The more General Assemblies I attend, the more thankful I become for the PCA, for presbyterian polity, for the BCO and the RAO, and for faithful men who do the work of participating in the courts of the church for the good of God’s people. The 52nd General Assembly was my fourth as a commissioner. It was the second time I served on a committee, and the first time I ever spoke on the floor. Yet my personal contribution is not why I’m so pleased with this Assembly. Rather, this Assembly showed once again that Christ’s promise to his Church is true. He will build his Church.
The Stated Clerk
This Assembly was a bit different. Usually there’s some hustle and bustle in the weeks and months leading up to the Assembly. Everyone is reading overtures, and big names are putting out their own “GA Guides” to help commissioners navigate the mountain of homework they’re given when they register. Guiding it all will be the Stated Clerk. The Stated Clerk is the one who handles all transactions of the General Assembly, preserves the records of the General Assembly, produces and distributes the Commissioner Handbook to the men who go to General Assembly, refers items of business to the appropriate committees of the General Assembly, and publishes the minutes of General Assembly. He’s the chief parliamentarian of the General Assembly (and recommends who should be assistant parliamentarians). He’s on the Interchurch Relations Committee, advises all Boards and Agencies of the General Assembly, has oversight of the PCA Historical Center, and proposes the docket for General Assembly. He is the correspondent with the lower courts of the church (e.g. Sessions and Presbyteries), and he is “authorized to make public statements for and on behalf of the denomination only insofar as such statements are warranted on the basis of specific actions of the General Assembly.”[1] He’s a very important man, and this year he wasn’t there.
Or, more accurately, he was there to officially announce his retirement. You see, shortly before General Assembly, the PCA’s Stated Clerk, Dr. Bryan Chappell, did an interview with The Gospel Coalition wherein he held up a piece of paper. That piece of paper, he said, contained a list of names of men who had spent their time destroying the reputations of others. Dr. Chappell claimed that every name on the list had either left the faith, left his family, or taken his own life. The trouble came when men on the list began to protest that they were still very much alive, happily married, and still walking with the Lord.
To say that this went off like a bombshell would be an understatement to say the least, especially with our NAPARC sister churches. Now, what is NAPARC? NAPARC stands for the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council.[2] These are church bodies who all largely share the same confession of faith (with two confessions being allowable depending on whether you’re Presbyterian or Continental Reformed), same view of Scripture, same structure in their polity. If a member of the PCA wants to transfer to another NAPARC congregation, it’s handled as if that church was PCA. So, when the Stated Clerk said that ministers in good standing, in NAPARC churches, had apostatized or worse, our sister churches were not happy.
I want to be very clear, Dr. Bryan Chappell is a good man and a faithful servant of Jesus Christ. I want to be clear, what he said about many of these men simply was not true. I want to be clear, Dr. Chappell’s actions in this matter were honorable. He repented publicly and privately. He went to his brothers and sought their forgiveness, and at least most of them granted it. That being said, given the great responsibilities of the Stated Clerk, Dr. Chappell was left unable to fulfill his duties in that position. He retired for the good of the church. I commend him for his many decades of faithful service to Christ and his Church and for his example of how to repent when caught in a very public sin. This could not have been easy for him, but he embodied Martin Luther’s first thesis in the 95 Theses, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”[3]
This left a vacancy in the position of Stated Clerk. In the long term, the Administrative Committee will bring a recommendation to next year’s General Assembly as to who they believe should be elected Stated Clerk. We should all pray for them as they endeavor to make a wise decision in this area. In the short term, I’m thankful to report that ruling elder John Bise agreed to serve as Stated Clerk pro tem until a permanent replacement can be found. RE Bise is a good churchman and an honorable servant of Christ, who actually served as the moderator of my first General Assembly in 2022. I’m confident he will serve well in his role as Stated Clerm pro tem, especially since he did a superb job during the Assembly.
The Moderator
Ever year the Assembly elects a moderator to preside over the proceedings. The moderator is not the boss. The moderator is simply the presiding officer. In fact, being moderator actually means you are quite limited as to what you can do during the Assembly. The moderator cannot speak to issues. The moderator must make sure that all sides are treated fairly, and this even applies to those with whom the moderator might disagree! The moderator doesn’t wear a jersey. He’s our moderator, all of us.
