Category Archives: commentary

Whither The PC(USA)? Wither The PC(USA)?

What next? What does this mean?

I suspect that many of you have also been hearing these questions whispered and shouted as Amendment 10-A looks fairly certain to be approved by the presbyteries and replace the “fidelity and chastity” section of the Book of Order. And I suspect that you are also hearing in the discussion of its passage the suggestion that there will be a resulting increase in the already high departure rate from the denomination or the comments that the next major Book of Order section to be changed will be the definition of marriage (W-4.9001) and then an exodus will really begin.

Well, as regular readers are aware, I have a particular interest in the dynamics of the realignments in Presbyterian branches (example 1, example 2, example 3). Needless to say, I have been thinking about some of these questions in the larger context of the history of American Presbyterianism and what the church might look like in the near future. So here is a back of the envelope calculation and a thought experiment related to what is next. Because this discussion is currently gaining momentum in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) I will be focusing on that branch, but I think a lot of this is easily generalized to other branches and denominations.

Experiment 1: Reality Check – The theological controversy is not the only membership decline issue
Frequently in the PC(USA) we hear that the denomination is losing members because of the internal controversies. Well, it is probably a bit more complicated than that.

If we look at the summary of comparative statistics for 2009, the most recent year that is available, we can first make a rough estimate of the replacement capacity of the PC(USA). In 2009 there were 20,501 individuals age 17 and under that joined the church by affirmation of faith. This is effectively the “internal gain,” that is the kids that come through the system from member families. This represents a 1.0% membership gain for 2009. This is offset by those that leave the rolls due to their new membership in the Church Triumphant, that is, those that have died. For 2009 that was 32,827 or a loss of 1.5% of the membership. So the net of -0.5% represents the church’s inability to replace its membership internally.

The other thing is that all of the mainline churches are declining in membership. But within this decline there is a difference in the rates of decline relative to the strength of internal controversy in the churches. For the six traditional “mainline” denominations that make the National Council of Churches 25 largest list, the less contentious United Methodist Church and American Baptist Churches in the USA declined by 1.01% and 1.55% respectively. The three with more heated internal controversy had larger declines: PC(USA) declined 2.61%, the Episcopal Church declined 2.48%, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America declined 1.96%. It would suggest that we could attribute at least 1%, and probably a bit more, of the PC(USA)’s decline to the internal controversy itself. But that is only about half the total decline with the other half broken into about one-third the lack of internal replacement and about two-thirds the general decline in the mainline and the trend towards non-denominationalism.

Now the case can be made that these three factors are nothing more than different facets of the same general problem that the mainline faces — a younger generation shuns the “institutional” nature of the church with its continuing controversies in a hierarchical setting and their departure for the non-denominational or the “nones” raises the median age and decreases the birthrate. However, the apparent correlation of membership declines with internal controversy is striking but not a complete explanation.

Experiment 2: Where could things go from here?
This is a fairly simple thought experiment — Let us begin with the question of the different paths forward and exploring a range of possible outcomes and then reflect briefly on the likelihood of each. I’ll be structuring this a bit like a decision tree so at some point I can revisit it and place probabilities on the various outcomes. Also, I am trying to keep this as a generalization so it is applicable in other instances. And along the way here I have a notation to systematically label the different cases.

The first question is whether the denomination remains as a single body ( A ) or formally divides ( B ).

For branch A, where the denomination remains a single body, we could imagine one outcome where a unifying state is found (A1) and another where the church is internally divided (A2).

I think that taking this one more level is appropriate, and so let me suggest that the unifying state could be either a formal arrangement that resolves the issues and all sides accept as a solution (A1a) and maybe they are even happy with – a “win-win” situation” – or an acceptance to live by the decision of the majority submitting to Presbyterian polity that the church has gone through the discernment process to reach the decision and the church lives with that (A1b).

Now what if there is one body but with internal divisions – there could be either a formal and institutionalized arrangement (A2a) or a de facto division into clearly defined but not formally recognized divisions (A2b).

The other top branch is the formal division of a denomination into two distinct and separate bodies. I must admit a bit more wrestling with this classification scheme and I’m not sure that always carrying it two levels further down works. One form would be a formal division without specific action on the part of either side (B1). (More clarification on this in a moment.) Another option would be division by action of only one side (B2). For this we could consider two cases, one where the action is taken by the majority/dominant/controlling side (B2a) and the other where the action is taken by the minority/dissenting side (B2b). Finally, there would be another case (B3) where the action is taken by mutual agreement of both sides.

