Yes, I am still around.  I have just been gone on vacation. Having grown up in New York I have a great affection for the Adirondack Mountains, but that was last year’s vacation.  This year it was the High Sierra Nevada at the highest campground that you can drive into in California.  For the record, that campground is almost twice the elevation of the highest point in New York. People ask if I prefer one to the other.  The answer is no, because each has its own personality and distinctive and each holds its own memories in my life. For vacation this year I did not take a lot of reading material.  No plane trips to do reading on and I had to pilot the truck.  My vacation reflection this year was more digesting information than ingesting it. Much of what I reflected on still needs to be fleshed out, but here is the broad sweep of what I considered and will be working on in the coming months in this blog…

Big Picture:  Over the last couple of years more than one person has commented that I have a hole in my coverage of Presbyterian Politics.  That hole is the Uniting/United Churches, those of Canada and Australia in particular.

In a sense they are right since those branches are part of the Presbyterian tradition in those countries.  For example, when the United Church of Canada (not to be confused with the other UCC) was founded 70% of the Presbyterians joined that branch while 30% went with what is now called the Presbyterian Church in Canada.  So I’ll try to find time to study up on the polity of those two branches to see if their polity is Presbyterian enough to include in the branches I follow.

But in thinking about these churches another big-picture concept really dominated my thinking — the “missing branches” in all those family tree diagrams.  You know the type of diagrams I’m thinking of.  There is the United Church of Canada diagram that shows all the branches coming together, but leaves off those churches that elected not to unite, such as those now in the Presbyterian Church in Canada.  And the diagram for American Presbyterianism is no better.  If you check out some of the family trees for the American Presbyterian Churches (example 1, example 2) they include the formation of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in 1810, but leave out other related Restoration Movement branches, specifically the Stone-Campbell Movement that came straight out of the Presbyterian church.  (It is mentioned in the Presbyterian History Center narrative time line.)   The Rev. Barton Stone was one of the leaders in the Cainridge, Kentucky, area that signed the 1804 Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery.  And while Stone and the Campbell’s were all Presbyterian ministers who began at similar times but in different places on the frontier without knowledge of each other, their movements joined in 1832 to form the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). (Two notes:  1. As you can see in the history the Disciples have not been without their own splits.  2. It is also interesting to note that another leader and denomination that came out of this time period of the Second Great Awakening and Restoration Movement thinking was Joseph Smith Jr. and the LDS (Mormon) Church.  Unlike the Stone-Campbell Movement no direct Presbyterian connection or influence is claimed there.)

So the Big Picture questions include thinking about not just the obvious Presbyterian branches but the more diverse spin-offs.  And in my very scientific manner I started thinking about quantifying theological diversity.  I now have the start of a statistical scheme to ask the question “How Presbyterian are you?”  This does beg the question of how to define Presbyterian to measure everyone against but I am hoping that will become clear as the project develops.  Maybe I’ll use John Knox as the standard.    This project is just getting started but my initial experiments suggest that quantifying denominational DNA could produce some interesting results.

Big Question:  In pondering the extended family trees of Presbyterians in North America, the U.K., and Australia the big question that is really bugging me now is “What is the line between schism and other division or realignment?”  And don’t say “when property is involved” because the Scottish court recently had to decide on a case where theological differences between the Free Church and the Free Church (Continuing) were not a factor.  No, the question really is whether the rules to call something a schism are clear?  When is it schism and when is it Reformed and Always Reforming?  Do we use the term schism when we want to cast the differences in a negative light?  Can a schism be good? John Calvin and Martin Luther didn’t see it as schism but restoring the True Church to New Testament standards.  Hold that thought and I’ll return to it in the coming months.

Big Churches:  One topic that I have been struggling with for well over a year now is whether “big churches” can be truly Reformed in nature.  The issue here boils down to this: If the Church is the Covenant Community called together by God with Christ as its head, and if a particular church is the Body of Christ in a particular place and time, does a (fill in the blank) church preserve the concept of the local Covenant Community?  Now, fill in that blank with some sort of “big” church, be it a multi-worship-service church, a multi-congregation church, a multi-site church, or the church in the virtual world.  If all of the members are not worshiping together is it one particular church or individual churches using the same leadership, infrastructure, or name?  This is one topic that I am not sure I’ll actually address very much in the coming months.  While I’ll keep musing on the Church Virtual, I’m still not sure that thinking about big churches is the best use of my blogging time since several
other people have been thinking about it as well.  But time will tell what I do with this topic.

There has been another interesting development in the news media concerning big churches and that involves leadership transitions in one Reformed and one Presbyterian church with high-profile senior pastors.  At the Crystal Cathedral, which as a member church of the Reformed Church in America could be thought of as the Reformed Church of Garden Grove, California, there has been some questions about leadership with the senior pastor the Rev. Robert Schuller apparently removing, or encouraging the departure of, his son from leadership and placing his daughter in leadership instead.  (news article)  In another high-profile succession, the Rev. W. G. Tullian Tchividjian was recently called by the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church (PCA) to serve as senior pastor, filling the pulpit previously occupied by the Rev. D. James Kennedy.  Now the media has jumped on a disagreement between the Rev. Tchividjian and the Rev. Kennedy’s children which has apparently led to some vocal dissenters being banned from the church and a judicial proceeding being initiated. (news article)

The interesting thing in both cases is that there is little mention of the church governing bodies in these disputes.  Now, recognizing that the news media does not really understand Reformed and Presbyterian polity, it could just be a lack of good reporting on the part of the media.  After all, being good connectional churches I would expect the consistory and classis, in the case of the Crystal Cathedral, and the session and Presbytery of South Florida, in the case of Coral Ridge, to be working together to work through these differences decently and in order.  Or because of their sizes are they working through them internally?  It will be interesting to see if we have church government done decently and in order.

So there you have a summary of my thinking from the past week.  I expect that some of this will be making it into blog posts in more developed form in the near future.  Stay tuned…