And I can’t think of a better candidate to fill that role than the man we got this year, Dr. Kevin DeYoung. Full disclosure, Dr. DeYoung was my professor in seminary, and many of my theological quirks can be traced back to things he either said or made us read in class. He is a prolific writer, and if you don’t believe me just search “Kevin DeYoung books” on Google. One of my other professors in seminary said that the faculty had an inside joke about Dr. DeYoung. They’d say, “We have sold or thousands, but Kevin his tens of thousands.” His books are well worth the read though.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from him as moderator. Often men who are known as great preachers or great theologians aren’t necessarily the best parliamentarians. Most men don’t go to seminary to study parliamentary procedure. So, when I heard Dr. DeYoung was going to be nominated, I was slightly worried that the job would be too much for him. Well, I was wrong, and I am so happy that I was. He did an outstanding job. There was one small moment that some online tried to turn into a controversy, but in that instance Dr. DeYoung was simply enforcing the rules of order. If you’d like more information about that, you can find a video I made with some friends on the subject here.
Tuesday Evening
Each year the Assembly begins with a worship service on Tuesday evening. Once this is completed, we elect a moderator. Then there are certain items of business that must be taken up on Tuesday night. Why? Well, the short answer is because more people attend that session than any other. The longer answer is that there are certain items that require a majority of commissioners registered to vote in favor in order to pass. There’s also certain things that the Assembly wants to have settled right away.
One such matter would be amendments to the Book of Church Order. Each year presbyteries (and sometimes sessions and pastors) will ask the General Assembly to ament the Book of Church Order for one reason or another. If this request is passed by the Assembly, it then goes down to the presbyteries, where it must be passed by two-thirds of the 87 presbyteries. If it does, then it goes back up to the General Assembly for a final vote.
This year, the BCO was amended to allow church members to have easier access to representation when facing discipline. While we believe that church discipline is a good thing, while we believe that it “is for building up, and not for destruction…is to be exercised as under a dispensation of mercy and not of wrath,” and while we further believe, “in this [the church] acts the part of a tender mother, correcting her children for their good, that every one of them may be presented faultless in the day of the Lord Jesus,”[4] it is nonetheless true that sometimes mistake are made, which is why every member is entitled to due process. Yet, under the old rules, if a member was brought up on discipline, but didn’t understand everything about the process (which many don’t), only a member of the same congregation could represent him or her before the Session. This year we amended the Book of Disciple to allow any member of the presbytery to represent a church member before the Session. My hope is that this will keep people engaged in the process so that they don’t become discouraged by the technicalities and simply withdraw in frustration.
The other matter that must be handled on Tuesday evening is amendments to our Rules of Assembly Operations. These are the amendments that must pass by a two-thirds majority consisting of a majority of the registered commissioners. That last part is important. You can’t just get a two-thirds majority of the people in the room. The two-thirds majority must also be a majority of all registered commissioners. So, let’s say there were 10 registered commissioners (there were a lot more, but let’s just say there were 10), but only 4 were in the room at the time of the vote. Even if 3 of the 4 people in the room voted in favor of the RAO amendment, it wouldn’t pass because 3 is not more than half of 10. I know it’s complicated, but those are the rules. Since Tuesday evening always has the best attendance rate, we take up RAO amendments on Tuesday night.
Two amendments are worth noting, and I’ll note an additional one because it mattered to me personally. First, the Assembly passed an amendment requiring all presbyteries to include a list of each congregation’s ruling elders and deacons in its presbytery directory. Why would we do this? Well, we want to make sure that every church is being sufficiently served by its officers. For example, sometimes churches do not have deacons, but the BCO explicitly states that “In a church in which it is impossible for any reason to secure deacons, the duties of the office shall devolve upon the ruling elders.”[5] Two things are clear from this provision. (1) If a church doesn’t have deacons, that doesn’t mean that no one is doing the work of the diaconate. The Session must take those responsibilities on itself. (2) This is clearly a temporary state of affairs until the congregation can secure deacons. If a church doesn’t have deacons, we want to know why, and we want to know that the church is trying to get deacons. This helps us in maintaining oversight of our churches.
