Category Archives: PC(USA)

Brief Update on PC(USA) Amendment 08-B Voting — A Tale Of Two Weekends

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One was the best of weekends, the other the worst of weekends — And which was which depended on which side of the Amendment 08-B debate you are on…

Well, bad literary parody aside (although I considered continuing like this and letting you count the clichés) I would not have had another update this soon, except that the voting patterns this weekend were so strikingly different from last weekend.

Last weekend many of us were marveling at the number of presbyteries that switched their votes – nine out of the sixteen presbyteries that had previously voted no.  This strong trend in switched votes led the Presbyterian Outlook and The Layman to seriously consider the passage of 08-B. 

Now the voting ending this weekend:  With results in from the last few days of voting there were two yes votes and 12 no votes, and neither of the yes votes were switches.  In fact a couple of presbyteries that were believed to be prime targets to switch votes went back to a stronger “no” vote.  For example, Indian Nations was tied at 52 last time and voted 38-43 this time.  (That could just be about the same vote ratio within the statistical variation.)

(And on another note, I was intrigued by the difference between there being some significant mainstream media coverage of the voting the last couple of weekends and none this week that I could find.)

With the drought in presbytery swings this week, the proportions in the current voting trend would mean another 11 presbyteries switch for a final vote of 72 to 101.  At the moment, the amendment is sitting at 36-57.  For Amendment 08-B to pass would require 51 more votes.  There are still 25 presbyteries left to vote that voted yes the last time on 01-A.  If they all vote yes again that means that 26 of the remaining 55 presbyteries that voted no last time would have to switch votes.  That is by no means out of the question, but it means that all the remaining voting needs to have presbyteries switch at the same rate we saw in the week ending February 21 and not like this week.

I’m not sure I, or anyone else, is ready to announce the defeat of Amendment 08-B yet.  But with these two weeks showing that the switching of votes was not necessarily a trend I do consider passage of 08-B fairly unlikely at this point.  Its supporters have a major up-hill climb ahead of them.  But we are only a bit more than half-way through and who knows how the Holy Spirit will move through the presbyteries as they discern the will of God.  After all, it ain’t over ’till it’s over and that’s why we play the game.  My prayers that God will help the remaining presbyteries discern His will.

Update:  Responding to the discernment process in Newton Presbytery, Viola Larson wrote about “Spiritual Manipulation When Voting On 08-b.”  After this weekend’s voting Bruce Hahne has a post on “Weekly 08-B Wrapup: The Anti-equality Deck Stacking Begins” highlighting how he views the process in Indian Nations Presbytery “Stifling the Spirit” because adequate debate was not allowed.

PC(USA) Amendment 08-B Voting At The Half-Way Mark

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Well today the voting on Amendment 08-B to the Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) reached the half-way mark with 86 of the 173 presbyteries now having their votes reported.

1)  The unofficial vote tally is 36 yes, 50 no.  The official tally as reported by the stated clerks is 29 to 40.

1a)  The official vote tally lists the voting on Amendment 08-A, about membership vows, as 43 to 29.  The almost mirror image of the 08-B results makes this hard to ignore, but I’ll dig into that another time.

2)  At this time 15 presbyteries have switched their votes from “no” on 01-A to “yes” on 08-B.  If this proportion holds up the final vote will be 75 to 98.  BUT, if you remember my last update the proportions at that time would have given a vote of 63 to 110.  In the last ten days there have been a higher proportion of presbyteries switching to a yes vote after voting no last time.  I still have 13 presbyteries on my “likely” list, but after seeing some previously “solid” conservative presbyteries, like Charlotte and Sheppards and Lapsley, switch votes I now view my list as a minimum.  The Layman has crunched some numbers and they see the possibility of a 50 presbytery swing while I only have a swing of 29 based upon current proportions.

3)  What has been most interesting for me has been to try to peel back some of the layers here and see what the voting patterns can tell us about what is happening in the PC(USA).  As I have mentioned before, looking at the changes in vote numbers in comparison to the changes in presbytery membership has not yielded much information for me.  At another time, when I have more data, I’ll put together my charts and statistics on that and show you what I have not found.

But I have found it interesting to look at how the votes have changed.  There are other observers that are netting it out and looking at percentage yes and no and see how that changes from one time to the next.  But I think that only tells part of the story and in some cases ignores what really seemed to happen.  While each presbytery is different, and there are numerous circumstances that can cause some of these patterns, I see four major categories of voting patterns:

1) No change: While I see this in the smallest number of presbyteries that fall into these four categories, there are several that exhibit no change from last time.  Yesterday’s vote by Missouri Union Presbytery is a great example.  On 08-B they were 31-48, on 01-A they were 34-46.  There were 79 votes cast this time and 80 cast last time and the yes and no numbers are close enough that  statistically I would not say the votes really differ.

