this analysis clarifies and qualifies some details but does little to change the overall conclusion I reached yesterday.

To recap, I am working with two data sets.  The first is the National Council of Churches list of the 25 largest denominations, especially the 14 of those that reported growth rates for 2010.  The second is The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey dataset from the Pew Research Center.  The resulting analysis and data manipulation is mine and it
should be kept in mind that “The Pew Research Center and the Pew Forum
on Religion & Public Life bear no responsibility for the analyses or
interpretations of the data presented here.”  For consistency I will again use only the data for the 48 contiguous United States and will not implement their weighting scheme.

In this analysis I want to look at only two questions in the survey.  The first is the multi-part question that established a respondent’s religion or denomination.  This was user supplied and provided some interesting results, as you will see in a minute.  I want to compare that affiliation information against the question “Aside from weddings and funerals, how often do you attend religious services… more than once a week, once a week, once or twice a month, a few times a year, seldom, or never?”

So, for the 14 denominations on the top 25 list that provided information, here are the results for that question.  I have ranked them by growth rate and include total respondents with each answer as well as the percentage.

Denomination 2010
Growth
Rate
(NCC) 		Attend
more than
once a week 		Attend
once a
week 		 Attend
once or
twice a
month 		Attend a
few times
a year 		 Attend
seldom 		Attend
never 		No
Answer
 Jehovah’s
Witnesses 		 4.37%
 158
74.2%
 21
9.9%
 7
3.3%
 13
6.1%
 9
4.2%
 4
1.9%
 1
0.5%
 Seventh-Day
Adventist 		 4.31%
 35
25.9%
 56

41.5%

 14

10.4%

 13
9.6%
 8
5.9%
 9
6.7%
 0
0.0%
 Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter
Day Saints 		 1.42%
 184
33.1%
 256
46.0%
 43
7.7%
 34
6.1%
 24
4.3%
 15
2.7%
 0
0.0%
 Catholic Church  0.57%
 842
10.5%
 2814
34.9%
 1471
18.3%
 1539
19.1%
 953
11.8%
 399
5.0%
 36
0.4%
 Assemblies
of God 		 0.52%
 225
46.9%
 135
28.1%
 44
9.2%
 38
7.9%
 26
5.4%
 11
2.3%
 1
0.2%
 Church of God
(Cleveland, TN) 		 0.38%
 65
52.4%
 24
19.4%
 15
12.1%
 15
12.1%
 3
2.4%
 2
1.6%
 0
0.0%
 Southern Baptist
Convention 		 -0.42%
 846
33.3%
 697
27.5%
 347
13.7%
 336
13.2%
 220
8.7%
 81
3.2%
 12
0.5%
 United Methodist
Church 		 -1.01%
 248
11.1%
 782
34.9%
 446
19.9%
 456
20.4%
 243
10.9%
 54
2.4%
 10
0.4%
 Lutheran Church-
Missouri Synod 		 -1.08%
 40
6.8%
 225
38.3%
 138
23.5%
 114
19.4%
 56
9.5%
 13
2.2%
 2
0.3%
 American Baptist
Churches in the USA 		 -1.55%
 70
17.0%
 114
27.7%
 80
19.5%
 82
20.0%
 46
11.2%
 16
3.9%
 3
0.7%
 Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America 		 -1.96%
 69
7.9%
 359
41.3%
 199
22.9%
 158
18.2%
 69
7.9%
 14
1.6%
 1
0.1%
 Episcopal Church  -2.48%
 41
8.6%
 144
30.4%
 101
21.3%
 106
22.4%
 61
12.9%
 16
3.4%
 5
1.1%
 Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.) 		 -2.61%
 71
13.1%
 238
43.8%
 102
18.8%
 81
14.9%
 44
8.1%
 6
1.1%
 2
0.4%
 United Church
of Christ 		 -2.83%
 21
8.5%
 81
32.7%
 46
18.5%
 62
25.0%
 27
10.9%
 10
4.0%
 1
0.4%

Well, instead of combining categories I ran correlation statistics on all six meaningful responses.  (You could argue that not responding is meaningful, and looking at the numbers there is a case to be made – why do more Episcopalians not want to respond? – but that is a topic for another time.)   However, from crunching the numbers the first time I noticed that responses from those affiliated with the Catholic Church were frequently outliers, something I pointed out in the first post and something that can be seen in this data set.  It has been observed in other reports that cultural and immigration factors play a larger role in membership numbers for that denomination so I have chosen to exclude those responses from my analysis.

Today, the correlation statistics I calculated include both the linear correlation coefficient as well as the rank correlation.  I won’t go into that latter statistic, except to say that it is a good test for leveraging by extreme values and for none of the responses was that significant, and the only response for which it might have a slight effect is “attend once or twice a month.”

Now it turns out that my combining response categories yesterday may not have been a good way to treat the data because the correlation for “once a week” was not only pretty low, but it was inverse at that.  The only category for which there was a meaningful positive correlation (0.74) was “attend more than once a week.” For “attend once or twice a month” and “attend a few times a year” there are pretty strong negative correlations (-0.84 and -0.81 respectively).  I feel better — While my combining categories may not have been the best move, it appears that it does not substantially change the “high bar” I saw that having the correlation with even “once or twice a month” being related to decline.  At this point I feel I can stick with yesterday’s conclusions.

But having embarked on this data exploration, let me continue with a couple new analyses.

First, using the strongest positive and negative correlations let me ask, “where is the line between growing and declining.”  Now, remember this is only a guideline and not hard and fast, but if we run a linear regression on “more than once a week” we find that using this as a predictor tells us that denominations that have more than 27.5% of affiliated respondents answering in that category were growing.  Looking at the table above (and remembering to skip the Catholic Church) we see that indicator holds up pretty well.  If we do the same with “once or twice a month” we get a predictor that tells us that growing denominations have less than 14.9% of affiliated respondents give that answer.  Again, in the table above this holds up with only one exception.  So while not perfect, these two numbers give a pretty good proxy for predicting growth or decline.

So lets apply these numbers.  First, what about non-denominational churches?  While they don’t represent a denomination, by definition, and we don’t have NCC growth data for them, let’s have a look at the attendance statistics for the three most frequently reported nondenominational categories in the Religious Landscape Survey.

Category Attend
more than
once a week 		Attend
once a
week 		 Attend
once or
twice a
month 		Attend a
few times
a year 		 Attend
seldom 		Attend
never 		No
Answer
 Nondenominational
Evangelical
 138
33.4%
 171
41.4%
 62
15.0%
 22
5.3%
 12
2.9%
 7
1.7%
 1
0.2%
 Nondenominational
Charismatic
 74
43.0%
 51

29.7%

 17
9.9%
 10
5.8%
 16
9.3%
 4
2.3%
 0
0.0%
 Nondenominational
Fundamentalist
 41
39.8%
 29
28.2%
 14
13.6%
 11
10.7%
 8
7.8%
 0
0.0%
 0
0.0%

As you can see, all three have “more than once a week” numbers above the indicator, and two out of three have “once or twice a month” numbers below that indicator – and the third misses by only 0.1%.  The indication is that if these were denominations we would expect them to be growing.

OK, lets get close to home — What about Presbyterian Groups?  The survey has 22 self-reported categories of Presbyterians.  Here are a few of the more frequently reported one.

Denomination Attend
more than
once a week 		Attend
once a
week 		 Attend
once or
twice a
month 		Attend a
few times
a year 		 Attend
seldom 		Attend
never 		No
Answer
 Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.)
 71
13.1%
 238
43.8%
 102
18.8%
 81
14.9%
 44
8.1%
 6
1.1%
 2
0.4%
Presbyterian Church
in America
 30
17.9%
 43
25.6%
 37
22.0%
 34
20.2%
 18
10.7%
 5
3.0%
 1
0.6%
 Associate Reformed
Presbyterian
 3
23.1%
 5
38.5%
 2

15.4%

 1
7.7%
 1
7.7%
 0
0.0%
 1
7.7%
 Orthodox
Presbyterian
 2
25.0%
 3
37.5%
 0
0.0%
 1
12.5%
 1
12.5%
 1
12.5%
 0
0.0%
 Evangelical
Presbyterian
 6
50.0%
 5
41.7%
 1
8.3%
0
0.0%
 0
0.0%
 0
0.0%
 0
0.0%
 Conservative
Presbyterian
 1
100%
 0
0.0%
 0
0.0%
 0
0.0%
 0
0.0%
 0
0.0%
 0
0.0%
 Presbyterian
(other not specified
evangelical)
 7
13.7%
 17
33.3%
 13
25.5%
 8
15.7%
 5
9.8%
 1
2.0%
 0
0.0%
 Liberal
Presbyterian
 0
0.0%
 1
100%
 0
0.0%
 0
0.0%
 0
0.0%
 0
0.0%
 0
0.0%
 Presbyterian
(other not specified
mainline)
 10
5.6%
 28
15.8%
 37
20.9%
 51
28,8%
 39
22.0%
 11
6.2%
 1
0.6%
 Mainline
Presbyterian
 5
4.9%
 17
16.5%
 12
11.7%
 32
31.1%
 28
27.2%
 9
8.7%
 0
0.0%

Well, maybe the most important thing about this table is a demonstration of the nature and limitations of surveys.  The first item is the statistics of small numbers.  This dataset works well for the largest denominations, but below the level of the PCA one would like to see a bigger sample.  The second is the self reporting of affiliations and it leaves me wondering if the two different mainline but unspecified categories should be folded into the PC(USA), ignored, or treated as their own group?  And what to do with our liberal and conservative friends?

