Thoughts on Leadership — When Theology Intersects the Secular

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Well, we are in the final stretch of the U.S. presidential election. (Praise God!)  The major political conventions are over and those provided some surprises.  But throughout the multi-year campaigns faith, religion, spirituality and church attendance has been an issue like I can not remember in any previous election cycle. 

While I may be a GA Junkie I am not that much of a junkie for secular politics.  I follow it, but not closely.  I say this at the outset because this post 1) is intended to discuss the theological and religious aspects and not the secular implications, 2) this is based upon my observations which are not scientific or complete, and 3) feedback on theology is welcome but purely secular political comments will not be posted.

While a number of faith & politics issues have caught my attention, and continue to intrigue me, my thinking, overlap with the regular content of this blog, and reasonable citations lead me to comment on two areas today — experience and women in leadership.

Experience
I must admit to being a bit cynical about the political process and this political cartoon by Marshall Ramsey pushed both the cynicism button and made me laugh at how the whole “experience” thing has played out this campaign season.

I must admit that I find the experience argument in the presidential campaign to be somewhat amusing.  The charges, claims and counter claims should force one to think about what previous experiences are important and relevant.  Also, how much experience should one have in a particular position?  For the two “young, energetic and historic candidate[s] with little experience” I note that while one has almost twice as much experience as the other in a “national” office, neither has completed their first term in that office.

However, I am always amazed in the scriptures that God seems to chose the unlikely candidate for leadership.  Moses was a murderer on the run, David was the youngest of eight brothers and why would God chose the youngest, and many of Jesus’ disciples were not well placed in society or religion being working class, Galileans, and, horror of horrors, a tax collector.

But in each of the examples above, while the unlikely were chosen they either had, or would get important experience before they were thrust into leadership.  As a general rule when it comes to major Biblical leaders, the unlikely are chosen but they are prepared for their role.

I find there to be an interesting juxtaposition with the leadership selections made at this summer’s 218th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).  In the case of the Moderator, the Assembly chose a candidate with some experience in higher governing bodies, but with no experience as the Moderator of a middle governing body.  In the case of the State Clerk election the Assembly chose the candidate with the most experience as a Stated Clerk having served as both a Presbytery Stated Clerk and a General Assembly Associate Stated Clerk.

It has also struck me that in both the presidential and moderatorial election campaigns youth and associated lack of experience, seem to be related to change, new ideas, and renewal.  Right or wrong, if someone is younger they are more likely to be viewed as better connected with new ideas and new ways of doing things.  (I do realize that a political partisan might view it that “my candidate does but not that other one.”)

And for a final parting thought on this topic, check out this post by DP Cassidy over at In Hoc Signo.

Women in Leadership
Since the party conventions many religious blogs have taken up the topic of women in leadership in a way that I don’t remember from earlier in the election cycle.  After all, at any point in this election process there was always a female candidate in the race.

Maybe the highest profile blog to ask the question about women in political leadership but not uniformly in religious leadership is On Faith which asked its religious panel if this was hypocritical.  Needless to say the answers were across the spectrum, which is what that blog is about.  The blog Ethics Daily discussed a switch in position of Southern Baptist Leaders from the ten year old statement that women should be in the home to the position that it is OK for women to serve in high office.  And in the recent frenzy in the blogosphere you can find posts on Presbyterian blogs including the Bayly Blog, Conversational Theology, Tribal Church, and A Church for Starving Artists as well as other blogs, like Ethics Daily and Vintage Faith, that touch on this complimentarian discussion and the role of women, particularly if the secular world differs from religious leadership.

Two additional observations about this topic:
First, in the Pentecostal tradition there is a long standing tradition of women in leadership, with Aimee Semple McPherson being an example.
Second, in the presidential race why did this suddenly become such a hot topic in reformed circles right around the time of the conventions?  Political and denominational affiliation probably were in play as well as family responsibilities and having a new candidate to raise the topic again.  The questions related to women in leadership positions are valid ones, but lets either ask them uniformly or hypothetically.

Enough secular politics for now.  These are areas where the secular news has overlapped with what Presbyterians are dealing with right now.

