Category Archives: History

The PC(USA) Does Appear To Have A “Lightning Rod”

I have two polity-heavy posts that I have been working on and decided to take a break from those to exercise the other side of my brain and crunch some numbers…

In the initial letter introducing the Fellowship PC(USA) the statement is made

“Homosexual ordination has been the flashpoint of controversy for the last 35 years.”

On most levels I take issue with this because in a larger sense Presbyterians around the world have throughout their history been debating scriptural and confessional imperatives and implications and this is only the latest specific detail over which the discussion is continuing.

But on a more practical level this statement seems to hold a fair amount of validity to me based on my personal experience. For the last several votes on changing Book of Order section G-6.0106b it has always struck me that my own presbytery had significantly higher attendance for the amendment vote meeting than for regular meetings. Even at the beginning of the debate, for our vote to include the current “fidelity and chastity” language in the constitution we had 284 commissioners vote. A couple of meetings later a very contentious issue had 202 commissioners vote. The pattern still continues today as I have had more than one commissioner ask me when our presbytery is voting and when I mention the different meetings for the different amendments they tell me they only want to know about Amendment 10-A.

Well, with the voting this year I have an ideal data set to test whether this observation holds in other presbyteries as well. Short answer – YES!

First, the usual comments on the data I use: My data is aggregated
from numbers from Twitter as well as vote counts at the Covenant Network, Yes on 10-A, Reclaim Biblical Teaching and the Layman.
This aggregation is available in my spreadsheet through this past weekend’s
reports. Because I will be looking at voting on all three major issues — Belhar, nFOG and 10-A — the Layman and Reclaim Biblical Teaching charts provide the full data set. (Note how this in itself is suggestive of my hypothesis about the focus on the 10-A voting as that is the only one followed by all four of these sources.)

Now there are 55 recorded votes for the Belhar Confession, 62 for the nFOG, and 115 for 10-A. (Again, suggestive of the higher-profile nature of 10-A and the need for a recorded vote.) Of these we have 39 recorded pairings of Belhar and nFOG, 36 pairings of Belhar and 10-A, and 45 pairings of nFOG and 10-A.

For those 39 presbyteries with recorded votes on Belhar and nFOG the ratios between the two range from having 31% more votes for Belhar to having 40% less. But the average and median are right at 1.00 indicating that on balance the turnout is the same for those two issues with a fairly symmetric distribution around that.

For the 36 presbyteries that have recorded votes on both 10-A and Belhar there are, on average, 12% more commissioners voting on 10-A than Belhar with the range from 75% higher to 13% lower. The comparison of nFOG to 10-A for those 45 presbyteries is very similar with the average 13% higher for 10-A and the range from 63% higher to 12% lower. With medians at 7% and 5% respectively, the distributions are clearly not as symmetric, having extended tails at the higher end.

I am sure that several of you have already started complaining about the problem with the analysis that I just did – the three votes are not always three independent events but in many cases multiple votes are taken at the same meeting and so, with the exception of a few commissioners who only come for the one vote they are interested in, the total number of votes cast should be, and in several cases are, nearly identical. (The other thing that could cause minor fluctuations is the fact that I don’t include abstentions.)

So, my first point is that in spite of not accounting for independent events the numbers are so robust that the upward shift is visible in this mixed data set.

Well, as much as I would like to separate these out into independent data sets, I have not personally kept a time history of the voting to be absolutely certain of which votes were take at the same meeting and which were not. (If any of you have that information please do the analysis of independent events and let me know how far off I am.) I can tell you several votes were taken at the same meeting and in fact these are very obvious in the posted spreadsheet having only a vote or two variation in the numbers. But let me try to separate out the different votes using my usual criteria that a 4 vote difference or a 4% difference is normal fluctuation and vote totals within this range will be treated as having happened at the same meeting. Also, from here on I will only consider the comparison of the Belhar and 10-A votes for two reasons: 1) My earlier work showing the closer correlation of these two votes still holds, and 2) it is my impression, and only my impression, that presbyteries are tending to do these votes at different meetings more than splitting nFOG and 10-A. After the voting is over I’ll revisit this topic with the final data set and I suspect that we will find a bimodal distribution to help us answer this question.

So, of the 36 presbyteries with recorded votes on both Belhar and 10-A , 20 have noticeable differences in the number of votes. Eighteen of those are higher for 10-A and two are higher for Belhar. Of the ones higher for 10-A they range from 7% higher to 75% higher and have an average increase of 24% with a median increase of 18%. While tempting to do the full frequency distribution analysis at this point, I will save that for a while until there are more data.

Now, accepting the fact that one of my analyses certainly includes dependent events and the other probably has unfairly eliminated independent events, it is still clear that a vote on “fidelity and chastity” brings out the commissioners more than a vote on changing the Book of Confessions. Like it or not, we have to accept the premise from the Fellowship PC(USA) letter that there is a “flashpoint” or “lightning rod” in the denomination.

Before bringing this exercise to a close, let’s ask the obvious question – “Was the increase in commissioners who voted yes or voted no?” The answer is both, but while there is significant variability between presbyteries, it was the no voters who tended to show up for the vote on 10-A. And yes, this is based on the presumption that a commissioner that voted one way on Belhar was going to vote the same way on 10-A so the other way to look at this is that there was a trend for more uniform commissioner turn-out with some commissioners that voted, or would have voted, yes on Belhar to vote no on 10-A.

