The PC(USA) General Assembly — Saturday Afternoon Reflections

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As the commissioners are being “oriented” this afternoon there is no business going on and I have been kicking back and chatting.

One big topic of conversation is the Moderator election this evening.  Having been in several conversations about this, at this point there seems to be a consensus that there is no consensus.  For the last 24 hours the candidates have been doing a “meet and greet” in the lobby during breaks and all four with their four Vice-moderator candidates have been doing a great job.



When I took these pictures this morning I somehow missed Roger and Peter.  Sorry, I’ll try to get you in here.  But what was missing from the other side of the table were the YADs who were still at breakfast.  Yesterday afternoon as people were milling about talking to the candidates there was a clear trend for the youth to be attracted to Bruce’s little space.  I apologize for the term Bruce, but you were a “YAD magnet.”

The attraction of the youth to Bruce may be attributed his high-gear Web 2.0 presence.  It could also be related to the fact that Bruce is the youngest of the candidates, or maybe even his ideas and positions.  We will have to see if that translates to excitement with the commissioners who actually make the decision.

The groups I have been in think the current favorites are Bill and Bruce, but almost everyone also agrees that many of the commissioners’ minds will probably be made up during the speeches and Q&A tonight.  And that is the working of the Holy Spirit in this process.

I would make one further comment about the afternoon session, and this is the pleasure we had of having the Very Rev. Sheilagh Kesting, immediate past Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, open the session in prayer at the invitation of our Moderator.  Thank you.

Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad

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Fifty years ago today my parents were married at a historic Presbyterian Church.  They now have many great years together, three children, three children-in-law, five grandchildren, and lots of friends of which many have been with them through the fifty years.  It is a marriage well practiced and lives well lived.

Looking at our family, it is in some ways a cross-section of the mainline churches today.  Now there are some differences, one of which is that we, my parents and all my baby-boomer siblings and all the grandchildren, are presently active in churches.  But in the youngest generation the mainline is losing its hold.

With my parents, myself, and my siblings, we take the mainline church seriously.  Besides my service as an elder, including the stint as a presbytery officer and now the synod circuit, my parents are elders and deacons.  My wife is an elder and deacon as well.  My sister is an elder and her husband is a Minister of Word and Sacrament and was a TSAD.  And of course, their grandson is, at this moment, a YAD.  From the foundation and example my parents gave us we have continued to find our connection to Presbyterianism.

So Mom and Dad — Congratulations, thank you, and well done!  Love Ya!

The PC(USA) General Assembly — Live Blogging Saturday Morning 1

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Greetings — I will be live blogging most sessions of the PC(USA) General Assembly.  I apologize to those with e-mail feeds or a feed reader since you will probably only get the first section of the post since I’ll be pushing update throughout the session.  Also, if you are reading this on a browser live you will also need to refresh the screen since I don’t have push technology on my blog.  It’s tough being Web 1.99999 in a Web 2.0 world.  Thanks for your patience.

Saturday Morning, June 21, 2008
The 218th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
10:00  — The commissioner chairs are filling up.  People are filing in.  The soothing background music is playing. (I could have done with great hymns of the faith) And camera operators are ready.

There has been some questions this morning about internet access.  It turns out that there is WiFi in the hall, but you can only get to PC-biz

10:01  The Assembly is called to order with the gavel and prayer by the Moderator of the 217th GA, the Rev. Joan Gray.  Including a long period, a couple of minutes, or silence.

10:04 — Cliff Kirkpatrick leads a litany followed by the Servant Song.    Interesting this was also used in opening by the Church of Scotland GA this year.  Except with stings instead of keyboard.

10:12 — Commissioners and delegates are asked and answer the questions of “commissioning”

Another prayer, litany, and hymn “Come O Spirit, Dwell Among Us” sung to Ebenezer.

10:20 — The General Assembly is now commissioned and we move on to formalities.
A quorum is declared, corresponding members seated, and welcome from COLA.

10:30 — Move on to promotional videos and official welcome and gift to Moderator and Vice-moderator:  hand-crafted wooden boxes.

10:41 — Robert Wilson assumes the gavel and Joan Gray gives the moderator’s report with her usual humor.