However, taking the numbers at face value and using the indicators suggested above the only listed Presbyterian branch where we would expect growth is the EPC and the OPC is pretty close.  It is interesting to see the PCA numbers in the same ballpark as the PC(USA).

OK, bottom line — While I need to modify or qualify my attendance calculations from yesterday, the conclusion remains pretty much in tact.  The difference between growing and declining congregations is not in getting Christmas and Easter members to church a couple more times a year (although that would be good) but in fostering an environment were religious faith and participation is taken seriously.

On to the next data set – PC(USA) amendment voting.  Stay tuned.

National Council Of Churches Membership Data — We Can Correlate That

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This past Monday the National Council of Churches USA announced the release of their 2011 Yearbook, a press release that traditionally includes the membership data for the 25 largest denominations in the country.

My first reaction, after a quick look at the data, was “nothing new here — move along to something else.”

My second thought was “why don’t I just take that part of the post from last year, copy and paste it for this year, strike out the old numbers and fill in the new ones.”  In all honesty, the two sets of numbers look a lot alike and I was wondering if there was anything new worth saying about it.

Well, I finally came to my senses, remembered that my motto is “I never met a data set I didn’t like,” and on my commute home I thought about what I could do with it.  I then spent my lunch hours the rest of the week crunching data.  Yup, that’s the way I roll.

Now, a couple of years ago I correlated the NCC data against surveys about political opinions and found that for the mainline churches the degree of membership decline correlated with stronger liberal political opinions.  But, based on reading I have done in the last couple of years I have modified this hypothesis and now think that part of the problem of decline is not the political opinions of the churches per se, but rather that the problem is a lack of clear and well defined beliefs and expectations, particularly in the mainline.  That is to say that trying to be too broad in doctrine leaves those looking for a church uncertain about that church and no need to be committed to anything in particular.  It is the hot and cold of Laodicea and shown on a small scale by the division of the Londonderry Presbyterian Church which split and, at least when I wrote about it a year and a half ago, the combined membership of the two churches had nearly doubled over what it was before the split.  (Now, when I get the the end of this post I won’t necessarily have proven that thesis, but I think it will support it.)

Now, to give credit where credit is due, this is not something I pulled out of thin air but, as I said, saw in the studies and essays I was reading.  Prominent among these, in the chronological order in which I read them: Beau Weston, Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment; Dean Hoge, Donald Luidens, and Benton Johnson, Vanishing Boundaries; Bradley Wright, Christians are hate-filled hypocrites… and other myths you’ve been told;  and Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian.

So, I set about seeing if I could find correlations between indicators of strength of faith and the NCC data.  Thanks to Brad Wright’s book I knew that the Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum On Religion & Public Life was a wealth of information.  The data is split into two reports, the Religious Affiliation Report (full report ) and the Religious Beliefs and Practices Report (full report ).  To tinker a little more, I downloaded The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey dataset from the Pew Research Center.  The resulting analysis and data manipulation is mine and it should be kept in mind that “The Pew Research Center and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life bear no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations of the data presented here.”  OK, you got the required disclaimer.

I was fun look at the raw data because there are some interesting details in there although they are generally not related to this present discussion.  For example, of the 480 participants who identified themselves with the Assemblies of God, 420 said there was a heaven but 432 said there was a hell.  While that may say something interesting about the theology, in fairness I would have trouble with the wording of the study’s questions because they were base on merit, that is if someone led “a good life” and not on Christ’s free gift of eternal life.  Since individuals could self-identify the denomination they were with it is interesting to note that there is one who said Emerging Church, one each who identified as Liberal Presbyterian and Conservative Presbyterian.  But my favorite has to be the two individuals who identified themselves as an Electronic Ministries Baptist and Electronic Ministries Pentecostal.  Can I now call myself a Virtual Ministries Presbyterian?  We will have to wait to see when the Open Source Church appears.   I am going to keep playing with the dataset and see what other interesting details I can find.

Anyway, some additional interpretation details: The survey was conducted in 2007 so technically a bit of a time offset from the 2010 NCC data.  In addition, the data package comes with one database for the continental U.S. and another for Alaska and Hawai’i.  I only number-crunched the former which contains a bit over 35000 records.  For the first set of correlations with the demographic data I have taken the numbers from Appendix 3 of the Religious Affiliation report which lists results as percentages with no decimal places.  Results for religious behavior that I calculated from the provided dataset are reported as percentages with one decimal place.  And for those interested in trying it themselves at home, the data is provided in SPSS format which you can also read with the open source package PSPP.  I will talk about correlation coefficients which test only for a linear correlation and the data is supplied with a weighting scheme designed to reflect reliability, which I did not use for this initial exploration.

For the NCC data, of the 25 churches on the list only 14 provided numbers for membership change. Of these, we saw notable growth in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (+1.42%), and significant growth in the Jehovah’s Witnesses (+4.37%) and the Seventh-Day Adventists (+4.31%).  There was small growth in the Roman Catholic church (+0.57%), the Assemblies of God (+0.52%), and the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.) (+0.38%).  The mainline/oldline churches had typical declines including the United Methodist Church (-1.01%), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (-1.96%), Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (-2.61%), the Episcopal Church (-2.48%), the American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A. (-1.55%), and the United Church of Christ (-2.83%).  Slightly smaller declines were experienced by more evangelical churches, such as the Southern Baptist Convention (-0.42%) and the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod (-1.08%).

All of the correlations I ran are available in a web-published Google spreadsheet and the sheet also contains the 2009 membership changes and correlations with those as well.  For this discussion I only use the 2010 membership changes.  As always, use at your own risk.  For those who don’t regularly work with correlations a quick introduction: If the number is positive the correlation is direct and if negative it is inverse.  Correlation statistics range in absolute value from 1, which is perfect, to 0 (zero) when there is no correlation.  Values of 0.8 and greater are generally considered strong correlations and values below 0.5 have weak to no correlation and need to be looked at carefully.  Also, this analysis assumes that the correlation is linear and I have not run tests for leverage effects by extreme values. (But as you will see in the graphs below there are a pair of high values that usually cluster nicely.)

The first demographic data I looked at was for members’ marital status and there was little to no correlation between that and a denominations growth rate.  However, looking at the extremes of age distribution we find that growing churches have a higher percentage of younger members (18-20 years old) than declining members and the declining churches have more older members (>65) than growing churches.
 
These correlations are good with 0.77 and -0.78.  The question is whether there is a cause and effect relationship.  Are growing denominations growing because they have more young people, or are more young people there because they are growing.  We can probably safely conjecture that the relationship is complex and mutual and there is a bit of each going on probably establishing a positive or negative feedback loop.

The correlation with number of children is somewhat predictable based on this preceding relationship. While families with no children are more likely at declining churches (correlation -0.63), it surprised me that the strongest correlation in the children categories was the relationship of families with one child to be at growing churches (correlation 0.81) and then to have families with two children to be completely uncorrelated (-0.03).  The correlation returns with moderate strength for three children (0.63) and for four or more not quite as strong at (0.50).  Like above, assigning dependency is problematic and there is probably a complex relationship. (Maybe something to crunch the numbers around a bit for.)

There is one other demographic relationship and that has a moderate correlation — college grads are more common at declining denominations (correlation = -0.55).

Now, what about the idea I really wanted to test – that patterns of behavior and belief that indicate more intense or dedicated religious practice are correlated with denominational growth.  The survey provides us with several of these.

First, again taking a lead from Brad Wright’s book, I look at church attendance, as self-reported.  I have combined six categories down to three with the frequent attenders (once a week or more than once a week) in one group, the occasional (less than once a week but still multiple times a year) in the second group, and the seldom to none in the last group.

In the first two cases there is a strong correlation with the frequent attenders (weekly or better) to be members of growing denominations (correlation=0.76) and the less-than-weekly to be members of declining denominations (correlation=-0.82).  For the seldom to none, they are more likely in declining denominations, but the correlation is weaker (correlation=-0.40).  For comparison purposes, the Presbyterian Panel asks a similar question and found that for members 26% responded that they attend weekly and another 38% said they attended “nearly every week.”  That total of 64% is a bit higher than the 56.9% in the RLS data, but seems a reasonable match in light of the different wording of the questions.

The survey has two ways of looking at the importance of religion to the participants.  The first is a direct question if their religion is very important, somewhat important, not too important, or not at all important.  The percentages that answered very important and somewhat important are both well correlated with the growth/decline numbers, but in opposite senses.  For those who said their religion was very important there was a correlation of 0.74 indicating they are more likely to be in growing churches.  For those who answered somewhat important, the correlation is -0.74 and they are more likely in declining denominations.