An amendment that failed, however, would have prohibited the Stated Clerk’s office in Atlanta (or close enough anyway) from collecting racial or ethnic data regarding the members of PCA congregations. Two perspectives were voiced. One perspective worried that not collecting this data would make racial and ethnic minorities feel as though they “weren’t counted.” This perspective felt that it was important for all our members to know that they are loved and valued by Christ’s church. Another perspective however, felt that collecting racial and ethnic data distracted from the greater reality that the Christian’s identity is Christ, not skin color or national origin. One African American ruling elder said, “When my church sends in our statistics on communicant members, I am counted.” It should be noted that those holding this view still largely believed that collecting data on language groups (e.g. those whose first language might be Korean or Spanish) was acceptable, just not ethnic data for its own sake. This amendment received a majority of the votes cast, but not a two-thirds majority. So it failed.
Finally, there was an RAO amendment to allow motions limiting debate in the Committee on Review of Presbytery Records. I know…you all care deeply about this one. So did I. I won’t bore you with the technical details as to why, but prior to this amendment, there could be no motion limiting debate in the RPR committee. Debates would go as long as they needed to go until the committee was ready to vote. The committee decided (by a very close vote) to ask the Assembly to change the RAO to allow a member to “move the previous question,” a motion which, if passed, ends debate and moves the committee to a vote on the motion under consideration. I spoke passionately against this measure (as passionately as one can when you’re nervous speaking in front of two thousand people), but my speech did not carry the day. The amendment passed, and now, if I have the privilege of serving on that committee again, I’ll get to vote “no” every time the previous question is moved.
Wednesday
Speaking of RPR, this committee’s report was the first order of business on Wednesday morning. As I alluded earlier, I got to serve on this committee this year, and I had a blast. Who wouldn’t love spending three days in Chattanooga debating whether presbytery minutes conformed to the Book of Church Order? It was awesome. When the meeting ended, I thought perhaps I would speak on one matter (the one I mentioned above), but I really didn’t think I would find myself at the mic during the actual report. Well…I was wrong. I did go to the mic in order to defend the committee’s work, and I was pleased that our report passed largely intact. Now, the report itself was over 200 pages long, so I won’t get into every detail, but two kinds of exceptions are worth noting.
First, many presbyteries have been in the habit of appointing their moderators to fill vacancies in “Committees of Commissioners.” Now, these are committees that meet only at the General Assembly (usually on Monday or Tuesday), and their job is to review the work of permanent committees. So, for example, Mission to North America has a permanent committee that will meet throughout the year, but every year at the Assembly a Committee of Commissioners will meet to review their work and see if they want to change any of the permanent committee’s recommendations to the Assembly. The PCA has these committees because permanent committees and boards in the PCUS made it impossible to correct the (theological) liberalism that took hold of that denomination. CoC’s are a vital check on the power of denominational bureaucrats.
So, why would it be a problem to have one man appoint commissioners to serve on these committees? Well, the RAO explicitly says, “Each presbytery shall…elect one of its commissioners to each of these committees of commissioners.”[6] One man cannot act on behalf of the presbytery. We do sometimes appoint smaller groups called “commissions” to act on behalf of presbytery, but the BCO states, “Every commission appointed by Presbytery shall consist of at least two teaching elders and two ruling elders.”[7] Now, this might seem like a trivial matter, and many on the floor of the Assembly said something to the effect of, “But we’ve been doing it this way for years.” I argued, however, that it is irrelevant what’s been done for years. We should follow what our book says, and if we want the book to say something else, we can amend it. The Assembly agreed.
The other matter I want to highlight has to do with BCO 38-3. This section governs how sessions and presbyteries handle a situation where a church member leaves the PCA to join another church. When this happens, the court will not the irregularity and remove the member’s name from the role. However, if the member has joined a church body that the court believes fails, “to maintain the Word and Sacraments in their fundamental integrity (BCO 2-2), that member or minister shall be warned of his danger, and if he persists, his name shall be erased from the roll, thereby, so far as the Presbyterian Church in America is concerned, he is deemed no longer to be a member in any body which rightly maintains the Word and Sacraments in their fundamental integrity, and if an officer, thereby withdrawing from him all authority to exercise his office as derived from this Church. When so acting the court shall make a full record of the matter and shall notify the offender of its action.”[8]
I hope that makes it clear how serious this action is. Joining a church that doesn’t rightly preach the word and/or administer the sacraments is equivalent to leaving the church catholic. That’s why the court must warn the person that this is what is happening. That’s why the person who persists in this is deemed an offender by the BCO. A few things are worth noting, though. (1) This is an act of compassion on the part of the church to warn someone that the road being travelled would endanger the soul. The church has a duty to her members, and one of those duties is to protect them from false teaching. We cannot stop anyone from leaving our churches and joining a new one, but we can warn them when their actions are dangerous. (2) Even though we believe that joining these churches, where the Word and sacraments are not maintained in their fundamental integrity, is dangerous, we are not thereby saying that every person in those churches are not saved. There can, and are, true Christians in false churches. However, true Christians have a duty to leave churches that don’t maintain the right preaching of the Word and the right administration of the sacraments. That’s why we have to warn our members not to go to such churches. Finally, (3) we’re not talking about the difference between a Presbyterian and a Baptist here. This is a case where actual heresy is involved.
