Thanks to Michael Kruse we know that the new Presbyterian Panel survey of the Religious and Demographic Profile of Presbyterians, 2008, has been released.  (And of course, technically their sample set is not all Presbyterians but only the largest American Presbyterian body, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).) If you don’t want to wade through all 54 pages of the full report a three page “Snapshot” is available.

Now at the moment I am swamped with research and writing on a couple of other projects, and as we ramp up to GA season crunching these numbers is not the first place I want to spend my time. So, what I will do over the next few weeks is look at parts of this report in smaller, bite-size pieces.  (I heard that collective sigh that I won’t be inundating all of you with a massive statistical dissection and reanalysis.)

But in the first paragraph of the text an item of polity, not population or probability, caught my attention that I would like to comment on first.

The first section of the text, titled “Overview” is mostly boiler plate that describes the report and methodology and shows only minor changes from one report to the next.  You can compare it to the 2005 report if you want.  In this report the second sentence reads:

Using scientific sampling, small but representative numbers of elders (lay leaders) currently serving on session, other members, and ordained ministers were contacted by mail and asked to respond to a set of questions about themselves and their congregations.

For comparison the 2005 report read:

Using scientific sampling, small but representative numbers of members, elders, and ordained ministers were contacted by mail and asked to answer a set of questions about themselves and their congregations.

You probably guessed that what caught my attention was the added parenthetical comment describing elders as “lay leaders.”

This raises the question of whether Presbyterian ruling elders are properly described as laity.  There is usage in the Book of Order, such as the term Commissioned Lay Pastor, that does suggest the most traditional and strictest usage of “laity” as other members of the church besides the clergy.  There are however definitions floating around the web that seem to be more appropriate to Presbyterian government such as one that describes the laity as “not members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.”  And of course we have an organization called the “Presbyterian Lay Committee” whose Objectives and Mission regularly talks about how they “inform and equip congregations and leaders,” implying that ruling elders are included in the lay members.

In my experience and research there is no clear consensus in the use of the term, but I do have a couple of friends who are more than ready at presbytery meetings when someone says “I am only a layman/laywoman/layperson” to let them know that “no, you are an elder, an ordained officer of the church and you help govern in parity and equality with the clergy.”

I personally do not consider an elder a member of the laity for two reasons.  First, we talk about the shared leadership of the church between teaching elders and ruling elders, each holding equal weight in higher governing bodies.  To distinguish between the different elders as “clergy” and “lay” in the governance of the church strikes me as setting up a false dichotomy.

The second reason gets back to the usage of the original Greek in the Bible and the distinction between elder, presbyteros, and people, laos.  I am not aware of an instance of their use in close proximity in the text regarding the early church, but in one of my favorite passages about ecclesiastical leadership, Acts 20:17-38, the text tells us that Paul is talking to the elders, presbyteros, of Ephesus.  In this conversation he refers to them as “overseers” of the “flock.”  No, Paul does not say that the elders take care of the people, laos, but rather they oversee the flock, poimnion.  If “people” and “flock” are interchangeable here, than the elders are distinct from the laity and therefore if the teaching elders, that is the clergy, are not laity then ruling elders are not either.  (Now, I’m sure someone would have problems with my exegesis here, but I’ve got some other, parallel examples I can point to as well.  As a counter example I am aware that in reference to the Jewish authorities the Gospel of Matthew uses the term “elders of the people” which can be read that the elders are part of the laos while still being their leaders.  But is that as much a secular leadership as a religious leadership in a theocracy?)

Anyway, as I said earlier, there are opinions about usage on both sides here so this is not a settled issue.  There is the usage of laity as an ecclesiastical term that may not fit the Presbyterian model too well but is understood to have a specific meaning in other traditions.  Welcome to the complexities of language.

I’ve got more in the works on elders but that will have to wait a couple of weeks.  I may have a chance to crunch a few numbers on elders this weekend and have something to say about the numbers in the new report then. And as for the usage in this sentence from the report that only distinguishes ministers as “ordained,” I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to ponder the why and wherefore of that one.