After several more presbyteries voted this past Saturday we are now at a total of 57 that are reported to have voted on Amendment 08-B to the Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). This is pretty close to one-third of the 173 total. Since my last update nothing has really changed but a few trends are becoming clearer. As always, the official word can be gotten from the Office of the General Assembly but the hot-off-the-press unofficial info can be found at PresbyWeb, Yes On 08B, Presbyterian Coalition, and the Layman.
1) Officially 08-B is running 9 yes and 25 no but the current reporting has the voting at 20 yes and 37 no as of Saturday February 14.
2) After this past weekend there are 6 of the 20 presbyteries voting yes that voted against the last proposal to change G-6.0106b. If this ratio of “flipped” presbyteries continues the final vote would be about 63 yes and 110 no. Some of the presbyteries that are on my “could switch” list, like Southeastern Illinois that voted this past week, have switched while others, like Pines and Cincinnati, were close but no change. (Cincinnati was a tie at 83 on each side so is in the “no” column.) And then there were surprises like Western North Carolina and Lake Huron that I don’t think were on anyone’s watch list.
3) The latest presbytery to switch was Charlotte this past Saturday. There was a lot of local press coverage of the meeting and vote and you can see some samples of the reports at the Charlotte Observer (complete with a slide show of five commissioners faces, but it has four ministers and only one elder (and by-the-way a great picture of you there Robert)) and WSOC-TV. It is difficult to gage the degree of shift in the presbytery since the vote last time on 01-A was a voice vote with out a reported count, but it passed this year 133-124 suggesting a notable shift.
Presbytery Moderator Robert Austell has posted a great piece on the process, discussion and the vote on his blog. There is a lot of good information in the piece and he has a lot of objective observations. For example, the first two of his overall observations:
1. Tone: on the whole, the pro-B folks
were warm, genuine, full of faith, and focused on Jesus, Scripture,
people, church unity, and justice (in that order); those against
Amendment B, on the whole, were saying what was wrong with the pro-B
folks and their arguments.2. Content – Scripture: the pro-B
folks lived up to their declared attentiveness to Scripture; the pro-B
5-min. presenter demonstrated how she interpreted each of the nine
passages mentioning homosexuality and why she was voting consistent
with her beliefs; the rebuttal to that was dismissive (“that’s poor
exegesis”) rather than demonstrating equal or better attentiveness to
Scripture.
He reports that the presbytery used a process similar to what others report using by beginning with longer presentations, four in this case with two on each side, before going to open debate.
4) With each vote, particularly the close ones, reaction to the voting builds. The More Light Presbyterians web site announces each yes vote and celebrates the victories when one changes from last time. And you will find reaction among the letters to the Layman (an example) with criticism of the process and theology when a presbytery flips. By the same token there are progressive reactions when a presbytery shows no shift, as a blogger this weekend lamented the intransigence of her presbytery.
5) Finally, if you have been following my comments on the voting you know that I am intrigued by patterns that are developing in the vote counts. What is interesting is the decrease in the number of votes cast. Early on there was a parallel decrease in both the number of yes votes and the number of no votes. However, in the last couple of weeks the number of yes votes has rebounded and it is currently at 95% of the number of yes votes cast for 01-A. The number of no votes is now at 74% of those for 01-A giving 84% of the total number of votes cast last time.
What is interesting is that I can not find a correlation with presbytery membership declines over the last seven years. I tried correlating membership numbers for presbyteries against anything I can find and there is nothing statistically meaningful. For example, this past weekend Pines had 92% of the votes cast in 01-A yet has a large, 27% membership drop over that time. Eastern Virginia had a similar vote drop with 90% of the number of votes cast with only an 8% membership drop.
A trend is developing as more presbyteries vote — most presbyteries fall into two very distinct groups. In both groups there is a similar decrease in the number of no votes, but in one group the number of yes votes remains about the same while in the other the yes votes decrease by an amount similar to the no votes. An example of the first is Washington which voted 27-82 on 01-A and 27-70 on 08-B. An example of the second case is Cayuga-Syracuse which voted 54-21 before and 33-12 this year. That is 61% of the number of yes votes and 57% the number of no votes. And this is not just a feature of the yes presbyteries: Foothills was previously 41-132 and this time 34-99, that is 83% and 75% of the yes and no vote numbers respectively. In all, I would place about 22 presbyteries in the group with no decrease in yes votes and 16 presbyteries in the both-decrease category. That leaves 16 more scattered around and three that can’t be counted because there is no recorded numbers on 01-A. (I’m waiting to do a formal grouping analysis until I have more data.)