In terms of the specific numbers, the average number of yes votes increases 7% while the number of no votes more than doubles, rising 102%. However, these are influenced by a couple of presbyteries with a small number of votes in a given column that when they pick up just a few more votes becomes a large ratio. For example, North Alabama had 3 no on Belhar and 28 no on 10-A giving a nine-fold increase. Another case is Central Washington which went from 7 yes on Belhar to 12 yes on 10-A for a 71% increase. With the extreme values present considering the median value of each data set (the value for which half are above and half are below) is more reasonable. Still, the median number of yes votes is up 4% and the median of the no vote increase is 28%.

So when presbyteries have important issues to discuss it appears from this data that commissioners are more likely to show up when the issue is G-6.0106b. I have to agree that for the last few decades the “issue de jour” for the mainline Presbyterians has been sexual orientation and practice, particularly as it applied to those who hold ordained office. But throughout the history of Presbyterianism other issues, such as church-state relations and confessional subscription and standards, have been the flashpoint over which we have debated, and divided. (It would be interesting to know if presbytery meeting attendance increased for votes on modifications to the Westminster Standards earlier in our history.) It also leads to the interesting question of what will become the “issue de jour” if 10-A passes. I think many would see the denomination moving on and rather than staying with modifications to G-6.0106b the next discussion point will probably be the definition of marriage (W-4.9001). But maybe it is something else that does not come to my mind at the moment. And the question of whether we Presbyterians need an issue as the focus of our debate is a topic for another time. We will see what develops over the next few years.

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…

Officers Of The Church — Prepetual Or Three-And-Out?

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In my recent reading I found a convergence of ideas that I want to spend some time musing about. The basic theme of this is the nature of the ordained offices of Ruling Elder and Deacon in branches where the office is perpetual but the service on the local board is not. I have not done a comprehensive survey of this point of Presbyterian polity but in my experience the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is the only branch I am aware of that has terms with limits as the only option, in their case six years, then requiring an individual to go off the board (session for elders, board of deacons for a deacon) for one year before serving again on that board. For many branches, and historically for mainline American Presbyterians, once your are called as a Ruling Elder of the church you continue serving on the session without limit. You can voluntarily step down due to personal circumstances, and if you move churches you remain an elder but you do not automatically go on to the new church’s session. And usually there is a process to remove you from the session should circumstances warrant. But it is not the case that you leave because “your time is up.” (The exception there would be in the sense of joining the Church Triumphant. )

Personally, my service as an elder on session lasted five years (I was first elected to fill a vacant partial term) and in the 12 years since I have not been invited back onto my church’s session. I state this only as fact and not as complaint because in those 12 years I have never ceased serving the church in the capacity of a ruling elder in other governing bodies of the church.

But my experience, vis a vis the congregation, is not unique based upon the numbers in the Presbyterian Panel background summary. PC(USA) Research Services, in what I consider a misleading and inaccurate division, categorizes their sample population into “elders” and “members.” If you dive into the data you find that when they refer to elders they mean elders currently serving on session. Furthermore, they report that of what they classify as members, more than one-third (38%), are ordained Ruling Elders. If you take all the individuals that have been ordained as Ruling Elders or Deacons (or both) it turns out to be more than half of the “members.” There is a very large population within the PC(USA) that have been ordained to church office. As we will see in a minute this is such a large group that within a congregation it is difficult to effectively use them to serve on the session. The Panel survey is silent on other ways that this large pool of ordained officers live out their call in the life of the church if they are not serving on session.

Now consider how the survey question is worded:

Have you ever been ordained an elder in a Presbyterian church?
Have you ever been ordained a deacon in a Presbyterian church?

I’m not sure if they are trying to capture those who have demitted and are no longer ordained officers, but in my experience that is a pretty small number, probably so small it would not be statistically significant. I would think that they could better reinforce the perpetual nature of the ordained office by asking “Are you an ordained elder (or deacon) in a Presbyterian church?” Or maybe they are recognizing that individuals may not realize the office is perpetual and phrase the question so that it still captures the respondents correctly. In that case we need to do a better job of educating our ordained officers. But either way, the nature of the survey questions do nothing to reinforce the perpetual nature of the office.

OK, that is a particular point in the ethos in the PC(USA) that really rubs me the wrong way (in case you couldn’t tell) and that I have ranted about before. But it is not just me… In the resource piece by the Rev. Joseph Small that was posted for the Special Commission on Middle Governing Bodies I found this (as part of a longer section beginning on page 4 that is well worth the read)(my emphasis added):

What led to the bureaucratization of sessions and presbyteries? At root, it was the bureaucratization of American society, and the church’s endemic eagerness to follow culture’s lead. But there are proximate symptoms and causes. In the 1950’s, Presbyterian polity was changed at several points for the very best of reasons, but with unintended, unfortunate consequences.

