Category Archives: ECO

33rd General Assembly Of The Evangelical Presbyterian Church

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Beginning tomorrow morning the Evangelical Presbyterian Church begins ramping up to the start of the meeting of its 33rd General Assembly. There are a variety of workshops tomorrow, Tuesday 18 June, and then the keynote workshop for everyone on Wednesday 19 June. It is not until Thursday morning 20 June that the Assembly actually convenes and the formal business sessions begin and those will continue until noon on Saturday 22 June.

The meeting is being hosted by Cherry Hills Community Church in Highland Ranch, Colorado, on the southern edge of he Denver metropolitan area.

Lots going on at this meeting so here is information to help you follow along:

  • For the first time there will be live streaming – see the bottom of the Documents and Webcast page. Not clear if only the business will be webcast or if any of the workshops and worship will be as well.
  • Most of the necessary documents can be found on the Documents and Webcast page including the complete Commissioners Handbook as a single document or by all the individual reports, documents and communications on that page. Please not that at the bottom of the page are a number of replacement pages.
  • There are a number of schedules for the Assembly posted on the Assembly page, but maybe the most useful for those following the business of the Assembly is the General Assembly Schedule Summary
  • The polity documents include the Book of Order, the Westminster Standards and the Essentials of Our Faith
  • Official news about the Assembly will be found as both press releases and in their electronic newsletter EP News and probably their Facebook page as well.
  • The official Twitter hashtag for the meeting is #epc33 and the church tweets as @EPChurch
  • As the meeting gets going I will update with other individual Twitter accounts to follow, but for starters let me suggest @Matt_Everhard.

In looking through the material for the meeting it is clear that one thing the EPC is working through are changes related to its current rapid growth. For those that may have missed it, churches requesting dismissal from the PC(USA) are going to both ECO and the EPC in roughly equal numbers. As a consequence, this will be the largest GA the EPC has had with 620 commissioners from around the world. In terms of the denomination’s structure, there is a proposal to create the Great Plains Presbytery from regions currently covered by the Mid-America and the West Presbyteries. There is also an overture from the Presbytery of the Pacific to add to its region part of a valley with churches, some coming from the PC(USA), that have an affinity with the other churches in that region.

In another sign of growth, and also of the general situation in the nation regarding new health care regulations, the Assembly will be asked by the Board of Benefits to grant commission status to the Administrative Committee for the limited purpose of evaluating and considering whether the “EPC Medical Plan should be retained, revised, outsourced, or terminated.” And, the EPC now has a Chief Operating Officer, Phil Van Valkenberg, who will be introduced at the Assembly.

To further understand the growth in the EPC you can have a look at the Stated Clerk’s Report where under the statistical information he reports a growth of 92 churches in 2012 for a total of 416. In his report the Stated Clerk also reports that on the advice of the Fraternal Relations Committee he sent a letter to the World Communion of Reformed Churches supporting the membership of ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. (And the Assembly will be asked to endorse this action.)

OK, on to other business of interest…

The EPC has been revising their constitutional polity documents and at this meeting the Revised Book of Government will be brought for a second reading and approval and the Revision of the Book of Worship will be brought for a first reading. The approval of the Book of Government is requested to take place under special rules for approval of the full report without amendment. The press release about the meeting says of the revision: “The revisions produce a more consistent use of language and formatting
changes. The revisions do not represent significant changes in polity.”

In other business from the Fraternal Relations Committee there is a request to approve the Fraternal Agreement with the Evangelical Reformed Church of Kazakhstan (ERCK).

As I mentioned at the top, the first two days are loaded with workshops and seminars including Wednesday’s keynote seminar on the theme of the Assembly: “In Christ Alone” A day with Lee Strobel and Mark Mittleberg. It should be interesting.

And so we wish the commissioners well and offer prayers for the guidance of the Holy Spirit over the next few days, especially for their discussion and discernment in the issues before them.

A Look At The PC(USA) Church Dismissals In Alaska

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A little under a year ago I did an analysis of some church dismissals from Tropical Florida and Mississippi Presbyteries of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). In each presbytery multiple churches were dismissed permitting a statistical comparison of the sizes of those churches with the churches across the presbytery and the analysis found that the churches requesting dismissal were typically larger than the churches in the presbytery as a whole.

Now a similar situation has presented itself in the Presbytery of Alaska that allows me to once again go into statistical analysis mode.
 
The Presbytery web site contains this short news statement:

The Presbytery of Alaska met in Haines on April 5-7, 2013, and having concluded the processes set out in
“A GRACIOUS, PASTORAL RESONSE [sic] TO CHURCHES OF THE PRESBYTERY OF ALASKA REQUESTING DISAFFILIATION”
dismissed to the Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterian [sic] these churches: Kake, Angoon, Hoonah, Chapel by the Lake, Haines, and Skagway.