Once voting gets closer to the end I’ll put together all the numbers with statistical measures and plots so anyone with a similar geekiness can rip it apart and tell me what I did wrong as would happen with any peer-reviewed article. 
But as I said above, the numbers don’t seem to support much attribution of vote decreases to PC(USA) membership decline. It would appear that commissioner fatigue and mental-resignation are a bigger factor in this. It is interesting that Robert’s article supports this with anecdotal evidence:
[T]he Presbytery of
Charlotte has a large number of rural and smaller town churches. Many
smaller churches are not involved (ever) in the life of presbytery, and
many did not send elders to vote. Additionally, the presbytery has
given almost all of the smaller churches who ever come to presbytery
meetings an additional elder vote in order to correct the imbalance
between ministers and elders. As many as 50-75 votes were not cast
because small or rural churches did not send two or even one elder.
Many of these would be more conservative. Conservatives did write,
call, and otherwise invite these folks… to no avail.
I am curious if others document this trend. Stay tuned.
Thanks for the comments, Steve. And wow, I hadn’t seen that pic of me… not the one I gave as my first choice. ick.
Congratulations, or at least thank you, for serving on the marriage/civil unions task force. You will be in my prayers!
Keep in mind that as membership decreases, we don’t really see a similar decrease in clergy. We might see more “at large” clergy, but they aren’t leaving the denomination at the same rate as lay people.
That means that the extra commissioners from churches move from being membership-based to “balance-the-clergy-based”. It’s a shift from G-11.0101a to G-11.0101b.
Hi Mark,
You are absolutely correct, that a decrease in general membership does not necessarily correspond to a decrease in the number of commissioners. And as you point out, “at large,” other validated ministries, and our enlarging group of honorably retired ministers are leading to more elder commissioners due to the redress of imbalance.
There are two things that surprise me. The first is that the decrease in the number of voting commissioners is slightly more than the decrease in the denomination membership. The second is that if you look at the decrease in the presbytery membership there is no correlation to the decrease in the number of voting commissioners. I can only conclude that what is going on is more complex than simply the membership decline of the denomination.
I hope that makes sense. As I said in the post, I’ve been collecting all this into a massive spreadsheet and I’ll post some numbers and charts when more presbyteries have voted.
Steve,
[sorry, this is rambly]
I would add to your response to Mark that only church closings would greatly affect total #s of voting commissioners.
I believe the BOO provides for one elder vote per 500 members, and give or take, you might expect an additional clergyperson per 500 members.
Related to overall PCUSA membership loss, what I believe is most common is that more and more small churches are unable to call a pastor and stop sending elders to presbytery as they get into survival mode. There are exceptions, but I think they are just that (exceptions).
Different presbyteries address the imbalance of commissioners differently. For a number of years, my presbytery offered those extra votes to racial-ethnic churches. Starting several years ago, a few rural churches asked for some votes, and we changed our policy to offer an extra vote to every church under 500 members, starting with the largest (499). But they had to respond and say “yes, we would like a 2nd elder vote.” By the time we removed non-responders from the pool, pretty much EVERY church under 500 that wanted one got a 2nd elder vote.
I think the reduced numbers don’t come from reduced membership or fewer churches, but from reduced interest and greater apathy. I always listen to the attendance report at the end of presbytery meeting… typically, we will have 60-70 of 134 churches represented at all. You can do the math on that. 🙁 We had 83/134 for the Amendment B vote.
It could also be bad weather. These early votes have mainly been taken in December, January and February.
Mark – I certainly think this happens. I have not seen an obvious case of this in the current round, but it might be there. My best candidate from the last round is Utica: 61 and 57 commissioners in the first two rounds, 32 last time, and an estimated 73 this time. Knowing the territory, I have to think that was a weather effect in 2002. But weather has been an issue this year in many parts so there may be a weather effect in there. Sometime when I have a chance I’ll try to correlate major storms with presbytery meetings.
Thanks Robert – You provided the detail that I have only alluded to in some of these posts. And I think you are correct about the reasons why.
Also, I congratulate you on serving as Moderator of the Presbytery this year. Best wishes for that service to the Church.
Thinking this through over the weekend I realized that there is one more factor that could depress votes — the late-voting presbyteries. Once the outcome has been decided there is less motivation to vote afterwards. I’ll see if I can adjust for this in my statistics.
Once again, the “liberal” faction of the PC(USA) has won and shown that it clearly has a majority (and has since the 1960’s). The tactic utilized was similar to the reunion debates (1950s-1980’s); keep voting/advocating and eventually your side will win. If the measure passes (which it likely will), it will be interesting to see if it prompts an exodus of several churches.