First, the understanding of “elder” as a called ministry within the congregation was weakened by the introduction of a regulation stipulating that elders could serve no more than two consecutive three-year terms on the session. This mandatory rotation of elders was instituted for one very good reason and one of questionable intention. The ordination of women as ruling elders had been part of (northern) Presbyterian polity since 1930, but most sessions had few if any women serving. Limiting terms of service on sessions was one way of opening the eldership to new persons, notably women. The regulation had its desired result, but this appropriate motive was joined by another, less noble one. It was thought that mandatory rotation would break the hold of “bull elders” on the life of the church, reducing the capacity of sessions to thwart pastors in their attempts to modernize and renew congregational life.

The unintended result of mandatory rotation was the loss of an understanding of elders as persons called to one of the ordered ministries of the church. Term limits for service on the church session produced brief tenure by an ever expanding circle of members. In many congregations, one three-year term became the norm, and the understanding of the eldership was transformed from a called ministry to merely taking one’s turn on the board. Short-term, inexperienced elders also increased the influence of pastors by diminishing the ministry of called, knowledgeable elders. This imbalance, evident in sessions, became especially pronounced in presbyteries where well-informed pastors were accompanied by revolving elders who knew less and less about matters before the assembly.

My thanks to Rev. Small for including the historical context along with his concurrence on the effect that I have seen of rotating elders. I’m glad to know that this is a recognized issue and not something I’m just reading into the polity.

What are the positives? As Rev. Small points out it encourages (forces?) diversity and additional voices on the session. What are the negatives? Personally, I am especially concerned about the loss of the understanding of the roll of elders and on this I believe the other problems hinge. And, in addition to the lack of experience and the loss, in some cases, of the joint governance, I have seen another issue where nominating committees have to find someone to “fill the position” and it becomes more of an issue of who will say yes as opposed to who has a sense of call. I, and others I have met who are in congregations with similar happenings, would rather see the position left vacant until it can be filled by someone who does have the sense of call. In some times and places the position of ruling elder has become just another position for someone to help out with.

In his 1897 book The Ruling Elder at Work, the Rev. J. Aspinwall Hodge captures the weight of the office and the nature of it as he writes as a fictionalized elder nominee in the opening paragraphs:

The Pastor of our church has just informed me, that the Session has decided
that the number of Elders should be increased. This has long been
regarded necessary. A meeting of the church will soon be called for that
purpose. I am troubled, because the Session desire to nominate me as
one of the new Elders. I wanted to decline at once, but the Pastor
informs me that I should with care and prayer consider what may be my
duty. He urges that, while the communicants have the privilege to
nominate and elect their own representatives, they have the right to
expect the advice of the Session, as its members are in a position to
consider the questions involved more fully than the communicants can.
They are required constantly to observe the christian character and
efficiency of the members of the church, and are thus prepared to judge
of the personal qualifications of those to be nominated. From their
intimate knowledge of the people, they should be able to propose those
who would be most acceptable to the various classes in the congregation, and
who can best represent them. And being well acquainted with the
peculiarities of themselves and of the Pastor, they can best select
those who are qualified to cooperate with them in maintaining the unity
of the church and the spirituality of the members. On the other hand,
the Session ought not to be a self-perpetuating body. It should impart
the information which it possesses, and give advice, but the
communicants can nominate and elect whom they please. Our Session,
feeling the responsibility, had, after long and serious consideration,
by a unanimous vote, determined to nominate me as one of the new Elders.

The question is, therefore, distinctly before me,
and I must consider it. The deliberate judgment of the officers of the
church demands respect, and my Pastor adds that he knows that the desire
is general in the congregation to have me an Elder.

I recently found out about a training program for ruling elders at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. This program, designed to be completed in two years of full-time study, leads to a Master of Ministry for the Ruling Elder degree. The program is described to “help the
Ruling Elder function on the Session, Presbytery, and General Assembly levels in a biblical fashion.” But they do add the qualifier that “the fact that Greenville Seminary offers these programs for the training and/or continuing education of Ruling Elders in no way implies that a seminary education is needed for the Ruling Elder to function properly in his office.” I wonder if SFTS or Fuller will every bring a program like this to the Left Coast? (Or if there are enough other interested ruling elders to make that worthwhile?)

Before I finish this post let me present a thought exercise: Consider a congregation of 240 members. If we use the Panel information and figure that one-third of the members are ordained elders that would mean that there are 80 elders in the congregation. I modeled this exercise on a congregation roughly the size of my own and my first reaction was that 80 was way too high. However, after thinking about it some more I am now inclined to think that it is high, but not by too much. For this thought exercise I will continue to use it. (And you will probably figure out that while the numbers are pretty close to my church, for this exercise I have selected numbers that give round numbers for us to talk about.)

Now consider a session of 12 members. This is a reasonable number for this size congregation. It represents 5% of the members and would be organized into three classes of four. If we have a situation where every elder serves only one term so four elders from our pool of 80 go onto the session each year then each elder in the pool would wait 20 years between their terms on the session. (So I have another eight years to wait.)

Of course, the situation is not that simple. In the case where each year two of the four were eligible to serve a second term and agree to do so, only two elders would need to be drawn from the pool so the rotation would be 40 years between terms. To add one more level of complexity what if we say that of the two “open” spots each year, one is filled from the pool but one is filled by a new elder, someone who is ordained to the office that year, then it would be 80 years between terms for those in the pool and the pool would grow by one new elder each year.