The Presbytery web site has been updated to list just the remaining nine churches.

At the one meeting this presbytery lost 2/5 of its 15 congregations. The question is whether this presbytery follows the previous pattern of church size distributions.

Here are the 15 churches’ membership numbers from their 2011 statistical reports.

Church  Location 2011 Membership
Remaining churches    
 First PC  Petersburg  39
 First PC  Sitka  73
 First PC  Wrangell  44
 First of Craig and Klawock  Craig  46
 Hydaburg PC  Hydaburg  28
 Ketchikan PC  Ketchikan  42
 Metlakatla PC  Metlakatla  40
 Northern Lights UPC  Juneau  99
 Yakutat PC  Yakutat  10
     
 Dismissed churches    
 Chapel by the Lake  Juneau  491
 First PC  Skagway  30
 Frances Johnson Memorial PC  Angoon  21
 Haines PC  Haines  63
 Hoonah PC  Hoonah  13
 Kake Memorial PC  Kake  14

Before the dismissals the Presbytery’s 15 congregations had 1053 members combined. Of that 421 members (40.0%) remain in the nine churches and 632 (60.0%) left in the six churches that were dismissed. The median size of the churches in the Presbytery before dismissal was 40 and after it is 42. The median size of the dismissed churches is 25.5.

So, the answer is that taken as a group the churches that requested dismissal to the Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians are generally smaller than the churches remaining in the Presbytery. In other words the pattern we saw in Mississippi and Tropical Florida is not seen here in Alaska, but rather we find the reverse.

There is one pattern here that we have seen elsewhere – the departure of the largest church. While this did not happen in Tropical Florida – there the largest church requesting dismissal was the second largest church in the Presbytery – we did see in Mississippi that the two largest churches departed. We are seeing in other presbyteries the largest church requesting dismissal but my more comprehensive analysis of that is still in the works. In Alaska, the largest church in the Presbytery was dismissed and it has a membership almost five times larger than the second largest church. In fact the membership of Chapel by the Lake represented 46.6% of the Presbytery’s church membership before dismissals and 77.7% of the membership that was dismissed. (And because this one data point has such a large value is the reason I have so far not mentioned the statical mean of the data.)

Looking a bit further at the data we see that the second and third smallest churches were also dismissed, contributing to the median size of the dismissed churches being below those that remain.

Just out of curiosity, if we drop the large outlier from the data set we find that there are 562 members in all the other churches with 40.1 members as the mean size of a church and 39.5 the median. For the five smaller churches that were dismissed there are 141 members (25.1%) and the remaining churches have 421 members (74.9%). These five departing churches have a mean size of 28.2 and a median of 21. The remaining churches have an average size of 46.8 and a median of 42.

All this to say that in this case, while the largest church in the Presbytery of Alaska was among those being dismissed, overall the churches that requested dismissal to ECO were generally smaller churches in the Presbytery.

I have not done the necessary research on these churches to have formulated a good theory as to why this reverse pattern is present in this presbytery. Part of the reason that this area may have significantly different dynamics is because of the isolation of each of these communities and therefore church choices are very limited. This is in contrast to areas with larger populations and better transportation networks where perspective members can church shop for a congregation that meets their long list of interests and preferences. Only in Juneau were there two Presbyterian churches in the same city. For the others, even if two churches were on the same island, travel between was by sea or air — no driving between the communities. There is generally no choosing between two Presbyterian churches with different styles or theological perspective.

For the polity geeks I will mention that with the Presbytery of Alaska dropping to nine congregations, they are now below the minimum of ten required for a presbytery. The Layman reports that while the Presbytery continues to be administered as it has been the Synod of Alaska-Northwest has assumed jurisdiction.

So, an interesting data set but one that may not be representative of other parts of the country. As other data sets get larger we will see what they look like.

General Synod Of The Covenant Order Of Evangelical Presbyterians

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Later today we have the gathering for the General Synod of the Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. This comes as one component of the larger gathering of the Fellowship of Presbyterians in Orlando, Florida.

Based on past events and the information on the web site, probably the best way to follow along with the business and activities will be on Twitter. There is the official Twitter account @fellowshippres and the same thing is being used as the hashtag for the meeting – #fellowshippres. These events usually generate a reasonable amount of Twitter chatter so it should be a good source to keep up with what is happening.

As for other social media I don’t know how much information will be available from the Facebook page, but they are promoting their newly created Instagram account.

There is a schedule for the meeting posted on the web site but no official docket for the General Synod that I have found and no reports or papers either.

In the event we need to refer to them the two important documents are the ECO Polity and Theology publications.

I will update this information during the meeting as appropriate but based on past meetings we can hope to see video of some of the talks made available after the meeting.

And so as ECO embarks on this meeting we offer them our prayers and best wishes for the transaction of their business.