Monthly Archives: September 2008

Keeping the Lord’s Day — Revisited

Regular readers of this blog know that I have half seriously/half humorously visited the topic of keeping the Lord’s Day before. While I do have some fun with this topic, our family does try to keep in mind that this is a day set aside for God. However it sometimes seems to be a far cry from a “day of rest” when we have five people all going in four different directions on a Sunday evening: our daughter to worship and my wife and I to our small group Bible study, while still needing to get the boys to their respective small group studies. And while we may spend time on Sunday afternoons getting odd jobs done around the house, we do try not to go shopping or go out to eat. And yes, like yesterday when I sat down and watched a bit of an MLS game and part of the Canada-Honduras soccer match, we do sometimes relax in front of the television, usually watching sports.

One thing that is interesting to note about the commandment to set a day apart for God is that it is the longest of the commandments. It gives not just the command that nobody and no animal in the household is to do work, but also the rational that God worked for six days and rested on the seventh. Any polity wonk would think that with that much documentation serious consideration should be given to it.

While I would say that our family is respectful but not legalistic about the Lord’s Day, an interesting poll and discussion has begun over on the PuritanBoard about “Is watching NFL Football a violation of the 4th commandment?” At the moment in the poll the results are running 20-8 that it is a violation.

But what is more interesting is looking at the discussion. This is not a simple yes/no question as the various issues brought up in the discussion address. There are so many subtleties and aspects that it would make a group of rabbis debating the law proud. Such issues as…

Is it a violation of the sabbath just because of what I do or also because those I am watching are working?

Is it a violation if I record the game on Sunday but watch it another day?

Is it a violation if I recorded it on Saturday and watch it on Sunday?

Does the Lord’s Day begin and end at midnight or at sunset and if it is that latter can I watch the late game?

Is participating in a PuritanBoard discussion work and so should PuritanBoard be shut down on the Lord’s Day?

So we Presbyterian and Reformed hold this, like other things, in the tension of taking God’s Word seriously while still being gracious and not legalistic about the commandments.

Statistics and “Missing” Information

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Over the last week I have had two conversations about statistics and in each case there is something missing or hidden if you just look at the information as presented in the table. This was also an important point at a church committee meeting on Saturday where we were working on the 2009 budget. Not statistics but financial data and the way that the accounting professionals presented it to us: while correct by their professional standards, it did not always make it straight-forward to understand exactly where the money was coming from and going to.

Statistics are frequently tricky and if you want proof of that from another perspective, and you are not already reading it, Bradley Wright, a professor of sociology interested in the sociology of Christianity has a series going right now on statistics at his blog, fittingly named, Bradley Wright’s Weblog. I really enjoy his writing, but that may be because I am a fellow academaniac.

Anyway, here are the two I was discussing…

The first statistic: Contemporary Christian Music
This one began with the observation that almost everything we sing in worship was “contemporary” at one time. Like I explained to my kids yesterday (to the usual eye roll that Dad is doing it again) the two great Issac Watts hymns our preacher chose for worship (that they didn’t really care for) were significant because of the influence Watts had in moving English worship music away from the literal Psalter. (And I do realize that there are some readers who consider that the beginning of the end for mainline Reformed worship.)

But what about contemporary worship music today. One measure of what is being sung is the monthly list from Christian Copyright Licensing International, better known as CCLI. This is who a church pays the small royalty fee to when they use modern music in worship for congregational singing. Well the August 2008 list is now available and while it includes a few that our congregation regularly sings in worship most are not used in my church. It is interesting that the list includes one song, Lord I Lift Your Name On High, with the incredibly low CCLI number of 117947. (Like a serial number giving the approximate order it entered the CCLI catalog.) Twenty two of the songs on the list have numbers above one million and many above four million.

