This can’t be happening.  What happened to “decently and in order?”  Where is all that Presbyterian formality?  Hold on to your hat everyone because the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand has gone “user friendly.”

Well, I may be exaggerating a little bit, but for the GA set to begin on October 2 at St. Patrick’s College, Silverstream, in Wellington, some traditional language has been replaced and high-profile reports and proposals have less formal names.  But first things first.

The Rev. Dr. Graham Redding has been selected as the Moderator for the Assembly.  He recently became the director of one of the denomination’s training centers, the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership in Dunedin.  Previous to that he was a parish minister for 15 years.  He has served the church in a number of capacities and has written a book titled Prayer and the Priesthood of Christ in the Reformed Tradition.  He is married with three teenage children.  He has chosen “Reformed and Reforming” as the Assembly theme.

In reading through the Assembly business one of the major items will be the “Press Go” proposal.  This is an initiative to solicit and fund projects related to church growth.  Recognizing that the PCANZ attendance over the last 40-ish years has dropped from the 90,000 range to the 30,000 range, this project is looking for innovative ways to grow the church and for the money to fund it.  And the associated report comes with the rather informal and un-Presbyterian sounding title “The Great Big Growth Plan.”

This plan is based upon five assertions:

1. Decline is not inevitable.

2. The Church’s money is not ours. The resources we share, the money in the offering plate, our congregation’s bank balance and buildings are not ours. Those present and past have entrusted us with the resources we have for the purposes of glorifying God and fulfilling God’s mission for and in the world.

3. The Presbyterian Church is ruled by Elders. Every Elder makes a commitment to fulfil leadership responsibilities for the whole Church. No Elder can fulfil their role by basing their decisions on the singular interest of any particular congregation or group. When Elders do this they undermine what it means to be part of the Presbyterian Church. An Elder’s primary commitment is to God’s mission and their decisions need to reflect an earnest commitment to seek God’s wisdom and the leading of the Holy Spirit.

4. Growth is possible. It is happening. Experience tells us about the best ways to organise ourselves to support growth.

5. The changes advocated here are radical and costly and can only happen through a broad consensus and willingness by Church leaders. The changes are not for someone else to make- they require an ownership by each one of us.

So based on these assertions where does the report go?

The solutions offered here are on one hand very simple and on the other very complex. The simple idea is the release of church assets to fund growth. This is an idea which receives broad theoretical support. The complexity is that we are very very attached to these assets. They represent a place, a history and a security for us. It may be just too hard a decision to make.

(PC(USA) folk — Sound familiar? G-3.0400 – The Church is called to undertake this mission even at the risk of losing its life, trusting in God alone as the author and giver of life, sharing the gospel, and doing those deeds in the world that point beyond themselves to the new reality in Christ.)

The project requires money for leadership salaries and property acquisition.  The report also asks for money for a staff position to coordinate all this.  The report calls for the church to provide 10% of the return on their assets (property and investments) for this program as gifts of 2.5% per year for four years.  There are specific suggestions discussed in the report for different asset types, but for declining congregations with uncertain futures this could mean closing the church and selling the property.

So what will this be used for?  The report identifies five characteristics of growing and vital churches:

• A strong pervasive commitment to focus resources on outreach based on Gospel imperatives. “We are not here first for ourselves but for others.”
• An administrative structure which supports gifted and skilled Christian leaders to do the things that they are good at doing.
• A readiness to support and fund innovation and to try new ideas.
• Worship that reflects the culture and communication medium relevant to the congregation.
• A resource base which allows for generosity, good hospitality, food and warmth in surroundings that are appropriate for the size and culture of the group.

With this in mind, the report advocates several steps.  For small churches a need to assess viability and appropriately support those that are in settings, particularly rural, where growth potential is minimal, but the ministry is vital.  There is a need to support new church plants in promising areas, particularly those the report considers “emerging” which it defines in a way many emerging church people might not agree with.  For medium sized congregations there is a need to evaluate solo pastorates and decide if a multi-leader team would help grow the church.  But the report really seems to rely on large churches, both for overall numbers growth as well as a resource to support the leadership of smaller churches in the area.  One model that I don’t explicitly see in the report, but derives from this large church idea, that the media has picked up, is a mega-church (my term, not theirs) auditorium style with small chapels associated with it that may accommodate the “traditional” existing congregations.

The report is 14 pages long and an interesting and easy read.  It is thought provoking and other church growth types might want to have a look at it.  It has been boiled down to a tri-fold brochure if you want an executive summary.  This proposal will be presented by the Press Go subgroup of the Council of Assembly.  In this final report there are a couple of changes, most notably the funding formula appears to have changed to having a $2 million contribution from the sale of a national property, a 1% contribution from churches’ investment return (as opposed to the 2.5% in the growth report), and additional fund raising.

Another item of business I would expect to be a major topic is a proposal to replace the Westminster Standards with a n
ew Statement of Faith and the associated commentary as the Subordinate Standards of the PCANZ.  The Westminster documents would join the Scots, Heidelberg, Second Helvetic, Apostles and Nicene documents in a “library of confessional documents which are central to the Church’s heritage.”  This recommendation comes from a body with the interesting name of the “Focal Identity Statement Task Group.”  This business is a follow up from the 2004 General Assembly where the Task Group report noted that the new confession had not been widely distributed in advance of the Assembly and that while the statement was originally included in the proposed new Book of Order, the commentary was not and should have been.  It is also possible that this report has been/will be withdrawn since the report from the July Council Meeting indicates there will only be a progress report.  If the report is presented and passed, it is my reading of the PCANZ Book of Order that this section is subject to the “Special Legislative Procedure” that requires the approval of the presbyteries.  I’ll keep researching this one.

It is probably worth noting at this point that this new Book of Order was approved by the previous GA in 2006 and then was approved by “the vast majority” of the presbyteries.  In the new Book the “Barrier Act” has been replaced by the similar “Special Legislative Procedure.”

This post is getting long so the one other major item I will put off until a follow-up post:  There is also a task group reporting on reforming presbyteries.  Briefly, the recommendations are 1) To restructure presbyteries to make them larger (they cite the PC(USA) as a model here) 2) separate the resourcing and governance functions and 3) separate the governance into core and discretionary.  It also wants to see what functions can be shifted to the central office.

In other business before the Assembly there are three presbytery “proposals.”  This is the first year with this new terminology and format and this is what most of the rest of the Presbyterian world would call an “overture.”  The first is a “clean-up” proposal designed to adjust the brand new Book of Order so that ministers in other validated ministries, not just in parish ministry, would be properly represented as GA commissioners.  The second proposal also addresses the new Book of Order, but asks for dispute resolution for certain lesser problems to be available quickly at a lower level as opposed to the new, central procedure.  The third proposal asks that the legislation of General Assembly be communicated not just to the presbyteries but to the parish councils/sessions directly as well so that the church is better informed.  Regarding this last one, I don’t read this as a request that sessions as well as presbyteries need to approve any legislation that GA has to send down to the church as “special legislation.”  It is also an interesting request in light of the new commissioner structure where each parish is supposed to have a commissioner, elder or pastor, to GA.

In reading through the rest of the business most is fairly routine that you would expect at most Assemblies.  The Council of Assembly has some business related to capital funds that appears to be coordinated with the funding models of Press Go.

So, with two weeks to go it will be interesting what lead-up there is to the Assembly and what coverage and commentary is like during the meeting.  And I’ll keep poking around and see what is actually supposed to happen with presbytery reform and the Focal Identity Statement.