Coming up this week we have the two largest annual American Presbyterian General Assembly meetings. The first will be the meeting of the 40th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America which will convene on Tuesday 19 June in Louisville, Kentucky. The meeting concludes on Friday. Committee meetings and pre-Assembly workshops and seminars happen on Monday and most of the day Tuesday with the Assembly convening Tuesday evening.

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

• Meeting Docket (including the pre-Assembly meeting)
• The meeting will be live streamed through the byFaith website
• Overtures web page with all 44 overtures to the Assembly (one has been rescinded)
• The Commissioner’s Handbook with the reports to the Assembly is only available for download by commissioners from the commissioner page. There is one report available for general distribution – the report of the Ad Interim Committee on Insider Movements
• Book of Church Order
• The official news source is byFaith and you can follow on their site, Facebook or Twitter (@PCAbyFaith)

If you want to follow the proceedings on Twitter this should be a fairly active meeting. As already mentioned the official news feed is @PCAByFaith but at this moment it seems the hashtag has not been settled between #pcaga or #pcaga12. As for individuals at GA… where to start? Let me suggest a few and I will update as needed – so for starters @PCAPresbyter, @RaeWhitlock, @EdEubanks, @SeanMLucas and @Weslianus. (That looks like a good Friday Follow on Twitter.) UPDATE: Add to that list @FredGreco

Lots of interesting business coming to the Assembly including that extensive report on Insider Movements.  With this meeting a lot has been known to happen with records reviews so we will see what might happen when that report comes up on Wednesday afternoon.

Fourty-three overtures is a fairly typical volume, or maybe a bit more than typical, for this Assembly and many of them are the routine business of doing things decently and in order. This would include Overtures 5 and 7, 23 and 24, and 22, 39, 40, 41 and 42. Each of these are sets of concurring overtures related to changing presbytery boundaries, including the last one which would dissolve Louisiana Presbytery and merge it into the four surrounding presbyteries.

There is a lot of important business in the overtures so let me break them into a couple of classes. A number of them are polity changes to adjust sections of the Book of Church Order (BCO), the Rules of Assembly (ROA) or the rules of the Standing Judicial Commission (SJC). There are also two (37, 44) recognizing the 30th anniversary of the “Joining and Receiving” of the Reformed Church, Evangelical Synod with the PCA.

Several of the overtures deal with confessional issues and confessional standards. This includes concurring overtures 1 and 2 which seek to have not just those that are ordained, but those that are in the process and are coming up for licensure to be examined for their conformity with the Standards. Another interesting proposed change to the BCO would make the distinction between confessing and catechizing the faith more distinct in the BCO. Overture 35 asks for a rewording of 55-1 and the addition of a new 55-2 so that faith is confessed using the Apostles and Nicene Creeds and is catechized using the Westminster Standards. This is actually part of a related series of overtures from Southeast Alabama Presbytery that deal with membership, including asking for the requirement that to join the church an individual must affirm the Apostles Creed (Overtures 33 and 34).

There are a couple of overtures that explore important theological questions. Overture 30  argues that in the Last Supper Jesus distributed the bread and wine in two separate sacramental actions and since communion by intinction merges the actions it is therefore not an appropriate means to distribute communion. The overture proposes language to make this explicit in the BCO. Another major topic this year is the historic nature of Adam and Eve and two concurring overtures, 10 and 29, ask the Assembly to reaffirm a PCUS statement of 1886 declaring the special creation of Adam and Eve by God with Adam being created from only the dust. These overtures also note that the failure of the PCUS GA to reaffirm this statement in 1969 “was a sign of the apostasy of the PCUS.” In response is Overture 26 which states that current statements on this topic are sufficient and that the specificity of the declaration is outside the Westminster Standards and therefore the statement proposed in the other overtures should not be adopted. (Earlier this afternoon updates from the committee meeting indicate that the committee will recommend not affirming Overtures 10 and 29 and affirming Overture 26.)

Just a sampling of the business before the Assembly. For a fuller discussion of the overtures check out Wes White’s blog Johannes Weslianus.

So I wish all the commissioners and families a good time in Louisville and enjoying the barbeque. Our prayers are with you for your deliberations and work.