The second is a question that asks “When it comes to questions of right and wrong, which of the following do you look to most for guidance.”  Of the four choices, two were substantially preferred by respondents.  “Guided by religious teachings and beliefs” is shown with the red squares in the graph below and has a 0.77 correlation with denominational growth.  On the chart you can see the outlier to the trend at 0.57% growth which is the data point for the Roman Catholic church.  Removing that data point the correlation jumps to a strong 0.83.  As you can see, the other strong answer is “Practical experience and common sense”, shown in green, and that has an inverse correlation at -0.77.  So in growing churches the members rely more on church teaching and in declining churches the members are guided more by their own experience.  It is interesting, and somewhat surprising to this scientist, how far below the first two the reliance on philosophy and on science fall.  And both of those have almost as strong inverse correlations.


 
You can have a look at the spreadsheet for a bunch of the other correlations I ran.  It pretty much holds up that strong religious beliefs, certainty in those beliefs, and practices correlate with denominational growth while the moderate to weak responses for these things are inversely correlated and are more likely in declining denominations.

Well, crunching the numbers is the easy part.  What does this all mean and can it be applied to reverse mainline decline?

First, let me say that I think it is difficult to separate what should be the neutral practices from the doctrine.  As I said, correlation coefficients for the relationship between beliefs and growth/decline are pretty much identical to correlations between practices and growth/decline.  To put it another way, at what point does regular weekly attendance at church change from being just a religious practice to being a matter of doctrine or belief?

Another tricky point here is that for most of the indicators measured, while the doctrinal ones may be teachings of the church, what the statistics show is not the effectiveness of the churches teachings directly, but the ethos of the church and the expectation for accepting those teachings.  In other words, almost every church would want a member to be guided by the church’s teachings to determine right and wrong, but the growing denominations pass along not just the teaching, but the expectation that members take it seriously.

Finally, it has to be remembered that a denomination is composed of particular churches and in most cases we are measuring one of these on the level of the individual member and the other on the level of the denomination.  Lost in the middle are the different congregations where this is actually implemented.

So by way of conclusion here are two things that surprised me in this analysis:

The first was the uniformity of the correlations.  Yes, there were some variations but in general there were a lot that fell in the 0.7 to 0.8 range or the -0.7 to -0.8 range.  This suggests to me that you should not be looking through this to find the “silver bullet.” Instead, these measures show broad patterns that probably reflect the overall nature of the denominations rather than where to improve on one or two specific practices.

The second thing that surprised me was how high the bar was.  In looking at this data we are not seeing the line between growing and declining as being in heresy or apostasy.  We are seeing the difference in whether members attend once a week or once a month.  We are seeing the difference in whether someone is certain or God, or fairly certain of God.

Now, I welcome you to stare at the data and draw your own conclusions.  My number one take-away is that “Being Christian” is not about what you do for one-hour on Sunday morning (OK, one and a half hours if the sermon goes long and you stay for a cup of coffee.)  Rather, it is about how you live your life the other 167 hours out of the week.  It is about whether that hour influences the other 167.  It is about how your Christian faith affects the rest of your life.  To me, these data show that the indicator of a growing denomination is a pattern of faithfulness in many areas of our lives.

Your mileage may vary.  OK, now what do I do with my lunch hour next week?

Technical note:  I think it is important to note that for questions with only two choices any correlations with a third variable will be of the same magnitude and opposite sign for the two choices.  For the Guidance question above, while there were four choices, the Philosophy option and the Science option were selected by so few respondents that there are effectively only two answers, the Religion option and the Experience option. That is not the case with the demographic graph since substantial numbers of respondents fell into the age ranges between these two end groups.  Combined, the two end members represent no more than 40% of the sampled population.

Strong Cross-Issue Correlation In PC(USA) Amendment Voting To Date

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To give you fair warning right at the onset, this will be a fairly geeky post to go with the geeky title.  So let me begin with an executive summary for those that want to avoid the drill-down into the statistics.

Coming out of the 219th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in the summer of 2010 were three high-profile amendments to be voted on by the presbyteries:  addition of the Belhar Confession to the Book of Confessions, a new Form of Government section for the Book of Order, and Amendment 10-A which proposed new language for the “fidelity and chastity” section, G-6.0106b, of the Form of Government.  At the present time between thirty and fifty presbyteries have voted on each and the votes on each side are very evenly matched.  Furthermore, when you consider the relationship between votes on the different issues they are very strongly correlated.

While this is an interesting statistical result there are two practical implications of this.  The first is that if voting continues to follow the current trends and the correlation holds, the final votes on nFOG and 10-A will be very close but we can expect that the Belhar Confession will not be approved by the presbyteries since it requires a 2/3 vote for inclusion.  The second implication is the fact that presbyteries, and by that we really mean their commissioners, might see some sort of strong linkage between these three items.  It is not clear to what extent any particular factor generates a linkage, but potential reasons could be related to maintaining or rejecting the status quo, affinity group promotion of particular votes, and perception of the issues as all being promoted by the centralized institution of the denomination.

Got that?  OK, for the geeks, nerds and other curious readers here is where this comes from…

I am taking the correlations from my own tally sheet of the voting on these issues.  My spreadsheet is not original to me but represents an aggregation of data from posts on Twitter, and other vote sheets from the Layman, Covenant Network, Yes On Amendment A, and Reclaim Biblical Teaching.  It is important to note that only the first and last of those have info on all three issues and the other two are only for 10-A.

As of yesterday morning, the Belhar Confession was at 21 yes and 20 no, the nFOG was tied at 15, and 10-A was at 27 yes and 25 no.  In total, 88 presbyteries – just over half – had voted on one or more of the issues.  Of these 22 have voted on two of the issues — 9 on Belhar and nFOG, 7 on Belhar and 10-A, and 6 on nFOG and 10-A. Seven presbyteries have voted on all three issues, five of those voting no on all three and two voting no on two out of three with one voting yes on 10-A and one on nFOG.

I eventually plan to run correlations on voting ratios for those presbyteries that have recorded votes, but for this analysis I maximized the sample set by just looking at the bimodal yes/no outcome.  I have a master matrix which those familiar with statistics should be careful not to confuse as a joint probability chart since I have mixed the votes together.  (And I’m sorry if the 70’s color scheme annoys you, but it is just my working spreadsheet and not intended for final publication.)

So, here are the charted data:

 n=16  Belhar
Yes 		 Belhar
No
 nFOG Yes  2  1
 nFog No  0  13

 n=14  Belhar
Yes 		 Belhar
No
 10-A Yes  4  1
 10-A No  1  8

 n=12  10-A
Yes 		 10-A
No
 nFOG Yes  4  1
 nFog No  1  6



Statistics of small numbers? Clearly. But I find it striking that so far only one presbytery has voted cross-wise on each combination except that no presbytery has yet voted no on nFOG and yes on Belhar.  I also think it is noteworthy that in each case, and most pronounced in the Belhar/nFOG voting, there are more presbyteries that have voted “no” on both than have voted “yes.”  For Belhar/10-A and 10-A/nFOG this goes away, and even reverses, if you take out the presbyteries that have voted on all three.

Looking at the bigger picture, while the total vote counts don’t provide any definitive correlation data, their very close margins at the present time are completely compatible with the interpretation that the votes are correlated.  In other words, if the votes are correlated very similar vote counts would be expected (which we have).  But this observation is only necessary and not sufficient for the interpretation.  Additionally, when vote counts are recorded there are usually very similar vote distributions for each of these issues, giving additional evidence of their correlation.

Calculating the number is the easy part, figuring out if it is meaningful is more difficult.  With less than 10% of the presbyteries actually represented in any of of these correlation charts at this point I firmly acknowledge that this could all easily change around very quickly.  So, I don’t want to over-interpret the data, but I do think some corresponding observations are in order.

The simplest explanation is that while the voting may be correlated they are not linked.  In this case a commissioner would make up his or her mind separately on each issue independently and without regard for the other two issues.  The result is that most commissioners, after weighing the arguments and reflecting on information, would be guided to vote the same way on each of the issues.  This is a likely conclusion, especially for those presbyteries that schedule the voting at three different meetings.

But even with our best efforts to be thoughtful and treat each issue independently I have observed a few things around the denomination that tend to link these issues together.  In some cases this is fairly prominent and in other cases I suspect the influence may be at a subliminal level.