We then have the report of the Vice-moderator and we are not up to the GAC report

The GAC church growth segment highlights the Highlands Church in Paso Robles, California, which has recently become the “poster child” for church planting in this day and age.

11:20 — Move on to Nominating Committee and an overview of the nominations from the floor process for challenging committee nominees

11:25 — Finance overview and financial implications.  They are listing what is covered under per capita, but there are possible changes to what budget items can be covered by per capita before this GA.  But the possible change to the mission budget, to the tune of an increase of $13,000,000, that would be caused by the proposed shift is presented as either full disclosure, or maybe a threat.

11:35 — The morning agenda has been concluded.  The afternoon is orientation so I probably will not live blog that.  Maybe a post or two of other business, but live blogging will resume this evening for the Moderator election.

The 218th General Assembly of the PC(USA) — The Journey Begins

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The marathon begins!

As I chatted with commissioners at the end of the day today they talked about how tiring a day it was.  And this was the preparatory day.  Things actually get underway tomorrow.  Today was about orientation and training.  Just wait until 1 AM on Friday night, that would actually be Saturday morning, as you still have one committee report to finish before you can go to bed.  Well, we will get there in a week.

But Today… Sed Hodie

Actually yesterday, YAD Philip, my son, made it to San Jose without any problem, got checked in, and began “YADding.”  I’ll talk more about the YAD program another time, but they keep them too busy for them to really get into trouble even though we had to sign a waiver that we understood there would be no “adult” supervision.  One of the highlights for him was riding on the shuttle bus from the airport next to Mr. Robert Wilson, Vice-moderator of the 217th GA and talking to him.  My Son The YAD seems to be doing fine when I chatted with him briefly today.  One thing he did note during the antiracism training for commissioners and delegates was that over lunch before the training the YAD’s were talking about how in their generation/culture it is not racism as it has been in the past as much as drawing lines of who is in and who is out on other criteria:  where you live, what you do, etc.

As for me, I grabbed a flight on Southwest up here and made it early afternoon.  The flight was on a new airplane, was on-time, had that little bit of Southwest’s stand-up comedy from the flight attendants (including a couple of bits I had not heard before), cost me nothing extra to check a bag, and cost less than filling up my truck twice.  But I was not the only Presbyterian on the flight.  One good friend, a few faces I recognized, and a few that were new faces to me but the “frozen chosen” stood out in the crowd.  And folks, we may like the back pews in church, but we’ll take the front seats on a plane.
Had a nice clear day for flying and it is well known among the geologists that the flight path from LA to the Bay Area follows the San Andreas fault, visible as the linear valley running from lower left to upper right in the picture.

From the airport we had a nice ride on the shuttle bus to the convention hotels and it was an honor to help a former Moderator of the GA with their luggage.

The convention center area is convenient.  There is a light rail system to help get around but most things are walking distance including San Jose State University.  I will note that I think the drivers are even crazier here than in LA LA land.  Be especially careful of cars looking like they are about to pull a right-on-red.  Then again, it is Friday evening and we Angeleno’s are at our driving “best” then as well.  After all, “L.A. is a great big freeway.”  And I do regularly confess that when I am driving is when I am probably my least Christ-like.

After checking in I got registered and started looking for friends old and new, including a number of the virtual kind.  I’ll have a few more days to do business but I did take care of some of that today.  But the surprise of the exhibit hall is that the Office of Evangelism and Church Growth and presbygrow.net has put the Easter card from Mission Bay Presbyterian Church on a t-shirt.  Had to have one.  All it took was agreeing to be on the e-mail list.  (I would also note that as I called up the web site to link it I see that the Office of Evangelism and Church Growth has changed their subdirectory from “/churchgrowth/” to “/goodnews/”  Sending a message with that one!)

I got a little time to talk to Moderator/Vice-moderator candidates but I’ll do more of that Saturday morning.  I also ran into a bunch of people I know mostly from the Web 2.0 world.  It was great to put names and faces together in the “face-to-face” world.  It got me thinking about what the wider electronic community of the Church Virtual misses when it does not gather in person.  Sunday worship will be an interesting experiment in technology as we gather in two large “arena” worship spaces but with a television feed between to share parts of the service.