The oldest list available from the search page is August 1997. What is the latest and greatest on that list… You guessed it, good old 117947, Lord I Lift Your Name On High. But as I look down the eleven year old list I recognize most of the songs as ones that we regularly sing in worship. Is my church so out of date in singing these “traditional” songs that everyone else has passed us by so they no longer appear on the CCLI list? No, when we, and other churches, sing them now it is “please open your hymnals to number 36.”

While the CCLI list is a useful tool for the “cutting edge” contemporary music, once a song has been widely adopted and enters the hymnals it drops off the CCLI list. The CCLI list ceases to be a good measure of all “contemporary” worship music, at least if contemporary music goes back more than a few years.

(In putting this post together I found on the CCLI site the results of a survey they did of their license holders about music in worship. What is the problem here? It is the sample population. If they only sampled their license holders they completely missed congregations that exclusively use printed material not requiring a CCLI license. None the less, there is some interesting stuff in those statistics but I’ll leave that for another time.)

The second statistic: Churches Leaving the PC(USA)
I make frequent mention of the Presbyterian Church (USA) annual statistics and the decline in membership numbers. What is interesting is that while the number of members has declined by more than 2%, the number of churches has declined by less than 1%. Yes, part of this is that the vast majority of churches in the PC(USA) are losing members, but part of the difference might be from how the PC(USA) accounts for the statistics when a church leaves the denomination.

As best as I can figure out, in the case where a congregation choses to disaffiliate, rather than request a transfer, and an administrative commission can identify a minority to continue the church, the result in the statistics is a large relative loss of membership, but no loss of a church. I am not saying this is a false reporting of the information; it is a technically correct way to list the data. I am just pointing out that it does mask the nature of the membership loss that occurred. It almost seems we need a category for “continuing churches decimated by schism.” Where are footnotes when you need them.

So that is what I have seen masked in how the statistics are reported.

Next Moderator of the Church of Scotland — The Process

Church of Scotland National Youth Assembly 2008

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If you have not picked up on the buzz, the excitement level is rising for the annual National Youth Assembly of the Church of Scotland which begins on Friday in Dundee. Among the blogs that I follow, Stewart Cutler and Margaret McLarty seem particularly excited and I kind of wish I could be there too. I look forward to what they have to say after the event, and they are both presenters in workshops.

This annual youth event has its own blog, wiki, and its Twitter keyword is NYA2008. No traditional web site that I can find so it sounds like a very Web 2.0 event. Lots of Twitter. Pictures on flickr?

The four day event includes Debates (sounds like discussion sessions) on Sustainable Living, Social Media (“If you’re not online you don’t exist”), Healthy Relationships, Future Church (including a discussion topic of “The Rights and Rites of the Church”). And the featured speakers and seminars strike me as a great mix of typical church-related topics (Mission, Bible Society, The Book of Revelation) and realities of life (parenthood, mental health). A good looking event that seems to know their target audience.

So have fun and be sure to write. (Based on the Twitter search that won’t be a problem.)

The Changes in the PC(USA) Ordination Exam on Biblical Exegesis — Brief Observations and Comments

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Last week the news broke, just in time for the latest round of ordination exams, that there would be changes to the grading of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Ordination Exam on Biblical Exegesis. The Presbyteries Cooperative Committee on Examinations announced two changes: 1) “The demonstration of a working knowledge of Greek and/or Hebrew will no longer be a requirement in order to complete the examination successfully.” 2) The inquirers and candidates will be asked to offer a “faithful interpretation” rather than “a principle meaning” of the text.

According to a document from the PCCEC these changes come from input received during a self-study. The committee has implemented the changes as a response to those concerns.

This one came in below my radar screen and I must thank the other bloggers I will reference below for alerting me to it. They have all made their own comments about it, and most in more detail and focus than I will. I simply wish to highlight a few issues in this discussion.