2) True swing:  There are some presbyteries where it seems clear the commissioners saw things differently this year and votes changed from no to yes.  Again from yesterday, Peace River is a great example:  On 08-B it was 63 to 82, on 01-A it was 37-105.  Total votes were 145 this time and 142 last time — again close enough to be considered statistically the same.  But clearly there was a shift to yes changing from 26% to 43% approval.  Not enough to approve of the amendment, but a clear trend in that direction.  An example where this happened and it did change the outcome was New Hope Presbytery with 316 voting this year and 312 voting last time but the yes vote went from 49% to 56%.

3) Uniform decline:  This is the case where yes and no votes decline proportionally.  An extreme example of this behavior is Plains and Peaks.  For 01-A the vote was 60-91, for 08-B it was 41-60.  In the first the yes vote was 41%, in the second 40%.  The total number of votes was only 67% of last time.  Looking at the past voting patterns for this presbytery the numbers and percentages have varied a bit over the four votes so while this shows the uniform decline behavior from the last vote, it would be wrong to conclude anything about PC(USA) membership from it.  Another more consistent example is Cayuga-Syracuse:  Going back to the original 96-B vote, and including the following 97-A vote, the pattern was: 26-78, 70-26, 54-21, and 33-12.  Again, fairly constant decreases in both the progressive and conservative numbers (remember the first is the vote to adopt fidelity and chastity so the progressive is the 78 no vote) allowing for some small fluxuations.  And over those four votes the progressive vote was in a narrow range between 72 and 76%.

4) Conservative drop:  Finally, there are several presbyteries that show a decline in the number of “no” votes only.  An example of this vote change is Greater Atlanta.  On 01-A the vote was 235-283 while on 08-B it was 243-233.  Yes, there was a slight up-tick in the number of “yes” votes, but what apparently lead to the approval of the amendment by this presbytery was a decrease of 50 no votes, and there was not a corresponding increase in yes votes.  At least in this case you can’t completely attribute it to declining membership since the number of churches declined by one and the number of members declined by a bit less than 7%.  This was not so much a 6% shift in votes as an 8% loss of “no” voters.

Now, what I have laid out here are four general categories of voting patterns that I observe.  While many presbyteries can be grouped into these categories it is more difficult for others.  In particular, many presbyteries show a combination of the uniform decline and the conservative drop.  And in those declining numbers it is very difficult to say what may be true swing.  And yes, there are a few cases of “liberal drop” and “conservative swing,” but not in nearly the numbers seen in these four groups.

Is this useful?  I think that it is because it provides indicators of what is happening in the denomination.  Admittedly I’m still puzzling over exactly what it means.  And the PC(USA) has its own department of Research Services to slice and dice the denomination statistically, so I’m not alone in looking for ways to take the pulse of the church.

Anyway, that is the complexity I am seeing in the voting trends.  But why should there be easy explanations?  The PC(USA) is a complex collection of unique congregations gathered into culturally different presbyteries.  Clearly no one answer will completely describe what is going on in the denomination.

Loss Of Identity In The PC(USA)?

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Yesterday Pittsburgh Presbytery hosted a Presbyterian Convocation on Our Freedom of Religion At Risk: A Presbyterian Crisis. I tried to structure my day so that I could hear as much of the webcast as possible.  It was interesting at times but I’m not sure if it lived up to the title and a lot of the material I had heard before.  I might make some more comments specifically on the Convocation in a future post.

But two of the speakers made comments that, combined with some other things I have read or heard recently, got me thinking about the loss of identity for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).  Has the PC(USA) drifted so that it is no longer, well… Presbyterian?

The first speaker at the Convocation, after the welcome and introduction, was Dr. Joseph Small, Director of the PC(USA) Office of Theology, Worship and Education Ministries.  The announced title of his remarks was The Westminster Assembly, but he spent a significant part of his remarks talking about the basis of Presbyterian connectionalism being rooted in the biblical concept of koinonia, translated as communion or fellowship. He made the point that this koinonia between entities in the PC(USA) has severely deteriorated and said something like “it is almost entirely gone between presbyteries.”  This struck a chord with me since back in October I had asked “Is The PCUSA Too Big?” with this issue in mind.  It seemed to me that one of Dr. Small’s points was that our Presbyterian connectionalism has broken down to the point where we are almost congregational because of the loss of scripturally and Spirit-filled communion between groups in the denomination.  He reminded us that the church is not a human endeavor but a community called together by God.