Now, some clarifications of this system. First, this is a unary or binary system and only considers what is going on in one body that may be dividing into two bodies. It does not consider a ternary system where some fraction is moved between two bodies. In that case it would be viewed as a division of one and a unification of the second. Second, as this example suggests, this system does not “map” the evolution of a division but only captures a description and classification of it at one point in time — a snapshot at an instant. Third, it simplifies the situation of a whole body down to one category while a more complex description of different conditions at various levels may be better. Finally, I have not yet reflected this classification system onto the reverse case of the merging of bodies.

So a quick check as to whether this scheme makes sense — here are some examples from Presbyterian history.

A1a – I would place the initial response for the Adopting Act of 1729 into this category where a solution was found that, at least temporarily, resolved the polity issue. This was also the hope for the report of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Uni
ty and Purity (PUP Report), although it is not clear that this hope was ever realized.

A1b – The category of living with the present polity even if opposed to it probably describes much of Presbyterian history — to use a liturgical analogy this is the “ordinary time” of our history. This category does not preclude working to change what is disagreed with, but it suggests maintaining the system and the discussion while also maintaining a sense of being the Body of Christ together.

A2a – While the body living with a formal internal division is not at all common, it is not unheard of either. This was part of the solution to reunify the mainline back in 1758 to resolve the Old/New Side split. The existence of the continuing Old Side/New Side presbyteries in the following years is a suggested prototype for some of the flexible presbyteries and New Synod proposals circulating currently.

A2b – The case can be made that this unofficial status of division represents the present state of the PC(USA) with individuals identifying more with the various affinity groups in the church than with the denomination as a whole.

B1 – This is the category that I have the most difficulty defining because I am not sure that it can easily apply to a denomination as a whole, but rather represents a subdivision of the body. However, I was looking for a category to represent the present church-by-church migration away from the PC(USA) through the New Wineskins organization. So here, rather than leaving en masse, maybe the church divides through incremental departures.

B2a – Probably the premier example of the controlling group (and not necessarily the majority) forcing the division is the PCUSA General Assembly of 1837 where the Old School commissioners “locked out” a portion of the New School commissioners and controlled the Assembly. It can be argued that this quickly became category B3 where the two sides basically agreed that they wanted to go it alone without the other.

B2b – This may be the most common category in the formal divisions of branch “B” with the majority group making a decision or disciplining a group or individual and that action precipitates a formal departure by members of the minority. Well known examples of this division include the Disruption of 1843 in Scotland where the Free Church of Scotland formed from the established Church of Scotland and the controversies in the PCUSA in the 1930’s that would lead to a division and formation of a branch that would later become the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

B3 – The best examples I know of in this category are related to Presbyterian reunions where a small group dissents and is permitted to not be part of the merger and usually continue are their own individual branch. This includes the continuing Free Church of Scotland churches that did not join the United Free Church in 1900, the churches from the Cumberland Presbyterian Church that did not join the PCUSA in 1906, the churches in the Presbyterian Church in Canada that did not become part of the United Church in 1925 and the Australian churches that did not join the Uniting Church in 1977 but continued as the Presbyterian Church in Australia. Even more recently, with the reunion that formed the PC(USA) in 1983, there was an opportunity for churches that were part of the Presbyterian Church in the United States to depart after the merger. It may be appropriate to have subcategories B3a for a mutual division that is not merger related and B3b for the case of a merger where a group is allowed to opt out of the union.

So, if you were keeping score at home you can see that the scheme I set up initially is not hypothetical but has examples from throughout Presbyterian history for each of the categories I suggest.

Discussion
So at this point some of you may be wondering whether my two experiments are “apples and oranges.” After all, the first involves changes on the individual level and the second involves categorizing ecclesiastical changes at the highest levels. Let me suggest that they are related…

These two forces are the tension the PC(USA), and other mainline churches, struggle with today. Those who still honor or understand denominational identity are looking at how that identity can be perpetuated and the modern ethos asks what the need for denominations is in the first place. Maybe the question to ask at this point is whether some of these categories of divisions could even happen today? To put it another way – As Western religious culture has transformed to a non-denominational model would we see a denomination divide in the same ways that it has in the past? Would we see a denomination truly divide at all or would it just dissipate?

