MILWAUKEE — While the Bible is primary for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the denomination’s Book of Confessions plays an important, if subordinate, role in guiding the church’s ministry and beliefs, as demonstrated by the vow that all ordained officers take to be guided by it.
Accordingly, the Book of Confessions, which is the first part of the church’s constitution, is deliberately difficult to amend or expand.
With that as background, the denomination’s 227th General Assembly voted 382-39 to, essentially, restart the process for considering if a new confession is needed and what it should say.
Adding a new confession has been discussed in one form or another since at least 2018, when the 223rd General Assembly was presented with a proposal to consider adding Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to the Book of Confessions. No deadline was set.
Two years later, the 224th General Assembly, without referencing the previous assembly, created a “special committee … to write a new confession to be considered” for the Book of Confessions.
Then in 2022, yet another special committee was approved, with special instructions to “consider voices who are not yet represented.”
A report from the special committee created by the 2022 General Assembly came before commissioners at GA227 in the form of RUS-10. The Committee on Reformed Identity in the United States (RUS) recommended sending the proposed confession to the presbyteries for a vote.
But some committee members questioned whether the Book of Order’s mandate for adding new confessions, outlined in G-6.03, had been properly followed.
G-6.03 requires a proposal for a new confession to be approved for study, considered by a geographically diverse special committee, reported back to a subsequent General Assembly, and only then, if approved, sent to the presbyteries for a vote. The proposal must ultimately receive approval from two-thirds of the presbyteries and a subsequent General Assembly in order to amend the Book of Confessions.
The Advisory Committee on the Constitution advised RUS that the 2022 special committee did not satisfy those requirements. As a result, the full assembly considered a minority report calling for the creation of a new special committee that would more closely follow the Book of Order‘s process, particularly its requirement that a proposed confession first undergo study throughout the church.
The minority report argued that the assembly was being asked to send the confession to presbyteries before it had received adequate discussion. Its authors wrote that RUS members “were prevented… from discussing the merits of the new confession” and that “no reading, studying, or debate of the confession was permitted.”
They concluded that the proposal was “premature and ill-advised” until the church had engaged in a sustained conversation about the confession’s merits and possible revisions.
The latest special committee is to “[i]nvite the whole church – every congregation and session, every presbytery, everyone – to study and consider the confession, and report its considerations to the new Special Committee,” which will report to the 228th General Assembly in 2028.
GA228 will then consider the confession proposed by the latest special committee and decide whether it should be circulated for a vote by the presbyteries. If two-thirds approve, GA229 in 2030 will get the last say.