UPDATE 9/16/08:  1) Thanks to the comment below I guess I need to refer to Conversational Theology as a “transient Presbyterian blog”   2)  Overnight Michael Kruse over at the Kruse Kronicle has posted a thoughtful and detailed piece on complimentarianism in the present political context.  He also points out an opinion piece on the USA Today web site that discusses it as well.

A Bit More On Property Cases

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First, my thanks to Lou for the additional info on the Kirk of the Hills case that he posted as a comment to my previous post.  He reports that there will be no written decision by the judge so I can stop watching for that and we won’t have any thing there to parse for the legal theory.  This will give us the state supreme court decision, when that is issued, as the next legal step in this case.

However, another case, that of All Saints Anglican Church of Rochester, New York, is a bit more advanced in the legal system.  The case, which I have mentioned before, is very similar to the Kirk of the Hills situation with a church that raised all the money to acquire the property and build the building before the “trust clause” and was then evicted from the building by the diocese.  Again, the church has lost legal decisions and the appeals are approaching the state supreme court.  In news reports today those associated with the case are suggesting that this could be the case that reaches the U.S. Supreme Court first.  It will be close since the California Episcopal Church Cases will go to that state supreme court in about a month so they might be the federal test case.

As always, stay tuned.

Summary Judgement in the Kirk of the Hills Property Case

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In the case CJ-2006-5063

The District Court for Tulsa County, Oklahoma granted summary judgment in favor of Eastern Oklahoma Presbytery and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) on September 9, 2008, and denied the motion for summary judgment of Kirk of the Hills.  Judge Jefferson Sellers enforced the decision of the Presbytery’s Administrative Commission and ordered Kirk of the Hills to convey the church’s real and personal property to Eastern Oklahoma Presbytery.  [from the Eastern Oklahoma Presbytery Press Release]

Tulsa County District Judge Jefferson Sellers ruled today that the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) and the Eastern Oklahoma Presbytery of the PCUSA (EOP) own the Kirk of the Hills property at 4102 E. 61st Street, under the denomination’s constitution. A constitutional provision inserted in 1983 provides that the denomination holds a trust interest in the property of a local church, even when the local church bought and paid for the property. The Kirk of the Hills paid for the property over the last four decades and the deeds are in the Kirk Corporation’s name. [from the Kirk of the Hills Press Release]

While I generally follow the property cases currently underway in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and The Episcopal Church, I usually leave the routine coverage of the cases to other sources.  (PresbyLaw, The Layman Online, Virtue Online)  The decision that was handed down yesterday in the case of Kirk of the Hills Church of Tulsa, Oklahoma (formally Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), now Evangelical Presbyterian Church) is notable in a couple of respects.

First, Kirk of the Hills is cited as the largest church, and one of the first churches, to depart from the PC(USA) following the 2006 General Assembly adoption of the PUP report.  This case was being watched by the churches as a test case of how the denomination and legal system would handle these cases.

This leads into the second interesting point, the legal theory of the decision.  The written decision has not appeared in the court database yet (if I’m checking the right database) but I’ll do a little reading between the lines of the press releases.  The Kirk press release is shorter (one page) and contains fewer legal details but the section I quoted at the beginning implies that their legal theory was that since the church has had deed to the property before the explicit trust clause then they own the property.  The Presbytery press release is richer in legal detail including part of the successful legal theory and says:

The Court followed the “hierarchical deference” approach in awarding the property to the Presbytery, which holds the property in trust for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).  Oklahoma has been considered a “hierarchical deference” jurisdiction since the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s ruling in 1973 in Presbytery of Cimmarron v. Westminster Presbyterian Church of Enid.

In reading through the press release it struck me that while the trust clause was mentioned above, it was always in the context of the church structure.  Furthermore, the Presbytery document places an emphasis on the Administrative Commission, like the opening quote above, as a demonstration of the PC(USA) hierarchical church.  It appears then, that the Administrative Commission and the process was a more significant legal argument than the trust clause alone and it seems to have worked in arguing against the Kirk’s argument about the trust clause.

