Well today the voting on Amendment 08-B to the Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) reached the half-way mark with 86 of the 173 presbyteries now having their votes reported.

1)  The unofficial vote tally is 36 yes, 50 no.  The official tally as reported by the stated clerks is 29 to 40.

1a)  The official vote tally lists the voting on Amendment 08-A, about membership vows, as 43 to 29.  The almost mirror image of the 08-B results makes this hard to ignore, but I’ll dig into that another time.

2)  At this time 15 presbyteries have switched their votes from “no” on 01-A to “yes” on 08-B.  If this proportion holds up the final vote will be 75 to 98.  BUT, if you remember my last update the proportions at that time would have given a vote of 63 to 110.  In the last ten days there have been a higher proportion of presbyteries switching to a yes vote after voting no last time.  I still have 13 presbyteries on my “likely” list, but after seeing some previously “solid” conservative presbyteries, like Charlotte and Sheppards and Lapsley, switch votes I now view my list as a minimum.  The Layman has crunched some numbers and they see the possibility of a 50 presbytery swing while I only have a swing of 29 based upon current proportions.

3)  What has been most interesting for me has been to try to peel back some of the layers here and see what the voting patterns can tell us about what is happening in the PC(USA).  As I have mentioned before, looking at the changes in vote numbers in comparison to the changes in presbytery membership has not yielded much information for me.  At another time, when I have more data, I’ll put together my charts and statistics on that and show you what I have not found.

But I have found it interesting to look at how the votes have changed.  There are other observers that are netting it out and looking at percentage yes and no and see how that changes from one time to the next.  But I think that only tells part of the story and in some cases ignores what really seemed to happen.  While each presbytery is different, and there are numerous circumstances that can cause some of these patterns, I see four major categories of voting patterns:

1) No change: While I see this in the smallest number of presbyteries that fall into these four categories, there are several that exhibit no change from last time.  Yesterday’s vote by Missouri Union Presbytery is a great example.  On 08-B they were 31-48, on 01-A they were 34-46.  There were 79 votes cast this time and 80 cast last time and the yes and no numbers are close enough that  statistically I would not say the votes really differ.

2) True swing:  There are some presbyteries where it seems clear the commissioners saw things differently this year and votes changed from no to yes.  Again from yesterday, Peace River is a great example:  On 08-B it was 63 to 82, on 01-A it was 37-105.  Total votes were 145 this time and 142 last time — again close enough to be considered statistically the same.  But clearly there was a shift to yes changing from 26% to 43% approval.  Not enough to approve of the amendment, but a clear trend in that direction.  An example where this happened and it did change the outcome was New Hope Presbytery with 316 voting this year and 312 voting last time but the yes vote went from 49% to 56%.

3) Uniform decline:  This is the case where yes and no votes decline proportionally.  An extreme example of this behavior is Plains and Peaks.  For 01-A the vote was 60-91, for 08-B it was 41-60.  In the first the yes vote was 41%, in the second 40%.  The total number of votes was only 67% of last time.  Looking at the past voting patterns for this presbytery the numbers and percentages have varied a bit over the four votes so while this shows the uniform decline behavior from the last vote, it would be wrong to conclude anything about PC(USA) membership from it.  Another more consistent example is Cayuga-Syracuse:  Going back to the original 96-B vote, and including the following 97-A vote, the pattern was: 26-78, 70-26, 54-21, and 33-12.  Again, fairly constant decreases in both the progressive and conservative numbers (remember the first is the vote to adopt fidelity and chastity so the progressive is the 78 no vote) allowing for some small fluxuations.  And over those four votes the progressive vote was in a narrow range between 72 and 76%.

4) Conservative drop:  Finally, there are several presbyteries that show a decline in the number of “no” votes only.  An example of this vote change is Greater Atlanta.  On 01-A the vote was 235-283 while on 08-B it was 243-233.  Yes, there was a slight up-tick in the number of “yes” votes, but what apparently lead to the approval of the amendment by this presbytery was a decrease of 50 no votes, and there was not a corresponding increase in yes votes.  At least in this case you can’t completely attribute it to declining membership since the number of churches declined by one and the number of members declined by a bit less than 7%.  This was not so much a 6% shift in votes as an 8% loss of “no” voters.

Now, what I have laid out here are four general categories of voting patterns that I observe.  While many presbyteries can be grouped into these categories it is more difficult for others.  In particular, many presbyteries show a combination of the uniform decline and the conservative drop.  And in those declining numbers it is very difficult to say what may be true swing.  And yes, there are a few cases of “liberal drop” and “conservative swing,” but not in nearly the numbers seen in these four groups.

Is this useful?  I think that it is because it provides indicators of what is happening in the denomination.  Admittedly I’m still puzzling over exactly what it means.  And the PC(USA) has its own department of Research Services to slice and dice the denomination statistically, so I’m not alone in looking for ways to take the pulse of the church.

Anyway, that is the complexity I am seeing in the voting trends.  But why should there be easy explanations?  The PC(USA) is a complex collection of unique congregations gathered into culturally different presbyteries.  Clearly no one answer will completely describe what is going on in the denomination.