Many of the great reorganizations and realignments in the Presbyterian church were based on the conviction of those involved that they were Presbyterian, but in good conscience could not accept some particular doctrinal or polity issue and so they removed themselves to be the variety of Presbyterians they thought God was calling them to be.

In the discussion above about membership loss the point is that some of the loss is not related to what it means to be Presbyterian, it is about finding a church that fits my tastes or has a style I can relate to. If we are now in a non-denominational age then being a Presbyterian means a whole lot less than it did even 40 years ago.

Related to divisions in the church, this raises the question of whether a dissenting group could get enough critical mass to form a new Presbyterian branch. That is why I was so determined to find some description for B1, the incremental informal departure.

So based on the present conditions which of these categories are likely outcomes and which are not? Group A1 is probably not likely since the PUP Report was apparently not accepted as a unifying solution and the ongoing discussion over ordination standards and the questions about the future if 10-A passes seem to imply that there are concerns in some quarters of the current or future polity. If we are looking for a unifying solution is must transcend the polity debates. So, unless a unifying solution can be found, if we want to keep the PC(USA) together we are considering branch A2 – somehow living with or working out an internal division. So far the General Assembly has been reluctant to approve flexible presbyteries or a parallel synod. Whether you want to identify our current state as A1b or A2b the bottom line is that the membership decline will most likely continue as long as the current state continues — I would suggest considering alternatives.

Following the other path, there is discussion of a division in the church if 10-A passes. I’m not sure I want to place exact odds on explicit division, or any particular form of formal division. But as I mentioned above, the B1 division continues with departures of individual congregations (another one last week) and so like status quo on branch A, there is no reason to expect this not to continue. The problem with branch B of course is that any alternative means two smaller denominations. The alternatives, after doing nothing, are 1) keep working to find a unifying solution, 2) create internal parallel structures, 3) by one method or another create two smaller denominations and see if that configuration is stable for both of them.

Now, as you can see from my list above you can’t use the seven last words of the church here: “We’ve never done it that way before.” You could argue that its not the way its supposed to be done. I can relate to that — remember I have a good friend who pretty accurately describes me as a “polity fundamentalist.” I don’t like the notion of a flexible ecclesialogy at all. Its just not… well, ITS NOT PRESBYTERIAN!

Please don’t think that I am abandoning Presbyterian polity for the purely pragmatic p
urpose of reversing membership decline. But, for those of us who value Presbyterian polity it appears that we have two choices – 1) Maintain the status quo and live with 50,000 member/year losses or 2) Consider what it really means to be Presbyterian (sovereignty of God, connectionalism, ~~meetings~~, discerning the will of God together, etc.) and find creative ways to be the Church in modern society while holding on to our core beliefs and (I think this is important) letting people know why we value the essentials of our polity. If being Presbyterian means something to us let people know why!

I pray daily for the Middle Governing Bodies Commission. I am encouraged by Tod Bolsinger’s comments at our Synod Assembly that the Commission will be looking for ideas to try on a demonstration basis. I hope that we all have the courage to try some creative ideas that may or may not work, but show that we can still be Presbyterian and do things in a new way. Maybe they would be along the lines of unifying ideas or maybe trying to live under the same tent with polity that differs a bit. I don’t know but I look forward to the suggestions.

So where is the denomination headed? Whither the PC(USA)? I don’t know. But I do know that if we keep doing what we are doing the PC(USA) will continue to wither.

Postscript: After posting and reflecting on this piece I realized that a part in my original outline that hit the cutting room floor provided a certain balance to the tension I develop. Rather than go back and add it to the original (there was a reason it got pulled) let me add three sentences here: What I don’t develop, but have mentioned elsewhere, is the non-organizational aspect of the membership decline. What studies are finding (Almost Christian, Vanishing Boundaries) is the need for mainliners to develop their spiritual focus, depth and expectations. If we subscribe to that remedy than we need to take Deep and Wide, or similar initiatives, seriously.

My Thoughts On The New Movements In The PC(USA)

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I had to laugh yesterday morning when I opened up Twitter because my friend Robert Austell (@gspcrobert ) had asked the question I had been pondering myself the last few days.

