Congratulations to Ruling Elder Cynthia Bolbach and Teaching Elder Landon Whitsitt who were just elected the Moderator and Vice-Moderator respectively, of the 219th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) . (OK, technically Cynthia was elected Moderator and Landon will be brought up as the nominee for Vice-Moderator at the plenary later in the week but that is a formality.) They were elected on the fourth ballot with 325 votes. As Ms. Bolbach said at one point in the Q and A — “Elders rule!”
Now, before I continue let me say that I was at a great family event among other Presbyterians this evening so I was not following much of the live streaming. Comments on the election process are compiled from the plethora of individuals providing details on Twitter as the event progressed. Also, you will probably want to check out the accounts from other blogs from people who were present.
Having said that let me comment on what I could follow of the election process. For both the speeches and the Q and A session the Assembly suspended the standing rules and extended the time for each by 30 minutes because of the large number of candidates so they all had reasonable time to present themselves.
I did see some of the nominating speeches and have the accounts of the candidate speeches and they all seemed to be well delivered and touched on traditional topics. And from the accounts multiple candidates sang parts of their speeches.
From the Twitter coverage the questions to the candidates all seemed like good ones. They were: 1) Why is it important to have educated clergy? 2) How do both parts of the PC(USA) constitution relate to each other in decision making? 3) What is at stake in the church if you are not elected Moderator? 4) How would you address mission and evangelism? 5) How do you feel about youth involvement in the life of the church and GA? 6) What do you think about civil union and marriage?
As you can see in the table below the vote went to a fourth ballot. After two ballots there was a motion to suspend the standing rules and change the procedure to drop the lowest vote-getter. It would have required a 2/3’s vote and the motion failed. In the Twitterverse Rock-paper-scissors or a penalty kick shootout were also suggested to speed things up.
| Votes | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| Belle | 71 | 60 | 73 | 51 |
| Bolbach | 149 | 220 | 272 | 325 |
| Kim | 57 | 52 | 44 | 25 |
| Lauterer | 76 | 78 | 74 | 49 |
| Leeth | 73 | 93 | 111 | 148 |
| Nielson | 71 | 53 | 64 | 37 |
| Total | 497 | 556 | 638 | 635 |
I am normally into reading tea leaves and trying to find something in these numbers. However, I am reluctant to do that this evening for a couple of reasons. The first is that from reading the candidates’ statements and from their answers this evening these are individuals who do not nicely fit the boxes we sometimes put them in. Therefore, I am avoiding the usual descriptive terms and will say that I see certain affinities between Lauterer’s views and Bolbach’s views and would think that the drop Lauterer had on the last ballot went to Bolbach putting her over the top. Similarly, there seemed to be an affinity between Nielson and Leeth and Leeth’s strengthening appears to be at Nielson’s expense. Those two shifts don’t completely describe what is going on so there are other shifts as well. I will say that with Kim’s name recognition in the denomination and his home-town advantage I was surprised that he was consistently last in the voting.
(Update: Jim Stochl, one of our presbytery commissioners and a friend of mine, posted his interesting observations about the election last night. His take was that Jin Kim was too negative in his speech and answers and came across as too radical about how the PC(USA) needed to change. Having heard Rev. Kim speak at the last GA that sounds like what he said then so he probably came across as not hopeful enough to many of the commissioners. Thanks Jim.)
The other reason I’m hesitant to say much is because there may be bad data. If you look at the total numbers of votes in each round you will see that round one and two are significantly lower than three and four. There was a long interval between ballot two and ballot three as the tech staff checked the commissioners’ wireless voting devices, the commissioners voted in a few rounds of test or practice voting on whether they had dinner, and they trained the Moderator on how to call for the vote. The consistency in the totals for the last two votes give me confidence that they got the system working. We will see if these issues continue to be a problem when the Assembly returns to plenary session in a few days. These problems led to a number of snarky Twitter comments which included such gems as “Lesson 1: Never do layoffs before a General Assembly” (originated with @revkirby I think) and “wireless voting at #ga219 #FAIL” (originated with @ajc123 as far as I can tell).
So, if you want to follow the new leadership on Twitter you can add @cbolbach and @landonw to your list. (And people are lobbying hard to get Cyndie Bolbach to actually tweet — Landon Whitsitt will probably see to that himself.) UPDATE: At the later news conference Cyndie Bolbach is quoted on Twitter by Leslie Scanlon (@lscanlon) of the Outlook as saying “I’m no @breyeschow or @bawade. But @landonw is.”
And thanks to Bruce and Byron for your faithful service over the past two years. I don’t know if other past-Moderators worked as hard as you two did and we just did not know about it because we did not have blogs and Twitter. But your on-line updates gave all of us a real appreciation for what goes into holding those offices and how much you do for the other 103 weeks of your term. Thanks to both of you and God’s blessings as your live return to “normal.” (And Bruce, is your life ever anything like most people would consider normal?) God Speed!