Monthly Archives: February 2008

Breaking News: GAPJC Decisions that Presbyteries Must Consider Exceptions to Ordination Standards

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UPDATE:  After reading the decisions in detail, while the presbyteries’ actions were all overturned, it appears that it is more to maintain a “status quo” rather than supporting the declaring of scruples.

The Permanent Judicial Commission of the General Assembly of the PC(USA) has just posted decisions in three similar cases where Presbyteries (Olympia, Pittsburgh, Washington) passed resolutions declaring the “fidelity and chastity” requirement among the essential tenets.  In a quick read it appears that the PJC ruled against the presbyteries.  The central decision appears to be 218-10 dealing with the Presbytery of Pittsburgh resolution.

Three decisions will take some time to digest.  Back with more analysis when I can find time to deal with them.

Recent News from Louisiana Presbytery and the PCA SJC Trial

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Over the weekend there was another meeting of the Louisiana Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and we are once again indebted to HaigLaw for his first hand information about the meeting.  (And as an aside, HaigLaw has a nice new look to his blog page.)

The quick rundown of the most recent events that got us here:  At a January 19 meeting of the Louisiana Presbytery they decided to plead guilt to one charge and not guilty to the second charge they faced in church court and turn the trial of Federal Vision (FV) advocate TE Steve Wilkins of Auburn Avenue Church over to the higher church court but within days the church and the minister decided to leave the denomination for an FV friendly denomination and everyone figured that would be the end of that.  But wait, it can’t end that easily…

The February 9 special meeting was called because the Standing Judicial Commission (SJC) of the PCA has decided to go to trial on March 6 in Atlanta on the one count that Louisiana Presbytery pleaded not guilty to.  HaigLaw gives a blow-by-blow description of the meeting but a few interesting points add to the convoluted nature of this specific proceeding.

The first is that while attendance appears small from the report of the voting (5-5, 6-5, 7-7), the numbers suggest good turnout since the Louisiana Presbytery web site lists seven churches in the presbytery.  (Yes Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church has been removed from the list).  Figure there should be 14, or slightly more, total votes since it would be one Teaching elder and one Ruling elder from each church.

But the second point, as you can gather from my numbers above, is that the votes show the Presbytery is split on this.  A motion to change their plea to guilty on the second charge failed on a 5-5 tie.  The written content of their defense passed by a 6-5 vote.

The next, but related, item of business dealt with the request of Rev. Duane Garner to continue as a member of Louisiana Presbytery laboring outside its bounds.  Rev. Garner is an associate pastor at Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church but would prefer to stay with the PCA rather than departing to the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) with his church and his senior pastor Rev. Steve Wilkins.  Permission to labor outside the bounds was denied on a 7-7 tie and a request that TE Garner show his exact adherence to the PCA constitutional standards at the next Presbytery meeting passed on a 6-5 vote.  The question arises out of the fact that Rev. Garner is second author on a Federal Vision book with his boss, TE Steve Wilkins, so there is a paper trail.

Finally, I will conclude with the fact that the prosecutor for the case, Ruling Elder Sam Duncan, was a guest at the meeting.  HaigLaw relates that Mr. Duncan recommended to the SJC that the remaining charge be dropped since with Rev. Wilkins’ departure it was moot, but the SJC voted to continue to trial.  Mr. Duncan declined to give his opinion of what the possible punishment would be if the Presbytery was found guilty.  And Mr. Duncan also said that he would be resigning as prosecutor for the case. 

There was one more comment by RE Duncan that was outside the scope of HaigLaw’s post but came out in the comments and in Jeff Meyers’ blog Corrigenda Denuo.  Jeff Meyers relays information from Mr. Garner that Mr. Duncan said that “No one from Louisiana Presbytery is going to get a fair trial before the SJC.”  This has lit up the blogosphere including the comments on both HaigLaw and Corrigenda Denuo.  Well, TE Lane Keister was a member of Sam Duncan’s prosecuting team and took the time to call him up, find out about the context, and post it on his Green Baggins blog.  The comment boils down to the fact that details in Federal Vision cases are so wide spread now that you could not find a “jury” that had not been influenced by “pre-trial publicity.”  It is not that the SJC members are inherently biased against the Presbytery.  This has unleashed a significant discussion and the comments on the Green Baggins blog post are up to sixty at the moment.  If you are interested, check it out.

The Church and New Technology — The Thrill and the Threat

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Today I had an interesting synergy of several items that got me thinking and reading about technology and the church.  In my web surfing today over lunch I read or found:

All of this got me going on my comments on the Church in a Web 2.0 world.