So what’s the difference (other than theological perspective) between #nextchurchindy and the fellowship/whitepaper? any takers? #pcusa

I’ll tell you my answer at the end, but let me first rewind to what got me into this line of thought in the first place…

In retrospect I realize that I was all over the Fellowship PC(USA) announcement because it fell in my lap. I got the original e-mail, it pushed one of my hot buttons, and I was off to the races. In contrast, the NEXT Church event earlier this week was something I had seen mentioned but had not really kept track of. It looked like just another conference like Big Tent (pick one ), Wee Kirk, or the College Conference. But when I started reading the tweets, and then watching the live streaming it seemed that this was a bit more high-profile than I had realized.

Well, the next stop was the web site to see what it said. On the conference web page I read this:

For some months a group of friends and colleagues across the church have been in conversation about the “next” Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). We have focused less on denominational controversies and other matters and more on vital, faithful and connectional congregational ministry.

Déjà vu all over again. Sound familiar?

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… Our purpose is to LIVE INTO new patterns as they are created, modeling a way of faith: the worship, supportive fellowship, sharing of best practices, and accessible theology that brings unity and the Spirit’s vitality.

Yes, those are lines from the original Fellowship PC(USA) letter. And yes, on balance the rest of the letters are a bit different in tone and viewpoint, I will grant you that. But both originated out of these small groups, mostly pastors it seems, that wanted to do something new to promote unity and connectionalism in the PC(USA).

Now, to be fair, almost any change, or movement (if that’s what these are), comes out of a small group and grows. After all, Jesus started with a core of 12 and grew the movement from there. And changes in the Presbyterian system begin with overtures from presbyteries to be debated by the General Assembly moving upward from local governing bodies to the national level. But in this case, it looks like both of these movements have grown out of groups of “tall-steeple” pastors who wanted to do something different. For more on the development of the NEXT group have a look at the post by YoRocko!, who happens to be addressing this exact same question.

At the moment, there is something that is different about these groups, aside from the theological perspective, and that is the fact that the NEXT group has had its first big conference. What that conference demonstrated, and which was pointed out by the attendees during the feedback session, is that those present were mostly white and middle class, with the most diversity being provided by the seminary students. It was also pointed out that the attendees included only a small number of ruling elders and most of those were from the local area. These were initial criticisms of the Fellowship group. The NEXT group made a commitment to diversity, much as the Fellowship group has. The point here is that both these groups reflect the reality of what the PC(USA) looks like now.

Another similarity between the groups is that they both advocate that something needs to change in the PC(USA). The NEXT web site says about the conference “Together, we will seek God’s guidance in discerning how to move forward in a rapidly evolving church and culture.” The Fellowship letter says of their conference “Our purpose is to LIVE INTO new patterns as they are created, modeling a way of faith: the worship, supportive fellowship, sharing of best practices, and accessible theology that brings unity and the Spirit’s vitality.” Both groups seek ways to discern and discuss what is the future of American Mainline Presbyterianism in a changing world.

I found one more interesting, and possibly telling, similarity between the two groups — both of their initial web sites are hosted as part of the church web sites at tall-steeple churches. The Fellowship PC(USA) web site is hosted by Christ Presbyterian Church of Edina, Minnesota. The NEXT web site is hosted by Second Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis, Indiana. Checking the Top 15 list of PC(USA) churches we find that these churches are number three and number thirteen respectively on the list. If your first reaction is “so what?”, you might be correct. Big churches have the resources to share with developing groups like these and both groups have announced that they will be migrating to their own web presence with unique URL’s. But look again, because I think there is a subliminal message which may not be intended but might be conveyed. In each case, at my screen resolution, the church’s banner takes up 1/3 to 1/2 of the visible page. In both cases the church was careful (as far as I can tell in the very dynamic world of web pages) not to put the conferences on their front page, sending no message that it is a ministry of the church. But each group’s individual page is still done in the church’s template implying an association with that body. When I place them side-by-side, and maybe it is only me and I am over-interpreting here, the message that I see is one of “battle of the tall-steeple churches.” The movements both give the impression of being driven by large churches contending for control of the PC(USA).

