If you thought the last couple of weeks were busy, hang on because now it gets even more active for the GA Junkies, beginning later today with…

The 137th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada

The General Assembly will convene with worship at 7 PM local time on Sunday June 5 at the University of Western Ontario, in London, OT.  The schedule of events and the business agenda are available online.

The Moderator Nominee is the Rev. Dr. H. D. Rick Horst, pastor of St. Andrew’s, Barrie, and who has been active in community organizations, including currently serving as vice-chair of the board of Barrie’s Royal Victoria Hospital.  He has been active helping congregations with strategic planning workshops.

The PCC places almost all of their GA resources on a single page with handy named links to the different sections.  This includes the Reports and News.

There will be live coverage of the meetings of the Assembly.

There is also an active Twitter community for the meeting with the official account @PCConnect and the hashtag #ga137.  In addition Colin Carmichael (@ccarmichael), the Associate Secretary for Communications of the PCC, will be present and tweeting. (I will update others as appropriate)

Links to other items that may be of interest to GA Junkies can be found on the Office of the General Assembly page resource section including the Book of Forms, Acts and Proceedings archive, as well as policies and guidelines. There is also a list of the referrals that this Assembly will consider.

There is a lot of business in all the reports published on-line so I will not attempt a preview of them all.  I will highlight just one committee, the Committee on Church Doctrine, since it touches on a couple of polity issues I have highlighted in other branches.

The first of these is “Ministers ceasing to act as agents of the state.”  This came to the Assembly from an overture in 2007, was referred to the Committee, and the Committee says “The authors of the overture are to be thanked for provoking a stimulating conversation within the Church Doctrine Committee.”  As a personal aside, this topic was also seriously discussed on the Special Committee I was on and while little was actually mentioned in our report, we acknowledge some significant theological issues related to both sides of this issue.

Two years ago the Committee circulated to the church a document titled “Doing Weddings Better.” The Committee received responses from 18 presbyteries and 52 sessions. They conclude “The overwhelming view of the church across the country is ministers in The Presbyterian Church in Canada should continue to sign marriage licenses, and a more significant role needs to be played by sessions and congregations in celebrating the covenant couples make between each other and with God in their marriage vows.”

The Committee recommends that the response to the original overture be this report and no change in policy.

The second item that caught my attention is a notice of future work, not an action item for this Assembly, on “A study of Presbyterian Polity: Its Distinctives and Directions for the 21st Century.” It is found at the end of the report beginning on page 7 and is an interesting read for polity wonks and others musing on what Presbyterian polity will/should look like in the future.  Let me give one extended extract:

A second factor that must be considered is that Reformed or Presbyterian polity at its beginnings, was remarkably flexible. What gave Calvinism, not only its theology but also its polity, an international character was its ability to adapt to different conditions and circumstances in the various lands in which it gained acceptance. This can be seen in the different polities that took root in Reformed and Presbyterian churches in France, Switzerland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Scotland, England, Canada, the United States, South Africa and Korea, to name a representative number. There are common elements in these polities but practices vary on a wide variety of matters. In other words, there is no pure, near-perfect Presbyterian Polity which a national church can therefore claim to possess and of which it can boast…. At the same time, Presbyterian polity is not infinitely malleable. Being an essentially conciliar system it is therefore incompatible with the hierarchical systems of the papacy and monarchical episcopacy. It is true that Presbyterianism opts instead for a hierarchy of church courts but in these courts the movement is both from top to bottom and from bottom to top. It is also incompatible with thorough-going Congregationalism or Independency. While Presbyterianism emphasises the importance and role of individual congregations it stresses their connection with one another within presbyteries, synods and General Assembly in order to maintain the unity of the church.

A related issue that has also to do with flexibility is that originally Presbyterian polity consisted of a number of basic principles as is evident from the Scottish First and Second Book of Disciple and the Westminister Assembly’s Form of Church Government. Inevitably these principles gave rise to more detailed rules of procedure which were necessary. Our book of Presbyterian polity originally bore the name Rules of Procedure and Book of Forms. (The members of General Assembly must have been asleep when it was proposed and adopted that the long title should be shortened to Book of Forms. This misnomer has been perpetuated for decades.) Moreover, we keep adding new rules almost annually. Rigidity sets in and flexibility is cast aside. All too often our rules stand in the way of carrying out our mission and are used by so-called experts in The Book of Forms to intimidate those not so well informed or as clubs to clobber one’s opponents over the head with. We need to heed Jesus’ critique of the multiplication of laws formulated by the Pharisees and Sadducees: “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear” (Matthew 23:4). What are the principles that lie behind the minute rules? How is it possible to keep them at the forefront and maintain a measure of flexibility in the application of these rules?

Fourthly and finally, an aspect of our new context is that many of our congregations, unlike in the past, are now made up of Christians from other church traditions, Anglican, Baptist, Pentecostal, Roman Catholic, United Church, etc. The Pew Foundation, a few years ag
o found that up to forty percent of USA Protestant congregations are now made up of Christians from other church traditions. This is equally true of most of our Canadian Presbyterian congregations…

I should also point out that there are reports from one Special Commission and two Special Committees.  The Commission was constituted to hear the appeal in a disciplinary case and they upheld the findings of the synod trial court.  The first Committee is looking at how the recommendations of a 2002 report regarding Han-Ca Presbyteries (Korean language) have been implemented and is only a progress report.  The second Committee reviewed the “Synod staffing formula” agreed to in 2009.  The Committee was formed when overtures questioning the formula were brought to the 2010 Assembly. The Special Committee found “We believe that the current funding formula, with its emphasis on an equal provision of resources to each region of the church, and its secondary provision for communicant membership is a fair and transparent approach.” They recommend no change in the formula.

So, the time is getting closer (and I got this done in time) for the Assembly will be called to order. Lots going on this week but we look forward to beginning it with the 137th General Assembly.  Our prayers are with you.