Will the NewFOG2 — the proposed revision of the proposed revision sent back to (an expanded) task force by last year’s General Assembly — bring us out of the fog? What’s been so foggy about the old FOG?
The old FOG was not foggy for me. Having participated in denominations ranging from Anglican to Assemblies of God, my first read-through of the UPCUSA’s Book of Order nearly blinded me with its brilliance.
Why was I reading it? A seminary graduate taken under care of presbytery, I had to pass ordination exams. The polity section of the exam would require a commanding knowledge of the Form of Government. I was prepared to trudge through a dense set of regulations. Instead, I experienced a string of epiphanies: “Where have these people been all my life? This is amazing!”
The FOG I was reading offered much more than rules and statues. It pointed the way to becoming better selves and building better churches. My academic training spied FOG’s biblical basis seeping out on every page. And its theological framework was simply true.
How could we improve on that? Will the NewFOG2 be anything more than a cheap imitation, an imposter, a poseur?
One thing is for sure. It will be briefer. As task force member Paul Hooker summarized for the Outlook, the first reason for a new FOG is “to restore the ‘constitutional’ nature of our Form of Government by eliminating to as great an extent as possible the volume of process-oriented language that has accrued via amendment over the years.”
Yes, process regulations have been multiplying. But weren’t those addenda needed to help us forge our way through the rugged terrain of distrust? It just makes sense that conflicted communities will need to write more laws and regulations to compensate for the lack of trust they feel toward one another.
Then again, the Israel of two millennia ago was thrashed about by foreign rule, arbitrary taxation, religious factionalism, clergy malfeasance, and a host of accompanying betrayals and compromises. Into the disruption and distrust Talmudic scholars articulated 620 commandments to build a hedge around the original ten — and to unite the people in a shared identity.
The man from Nazareth took another tack. He summarized the ten commands in two.
Hooker offered a few other reasons for the NewFOG.
• “to maximize flexibility on the part of sessions and presbyteries to meet the changing missional needs of their particular contexts, while maintaining standards that are appropriate to the practice of the whole church,”
• “to move from a regulatory polity to one based upon relationships,”
• “to clarify the theological and historical foundations of our covenantal polity,” and
• “to focus on the mission of the congregation.”
Good reasons. Good effort, too.
The NewFOG2 task force has been revising its proposal in response to feedback generated by the 2008 General Assembly commissioners. They’ve posted their updated proposal online (http://www.pcusa.org/formofgovernment/). Now they await our feedback.
Will we consider their proposal, or will we go to the next General Assembly only to say again, “We didn’t have enough time to consider this”?
I know one thing. The Form of Government I studied for ordination exams 26 years ago was revamped just after I studied it, due to the reunion of the two then-existing denominations. That was nothing new. As nFOG TF member James Kim says, “we have adapted it all along through our history … to do ministry as effectively as possible as our context has changed.”
Our context has been changing. This may be the time to enact such changes in our polity, too. It certainly is the time to consider the proposals being prepared to help us defog our life together.
— JHH