With all that as background, there was a matter that came to RPR where a presbytery had released a man to the Episcopal Church without warning the man of the action he was about to take would place him within a church body where the Word and Sacraments were not maintained in their fundamental integrity. The Assembly chose to cite the presbytery for this action. While there are certainly true Christians within the Episcopal Church, we cannot, in good conscience, simply watch someone join that church body without warning them of the great danger involved in doing so.
The rest of the day on Wednesday was taken up with reports of Committees of Commissioners. Most of these go fairly quickly. The only one to create a ruckus this year was the Mission to North America Committee. There was an extensive debate regarding whether we should continue to have Dr. Irwin Ince as our MNA coordinator. Much of the debate centered about church planting goals that haven’t been met, as well as a budget deficit this past year that was close to two million dollars. There was also one man who spoke against Dr. Ince on the grounds of his participation in “an evening for black worshippers,” which has been highly controversial within the PCA. On that subject, (1) I don’t think either side is in favor of any kind of racial superiority or segregation, and (2) I think that keeping communication lines open is the best strategy. Not everything has to be a case of disagreeing and going our separate ways. Sometimes we can disagree and still be united. As far as Dr. Ince’s reelection goes, though, he passed and will continue to be MNA coordinator for another year.
Thursday
The biggest item on the agenda for Thursday was the Overtures Committee report. Every year presbyteries (and sometimes sessions or even individuals) will send overtures asking the Assembly to do something. Sometimes they will ask the Assembly to say something, like when we asked the Assembly to commend the Nashville Statement in 2019, or to republish the “Message to All Churches” from the first General Assembly in 2023. Sometimes an overture will ask the Assembly to do something, like when we appointed a commission to write a letter to the United States government urging them to end gender reassignment surgeries on minors. Finally, many times an overture will ask the Assembly to amend the Book of Church Order. We had all three types of overture this year.
I won’t go through every overture, because you’d be reading this report until Christmas (to say nothing of how long it would take me to write it). I’ll simply highlight some examples from each of those categories. So, in the category of “asking the Assembly to say something,” was Overture 48 from Tennessee Valley Presbytery. This overture was originally written to request that the Assembly create a committee to write a pastoral letter on the topic of Christian Nationalism. I’ll say more about that particular subject when we get to overtures that asked the Assembly to do something. This overture, however, was amended to simply ask the Assembly to affirm a statement adopted by our sister denomination, the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. The overture passed, and we adopted the following statement as an Assembly: “The 52nd General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America does hereby join with the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (221st General Synod) and with the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America (193rd Synod) in condemning without distinction any theological or political teaching which posits a superiority of race or ethnic identity born of immutable human characteristics, and does call to repentance any who would promote or associate themselves with such teaching, either by commission or omission.”
That was more or less a temporary statement until our study committee on Christian Nationalism can bring a full report, which brings me to the next category of overtures: those asking the Assembly to do something. Several presbyteries sent overtures to the Assembly this year asking us to create a committee to study the topic of Christian Nationalism. What is that? I honestly don’t know, and that’s why I think we needed this committee. Does Christian Nationalism teach that the magistrate should punish evil and reward good? Does it teach that the magistrate should establish a church in order to teach the people the true religion? Does it teach that one political persuasion is the only one allowable for Christians? Does it teach that one race or ethnic identity is superior to others? Each of these positions have different answers to the question of “is it okay to believe this?” I probably don’t even know all of the right questions to ask about what Christian Nationalism even is. So, what we did as an Assembly is adopt the above statement making it clear that racism of any kind is to be condemned, and we’ll have a full report on this thing called “Christian Nationalism” in the coming years.