Two speakers later was Dr. Beau Weston on The Adopting Act of 1729, which he talked about in detail.  The Adopting Act was necessary as a tool to settle differences between those presbyteries advocating subscription to the Westminster Standards and those desiring a less-enforced orthodoxy.  He then jumped to the last 50 years and pointed out that with the Confession of 1967 the Presbyterian Church moved from adopting the Westminster Standards to agreeing to be guided by the new Book of Confessions.  As he said yesterday, and has said elsewhere, including his book Leading from the Center, this was a turning point in the mainline Presbyterian church and the beginning of the loss of institutional identity.  He makes the point as well in his recent document “Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment.”

Central to the assault on authority in the Sixties was the overthrow of the confession of the church.  When two northern Presbyterian bodies merged to produce the UPCUSA, a new confession was called for.  The new confession, The Confession of 1967, was indeed produced.  Instead of adopting the new confession as the constitutional standard of the church, though, the denomination took the revolutionary step of adopting a whole library of confessional documents.  The Book of Confessions included the Westminster Standards, the Confession of ’67, and a slew of others.  It was as if the country amended the U.S. Constitution, but, instead of incorporating new text into the venerable old document, adopted the entire constitutions of a dozen other countries, too.

In theory, the one constitutional confession was supplemented by many others.  In practice, officers of the church were no longer expected to be bound by any confessional statement at all.  Dropping the confession out of the binding part of the church’s constitution undermined authority in two ways.  First, leaders no longer had any authoritative faith to develop or lead from; second, the body of the church no longer had a clear public standard to hold its putative leaders to.  Instead of an establishment that kept one another humble by trying to live within the confession, the church was afflicted with a host of self-appointed prophets who expected the church to follow them, pay for their pet projects, and the like.

The consequence, he said yesterday, was that we stopped arguing over the confessions and started arguing over the Book of Order.

While Dr. Weston talked about this published theory of his, he mentioned a related item that I don’t recognize from his circulating work.  He mentioned that he had done a survey of some members of the PC(USA) and asked which, if any, of the documents in the Book of Confessions should be there.  Keeping in mind that the standard for adding a document to the Book is endorsement by 2/3 of the presbyteries, only the ancient creeds, Apostles and Nicene, even broke a simple majority.  The Westminster Standards and Declaration of Barmen were next and the rest were further back.

Two thoughts crossed my mind.  First, that this is a terrible indication of our theological identity and history.  Second, if the confessions mean so little why is the PC(USA) embarking on the expense of time and money to consider the revision of one catechism and the inclusion of another confession.

I would also point out that the idea of the loss of identity with the diminution and abandonment of the Westminster Standards is not unique to Dr. Weston;  this is a primary thesis of D. G. Hart and J. R. Muether in their book Seeking A Better Country: 300 Years of American Presbyterianism.

That is all I have to say about yesterday’s Convocation at this time, but two other items also crossed my path recently.

The first comes from Michael McCarty over at his blog Around the Scuttlebutt.  I am sure some of you are following his series serving as a case study in church leadership titled “The Adventures of Graying Presbyterian Church.”  Yesterday’s installment was called “To recall from whence we came.”  He compares the church with the U.S. Marine Corps and how every marine learns the history and traditions of the corps.  He then says of the church:

In the same way, when elders have a basic understanding of the history
of the Church in general and the Reformed and Presbyterian tradition in
particular, they are better able to perform the really important duties
of their office.

The real irony here is that the expansion of the Book of Confessions was to allow for greater understanding and recognition of our tradition.  I guess the problem is that we agree to be guided by it, and then set it on the shelf.

Finally, the other day a friend made the profound comment that churches that have a strong sense of identity with the PC(USA) are ones with older, well established facilities.  Likewise, churches interested in leaving the PC(USA) with their property are more likely churches that have newer facilities.  The idea is that the newer buildings are viewed as “we built this church, we should be able to keep it” as opposed to older facilities where the attitude is “our predecessors built this church and we are the beneficiaries of their faithfulness.”  Again, do we have a long-term denominational identity or a short-term local identity?

This got me thinking and so I did a quick, semi-scientific study over lunch today.  I took the last, that is the most recent, 20 churches on the Layman’s list of departing churches and tried to figure out the age of their facilities.  For the sake of this survey I divided the “new” from the “established” at 50 years old.  Many of the churches had their church histories on their web site making it easy to find out the age of the buildings.  For a few I had to depend on the pictures on their web site.  In a few other cases I could get a good idea from the Google satellite (actually aerial) image or the street view.  And in two cases I could not be certain enough to make a call.