The first possible effect is that affinity groups, by recommending the same votes on all three issues, are having an effect and providing a linkage, even if only implied.  Resources at Theology Matters and the Reclaim Biblical Teaching site of the Presbyterian Coalition both recommend a no vote on all three issues.  Similarly, the Covenant Network and Presbyterian Voices for Justice are in favor of all three actions — although to be fair, PJV voices are not unanimously in favor of nFOG.  What has been set up, rightly or wrongly, appears to be a “party-line” vote where you vote yes on the slate if you are progressive or liberal or vote no if you are conservative or orthodox.  This linkage of Belhar and 10-A has been floating around for a while.  It is tougher to tell if there are real linkages of these two with nFOG or whether they are not linked but rather appeal to the same theological base, or possibly whether the issue is “guilt by association.”  Maybe another linkage between nFOG and Belhar is not theological but logistical and some of the negative sentiment simply stems from the church not having had the time to discuss and explore them enough yet. Yes, quite possible despite the fact that we were supposed to be doing that with both issues for the last two years between assemblies.

Beyond the third-party recommendations, let me put forward more subtle explanations – inertia & cynicism.  This is somewhat related to the lack of familiarity argument above but more about the seven last words of the church – “We’ve never done it that way before.”  The question I have is how many presbytery commissioners are opposed to all of them because this seems like change for change’s sake?  Or how many are for it because the church needs to change?  Or to put it another way – “if it ain’t broke why are we trying to fix it?”  A similar argument against Belhar and nFOG could be “if it comes from Louisville it must not be good.”  Remember, neither of these finally came as a presbytery overture but as recommendations from GA entities. (The nFOG has been talked about for a while but the recommendation to form the Task Force was the result of a referral to the OGA.  The request to study the Belhar Confession came from the Advocacy Committee on Racial-Ethnic Concerns.)

Now let me be clear before I am set upon in the comments: For each of these amendments there are very good arguments for and against them and as presbytery commissioners we set about weighing these arguments and discerning God’s will together.  I would expect few if any commissioners would vote solely on the idea that “nothing good can come from Louisville.”  What I do expect is that for some individuals the preservation of the status quo and skepticism of proposals that are top-down rather than bottom-up from the presbyteries are important factors, explicitly or implicitly.

Well, I am afraid that I have gotten too close to the great quote from Mark Twain – “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”  Considering we are still in the early stages of the voting I may indeed be guilty of over interpreting the data.  So rather than provide more conjecture, let me ask a question that may be hinted at but not answerable by these data or even the final data set:  Are we doing our deliberations and voting a disservice by having so many high-profile votes in a single year?  To put it another way – Is our explicit or implicit linkages of issues, valid or not, unfairly influencing the votes?  Something to think about and keep probing the data for answers.

So, until next time, happy data crunching.

Further Thoughts On The Fellowship PC(USA)

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Well, I have had a couple of days to reflect on the Fellowship PC(USA) letter, announcement, and white paper.  I have also had a bit of time to reflect on my own reaction and ask if I jumped too quickly.  The answer to that is maybe yes and maybe no.  More on that at the end.  But first, some comments on the white paper and the developments so far.

Time For Something New – A Fellowship PC(USA) white paper

I have now read the white paper referenced in the original letter and for those who have not read it, it is essentially an extended discussion of the same material as the letter.  In fact, the letter is pretty much a condensed version of the white paper with the meeting announcement and the signatures added.

On the side that maybe I did respond too quickly, I was interested to see that the extended discussion in the white paper addresses a couple of the issues I had with the letter.  On the topic of the conflict and decline in the PC(USA) being about more than the homosexuality issue, the white paper contains this paragraph which the letter does not:

Certainly none of these issues are unique to the PCUSA, [sic] but are all part of larger cultural forces. But what is the way forward? Is there a future beyond the decline as yet unseen? Is there a way to avoid endless fights, to regain consensus on the essence of the Christian faith? We see no plan coming from any quarter, leaving a continued drift into obsolescence.

While it does not seem to consider the broad range of issues the mainline/oldline faces, at least it acknowledges the “larger cultural forces” that are in play here.

Likewise, a couple of my other concerns are moderated in the white paper.  Regarding the diversity and inclusively, they say that they are speaking as a group of pastors but explicitly say “We call others of a like mind to envision a new future…”  Regarding the reference to the PC(USA) as “deathly ill” that was a lightning rod in the letter, the phrase is not used in the white paper but instead they say “The PCUSA [sic] is in trouble on many fronts.” (And as you can see the white paper uses my less-preferred acronym PCUSA instead of the PC(USA) used in the letter.) And finally, there is more acknowledgement of similar predecessor organizations and explanation of why a new one:

We recognize that there are still islands of hope across the church, but they do not seem to represent a movement. Many faithful groups and organizations have been devoted to the renewal of the PCUSA, and they have offered valuable ministry for many years. Yet it appears they have simply helped slow down a larger story of decline. Is it time to acknowledge that something in the PCUSA system is dying?

and

In many ways this [new] association may resemble some of the voluntary organizations of the past (PGF, PFR, etc.) but it is only a way station to something else. It is an intermediate tool to begin to bring together like minded congregations and pastors to begin the work of another future, different than the current PCUSA.

So some of these ideas are more developed in the 3 1/2 page white paper than they are in the 2 page letter.

Response

It was interesting to see how quickly word spread about the original letter on Twitter and the concerns that many people expressed.  This seems to have led to two rapid responses.

The Fellowship PC(USA) saw a need to respond quickly and the day following the distribution of the letter they put out a one-page FAQ addressing some of the concerns I and others had. Specifically, they address the narrow demographic of the original group (white, male, pastors mostly of larger “tall-steeple” churches).  The response is that this letter was only the beginning of a conversation that they want to broadly include all aspects of the church.  Of course, they get another negative comment from me because in an apparent effort to say that the conversation should include more than clergy they use the phrase “clergy/non-ordained as equal partners.” (Ouch! That hurt this ruling elder.)  This has now been changed to “clergy/laity.”  Sorry, no better. At best this comes off as a technical glitch that in either wording does not include ruling elders as ordained partners in governance with teaching elders (clergy).  At worst, while probably not intended to be so, it strikes me as a Freudian slip or condescending comment that teaching elders are somehow superior to ruling elders in all this.  OK, soapbox mode off.  (And yes, if you think I am being super-sensitive about this one little detail, this GA Junkie is by nature super-sensitive to that one little detail.  Sorry if that bothers you.)

The FAQ also addresses the relationship to the New Wineskins Association of Churches, other renewal groups, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church and why their plan is better, different, reasonable, or something like that.

The Fellowship has also updated the letter (the old link is broken) with a revised one that appears to be the same text but has a longer list of signatories that now includes ruling elders and women.  The original seven names are there for the steering committee, but the 28 names for concurring pastors has grown to 95 (including a couple of women) and there is now a category for Concurring Elders, Lay Leaders and Parachurch Leaders with 15 names. (And I suspect that this will be a dynamic document that will be updated as more individuals sign on.)

The Fellowship letter and viral response, possibly influenced by the concurrent meeting of the Middle Governing Bodies Commission, elicited a response from the PC(USA) leadership with a letter on Friday from Moderator Cynthia Bolbach, Stated Clerk Gradye Parsons, and GAMC Executive Director Linda Valentine.  This message, titled Future of the church: GA leaders invite all Presbyterians to join in conversation, cites not just the letter but several more conversations going on in the PC(USA) through the MGB Commission, and other task forces.  One of their concluding lines is “We ask that those who would challenge us also join with all of us across the church as we work together to make that happen.”  I also applaud their openness to the whole of the Presbyterian family as they address the letter to “All Presbyterians” and part-way through the letter say “Presbyterians everywhere long for vibrant congregations and communities
of faith, and relationships built upon trust and our common faith in
Jesus Christ.”

I mention this broad-mindedness since these developments have caught the attention of the wider Presbyterian family in the blogosphere and there are comments about it by David Fischler at Reformed Pastor and Benjamin Glaser at Mountains and Magnolias.  Within the PC(USA) ranks there is a nice analysis by Katie Mulligan who has a summary of the demographics of the churches represented by the original signatories.  (Thanks Katie. It was something I started to do, but as the signatory list became a moving target I reorganized my thoughts and it will appear as a slightly different statistical analysis in the future.)

There is also an unofficial response
from the affinity group Voices for Justice.  They reject the viewpoint
the Fellowship letter has of the PC(USA) and urge working together as
one denomination.

A Case Study in Social Media

Probably what interests me the most in all of this is how it played out.  As best as I can tell, this went viral, or as viral as something can go within the denomination, within about five or six hours.  The letter and the Fellowship group itself seem like somewhere we have been before and we will see if it plays out any differently.  How this played on Twitter is something else altogether and  I’m not sure anything like this has spread through the PC(USA) Twitter community in the same way.