I finished the evening at the Church Basement Roadshow at First Presbyterian Church of San Jose, just a few blocks from the convention center area.  A little on the Roadshow in a moment, but I was also struck by the church.  It is very “utilitarian” architecture with a sanctuary (worship space?) with theater seating for a bit over 100 that with some minor modifications could be just another lecture hall.  But it is a historic church and this is the third building they have had in their history.  One of their members spent a great deal of time telling me the history of the church.  The first building was destroyed in the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, a reminder that San Francisco, while large and having the great fire, was not the only city devastated by that earthquake.  The second building became “unsafe” and the current space was built in 1972.  There are stained-glass windows from the previous building hanging over the current windows.  While preserving the past this looks like an example, at least in its architecture, of a church that moved on to modern or post-modern thinking early on.  And what’s this about a church basement, this is California and most residences, churches, and small commercial spaces don’t have basements.

As for the Roadshow, I found it entertaining and moving.  I need to say that it is part entertainment.  It is also part promotional with the corporate sponsors and each of the principals having books on the market.  And the bucket was passed with a suggested donation of $10. (Although it seemed around me that less than half put anything in.) But it also included three significant “testimonies,” even if tied to the books.  After reflecting on this I have decided not to thoroughly review or deconstruct the evening in case others will be seeing the roadshow later on.  Getting back to the “face-to-face” thing, you should hear the testimonies in their original voice first.  But I will comment that one speaker shared a story similar to Augustine’s with “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in YOU.”  It was also a critique that as God is working in our hearts, salvation is not a “one-size-fits-all” “four spiritual laws” path to salvation, but when God calls, the call may come differently for everyone.  It is where your heart is broken and there is a place for emotions in your spiritual life.  Another testimony picked up on where your heart is broken and the call to covenant community.  The theme of love was present throughout the evening, but not in the general sense that “God is Love,” but in a very real and tangible sense of love for others in the covenant community, really caring about your brothers and sisters in Christ.  And also, like the remaining testimony talked about, loving like Jesus loved for the outcast and marginal.  The show is not for everyone.  But if you want some entertainment with some hard-hitting stories consider it.  I thought it was an evening well spent and an interesting voice about the body of Christ in the future.

As for tomorrow, this little piece of the body of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) convenes it’s General Assembly in the morning.  Back then.

The 28th General Assembly of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church

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We are now in the midst of the 28th General Assembly of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, being held in Bethesda, Maryland.  By most Presbyterian standards four days is relatively short for a GA.

Since I am currently focusing on another General Assembly that starts tomorrow, and still have two blog entries each to finish from the Church of Scotland, PCA, and my GA 101 series, I’ll have to play catch-up later on the EPC meeting.  However, I don’t feel too bad doing that since the Rev. David Fischler from The Reformed Pastor is attending and blogging.  I would also note, and David confirms, that the Rev. Bill Crawford from Bayou Christian is there as well and I would expect his comments at some point in the future.  The event is properly covered.

But some think that the real EPC fireworks will be over at the PC(USA) where an overture makes accusations of “sheep stealing” (the polite term the overture uses is “persuade” but other stronger terms are being used in private conversation) and some in the PC(USA) want an investigation and cutting formal ties with the EPC.

Blessings on the EPC meeting and I’ll try to cross-correlate later.

What’s Shaking in San Jose?

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First, this is what you get when you have a GA Junkie that has just turned in his course grades and now has a bit more time on his hands…

Second, if you are coming to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assembly in San Jose from some place else in the country where you don’t worry about earthquakes and the thought of earthquakes may be worrying you, you may not want to continue reading.  On the other hand, “knowledge is power” and having this info may help calm nerves.  (And you can think of that “may” in our polity sense.)

In case you haven’t caught it from one of my previous posts, my day job includes earthquake geology.  And you might have noticed in the GA Program that on Monday afternoon there is “Mission Tour 4: Hike through earthquake country” that includes a visit to the San Andreas fault.  (And no, I’m not planning on going since I’m there for the GA business.)

On the plus side, I would encourage you to be aware of earthquakes and be prepared for them.  The mantra here is “Duck, cover and hold,” although I joke with my class that “Don’t Panic” works too.  That is duck under something solid, cover yourself with that solid object, and hold on to it so it does not shake away from you.  Standing in door frames is not the current preferred safe zone since we finally figured out that most door frames also have a door attached to them and sometimes that door wants to use the frame with you so people were getting hit by the door.  If you want more info, the standard reference around these parts is “Putting Down Roots in Earthquake Country,” and check out the San Francisco edition.