Now, this model does not take into account those that leave the pool by death or transfer, and of course it does not include elders joining the pool by transfer into the church. In addition, it does not include those who due to age, health, or other circumstance are in the pool but not up to the responsibilities of serving the church any more. (And I know several very faithful and dedicated elders who have inspired me who are now in this category.)

The bottom line though is that, if the Panel data is correct, each congregation has an abundance of called and ordained individuals, ruling elders and deacons, sitting out there in the pews every week. How does the congregation continue to give them opportunities to live out their call? How do we reinforce to them, and the church as a whole, that the office is perpetual? If we are going to limit service on the session, how do we intentionally find ways to uses elders in other appropriate roles? Should the denomination’s polity include provisions for limiting the number of elders so such a large back-log does not build up and individuals are able to serve on the session, and thus more often use the spiritual gifts that were recognized in them when they were originally called to serve on the session?

I want to leave you with one last image: In about a month-and-a-half at least a couple of the elders in my church who are going off of the session will have to give up their name tags that also identify them as “Elder.” What message does this send to them and other ordained officers not serving on boards about the perpetual nature of the office? What message does this send to the congregation about the nature of the ordained office? Just because they are not on the session and have stopped wearing the name tag do they stop functioning as elders or stop thinking of themselves as such? What does this mean for the PC(USA) as a whole?

Past Meets The Present In Scotland — Rome Amidst The Reformed

Historical Realignments In The Scottish Presbyterian Church And Parallels In Other Branches

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I ran across an article today that had some interesting historical details about the Presbyterian churches in Scotland, details that seem to mesh with what I have previously commented on for North American Branches.

The article is on the blog Holdfast and is titled “the Free Church in its current form is finished.” The article looks ahead to the Free Church of Scotland General Assembly, something which would be of interest to a GA Junkie from the start. Related to the focus of the piece is the editorial in the July ’09 issue of the Monthly Record, the Free Church’s official publication, something I had commented on at the time. The point of the editorial was what the controversy in the Church of Scotland over ordination standards means for the Free Church — Including possibly making worship standards more flexible to allow CofS churches to comfortably realign with the Free Church.

What the author mentions, which I am interested to find out, is that was not the first time the editor, Mr. David Robertson, had made comments about worship style. The blog post informs us that he made a statement a year before at the 2008 General Assembly:

The current editor of the Monthly Record told the Assembly in 2008 that he could no longer ‘assert, maintain and defend’ the current practice on worship. That is that he desires hymns, instrumental music and women deacons too. He has said ‘the Free Church is going to change’, ‘the Free Church in its current form is finished’.

The 2008 General Assembly comments are covered in the July 08 issue of the Monthly Record (p. 27) and were preceded by editorial comments on “Worship Wars” in the May 08 issue (p. 4-5).

The specifics of the current debate I will hold for a while and try to return to them before the Assembly meets in May. The information indicates that the Trustees will be bringing a recommendation to the Assembly concerning the current “Worship Wars.”

But all that is introduction to what really caught my attention in this article. In my contemplation of the complexity of American Presbyterianism I have seen that Scottish Presbyterians are not far behind in their splits and unions. But some of the parallels in dates are intriguing, such as a major Scottish split in 1732 and an American mainline split in 1741. While the Americans reunited shortly after the Scottish branches did not. The big Scottish split was the “Disruption of 1843” which produced the Free Church, while the American mainline suffered its Old School/New School split in 1837. Maybe something related in all of this, maybe not.

Last week I mentioned the 1906 reunion of a majority of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church with the mainline American Presbyterians and how that was immediately preceded by revision of the Westminster Standards and occurred during the Ecumenical Movement of the early 20th Century. Note what the author of the Holdfast piece says about the Free Church in that same time period:

The interesting thing for those who have a knowledge of the history of the Free Church is that the proponents of change are appealing to the historical precedent of the late-victorian Free Church where hymns and organs were permitted in order to make way for union with the United Presbyterian Church. Union with Church of Scotland evangelicals unable to accept psalms without organs is the great rallying cry now behind the movement for change. History is evidently repeating itself, it has to because few are really listening. An astute article looks at the historical arguments used by contemporary proponents of change. It notes that the changes in Victorian times came hand in hand with theological declension. The attempts to form a superchurch in those times culminated in the United Free Church declining further until it merged into the Church of Scotland in 1929. Only a very basic theological standard is going to suit most evangelicals in the Church of Scotland.

To clarify the timing here, in 1900 some from the Free Church joined with the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland to form the United Free Church. Then a majority from that body joined the Church of Scotland in 1929. Like the CPC/mainline American union, this is in the same time period and, as the article states, involves a modernizing/modification/compromise/weakening of standards (depending on your viewpoint) to accommodate the merger between two bodies with a vision of greater ecumenical unity through organic union. Similarly, the United Church of Canada effected its union in exactly the same time period, joining in 1925 after 20 years of discussion. The central argument among the Presbyterians was whether to have organic union to unite three denominational bodies as one, with the necessary compromises in doctrine and polity, or whether to have federation to more closely work together in locations where three separate church bodies were duplicating their efforts but preserving denominational identity. The unionists formed the United Church but the large minority of Presbyterians who opposed union, and mostly supported federation, continued as the Presbyterian Church in Canada. (It is also an interesting parallel that one of the figures in that debate, but on the anti-union side, was the editor of the official Presbyterian publication.)

