After a two day break we now turn our attention to the other side of the North Channel and the activities in Belfast. At 7:00 PM tomorrow evening, Monday 28 May, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland will convene in the Assembly Hall. If you are interested, here is some helpful information:

• The Church has produced an excellent narrative of their docket as well as the more standard programme of the meeting on the same page.
• The narrative contains links to the reports in order of discussion and you can also get them in alphabetical order on the reports page. I don’t see a link to the complete Blue Book although some reports have been issued after publication of the Blue Book. At some point it should appear on the Archives page.
• The Assembly meeting is typically livestreamed. I don’t see a link yet but will update as appropriate – UPDATE: Live Streaming
• Likewise, there are usually news reports from The Press Office. There is the news page or I will update if a separate page is used.
• If you need a polity refresher you should check out their unified document, The Code
• In the past the PCI has done a wonderful and prolific job of tweeting the Assembly at @pciassembly. For the meeting the hashtag is #pciga12
• Other Twitter accounts related to the church that could be interesting are @PCIYAC from the Youth and Children department and @pciSPUD from the Youth Assembly
• Other observers of the GA to keep an eye on include Alan in Belfast (Twitter @AlanInBelfast, blog Alan in Belfast) and the local news site Slugger O’Toole with their Twitter @sluggerotoole

The preview of the Assembly acknowledges that this year’s meeting will be a bit quieter than several past meetings as restructurings are implemented. One of the interesting reports should be the Financial Crisis Panel formed in response to the Presbyterian Mutual Society issue. They will report under the General Board report and be highlighting lessons learned and recommendations for the future.

One of the other interesting items under the General Board report is the Doctrine Panel which will be presenting a report on marriage. This has definitely been a consistant theme across General Assemblies this year and like the others this has its own particular nuances.  Consider the remit from the 2009 GA:

The terms of the 2009 General Assembly remit to the Doctrine Committee were as follows: ‘That the Westminster Confession, chapter 24, paragraph 3, states: “It is lawful for all sorts of people to marry who are able with judgement to give their consent; yet it is the duty of Christians to marry only in the Lord”. Within the Church, there is a variety of interpretations held concerning what is meant by “to marry only in the Lord”. Such confusion arising from a variety of interpretations is unhelpful and is giving rise to pastoral difficulties and clarification is therefore required’.

A draft was presented last year and has been commented upon by the presbyteries and in response to that significant rewriting and restructuring occurred. In particular at the end of the introductory material the Panel says

In the present report, we have altered the order in which we present the material. The report presented in 2009 was divided into three sections: (a) the Confession; (b) Scripture and (c) pastoral issues. It began with the Confession not because we regarded it as having priority over Scripture, but because the remit referred specifically to the Confession. However, Presbytery responses revealed that perceived deviation from the Confession was a cause of concern only to the extent and on the assumption that this was also a deviation from Scripture, a principle which, we assume, is shared by both the Doctrine Committee and the General Assembly. We have therefore judged it advisable to begin this revised report with biblical materials and proceed to make brief remarks on the Confession after that.

After considering these issues the Panel states a general principle based on the Apostle Paul’s writings that “those who truly seek to follow Jesus Christ should marry only those who also truly seek to follow Jesus Christ.” In their conclusion they state three things:

• It is important to uphold marriage, understood as a relationship between man and woman, in the third millennium…
• It follows that teaching about marriage and relationships is important in the churches. When this is done to the exclusion of wider teaching on a range of social issues, ministry becomes unbalanced, but we believe that it cannot be neglected in any congregation.
• The imperfection of the church, like that of the people of Israel, for all the differences between them, results in a situation with which we are bound to wrestle: God’s requirement, on the one hand, that we should be holy and blameless; the reality, on the other, that we are not like that. We find Paul, in particular, wrestling with this in his epistles and instructing the churches with both things in mind – the need to be holy and the necessity of being realistic.

Each of these are only excerpts of the conclusion so check the report if you want the full discussion. And much more detail and discussion is available in the full report which begins on page 38 of the General Board report. The General Board reports on Wednesday.

So we look forward to another GA and our prayers are with the Assembly and the incoming Moderator, the Rev. Roy Patton. May the Holy Spirit indeed be moving among you.