With three days to go before the election of the Moderator of this year’s General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) I thought I really needed to get back to this subject a bit.

First, I wanted to mention two developments related to the field of candidates standing for Moderator and their selections for those standing with them for Vice-Moderator.

One of these is the departure of Teaching Elder Janet Edwards from the field. As she explains on her web site her husband Alvise has developed some medical challenges and this is no longer the appropriate time in her career to consider serving as Moderator of the General Assembly. our prayers continue to be with Janet and Alvise. Since she is no longer a candidate a revised Moderatorial Candidates Book has been issued. However, for my purposes here I am interested in the broader sweep of the candidates and will include her information from the original version of the book for part of my discussion below.

The second item is a bit of a controversy that has arisen around Teaching Elder Tara Spuhler McCabe, Vice-Moderator selection standing with Neal Presa. An anonymous source provided the Presbyterian Outlook, and apparently the Presbyterian Layman, with documents showing that the Rev. McCabe signed the marriage license for a same-gender marriage in the District of Columbia in April where the marriage is legally recognized. I suggest that you read the complete article from the Outlook with excerpts from their interview with Rev. McCabe because her answers are specific and nuanced. I will leave it to say that she describes her role as “standing with” the couple in their ceremony and guiding them through it, that it was not a ceremony at her church and her church was not aware of it until some time after it happened. Rev. McCabe will remain as the Vice-Moderator selection and Rev. Presa has released a statement on Unity with Difference related to the situation.

Turning to the Moderatorial Candidates Book I am struck by the incremental improvement in the candidate’s submissions with each successive GA, especially in the area of layout, design and typesetting. (The Book from the 219th GA for comparison) The candidates submit their self-formatted copy to the OGA and with the advances in desktop publishing they are looking more professionally done. In addition, throughout the time introducing themselves to the church each has established ways of branding themselves, like TE Randy Branson has done with similar graphical elements between his blog and his pages in the book. It is interesting to see that both TE Sue Krummel and TE Branson have gone to more formal portraits in their material now while TE Robert Austell and TE Neal Presa have stuck with the same head shots since they announced (if my memory is correct), neither of them appearing to be formal portraits. And you have to admire the QR code that TE Presa has put on his bio.

The Moderatorial Candidates Book has biographical and sense of call information supplied by each candidate and a page about their selected Vice-Moderator candidate. The candidates also have to provide brief (less than 500 word) answers to five questions from a list supplied by the OGA. The first three questions are required and they are:

1. What are some of the exciting possibilities facing the 21st Century church? What are the challenges that face the church in this century?

2. In the Mid-Council Commission report a great deal of the narrative spoke to the emerging shapes and forms for mid-councils. In your view, what do you find especially promising in the narrative and why?

3. How might the initiative to create 1001 new worshipping communities help the PC(U.S.A.) reach its goal of increasing its racial ethnic membership and come closer to becoming a multicultural community of faith, hope, love, and witness?

The additional two questions are selected by the candidate from a pool of seven possible questions. Interestingly – and I think this is a sign of the condition and hope for the PC(USA) – all five candidates (including TE Edwards) answered this question:

5. In F-1.03 of The Foundations of Presbyterian Polity in the Book of Order, we are reminded that, “Unity is God’s gift to the Church in Jesus Christ. Just as God is one God and Jesus Christ is our one Savior, so the Church is one because it belongs to its one Lord, Jesus Christ.” How would you work for unity within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and how would this contribute to the visible unity we seek within our church and with other churches and Christian communities?

In addition three candidates, TE Edwards, TE Krummel and TE Presa, all answered the same question as their second optional one:

10. Brian McLaren will be addressing the Office of the General Assembly breakfast on Monday morning. He has written: “Those who dedicate themselves to be agents of change in our churches will require superhuman doses of courage, kindness, creativity, collaboration, and perseverance. Thanks be to God, faithful change agents will find, like the little boy with his fish and bread, that they already have more resources for the journey than they realized.” What are some of the resources God has already provided the Presbyterian Church for the journey ahead?

For his second question TE Austell answered:

7. What suggestions do you have for identifying new directions for the development of faithful leadership for the mission of Christ?

and for his second TE Branson discussed:

8. We are living in a war-torn world. What might the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and its congregations do to strengthen the ministry of peacemaking at this time?

