After the usual items that follow lunch we proceeded to the consideration of Overture 97-10, and the committee's amendment of it. The overture used language for the "fidelity and chastity" section approved last year that was a bit more flexible and dropped the line that "persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged...sin shall not be ordained..." The committee, after open hearings and much discussion recommended the following amended overture by a vote of 39 to 9:
In the end, neither report was amended and the debate contained many of the usual arguments which I will not enumerate here. I think that the only new argument was that we should take a year off from this war, a "cease-fire" as one speaker called it.
Part of the respect for each other, the process, and God's will was pausing for prayer before each vote and prayer after the first vote. In addition we had a brief outage of the voting system and to maintain the spirit of reflection and focus on God the moderator lead us in "Amazing Grace." In addition, the moderator's request for no displays of celebration by those supporting the prevailing position was honored.
On the question of whether the minority report should be substituted for the majority report, the question was defeated 227 to 309, effectively deciding the issue. There was additional debate on the main motion but everyone seemed to realize that was a formality. The motion was finally approved 328 to 217.
I came away from this debate, as well as the abortion debate earlier in the week, extremely impressed with the Assembly. While I do not know or believe that we have reached God's will on these issues, I firmly believe that we are making an honest attempt at it. While I believe that many of us are arriving with agendas and already made up minds on the issues, respect is being shown for the other side, discussion is actually happening in these debates, some of us are listening to the other side, and maybe we are hearing something which the Spirit will use in our hearts and minds in the future. Maybe I am being naive, but this is my initial impression. Let me ponder this further and I will have some additional comments in a summary I will put out in a couple days.
In all, this debate took two hours leaving us with a significant number of other Book of Order issues to consider. I'll come back to those.
There was a bit of other work to do including the Committee on Mission Coordination which brought the recommendations related to the Anderson Report. The first recommendation was to move the Corporate and Administrative Services within the Office of the Executive Director and rename it the National Office of Finance and Technology. The commissioners felt that the new acronym "NOFAT" was a bit too cute and it was renamed the Technology and Finance Office. There was also some discussion over how large a special committee to create and how many at large candidates to have and who decides who they will be. The GA action today tightened up the corporate structure a little and established a group to bring further recommendations. The amended recommendation was approved 464 to 19.
The committee on church wide partnerships continued their report which we had worked on portions of twice before. The only remaining substantive issue was an "incident" between the Presbyterian Foundation and the Presbytery of San Juan, Puerto Rico. The details are complicated, and I don't even pretend to really understand them, but stems from a lawsuit filed against the Presbytery by a former foundation employee and the costs incurred since the presbytery, contrary to instructions in the book of order, did not have liability insurance. The Assembly took the committee's recommendation to form a task force to facilitate an agreement, and amended the motion to require the presbytery to get the required insurance within a month.
Finally, we returned to the Book of Order. After some debate new ordination questions were adopted for elders and deacons like those adopted in the morning for ministers. Part of what the new questions do is split out the parts of the long last question we currently have. They also ask about duties specific to each office. In general I like the new questions but regret the loss of a couple of phrases. Another major change is the ability to elect elders and deacons for either a two or three year term. "Stand-alone" deacons were also added with a great deal of discussion. This is for churches who do not have a board of deacons, they can now ordain deacons for specific tasks. The vote was 270 to 216. It was also decided that Commissioned Lay Preachers must be ordained elders, the original recommendation for an exception being defeated by 183 to 277.
As the night dragged on commissioners showed signs of fatigue, irritability, and confusion. Everyone wanted to get out of there but a long committee report was ahead of us and questions from confused commissioners were becoming more frequent slowing our progress. After completing work on the recommendation for no statute of limitations in sexual abuse cases, a motion was made to treat the remaining items as an omnibus motion. While we contemplated the propriety of summarily passing the remaining business an alternate motion was made to refer all unfinished business to the 210th GA. This was not accepted well and it was soon clear that most regarded this as a clear dereliction of our duty, particularly since we realized that it probably wouldn't be handled in any more conscience manner than we were handling it. So the motion to refer went down to defeat and we scrambled to scan the remainder of the report for recommendations that we had questions or objections too. The two I found were found by others and removed from the omnibus motion. The omnibus motion was created, the window to remove was closed, and the recommendations passed. As it turned out the two items that were removed were related to other business we had passed and needed some detailed work, or would be best considered in the light of presbytery votes on Book of Order amendments to be sent to them from this GA. So each was in turn, with the Book of Order committees blessing, referred to the 210th GA. An interesting twist in light of the earlier discussion. This all took 20 minutes and having finished the docket we recessed for the evening at 12:50 in the morning, with prayer.