So here is the timeline from my perspective (all time PST)(note: items marked * have been added or updated):

  • Feb. 2, 10:46 AM – Fellowship letter hits my email box
  • Feb. 2, 11:32 AM – Tweet from @preslayman announcing their posting of the letter – The first tweet I can find.
  • Feb. 2, 12:32 PM – John Shuck posted his first blog entry, tweeted announcement at 1:25 PM
  • Feb. 2, 3:00 PM – Tweet from @ktday that asks “what do you think of this” – quickly and heavily retweeted; beginning of the flood of tweets
  • Feb. 2, 3:17 PM – @lscanlon of the Outlook puts out a series of tweets reporting the letter
  • Feb. 2, 3:32 PM – My first blog post, I tweeted announcement of it at same time
  • Feb. 2, 7:12 PM – Time stamp on the Outlook article.*
  • Feb. 3, 2:31 PM – First tweet I saw about the Fellowship FAQ, from @CharlotteElia
  • Feb. 4, 8:56 AM – @leahjohnson posts first tweet I found about the PC(USA) leadership response*
  • Feb. 4, 9:01 AM – @Presbyterian official announcement by tweet of the denomination leadership response
  • Feb. 4, 10:10 AM – Katie Mulligan posted her blog article
  • Feb. 4, 11:07 AM – @shuckandjive announces the Voices for Justice response

Now that is what I saw.  Please let me know if you have other important events in this history that should be on the time line.  And I am going to keep researching it myself and it may grow.

So, I have to give credit to the Fellowship leadership, or at least their response team, for being able to turn around a response FAQ in 27 hours.  Nice job also by the denominational leadership for having a comment out in less than 48 hours.

In the realm of social media this is a very interesting development – that in the course of a day or two a topic could gather so much attention that the major parties each feel the need, or pressure, to weigh in on the subject.  And that the originating organization received enough criticism and critique that they so quickly issued a clarification and updated list of names.  In case you don’t think the world of communications has changed you need to take a serious look at how a topic, admittedly a hot one but one of limited interest outside our circle of tech-savvy and enthusiastic participants, has played out in just 48 hours.

And I would note that the PC(USA) is not alone in this.  In my observation of the PCA voting on their Book of Church Order amendments this year, and the ultimate non-concurrence by the presbyteries, social media, especially the blogosphere, played a major role.

So here I am commenting on it 72 hours after it broke.  Was my first response reasonable?  As I comment above, it was on only one piece of the evidence and it took me a couple more days to find time to read the white paper.  But then again, maybe it was.  The situation developed rapidly and having my own rapid response to the letter meant that the initial concerns I raised were among those addressed in the clarification the next day.

Now the big question – is all of this a good thing?  I will leave the ultimate answer up to each of you.  I have, in a bit of a play within a play, personally demonstrated what I see as both the negatives and the positives — my initial response was not as well developed as it could have been but in the reality of the new social media world it helped (I would hope) to propel the conversation forward.  Don’t we live in interesting times…

So where from here?  It will be very interesting to see what further role social media plays in this going forward.  Will this discussion become a topic for more narrowly focused groups who continue their work off-line, or will the new realities force or require this topic to remain viable in the extended social media community of the PC(USA). It will be interesting to see, and I would expect that if this Fellowship initiative is to really propel discussion of the future of the PC(USA) they will need to embrace the reality of the connected church.  I think we need a hashtag.

An Interesting Invitation And Some Of My Preliminary Reactions

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I got an interesting invitation in my e-mail today, and I’d bet that at least a few of my regular readers got it as well.  As I read it over I had some pretty quick reactions to some of the items, both positive and negative, and thought I would spend my lunch hour reflecting on these a bit.  For me, this can be dangerous because my first reaction often is sarcastic and snarky.  So either move along to other reading or enable your snark filters before going any further if that might be a problem for you.

The invitation came in the form of a letter from “A Fellowship of Presbyterian Pastors” inviting me to a gathering next summer.  (If you don’t have a copy of the letter you can download one.) Those of you who know me realize that this in itself throws up a red flag in my mind.  Not the gathering but that it is coming from a group that contains exclusively teaching elders — no ruling elders.  Now to be clear, the invite is to ruling elders as well as teaching elders, so this is not another case of receiving mail incorrectly addressed to “Dear Rev. Salyards.”  But I must admit that as I looked through the letter and read through the signatories the first thing I thought of was RE Beau Weston’s thought piece Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment.  More on the signatories in a moment, but on to the content.

The letter begins

To say the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is deathly ill is not
editorializing but acknowledging reality.

Interesting.  We are “deathly ill?”  OK, read on and I’ll address that in a moment…

Over the past year, a group of PC(USA) pastors has become convinced that
to remain locked in unending controversy will only continue a slow
demise, dishonor our calling, and offer a poor legacy to those we hope
will follow us.

I tend to think that it is not the presence of controversy itself, but the process by which we wrestle with the controversy. (And there’s that thing about this coming only from teaching elders again.)

Skipping down to the next paragraph

Our denomination has been in steady decline for 45 years, now literally
half the size of a generation ago.

It then goes on to further detail the decline.

Holding here for a moment let me first compliment them on using the acronym PC(USA) instead of PCUSA.  The latter (Presbyterian Church in the United States of America) was of course a predecessor denomination that ceased to exist with a merger in 1958 when the UPCUSA was formed. But that brings me to asking the question about who is in decline?  The PC(USA) has only been in existence for 28 years so going back 45 years means that we have to consider all the predecessor denominations and their children if we want to be faithful to the lineage.  That would be the UPCUSA and the PCUS (northern and southern in the vernacular) and out of them in the last 45 years has come the PCA, PC(USA), and EPC.

Am I just being picky?  Maybe.  But let’s skip over the next paragraph and the following begins…

Homosexual ordination has been the flashpoint of controversy for the
last 35 years.  Yet, that issue – with endless, contentious “yes” and
“no” votes – masks deeper, more important divisions within the PC(USA). 
Our divisions revolve around differing understandings of Scripture,
authority, Christology, the extent of salvation amidst creeping
universalism, and a broader set of moral issues.

While I don’t argue with what is said here, so far in the letter two things stand out to me as being a bit, shall I say, short-sighted.  First, Presbyterians – be it American, Scottish, or others – have always argued.  Does the Adopting Act and the New Side/Old Side debate ring a bell?  American Presbyterianism was imported in three or four separate streams and over 300 plus years we have recombined and realigned numerous times to double or triple that number, depending on how you count.  And many of the topics mentioned – understandings of Scripture, authority, Christology – have been part of these arguments the whole time.  Presbyterians seem prone to disagree by our very nature.  Our problem is not that we have disagreements but how we work through them.

My second point here is that all mainstream, or oldstream, denominations are in decline.  The reasons are complex and I think to simplify it to our divisions does not recognize the full nature of it and the changes in society that are also a part of the formula.

In light of this, are we “deathly ill?”  While we will continue to decline to an unsustainable level if current trends continue we must also recognize that many of the individual churches represented in the list of signatories, as well as others, are doing well individually and there are strong ministries within the PC(USA).  The question is more about how we get things done and what course we chart for the future.

So speaking of what the future course will be, the letter goes on to state five “new things” the PC(USA) needs and the four values that this group of pastors is proposing.  The first of the new things is really not new — A clear concise theological core was what the Adopting Act of 1729 was trying to attain.  The other four things are a commitment to nurture leadership, a passion to share in the larger mission of the people of God, a dream of multiplying healthy missional communities, and a pattern of fellowship.  I can get behind each of these characteristics.  Moving on to their four stated values, members across the spectrum of the PC(USA) will find these a bit more problematic.

The letter concludes with a discussion of what these pastors are looking at implementing — A Fellowship, New Synod/Presbyteries, Possible New Reformed Body and/or Reconfiguring the PC(USA).  To some degree, in fact in my mind to a large degree, this sounds like the New Wineskins Association of Churches so I would be interested to hear how this proposed fellowship would be different.

Maybe one way that it would be different would be the size of the churches.  NWAC contained some fairly large churches.  The signatories to this letter, while clearly stating they represent only themselves, do have connections to eight of the fifteen largest churches in the PC(USA) with several more recognizable congregation names in the bunch.  The significance and implications of this are left as an exercise for the reader.

In addition to the letter this group, Fellowship PC(USA), has a temporary web page as well as a four page white paper titled Time For Something New.  (Although I find it interesting that the current name of this file itself is “PCUSA Problem Internal 3 5b.pdf.”)  A few mentions have popped up on Twitter, there is a web copy of the letter over at the Layman, and John Shuck has given us his opinion.

Those are my initial thoughts, but I want to digest the letter and white paper some more.  Maybe I’ll have more to say later.  The meeting is August 25-27 in Minneapolis (nicely outside GA season).  I am curious to find out more of what is behind this and curious enough to mark the date on the calendar, but not so enticed yet to make my airline reservations.

It will be interesting to see where this goes.  As the polity wonks will quickly recognize, a couple of the proposals are ideas that have been brought to GA but have not gone any further.  Recognizing that holding the PC(USA) together as an organization of something even near its current size will require restructuring and compromise on both sides, this, like the Middle Governing Bodies Commission, may be a valid forum for exploring the way forward.

I’m interested to see what other reaction there is to this initiative both within and outside the denomination.

Stay tuned…

Church Of Scotland Redesigns Their Web Page

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Within the last couple of weeks the Church of Scotland has rolled out a redesigned web site.  It has a simple and clean look with great consistency between pages.  One of the more interesting features is that many of the pages have contact information for relevant individuals right at the bottom of the page rather than in some central directory page.