As I said, I might be getting this wrong. But try to think about it as if you are not an insider to the PC(USA) world — if you look at these two pages with the eyes of an outsider what message does the totality of the page send? OK, maybe I’m the only one getting this impression.

Turning to what is different, the first thing that strikes me is the tone of the two groups and their outlook. There is a lot more printed verbiage from the Fellowship group so their perspective is easier to see. To be specific, the Letter and the White Paper are very negative about the future of the PC(USA) but do strike a hopeful tone about the possibility of reform when they say “We hope to discover and model what a new “Reformed body” looks like in the coming years, and we invite you to join us, stepping faithfully, boldly, and joyfully into the work for which God has called us.” Interestingly, in the white paper the similar line is followed by “We propose this change with regret, despising division and all it entails in witness to the world, but with excitement at what may emerge.” The mix of negative and positive.

The NEXT group says less on their web page, but do begin by quoting the prophet Isaiah (43:19) “Behold, I am doing a new thing. Do you not perceive it?” They make passing reference to the current situation in the PC(USA) and give the invitation in a positive phrasing:

We will join with friends and colleagues, old and new, who care about
the future of Presbyterian witness. Together, we will seek God’s
guidance in discerning how to move forward in a rapidly evolving church
and culture.

The NEXT Conference plenary sessions are available online so you can hear what was actually said. I have listened to some, but not all, and again find the tone mostly positive. But let’s turn to someone who was there, Carmen Fowler, and what she had to say in an article for the Layman. While Ms. Fowler could probably at a minimum be described as a “skeptical observer” and she had plenty to critique about the NEXT Conference, she also had mostly positive comments about the spirit of the conference. This includes:

The
spirit of the event was positive, framed by beautiful Reformed,
Word-centered worship and designed to promote genuine fellowship.
…
There
were no exhibits, no stoles, no banners, no buttons and no animosity
from the leadership toward the few folks in attendance who could be
identified as “right” of center.
…
There is hope among Next organizers that when Next meets again, a broader spectrum of voices will participate.

Again, when the Fellowship group meets it will be interesting to see if their tone is reviewed as positively by a neutral or skeptical observer.

Maybe the biggest difference between the two movements is that the Fellowship documents lay out as their agenda specific points and actions they want their group, and by extension the denomination to take. The NEXT group outlines their conference description as “We will engage in worship, hear presentations and participate in small
groups. More than that, we will build relationships, connect with others
in shared ministry and learn from one another.” In this case, the discussion and relationship are the agenda.

Finally, there is the “theological perspective” of each group. It seems that this has been set up as a Conservative (Fellowship) versus Liberal (NEXT) polarity. The Fellowship group is pretty clear with the stance when they list one of their characteristics as seeking “A clear, concise theological core to which we subscribe, within classic biblical, Reformed/Evangelical traditions, and a pledge to live according to those beliefs, regardless of cultural pressures to conform.”

The lack of verbiage on the NEXT web site makes it more difficult to clearly claim a theological perspective from that source, but if nothing else the comments during the meeting that held up NEXT as an alternative to the Fellowship seem to also declare an alternate theological perspective. Ms. Fowler suggests this as well, telling us “Unfortunately,
the conversation was had largely in isolation among Presbyterians who
share a progressive theology. Conservative Presbyterians did not show
up.”

Finally, let me mention one more factor what we will have to wait and see if it is a difference or a similarity. One thing that really struck me about the NEXT Conference was the number of members of the PC(USA) national leadership that showed up for it. This included the Moderator and Vice-moderator of the General Assembly, the Stated Clerk of the General Assembly, and the Chair and Executive Director of the General Assembly Mission Council. The list goes on, making you wonder who was left in Louisville. When the Fellowship consultation rolls around we will have to see if the showing is as good.

Now I have listed most of the similarities and differences I have seen and the question Robert asked excluded the theological perspective. When I first considered his question I looked at the theological perspective in a very broad sense that attributed all the differences to the differences in theological perspective. In other words, how much does the theological perspective influence the tone and their view of the PC(USA). How much does the theological perspective influence how the agenda is shaped and how specific it is or is not. In a broad sense I thought that it did and my answer to Robert was “not much it seems.” (If you think this is too terse or superficial remember that the medium was Twitter.)

