Day 1 - In a FOG

I arrived this morning in Minneapolis. So far, the experience is fantastic. It is so easy to be around the Presbyterians. In a way it is very much like family. I am enjoying the experience and greatly enjoying the people I am meeting. Just like being around family too long, I'm sure I will be irked by some of our discussions we will have this week. However, it is so incredibly cool that our denomination pulls together to directly discuss our issues, head-on, no soft petaling. Today there was a lot of discussion about how to treat and interact with each other, our co-moderator of our committee spoke and kept saying, it's not if you disagree, it is when you disagree you should follow the disagreement guidelines (Speak respectfully, maintain a spirit of Love in Jesus, be ready to forgive and be forgiven).

My Committee, new "Form of Government" is considering a recommendation to accept a major re-write of the book of order. (for those non-Presbyterians, the BOO is our polity book, sort of our laws of regulation that provide rules for everything from hiring pastors, to selling Presbyterian properties, to ordination, to rules about who should be on a churches session, how the committee on Ministry should act etc. When first hearing about being selected for this committee, I thought BLAHHHHHH!!!! I thought I was going to do nothing but work on bureaucracy. I was not sure how this was supposed to help the Presbyterian Church. On reflection, the work of this committee could introduce one of the biggest changes to the Presbyterian church in decades. So it is more exciting then perhaps it sounds.

One of the main reasons for this new Form of Government (nFOG) proposal is to help the smaller congregations and geographically diverse Presbyteries. A church of 20 people, can't have a 8 member pastor nominating committee A Presbytery of 30 churches, 900 members over 4 states can't hope to fulfill the requirements set up in the book of order for the Committee On Ministry.

So what does the FOG task force want to do? The recommendation or this nFOG is to create more flexibility and make the rules and regulations less rigorous so churches, presbyteries and synods can focus more on issues of greater importance like mission. It greatly reduces the size of the BOO. In addition, this nFOG could be a peace plan of how we can accept more diversity by creating a more flexible environment.

It is a very complex issue. So complex that our committee started a day before everyone else.

Conceptually, the nFOG seems to be good idea. However, it also seems there may be tremendous issues and problems with dealing with conflict, power of the governing bodies and even some of the new language with the nFOG. I don't know enough yet to have an opinion. We will be taking a large part of Sunday and Monday to continue to study and understand this complex issue.