The Evangelical Presbyterian Church has released the Report of the Interim Committee on Women Teaching Elders¹ and it is a document that polity wonks will want to have a look at.  It lays out a rational for the EPC to structure itself in light of its motto “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things charity”² to accommodate the ordination of women in some congregations and presbyteries. Now you may not agree with the committee’s analysis and recommendations, and in fact the report acknowledges that some people won’t when it says:

The interim committee does not advocate running from this potential conflict but heading into it with humility and a conviction that we will honor God by treating one another respectfully. The unique ethos of the EPC on women’s ordination intrinsically implies that not all Presbyterians will be comfortable with our ecclesiastical arrangement.

The report begins with a review of the situation in the EPC.  The first line says “A guiding principle of the EPC from its beginning has been our declared intent to allow liberty on the women’s ordination question.”  The second paragraph sets out the polity basis for this stance:

At the beginning, we must acknowledge the fundamental principles that inform the EPC’s liberty on women’s ordination. The Biblical Principle: The Holy Scriptures are the inspired Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice. This authoritative Word is true in all that it teaches. The Ecclesiastical Principle: Women’s ordination is a non-essential issue about which faithful believers may have honest differences of biblical interpretation and practice. One’s view of women’s ordination is not an essential element to the catholic faith, Evangelical Protestantism, or the Reformed Tradition. The EPC has always affirmed that women’s ordination is a matter of biblical interpretation, not biblical authority.

So the committee sets forth at least two important Presbyterian principles here — The primacy of Holy Scripture and the freedom of conscience in the matters of non-essentials.  (Whether this issue falls into the category of essential or non-essential we will return to later.)

Another Presbyterian principle the committee bases their recommendations on is the right and responsibility for electing officers:

“The particular church has the right to elect its own officers” (§BOG 7-2). This right is guaranteed in perpetuity to all churches in the EPC. Similarly, the authority of presbyteries to determine their membership is granted in the constitution.

So given these principles as the doctrinal basis the committee makes three recommendations:
 
1) Reaffirmation of the EPC Position on Women’s Ordination
The committee recommends making the denomination’s stance as set forth in the Position Paper explicit in the constitution :

Recommendation: That BOG §2-2 be amended by adding an excerpt from the EPC Position Paper on the Ordination of Women to the existing statement. The amended BOG §2-2 would read:

The Officers of the Church as set forth in Scripture are: Teaching Elders (designated by many titles in Scripture, including Ministers and Pastors), Ruling Elders, and Deacons. The Evangelical Presbyterian Church does not believe that the issue of the ordination of women is an essential of the faith. Since people of good faith who equally love the Lord and hold to the infallibility of Scripture differ on this issue, and since uniformity of view and practice is not essential to the existence of the visible church, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church has chosen to leave this decision to the Spirit-guided consciences of particular congregations concerning the ordination of women as Elders and Deacons, and to the presbyteries concerning the ordination of women as Ministers.

The rational argues that while the Position Paper has functioned as justification of BOG §7-2 “it would be appropriate to insert these succinct excerpts from the Position Paper into the constitution.”  They also point out that there is precedent for doing something like this from when the document Essentials of Our Faith was incorporated into the constitution.

2) Transfer of Congregations to Adjacent Presbyteries for Reasons Regarding Women as Teaching Elders

The interim committee recognizes the tension inherent in our polity regarding the ordination/election of women as Teaching Elders. Basic polity rights can actually compete with one another in presbyteries on this issue. The right of the congregation to elect its officers and the authority of the presbytery to examine persons for a position as Teaching Elder can create conflict. A congregation may elect a woman as a Teaching Elder while a presbytery may decline that call due to the majority interpretation of Scripture on this issue. This creates an obvious tension that we would like to resolve.

The committee goes on to recognize the situation of a congregation transferring into the EPC through the New Wineskins Transitional Presbytery with a female TE in place.  So how does the denomination provide this liberty within the structure of the geographic presbyteries?  The committee writes “We desire to provide freedom for these congregations without compromising the constitutional authority exercised by presbyteries.”

In this section the committee provides only general guidance for changing the BOG not specific wording like Recommendation 1.  For this recommendation part A suggests “In specific cases, for reasons related to the prohibition of the ordination or reception of women as Teaching Elders, a church may petition a geographically adjacent presbytery for membership.”  This would require all the usual approvals that we Presbyterians are familiar with for transferring presbyteries — request by the session with explicit reasons regarding this ordination issue, approval by the receiving presbytery and approval by the dismissing presbytery, both by majority vote.  And the wording of the recommendation is clear that congregations with positions on either side of the issue could request to transfer.