I have to say a word about navigation because they appear to have put a lot of thought into it.  When you go to the home page you don’t see top nav links for any of the “institution” of the church.  Instead you see topics, especially topics someone not connected to the church might be interested in.  Clicking through to the next level you get to much the same type of thing but now splitting out that topic.  For example, if you click the top nav bar for “Connect” your navigation choices on the left are now “Young Church,” “Emerging Church,” “Rural Church,” etc.  It is not until the next level down that you start to really see program names, such as under “Young Church ” you then get “Clann,” “National Youth Assembly,” and “Cosycoffeehouse.”  You can argue that this is too many clicks to get what you want, but it also struck me that the titles were nice and descriptive allowing you to narrow down what you wanted before you got the cute program names that would only be meaningful to insiders.  Another subtle example of this is that the guides to various liturgical days and seasons are not arranged according to the liturgical calendar but alphabetically.

Along those lines, it also appears clear that the site is primarily focused on those that are not familiar with the church.  The emphasis does not appear to be as much about news, announcements and resources as it is about connecting with the general population, introducing the church to those who are not familiar with it, and talking about its ministries within Scottish society.  Have a look at the “Speak Out ” page, which is about the church speaking out, not as much people speaking back to, or through, the church.   The page begins:

The Church of Scotland plays an important role in Scottish and
international life. It is involved in a range of political, ethical and
social issues and campaigns which affect peoples’ lives, such as human
rights, poverty, climate change, health and education.

It then starts talking about specific ministry initiatives and structure.

For those familiar with the old site, like my regular search for polity or GA details, the new site will probably take some getting used to.  They have a helpful page, the “Help! ” page, to give you some orientation to the new site. Nice touch.  I also found that the navigation links at the bottom reflect the old organization more than the top or side bars do. 

The site structure seems to have changed significantly so that my old links and bookmarks don’t work and there does not appear to be redirection. The extranet site appears to be gone and the information rolled into the main one, such as the Acts of the General Assembly page, making it one unified site.  In my survey of the site it appears that most of the previous material is there somewhere, including some behind a password protected members’ section.  My biggest complaint about the redesign is that there is still no newsfeed, Atom or RSS, for the Kirk’s news stories and nothing that I have found so far promoting social media for the denomination.

The redesign of the web site is probably not a surprise.  Back in late 2009 there was a bit of a dust-up when a design firm let it be known in a trade journal that they were doing work for the Kirk to update their image.  The Kirk was not pleased because it wanted to make this info known on its own terms and tried to retrieve their payment for the services, a claim the courts later denied.  Clearly the Kirk has been conscious of their public image and working on it.

So I look forward to surfing around the new site, getting to know it better, and especially looking for information that has been added.  It is an interesting implementation of a particular emphasis and I hope it gets the intended results for the Kirk.

A Very Preliminary Look At Amendment Voting In The PC(USA)

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The holidays are now behind us and traditionally this is the time when voting on amendments to the Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) kicks into high gear.  So I thought that I would take the first, preliminary look at possible trends in the voting.  But first some preliminaries…

Let me first make a couple of comments about the question “why bother?”  Well, beyond the fact that crunching data is the sort of thing that I enjoy doing I also think that it gives one of the best windows into what is going on in the denomination at this time.  It is a widely accepted generalization that the decisions of the General Assembly do not necessarily reflect the thinking of the “people in the pews.”  The usual evidence that is pointed to is the fact that three times previously the GA has sent an amendment to remove or rewrite G-6.0106b in the Book of Order, and three times it has been rejected by the presbyteries.  Another example of a disconnect is the negative reaction from many churches to the GA decision to boycott companies who supply items linked to the Israel-Palestine conflict.  So, while Research Services gives us statistics based on opinion poles of sampled members, the vote counts, both the absolute and relative numbers, give us an insight into how ruling and teaching elders react to the issues the Assembly sends down to them.  In short, I think the vote numbers can give us an insight into how the PC(USA) is changing.

So what is different this year about the vote?  I think there are four things that need to be taken into account.

1) Each year the Assembly sends an amendment with a bit different wording and that might make a difference.  This year the proposed language speaks more about the examination, that the governing body is responsible for it, and that they are to be guided by the Scriptures and the confessions.   One of the more interesting lines is “The examination shall include, but not be limited to, a determination of the candidate’s ability and commitment to fulfill all requirements as expressed in the constitutional questions for ordination and installation (W-4.4003).” So while the confessions and the Scriptures are to guide the governing body, the candidate’s qualifications seem to be focused on the constitutional questions.  So, how will any individual commissioner view the proposed wording this time around?

2) This vote is coming right after another vote two years ago while the previous interval was seven years from 2001 to 2008.  There are a number of ways that this could manifest itself with two possibilities being the reduced turnout due to a “fatigue factor” and/or little change in the numbers due to less time for the church to evolve.

3) I will not develop this point here, but will just say that in looking at the numbers for the last four votes (96-B, 97-A, 01-A, 08-B ) I consider the vote on amendment 01-A to be a unique case with a turnout of conservative voters in proportions not seen in the other three votes.  I will say that so far for 10-A this observation seems to still hold with the current numbers looking a lot like the last round of voting.

4) Overall, the voting is not just about “fidelity and chastity” this year but there is also the addition of the Belhar Confession to the Book of Confessions and a whole new revision to the Form of Government.  The voting could have different dynamics this year due to this expanded slate and the dynamics of the timing of scheduling the votes.

OK, now the data.  While the official count is always kept by the Office of the General Assembly , it only gives the totals.  For the Amendment A vote I have been comparing the breakdown by presbytery from several sources: the Yes On Amendment A site, Covenant Network, Reclaim Biblical Teaching, and the Layman.  Voting on the Belhar and nFOG are covered by both the Layman and the Reclaim Biblical Teaching site.  Then for breaking news there is always Twitter.  I’ve got my own tally sheet shared online, but I don’t claim to have it updated as quickly as the others.  And if you want a detailed list of resources related to these votes you should start with Robert Austell’s GA Help web site.

So, at the present time the Belhar Confession trails by 17-12 (remember it needs 2/3 for a confession to be approved), nFog is passing 10-7, and after a flurry of voting yesterday Amendment A is currently failing 15-20.  In total, 67 of the 173 presbyteries have voted on at least one of these items, eight have voted on two and three have voted on all three.  You can see that so far the presbyteries are taking the votes deliberately and not usually taking more than one at a time.

Of the four that have voted on both the Belhar and 10-A the votes have been very similar: Alaska – 24% yes Belhar and 31% yes 10-A, Lackawanna – 45% yes Belhar and 40% yes 10-A, New Castle – 72% yes Belhar and 70% yes 10-A, Santa Barbara – 23% yes Belhar and 27% yes 10-A.  While this is not proof that commissioners view Belhar and 10-A as being closely linked, it is suggestive that many may view both of them through a common filter.

Correlations for nFOG with the other two are not as close.  Sometimes there is a similar proportion, like Alaska that had identical 7-22 votes on each, or Des Moines which had 64% yes on Belhar and 70% yes on nFOG. Sometimes it is not as close, such as Eastern Oklahoma that barely passed 10-A but passed nFOG on voice vote, or Northumberland which was 36% yes on Belhar but only 13% yes on nFOG.

But these are early trends of just a small number of votes so we will see what develops over the next six months.

I want to finish by taking a quick look at the repeat voting on G-6.0106b comparing Amendment 10-A to 08-B.  We have reports on 35 presbyteries having held their votes and so far two have moved from “no” to “yes” (Eastern Oklahoma, Eastern Virginia) and one has moved the other way (Lake Huron).  So the net change at this point is one to the yes column.

Looking at the total yes and no votes, we find that there are 6% fewer total votes (3848 versus 4101) for these 33 presbyteries.  It is interesting to note that this 6% decline in commissioners voting exactly matches the overall decline in membership in the PC(USA) over the last two years (3.1% plus 2.9%).  Taken as a whole, the
number of commissioners voting yes is up 5% (1875 this vote versus 1786
in the last vote) while those voting no have declined 15% (1973 down
from 2315).  If the decline in total votes were proportionally represented in the yes and no votes we would expect 88 fewer yes votes and 199 more no votes.  So the decrease in no votes can not be explained only by the increase in yes votes but there must also be a decline in the number of commissioners who favor “fidelity and chastity” who are voting.

For the 33 presbyteries with reported numbers (Northern NY and Cayuga-Syracuse had hand or voice votes without recorded numbers), 23 had a decrease in the number of votes, 9 had an increase and one was exactly the same.  Now, some normal fluctuation in the number of commissioners attending the meeting is to be expected and I have usually placed this at +4%.  Taking this into account,  eight lower totals and five higher totals for a total of 13 more are added to the unchanged category.  This total of 14 is just a bit less than half of all the presbyteries voting so far.  The greatest decline is from Elizabeth Presbytery which had only 76% of the commissioners present as they had for the last vote.  This could easily be attributed to the inclement weather in the northeast this weekend. However, Genesee Valley, which voted at the same time, had only a slight decrease of 3%.  The largest increase was in Newton Presbytery which had 1.14 times the number of commissioners as the last vote.  Of the four increases that I consider significant (in a statistical but only quasi-rigorous sense), there are three presbyteries that voted no and one voted yes.  Tempting but dubious to draw conclusions from such a small sample.

