Beginning in just a few hours the Synod of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America (RPCNA) will begin its 182nd meeting at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana. While there is no streaming of this meeting there is a good representation in social media. The best place for official updates and discussion should be the RPCNA Facebook page. In addition, we can expect updates from their news site Reformed Presbyterian Witness. Finally, RP Witness also has a Flickr stream which we can watch for images from the meeting. For unofficial updates and maybe commentary The Aquila Report has indicated that they will be publishing updates from TE Nathan Eshelman. Also, based on previous years, the blog Gentle Reformation could provide some updates and review as well.

I am not aware of an official Twitter account for the RPCNA but they have been actively letting people know that the official hashtag is #rpsynod. There is some various activity there already but let me point you to TE Eshelman (@pastoreshelman) for now. I would also add that @FakeRPCNA could be interesting as well, particularly with this early tweet.

To my knowledge the documents for the meeting are not available on-line but for the polity documents you can download the full constitution with secondary standards from the Convictions page.

Reformed Presbyterian Witness provides a preview of some of the business the Synod will consider, including one that has an interesting echo from another meeting. This is a paper ascending from Alleghenies Presbytery that asks that a section be removed from the RP Testimony that states that presentation of offerings is warranted in worship. This is similar to an overture that the Presbyterian Church in America considered, and rejected, that would have added a similar line to the Westminster Confession of Faith.

In addition, the Synod will be considering polity changes that would clarify the relationship of pastors at a multi-pastor church. There is also a recommendation to move churches in Colorado and Wyoming from Midwest Presbytery to Pacific Coast Presbytery and rename the latter to Western Presbytery.

Finally, there has been some buzz on the internet about the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, the closest cousin of the RPCNA in the Presbyterian branches, accepting an invitation for concurrent Synod meetings at Bonclarken in 2015. That could lead to some interesting discussion in this year’s and next year’s meetings leading up to the concurrent meeting.

And so we offer our prayers for the discernment of the commissioners to the Synod and wish them well for their meeting.