For me one of the take-aways is that I may not be focusing as much on the ecumenical movement as I should, instead focusing on the fundamentalist/modernist debate that followed, and was probably influenced if not precipitated by the ecumenical movement. And I will have to look more closely at the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand and the merger in 1901 that formed the present denomination. I am curious if any of these dynamics seen elsewhere were a part of that merger.

And we will see how this specific issue develops both before and during the General Assembly of the Free Church which will convene on May 17, if my calendar is correct.

The Bicentennial Of The Cumberland Presbyterian Church, February 4, 2010

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Two hundred years ago today the Rev. Finis Ewing and the Rev. Samuel King met with the Rev. Samuel McAdow at Mr. McAdow’s cabin in Dixon County, Tennessee, and held the first meeting of the Cumberland Presbytery, the predecessor of the Cumberland Synod, the predecessor of the General Assembly of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

(Update: Thanks to Mr. Knight for his comments below and correcting me on my original text of the formation of the presbytery. I stopped reading the history too soon and in a less-complete source. I have rewritten the next paragraph to (hopefully) provide a more accurate account of the formation. I regret the error and gladly accept the correction.)

The Cumberland Presbytery was established by the PCUSA in 1802 along with the Synod of Kentucky but within four years disputes developed over confessional and educational requirements for ordination. The Synod was petitioned to investigate ordination standards in the Cumberland Presbytery with the result that an investigating commission was formed, ministers were summoned to be examined at the next Synod meeting, and when the ministers declined the Kentucky Synod disbanded the presbytery. In 1807 the complaint against the synod for requiring unconstitutional synod examinations and dissolving the presbytery was heard by the General Assembly which ruled that the synod had over-stepped its authority in controlling ordinations clearing the way for the Cumberland Presbytery to be reinstated. However, the Synod did not act to reinstate the presbytery and additional requests to the GA for this remedy were unsuccessful, so these three pastors took the initiative to reestablish it.

While the Old Side/New Side split had been mended administratively in 1758 many of the tensions over education and confessional standards remained in the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. (That would be the PCUSA, not to be confused with the PC(USA) ). At this time the Second Great Awakening was causing tensions on the bonds of the church and not just the Cumberland Presbytery formed but Restoration Movement churches split off including the Cain Ridge/Stone-Campbell groups that included the Springfield Presbytery. While the Cumberland Presbyterians had issues with Calvinism, as you can see in the document below, they were really the one group that remained in the Presbyterian stream, as evidenced by the partial reunion in 1906 and continued close relations with mainline American Presbyterians today.

The partial reunion of 1906 is an interesting study in church history itself because it comes during the “church union” or ecumenical movement of the early 20th century that saw other forms of interdenominational cooperation including the formation of the United Church of Canada from the Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational churches. It also comes at the beginning of the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy of the early 1900’s. One catalyst to the reunion, and a step in the theological controversy that was developing, was the 1903 revision of the Westminster Confession of Faith. As Hart and Muether describe the theological leanings of some in the northern church at that time

[Charles A. ] Briggs was tapping into a growing consensus in the church, which had begun to form no later than the reunion of 1869, that the harder Calvinistic edges of the Confession needed to be softened. In the words of Benjamin J. Lake, “Some of the time-honored rigidity in the Westminster Confession seemed obsolete to many Presbyterians.” Typically, Presbyterian rigidity was spelled p-r-e-d-e-s-t-i-n-a-t-i-o-n.

Asked to be on the committee to make the revision B. B. Warfield declined. Hart and Muether record:

“It is an inexpressible grief,” [Warfield] wrote, to see the church “spending its energies in a vain attempt to lower its testimony to suit the ever changing sentiment of the world around it.” Warfield’s lament would persuade few. In an era when change was a sign of health, his dissent sounded, in the words of an opponent, as a call for the “harmony of standing still.”

In 1903 the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. approved the changes to the Westminster Confession that did indeed soften the edges enough that a majority of the Cumberland churches were comfortable reuniting with the mainstream church.

An interesting piece of information I once heard about the reunion (and I don’t remember the source so this might be urban legend) is that all Cumberland churches had the initials “CPC” on their communion ware. Following joining with the UPCUSA many churches changed their names to Central Presbyterian Church, Christ Presbyterian Church, or another similar name so the “CPC” still applied.

But like the Presbyterians in the formation of the United Church in Canada, there was a sizable minority of those in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church who chose to continue as they were and that is the body that today celebrates its bicentennial. (What is it about these Presbyterians?)

The Cumberland Presbyterian Church will celebrate this coming Sunday on Denomination Day 2010. They have produced a resource to help with worship and their 2010 GA will hold a full-day event at Mr. McAdow’s reconstructed home in Tennessee.

So happy birthday to the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Thanks to their wonderful on-line collection of historical resources, here is the circular letter that started it all:

February 4, 1810[Information Contained in A Circular Letter, no actual minutes recorded]

In Dixon county Tennessee State, at the Rev. Samuel M’adow’s this 4th day of February 1810.