If theological perspective is more narrowly viewed as just the stance each group takes, then there are some areas in which the two movements diverge. But on balance, I would argue that these groups presently have more similarities than differences. Breaking it down, in origin and structure the two groups appear very similar. In theological perspective and agenda the groups are pretty different.

OK, if you want to make up your own minds, there is plenty of reading out there about the NEXT Conference and I suspect more will emerge. I’ve already mentioned YoRocko! and the Layman article. There are also discussions from McCormick Theological Seminary, MGB Commission and MGB Commission member John Vest, Landon Whitsitt’s riffing on John’s piece , and Bruce Reyes-Chow’s comments . And that is just a start.

As I said, at this point we are at a disadvantage in the comparison since one group has a lot of written material but the first conference has not yet been held, and the other has had their conference but has not provided a lot of written background, at least in the public domain. So we will see how all this develops and maybe we’ll be in a better position to compare the different approaches in August after both have met. May I suggest they also live stream their event for those of us who can’t get free to attend in person.

Stay tuned…

PC(USA) Amendment 10-A Voting About To Reach Half-Way Point

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There has been a flurry of presbytery voting this past week with some interesting developments. Here is a quick summary and some observations.

Following presbytery meetings last Saturday it appears from the reports that 81 out of the 173 presbyteries have voted on Amendment 10-A, quickly approaching the half-way mark of 87 presbyteries. A potentially bigger development is the flurry of presbyteries that have voted “yes” on 10-A after voting “no” on 08-B in the last round. The number of presbyteries switching now stands at a net change of eight towards “yes,” with nine total switching to “yes” and one switching to “no.” Since a net change of nine is necessary for the passage of 10-A (it was 78 “yes” and 95 “no” last time) if the current trend continues it is reasonable to expect that 10-A will be approved. However, don’t take that as a done deal because 1) part of being Presbyterian is the process and 2) just as there was a flurry of “yes” changes this weekend there could as easily be a momentum shift with a number of “no” switches in the future. Oh, and if you are keeping count I think the vote is 46 “yes” and 35 “no.”

One of the interesting things in the past few weeks was how the three votes were tracking together — That has changed somewhat. The first observation is that while there was a burst of voting on 10-A, there was not a corresponding burst on Belhar or nFOG. At the present time 51 presbyteries have voted on Belhar and 47 have voted on nFOG. Breaking it down, I have 12 presbyteries that have voted on all three amendments, 14 that have voted on Belhar and nFOG but not 10-A, 15 that have voted only on nFOG and 10-A, and 13 that have voted on 10-A and Belhar only. That gives a total of 61 presbyteries (including my own) who have not voted on any of the amendments yet.

The second thing that struck me was a bit of a weakening of the cross-issue correlation I commented on a little while ago. While I have not done a full recalculation of my chart to include Saturday’s voting, looking at the numbers it seems there have been a few presbyteries who have voted “yes” on 10-A and “no” on nFOG, to the point that while 10-A is currently passing nFOG is trailing 21-26. I don’t know if it is this trend, or just a coincidence, that a few days ago GA Moderator Cynthia Bolbach in her monthly column encouraged passage of the new Form of Government and pointed readers to the nFOG blog. ( And yes, Ms. Bolbach’s statement to avoid nFOG advocacy applied only to the sessions of the General Assembly and not the voting period.) And if you are keeping score at home, both Belhar (needs 2/3 to pass) and nFOG are currently trailing, the former 28 to 23 and the latter 21 to 26.

I will leave further analysis of Belhar and nFOG for another time as well as the cross-issue trends. But taking a more detailed look at 10-A voting we have 73 presbyteries with reported numbers for their votes on both 08-B and 10-A. I have aggregated these 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.

At the present time the total reported number of voting commissioners is 8635, down 8% from the corresponding 08-B total of 9337. Votes for 10-A have increased slightly from last time, 4602 to 4726, a 3% increase. Votes against have dropped 17% from 4735 to 3909.

In the chart below I try to graphically show the different results from the presbyteries. I use my usual margin of a 4% change (or 4 votes for small numbers) being random variation, and so the numbers in that range are considered equivalent for this analysis. And for the chart below, the comparisons mentioned (Y>N, Y<N, Y=N) are the magnitude or the absolute value of the change in Yes and No votes. For example, if Yes votes decreased by 15 votes and No votes increased by 6 votes, that would be counted under the “Y decrease, N increase, Y>N” box. I hope that makes sense.