Bruce and Shawn have some great points about what churches are (should be?) doing in the new technological environment and how it fits with our past concepts.  I’ve got a few extensions:

First, as Reformed churches, we are a people of community.  Our religious life and government are completely about community.  Web 2.0 is also about community, but about a community that is not necessarily all in the same geographical place but in the same virtual place.  But since the gathering is virtual, does this still reflect the new covenant community that we are called to be?  Maybe, maybe not.  I’ll save that for another time, but note now that the question is there.

Second, in my coverage of Presbyterianism globally on this blog, I think I can say that many Presbyterian branches have nice web sites, the new EPC site being an example, but the best Web 2.0 interactive site I can think of is the Free Church of Scotland Online Forum.  The PC(USA) now has some limited blogging, such as Linda Valentine‘s which does get interaction in the comments.  But at what level should we expect the online community to be built or gathered?  If it is indeed “viral” (spread by non-standard communication) we would expect to see the communities organized around affinity groups or distributed across several nodes (blogs?).  Don’t expect things to be the way they used to be.  But this is fully compatible with ministry being carried out at the most practical level closest to the congregation and with being a missional church.

Finally, a brief comment on bringing in a younger audience.  While I fully acknowledge that Web 2.0 will get the attention of a younger generation, and it might get them in the door of a church, will it actually have an impact on the age of those involved in Presbyterian government?  I would note that Bruce and Shawn are both ministers.  They do church as a profession.  For elders, it is a vocation, and we usually have to have jobs to pay the bills.  I was fortunate that I have a wonderful family that is supportive of this crazy Presbyterian government stuff, and I have been blessed by an employer and supervisor who have provided me with the flexibility and generous vacation days to actually follow this calling.  It is the unfortunate situation that many younger Presbyterians, while they might serve on their church sessions, and follow all this Web 2.0 stuff, are too busy with a young family and young career to have the time necessary to serve on a Presbytery committee, to say nothing of taking over a week’s vacation to be a commissioner to GA.  Yes, elders of any age must make a choice about being active in the government of the church, but once we are older, we have accumulated the necessary vacation, and our career is more stable, then we have a greater comfort level being active, especially being GA commissioners.

For the last 15 years I have frequently been the youngest elder in the room at governing body meetings and committees.  I have taken it as a part of my calling to encourage younger elders to become active in church government above the session.  And to encourage governing bodies to modify the way they do things so that younger elders are able to participate around their jobs.  A couple of presbytery committees have moved their meetings later for me and others, much to the dismay of some respected ministers who wanted to get it out of the way early in the day.  But if you want younger elders, you must compromise for them.  You can expect them to compromise some as well if you make the effort to show you are serious.

Anyway, my contribution to the discussion for now.  I think this one has legs and will continue for a long time to come.  As I look at this post I think I raised more questions than I answered.  And about all this new technology…  Way back in 1997, as an elder commissioner to the 209th General Assembly, I believe that I was the first GA commissioner to post my comments and pictures daily to a web site for my presbytery to read.  I have it archived and I’ll find a place to repost it some day.  Ya, I was always this geeky.

New Evangelical Presbyterian Church Web Site Design

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Overnight the Evangelical Presbyterian Church rolled out a new web site design.  It is clean and consistent, makes extensive use of flash, and is very readable.  It is still not completed or linked in places and seldom uses both the left and right side bar at the same time.  Still it is attractive, easy to navigate. and makes extensive use of Jeff Jeremiah’s picture.  But I also noted that the web site for the Presbytery of the East disappeared at the same time this site was launched.  And for the hard core web designers, it does not scale well to smaller screens, the little bullets in the left nav bar are not open/close toggles as you might expect, but it looks good on several different browsers, if you have the screen resolution.  And the name might bother you, but looking at the source code it uses the “suckerfish” javascript for drop-downs menus.

Geek moment over, enjoy the new look.

Tension in the EPC/PCUSA Relationship?

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There appears to be a developing story in the relationship between the Evangelical Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (PC(USA)).  On his blog, Reformed Pastor, Teaching Elder David Fischler discusses last weekend’s EPC Presbytery of the East meeting.  Specifically, he reports the comments at that meeting by EPC Stated Clerk/Executive Pastor Dr. Jeffrey Jeremiah regarding contacts from the PC(USA) headquarters.

Specifically, TE Jeremiah mentioned that in the fall a PC(USA) “constitutional body” declared that churches were not to be released to the EPC Transitional Presbytery.  I am not sure exactly what declaration this was, but it might be referring to one of two Advisory Opinions from the Office of the General Assembly (OGA).  Opinion 17 was titled Schism and Opinion 19 was titled Implementing the Trust Clause for the Unity of the Church.  It could also be related to letters sent to presbyteries by the OGA that we don’t have the text of.

