Commisioner Reporting from GA

Report from Birmingham
General Assembly 2006

Its Sunday afternoon and we finally have some extra time. The commissioners are each assigned to a subcommittee responsible for looking at a particular area of our work as a denomination. I was assigned to the Polity Committee and we finished our work late last night. Tonight we will worship with two branches of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church all in a large indoor arena. That should be an exciting worship service indeed.

In our polity committee we considered several major pieces of business that came to us as overtures seeking to change the Book of Order somehow. I will hit several high points to help you understand:
We considered an overture from the Presbytery of Stockton CA asking us to change the Book of Order to permit all churches to own their property outright. This would have changed all church property from being held in trust for all Presbyterians to a congregational model of everyone owning their own property. The overture was defeated soundly. As Presbyterians since the mid 1700’s we have joined the church knowing any church property we join with or build will belong to the whole church, not us. As an individual church we can’t get mad at something in the denomination and leave with our church property. This is a good thing grounded in our collective vision of being one church belonging to God and to all God’s children past, present and future.
There were several overtures seeking to speed up the process of searching for a pastor, or permit an associate or interim pastor to be elected pastor. One overture asked for a change to the Book of Order to permit beginning the search for a pastor as soon as a departure date is announced. These announcements come 2-6 weeks before a pastor’s last day. If Nominating Committees and search processes were started when the pastor is trying to leave it opens a can of worms at the very time when people should be saying good-by and honoring a pastor for his/her work. This overture was defeated. Other overtures seeking to permit associate or interim pastors to replace the pastor were also defeated.
We approved a rewrite of Chapter 14 of the Book of Order to help streamline the ordination process. That chapter has become more of a bureaucratic burden than a helpful process. The new chapter will need to be approved at the full meeting of the GA next week and then passed along to the Presbyteries for their OK. So we will all see this again before the change is actually made.
There is also a move afoot to look at the entire Book of Order section G – that’s the governing rules part. We recommended a 4-year process of study, consultation, research, and communication be undertaken before a rewrite of the whole G section can be approved. It will all come back to the 2010 GA meeting.
An overture came to us from 2 Presbyteries asking us to add lines to the Book of Order affirming our need to care for God’s creation as faithful Christians. We voted both down with a comment affirming it is important to care for creation, but there are already strong admonitions to care for creation made by the GA in the past, areas of the Book of Order and in our Creeds all pointing us in this direction. There was not a pressing need to say it all over again.
Several overtures really got into a problem that seems to be on the rise in our church. It’s the problem of members and officers of the PC (USA) filing what can be called “frivolous” complaints and disciplinary actions against other members or officers. These kinds of things can ruin someone’s day and if serious enough they can and do ruin careers. In our struggle to find a solution we came to the decision to point out that people who maliciously use our church juridical process by filing frivolous actions can be charged with several things themselves. We also recommended the Office, of the GA study this matter and bring findings of both information and some possible further remedies to the next GA meeting 2008.
The longest discussion we had was started by an overture asking for a study of the ramifications of creating a non-geographical synod for the Korean American members of the PC (USA). There are already 4 Korean Presbyteries. The Korean community within the church is a vital and growing part of our family tree, but its not the only part of the family tree composed of people from minority immigrant, ethnic, national and racial backgrounds. So we added to the recommendation for study provisions that bring all these groups under the study, that call for an organized way to support and minister to these groups, and look to the consequences of non-geographical presbyteries and synods in the long run. I must give credit here to a theological student from Princeton who was instrumental in all this. She tenaciously held her very reasonable ground and brought all of us to a better end than we had at first conceived.

That is a good summery. In between all this we dealt with several other issues that I may get to later. I will check this blog for questions you may have so go for it – I’m not just a commissioner to GA, I’m your commissioner to GA.

With Trust In Our Lord
Rev. Rob Mellgard
Pastor, New Hope Presbyterian Church, Knoxville TN.