1. The Future Is Now
Maybe the most important thing to come out of this, from my polity wonk viewpoint, is that this is the first highly visible change resulting from our new polity model. While we may have been focused on the Form of Government revision (nFOG) from the Task Force and the 218th General Assembly that the Assembly referred to the presbyteries for further review, we need to remember that the revision to Chapter 14 of the current Form of Government, sent to the presbyteries by the 217th GA and approved by them, was in the same spirit as the nFOG. This is a model that removes procedural details from the Book of Order and shifts it out to “manuals” to be written and approved by other agencies and governing bodies. So now Chapter 14 simply says that there will be ordination exams and one of the topics that will be covered is “Biblical Exegesis” rather than giving specifics about the Exegesis exam and what particular details it will cover.

If the nFOG gets adopted expect a lot more of this. Depending on how you look at it this is not necessarily a negative thing. In this case, while the Cooperative Committee may have changed the grading of the exam, the door is now open for a presbytery’s Committee on Preparation for Ministry to adopt grading and interpretation of the exam that are stricter than previously specified in the Book of Order.

So, if the church as a whole does not like this change what do they do? (I would note that between the many blogs I read and a Google search I have found only negative comments about this change by bloggers, but it is usually those objecting that shout loudest. However, reading through the comments on the blog posts I reference there are positive comments about the change like this one from Adam Copeland.) It is not clear to me that there is an established method for input and adjustment to these new manuals from the wider church other than expressing concern to the committee and supervising agency or council. There are of course always Book of Order amendments.

For more on the change in polity regarding this I refer you to Pastor Bob.

2. This Discussion Has Been Going On Throughout Global Presbyterian History
I won’t go into great detail here, but while Presbyterians have historically held higher education requirements than almost any other denomination, the exact nature of those requirements has been a topic of discussion from the very beginning and continues today. Whether pastors can be trained at small specialized institutions instead of full-fledged universities was a topic of discussion in 18th century American Presbyterianism regarding the Log College and today in the Church of Scotland regarding Highland Theological College.

One of the issues that has been mentioned related to this level of theological training is the high failure rate, possibly related to uneven grading, for any of the more “subjective” or “interpretative” ordination exams. (The polity exam also regularly comes up in this category.) Again, read through the comments on some of the referenced blog posts for individual stories regarding conflicting graders’ comments.

3. This Shifts But Does Not Necessarily Weaken The Standards
If the Cooperative Committee and their exam graders were the final word than a good case can be made that the standard is weakened. There is a great series of posts by Mark D. Roberts (First, Second, Third, Fourth, Postscript) on the change and what the weakening of the original language requirement and the different meanings of “a principle meaning” versus “faithful interpretation” imply. (There is more great discussion in the comments to these posts and Jim Berkley has a follow-up.) I think we will have to wait a little bit to see how this change is actually implemented in the grading.

What this change has effectively done has highlighted the responsibility of the graders for interpreting that standard, and shifted the responsibility for judging the candidates ability with the original language to their Committee on Preparation for Ministry. While the proficiency with the original languages will not be graded it will be commented on for the benefit of the CPM’s. What will the CPM’s do with that?

In essence this change has moved some of the authority and responsibility from the central structure of the denomination back out to the presbyteries. It is now up to the CPM’s to take this new responsibility seriously, but you can bet that through differing levels of oversight and differing philosophies there will be a less uniform standard for candidates certified ready to receive a call.

A personal reaction: First, I am a ruling elder and never had to suffer through ordination exams. (Want to trade for my doctoral exams?) However, having had formal Latin training and a few “kitchen table” classes on Greek, I have a rudimentary knowledge of that original language. (Sorry, no functionality for Hebrew.) I do sometimes follow sermons in my Greek text and have done my best to work with both the Greek and transliterated Hebrew on the few times I have preached. From this background I am sorry to see original language ability disappear as an explicit requirement for the exam and if the exam grading remains like this I hope the CPM’s will still seriously evaluate a candidate’s functionality with the original languages when deciding if they are certified ready to receive a call.

The GA Junkie

The Politics of Presbyterianism