Mr. Fischler’s report on TE Jeremiah’s comments continues on to say that the EPC has been contacted by the PC(USA) and accused of initiating contact with PC(USA) congregations to encourage them to switch to the EPC.  Mr. Jeremiah flatly denies that the EPC has initiated contact and is concerned that their reply to the inquiry of an individual could be interpreted as recruiting of that church.  In addition, the PC(USA) was displeased that the EPC would receive a church that was not properly dismissed by their presbytery but just left, technically speaking they “disaffiliated.”

Finally, TE Jeremiah reported that there is at least one PC(USA) presbytery that will be sending an overture to this June’s General Assembly to declare that the PC(USA) is no longer in “correspondence” with the EPC, thereby prohibiting presbyteries from dismissing congregations to it.  This information is echoed by the Rev. Bill Crawford in his blog Bayou Christian.  Rev. Crawford’s source also says that Louisville is encouraging presbyteries to stall dismissal actions “by any means possible” until after GA so that churches could no longer be dismissed to the EPC… If the Overture passes.

We will have to wait for further developments to see if such an overture is submitted and how this plays out in advance of GA.  It should be noted that the New Wineskins Association of Churches has their own sample overture for presbyteries to approve and send to GA making it easier for churches to be dismissed with their property.  Among other Book of Order changes, this overture requests that Chapter VIII, “The Church and Its Property” be completely removed from the Constitution.  Again, I have not heard of a presbytery passing this overture nor has it appeared on the GA Business page listing.

And the Designee is… Results from the Presbyterian Church in Ireland

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No, its not those election results.  For us GA Junkies there is a more interesting election tonight, the selection of the next Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.

This is the most interesting of Moderator selection systems, at least to me, because the 21 presbyteries meet, all at the same time, and each votes for their choice.  It gets phoned into Church House in Belfast and the Moderator Designee is…

The Rev. Dr. Donald Patton, minister of Old Church, Randalstown.  Rev. Patton received the nominations of 11 of the 21 presbyteries.  He was selected from a group of seven candidates, all ministers, from whom the presbyteries chose.

Rev. Patton is a parish minister, having served at Randalstown for the last six years.  He was ordained in 1975 and has served his entire career in parishes.  He has all three of his degrees from Queens University, Belfast.  Of himself he says that he is “a warm evangelical teacher and pastor intent on reaching out with the
Gospel to the wider community on issues that are relevant to them.”

More details are available in the news story from the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.

And a recognition to William Crawley, a BBC Northern Ireland broadcaster who accurately handicapped this election in his blog on Irish religion “Will and Testament.”  He posted his analysis before the meetings today, as well as his wrap-up afterward.

There may be more tomorrow as the Moderator Designee traditionally holds a press conference the next day.

Passings: Jack Stotts, Lewis Wilkins, and William Smith

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Question 1. What is your only comfort in life and death?
Answer: That I belong—body and soul, in life and in death—not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me from the dominion of the devil; that he protects me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, that everything must fit his purpose for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him. [Heidelberg Catechism]

In life and in death we belong to God. [Brief Statement of Faith]

These two phrases, each leading off their respective faith documents, are almost mantras to me.  “I am not my own,” “We belong to God.”  And from what I know, these are appropriate to the three gentlemen who I remember here today.

The Rev. Jack Stotts Ph.D. was familiar to many American Presbyterians as the former president of Austin Theological Seminary and McCormick Theological Seminary before that.  Among his most remembered contributions will be the job of chairing the task force that wrote the Brief Statement of Faith, adopted in 1991.  This document was written in the wake of the UPC and PCUS reunification to embody the shared faith.  He was himself a strong advocate for unification.  He went to be with the Lord on January 24 and is remembered in both a Presbyterian News Service press release and a page on the PCUSA web site.

In God’s divine wisdom He also called home the Rev. Dr. Lewis Wilkins, another worker for Presbyterian unification, on January 31.  In addition to his Presbyterian union work, Rev. Wilkins served a variety of positions, many of them as staff in higher governing bodies including presbytery executive, associate executive of synods, and staff on the national level for the Presbyterian Church in the United States.  The Presbyterian News Service released an article remembering Rev. Wilkins.