While I look forward to reading this decision when made available somewhere, in skimming through the 1973 ruling, which relies heavily on the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Watson v. Jones (1871), it does not surprise me that with this legal precedent a District Court ruled in this way.  It seems that if Kirk is going to retain its property it will have to convince the current Oklahoma Supreme Court that this case differs from Cimmarron v. Westminster.

An appeal decision has not been made but is likely, according to the church press release.  Kirk and EOP have 20 days to make arrangements about the property under the judge’s order.

Beyond the legal arguments where does this leave everyone?  It seems that EOP will have a big empty box on its hands and a 2,400 member church with a 175 family preschool will be looking for a new location.  It is too soon to know what is going to happen here but I think both parties could use our prayers.  While this predates the GA action, maybe it is time to remember the “gracious, pastoral response.”

UPDATE 9/11/08:  The Presbyterian News Service has issued an article/press release on the decision which draws heavily on the Presbytery press release I also drew on.  But it is interesting that in News Service article they use the phrase “trust clause” and place an emphasis on that while I read the Presbytery’s release to emphasize the Administrative Commission process as being important.  I did find it interesting that the New Service article describes Kirk of the Hills departure with the more dramatic term “bolted” without any additional facts about the swiftness or legal proceedings to support the use of the term.  Terms like “departed,” “disaffiliated,” or “realigned” might have been more appropriate if the circumstances of the departure are not spelled out in the story to suppor the dramatic term.  I also found it interesting that the article describes the PC(USA) as a 2.3 million member denomination when at the end of 2007 the membership of 2,209,546 would round to 2.2 million members.  It could be habit, 2007 is the first year the PC(USA) would round to 2.2 million members, or it could be that we were 2.3 million members when the process started in 2006.

Also, I have still not found the full decision posted anywhere yet but…  PresbyLaw has info from the hearing where the decision was read and the report there is that the judge suggested that on appeal the court could go with “neutral principles” and that could go in favor of the church.

Finally, the word from other sources, included in PresbyLaw, is that the church will appeal.

Keeping the Lord’s Day — Revisited

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Regular readers of this blog know that I have half seriously/half humorously visited the topic of keeping the Lord’s Day before.  While I do have some fun with this topic, our family does try to keep in mind that this is a day set aside for God.  However it sometimes seems to be a far cry from a “day of rest” when we have five people all going in four different directions on a Sunday evening: our daughter to worship and my wife and I to our small group Bible study, while still needing to get the boys to their respective small group studies.  And while we may spend time on Sunday afternoons getting odd jobs done around the house, we do try not to go shopping or go out to eat.  And yes, like yesterday when I sat down and watched a bit of an MLS game and part of the Canada-Honduras soccer match, we do sometimes relax in front of the television, usually watching sports.

One thing that is interesting to note about the commandment to set a day apart for God is that it is the longest of the commandments.  It gives not just the command that nobody and no animal in the household is to do work, but also the rational that God worked for six days and rested on the seventh.  Any polity wonk would think that with that much documentation serious consideration should be given to it.

While I would say that our family is respectful but not legalistic about the Lord’s Day, an interesting poll and discussion has begun over on the PuritanBoard about “Is watching NFL Football a violation of the 4th commandment?”  At the moment in the poll the results are running 20-8 that it is a violation.

But what is more interesting is looking at the discussion.  This is not a simple yes/no question as the various issues brought up in the discussion address.  There are so many subtleties and aspects that it would make a group of rabbis debating the law proud.  Such issues as…

Is it a violation of the sabbath just because of what I do or also because those I am watching are working?

Is it a violation if I record the game on Sunday but watch it another day?

Is it a violation if I recorded it on Saturday and watch it on Sunday?

Does the Lord’s Day begin and end at midnight or at sunset and if it is that latter can I watch the late game?

Is participating in a PuritanBoard discussion work and so should PuritanBoard be shut down on the Lord’s Day?

So we Presbyterian and Reformed hold this, like other things, in the tension of taking God’s Word seriously while still being gracious and not legalistic about the commandments.