We Samuel M’adow, Finis Ewing, and Samuel King, regularly ordained ministers, in the presbyterian church against whom, no charge, either of imorality, or Heresey has ever been exhibited, before any of the church Judicatures. Having waited in vain more than four years, in the mean time, petitioning the general assembly for a redress of grievances, and a restoration of our violated rights, have, and do hereby agree, and determine, to constitute into a presbytery, known by the name of the Cumberland presbytery. On the following conditions (to wit) all candidates for the ministry, who may hereafter be licensed by this presbytery; and all the licentiates, or probationers who may hereafter be ordained by this presbytery; shall be required before such licensure, and ordination, to receive, and adopt the confession and discipline of the presbyterian church, except the idea of fatality, that seems to be taught under the misterious doctrine of predes
tination. It is to be understood, however, that such as can clearly receive the confession, without an exception,shall not be required to make any. Moreover, all licentiates,before they are set apart to the whole work of the ministry (or ordained) shall be required to undergo an examination, on English Grammer, Geography, Astronomy, natural, & moral philosophy, and church history. The presbytery may also require an examination on all, or any part, of the above branches of literature, before licensure if they deem it expedient.”

New Official Web Site Design And Blog From New Zealand

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If you have not visited the web site of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand recently then you have missed the redesign of their site. It is a sharp design with good use of graphics and easy, logical navigation bars. It is a design that give the page a new look while preserving elements of the “feel” of the old site. A nice transition. And there are nice dynamic elements – check out the “Find something fast” bar at the top. When the Book of Order is at the top of this list you know you will please a GA Junkie. But maybe the best thing about the new site is that there is now a feed for new info posted to the site, a great help for those of us with feed readers. The redesign does unfortunately mean that many links in all my past posts about the PCANZ are now broken.

But for me the real news from New Zealand is that the PCANZ Archives Research Centre has begun its own blog, “Presbyterian Research,” in the same style as the blog from the PCA Historical Center, “The Continuing Story.” Like The Continuing Story, Presbyterian Research highlights the denominational history and ethos with short vignettes and glimpses of items in their collection. Any GA Junkie would appreciate the story about the 1901 General Assembly which got into a debate on the floor of the Assembly over the robes the Moderator was wearing. Another item highlights a recent lecture to the Research Network by the Rev. Dr. Susan Jones. (The print version is available on-line.) The item describes the lecture

…which probed the development of ministerial training in the PCANZ. She not only placed her research in an historical context but she also analysed the nature of the training itself. Her analysis showed that training has been fragmented and that ordinands have often learned academic subjects but they have not been helped to integrate knowledge into their faith.

When the article describes the topic as “continually challenging” that can probably be applied to Presbyterian branches everywhere.

And finally, what geek can not appreciate a blog where the first article is titled “Hello world!” (For the non-geeks, it is now a standing tradition among programmers that your first programming exercise is to write a program that prints out the words “hello world.”)

So far it is interesting reading. I look forward to much more.

Presbyterians Certainly Are A Peculiar People

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After putting my earlier post to bed I continued thinking on the topics I raised in that discussion about Presbyterian reorganization and started to do additional analysis on some of those thoughts. This is a follow-up based on what I have contemplated and researched in the last couple of days.

To remind you of my thoughts from Saturday, in a nutshell I said that in historical Presbyterian divisions I regularly see certain proportions in the divisions. Those are generally about 1:1, 2:1, and 19:1. Put another way, when a division happens it regularly involves either 50%, 33%, or 5% of the Presbyterian branch.

What happened next was that I decided to be a bit ecumenical about this and look at some other Protestant branches:

Observation #1: The split of the Anglican Church of North America from the Episcopal Church is a 5% split. (Actually it is 4.5% if you use the ACNA membership of 100,000 but only 3.1% if you use the 69,000 number that is also floating around. This from a total of 2.2 million for the Episcopal Church.)

Observation #2: As I went looking for historical divisions in other traditions I started looking for the “family tree” type charts for other churches. Short answer, they are few and far between. There are charts for all of Christendom (example 1, example 2 – note the Pentecostals with no connection to the trunk of the church). There are a few that show division or union on a particular branch. But with the exception of a great chart for the United Church of Christ, I could find nothing comparable to the Presbyterian charts. Why?

The answer could be operational – I might not have found the right search terms for the search engines or things like this for other denominations might not be on line.

But I think the answer is also likely denominational. Are Presbyterians peculiar in some way that we need these charts?

One explanation could be retention of our shared tradition: Often, when divisions occur in denominations a new denomination is formed. (And it would therefore leave the chart.) A prime example of this is the creation of the Methodists from the Anglican church. Even within the Presbyterian tradition we have the Disciples of Christ originating from Presbyterianism, but never recorded on our family trees. But for Presbyterians that seems to be the exception rather than the rule and usually when Presbyterians split there is simply another flavor of Presbyterians formed. Our complexities of tradition could be attributed to dividing branches staying “in the neighborhood,” so to speak.

Another possible explanation is that there is something about Presbyterian governments that make our divisions, multiple branches, and reunions more likely than in other forms of church government. (It actually would be an interesting discussion of whether it is the polity itself or if it reflects the type of people who are attracted to that polity.) But given the recognition that, within the bounds of the collective judgment, a governing body can not bind an individual conscience the stage seems set for disagreements leading to a parting of ways. More on that another time.