If you want more info:  There is the real time earthquake map of the San Francisco area and a slightly different map with more around San Jose.  There is also a page on Bay Area Earthquake Probabilities from the USGS.

Around here we usually calculate probabilities on a 30 year time period, as in there is a 99.7% chance that California will have a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake in the next 30 years.  And around here that is not called a forecast, that is a reminder.

What about for next week?  Well the good news is that there has not been a large one in the area for a while so there are no really active aftershock sequences to provide any shaking.  As for regional quakes, based on regional probabilities there is about a 10% chance that the San Francisco Bay area will have a magnitude 4 or larger earthquake in any given week. (If you want the gory details, the G-R magnitude relationship, based on the last 20 years of seismicity, is log N = 6.04 – 1.33 M.  N is the number of earthquakes in a year larger than magnitude M.)

But “California does have its faults” and San Jose is sandwiched between the big ones in the Bay Area: the San Andreas about 15km to the west and the Hayward and Calaveras faults about 10km east.  Running some rough numbers based on the State of California fault information for the area the San Andreas fault to the north and to the south, if treated as separate earthquake sources, could each produce something a bit over a magnitude 7.  No surprise here since the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake was a 6.9 on that southern segment.  The Calaveras and Hayward faults are about the same.  But the closest fault to the west is the much less active Monte Vista thrust fault about half way to the San Andreas.  Add up all their probabilities and you get about a 0.03% chance of having a large earthquake on one of these faults in the next week.

So there you are — Welcome to California.  And I’ll see you there.

Then
a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the
rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind
there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. – I Kings 19:11b, 12 NIV

Moderator of the Church of Scotland Now Blogging

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Well, the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland has started blogging.  The first, I think, entry is about the visit of six Malawians to Glasgow.

It will be interesting to see how this develops.  At the moment the blog is a page on the Church of Scotland web site and not hosted using the more typical CMS blog software.  When a new post is added we will have to see if it replaces the previous or they are available on the same page or the older one is archived.  And if there is an RSS feed I have not found it yet.  And as you can tell, this is not Web 2.0.  It is more like a weekly update or reflection from the Moderator and without comments it is not interactive.  We will see if this evolves.

A Paperless GA? Not quite.

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This year I have had an inside view to the pre-GA ramp-up through my son the YAD.  (YAD= Youth Advisory Delegate – one youth from each presbytery who has an advisory vote. Except in committee where it is a full vote.)  I can tell you that GA has not gone completely “paperless.”  Yes, the paper for official functions and business might have been minimized, but for the last two months he has been the dominant recipient of mail in our household. 

The official mailings are not like they were “back in the day” when a three-inch binder was required to hold all the pre-meeting paper, but there is still some paper even here.  This includes some official paperwork that just can’t be done electronically.  There are also some pieces of business that get mailed out, notably a nice published copy of the Revised Form of Government (rFOG).  This came out in the same dimensions as the current Book of Order so you can see how it would look and how much less space it would take on your book shelf.  He has also gotten communication about arrangements and committee work via snail mail.

The first mailings by affinity groups were two books related to the current ordination standards debate that he received from progressive groups.  I will give them credit getting the information out early so the commissioners have plenty of time to look them over in advance.  However, for the YAD’s, or at least this one, it was not the best since it was the final stretch of the school year and preparing for the GA was not on the radar screen.  They got shelved but he has gotten back to skimming them in the last couple of weeks.

Probably the next piece of material to arrive was the item that interested him the most — the Presbyterian Outlook.  For those of you at the Outlook, good move and thank you.  He found it succinct, topical, interesting, and relevant.  The sort of thing a student can pick up and cover one article in a short sitting between other things in a busy life.  In my opinion, getting the Outlook for a few weeks did more to prepare him for GA than any other information he received in the mail this spring.

And then there have been the letters.  Many groups have sent him letters explaining their positions on issues.  Most have been from affinity groups advocating their positions on issues before GA.  A good portion of these, including the letter from six U.S. congressmen who happen to be Presbyterian, have been about the church’s stance on Israel/Palestine.  One day when I got home from work and asked him about that day’s mail he joked that one position letter that day began by saying it was “brief” but turned out to be almost as long as all the other position letters of the day combined.  In addition he also got a couple of letters from church sessions advocating for overtures that they had initiated and their presbyteries had sent on to GA.