Statistics and “Missing” Information

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Over the last week I have had two conversations about statistics and in each case there is something missing or hidden if you just look at the information as presented in the table.  This was also an important point at a church committee meeting on Saturday where we were working on the 2009 budget.  Not statistics but financial data and the way that the accounting professionals presented it to us: while correct by their professional standards, it did not always make it straight-forward to understand exactly where the money was coming from and going to.

Statistics are frequently tricky and if you want proof of that from another perspective, and you are not already reading it, Bradley Wright, a professor of sociology interested in the sociology of Christianity has a series going right now on statistics at his blog, fittingly named, Bradley Wright’s Weblog.  I really enjoy his writing, but that may be because I am a fellow academaniac.

Anyway, here are the two I was discussing…

The first statistic:  Contemporary Christian Music
This one began with the observation that almost everything we sing in worship was “contemporary” at one time.  Like I explained to my kids yesterday (to the usual eye roll that Dad is doing it again) the two great Issac Watts hymns our preacher chose for worship (that they didn’t really care for) were significant because of the influence Watts had in moving English worship music away from the literal Psalter.  (And I do realize that there are some readers who consider that the beginning of the end for mainline Reformed worship.)

But what about contemporary worship music today.  One measure of what is being sung is the monthly list from Christian Copyright Licensing International, better known as CCLI.  This is who a church pays the small royalty fee to when they use modern music in worship for congregational singing.  Well the August 2008 list is now available and while it includes a few that our congregation regularly sings in worship most are not used in my church.  It is interesting that the list includes one song, Lord I Lift Your Name On High, with the incredibly low CCLI number of 117947.  (Like a serial number giving the approximate order it entered the CCLI catalog.)  Twenty two of the songs on the list have numbers above one million and many above four million.

The oldest list available from the search page is August 1997.  What is the latest and greatest on that list… You guessed it, good old 117947, Lord I Lift Your Name On High.  But as I look down the eleven year old list I recognize most of the songs as ones that we regularly sing in worship.  Is my church so out of date in singing these “traditional” songs that everyone else has passed us by so they no longer appear on the CCLI list?  No, when we, and other churches, sing them now it is “please open your hymnals to number 36.”

While the CCLI list is a useful tool for the “cutting edge” contemporary music, once a song has been widely adopted and enters the hymnals it drops off the CCLI list.  The CCLI list ceases to be a good measure of all “contemporary” worship music, at least if contemporary music goes back more than a few years.

(In putting this post together I found on the CCLI site the results of a survey they did of their license holders about music in worship.  What is the problem here?  It is the sample population.  If they only sampled their license holders they completely missed congregations that exclusively use printed material not requiring a CCLI license.  None the less, there is some interesting stuff in those statistics but I’ll leave that for another time.)

The second statistic:  Churches Leaving the PC(USA)
I make frequent mention of the Presbyterian Church (USA) annual statistics and the decline in membership numbers.  What is interesting is that while the number of members has declined by more than 2%, the number of churches has declined by less than 1%.  Yes, part of this is that the vast majority of churches in the PC(USA) are losing members, but part of the difference might be from how the PC(USA) accounts for the statistics when a church leaves the denomination.

As best as I can figure out, in the case where a congregation choses to disaffiliate, rather than request a transfer, and an administrative commission can identify a minority to continue the church, the result in the statistics is a large relative loss of membership, but no loss of a church.  I am not saying this is a false reporting of the information; it is a technically correct way to list the data.  I am just pointing out that it does mask the nature of the membership loss that occurred.  It almost seems we need a category for “continuing churches decimated by schism.”  Where are footnotes when you need them.

So that is what I have seen masked in how the statistics are reported.

Next Moderator of the Church of Scotland — The Process

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While I regularly blog the nominating process of the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, we have a different insight this year because another blogger,  the Rev. Louis Kinsey, is on the nominating committee for the Moderator of the 2009 GA and Louis is sharing his experience of serving on that committee on his blog Coffee with Louis.  The committee has had its first of two meetings and he shares with us his experience (but no names) from that meeting.

I look forward to hearing further from him.