So are Presbyterians just more inclined to these divisions and mergers that, if we are to keep track of our tradition, give us a need for these complicated charts? And can we take this a step further and ask if because we have these charts and are aware of our heritage of reorganizations, has that lowered our resistance to future divisions?

Put it another way, how much is it a part of, or maybe even inherent in, our system and how much is it because “that’s the way we have always done it?”

The bottom line is that as far as I can find on the web Presbyterians seem to corner the market, or at least dominate it, in diagrams showing our reorganizations over the last five centuries.

This led to the third point for today, (WARNING: this is about to get very geeky) I started thinking about the use of fractal behavior in numerical models of church division and recombination.

The numerical modeling of church division is not new to the last post — As you may have noticed from other posts I have some numerical models of mainline decline which I am working on to make them independent of denomination. One of the features of these models is that the decline of a mainline church is not linear to zero but will reach an equilibrium point. What I have been struggling with is what conditions to place on the calculation of that “plateau.” My recent thoughts on the possible fractal nature of denominational size may help provide those conditions.

It was at this point in my previous post that I made a logical jump that may have left a lot of my readers behind. I began by talking about proportions in church divisions and then turned to seeing if various Presbyterian traditions might be fractal. The thing I should have added there is that if divisions regularly occur with about the same proportions then the various branches that develop will have similar ratios of their sizes. That is to say that two small branches would have the same relative proportions compared to each other as two large branches. This “self-similarity” is what is known in the jargon as “fractal” behavior. A concrete example in a moment.

So what would the development of a fractal church look like?

A quick answer is taking the beginning population (Scottish churches in 1560?) and progressively divide them according to some ratio over a certain number of cycles. If you take five cycles you end up with 32 different churches that each has one of six possible sizes. Using a 70:30 split the continuing “main” church has 17% of the members and the “always minority” church has 0.2% of the population. For a 95-5% split (19:1) the numbers change to 77% “always majority” and an effectively zero “always minority.”

But the interesting thing is that if you compare the largest branch to the second largest branch it will have the same ratio as comparing the second smallest branch to the smallest branch. For the 70:30 split that ratio is 2.33 and for the 19:1 split the ratio is 19. Going back to the previous post I observed that a number around 6.5 was seen as a ratio for American Presbyterianism in several cases and that would result from an 87-13% division.

Two refinements are immediately obvious: 1) Provide for merger of branches based on theology and 2) Provide for merger of branches based on practicality when one or both are too small to survive.

How you introduce mergers will clearly influence the outcome. One simple model is that in each cycle the minority of one branch finds more theological kinship with the majority of the neighboring branch and merges with them. (Think PC(USA) churches moving over to the EPC.) This gives six separate branches after five cycles. The unmerged ends (only splits) have the same proportions mentioned above, but the four middle and successively reorganized branches have varying sizes. For the 70:30 split the largest branches end up being part of the reorganization with one having 36% and ano
ther 30% of the total population. For the 19:1 split no other branch has enough membership to grow to rival the unmerged majority with the second-largest branch having 20% of the population.

But with the mergers the ratio of sizes is now varied but lower than it was in the no-merger case. In the 70:30 split a number around 1.5 is commonly seen and in the 19:1 case there are a few lower numbers (3.8, 9.5, 1.5) but the very smallest branches have very high ratios (such as 473).

From here countless refinements are possible including pruning or merging of branches that fall below a particular threshold of sustainability, the introduction of a virtual coin-toss to decide if two branches would merge and add a component of variability, and some sort of rule or probability that would result in mergers with the edge branches. Maybe over the Thanksgiving holiday I’ll program up a Monte Carlo simulation.

So there are my extended thoughts on all of this. I’ll provide future updates on where my reading or modeling takes me with this.

Patterns Of Proportionality In Presbyterian Partition — Or — Are Fractures Fractal?

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With mild apologies for the alliteration in the title, I wanted to take a look at a couple of patterns I have seen as I looked at Presbyterian history.

One of the concepts that I have been studying is the “reorganization” of denominations. As I have commented before, this is more than just the divisions and schisms that probably first come to mind, but also a couple merger-related reorganizations that formed whole new denominations as well as reorganizations that merged multiple branches together. I find it instructive that the “family trees” for American Presbyterianism and Scottish Presbyterianism are equally convoluted and the Presbyterian branch of the United Church of Canada is almost as full. (And the Canada chart does not even include the continuing Presbyterian Church in Canada.)

But as I have been studying the partitioning a couple of patterns have jumped out at me:

The first are splits that are about two-to-one. There are a few famous ones that are described as 30% or one-third (33%). Maybe the most famous is the Scottish Disruption of 1843 where 450 ministers walked out of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and formed the Free Church of Scotland. As with most of these splits the number in the minority are easy to find, but the number remaining is more difficult. The departing group is widely described as one-third of the ministers, but thanks to Iain Campbell we know that 752 ministers remained, so the departing minority was close to, but slightly more than, one-third at 37.4%.

In that same ball park are the proportion of Presbyterian churches that chose not to join the United Church of Canada or the Uniting Church in Australia. In both cases these are reported as about 30% for Canada and one-third for Australia. (Canada, Australia)

Finally, while this is a single data point for a whole category, and it does represent a fairly unusual occurrence, it did catch my attention that last week’s vote on a pastor in a high-profile call ended up 69%-31%, a repeat of the 2:1 general proportions.

