In my previous posts about upcoming General Assembly business, specifically overtures to the Assembly, I mentioned hints of information but no specifics on two items.  Well, there is now specific information, or at least more information, on these two items.

For the 29th General Assembly of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church there has been some advance discussion of Affinity Presbyteries to provide a framework for churches that ordain women to be able to join.  As I mentioned in the last post on the subject, the New Wineskins Transitional Presbytery was discussing the idea but it has chosen not to request such an affinity presbytery.  There were also indications that the Presbytery of Mid-America was going to overture for a parallel affinity presbytery structure.  That overture has finally been confirmed in the EP News of Feb. 19:

The Presbytery of Mid-America met at Central Presbyterian Church
in St. Louis, Missouri on January 30-31. By an approximate vote of two
to one, the presbytery approved a proposal to draft an overture for
General Assembly consideration calling for the creation of two affinity
presbyteries within the geographic bounds of Mid-America. One affinity
presbytery “would ordain only men to the office of teaching elder and
one would be free to ordain men and women to the office of teaching
elder.” These presbyteries would exist for five years, after which an
evaluation would take place.

The full document is available and contains some more interesting detail.  There is one note that says that the two presbyteries would commit to maintaining the viability of each other.  The second note talks about another meeting before the presbytery meeting where 20 complimentarian pastors indicated they all favored the concept and agreed to work with their sessions to ensure viability and to “maintain relationships.”  There is also a section that talks about the ordination of women being a non-essential and that the presbytery had a process to study and discuss the issue.  Being unable to agree they are now requesting this “friendly division.”

The same news article also mentioned the action of the Presbytery of the East that I talked about last time.  The presbytery agreed to begin permitting the ordination and service of women as pastors.  The article also mentions that the Presbytery of Florida voted to have the Moderator appoint a special committee “to study the ordination and reception of women as Teaching Elders” in that presbytery.

The other piece to be filled in was the missing text of an overture to the 37th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America.  While not available a the time of my previous post on this, the text of Overture 1 has now been posted and it is a fairly simple piece of clarification.  It deals with Book of Church Order section 37-7 which addresses the removal of censure on an individual after they have relocated to another area.  Specifically the overture requests the change from a person removing to a “part of the country” to “location.”  The rational is that “part of the country” is ambiguous while “location” removes the ambiguity.