Church of Scotland National Youth Assembly 2008

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If you have not picked up on the buzz, the excitement level is rising for the annual National Youth Assembly of the Church of Scotland which begins on Friday in Dundee.  Among the blogs that I follow, Stewart Cutler and Margaret McLarty seem particularly excited and I kind of wish I could be there too.  I look forward to what they have to say after the event, and they are both presenters in workshops.

This annual youth event has its own blog, wiki, and its Twitter keyword is NYA2008.  No traditional web site that I can find so it sounds like a very Web 2.0 event.  Lots of Twitter.  Pictures on flickr?
The four day event includes Debates (sounds like discussion sessions) on Sustainable Living, Social Media (“If you’re not online you don’t exist”), Healthy Relationships, Future Church (including a discussion topic of “The Rights and Rites of the Church”).  And the featured speakers and seminars strike me as a great mix of typical church-related topics (Mission, Bible Society, The Book of Revelation) and realities of life (parenthood, mental health).  A good looking event that seems to know their target audience.
So have fun and be sure to write.  (Based on the Twitter search that won’t be a problem.)

The Changes in the PC(USA) Ordination Exam on Biblical Exegesis — Brief Observations and Comments

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Last week the news broke, just in time for the latest round of ordination exams, that there would be changes to the grading of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Ordination Exam on Biblical Exegesis.  The Presbyteries Cooperative Committee on Examinations announced two changes: 1) “The demonstration of a working knowledge of Greek and/or Hebrew will no longer be a requirement in order to complete the examination successfully.”  2) The inquirers and candidates will be asked to offer a “faithful interpretation” rather than “a principle meaning” of the text.

According to a document from the PCCEC these changes come from input received during a self-study.  The committee has implemented the changes as a response to those concerns.

This one came in below my radar screen and I must thank the other bloggers I will reference below for alerting me to it.  They have all made their own comments about it, and most in more detail and focus than I will.  I simply wish to highlight a few issues in this discussion.

1.  The Future Is Now
Maybe the most important thing to come out of this, from my polity wonk viewpoint, is that this is the first highly visible change resulting from our new polity model.  While we may have been focused on the Form of Government revision (nFOG) from the Task Force and the 218th General Assembly that the Assembly referred to the presbyteries for further review, we need to remember that the revision to Chapter 14 of the current Form of Government, sent to the presbyteries by the 217th GA and approved by them, was in the same spirit as the nFOG.  This is a model that removes procedural details from the Book of Order and shifts it out to “manuals” to be written and approved by other agencies and governing bodies.  So now Chapter 14 simply says that there will be ordination exams and one of the topics that will be covered is “Biblical Exegesis” rather than giving specifics about the Exegesis exam and what particular details it will cover.

If the nFOG gets adopted expect a lot more of this.  Depending on how you look at it this is not necessarily a negative thing.  In this case, while the Cooperative Committee may have changed the grading of the exam, the door is now open for a presbytery’s Committee on Preparation for Ministry to adopt grading and interpretation of the exam that are stricter than previously specified in the Book of Order.

So, if the church as a whole does not like this change what do they do?  (I would note that between the many blogs I read and a Google search I have found only negative comments about this change by bloggers, but it is usually those objecting that shout loudest.  However, reading through the comments on the blog posts I reference there are positive comments about the change like this one from Adam Copeland.)  It is not clear to me that there is an established method for input and adjustment to these new manuals from the wider church other than expressing concern to the committee and supervising agency or council.  There are of course always Book of Order amendments.

For more on the change in polity regarding this I refer you to Pastor Bob.

2.  This Discussion Has Been Going On Throughout Global Presbyterian History
I won’t go into great detail here, but while Presbyterians have historically held higher education requirements than almost any other denomination, the exact nature of those requirements has been a topic of discussion from the very beginning and continues today.  Whether pastors can be trained at small specialized institutions instead of full-fledged universities was a topic of discussion in 18th century American Presbyterianism regarding the Log College and today in the Church of Scotland regarding Highland Theological College.

One of the issues that has been mentioned related to this level of theological training is the high failure rate, possibly related to uneven grading, for any of the more “subjective” or “interpretative” ordination exams.  (The polity exam also regularly comes up in this category.)  Again, read through the comments on some of the referenced blog posts for individual stories regarding conflicting graders’ comments.