Today, the Edinburgh News published the news of the death of Elder William Smith on December 1, 2007.  From reading the article I was struck by the tremendous example he set of an Elder involved in the work of the church.  The article carried the great title of “A Life Spent Serving Faith and Family.”  This servant, unable to afford a university education, was a life-long member of the Church of Scotland and a civil servant.  He was ordained an elder in 1950 and served as his kirk’s clerk twice.  But he also served on the national level being the first elder to serve as convener of the Diaconate Board of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland from 1981-1986.  In 1987 the Moderator of the General Assembly ask Mr. Smith to serve as his senior chaplain.  Once again he was the first elder to be asked to hold that position.  His dedication and faithfulness remind us that the core of our Presbyterian government is elders and clergy serving together and equally in the administration of the church.

“Well done good and faithful servants.”

Visualization of Bible Linkages

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This is a bit off-topic for my usual blogging, but as a geek/research scientist/amateur Bible scholar this fascinates me.

Chris Harrison, a doctoral student in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, has posted on his web site a page on Visualizing the Bible.  The first plot displayed is Bible cross-references showing the linkages between different verses in the Bible.  If you download the hi-res version (and watch out because it is hi-res at 109 MB and 12000×7000 pixels) you can get a cross-reference down to the chapter and pretty close to the verse in the Bible.

Have a look at it.  If nothing else Chris has done a great job of making it visually appealing.  But just a few of the things that jumped out at me:

How much of the Bible references back to Genesis and the first half of Exodus. This includes Revelation providing an “over arching” feel to the plot.

The cross-references within individual books, especially Revelation.

The number of cross-references to Ruth and Song of Songs is very low.

There are some interesting moderate-length linkages to the end of Deuteronomy and the end of Ezekiel.

Now I realize that the eye may find patterns that are not significant, but this is an interesting way to view this data.  what do you see?  Is this helpful to interpret scripture in the light of scripture?

My thanks to Corey’s blog “It’s A Start” for the post pointing to this.

Committed Christians “Dissatisfied” with the Church

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As my family was visiting with our extended family over Christmas and New Years the topic in one conversation came around to the Willow Creek Community Church and the Willow Creek leadership’s discovery that their programs were not developing their members spiritually, at least according to the measurements in a study they had released over the summer.  When I indicated that I had not yet heard about this I was roundly greeted by a “where have you been?” from nearly everyone else in the room.  While this was a big topic in Evangelical circles it was not major news in Reformed and Presbyterian circles.  (And if any of the blogs I regularly read had picked this up and I somehow missed it I apologize.)  It turns out that a quick Google search showed that it was still big news and even today as I write this there are blogs still commenting on it.  For example you can check out the blog 9Marks which has been writing about it in January, or a recent article in the National Catholic Reporter Online.  I only want to concentrate on one specific aspect, so if you, like me, missed the initial push on this and you are interested in more info there is a lot out there.

Having missed the boat on this major religious news story I decided to go straight to the source and added the book that come out of the study, REVEAL: Where are you?, by Greg L. Hawkins and Cally Parkinson, to my holiday reading list.  Short book, lots of graphics, pretty quick read.

So to make a short book even shorter, the team at Willow Creek surveyed members of their congregations and six other congregations across the country and found that “Involvement in church activities does not predict or drive long-term spiritual growth.”  (There is a Denver Post article about how Richard Foster figured this out 30 years ago.)

OK, now some details…

The study’s working definition of spiritual growth was “An increasing love for God and for other people.” It may not be everything that a Reformed theologian would want, but I have to give them credit for grounding it in scripture and the Two Great Commandments: “You must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.” and “Love your neighbor are yourself” from Matthew 22:37-39.  In this study the authors grouped the respondents into one of four different groups based upon their increasing level of spiritual development:

Exploring Christianity: Believe in God, not sure about Christ.  Faith not important part of daily life
Growing in Christ: Believe in Jesus, working on what it means to get to know him
Close to Christ: Feel really close to Christ, depend on Him daily for guidance
Christ-centered: God is all I need, Everything I do is a reflection of Christ

To give a very brief summary of the results:  Church program is only really important to spiritual growth in the first two groups and the church needs to train people to be “self-feeders” to develop at the two higher stages.

I’ll leave the basic findings at that but there is plenty more in the blogosphere about the study.  A particularly notable series of posts is by Prof. Bradley Wright, a faculty member in the Sociology Department at the University of Connecticut who studies sociology of Christianity.  He approaches the REVEAL study from a professional academic viewpoint and many of the measurement problems that jumped out to me as a research scientist he is able to describe and dissect more meaningfully.  You can start at the beginning with his first post or just jump to number 11 for the summary.  One of the things that he and I agree on is that in many cases the study over-interprets the results.

