Enforced extroversion is taking its toll, and the weight of the
denomination’s concerns would have my head spinning, if the muscles in my neck
weren’t keeping a vise-like grip on my brain pan.
So, how are you?
Seriously, we’ve gone through a crush of business
here on Thursday, including, but not limited to, General Assembly Procedures, Mission Coordination, Church Polity,
Social, Justice and the Board of Pensions, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation
and the Presbyterian Foundation.This morning, my Committee was on the clock.
Committee 5, Middle Councils, dealt
with a variety of issues, most of which were not controversial, like churches
transferring from one presbytery to another. There were a few issues of some
particular interest, though. Let's look at one.
The first
controversial item was what to do with
Synods?
The Report of the Middle Council Commission had an
answer: scrap them. Their recommendation was to eliminate the synod as a council of the church (what we used to
call a Governing Body) and reserve their necessary ecclesiastical functions to a
series of regional Administrative Commissions – leaving presbyteries free to
form mission cooperatives in whatever direction their collective hearts desire.
At first reading, this was quite appealing to me; my opinion about synods is
much like Rick’s opinion of Ugarte, if you catch my meaning. But there were a
lot of unanswered questions in their recommendation – the kind of
constitutional holes that drive clerks crazy, and end up making the
congregations and presbyteries suffer. Then we heard from a lot of people how
much they love their synod, how vital and active they are, how mission-minded
and helpful they are, how clean and bright and beautiful all synods could be.
We found ourselves on the horns of a dilemma: take the word of the Mid Council
Commission, who undertook one of the most thorough surveys ever of our
denomination, or heed the experience of so many (both on our committee and in
open hearing) who weren’t asked what they thought.
My head still hurts.
In the end, Committee 5 recommended not
eliminating synods, but reducing their number, recommending a Task Force to
figure out how best to accomplish this. And then the Assembly got hold of it,
deciding to simply refer the matter without recommendation to a new task force,
to figure out just what to do about Synods – whether to scrap them, reduce
their number, or perhaps reduce their mandates, giving them more flexibility to
thrive where they are strong, and retract where they are not.
No comments:
Post a Comment