Well, the 220th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church is behind us. I am taking a little while to digest a lot of what I saw and heard and will probably have at least a few things to say about it, and maybe a lot. However, I have completed my summary sheet that I make available to my congregation and anyone else is welcome to it as well. This year it was particularly tricky to compile because a lot happened but in the end not a lot changed. I ran out of room to mention the debut of the new hymnal, corporal punishment, the language about “repentance for sin” and the various “means of grace” that is being proposed for the ordination standards (G-2.0104a) and the immigration and social justice issues (besides the Middle East), among other things.
If you want to see an official summary there is the traditional church-wide pastoral letter from the PC(USA) leadership. UPDATE: The PC(USA) has also now issued their summary, Assembly in Brief.
I have not seen other comprehensive summaries yet (please point them out if I am missing them) but there is plenty of information out there. (There is of course the published summary from the Presbyterian Outlook available for purchase and distribution to congregations.)
From the mainstream media there is a good article from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
If you want to drink from a fire hose there are these news feeds with copious articles about individual actions and issues
There was also a feed from the Presbyterian Layman and their collection of writers. In addition, Robert Austell has started ramping up the post-GA coverage on his GAhelp site.
Update: Christie Ramsey has put together a great collection of links to points of interest in the videos – Mountaintops, Valleys, Memorable, Important, and The Best of Gradye
There are also official reactions on specific topics from various organizations. There are comments from:
- Covenant Network (marriage)
- More Light Presbyterians (marriage)
- Israel/Palestine Mission Network (Middle East)
- Presbyterian Peace Fellowship (Multiple news items)
- Presbyterians for Family, Faith and Ministry (Marriage)
- Presbyterian Lay Committee has produced a Post GA Issues Report
[ Update – I originally had the following sentence above but on rereading I realized that the article was an extremely prescient and prophetic entry from before the Assembly that Tod reminded us of because it could have just as easily been written after the meeting – “Most notable is probably the reflection from Tod Bolsinger on the Mid Councils Commission blog about the fate of their report.” ]
Beyond this there are numerous individual reactions. At the moment I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to go through those, but I reserve the right to add a few of the ones I find particularly enlightening.
More later
Steve ..
then you have the Advisory Committee on the Constitution advising the Stated Clerk, who then ruled that the Book of Order does not need to reconcile with the Book of Confessions. That the BOC has many different interpretations of Scripture, so its basically not authoritative any longer, does not need to be followed as long as you follow the BOO.
What is your take on this ??
Hi Reformed – I’ve spent the last couple of days connecting the dots on this one and hope to have a comment put together early next week. But the bottom line is that we have too many voices speaking to us in the Confessions so that we have stopped listening to them.
Have you posted your promised comment? Very interesting subject. If the role of the Book of Confessions has changed, shouldn’t we have talked about this? The matter of divorce was settled by amending the Westminster Confession. Why is the situation different now? Thanks for all you do!
Sorry no. It is half written and currently sitting at #3 in the queue. I am hoping to clear some of the backlog this weekend.
I was holding off a bit because I was hoping the McNeill case might have added some more to the debate, but that was decided on technicalities and not theology.