For decades we Presbyterians have complained about the bureaucratic control that the denominational offices have tried to exercise — telling issue groups how to behave, telling seminaries what to teach, making those who hear a call to ministry jump through hoop after hoop regardless of their experience in church leadership.
Well, we may complain about the General Assembly mostly because the national organization seems removed. But it is also true that regulations and bureaucracy have actually sprouted, mushroom-like, in almost every area of our church lives, in sessions and presbyteries as well as synods and at GA levels. The denominational offices have visited on us a plague of “shall upon shall.”
So what a treat to read the FOG report! A small committee, appointed by Moderator Joan Gray after the 2006 Assembly, has been working mightily on our Form of Government to recast the Book of Order. If their report is approved and presbyteries concur, the results will be dramatic, and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) can concentrate on resourcing local and global faithfulness rather than on mandating how to change or circumnavigate them.
The report would have us eliminate many (most?) national rules. Instead, the revised book would offer words of encouragement and permission. Gone are the one-size-fits-all rules for sessions, presbyteries, and synods. Gone are the mandated committees, regardless of size and context, for “governing bodies.” In fact, gone are “governing bodies,” a terrible phrase in the first place and a poor replacement for the term “church councils.” What do we call sessions, presbyteries, synods, and the Assembly? Well, “councils,” the original biblical moniker recaptured!
Others will doubtless focus on the theological language and the more fluid, missional themes that the report evokes. But for this old historian, the FOG report deserves special commendation for reversing one hundred years of unmitigated growth in the size and bureaucratic controls of the Book of Order.
Almost twenty years ago and not long after the reunion of 1983, Craig Dykstra and James Hudnut-Beumler asked about the styles of denominational life through American history. Had Presbyterians in America formed first a “constitutional confederacy,” replaced it with a “corporation” model of government, and most recently attempted to achieve a “regulatory agency” style of government? Dykstra and Hudnut-Beumler sought to begin a conversation.1
They, and others of us studying the PC(USA) as a case study in Mainline American Protestantism, declared in every available assembly of Presbyterians that we should repent — turn around — and increase denominational resources while reducing mandates. Presbyterians had changed styles of governance before to meet new circumstances, for example, from the looser, more familial ways of the nineteenth century to corporate styles to provide additional resources for congregations. Now, in an era of more fluid, less structured community life, distrust of national institutions, and with mission and identity bubbling from below more than trickling down from above, we needed a style for networking centered on congregational mission.
Twenty years later, the FOG Report seriously engages that conversation. Adopting it, ratifying it in presbyteries, and living into this new style will go a long way toward reversing denominational decline — in spirit certainly, and perhaps in numbers eventually.
But changing our direction will be difficult indeed. Almost all of us are invested in one or more of the current Book of Order regulations. We will want to eliminate all the regulations except those from which we benefit.
If we examine a regulatory agency of the federal government, we can see the problem clearly.
Consider the Internal Revenue Service, a governmental regulatory agency we love to hate. We all have to obey the convoluted, confusing code. We decry the unfair exemptions for people and businesses — all the people and businesses except the ones in which we are invested. Let tax code reformers propose eliminating special deductions for capital investments and those of us who make or sell heavy machinery yell “Foul.” Reform exceptions for farms, and rural folk protest (Maybe even yell, “Fowl!”) Reform a fair estate tax? The wealthy feel abused by a “death tax.” And woe betide IRS reformers who propose elimination of “Manse Allowance” provisions! Half the members of every presbytery are up in arms, energized for battle.
The IRS can enforce its regulations. The federal government is not a voluntary organization. But the PC(USA), much as we might imagine our portion of the Body of Christ to be the “True Church,” cannot enforce regulations except by suasion — in a climate of negligible denominational identity. People simply leave to join portions of the church with fewer if any regulations — part of the appeal of the post-denominational era’s megachurches of creeks and saddles.
The proposal that church councils will form necessary committees and procedures to do their work means we must trust others regionally and locally to exercise justice and prudence in their particular circumstances. Certainly, the Presbyterian Church envisioned in the Report of the Form of Government Committee prescribes a heavier dose of Gospel, grace, and trust than our church law practiced previously. Can we embrace the freedom that the Report invites us to live into?
Louis B. Weeks is a former pastor and president of Union-PSCE in Richmond, Va. He is honorably retired and living in Williamsburg, Va., as a member of the Eastern Virginia Presbytery.
- Craig Dykstra and James Hudnut-Beumler, “The National Organizational Structures of Protestant Denominations: An Invitation to a Conversation,” in Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks, The Organizational Revolution: Presbyterians and American Denominationalism. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992. pp. 307-331.
