Over the weekend we reached, actually almost reached, the 20% mark of presbyteries voting on Amendment 08-B to change the “fidelity and chastity” section, G-6.0106b, in the Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).  With the five presbyteries voting on Saturday, 33 out of the 173 presbyteries have now voted, at least according to the unofficial vote counters (Layman, PresbyWeb, Presbyterian Coalition, More Light Presbyterians).  As always, the official tally reported by the stated clerks can be found at the Office of the General Assembly.  There has been an noticeable and expected acceleration in the rate of
voting:  The first 18 voted over the course of three months while the
next fifteen voted in the last week and a half.  At this moment the voting stands at 11 yes and 22 no.

Two interesting developments:
1)  On Saturday we had the first presbytery to approve the new language after voting against changing G-6.0106b in 2001-2002.  The Presbytery of Western North Carolina voted in favor of 08-B by 144 to 108 after voting 100  yes and 187 no for Amendment 01-A.  On both my list and the list kept by Bruce Hahne (and quoted by More Light Presbyterians) this presbytery was not expected to change this much and I will be curious to hear what it was about their process or the situation this time that led to a significant swing.  (I’ll update here if I find anything)

2) Saturday January 24 and Tuesday January 27 must have been good days to attend presbytery meetings because after a string of vote totals that were lower than previous years (with one even), there were two presbyteries each day that exceeded their vote totals on 01-A.  On the 24th Albany had one additional vote and New Castle had ten more.  On the 27th Carlisle had six more.  So not all presbyteries are showing the decline in voting totals.  (In perspective of the long-term totals including the older votes Albany shows a decrease and the other two are fairly constant totals.)

The last presbytery of the four is Utica which voted by voice vote so only an approximate number is available.  A voice vote was appropriate since it was overwhelmingly yes.  The unofficial sites that list the vote totals for Utica all agree on 70 yes and 3 no.  This is a significantly larger total number of votes than the last time which was 24 yes and 8 no.  Checking out the presbytery, it has 35 churches so a minimum of 70 commissioners and then there would be additional for multi-staff churches, those in validated ministries, H.R.’s, and at-large members.  A total of 73 votes would be a high turn-out but seems reasonable to me and I have included it in my statistics, even though the ratio of 2.28 is significantly above all the rest.  I’m considering “correcting” the vote on 01-A.  Going back to the two votes before 01-A the totals are similar, 57 and 61, so 08-B is high and 01-A is low. It would be interesting to see if there was weather or other factors that might have depressed the attendance for voting on 01-A. 

However, in spite of those four increased totals, vote totals are still running below those for 01-A.  The numbers are averaging 86% of what they were last time and enough presbyteries have reported now that a normal distribution (Gaussian) is developing with a mean of 0.86 and a standard deviation of 0.28.  The Utica number is included in there but is a significant outlier and an “adjusted” number brings the standard deviation down to 0.14.

Finally, I am interested in the discernment process that presbyteries are using in voting on 08-B.  A member of Newton Presbytery, the Rev. Mitch Trigger, who is also an officer of the Witherspoon Society, provided the Witherspoon Society web site an account of how the Newton Presbytery discernment process worked.  He notes that it was borrowed from Mid-Kentucky Presbytery.  The process involved responding to three questions about the current language and proposed language using mutual invitation.  In response to this description, Viola Larson at Naming His Grace has posted her own her view of the “spiritual manipulation” involved in the Newton Presbytery process.  I have to agree with a couple of her points about using mutual invitation in a deliberative setting.  From my own experience I have found mutual invitation a useful tool for group study of scripture but it broke down when a task force I was on tried using it for conducting business.

Well, if you thought the last two weeks were busy you should brace yourself because there are still 140 presbyteries to go and most will probably vote in the next two months giving about 18 per week.  While my projections and conversations still seem to be trending against passage, the flip by Western North Carolina has caused the Layman to reevaluate their numbers and admit the possibility of passage of 08-B if more major swings occur.  Needless to say, those that favor 08-B take the Western North Carolina swing as a hopeful sign.  We will see.  Stay tuned.