The second part of this recommendation addresses churches entering the denomination through either transitional presbyteries or directly.  The proposal is that the BOG would provide for the church to first consult with the geographic presbytery they would be within and “If, after such consultation, the presbytery discerns the need for relief for the entering congregation on this issue, then it will contact the adjacent geographic presbytery and recommend admission of the church”

3) Immediate Relief for a Presbytery in Conflict
Finally, this committee arose from a specific overture at the last General Assembly by Mid-America Presbytery to permit the Presbytery to act as two parallel presbyteries in the same geographic area.  The committee recommends dividing the Presbytery into two geographic presbyteries roughly along the Mississippi River with the expectation that one would permit ordaining/electing women Teaching Elders.

Discussion:
If you are tracking the debates in the PC(USA) and the PCA over ordination standards you have probably already read this document with one or the other or both of those branches in mind.  Here are my thoughts…

The issue of presbytery membership is the easier one to discuss and for the EPC with their tradition of “local option” the recommended relief seems to make a lot of sense.  I have not analyzed the pattern of presbyteries to see how far a church would have to “reach” to find a compatible presbytery, but one could envision the membership patterns becoming a checker board with fuzzy boundaries between the “yes” and “no” presbyteries.  If this recommendation is adopted it will be interesting to see how much this becomes a point of consideration in the future in forming new presbyteries like it is part of the thinking in Recommendation 3.  In other words, will there be consideration of whether a “permissive” or “restrictive” presbytery is needed in a particular geographic area.

It is interesting to compare this with the proposals coming to the 219th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) that call for flexible presbytery membership and an alternate synod structure.  It strikes me that this EPC proposal tries to preserve the geographic nature of presbyteries to the maximum extent possible, something not a prominent in the PC(USA) proposals.

The other issue in this proposal is what is essential, or how ordination standards are “Biblical Principles” and not subject to “honest differences of biblical interpretation.”  The Presbyterian Church in America is clear that the ordained offices of elder and deacon are open only to men based upon the witness of Scripture.  The discussion that is ongoing in that branch is about interpretations and practices that are nibbling around the edges of that doctrine regarding the participation of women as commissioned helpers of deacons.

The situation in the PC(USA) is the opposite and they have inherited a stance from the former United Presbyterian Church that the ordination of women is an essential.  Knowing that this post was in the works, at the very end of my last post I made a cryptic, and probably snarky, comment that referred back to the 1975 General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission decision in the case of Maxwell v. Presbytery of Pittsburgh, now universally known as the Kenyon Decision.  In that case Mr. Walter Wynn Kenyon was denied ordination as a Teaching Elder because he disagreed with the ordination of women.  He was clear about his declared exception and the fact that he would not participate in the ordination of a woman, but he also said he would not hinder someone else doing it.  Pittsburgh Presbytery approved his exception and cleared him for ordination but the Presbytery decision was challenged.   In the end the GAPJC decided:

The United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, in obedience to Jesus Christ, under the authority of Scripture, and guided by its confessions, has now developed its understanding of the equality of all people (both male and female) before God. It has expressed this understanding in the Book of Order with such clarity as to make the candidate’s stated position a rejection of its government and discipline.

In the PC(USA) accepting the ordination of women is an essential according to the GAPJC decision.

So what if you read this report and try to imagine it as applying to the PC(USA) and its current controversy which has been cast to be about biblical interpretation of non-essentials and the presbytery’s authority to decide who can be ordained? An ordination standard currently in the Book of Order (G-6.0106b), seen as a “clear mandate” by some , is included in a General Assembly Authoritative Interpretation as something that can be declared by a presbytery as a non-essential.  The overlap and parallel nature of these discussions is striking.

But this discussion in the PC(USA) is not an independent one because it has the shadow of the Kenyon decision cast across it — how is a 1975 decision about what the Book of Order says is essential applicable to the denomination today?  I am not the first to consider this juxtaposition and the Kenyon decision has been cited as one of the reasons for churches leaving the PC(USA) for the PCA and EPC in the 70’s and 80’s over the disagreement of not just the essential itself but over the GA, and not the presbytery, being able to specify that as essential.

On the other hand this new report points to the principle advocated by the recent PC(USA) AI that presbyteries have the right and responsibility for deciding on the suitability of candidates for ordination or election.  Essentially all leadership decisions are to be done under “local option.”  (And again it is noted by some that the Kenyon decision and G-6.0106b properly or improperly raised certain ordination standards to the level of denomination-wide essentials.)

So as I said at the beginning this report crafts a resolution suitable for the “ethos of the EPC,” but a resolution that will not have the concurrence of all Presbyterian polity wonks.  I believe that the committee has done a good job of crafting a solution that fits the circumstances and polity of the EPC.  How the overtures in the PCA and PC(USA) that includes facets of the EPC report recommendations will fare will be interesting to see.  At the present time the EPC model does not fit the polity of these other branches which have some significant internal challenges.  Going forward it will be interesting to see how essentials and non-essentials and unity and liberty are balanced in each of these.  And of course, “In All Things, Charity.”

Footnotes
[1] This link is to a PDF format version I created for easier download. The original is a Word document file available from the EPC web site .
[2] An interesting discussion on the origin of this phrase can be found at http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/augustine/quote.html