Y increase
N decrease
Y > N

n=8
11%

Y increase
N decrease
Y < N

n=13
18%

Y increase
N decrease
Y = N

n=4
5%

N no change
Y increase

n=7
10%

Y increase
N increase
Y > N

n=1
1%

Y increase
N increase
Y = N

n=0
0%

Y increase
N increase
Y < N

n=0
0%

Y no change
N decrease

n=13
18%

Y and N
no change

n=4
5%

Y no change
N increase

n=3
4%

Y decrease
N decrease
Y < N

n=4
5%

Y decrease
N decrease
Y = N

n=6
8%

Y decrease
N decrease
Y > N

n=4
5%

N no change
Y decrease

n=3
4%

Y decrease
N increase
Y = N

n=2
3%

Y decrease
N increase
Y < N

n=0
0%

Y decrease
N increase
Y > N

n=1
1%

See any patterns? There is a tendency for “no” votes to decrease — in 10% of the presbyteries they increase, in 19% the no votes are constant, and 71% of the time they decrease. And there is a weaker tendency for yes votes to increase — in 45% of the presbyteries it increases, in 27.5% they remain the same, and in 27.5% they decrease. But if you are looking for patterns of no decreases or yes increases it is tough to make a strong argument for a consistent behavior across all the presbyteries. The best we can say is that the two cases of decreases in “no” with stable “yes” and decreases in “no” with smaller increases in “yes” comprise about 1/3 of the presbytery vote changes. The other 2/3 are more evenly distributed across a greater variety of cases.

OK, eyes glazed over? The object of this extensive enumeration is to make the point that there is little in the way of strong trends that one can point at. Is the trend for shifting from “no” votes to “yes” votes? Yes, in several presbyteries like Central Florida where the total number was stable (a 3 vote/1% drop) but there were 17 more “yes” votes and 20 fewer “no” votes. And then there is Stockton where there were 50 votes each time but five votes shifted from “yes” to “no.” Yes, we can say that there are fewer “no” votes overall, but sometimes that comes at no increase in “yes” votes, as in the case of Cimarron, and sometimes with a substantial decrease in “yes” votes as well, such as happened in Heartland.

Bottom line – there are a few trends but if you are looking for easy explanations (like “the conservatives are leaving” or there is a “shift to equality” ) it is hard to tease that out as a simple rule when you look on a case-by-case basis at presbytery voting. Presbyteries are amazingly unique entities — that is what I have found in my years of tracking this stuff. (And that does not even include consideration of weather conditions, wind direction, what show in on in prime time that evening, or who is having a conference in Phoenix.) Believe me, I would love easy answers. But I have lost count of the number of numerical models I have made that are either solvable but too simplistic or complex but underdetermined.

So we will see how the voting goes in the next few weeks. We are getting enough data that I can start calculating robust statistics and frequency distributions like I have in the past. And I will try to keep the cross-tabulation above updated as well as the cross-issue correlation chart. So stay tuned…

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.

One Heart Bowl — Another Game Altogether

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Well, this is the eve of the greatest secular high-holy day in American culture. Tomorrow there is a lot of spectacle and celebration around a game of American football played by one team named for a meat packing plant and another named for an industrial economy that has been gone for decades. If you want to play the religious geography, you can think of it as the game between the team from the Presbyterian hills of western Pennsylvania versus the one from the Lutheran coast of Wisconsin. I am nominally pulling for the black and gold, not because of Presbyterian connections but because I have a few ties to that part of the world.

(And in another development my pastor is starting a new sermon series tomorrow on… wait for it… the Sabbath. When I asked him later about the coincident timing he was surprised and admitted that he had not paid attention to the calendar and did not realize what else was that day. This is going to be interesting.)

But I’m not here today to talk about the fight for global supremacy. I’m here to revisit a story about “the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.” I’m here to talk about the

One Heart Bowl

Two years ago, in this very spot and on this same occasion, I shared a series of vignettes from football that were positive, inspiring, inspirational, instructive and even religiously significant.

One of those was about the high school football game that past fall between the Grapevine Faith Lions and the Gainesville State School Tornadoes. You probably remember hearing about the game. This was the one where the Grapevine Faith coach encouraged his parents, students, fans, and everyone else, to become a “home team” for the kids from the state correctional facility. Half the fans sat on the Tornadoes’ side and cheered for them by name. It was a demonstration of respect and affirmation that most of the visiting players had never experience before.