Of those 20 churches, 12 had new sanctuaries or worship spaces built or acquired in the last 50 years.  One more was 52 years old.  There were five that, as far as I could tell, worshiped in buildings substantially unchanged in outline in the last 52 years.  At least in this quick survey the concept holds.

I do need to acknowledge the caveats here.  The first is that I am painting with a very broad brush using easily attained data.  The second, is that I have not even touched the negative evidence, the congregations with new buildings that are not even considering leaving.  Or to put it another way, I don’t have a control group.  And finally, I realize that it is probably easier and safer to say that churches with older buildings have more denominational identity and loyalty than to say that churches with newer buildings have less identity and loyalty.  Anyway, it was a thought provoking comment that appears to have some evidence supporting it.

And in closing…  Speaking of denominational loyalty, you probably saw the news this week that protestants these days have more loyalty to their toothpaste than their denomination.  Yes, from USA Today, it turns out that 16% of protestants have single brand denominational loyalty, but 22% have one brand of toothpaste.  The good news is that 67% of protestants have some denominational preference.  Comment in the blogosphere is rampant but I’ll point to the Rev. Mark D. Roberts who is turning his comments into a series on this.  And for the record — while I may be a dyed-in-the-wool Presbyterian, my family has attended the church God calls us to.  And one time, when God called us to another denomination’s New Church Development, I think some of the denominational hierarchy were glad to see this Presbyterian move on after questioning the episcopacy too many times.  But that is a story for another time…

Amendment 08-B Voting At The One-Third Mark

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After several more presbyteries voted this past Saturday we are now at a total of 57 that are reported to have voted on Amendment 08-B to the Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).  This is pretty close to one-third of the 173 total.  Since my last update nothing has really changed but a few trends are becoming clearer.  As always, the official word can be gotten from the Office of the General Assembly but the hot-off-the-press unofficial info can be found at PresbyWeb, Yes On 08B, Presbyterian Coalition, and the Layman.

1) Officially 08-B is running 9 yes and 25 no but the current reporting has the voting at 20 yes and 37 no as of Saturday February 14.

2) After this past weekend there are 6 of the 20 presbyteries voting yes that voted against the last proposal to change G-6.0106b.  If this ratio of “flipped” presbyteries continues the final vote would be about 63 yes and 110 no.  Some of the presbyteries that are on my “could switch” list, like Southeastern Illinois that voted this past week, have switched while others, like Pines and Cincinnati, were close but no change.  (Cincinnati was a tie at 83 on each side so is in the “no” column.)  And then there were surprises like Western North Carolina and Lake Huron that I don’t think were on anyone’s watch list.

3) The latest presbytery to switch was Charlotte this past Saturday.  There was a lot of local press coverage of the meeting and vote and you can see some samples of the reports at the Charlotte Observer (complete with a slide show of five commissioners faces, but it has four ministers and only one elder (and by-the-way a great picture of you there Robert)) and WSOC-TV.  It is difficult to gage the degree of shift in the presbytery since the vote last time on 01-A was a voice vote with out a reported count, but it passed this year 133-124 suggesting a notable shift.

Presbytery Moderator Robert Austell has posted a great piece on the process, discussion and the vote on his blog.  There is a lot of good information in the piece and he has a lot of objective observations.  For example, the first two of his overall observations:

1. Tone: on the whole, the pro-B folks
were warm, genuine, full of faith, and focused on Jesus, Scripture,
people, church unity, and justice (in that order); those against
Amendment B, on the whole, were saying what was wrong with the pro-B
folks and their arguments.

2. Content – Scripture: the pro-B
folks lived up to their declared attentiveness to Scripture; the pro-B
5-min. presenter demonstrated how she interpreted each of the nine
passages mentioning homosexuality and why she was voting consistent
with her beliefs; the rebuttal to that was dismissive (“that’s poor
exegesis”) rather than demonstrating equal or better attentiveness to
Scripture.

He reports that the presbytery used a process similar to what others report using by beginning with longer presentations, four in this case with two on each side, before going to open debate.

4)  With each vote, particularly the close ones, reaction to the voting builds.  The More Light Presbyterians web site announces each yes vote and celebrates the victories when one changes from last time.  And you will find reaction among the letters to the Layman (an example) with criticism of the process and theology when a presbytery flips.  By the same token there are progressive reactions when a presbytery shows no shift, as a blogger this weekend lamented the intransigence of her presbytery.