3.  This Shifts But Does Not Necessarily Weaken The Standards
If the Cooperative Committee and their exam graders were the final word than a good case can be made that the standard is weakened.  There is a great series of posts by Mark D. Roberts (First, Second, Third, Fourth, Postscript) on the change and what the weakening of the original language requirement and the different meanings of “a principle meaning” versus “faithful interpretation” imply.  (There is more great discussion in the comments to these posts and Jim Berkley has a follow-up.)  I think we will have to wait a little bit to see how this change is actually implemented in the grading.

What this change has effectively done has highlighted the responsibility of the graders for interpreting that standard, and shifted the responsibility for judging the candidates ability with the original language to their Committee on Preparation for Ministry.  While the proficiency with the original languages will not be graded it will be commented on for the benefit of the CPM’s.  What will the CPM’s do with that?

In essence this change has moved some of the authority and responsibility from the central structure of the denomination back out to the presbyteries.  It is now up to the CPM’s to take this new responsibility seriously, but you can bet that through differing levels of oversight and differing philosophies there will be a less uniform standard for candidates certified ready to receive a call.

A personal reaction:  First, I am a ruling elder and never had to suffer through ordination exams.  (Want to trade for my doctoral exams?)  However, having had formal Latin training and a few “kitchen table” classes on Greek, I have a rudimentary knowledge of that original language.  (Sorry, no functionality for Hebrew.)  I do sometimes follow sermons in my Greek text and have done my best to work with both the Greek and transliterated Hebrew on the few times I have preached.  From this background I am sorry to see original language ability disappear as an explicit requirement for the exam and if the exam grading remains like this I hope the CPM’s will still seriously evaluate a candidate’s functionality with the original languages when deciding if they are certified ready to receive a call.

Women in Ordained Ministry in the Church — Current Discussion and Some Thoughts

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The first item, or actually two items, of news relates to the ongoing discussion in the Presbyterian Church in America about the role of women in the diaconate.  You may remember that at their General Assembly back in June there was a significant discussion about establishing a study committee to look at this issue and the various aspects of ordination versus commissioning versus participation.  In the end the Assembly decided not to establish the study committee but to continue the discussion in the denomination, including through the process of records review.

As part of that continuing discussion the PCA publication byFaith has just published on-line a pair of articles that do a great job of presenting two of the aspects of this issue:

The Case for our Current Policy on Female Deacons by Ligon Duncan

The Case for Commissioning (Not Ordaining) Deaconesses by Tim Keller

Each of the articles is well written for a knowledgeable but not scholarly audience.  For instance, they presuppose that you know a bit about the issue and are familiar with the concepts of complementarianism and egalitarianism.  But they do a good job of discussing relevant points in the history of the debate as well as theological and scriptural issues without your eyes glazing over when presented with the Greek vocabulary.

It is also important to point out that the articles are written by two high-profile and respected teaching elders in the PCA with somewhat different views, but who both acknowledge, if not affirm, the present constitutional standard of the PCA that only men may hold any ordained office.  They also affirm the constitutional standard that women are to be involved in the diaconate ministry.  The articles discuss two different approaches to that involvement.

For those of us not in the PCA this is not an unrelated issue.  Between the PCA, with no ordination of women, and the PC(USA), with full ordination of women, there is the Evangelical Presbyterian Church with “local option” ordination.

As the movement of churches disaffiliating from the PC(USA) began and these churches generally realigned with the EPC, there were concerns raised about the status of women’s ordinations in the realigned churches.  In particular, Presbyterians for Renewal had an article in their 12 reasons to stay in the PC(USA) on “The PC(USA) Affirms and Encourages Women.”  (All of my links to that original article are now broken but there is a post at Renewing.NewCastleFPC.org that has the original list of 12 reasons to stay in the PC(USA).)  There was also a series of articles by the Network of Presbyterian Women in Leadership titled “Has anyone asked the women?”

In thinking about this I wondered “How much of an issue is this at the present time?”