Another overture asking the Assembly to do something was Overture 26 from Northwest Georgia Presbytery. This overture asked the Assembly to appoint a committee for the purpose of revising our Directory of Worship. You may not know this, but the PCA is the only confessional presbyterian and reformed denomination in North American without a constitutional directory for worship. Parts of our directory are constitutional, but not all of it. Why? Well, because the task of finishing the directory kept getting kicked down the road until eventually the project just stopped. We passed Overture 26, as amended, and I hope that soon we’ll have a constitutional directory for worship. If you’d like to read about why I think we need one, you can find an article I wrote here.
Finally, we come to overtures that asked the Assembly to amend the BCO. I’ll only highlight one in this category, an overture I heartily supported. Overture 31 from Houston Metro Presbytery asked the court to amend the BCO in order to require a two-thirds vote of the entire court when administratively suspending an officer from performing the functions of his office when process is pending. Now, that’s a lot of technical language, so let me break it all down for you. When a church officer, such as a ruling elder or a pastor, is accused of wrongdoing, no penalty (what’s called a “censure”) can be handed down by the courts of the church unless the case goes through due process. There has to be an actual charge. There must be a prosecutor to argue the charge before the court. The accused is entitled to a defense. It’s all very much like the secular justice system, only dealing with ecclesiastical matters.
Now, let’s say a pastor has been accused of a heinous sin, a sin that, if he is guilty, would make it so that he should not be in ministry under any circumstances. Does the church simply have to wait for process to complete before this man is removed from the pulpit? Is there nothing that can be done to protect the sheep in the meantime? Thankfully, there is. The court can administratively suspend a man from office until the case has gone through process. In doing this, the court isn’t saying that the man is guilty. It’s simply saying that the accusation is so serious that, for the good of the church, he needs to step away until either his name is cleared (in which case he can return) or he is found guilty (in which case the court will censure him).
Yet even this can sometimes be abused. What if the man is innocent? What if he’s been falsely accused, but the church couldn’t go without a pastor for the months (and sometimes years) that it takes for process to play out? What if, after two years of ecclesiastical litigation, the man is found not guilty, but the church couldn’t wait that long and had to call a new pastor? Now, not only has he been without a paycheck (unless he got a secular job) for two years, but he can’t even go back. That’s why the Assembly voted a couple years ago to amend the BCO to require a two-thirds majority whenever this administrative suspension is invoked. There are times when it is absolutely necessary, but that needs to be clear to nearly everyone.
So far, so good, right? This is a serious matter. It has serious consequences, so we don’t allow a simple majority to enforce it, but rather a supermajority. What’s the problem? Well, the problem comes when the court decides to appoint a commission. “A commission differs from an ordinary committee in that while a committee is appointed to examine, consider, and report, a commission is authorized to deliberate upon and conclude the business referred to it.”[9] In laymen’s terms, when the court appoints a commission, the action of the commission is the action of the court. Commissions can be useful for two reasons. (1) Something needs to be done quickly. (2) Something is complicated and needs a small group of people solely focused on the facts. This second reason is why judicial matters are almost always handed over to commissions. Complicated fact patterns, multiple witness testimony, and application of specific BCO provisions can often be difficult in a room of over a hundred people, but, “Every commission appointed by Presbytery shall consist of at least two teaching elders and two ruling elders.”[10]
So, if the case is decided by a commission, suddenly a two-thirds majority could be as few as three people. That’s not what the Assembly had intended when it put the two-thirds requirement in place. Now, could there be situations where administratively suspending a man is vital, when it must be done immediately? Absolutely. That’s what called meetings are for. This overture passed, and I’m glad it did. I hope it passes two-thirds of the presbyteries so that we can get it officially in the BCO next year.
Conclusion
General Assembly is always a lot of work. I got to see this year that it’s even more work than I’d originally thought. It’s always fun to see friends from seminary. It’s always fun to go to the exhibit hall. But ultimately the reason I go to the Assembly is to serve the church. This Assembly went very well, not perfect, but as good as can be expected. God is good. Christ will build his Church. “Lord, keep us steadfast in thy word!”
[1] RAO 3-2. I actually skipped a few of his responsibilities because that paragraph was getting so long.
[2] https://www.naparc.org/
[3] Mark A. Noll ed., Confessions and Catechisms of the Reformation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991), 29.
[4] BCO 27-4. My apologies for what is certainly a run-on sentence.
[5] BCO 9-2
[6] RAO 14-2. Italics mine.
[7] BCO 15-2. Italics mine.
[8] BCO 38-3.b. Italics mine.
[9] BCO 15-1
[10] BCO 15-2.
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