5)  Finally, if you have been following my comments on the voting you know that I am intrigued by patterns that are developing in the vote counts.  What is interesting is the decrease in the number of votes cast.  Early on there was a parallel decrease in both the number of yes votes and the number of no votes.  However, in the last couple of weeks the number of yes votes has rebounded and it is currently at 95% of the number of yes votes cast for 01-A.  The number of no votes is now at 74% of those for 01-A giving 84% of the total number of votes cast last time.

What is interesting is that I can not find a correlation with presbytery membership declines over the last seven years.  I tried correlating membership numbers for presbyteries against anything I can find and there is nothing statistically meaningful.  For example, this past weekend Pines had 92% of the votes cast in 01-A yet has a large, 27% membership drop over that time.  Eastern Virginia had a similar vote drop with 90% of the number of votes cast with only an 8% membership drop.

A trend is developing as more presbyteries vote — most presbyteries fall into two very distinct groups.  In both groups there is a similar decrease in the number of no votes, but in one group the number of yes votes remains about the same while in the other the yes votes decrease by an amount similar to the no votes.  An example of the first is Washington which voted 27-82 on 01-A and 27-70 on 08-B.  An example of the second case is Cayuga-Syracuse which voted 54-21 before and 33-12 this year.  That is 61% of the number of yes votes and 57% the number of no votes.  And this is not just a feature of the yes presbyteries:  Foothills was previously 41-132 and this time 34-99, that is 83% and 75% of the yes and no vote numbers respectively.  In all, I would place about 22 presbyteries in the group with no decrease in yes votes and 16 presbyteries in the both-decrease category.  That leaves 16 more scattered around and three that can’t be counted because there is no recorded numbers on 01-A.  (I’m waiting to do a formal grouping analysis until I have more data.)

Once voting gets closer to the end I’ll put together all the numbers with statistical measures and plots so anyone with a similar geekiness can rip it apart and tell me what I did wrong as would happen with any peer-reviewed article.

But as I said above, the numbers don’t seem to support much attribution of vote decreases to PC(USA) membership decline.  It would appear that commissioner fatigue and mental-resignation are a bigger factor in this.  It is interesting that Robert’s article supports this with anecdotal evidence:

[T]he Presbytery of
Charlotte has a large number of rural and smaller town churches. Many
smaller churches are not involved (ever) in the life of presbytery, and
many did not send elders to vote. Additionally, the presbytery has
given almost all of the smaller churches who ever come to presbytery
meetings an additional elder vote in order to correct the imbalance
between ministers and elders. As many as 50-75 votes were not cast
because small or rural churches did not send two or even one elder.
Many of these would be more conservative. Conservatives did write,
call, and otherwise invite these folks… to no avail.

I am curious if others document this trend.  Stay tuned.

An Account Of The Amendment 08-B Process In The Presbytery of Western North Carolina

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My thanks to the Rev. Carolyn Poteet and The Layman Online for a good description of the process and deliberations regarding Amendment 08-B in Saturday’s meeting of the Presbytery of Western North Carolina.  The presbytery voted 144 to 108 in favor of the amendment becoming the first presbytery to change their general stance from the vote in 2001-2002.

What does Rev. Poteet identify as a critical or central point?  Here she says:

The
pro side consisted of those wanting to remove the current G-6.0106b and
its fidelity and chastity clause, and put in its place new language
approved by the General Assembly last June. The single most effective
point they made was this: the new language called for obedience to
Jesus Christ first and foremost, while the old language doesn’t mention
Jesus at all. They have a point.

She describes the process the presbytery followed:

I
do want to applaud the way the debate was handled. Two ministers, one
from each side, were allowed seven minutes each to present their cases.
This was followed by a time of silent prayer.



The debate that followed was to be an hour long, with two minutes per
speaker, alternating between pro and con sides. All was decently and in
order. Both sides had excellent moments and awkward moments.



Following the debate, we had another silent prayer and then we voted by
secret ballot. They asked that no one applaud when the results were
announced. We continued on to the rest of our docket, interrupted
briefly by the moment when the counters returned with the news, then
back to our regularly scheduled meeting reports. We were deeply
disappointed, but having a fair hearing did make the results a little
easier to take.

She has a lot of description of the debate itself but makes these observations about the general tone:

Listening
more closely, though, it seemed like the pro arguments sought to mold
Jesus and Scripture into the image of today’s world. If anyone in
history was ever counter-cultural, it was Jesus – followed closely by
Paul. Neither of them was afraid to tell the culture that what they
were doing was wrong.

and

When
it came down to it, the line at their [the pro] microphone was longer than ours.
They had more people with prepared, precisely-timed, two-minute
speeches. And their arguments fit well into the strong current in which
our whole culture has been drifting.


