Well for the first time in a couple of weeks there is no General Assembly of a Presbyterian church going on today. (If you know of one I have missed pleeeeeeese let me know — this junkie is going through withdraw. 
)
Five down:
- Free Church of Scotland – Assembly Updates
- Free Church of Scotland (Continuing) – Assembly Report
- Church of Scotland – Assembly hall updates and audio reports
- Orthodox Presbyterian Church – Daily reports
- Presbyterian Church in Ireland – General Assembly News
I’m writing comments on each of these that I hope to have posted in the next few days. But the break is very brief…
Up next – the 135th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada
Thanks to Colin Carmichael from the Communications Office, most of what you need to know is listed in his blog post this morning. But I’ll pass it on as well…
- 7-12 June, McMaster University, Hamilton Ontario (Opening session at Redeemer University College, Ancaster, Ontario)
- GA Documents including Reports
- Agenda and Daily Schedule
- Practice and Procedure At General Assembly (The standing rules or rules of assembly operation if you will)
- Check for news and updates on PCConnect Daily or the General Assembly Page (Probably in the GA 2009 News section at the bottom of the page.)
- The Twitter updates and discussion will use the hashtag #pccga09. You can search the hashtag with http://search.twitter.com/search?q=pccga09
- If you want to get the updates on Facebook you can check the group PCConnect
In addition, for the last few weeks the weekly PCConnect-TV segment on the web has been building up to the General Assembly. While focusing more on the churches in the Hamilton area than the issues and workings of GA itself, the series has provided a great insight into some of the things going on in the PCC today.
Having grown up a-ways down the lake shore from Hamilton I though about attending myself, but I’ll drop in on one of their Assemblies another time.
That is all that I am aware of. I’ll update if I find other things. And now a couple of additional comments…
For the different sessions of the GA the PCC uses the (I believe Scottish from the Latin) term “sederunt,” meaning “A formal meeting, especially of a judicial or ecclesiastical body.” (from Wiktionary)
I have been impressed with the response to Twitter at GA’s this year. There are two great examples with very different approaches so far. For the Church of Scotland GA there was a great Twitter update coming from the Assembly Hall as well as a lively discussion that developed around the #ga2009 hash tag. For the Presbyterian Church in Ireland GA there was an even more active news update from the Assembly Hall, a very close play-by-play, but I found no sign of a discussion that developed. (For comparison there were 486 official updates for the four-day PCI GA and 231 for the week-long CofS GA.) For the PCC we have the hashtag, now lets see what happens. One other advantage of the hashtag is that when there is more than one individual posting official updates they can come from different Twitter names.
Finally, a personal and public congratulations to Colin Carmichael, Associate Secretary for Communications for the Presbyterian Church in Canada, who will be following this GA from a distance owing to the recent birth of his twins. Congratulations to the whole family and I can think of no better reason to miss a GA. And the Twitter picture of him holding the kids is great. But he may be on leave from the office but not from the web as you can tell from his blogging today and twitter updates. God Bless!