I was targeting my next update on the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assembly for about April 15, but within the last couple of days there have been two interesting developments worth mentioning.

The first is that the workers on the back side of PC-biz, the GA business web site, are now assigning action items to committees.  But in the on-line system there is an up-side and a down-side to this.  The positive is that we now see which committees will be dealing with what business, barring changes by Committee 2 – Bills and Overtures.  In particular, the “man behind the curtain” has been moving several items over to Committee 3 – General Assembly Procedures, and Committee 4 – Church Polity.  The problem is that in the assignment, while the back-end ID number seems to remain the same, the more user-friendly overture number or recommendation number gets removed and replaced with a committee item number.  For instance, Overture 86 on creating the Truckee Lutheran Presbyterian Church is now Committee item 04-10.  If you do the digging to look at the sponsor, it is then clear it came from a Presbytery, therefore it must be an Overture.  But there appears to be no reference kept to its overture number. C’est la vie

The second item of news is that Moderator candidate Bruce Reyes-Chow has announced that his Vice-moderator nominee is Dr. Rev. Bryon Wade.  Rev. Wade is the pastor of Davie Street Memorial Church (CitySearch calls it Davie Street Presbyterian Church as does the Presbytery congregations page) in Raleigh, NC, New Hope Presbytery.  While Bryon does not appear to match Bruce in “on-line presence,” (I’m now sure how many of us could) Bruce does list a Facebook page for him.  Rev. Wade is originally from Los Angeles and has served the denomination in a number of positions, including service on General Assembly Council.  Bruce comments that they have been friends for a couple of decades and share not only a history with the denomination but similar visions for it.

We can expect more Vice-Moderator information coming from the other candidates in the next few weeks.  At the latest, the Vice-Moderator nominees and the official bio and statements book will be out no later than May 7, the 45 day deadline before GA begins.

A few other developments:

Over on Presbyblog Bob Davies has his comments on many of the issues faced by General Assembly this year.  And Rev. Davies is taking these item by item so there is significent detail on several of them.  With so many significant pieces of business coming up we will see how many he gets through before GA begins.  However, one of the items he has commented on is the proposed General Assembly Council Mission Work Plan, currently knows as Recommendation 31.  Another fellow blogger, Michael Kruse, is on the GAC and is one of the authors of that work plan and has some comments on Bob’s discussion.

Finally, the PC(USA) General Assembly site has posted a Prayer for the General Assembly from the Book of Common Prayer on the GA Worship page.  Usually a couple of other organizations prepare prayer guides leading up to GA so we will keep watching for those.