LOUISVILLE — A task force charged with revising the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Form of Government (FOG) has backed away from its proposed rewrite of the PC(USA) Constitution’s theological underpinnings (chapters 1-4 of The Book of Order).
The task force was authorized by last summer’s 217th General Assembly to revise the FOG to make it more flexible for presbyteries and congregations. Some members of the task force had drafted a new section to replace the first four chapters.
But instead of recommending this new section entitled “The Foundations of Presbyterian Polity,” the nine-member Form of Government Task Force tentatively decided at its April 12-14 meeting here to submit both “Foundations” and the existing first four Book of Order chapters to the 2008 assembly and let commissioners decide which they prefer.
“The first four chapters are already widely perceived as foundational,” said the James H.Y. Kim, a task force member and pastor of Trinity Church in suburban Dallas. “So any change is perceived as threatening in evangelical circles where I travel,” he said, adding that he’s heard opposition to the revision “on the other side as well.”
Steve Smith, stated clerk of Pacific Presbytery, agreed. “I don’t think people will buy the rest of the document if they can’t get past the foundational revisions,” he said.
The task force voted 6-3 to submit both versions and let the assembly decide. Mark Tammen, director of constitutional services for the Office of the General Assembly called the approach “unusual but not unprecedented.”
Most task force members seemed willing to concede their “Foundations” version for the sake of the overall FOG revision.
The 2006 assembly asked the task force to create a new FOG that “shall provide flexibility at all levels, granting authority while permitting governing bodies to develop the structures to carry out their respective missions.”
It specifically excluded G-6.0106b (the “fidelity and chastity” requirement for church officers) and G-8.0201 (which declares that all church property is held in trust for the denomination and is not owned by the local congregation) from the process.
The current FOG is 18 chapters and 148 pages long, including the first four foundational chapters. The task force’s revision reconfigures the Book of Order into the “Foundations of Presbyterian Polity” plus six chapters of polity:
The Particular Congregation — covering material contained in chapters 5 and 7 of the current FOG;
· Officers, Ordination, Commissioning and Certification — chapters 6, 11 and 14;
· Governing Bodies — chapters 9-13;
· The Church and Civil Authority — chapters 6-8;
· Ecumenicity and Union — chapters 13, 16 and 17; and
· Interpreting and Amending the Constitution — chapters 13 and 18.
Little criticism has been received regarding the six polity chapters. The entire document is built upon “missional polity” — the concept that the church does not have a mission, but that its very essence is mission. In a companion document to the FOG revisions, the task force states: “Mission lies at the heart of the Church’s identity. The Church is called into being and is an expression of the mission dei, God’s ongoing engagement with the world to reconcile, transform, and finally fulfill the divine creative intent in it.”
Borrowing from renowned Presbyterian missiologist Darrell Guder, the task force posits five characteristics of missional polity:
· Biblical — “there should be explicit biblical foundations for what we believe about the church”;
· Historical — polity must acknowledge that “we come to the church as the latest in a long tradition of Christians who have struggled with what it means to be faithful and from whose struggles we can learn”;
· Contextual — “the Church is not an abstraction but exists in particular … settings” so polity “must provide the flexibility to enable the church to adapt …”;
· Eschatological — “polity must have at its core the conviction that the Church is moving toward God’s promised new creation and should bear witness to that new reality in all that it does”;
· Practicable — “what the polity envisions can be put into regular and effective practice by the Church.”
The purpose of “re-organizing” the existing first four Book of Order chapters as “Foundations of Presbyterian Polity,” said task force member Neal Lloyd, a retired pastor from Rochester, Minn., was to “undergird this missional polity, support flexible patterns of authority and order and reflect a greater theological and literary unity. In this reorganization, we have further sought to retain the vast majority of the present text of G.1.000 — G.4.000,” Lloyd insisted, “albeit in a somewhat different structure.”
Though he said he could “go either way,” Kim argued for the preservation of Chapters 1-4. “They (the two options) are of equal weight to me, but there’s so much resistance, it’s a practical matter,” he said. We’re a victim of the climate of the times — every change is perceived as having an agenda.”
Paul Hooker, a task force member and executive presbyter/stated clerk for St. Augustine Presbytery, pressed for “Foundations.” Hooker, a member of the Advisory Committee on the Constitution (ACC), said of the task force’s revision, “If it’s going to fail, then I want to fail with the best thing we can do.”
To aid the church in comparing and contrasting “Foundations” and the current Chapters 1-4, Doska Ross, the Office of the General Assembly’s manager of polity guidance and training, said the two proposals will be published in a side-by-side format.
The revised Form of Government will be first sent to the ACC for its feedback. The entire proposed revision, which is still being worked on by the task force, will be released to the public, along with advisory handbooks, by Sept. 1.
6/9/07 update: PNS published a publication to their article on Monday, May 8: https://www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2007/07267.htm