I also thank Ms. Poteet for filling in a significant piece of demographic information for me:

Perhaps
Saturday’s result was because we have lost several of our brothers and
sisters to the greener pastures of the EPC. Perhaps it was because the
heart of our presbytery, Asheville, N.C., is living up to its title of
the “San Francisco of the East.” Perhaps God is at work in ways we
can’t understand right now.

I would note that three churches have departed from the presbytery since the last vote, the largest being Montreat Presbyterian Church.

There is lots more in the piece and while Ms. Poteet’s viewpoint is clear, it is labeled as commentary after all, it strikes me as a very fair and informative assessment of the meeting.  Thank you.

Amendment 08-B Voting At The 20% Mark

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Over the weekend we reached, actually almost reached, the 20% mark of presbyteries voting on Amendment 08-B to change the “fidelity and chastity” section, G-6.0106b, in the Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).  With the five presbyteries voting on Saturday, 33 out of the 173 presbyteries have now voted, at least according to the unofficial vote counters (Layman, PresbyWeb, Presbyterian Coalition, More Light Presbyterians).  As always, the official tally reported by the stated clerks can be found at the Office of the General Assembly.  There has been an noticeable and expected acceleration in the rate of
voting:  The first 18 voted over the course of three months while the
next fifteen voted in the last week and a half.  At this moment the voting stands at 11 yes and 22 no.

Two interesting developments:
1)  On Saturday we had the first presbytery to approve the new language after voting against changing G-6.0106b in 2001-2002.  The Presbytery of Western North Carolina voted in favor of 08-B by 144 to 108 after voting 100  yes and 187 no for Amendment 01-A.  On both my list and the list kept by Bruce Hahne (and quoted by More Light Presbyterians) this presbytery was not expected to change this much and I will be curious to hear what it was about their process or the situation this time that led to a significant swing.  (I’ll update here if I find anything)

2) Saturday January 24 and Tuesday January 27 must have been good days to attend presbytery meetings because after a string of vote totals that were lower than previous years (with one even), there were two presbyteries each day that exceeded their vote totals on 01-A.  On the 24th Albany had one additional vote and New Castle had ten more.  On the 27th Carlisle had six more.  So not all presbyteries are showing the decline in voting totals.  (In perspective of the long-term totals including the older votes Albany shows a decrease and the other two are fairly constant totals.)

The last presbytery of the four is Utica which voted by voice vote so only an approximate number is available.  A voice vote was appropriate since it was overwhelmingly yes.  The unofficial sites that list the vote totals for Utica all agree on 70 yes and 3 no.  This is a significantly larger total number of votes than the last time which was 24 yes and 8 no.  Checking out the presbytery, it has 35 churches so a minimum of 70 commissioners and then there would be additional for multi-staff churches, those in validated ministries, H.R.’s, and at-large members.  A total of 73 votes would be a high turn-out but seems reasonable to me and I have included it in my statistics, even though the ratio of 2.28 is significantly above all the rest.  I’m considering “correcting” the vote on 01-A.  Going back to the two votes before 01-A the totals are similar, 57 and 61, so 08-B is high and 01-A is low. It would be interesting to see if there was weather or other factors that might have depressed the attendance for voting on 01-A. 

However, in spite of those four increased totals, vote totals are still running below those for 01-A.  The numbers are averaging 86% of what they were last time and enough presbyteries have reported now that a normal distribution (Gaussian) is developing with a mean of 0.86 and a standard deviation of 0.28.  The Utica number is included in there but is a significant outlier and an “adjusted” number brings the standard deviation down to 0.14.

Finally, I am interested in the discernment process that presbyteries are using in voting on 08-B.  A member of Newton Presbytery, the Rev. Mitch Trigger, who is also an officer of the Witherspoon Society, provided the Witherspoon Society web site an account of how the Newton Presbytery discernment process worked.  He notes that it was borrowed from Mid-Kentucky Presbytery.  The process involved responding to three questions about the current language and proposed language using mutual invitation.  In response to this description, Viola Larson at Naming His Grace has posted her own her view of the “spiritual manipulation” involved in the Newton Presbytery process.  I have to agree with a couple of her points about using mutual invitation in a deliberative setting.  From my own experience I have found mutual invitation a useful tool for group study of scripture but it broke down when a task force I was on tried using it for conducting business.

Well, if you thought the last two weeks were busy you should brace yourself because there are still 140 presbyteries to go and most will probably vote in the next two months giving about 18 per week.  While my projections and conversations still seem to be trending against passage, the flip by Western North Carolina has caused the Layman to reevaluate their numbers and admit the possibility of passage of 08-B if more major swings occur.  Needless to say, those that favor 08-B take the Western North Carolina swing as a hopeful sign.  We will see.  Stay tuned.

