41st General Assembly Of The Presbyterian Church In America

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  For American Presbyterians coming up this week we have a triple-header of General Assemblies with two beginning on Monday and one on Tuesday. Let me start with the 41st General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America which will begin on Monday 17 June in Greenville, South Carolina. Committee meetings and pre-Assembly workshops and seminars happen on Monday and most of the day Tuesday with the Assembly formally convening Tuesday evening.

There is plenty of info related to this meeting. Here is some of the most useful and important material.

There should be no lack of activity on Twitter for this Assembly and the task is really to narrow the recommendation down to a reasonable number. As already mentioned the official news feed is @PCAByFaith and the hashtag will be #pcaga. As for individuals at GA… where to start? A few that have jumped out so far include Fred Greco (@fredgreco) who is promising coverage as well as Burk Parsons (@BurkParsons) and Ligon Duncan (@LigonDuncan) who are fairly high-profile in the PCA and active on Twitter. Probably should include Tim Keller (@TimKellerNYC) and Harry L. Reeder III (@HarryLReeder3) to the list but we will see how actively they are tweeting the meeting. The other early active and informative folks include William F. Hill Jr. (@WmHillJr). And for organizations you can include Ligonier Ministries (@Ligonier) although I suspect they will be tweeting more about their activities around the meeting than the meeting itself. There are a couple more I people expect to be active but have not seen them check in yet so I will update here if they do start tweeting.

Finally, I would be remiss not to bring to your attention @PCAPresbyter and his own unique view of the Assembly. And there is mention that there might be a microphone bingo card for the meeting (who gets up to speak) as opposed to my parliamentary bingo card.

There are several interesting seminars at the Assembly. On Thursday night Ligon Duncan and Tim Keller will be dialoging in a session titled Working Together in the PCA to Address our Cultural Moment. Thursday morning will be another seminar, Commending and Defending the Total Truthfulness of Scripture, with Ligon Duncan and Albert Mohler. In addition, the Gospel Reformation Network will be hosting a pre-Assembly conference on What Grace Does with keynote speakers Harry Reeder, Ligon Duncan, Richard Phillips and Al Baker. There are full lists of all the pre-Assembly activities and the seminars. And the seminars page does say that they will be recorded and available for purchase.

As far as business for the meeting, there are a number of very interesting overtures that I look forward to the discussion and discernment around. There are a significant number that involve judicial process, including requests for the Standing Judicial Commission to rehear or take original jurisdiction of certain cases. At this time I would note their inclusion in the business and will strive to produce a separate post regarding that business and the associated history.

But there are plenty of other interesting overtures and the ones dealing directly with confessional standards, and how the church relates to them, got my attention. One overture (No. 17) requests beginning the process to add to the list of required elements of worship in the Westminster Confession of Faith 21:5 “collections for the work of the church.” In other words, require the taking of a collection at a worship service. Another overture (No. 7) asks to “Establish a Study Committee on Sabbath Issue in Westminster Standards.” That overture notes that “a large number of officers ordained in the PCA take stated differences to the requirements for keeping the Sabbath or Lord’s Day…” and seeks to get a better understanding of the requirements. And finally, an overture (No. 8) asks to change the BCO section on officers receiving and adopting the Standards so that if an officer finds his views have changed he would have to notify his presbytery that his views differ from the Standards rather than differing from “the fundamentals of this system of doctrine” as is the requirement now.

Another interesting overture is the first one (No. 1) which asks for a special order for each Assembly that would put all the important stuff together starting on the second morning of the Assembly. The idea is to place the business together at a point that some commissioners could come for just one day and be able to have input on the items most important to the church. The overture points out that at the last GA only 25% of the commissioners were ruling elders and less than half of the churches even sent a commissioner – ruling or teaching elder. The hope is that this would consolidate the most important stuff at a given time so attendance can be improved among those who can not attend for the full week.

There is also an overture to form a new presbytery (No. 9) since James River Presbytery has now grown above the recommended upper limit of 30 congregations so it would be divided creating Virginia Tidewater Presbytery. There is also an overture to consider a largely paperless GA (No. 11). And another overture (No. 18) asks to correct a parliamentary problem by adding a line to BCO section 12-6 to restrict called meetings of the session to only those items of business in the call. Presently the GA, presbyteries and congregations — as well as Roberts Rules of Order — have this restriction but not called meetings of the session.

There are lots of interesting topics up for discussion this week and I am looking forward to hearing the various viewpoints expressed on these matters as well as several other. We pray for the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the deliberations and discernment of the commissioners in the coming week.

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