Questions about highlighting our confessional theology, ecumenical challenges and resources, and addressing economic injustice were not answered.

Now, I need to condense each candidate’s responses down into something manageable so I decided to feed their narrative portions and the answers to their questions through Wordle. OK, maybe a bit too much condensing, but it is interesting none the less.

It should be no surprise that “God” and “Church” are prominent in almost all five candidates’ statements and “Presbyterian” comes through pretty strong as well. But there are a number of interesting subtleties. (And the images below are displayed at about half size if you want to pop them out and have a closer look.)

Let me begin with Neal Presa. As you can see his cloud is dominated by “God” and “Church” with “one”, “Presbyterian”, “Christ”, “communities” and “mission” (and “Neal”) in a noticeably lower second tier. This is consistent with a recurring theme in his statement about the Church needing to be “catching up” to what God is about.
In many ways Randy Branson’s cloud is a bit different than all the rest. You will note that his is the only one with “God” not dominant in the cloud and that since Wordle is case-sensitive it differentiates between his use of the “Church” universal and the “church” particular. I was surprised that with his emphasis on the PC(USA) needing a Moderator-as-pastor at this time that the word “pastor” was not more prominent, but the associated word “ministry” is there. In a technical note, TE Branson is the only one to use the church abbreviation PCUSA and so that appears prominently in the cloud. The cloud does a good job of capturing his idea that this is a time of healing for the church so it might be looking a bit more inward.
Robert Austell’s Wordle cloud, like TE Branson’s, has several terms primary in the cloud – in this case “world”, “Christ”, “congregation” and “community”. In particular it reflects TE Austell’s emphasis on community and the outward look to the world. With his extensive work related to worship I was surprised that word is not more prominent and similarly for mission.
The first thing that struck me about Sue Krummel’s Wordle cloud was that her’s was the only candidates’ cloud with their name prominent in it. This is easily explained by the story telling about her family she does in her statement as well as the fact that her endorsement letter is peppered with her full name. Since that story telling relates to mission it is not surprising to see that and “world” also prominent in her cloud.
For the sake of completeness here is the cloud for Janet Edwards. In addition to “God” and “church” the term “Christ” is just as prominent. There are then several terms in the second tier like “new”, “unity”, “Presbyterian”, “change” and “moderator”. It is also interesting to note that a locality comes through stronger in her cloud than any other one due to the fact that Pittsburgh is not only the location of GA but also her long-time home and presbytery as well as her teaching at Pittsburgh Seminary and having historical family ties to it.

This obviously is not intended to be anywhere near an exhaustive discussion of the candidates’ thoughts and positions. For those making the decision on Saturday night I don’t want this to substitute for a good read of the Moderatorial Candidates Book. I do hope that it gives everyone a good overview and maybe a slightly different look at the candidate’s statements. In addition, it is my observation that the single most important phase of the election process is the Q and A on the floor of the Assembly before the vote. I intend to be there live blogging that. We can make two assertions at this point – the new Moderator and Vice-Moderator will be teaching elders and the winning ticket will be gender balanced. To the rest we trust the leading of the Holy Spirit. (And on a side note, I am leaving it as an exercise for the reader to consider the references to the three persons of the Trinity in the Wordle clouds above.)

In conclusion I need to give some full disclosure and on a personal note I want to contribute what you might call a reference check. This is the first year in a while that I have had some significant previous interaction with one of the Moderator or Vice-Moderator candidates and it should be no surprise that it would be Robert Austell. He is, after all, a first class GA Junkie as testified by his great GA Help web site and he has done me the honor of linking this blog there. In working with him I have always found him sincere, hard working and well informed as well as having a cheerful and positive attitude. I have seen him working with the diverse theological perspectives in the PC(USA) and I really believe that his gracious dismissal resolution four years ago has done much to set a more peaceful tone for the PC(USA) today. And please don’t hold our shared like of Bluegrass Music against either one of us.  I don’t know the other three candidates well enough to single out Robert as the only choice for GA Moderator, but I know him well enough to say that if he is elected he will do a good job and represent the PC(USA) well.

And with that I turn it over to the wisdom, discernment and leading of the Holy Spirit through the voice of the commissioners. We pray that God will lift up a Moderator that God has prepared for these times.