As you can see, he has been reading his mail, especially since school got out.  But in talking with him the other day he seems most impressed and touched by the hand written cards and notes that say nothing more than “Thank you for serving at GA.  I/We/Our church will be praying for you.”  I think these have helped him capture the image of the church not as our individual congregation, or the local groups of churches that Dad keeps running off to work on committees with, but as a much, much larger group of churches and people across the country that will be working together next week to see where God is leading them.  To all of you, and especially Community Pres. in Pittsburg, California, thanks to you, and please keep praying.

The Future of the Mainline Church — An Update

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In just about a week we can expect the membership statistics from the Presbyterian Church (USA) for the close of 2007.  In years that General Assembly meets the numbers are usually officially released as part of the GA.  It seems that there are rumors circulating that the membership loss, primarily due to churches disaffiliating and transferring, will be two to three times larger than last year.  One friend has seen an advanced copy of the new statistics and thinks they are in line with the preceding year.  When the official numbers and category break-downs are released we can see who is correct and what other interesting features we see in the data.  But this past week the Southern Baptist Convention at their annual meeting had to confront their stagnation in growth (16.30 million last year versus 16.27 million this year) and graying of their flock.  (Atlanta Journal Constitution article)

Over the last few months since the previous discussion back in March, and the release of the Pew Foundation report that was part of it, there have been a couple of other interesting items that have come up.

The first of these is a post at the end of May by Michael Kruse over at Kruse Kronicle titled “The Decline of Mainline Denominations… for 150 years?”  The data comes from the book The Churching of American, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark.  The point of that analysis is that while the number of members in mainline denominations began declining in the 1960’s, the growth of those denominations fell behind U.S. population growth about a century earlier.  And the graphs Michael posts are for denominational groups not individual branches.  But if you are looking at Presbyterians over the last century and a half you need to look at them in a way that deals with all the splitting and reuniting.

Also from the end of May, The Lead on the Episcopal Cafe web site pointed to a significant USA Today commentary about the study and the trends.  The commentary points out that the dominant trends of stable and growing “traditional” churches is either high birth rates or immigrants that keep the number up.  Mainline churches are in decline because they don’t benefit from either of these effects.  This was noted in the Pew report, but the point of the commentary was that the solution may be “Mainline Megachurches.”  Not a far-fetched idea from my experience since in my presbytery over 10% of the members are in one larger church which probably is not even large enough qualify as a megachurch.  And in the surrounding areas I can point to a few larger Presbyterian churches that seem to dominate the landscape.  However, I would also point out that in a quick evaluation of what I know about these churches they do strike me as tending to the evangelical side and a few are part of the New Wineskins movement and are considering departure.  I would not be surprised if the churches moving from Episcopal to Anglican would also fit into the same description.  But in line with the article from Michael Kruse these shifts are between denominational branches not across denominations.

While this may be a significant approach, as I have said previously my anecdotal evidence suggests that two out of three of my kids prefer the style, fellowship, and teaching they get at more evangelical non-mainline church youth groups.

But the last word on this for today comes from the six-year-old daughter of a friend of ours at church.  Now before I tell the story I would say that our church is a stable, multi-generational, 250-ish member PC(USA) congregation.  So, on the way to church today the child asks her dad why there are “so many old people” at our church.  The dad said that he gave an answer about the denomination being a “mature church” and tending to have more older people.  The girl responded “Then we need some new members because they are almost 100.”  While that may not be as much of a problem for our particular church, she pretty much nailed it for the denomination at large.

The Presbyterian Church in Ireland Takes The Church and Technology to the Next Level

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Thanks to Alan in Belfast, who is one of the organizers of this, now youth can attend a church summer camping experience on technology now in its fourth year.  Yes, for youth ages 13 to 16 who would rather twitter than sing around a campfire there is a dorm-hosted Presbyterian Church in Ireland summer experience where they can learn to use technology and visit some great technological sites.  You can check out Alan’s description or the official web site.  And the “powers that be” would not let it be called “Geek Camp.”