If we look at yes and no votes broken down by presbytery, on average there are 19% more yes voters and 13% less no voters.  For the presbyteries that voted yes there was only a 1% increase in the number of yes voters and 16% decrease in no voters.  For the presbyteries that voted no, the increase in yes voters was 31% while the no voters decreased by 11%.  That increase in no votes was pulled by a couple of large increases, but it suggests that the Yes on A get out the vote campaign is having an effect while the similar effort for No on A is not as effective.

Let me warp up this discussion with the general observation that I am seeing the whole range of behaviors in different presbyteries.  The three presbyteries that switched all had significant increases on the prevailing side with 12%, 21% and 22% increases.  On the other side were varying decreases from 5%, to 14% to 23%.  The switch in position was a two-way street apparently caused by both gains and losses.  There were a couple of presbyteries with uniform change, such as Great Rivers which had a 3% increase in both the number of yes and no votes, or Newton which had a uniform 19% increase in both columns.  There are also presbyteries, like Central Florida and Stockton, where the total number of votes was very constant and the votes shifted columns.  It was into the yes column for Central Florida and towards no for Stockton.  There is only one presbytery, Mississippi, where the no votes were stable (47 versus 49) but the yes votes increased (up to 11 from 2).  And there are two presbyteries, Boston and New Castle, where the yes votes remained constant but the no votes declined significantly.  And then there are the rest of the presbyteries which exhibit more complex changes that can not be explained solely with these simple end-member models.

So, that is what I am seeing so far.  As I said, this is preliminary because with only around 30-40 presbyteries having voted on each amendment drawing statistical conclusions would be a bit early.  However, there are interesting trends developing and we will see how those play out.  Stay tuned… I’ll get out the white board and draw geeky charts and graphs next time.

Web 2.0 And The Internet Are Changing The World — An Example From The Scientific Community

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Here is an interesting case study that might be of interest to the Church Virtual/Open Source Church/Wiki Church types out there.  In watching this unfold in my professional life I found some interesting parallels in what happened with the reaction to this scientific discovery and what I think about regarding how the church does theology and polity in a Web 2.0 world.

While I want to focus here on the interaction that took place in the on-line world, let me briefly describe the announced scientific discovery behind this so that you have some context.

Back on December 2 a team of researchers associated with the NASA Astrobiology Institute published an interesting paper in Science magazine and held a press conference hosted by NASA to announce and discuss their results from bacteria they found in Mono Lake, California.  This bacteria appears to, at least partially, substitute arsenic for phosphorus in the chemical building blocks of the cell.  These building blocks could include enzymes and proteins.  There is a good discussion of the science related to this in articles from Wired, Science Daily, and a NASA article.  The abstract, but not the full article, is publicly available from Science. (Those readers in academic or research settings may have institutional access to the full article.) Interestingly, while researching this story I found an article from last Spring in The Times (of London) that has much of the scientific story at that time.  If you are not familiar with the biology and chemistry behind this you might not realize that, if the results hold up, this is a very significant scientific discovery.  At a minimum, they have discovered a life form that can live in an extreme, and normally very toxic, environment.

Well, this story went “viral,” if you will pardon the expression.  The press conference was streamed and, having been tipped off by a colleague that it was “going to be interesting,” I followed along and heard the news and the discussion.  There was plenty of coverage of the event across the news spectrum ( for example PC Mag, The Boston Globe, The Telegraph, just to name a few in addition to those above)  as well as the blogosphere (e.g. WeirdWarp, The Curious Wavefunction ).

Now, previous controversial discoveries raised a bit of professional chatter as well as some brief media attention and then usually disappeared from the radar to all except those who really cared.  (an example in a moment)  This announcement took a different path — five days later a widely publicized critique also went viral.  The original critique by Rosie Redfield appeared on her blog as a way, as she puts it, to clarify her thinking.  This was picked up by Slate and then spread to other blogs and developed a life of its own with one asking if this was a NASA publicity stunt and another wondering if this is “flim-flam.”  In short, the new Web 2.0 allowed for scientists to “wonder out loud” to both their colleagues and the public and media at large as well as providing a platform for the general public to discuss and weigh in on a discovery which was not necessarily in their realm of expertise.

Speaking of “not in your realm of expertise” let me comment briefly on my professional view.  As I suggest above the results are interesting.  A number of years ago I was a bit player in some research on the tufa towers in Mono Lake so the environment is not completely unknown to me.  It is a weird and wonderful place but the habitat harsh.  Anything that survives there will be interesting.  To me these bacteria are clearly a good subject to understand better.  On the other hand… I am strongly persuaded by the arguments of the critics and find the most radical conclusions about the arsenic substituting for phosphorus lacking the strong support I would look for regarding such a revolutionary conclusion.  To invoke Carl Sagan’s second best known quote: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”

In short, what has happened here is that a tantalizing and potentially extraordinary discovery has been extracted from the “traditional” scientific process and is now “owned” by the greater on-line community through the ability to distribute the information to the whole world in real time and for the on-line community to be able to interact with it.

Whether you think that is a good thing or not we must accept that it is the new reality of our society.  If you want to make an announcement of an extraordinary discovery to the world, be prepared to have anyone out there weigh in, not just your colleagues in the small academic fishbowl of your discipline.

Consider two previous extraordinary announcements.  Back in 1989 there was a claim that nuclear fusion could be accomplished on a lab bench at low temperatures – the so-called “cold fusion.”  Because the experiment was simple and the researchers published their experimental setup, physicists everywhere were trying to reproduce it, all without success.  But what happened is that the theory did not go away but a few people continued looking at the possibility even if the original experiment was not verified. (article in Wired, Wall Street Journal ) 

Another similar, and NASA connected, discovery was the announcement in 1996 of possible life preserved in a meteorite that originated from Mars.  The publication of this finding was also accompanied by a NASA news conference and picked up by the press.  But with a unique sample and without the web it left the skeptics in the general public without a forum for discussion or criticism.  Now, with time, the scientific community sees better explanations for what was seen in the original meteorite study, but like cold fusion a much lower profile search still continues. (Good backgr
ound info)

Returning to the arsenic life debate, the topic was hot enough that there was a panel discussion at the American Geophysical Union meeting regarding, not the science, but the course the reaction had taken.  This was live streamed and I enjoyed watching and tweeting my thoughts as the discussion progressed.  However, if you are looking for other Twitter messages check out the hashtag #arseniclife and the tweets by Alexandra Witze, @alexwitze, a contributing editor to Science News.  Her coverage was very good.  Some of her more thought provoking tweets about the process (names in front are the speakers on the panel – listing available from the panel moderator’s blog):

Steele: Everyone has a voice now. Is this how science will be self
correcting on a much quicker timescale?

Petit: Information is good, and messy. The more we have, the more it
flows and more robust society is

Steele: Scientists shd have more responsibility to understand effect of
what they say to public.

Harris: Does refusing to engage in conversation ever help one’s case?
(Not that this happened here.)

Oremland: I think not engaging hurt us. Gave us appearance of being
elitist.

Petit: Peer review worked fine. It put out a hypothesis that’s being
chewed on pretty hard.

Steele: If you stick to peer review process are you being elitist?

Sperling: there is a time needed to get things right. Blogosphere will
claim it’s about conversation, but they want scoop #arseniclife

Oremland: Point is about human response to things without time for
reflection.

One final detail on this – while the researchers would have preferred to have responded in the traditional “comment and reply” format, the nature of the response in the blogosphere did persuade them to publish a non-traditional reply to the criticism that had been distributed.

Going forward it will be interesting to see how quickly these claims are verified or contradicted.  It will also be interesting to see how quickly the viral nature of this news dissipates.

Regarding what this means for any organization and it’s interaction with modern society and culture I encourage you ponder this case study and come to your own conclusions and lessons.  Having reflected on this for almost a month now, let me share a few things that come to mind.

1) The easier access to information and the ability to discuss it has changed society.  Just as Luther’s German Bible and the Authorized Version of the English Bible put God’s word in the language of the people, the Internet now puts all manner of information at our finger tips.

2) But maybe this information is too easily available.  As the final tweets suggest “there is a time needed to get things right” and time is needed for reflection.  Do we get information too fast to be able to put it in context and reflect on the meaning?  Do we get too much information to be able to process it properly?
 
3) What is the responsibility of those of us with formal training in these areas to others who are trying to figure out what is means?  How do we communicate if what we view as being responsible is viewed by the general population as being elitist?

4) What have 8-second sound bites, a 24/7 news cycle, and 140 character messages done to our ability to communicate and discuss complex or deep concepts?  Are we looking too quickly for the bullet point or the executive summary with out looking for what is behind it or how it fits into a bigger picture?