In American Presbyterianism the pattern seems to be either about 1:1 or a very small minority.

The two most famous breaks, the Old Side/New Side and Old School/New School, were closer to even breaks but when you dissect the numbers they are very complicated and some numbers are uncertain. In addition, they were not so much departures as expulsions.

The date for the Old Side/New Side break is set at 1741, although the following year is interesting as well. Charles Hodge gives us a very detailed account of the events leading up to the Synod (first GA was in 1786) and the commotion at the meeting. For 1741 Hodge names the 25 clergy present from five of the six presbyteries (p. 176). Hodge also lists those who met later to reform their excluded presbytery (p. 195) giving the names of the 11 clergy who were at the meeting, of which one was not on the Synod list. If you use the 10-15 split of the Synod it would be a 40% minority or 2:3 split. But the overall situation is more complicated.

One of the interesting aspects of this rupture is the dynamics related to the missing New York ministers. While absent in 1741 they represented seven of the 25 clergy present at the 1742 Synod (28%). Over the next several years, and throughout the 17 years of separation, several of the New York ministers were integral in healing the division. While theologically with the Old Side, they felt that justice was not done to their New Side brethren and so in 1745 they left the Old Side to help form the New Side Synod of New York.

In all, Hodge tells us (p. 253) that there were a total of 40-45 ministers before the schism of which nine (20.0-22.5%) were excluded in 1741 and 11 or 12 more withdrew in 1745 ( about 50% total).

The 18th Century split can be viewed as a 50-50 division looking at the totals, but let me take the analysis a step further. (And this is preliminary, based mainly on Hodge, so a true church historian may have better information.) I find it interesting that at the 1742 Synod the ratio of Old School to moderate (previously absent) New York ministers was not quite, but approached, 2-to-1.

I am not going to do a detailed analysis of the Old School/New School split of 1837 and 1838 at this time except to note a few things: 1) It was an exclusion more than a parting of ways, 2) The NY Times reported that the original expulsion of Western Reserve was by a vote of 138-107 (56.3-43.7%) 3) But in the end the division was close to a 50-50 split based not on the Assembly vote but on the wider church that followed Western Reserve in the division.

The final pattern that I see is the very small minority. I mentioned before the vote for a pastor that was about a 70-30 split. In my experience working with several congregations there are always 1-2% of the members of the congregation that dissent on any vote to call a pastor. Denomination-wide dynamics seem similar. For example:

In 1846 when the Scottish Relief Churches merged with the Seceder Churches 14% did not agree. (This is an exception since it is more than the “small minority.”)

In 1875 when four streams of Canadian Presbyterians merged 21 of 623 ministers (3.3%) did not agree and withdrew from the new denomination.

In 1936 there were 34 ministers out of almost 10,000 that left the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America to form what would become the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

In 1973 260 churches, out of 4230 churches, (6.1%) left the Presbyterian Church in the United States to form the Presbyterian Church in America.

In 1981 67 churches formed the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, out of almost 9000 churches in the United Presbyterian Church.

One thing that happens when many groups split off is that there is a small group that initially forms but others may later join them when they see how things are working out. One example of this is the Seceders in Scotland in 1733. While they began small the Associate Presbyterians grew in number over the next few decades, and suffered their own divisions until by 1820 they had split into four groups giving a total of seven Presbyterian branches in Scotland. By 1875 the membership breakdown in Scotland is recorded as:

Church of Scotland – 460,464
Free Church of Scotland – 256,554
United Presbyterian Church – 187,761

I find it interesting that the ration of the Established Church to the other two major branches is almost 50-50.&nb
sp; I would like to make the case that the membership pattern is fractal at 2:1, but with ratios of 1.79 and 1.37 there is a suggestion of semi-fractal nature in the 1.5 area. (Or maybe I’m just making the data fit my theory.)

For the five branches coming off the mainline of American Presbyterianism in the 20th century the membership and congregation numbers are:

PC(USA) – 2,140,165 in 10751 congregations
PCA – 340,852 in 1693 congregations
EPC – 82,884 in 247 congregations
OPC – 27,990 in 255 congregations
BPC – 3000 est. in <30 congregations

This gives ratios of:

PC(USA)/PCA – 6.28 members, 6.35 churches
PCA/EPC – 4.11 members, 6.85 churches
EPC/OPC – 2.96 members, 0.96 churches
OPC/BPC – 9.33 members, 8.5 churches

Numbers are suggestive but not really close enough to declare it as fractal. (But I am interested by those ratios a bit over 6.) And for a set of Presbyterian churches in major flux at the moment (although looking at history are Presbyterian churches ever not in flux?) ratios are changing so this may not be a good comparison of “stable” population.

So, all this comes with the usual disclaimers: I put this together with a variety of data with varying quality. It is intended to be an overview and summary and present areas for future exploration. This discussion is by no means comprehensive of all the events that could be considered. And finally, there is no statistical control on any of this so I could just be finding patterns in what is actually random numbers, a common human behavior.

None the less, I do wonder if there is something to certain of these patterns. If these numbers are real does it represent something about the Presbyterian system of government? Does it represent something about human nature in general? Does it reflect something about how humans structure or organize themselves?

Questions to ponder.

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