Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

First, for anyone looking
for my word of hope being in the fact that approval of 08-B is
trailing in the voting or that a significant number of presbyteries have switched
their votes from the negative to the affirmative in this round of
voting, you won’t find that here.

Instead, I have been
reflecting on some of the voting trends to see what it means for the
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

While what I have
previously written about the amendment voting, especially the
analysis of the numbers, I view as data-driven and analytical, I do
realize that there is the potential for it being take as negative or
pessimistic because of the focus on membership decline and
theological controversy — the “doom and gloom” if you will. It is my motivation and intent that using my skills to drill down into
the numbers would help us better understand what is going on and
would lead to “building up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:12). So
in a more explicit spirit of that let me offer what I see as a word
of hope:

In tracking the votes and
looking for correlations with membership trends my working hypothesis
was that declines in membership would be reflected in the voting
trends. However, as I discussed in another recent post this is not
the case. Hypothesis busted! While I do see trends that I can break into categories of behavior, looking for this broadly across the
denomination’s presbyteries does not show it. I consider that good news for the
PC(USA).

I do not mean to minimize
the challenges that are before the denomination. Membership is
declining in almost every presbytery. Amendment 08-B is an issue
with strong feelings on both sides. Total membership decline numbers do suggest some association.  But the presbytery data indicate that we can not take these and
paint across the denomination with too broad a brush. To paraphrase the
Tolstoy quote above, “every presbytery has its challenges in its
own way.” No broad generalizations can be made about relationships
between 08-B, theological viewpoint, and membership decline. This
leads me to the broad generalization that every presbytery is unique,
has its own individual challenges and stories, and should be worked with
on its own terms. It is just like one of our basic principles of
Presbyterian polity, it all comes down to the presbyteries.

What this effectively
means could be expressed in a couple of well-used phrases:

All politics is local

or

Think globally, act
locally.

If every presbytery is
unique, don’t look to the General Assembly or the Headquarters for
your solution. They are there to help, but not come up with the silver bullet to solve every
problem if there are 173 different problems. Look for what you can
do where you are to work on the challenges in your presbytery.  These data suggest that we need to change the denomination by starting at the bottom because this issue does not register as being the unique problem across the church.

(Having said that, there are
some general categories of behavior but nothing that is seen across the board. I’ll go back to my geeky data analysis and
lay those out in the next couple of weeks.)