March 15, 2010: Something's Up
OK, so it is the "Ides of March."
So what makes me think that something's up? Two things:
The first thing was the Presbynews article regarding the proposal to create a commission with the authority "to organize new or realign existing presbyteries and synods in response to actions of the 219th General Assembly or requests from presbyteries or synods." As I have been writing over the last several posts; the implications of approving this commission are huge.
The second thing is the report by Paula Kincaid on the Layman Online that Mark Tammen of the Office of the General Assembly (OGA) is advocating for the new Form of Government by pointing out the General Assembly Mission Council would be abolished.OK, that's a little bit of an overstatement -- but not much.
The new Form of Government (nFoG) recommendation coming before the 219th General Assembly “does not mention the General Assembly Mission Council (GAMC) anywhere,” said Mark Tammen during his presentation to the council on nFOG last week. “So it provides all of the authority but none of the particular structures,” said Tammen, director of the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Constitutional Services.In the past, the Office of the General Assembly has been rigidly unwilling to lead the parade towards innovation. Yes, the former Stated Clerk was behind the nFoG process; however, these two items seem to reflect a radically different approach more Wild West approach to doing things. True: the nFoG proposal is not new; what is new is the director of Constitutional Services advocating for “The idea is to provide all the authority but none of the structure that will allow this church to be the church God wants it to be in the new millennium.
It is beginning to look like the Office of General Assembly is spearheading an effort to move into a post-modern, post-denominational environment by pushing towards chaos -- chaos intended to force a re-constituting. Whether following the "emerging" or "emergent" or "missional" paradigm is yet to be seen (and good luck defining distinctions among them).
I spent a study-leave week trying to read though some of the material that is cited by a number of leaders, including Moderator Bruce Reyes-Chow (who will be here tomorrow).
As I began to read Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence, the idea is a paradigm shift every 500 years. From pages 27-28:
In sum, what all of this means is that the more organized, formalized monasticism which came with the sixth century never left us either in tradition or by practice. In adapted and updated forms, monasticism still influences and informs Christianity all over the world. All that really happened was that its somewhat decentralized system gave way to an increasingly more centralized on in Rome. Rome in turn, for political as well as religious reasons, severed itself in the eleventh century from a non-Western threat to its absolute theological and ecclesial authority. In that Great Schism, however, Eastern or Orthodox Christianity was hardly destroyed. Far from it. It was freed to become fully itself and fully an expression of its own experience of living out the Christian faith in its own circumstances. Indeed, one of the great gains of the last half century for North American Christianity has been the re-introduction of Orthodoxy to Western Christian practice, understanding, and appreciation.
Certainly, as is patently obvious, Roman Catholicism did not cease to exist with the coming of Protestantism in the sixteenth century. It did, however, lose dominance, social and political as well as religious. But any honest observer would have to say that in the course of that loss, the Roman Church was itself also freed -- freed to weed out its errors and corruptions while at the same time evolving a more "Roman" way of being "Roman than had previously been the case. That very process, which the scholar Diana Butler Bass calls "re-traditioning," has occurred with each turn of the eras and is a substantial dynamic in the progression from upheaval to renewed stability. It certainly constitutes an important part of what must be discussed in any analysis of where both established Protestant and Emergent Christianity are going -- and taking us -- in both the near and more distant future. And "taking us," we must remember, is central to any analysis of re-formations, whether past or present.
When an overly institutionalized form of Christianity is, or ever has been, battered into pieces and opened to the air of the world around it, that faith-form has both itself spread and also enabled the spread of the young upstart that afflicted it. ...(emphasis added).
That last line seems to reflect the operating assumption for the COGA commission and the nFoG. If we give the commission the power to restructure, we give the mechanism for dis-integration. If we eliminate the GAMC, we require this body to re-constitute.
What do you think? Am I making too much of this?
Housekeeping notes:
1. The lack of posting for a couple of weeks has been due to an imperfect storm of miscellaneous, time consuming, administrative details. Nothing serious -- at all -- just immediate pressing things that needed my attention.
2. I am working on improving the fonts. I need to spend a couple hours figuring out what it is I have done to generate the problem I have with getting them to appear on the site as they appear when I create them. If it is any consolation, the site looks great on my computer.
3. I also am going to add a comments section, allowing some measure of interactivity. I am doing so with some reluctance and trepidation; I am loathe to spend a lot of time moderating. Thus, it is an experiment that will either fly or not fly based upon how much time I have to spend serving as referee.
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