While I am working on a longer post about some of the racial-ethnic issues that have surfaced in the PC(USA) and the wider Presbyterian family in the last few days I wanted to break away for a moment to make a brief comment about what happened in the 219th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Thursday night and Friday morning.

To summarize the actions: Thursday night the Assembly took the recommendation of the Commissioner Committee on Civil Union and Marriage Issues and amended their recommendation commending the Final Report of the Special Committee so that it now commends both the Final Report and the Minority Report from the Special Committee to the denomination.  Only a short while later the Assembly voted 348 to 324 to have the rest of the items from the Assembly Committee answered by the action on the Special Committee’s reports.  This effectively said that changes to the definition of marriage in the Book of Order, which was outside the charge to the Special Committee, would not be considered this year.  Friday morning, as probably anticipated by every polity wonk tracking this, the motion was made to reconsider the previous night’s action and after some debate the Assembly voted 275 to 407 not to reconsider.  I am guessing that result was also anticipated by most polity wonks, although I must admit I was surprised by the large margin of the vote.

OK – impartial observer mode off and commentary mode on.  Beware of snark…

1) As a member of the Special Committee on Civil Unions and Christian Marriage I would like to personally thank the Assembly for the confidence you placed in our report to make it, the whole thing with Final and Minority combined, the final word on marriage from this Assembly and for the PC(USA) for the next two years.  I truly appreciate the word to the church to have them study what we wrote — I know that I learned a lot about the topic from researching the report.  But aside from the definition of Christian marriage, the church finds itself in an interesting situation right now where we have in W-4.9001 an inaccurate definition for civil marriage in certain jurisdictions, still saying civil marriage is between a man and woman while some states have moved away from that.  Hopefully the church will use this time the Assembly has given it to contemplate how to better define Christian marriage while acknowledging that the definition of civil marriage is changing in some places.

2) While acknowledging that a lot of people are frustrated, to say the least, by the Assembly deferring the issue all together, this whole sequence points to a much larger issue related to the Assembly — the Assembly has far too little time to do way too much business.  Both the move to quickly answer all the other business with the report as well as the strong response not to reconsider it today are, in my observation, an indication that the commissioners are setting priorities for what items they are willing to engage in lengthy debates about and they essentially said that this was not one of them.  Back at the 209th GA when I was a commissioner we reached 1 AM on Friday night (i.e. Saturday morning) and just started referring business to the 210th GA to finish off the docket.

Please be clear that I am not saying that the commissioners were looking to ignore the issue, wanted a quick fix, or needed an easy out, especially because of the late hour.  What I am saying is that in the multitude of factors that the commissioners were weighing, consciously and subconsciously, the fact that they had a limited amount of time to deal with an overwhelming amount of work was a factor that influenced some and, I believe, the original resolution passed at that hour when it probably would not have passed at an earlier hour of the day.

After tracking GA’s for a number of years I have come to understand that an Assembly has one good debate per day in them.  It appears that Thursday’s debate was on the issue of ordination standards.  The commissioners saved their energy for that and when finished they then had enough of hot topics for the day.  Again, this is not a reflection on the inherent importance of the topic itself, only the tendency of the Assembly to prioritize the use of their time and energy.

If you are wondering about the energy level of the Assembly, it was clear from the commissioners at the microphone that by Friday morning the energy was starting to fade — There was one commissioner that had lost track of which day it was and another that had lost track of which vote they were taking.

Now, my comments here are not a conservative’s plea of “Let not deal with it and keep the status quo.” This is a realist’s plea to say “Let’s find a better way to deal with it.”  That is also part of the message of our Special Committee report.  The Assembly has a limited amount of time to deal with a whole lot of business.  For the most part the commissioner committee process is successful and the full Assembly tends to trust the intense discernment and study each committee puts in on the topic.  But there are still enough major issues to eat up more time than the GA has to faithfully deal with them.

So, can we step back for a moment and ask if the PC(USA) is trying to do too much business with too little time?  Are we giving ourselves space to be the body of Christ together in real discernment listening to each other.  That is what the Special Committee did and our conclusion was that we were brothers and sisters in Christ around that table and while we could not come to agreement on that topic, we were still around the table together.

I don’t know the answer.  I ask myself if we need to limit the business to an Assembly.  Do we need to restructure the way business gets done.  Do we need more Assemblies, each more specifically focused.  I’m still thinking and have not decided yet.  But it is my conclusion that at the present time the General Assembly feels the constraint of the clock too much with too much to do in too little time to properly work through it.

My thoughts for today — your milage may vary.