The story was broken by Rick Reilly of ESPN and was picked up widely across the media. The Grapevine coach became a minor short-term celebrity, even being invited to the Superbowl that year. And it is still being used as a sermon illustration — I know I heard it used very recently.

But what happens when the lights go out and everyone goes home. In the case of Grapevine Faith they went back and did it again the next year and again the next. Welcome to the One Heart Bowl. Even though the schools are no longer in the same conference Grapevine Faith has made sure the tradition continues. As the web site describes it:

One Heart Bowl™ is an annual football game between Grapevine Faith
Christian School and Gainesville State School, a maximum-security
facility of the Texas Youth Commission for juveniles. Coach Kris Hogan
committed to this game in 2008, and with it, taught his players about
the consequences of bad decisions while showing the players at Gainesville State that they were “just as valuable as anyone else on
planet Earth.” Students, family and faculty all attended the football
game and cheered on the Gainesville Tornadoes. Because the game was such
a positive success for the Gainesville youth and Grapevine Faith
Christian’s students, it is now a permanent game held annually.

This is your opportunity to be a part of this life altering event.

And when they say it is “life altering,” they mean for both the Grapevine and Gainesville sides. As a 2009 article from Pegasus News says:

Several sports teams from around the nation have followed Grapevine
Faith’s example and conducted similar outreaches to opposing teams
comprised of incarcerated, at-risk, underserved, or disabled youth.

Members of the Grapevine Faith community continued to reach out to
the inmates at Gainesville. Several of them serve as mentors to boys at
Gainesville, visiting them on a regular basis.

So the story continues. This was not a one-time event but the start of an ongoing ministry. So mark your calendars for the next One Heart Bowl on Friday September 9, 2011. For those who heard about it the first time but then lost track of it, please know that the exhibition of the Kingdom continues.

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…

Web 2.0 And The Internet Are Changing The World — Follow-up

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Last week the journal Nature published a news piece, Peer Review: Trial by Twitter , about the changes that social media, blogs and instant communication are having on how science is done, or more specifically, how science is reviewed. For those thinking about this sort of thing in any realm I would suggest you have a look.

I won’t rehash the history of this, you can check out my earlier post, but here are a couple of the good lines in the new article about how things have changed:

Papers are increasingly being taken apart in blogs, on Twitter and on
other social media within hours rather than years, and in public, rather
than at small conferences or in private conversation.

…

To many researchers, such rapid response is all to the good, because it
weeds out sloppy work faster. “When some of these things sit around in
the scientific literature for a long time, they can do damage: they can
influence what people work on, they can influence whole fields,” says
[David] Goldstein [director of Duke University’s Center for Human Genome
Variation].

…

For many researchers, the pace and tone of this online review can be
intimidating — and can sometimes feel like an attack. How are authors
supposed to respond to critiques coming from all directions? Should they
even respond at all? Or should they confine their replies to the
conventional, more deliberative realm of conferences and journals? “The
speed of communication is ahead of the sheer time needed to think and
get in the lab and work,” said Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a postdoctoral fellow
at the NASA Astrobiology Institute in Mountain View, California, and
the lead author on the arsenic paper. Aptly enough, she circulated that
comment as a tweet on Twitter, which is used by many scientists to call
attention to longer articles and blog posts.

and finally

To bring some order to this chaos, it looks as though a new set of
cultural norms will be needed, along with an online infrastructure to
support them.

The article then has a good discussion of where fast, open reviews have been tried as well has whether or not they worked. It also outlines some interesting ways that social media and Web 2.0 are being integrated into the traditional infrastructure. I’ll leave it for those interested in this sort of thing to have a closer look.

The GA Junkie

The Politics of Presbyterianism

Category Archives: commentary

Whither The PC(USA)? Wither The PC(USA)?

My Thoughts On The New Movements In The PC(USA)

PC(USA) Amendment 10-A Voting About To Reach Half-Way Point

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

National Council Of Churches Membership Data — We Can Correlate That

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

One Heart Bowl — Another Game Altogether

An Interesting Invitation And Some Of My Preliminary Reactions