Young Evangelicals And The Presbyterian Church

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I suspect that many of you, like me, are regular readers of the blog Tribal Church by Carol Howard Merritt.  (If you are not, I highly recommend it if you want an honest look at where the church is among young adults today.)  And if you have not carefully read today’s entry I encourage you to have a look.

Carol uses the change in the presidential administration as a vehicle to touch on two important themes — one in the general religious landscape and one in the PC(USA).

The first point Carol mentions is that your typical young “evangelical” probably does not fit the stereotype from a few years ago.  While “social evangelicals” have been around for a while, with organizations such as Evangelicals for Social Action, Carol says that today:

Well, there is a new passion for social justice, for living out the
words of Jesus. And I cannot help but notice the Joshua Generation—the
young Evangelicals who cannot swear allegiance to Christian Right, who
are finding their own way.

and

There are a swarm of young Evangelicals who are wandering right now.
Twenty-six percent of young Evangelicals support same-sex marriage.
They no longer have a spiritual home in the congregations of their
youth.

There is a group that is between the traditional descriptions of the evangelicals and the progressives.  She asks “Can these young evangelicals call the PC(USA) their home?” That is my paraphrase of her question.  What Carol says is:

Often, when I’m around denominational types, things are said that
make our denominations inhospitable for people who grew up Evangelical.
I guess I should just spell it out. Because I love my church, I need
to let you know that if we want to reach out to a new generation, we
will need to learn to accept Evangelicals or ex-Evangelicals. You may
not agree with me, you may not have had the same experience, but still,
personally people communicate to me regularly, “You’re not one of us,
and you never will be.”

Carol points out three places where the younger generation is challenged

  • “Well, they obviously don’t know what it means to be Presbyterian.”
  • “Christianity has not been a force in our society since the sixties.”
  • “Evangelicals are dumb.”

Check out the article for her discussion of each of these.

On the one hand, questions and comments like these are nothing new — American Presbyterians have been debating, and dividing, over what it means to be Presbyterian from pretty much the beginning.  On the other hand, times have changed.  Mainline denominations are now sidelined and American Christians are losing denominational identity and loyalty.  What does that mean for the institution of the PC(USA)?  Clearly these young evangelicals are having trouble seeing themselves in it.  For established conservative churches withholding per capita they are having trouble seeing themselves in it as well.  How big a tent can we be, or to put it another way, can we be all things to all people?  How we, not as an institution but as a community, answer these questions will decide what the PC(USA) will look like in the future.

Some Brief Observations On PC(USA) Amendment 08-B Voting

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In the last week and a half five more presbyteries have voted on Amendment 08-B (the modification of G-6.0106b that would remove “fidelity and chastity” language) sent to the presbyteries by the 218th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).  Some brief news, observations and comments…

1)  The unofficial vote count now is 4 yes and 14 no.  You can follow the unofficial vote count at The Layman, Presbyweb, or the Presbyterian Coalition.

2)  The official vote count, that is those votes that have been received by the Office of the Stated Clerk, is 1 yes and 11 no.  The official tally list has the reported votes for all the amendments and ecumenical statements.

3)  At this time no presbytery has switched its vote from the last similar vote in 2001-2002.

4) The National Korean Presbyterian Council, an organization of 400 Korean churches in the PC(USA), has sent a letter to the churches in the PC(USA) arguing against any changes to G-6.0106b.  The letter is available in Word format from the Presbyterian Coalition web site.

5)  About 10% of the presbyteries have now voted — 18 of 173.  The final tally in 2002 was 46-127, the current 4-14 mirrors 10% of that pretty well.  This is either by shear luck (or providence) or voting order is pretty random if the final numbers end up about the same as the last vote.

6)  The decline in total numbers of commissioners voting continues with vote totals being an average of 80% of what they were in 2001-2002, a trend I noted earlier and my analysis has been confirmed by The Layman with a bit more data and similar explanations.

7)  In a fit of shear geekiness I threw together a model to project the presbytery vote counts into the future.  I’m still refining the methodology and would like to have more data from this round before I put out my forecast for the future of G-6.0106b.  Stay tuned for that.  But one striking feature of my current model projecting forward three GA’s  (2014) is that in that time as many presbyteries disappear (decline to zero votes) as change their votes.  I was not expecting that many to disappear, that was not part of the model, so I’m looking to see if that is a reasonable result and rethinking some of my algorithms for the next iteration.

