I can’t remember if I said that I’ll resume live blogging when the plenary reconvenes on Wednesday afternoon.  Today, and probably tomorrow, I spent moving between committee meetings.  I did not see very much through from start to finish but did spend larger chunks of time in Committee 8 – Mission Coordination and Budget and Committee 5 – Church Orders.  I’ll talk about Committee 8, and a couple of others, in briefer detail in a following post, but let me make some comments on Church Orders here.

First, Church Orders is our polity wonk name that is mainly ordination standards so they are dealing with, among other things, PUP report issues and G-6.0106b “fidelity and chastity” issues.

I came in during the overture advocates presentations on 05-03 and 05-18 which were linked together.  Both of these deal with examinations under PUP, commending presbyteries for working on their examination procedures and asking the stated clerk to compile best practices.  And both overtures cite that acknowledgment of sexual orientation must be self acknowledged and the examining body must be consistent in questioning.  And interestingly, in the Standing Rules each overture gets three minutes to speak to the overture, but for 05-03 there were nine concurring presbyteries who also get time.  Lumped together that was eleven speakers total so they had 33 minutes.  The pooled their presentations, it was scripted, choreographed, and with a great PowerPoint presentation.  And it was loaded with scriptural and polity arguments.

Of those polity arguments, two struck me as “interesting.”

The first was their take on the GAPJC “Bush v. Pittsburgh Presbytery” decision last February.  Their claim was that in the Bush decision the GAPJC lifted “fidelity and chastity” to a higher standard since an exception could not be declared for it.

Specifically the Bush decision says:

So in a technical sense the GAPJC did set this higher, but as they say it was not really themselves that set it higher, but rather “The church has decided…”, it is the whole church by including it in the constitution.  A little later they generalize this with:

Although G-1.0301 permits broad freedom of conscience for members of the church, “in becoming a candidate or officer of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) one chooses to exercise freedom of conscience within certain bounds” (G-6.0108b). G-6.0108a defines the limits of this freedom of conscience for ordained church officers.

One of the interesting arguments made by the overture advocates was that we don’t need to over legislate this but to trust the presbyteries and correct this in the review process inherent in our connectional system.  This is almost exactly the same argument made, and exhibited, at the Presbyterian Church in America General Assembly just concluded when they decided that they did not need a study committee to consider the ordination of women to the diaconate since changes to polity should come from the presbyteries and then later the same day in the review of presbytery records considered an “unsatisfactory exception” when a presbytery’s examination of a teaching elder for membership did not fully examine and classify his views in favor of women elders.  For more on this check out the comment by Scott to my discussion of the debate at the PCA GA.

The other polity item that struck me was the reference to the previous GAPJC decisions and the commissioners’ comments about not being able to ask but that the sexual orientation must be self-acknowledged.  For the most part that is correct, but I would like to clarify from the headnotes of Weir v. Second Presbyterian Church, case 214-5:

Self-acknowledgment: The plain language of the Constitution clearly states that disqualified persons must have self-acknowledged the proscribed sin. Self-acknowledgment may come in many forms. In whatever form it may take, self-acknowledgment must be plain, palpable, and obvious and details of this must be alleged in the complaint.

Examination of Candidates for Ordination and/or Installation: The ordaining and installing governing body is in the best position to determine whether self-acknowledgment is plain, palpable, and obvious, based on its knowledge of the life and character of the candidate. If the governing body has reasonable cause for inquiry based on its knowledge of the life and character of the candidate, it has the positive obligation to make due inquiry and uphold all the standards for ordination and installation.

While the self-acknowledgment need not be verbal, reasonable cause is necessary to investigate further.

As I noted, the overture advocates for these overtures received a significant amount of time due to the number of concurring presbyteries.  After a question from a commissioner, a short conversation with the Stated Clerk, and then praying about it over dinner, the chair of the committee agreed that in fairness the overture advocates for overtures recinding the PUP report should have additional time.

The nature of all these presentations up to this point, filled with scriptural and polity arguments, differed markedly from the presentations that followed regarding the removal or modification of G-6.0106b, the fidelity and chastity section.  These appealed to love, justice, fairness, gifts, call, and pain with very little discussion of scripture or polity.  Needless to say, the theme passage for the General Assembly, Micah 6:8, was regularly cited.

Well, that was the most polity intensive and nuanced discussion I heard today.  Not even the Revised form of Government comments were that good.  So that wraps up Church Orders.  Next I’ll prepare some discussion of the other committees I checked in on.