The last General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), meeting in Birmingham in 2006, created the task force to propose to the church a revised form of government — one that task force members say would be less regulatory, more flexible and based on missional theology. Whether Presbyterians are buying that approach, agreeing that it’s necessary to start with, or agreeing that this is the best way to do it, remains to be seen.
A growing pile of overtures, at least 10 so far, suggest that there hasn’t been enough time; that with something this important, “there is no compelling need to rush the process,” as Overture 49 from Donegal Presbytery puts it. Many of those overtures call for putting off an up-or-down vote on the task force report until 2010.
Whether those calls for more time signal an underlying support for the changes the task force is recommending (in other words, give us more time to study this and make sure we do it right), or whether they are an indication of simmering opposition is not necessarily clear.
Detroit Presbytery is recommending something different – and perhaps more radical. Basically, it’s suggesting in Overture 70 that six presbyteries volunteer to try out the new form of government the task force is recommending – put it to the test on a trial basis, to see how well it works. Those presbyteries would report back to the General Assembly in 2010 and make recommendations about what to do next.
Ed Koster, the stated clerk of Detroit Presbytery, said he wrote that overture out of a sense that without an alternative being proposed, the task force report might fail altogether.
“My belief was and is that if you delay something, that’s the first potential step in killing it,” Koster said in an interview. “I’d really like it to get a good hearing.”
Koster said he’s sensing two major sources of resistance to the FOG report. Some say the recommendations are too complex for people to grasp in this short a time; they want more time to sift through the implications. And there’s “a problem of trust,” Koster said. “There are significant numbers of people who feel the constitution is not working as it is,” so “why relax the rules” and give governing bodies more flexibility?
The task force itself is taking no position on any of the overtures.
“We were given a task to do, we did the task, and now it’s up to the General Assembly to do what it wants to with the report,” said co-moderator Cindy Bolbach, a lawyer and Presbyterian elder from northern Virginia.
She said the task force knows some of its proposals are controversial, and in certain cases has offered alternative wording for the assembly to consider. For example, the task force recommends a provision that would allow an interim or associate pastor to become, with a two-thirds “super-majority” vote of approval from the presbytery, that congregation’s next installed pastor. It also presents the assembly with another alternative if it disagrees with the recommendation.
Task force member Paul Hooker, who is the executive presbyter of St. Augustine Presbytery, and who stressed that he was speaking as an individual, not representing the task force, said he has encountered some misunderstandings when explaining the task force’s work to presbyteries.
At about half of those meetings, Hooker said, someone has asked whether the FOG report wouldn’t provide some sort of “local option” for presbyteries – implying there might be an impact on the ever-controversial matter of ordaining gays and lesbians.
But the 2006 General Assembly specifically instructed the FOG task force not to make any changes in two areas: the property trust clause, and the current constitutional language limiting ordination to those who practice fidelity if they are married or chastity if they are single. So the task force proposal leaves the language in those two areas unchanged.
In the presbytery discussions, the question raised has been, “Are you not in fact advocating something approaching local option?” Hooker said. “The answer to that is ‘Yes,’ except in the
areas we were mandated not to change. And those areas are ‘fidelity and chastity’ and the property trust clause. …
“Nothing about those provisions has changed. Nor has anything changed about the way in which those provisions would be administered. So it seems to me that concern about the proposed form of government making it easier for persons who are gay or lesbian being slipped in through the back door through some foggy or clouded local option process are misplaced concerns.”
The Presbyterian Coalition, an evangelical group, has paid close attention to the FOG report and is preparing a study paper on it, reflecting its concerns.
“We put a study group into place with the first work of the task force,” said Terry Schlossberg, Coalition executive director, who has attended many of the task force meetings. “We looked at every draft as it was released and we tried to keep track of the changes as it went along. We see some serious problems” with the recommendations.
“To me, ‘Why’ is the big question,” Schlossberg said. The reasons for rewriting the form of government “seem slim to a lot of us,” she said. “It’s really an enormous investment of time and energy that’s being called for,” for presbyteries and sessions to implement the changes being proposed. “I think the church is probably going to want to see more substantive reasons for making the change.”
Some of the presbyteries that have presented overtures asking for a delay of two years before voting on the merits of the FOG report do seem to want the report to be given serious consideration.
Philadelphia Presbytery, for example, has submitted several overtures regarding the FOG report, including asking that a Committee on Representation be retained at each level of the governing body system.
While the FOG task force suggests that other means could be used to attain diversity in the Presbyterian system, “we didn’t think that was practical” to expect that to happen, said Albert DerMovsesian, Philadelphia’s acting general presbyter.
“To say it can be done as effectively without committees on representation, I don’t understand it and the presbytery doesn’t understand it, because we are a church that should be reflective of its full constituency. … If people feel alienated because they don’t feel they’re at least given the opportunity to participate, that’s what can lead to divisions, and that’s not what we need as a denomination.”
Philadelphia Presbytery also is asking for more time to study the FOG report, in part because any constitutional change would require approval both from the General Assembly and a majority of the 173 presbyteries.
“We don’t want to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater,” DerMovsesian said. “If something isn’t understood fully, and people don’t feel they’ve had the opportunity to explore it fully, the natural reaction is to say, ‘No.’ This is not an attempt to scuttle the work of the task force, but rather to make sure that it’s not voted down by the presbyteries because they don’t feel they’ve had the opportunity to review and express concerns and have those concerns heard.”
He thinks it has a greater likelihood of being accepted if there’s not a feeling of a rush to judgment.
The Presbytery of East Tennessee has submitted another of the overtures calling for more time for consideration.
“It’s absolutely not our intent” to kill the proposal through delay, said Executive Presbyter Steve Benz, who also serves on the General Assembly Council. “I think if we want to kill it, then we let it go. We vote on it this year, because I don’t think it can pass.”
Benz said he reads the overtures calling for more time as saying, “If we’re going to do this, then let’s do it right and really talk about it … about what this will really mean for the church, and go into it with more of a consensus.”
Bolbach said the FOG task force has attempted to communicate with the church from the beginning, regularly posting drafts of its work on the task force’s Web site and inviting comments and suggestions. While the task force doesn’t have a huge budget, its members have accepted speaking invitations from nearby presbyteries, and “I think we’ve tried as best we can to get this out to the church,” she said.
Hooker said he hopes the church does decide to move toward a more streamlined and flexible form of government either this year or in the near future.
“Personally, I hope we adopt this,” Hooker said. “And my driving reason for wanting to be involved with it is that this proposal reconnects something that we have allowed in the mind of the church to get disconnected, and that is our ecclesiology — our theology of the church — and our polity. Those two ought to be intimately connected. The polity ought to be our reflection of what we think the church ought to be,” not some kind of arcane canon law.
And the task force is advocating a missional ecclesiology, Hooker said. “It says that the church exists not to serve its own ends or guarantee its own survival, but rather to express God’s work in the world, and polity is the architecture through which we go about expressing that mission.”
Hooker describes the task force proposal as “a new kind of polity that helps us become a different kind of church.” Whether the assembly moves in that direction now or waits two years “is of less concern to me,” he said, “than that we do it.”