I won’t go into more details on this topic since not much has really changed with this situation since my previous discussion, the favorable response of More Light Presbyterians to a string of three yes votes in one day, not withstanding.  Maybe the one significant piece of news is that only 18 presbyteries have voted so far, a number below past votes, and that might suggest the discernment process the GA recommended is being used and presbyteries are taking time to discuss this issue.  I’ll update again when there is significant news or more data.

Gracious Witness — The World Does See It

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The World is watching…  And the World has noticed.  (At least here in California.)

As much as we are concerned about the confusion, anxiety, and uncertainty in the future of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), at this moment events are moving faster in the Episcopal Church and their local churches that are realigning with other Anglican Provinces.  The California Supreme Court cases, while they will have an impact on Presbyterians, were about Episcopal Churches here in Southern California.  The bishop is offering reconciliation but the churches are looking ahead to the cases being heard in trial court.  And there are more church cases waiting in the wings (e.g. St. John’s, St. Luke’s).  The Presiding Bishop’s office has brought on new high-power legal talent. Meanwhile a SoCal megachurch has offered to have displaced Anglican churches nest on their property.

At a higher level, while the PC(USA) has some unhappy presbyteries, the Episcopal Church has four diocese that have realigned with other provinces and are looking at a new North American province.  Here in California the Episcopal hierarchy has set up a new San Joaquin diocese along side the realigned one and is trying to figure out how the new court decision might help them there.  And in Fort Worth the Presiding Bishop herself will be stopping by in a couple of weeks to lead a special meeting to bring the diocese back into the fold. 

So, in the midst of all this discord what is the good news?  The Modesto Bee has noticed that while the Presbyterians and the Episcopalians have similar problems, the way they are handling them is different.  In an article titled “Presbyterian Splits Lack Episcopalian Litigiousness” they compare how the the two denomination are handling church departures and observe “[M]any of the Presbyterian churches have been allowed to leave “with
grace” and their property, as opposed to the Episcopalian parishes and
dioceses that have been sued across the country.”  It is nice to see that the “gracious witness resolution” passed by the 218th General Assembly may be bearing fruit, not just in the life of the church but as a witness to the world.  As one of the points of the resolution says:

Gracious Witness: It is our belief that Scripture and the Holy Spirit require a gracious witness from us rather than a harsh legalism

Controversy Over A Pastoral Call In The Church Of Scotland

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Within the last week a controversy has developed in the Church of Scotland over a minister who has received a call, with the presbytery concurrence, to an open pulpit in Aberdeen.

At its meeting on January 6 the Presbytery of Aberdeen, by a vote of 60-24, sustained the call of the Rev. Scott Rennie to the Queen’s Cross Church.  The controversy is that Rev. Rennie is an openly practicing homosexual in a public enough way that his call may be the first to be challenged because of his lifestyle.  (The Rev. Ian Watson, in his blog Kirkmuirhillrev states that Rev. Rennie is the first gay man to be called, while a news article from the Evening Telegraph quotes an unnamed CofS spokesperson that Rev. Rennie is not the first.)  It is expected, according to these sources, that some in the minority will challenge the appointment to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, possibly putting the call on hold for five months.  Two years ago the presbyteries of the Church of Scotland rejected the blessing of same-sex civil partnerships.  In his blog Coins for Change, Boris Delahoya describes a bit more about the process ahead.

[Correction:  I missed the fact that Ian Watson’s and Boris Delahoya’s blog entries are essentially identical (I did see that they were very similar).  In the comment below Rev. Watson clarifies that he is the original author of the material.]

There are a couple of interesting nuances to this story which I am not seeing dealt with in the press reports. The Press and Journal, states that the Rev. Rennie is/was married and has a daughter with his wife.  The first is the probable fact that his sexual practice was heterosexual at the time of his ordination.  Therefore, the ordination is not an issue but rather the call based upon his present lifestyle.  The second nuance is that the news story lists his marital status as “separated” not divorced.  Scottish terminology or law may be different than here in the states (please let me know if it is) but being engaged in a sexual relationship with someone other than your spouse before a divorce is finalized is generally not considered an appropriate lifestyle for an ordained officer of the church regardless of the orientation of the relationships.  (Although it seems to be sometimes overlooked if you are discreet about it.)  If the protest is filed it will be interesting to see if and how these details play into it.  Very little of the presbytery discussion has been reported so far.

In a related development, Adam Walker Cleaveland, on his blog pomomusings, recently posted on “The Bible & Homosexuality: Enough with the Bible Already,” which you can probably imagine from the title got a lot of comments, both on the blog and elsewhere.  Now there is a well written counter argument, whether or not it was intended as a direct response, by Dr. Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary.