In the recent restructuring of the General Assembly Council, an annual meeting between the General Assembly Council and Middle Governing Bodies was mandated. Bottom line: These are groups with different vantage points and inter-related responsibilities in the current mix of the PC(USA). Building relationships and promoting productive interactions between these groups are critical to the future mission of the denomination.
The church stage on which these entities currently interact can no longer comfortably accommodate four dancing elephants. For all the church’s talk of Bible and theology, we’d do well to attend to the four governing body elephants that keep clumsily crashing and banging, trying to be nimble and viable in a complex and rapidly changing church and culture.
Elephants dancing on a flat stage are hard enough to imagine; on a multi-tiered stage, they cannot begin to navigate the necessary hydraulics, trap doors, ladders, and steps.
The PC(USA) is becoming a flat stage, even if some of the dancers are still elephants trapped on a multi-tiered one they cling to so tenaciously.
On a flat stage, para-church organizations, individual congregational efforts, presbytery sponsored mission, national initiatives directed to congregations, affinity groups, and mission groups, validated or not, dance together randomly and interdependently. The energy level of the Holy Spirit responds to the vision, work, and presented needs. In life cycle language, flat stages encourage incline and recline activity.
On our multi-tiered church stage, groups, structures, and organizations exist in mandated or established forms. At the dance, everyone wants to dance using his or her assigned or claimed dance step. Not the dance, but the dance step dominates time and Holy Spirit energy. The value is on teaching the dance steps, not on having a great dance! In life cycle language, multi-tiered stages entrench decline activity.
On a flat stage, the General Assembly, synods, presbyteries, and congregations go to the dance and dance with the partners who want to dance with them. On a multi-tiered stage, the dancing elephants assign or claim their steps at the dance, and tell their partners how, when, where, with whom, and how much to dance.
We can have as many partners on the flat stage as works and makes sense. The number of partners on the multi-tiered stage is limited by the room needed for stomping feet and stumbling all over each other.
We may choose to retain all our governing bodies, dancing elephants or not; however, we must give them the freedom to act creatively and interdependently and serve a purpose larger than keeping one another in business.
Sam Roberson is general presbyter/stated clerk in the Presbytery of Charlotte. He has participated in the planning for the first and second annual meetings between the General Assembly Council and Middle Governing Bodies.