So in my morning coffee break and over lunch today I did a quick survey.  I took the EPC list of churches in the New Wineskins/EPC Transitional Presbytery and did a quick, and probably unscientific, look at all listed web sites to see how many had women on staff who were ordained as ministers.  I would first note that of the 30 churches on the list, there is only one with a woman as the solo/senior/head pastor.  In total I found about six women in what appeared to be ordained pastoral positions at these 30 churches.  (I gave one or two ambiguous names the benefit of the doubt as being women and on some church web sites technical titles that a GA Junkie would want were absent, so again I had to make my best judgment if the individual was ordained.  I also included one commissioned lay pastor.  Like I said, it was quick, “back of the envelope,” and unscientific.)  My best count from the web sites is that there are at least 66 total ordained ministers at these churches.  At six out of 66 there are about 9% ordained women serving in these churches.  So in reality, while six individuals may have an issue when the transitional presbytery dissolves (depends on the status of women in the presbyteries these churches will be transferred into), 91% will have no problem.  (Interestingly, I just called up the PC(USA) 2007 statistics, and while they break out male/female elders and deacons, they don’t for ministers.  But I would bet that the percentage of ministers in the PC(USA) who are women, while less than 50% is more than 9%.  I did a count of my presbytery membership and it is 15%.  For ministers serving churches it is 22% in my presbytery.)

It is interesting to consider the reasons for this low percentage of women in ordained ministry in these churches.  I am not aware of a departure of women from the church as the church departs for the EPC.  Maybe there is already a “corporate culture” at these churches that gives them an affinity for the EPC including the lower likelyhood of women in ordained office.  Or you could play thought games with the cause and effect:  “Because they have few women in leadership they have an affinity for the EPC” or “Because they have an affinity for the EPC they have few women in leadership.”  While not losing sight of the fact that these churches are realigning with the EPC for other reasons, the issue of women in ordained leadership, or not in leadership as the case may be, appears to be an associated factor.

But at another level it is an issue.  Over the last couple of months I’ve had conversations with two women attending my church about their sense of call to ordained ministry.  For both, because of “where they are,” ordained ministry in their present situation is not an option, whether it be denominational membership or seminary attendance.  They are still talking to God about whether the call is authentic and if so should they make a change in their situation.

And given time, maybe this will not be an issue with the EPC.  I have speculated that with a continued or increased realignment of churches from the PC(USA) to the EPC there can’t but help being a certain “PC(USA)-isation” of the EPC which I expect will include the spreading of women’s ordination under local option, if not the approval of the ordination of women across the denomination.  As I frequently say, time will tell.

8th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana

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At this time there is less coverage of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana than the General Synod of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, Ghana.  It is currently meeting so maybe there will be more news later in the week when it concludes.

One article from Ghana Web focuses on the comments of the Moderator, the Rev. Dr. Yaw Frimpong-Manso in his Moderatorial sermon yesterday.  He encouraged the PCG churches “to pray for peaceful, transparent, free and fair elections.”  He also commented on the political process saying “As we work towards
Election 2008, let us pray for presidential and parliamentary
candidates who seek office because they see themselves as a call to
serve God and his people and not themselves first.”

I have noted previously that the Rev. Frimpong-Manso is forthright and outspoken when commenting on the moral state of society.  According to this article he also addressed that in his sermon:

Rt. Rev.
Frimpong-Manso said Satan had re-packaged immorality, bribery and
corruption, ethnicity, alcoholism, among others, “so that they are now
called weaknesses worth tolerating”. He appealed to Christians to be
watchful and lead upright lives and said “today we encounter forces of
division and rancour, sexual promiscuity, murder and crimes as well as
forces of family breakdown and breakdown in cherished values of
society”.


The Assembly also heard the call for churches to work for peaceful elections in a statement from Ghana’s President Kufuor that was read to the Commissioners, according to another story from Ghana Web.

In addition, Rev. Frimpong-Manso reported on the project to construct a new conference center and he reported on the church’s television ministry.  For both projects he appealed for the church’s continued financial support of these ministries.

As the week goes on we will see if additional news stories give us more information about the Assembly.