I read with great interest Rob’s analysis at The Spyglass of the PC(USA) General Assemby’s decisions. For three years we have been attending a Baptist church, but my husband is still a “member-at-large” of our local Presbytery, and has been starting recently to look at nearby PC(USA) churches with open pulpits. The news from San Jose was not encouraging, but as Rob points out, the sky is really not falling. Yet.
I found a similar outlook today in the blog post by the pastor of the church where my husband was ordained. (He is a new pastor there, so we have never met. But I read his weekly blog posts.) He attended General Assembly not as a commissioner, but as an observer and to assist a friend with promoting a proposed piece of legislation (i.e. a proposed change to the church’s rules on how they do things). If you’re wondering about the title of my post, read his to find out.
Pastor Bill does not address the specific issues that Rob does in The Spyglass. Instead he has written a second post describing the committee meetings where his friend’s recommendations were presented – and rejected pretty much out of hand. Like Rob, he does not think the sky is falling – but he left GA discouraged and disappointed. After reading his first-person account of how things went in the Committee, I certainly can understand why.
A number of my conservative friends at World on the Web tend to dismiss the PC(USA) as a bunch of liberals. Occasionally I point out that there are still a significant number of pastors and churches that are conservative, that stay in the denomination to be salt and light, and because they don’t feel God has called them to abandon it. With each General Assembly, however, the argument seems to get harder to make.
