PITTSBURGH, July 5, 2012 – The 220th General Assembly has said “No” to nongeographic presbyteries, with some commissioners saying they worry such alignments would be used more to gather theologically compatible congregations together than to focus on innovative mission.
Joann Lee, a teaching elder from the Presbytery of the Greater Twin Cities Area, told the assembly she grew up in a Korean-language nongeographic presbytery, and “it limited my own understanding of the church,” both its gifts and its struggles. “We should not be running away from our differences,” Lee said, but should instead dismantle structures that make Presbyterians feel they have to be the same in order to be united.
Debra Avery, a teaching elder from Grand Canyon Presbytery, said that for the denomination’s many small congregations, the work it takes to stand together despite theological differences “is actually life-giving.” Presbyterians “have an important witness to make today in our fractured contexts,” she said.
The assembly voted 480-169 (73 percent to 26 percent) not to send to the presbyteries a constitutional amendment to permit provisional nongeographic presbyteries for particular missional purposes and for a limited period of time. In voting that down, the assembly added a comment advising that “congregations be encouraged to engage in collaborative missional endeavors, irrespective of their locations within particular presbytery geographic boundaries.”
Allowing for provisional nongeographic presbyteries during a “designated season of experimentation” was one of the key recommendations of a report from the General Assembly Mid Councils Commission. The commission spent two years listening to Presbyterians across the country, gathering information about what’s working (and what’s not) in presbyteries and synods, and searching for ways to encourage innovation and creativity in a denomination that many feel cannot afford to refuse to try something new.
The commission intended to present “a genuine plan for transformation,” said Tod Bolsinger, a teaching elder from California who is moderator of the commission. “It’s about the way the world is changing so rapidly and our structures are not.”
The General Assembly, however, did not seem ready to embrace much of what the commission had recommended – including proposals for nongeographic presbyteries and for discontinuing synods as ecclesiastical bodies. Earlier this week, the assembly’s Mid Council Issues Committee had voted down the recommendation on eliminating synods, recommending instead that a 16-member task force (one representative from each of the 16 synods) be created to draft a plan that would be submitted to the 2014 General Assembly for reducing the number of synods.
The full assembly took a different route. It voted to refer a number of the commission’s recommendations to a new task force – made up of representatives from the commission, the Committee on the Office of the General Assembly and of the assembly itself.
Miriam Dolin, a ruling elder from San Francisco who served on the commission, urged the assembly not to abandon the committee’s work even if it wasn’t ready to accept its recommendations.
For two years, “we listened, studied, prayed, discussed, argued, basically worked our tails off,” Dolin said. While she did not agree with everything the task force considered, “we spent an incredible amount of time and energy and also the resources of the church creating this report.” Dolin asked the assembly to send the task force’s recommendations regarding non-geographic presbyteries to the task force for further discussion – something the assembly did not do.
But there was some sense the assembly did not want to abandon the commission’s work altogether.
The commission offered the church “an extraordinary gift,” said John Wilkinson, a teaching elder from New York state and moderator of the Committee on the Office of the General Assembly. On some matters, “we didn’t want to say no, but we weren’t quite ready to say yes.”
The assembly also voted to direct the moderator of the 220th General Assembly to appoint a task force to review the nature and function of the General Assembly Mission Council and the Office of the General Assembly “specifically with respect to their relationship with and support of mid councils as they serve the vitality and mission of congregations in our changing context,” and to report to the assembly in 2014.
And it voted to create a National Racial Ethnic Ministries Task Force to report back to the assembly in 2014, to assess the work the denomination is doing – and determine what needs to be done – in racial ethnic ministry.
The assembly deferred until Friday a decision on whether to create just one task force to consider all these issues, or multiple ones.