From a theological viewpoint, the book is not written from a Reformed perspective.  One of the things that jumped out at me was the usage of the word “church.”  While I did not see it explicitly defined in the book, in my reading it seemed to carry the implicit meaning of the institution not the community.  For example, one of their observations is “The research strongly suggests that the church declines in influence as people grow spiritually.”  While this and most references to “church” could be interpreted as the community, lacking a specific declaration it seemed to me that the institution was a more likely reading than the community.

A more direct example of theological viewpoint is shown in another of their observations:  “The human spirit is wired by God to search for him, just like birds are wired to fly south for the winter.”  Not withstanding Augustine’s “Our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in you,” Reformed theology agrees that before the fall the human heart was wired to seek God, but in the fall that wiring got short-circuited so that now God must search for us.

Now, with that build-up, I want to move on to what I found the most interesting within this study.  The study found two more groups of people contained within the four classes that are outlined above.  First within the middle two groups they found that 16% of all respondents were “stalled.”  These are Christians who have some basic level of belief but are not really active or spiritually developing.  They found that this could be due to a number of reasons ranging from addictions, to personal issues, to not prioritizing their spiritual life.

The second group they found was the “dissatisfied” segment.  These were Christians at the highest level, actively involved in the church and in serving others, who found worship services were not fulfilling, who wanted more in-depth Bible teaching, and among them 63% were considering leaving the church.  This dissatisfied group comprised about 10% of the respondents.  In other words, some of the heaviest consumers have some of the least brand loyalty.  The study found that this group felt the church was not keeping them on track or helping them find spiritual mentors.  This group wanted to be challenged and helped to develop further and to be held accountable.

The REVEAL study draws the conclusion that this group, and the stalled as well, has not been taught that they have a large responsibility for their own spiritual growth at this level.  The church needs to be a better “parent” in preparing members to develop on their own.

I think that is part of it, but this finding struck me because it quantifies something that I have observed in my time in leadership in the Presbyterian church and which (confession time) my wife and I sometimes feel.  But, from my experience I would add other, more complex, factors into the reasons that this dissatisfaction occurs.  I do not dispute that there are cases where the church is not good at helping Christians learn to “feed themselves.”  But I have seen at least three other factors are in play here.

First, most churches are smaller and have limited time and resources.  Preaching and teaching need to be targeted at the “median believer”, if you will, and the church member that is more spiritually mature misses out.  But I would not say that the believer must feed him or herself alone.  They and the church must make a point of gathering these mature Christians together so that they can challenge ea
ch other in community.  OK, I guess that is in line with the REVEAL study except that the growth can be in community.

The second factor I have seen is burn out and distraction.  I have seen several leaders, very active in the church, frequently heading up a major task force, committee, or Pastor Nominating Committee, finish up their work and quickly disappear from the church.  In talking with a few of them I have found that they wanted to switch churches and find a place where they could be anonymous.  They just wanted to get the administratia behind them and focus on their spiritual lives, and they did not feel they could do that by remaining in the same place.  It was not the church’s teaching or lack there of, it was the distraction they felt at the church.  They wanted to wipe the slate clean and start over.  It was not that they were necessarily looking for a “better” church, they were interested in a “different” church.  I will say that several times in our lives my wife and I have felt this and been “two-church” people:  One where we worked, and one where we could attend without business on our minds and feel a stronger sense of worship.  Is it possible for churches to structure themselves so that members can feel free to “release” their servant side and concentrate on their worship and learning side for a while?

Finally, I have known a limited number of church leaders who have become dissatisfied by the politics within the leadership of the particular church and have considered moving on to find a church without the problems and politics.  In severe cases this spills over to the congregation as a whole and members use the opportunity to move on to other churches.  But here I am talking about mild disagreements within the Session that persist and so a leader feels frustrated and considers moving on to another church where things might be better.  I have reminded a few of these people that we are a fallen race and every church has its problems.  Some church’s challenges are larger than others, but as the former chair of the presbytery’s Committee on Ministry I can assure you that no church, at least in our presbytery, was immune from an occasional leadership problem.  Maybe your presbytery doesn’t have these problems.

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to the spiritually mature dissatisfied church member.  I do agree that mature Christians in general, and the elders of the church in particular, must take some responsibility for their own continuing spiritual development.  Furthermore, as the shepherds of the flock, they are responsible for the spiritual development of all the members of the congregation.  This responsibility is not just to make sure that worship is meaningful and that education opportunities are available, but to individually mentor other members of the congregation and keep them accountable for their development.