Anyway, those are questions that come to mind for me.  Your mileage may vary.  But have fun with it.

Musings On Middle Governing Bodies

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Well, the Moderators have done their job and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has their Special Commission on Middle Governing Bodies.  There are 21 members of the commission and they look like a good bunch.  I know a couple of the members well and they are good choices for this work.  My prayers and best wishes are with all of you as you begin your work in two weeks.

This commission commencing its work, and the analysis I did last week, got me thinking about middle governing bodies and Presbyterian structure.  In particular I started wondering further about the size of presbyteries and where the PC(USA) falls in the spectrum.

After looking at some numbers I thought it would be a worthwhile thought exercise to consider the following option for reorganizing the PC(USA):

The presbyteries in the PC(USA) should be divided up so there are more, smaller presbyteries.

Oh, gosh, yes, this is counter-cultural and possibly counter-intuitive. The current thinking around the church is that with our declining membership we need to adjust our structure accordingly, combining presbyteries to keep them sustainable and eliminating parts of our structure. But this is only a thought experiment so stick with me for a few minutes.

What started me on this path were the following data.  Consider the following Presbyterian branches and their average presbytery sizes:

  Churches Presbyteries Churches/Presbytery
PC(USA)  10,657  173  61.6
 PC Taiwan  1208  20  60.4
 PCA  1740  79  22.0
 EPC  298  10  29.8
 PC Canada  952  45  21.2
 Church of Scotland  1200  43  27.9
 PC Ireland  550  19  28.9
Historic      
 PCUSA
Synod of New York
1888 		 822  29  28.3

Now I don’t know if these data got your attention, but obviously they got me thinking.  At the present time the PC(USA) has presbyteries that are on average a bit more than twice as large as these other branches and as they have been historically.  That is not to say that these other branches have uniform size presbyteries — Edinburgh Presbytery has 81 congregations and in 1888 the Presbytery of New York had 52 churches.  But today the largest PC(USA) presbytery is Coastal Carolina with 188 churches, and there are twenty more larger than 100 churches.  The smallest current presbyteries in the PC(USA) are San Juan and Cimarron with 14 churches and there are five more with less than 20.

So if smaller presbyteries are more of the norm, what if the PC(USA) were to reorganize so that it has lots more smaller presbyteries?  If we chose a target average of 25 churches per presbytery that would mean about 426 presbyteries in the denomination.  (Yes, I just saw a bunch of you flinch.)

Now I have no idea if this is a worthwhile thing to do — after all, the discussion on all levels has been to combine smaller presbyteries to make them sustainable.  But let me continue this thought experiment for a few more minutes to explore the implications.

It is interesting to note how the PC(USA) and its predecessor branches got here.  Finding the 1888 records was in some ways providential because, as the report of the Special Committee on the Nature of the Church and the Practice of Governance, approved by the 205th General Assembly (1993), tells us (p. 18):

Until the late nineteenth century, the denomination was “a ‘constitutional confederacy’ of congregations loosely connected by relatively weak institutional structures and a broadly defined constitution.”

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the church became a corporate denomination.

It goes on to clarify that the “corporate denomination” is not necessarily a negative because it could deliver goods and services to congregations and devote resources to mission causes.  But then in the mid-1970’s there was a decentralization of the corporate structure (p. 22):

Twenty years ago [1973] major reorganizations took place in the predecessor denominations of the PC(USA). A basic principle of reorganization was that mission was done best by the governing body closest to the area of mission.
…
In the UPCUSA, this reorganization led to the development of large regional synods where there had been smaller synods generally following state boundaries. Presbyteries and synods had full-time executives and offices… Presbyteries and synods linked sessions and congregations with the General Assembly. The UPCUSA saw this interrelatedness as program and polity, demonstrating the oneness of the church.

This is the background to how the PC(USA) got to its current structure.  Now, this thought experiment is about changing the structure but I do not fully discuss how much the underlying model on which the current structure is based would need to be changed to fit the new model.  Probably the model would need to be changed, but maybe not.

As I said earlier, the conventional wisdom in the PC(USA) right now seems to be that we need to find combinations of presbyteries to keep them sustainable as they loose members and resources.  But what is it about the institution we need to sustain?  The word that keeps flying around the PC(USA) right now, and what the new Form of Government is supposed to encourage, is to be missional.  We also keep hearing that we should not be stuck in the old ways but to find new and innovative ways of doing things.  With that in mind let’s consider what a structure loaded with small presbyteries would bring.

The benefits of the smaller presbytery model that I see are that they are more flexible and potentially more connectional among the member congregations.  For some presbyteries there would be no change — they are already in the target range.  For others, particularly in metropolitan areas, there would be significant reorganization.  Maybe San Francisco would remain unchanged (78 churches) but presbyteries over 80 (arbitrarily chosen from the size of Edinburgh) would be divided so Greater Atlanta and National Capital would each be divided into two presbyteries with slightly more than 50 congregations in each one.  Something like this is done in Toronto by the PC Canada where they have an East Toronto and West Toronto Presbytery with 23 churches.  It would seem that with a smaller more compact presbytery groups could meet more frequently, there would be less business so meetings could include a greater part of education, fellowship or visioning, and the smaller size would help make them more attuned, flexible, and responsive to local needs.  In other words — less business, more focus, more flexibility in addressing mission needs.  Isn’t that what the nFOG is supposed to be all about?

There are a number of issues I could see going either way depending on your perspective.  One of these is the institutional infrastructure.  On the one hand there are presbyteries in the target size range now that sustain their paid staffing needs beyond the stated clerk.  On the other hand, this suggestion is partly modeled on the way that the PCUSA was before it became a “corporate church” so paid support and resource staff at the presbytery level beyond the stated clerk may not necessarily be a desired part of the new structure.

Another issue that could  be subjective regarding the benefits and outcome is whether this would decrease connectionalism between middle governing bodies.  The structure back in 1888 was described as a “constitutional confederacy.”  Depending on your ideas for the PC(USA) and what your goals for the new structure are, that looser affiliation could be viewed as either a positive or a negative.

The issues on the negative side are significant as well.  With 426 presbyteries there would be an increase in the ecclesiastical review necessary, including records review and polity consultation.  One would expect the number of judicial cases to remain constant.

OK, that is where my thought experiment brings me and I have to admit I’m not entirely sure I like it in that form.  I did not address synods and for today let me simply say that something like synods would be needed in this model for a variety of reasons, including the fact that judicial and records review for 426 presbyteries would overwhelm the General Assembly.  There could be the same number of synods, there could be more – I don’t think that part of it is important right at the moment.

Now the discussion currently circulating in the wider church is about what the appropriate size of a presbytery should be so that it is sustainable.  Let me ask it a different way – What is the appropriate size to be able to conduct the necessary mission?  Remember, mission is to be done by the governing body closest to the mission.  I am more than ready to acknowledge that a presbytery of 25 churches could be too small to carry out the mission needs they see in a region.  What about a larger grouping?

Let me suggest another grouping here — for the sake of this discussion let’s call it a “district.” (FYI – districts are a perfectly good Presbyterian concept for non-governing body groupings, although some branches use it for subdivisions within a presbytery and some use it for groupings of presbyteries.)

The district would not be a governing body, no commissioners would be sent to it, it would have none of the powers or responsibilities of a governing body.  A district would exist for the purpose of presbyteries mutually coming together to conduct mission or other business that requires a scale larger than a presbytery but smaller than a synod.  Groupings like this already operate, such as the Sierra Mission Partnership between three presbyteries in California and Nevada.

Beyond that I really wouldn’t specify anything for a district.  Maybe it would be a formal division, such as covering three present presbyteries, or maybe it would be ad hoc and formed of presbyteries interested in a specific mutual mission.  (That latter concept could actually lead to overlapping districts each based on a mission need.)  It might or might not have staff.  The essential point is that it would be a larger grouping to help presbyteries facilitate mission of mutual interest.

Now, I have some dear friends who are presbytery execs and I don’t want to put this in a negative light for them, so let me suggest that there are places in this thought experiment for denominational staff if it is phased out at the presbytery level.  As I indicated, the place for sharing resources would be at the synod or district level.  While not every district would need/want/afford one or more professionals, that would be a place that someone would be beneficial to coordinate, encourage and oversee the joint mission. That would be a place for resource staff.  The other thing that I would imagine happening under this scenario is the expansion of professionals shared between or across presbyteries much like Sierra Blanca and Santa Fe do now.  The positions would not be the same, but it is probably a safe bet that not too far into the future the current professional positions will be different one way or another — We just need to figure out how.

So there is one model or option: We turn the PC(USA) into a collection of smaller, flexible and more intimate presbyteries.  We give up the idea of economies of scale for more relational groups that can focus on specific ways to be missional as God is calling them.

Anyway, I just throw this out there after looking at presbytery sizes in other Presbyterian branches.  It is only one of the options.  I don’t know if this is the route God is calling us since that is the task of all of us joining together to seek the will of God.