In the last week and a half five more presbyteries have voted on Amendment 08-B (the modification of G-6.0106b that would remove “fidelity and chastity” language) sent to the presbyteries by the 218th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Some brief news, observations and comments…
1) The unofficial vote count now is 4 yes and 14 no. You can follow the unofficial vote count at The Layman, Presbyweb, or the Presbyterian Coalition.
2) The official vote count, that is those votes that have been received by the Office of the Stated Clerk, is 1 yes and 11 no. The official tally list has the reported votes for all the amendments and ecumenical statements.
3) At this time no presbytery has switched its vote from the last similar vote in 2001-2002.
4) The National Korean Presbyterian Council, an organization of 400 Korean churches in the PC(USA), has sent a letter to the churches in the PC(USA) arguing against any changes to G-6.0106b. The letter is available in Word format from the Presbyterian Coalition web site.
5) About 10% of the presbyteries have now voted — 18 of 173. The final tally in 2002 was 46-127, the current 4-14 mirrors 10% of that pretty well. This is either by shear luck (or providence) or voting order is pretty random if the final numbers end up about the same as the last vote.
6) The decline in total numbers of commissioners voting continues with vote totals being an average of 80% of what they were in 2001-2002, a trend I noted earlier and my analysis has been confirmed by The Layman with a bit more data and similar explanations.
7) In a fit of shear geekiness I threw together a model to project the presbytery vote counts into the future. I’m still refining the methodology and would like to have more data from this round before I put out my forecast for the future of G-6.0106b. Stay tuned for that. But one striking feature of my current model projecting forward three GA’s (2014) is that in that time as many presbyteries disappear (decline to zero votes) as change their votes. I was not expecting that many to disappear, that was not part of the model, so I’m looking to see if that is a reasonable result and rethinking some of my algorithms for the next iteration.
I won’t go into more details on this topic since not much has really changed with this situation since my previous discussion, the favorable response of More Light Presbyterians to a string of three yes votes in one day, not withstanding. Maybe the one significant piece of news is that only 18 presbyteries have voted so far, a number below past votes, and that might suggest the discernment process the GA recommended is being used and presbyteries are taking time to discuss this issue. I’ll update again when there is significant news or more data.
Steve, wouldn’t your projection that some Presbyteries would drop to zero voters be supported by the fact that the entire denomination will theoretically go through 0 on the x axis by the middle of the century? That likely won’t happen because of ethnic congregations and large evangelical congregations, but our denominational future does not look bright. The PCUSA would do well to look at the Seventh Day Adventist denomination, which is one of the most successful in church planting, in starting ethnic congregations, and starting multiethnic congregations. The Foursquare Church is having significant success in this type of ministry, too.
Hi Howard,
Yes, any projection of the PC(USA) membership based upon current trends will, at some point, take the membership to zero. And you are also correct that we have (generally, there have been some successes) not learned how to effectively church plant.
In this post my comment was more of a technical point with my projection. I had more presbyteries than I expected going to zero, or very near zero, in just seven more years. After looking at my algorithm I realized that in my attempt to model “exodus presbyteries” that have accelerated losses I did not put an adequate “floor” on the losses and the membership numbers I projected just plummeted out of control. When time permits, and more data becomes available, I’ll be testing a couple of stabilizing approaches to make the projection more realistic by putting in a point where the exodus of whole churches has stopped.
It is interesting how this model going out of control is similar to models in my day job, except when those go out of control we just see it as “The Big One” on the San Andreas Fault.
That’s the problem with using statistical modeling to predict human behavior, isn’t it–we’re a little unpredictable, and there are often anomalies. [Some of our trustees have enjoyed reading The Black Swan.] I would imagine that there will always be one or two or three churches in any presbytery that remain active, and they will be sending presbyters to presbyteries.
It might be interesting to do an analysis of the life cycle of a Presbyterian church–such as the one we just closed. How long does it take a large church with 1000+ members to dwindle to almost zero, and what are the factors that contribute to that. In this case, one of the causes of death would seem to be a failure to understand and adapt to the surrounding culture.
I’m glad you’re involved with the Synod–you have much more patience than I do.
You point out one of the problems in my initial model, that the membership of the Presbytery could go negative. As you suggest, I now put a 2 yes and 2 no vote floor on each presbytery. I’m trying to figure out how to automatically “merge” presbyteries, but I’ll probably continue just taking them out when the floor is reached and not worry about transferring the imposed residual to a neighbor.
As for the anomalies, yes they are there but the idea is that with 173 presbyteries, that will be enough to average out the anomalies in a statistical sense. It is interesting that with the 28 presbyteries that have voted now you can already see the central limit theorem at work and a normal distribution developing in some of the metrics that I am looking at.