Thursday, November 20, 2008

A few interesting presbytery meetings!

Tuesday, Nov 18th, was the third Tuesday of the month. In many presbyteries, this is the night of the scheduled presbytery meeting. There were two separate meetings that night that I was interested in.

The first was at Woodchuck-Servant Presbytery. The Open Theological Declaration was voted down by a 8 vote margin, but referred to a Presbytery Task Force. You can read about it here. I was wondering what would happen, and while saddened, not surprised that this would happen. The good thing is that its not going to go away. These are things that need to be talked about, especially if the change to the Fidelity and Chastity clause gets voted down, then what happens. Its going to be an interesting set of votes coming down.

The second was at Nother Completely-different Presbytery, where a friend of mine was approved to move to Candidate status in preparation for ministry. This was not a given, and my friend was somewhat nervous. The friend's spouse told me that the Presbytery made it very easy for the Inquirers who were moving to Candidate status. Their examination consisted of telling the assembled commissioners a 3 minute long version of their faith journey. They were also the first item on the docket after approval of previous minutes, and so on, so they'd be able to leave right after worship.

Evidently, there were three Candidate candidates (kinda redundant, no?). Anyway, from what I understand, the first rambled all over the place, the second read from a prepared script not really looking up to get eye contact, but my friend's spouse said that when my friend got up to speak, and started out with the first phrase of her journey, those who were reading papers, and such, stopped and listened. There was humor and some chuckles from the commissioners, a few nodding heads, and they were in the palm of my friends hand. Of course, the spouse is telling me all this, so I figure that this is a biased report with all the baggage that comes with that.

That said, my friend is now a Candidate.

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