Ecumenical Partners Share Presbyterian Deliberations
Episcopal News Service. August 10, 1978 [78227]
NEW YORK -- (Editor's Note: When the Presbyterian Church, U. S. held its annual General Assembly this Spring, it invited representatives of different denominations to fully share their convention and life. The Rev. Charles Long, editor and director of the Forward Movement, represented the Episcopal Church and brought back an enthusiastic report of a unique response to ecumenism. Excerpts from his letter to Presiding Bishop John M. Allin follow.)
It was, I believe, the first time that a denomination has offered both voice and vote in its highest legislative body to "Ecumenical Participants" from other churches. There were eight of us in this category including representatives of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Lutheran Church in America, the United Methodist Church, the AME Zion Church, the UPUSA and the Presbyterian Churches of Canada and Mexico. It is planned to invite different churches to send representatives each year.
Travel expense and a per diem allowance for hospitality were paid by our hosts. We were given the same documentation, nearly 1000 pages, provided other commissioners (deputies); assigned in random fashion, as others are, to legislative committees; put at special tables up front for plenary sessions; personally introduced to the key leadership of the Assembly; briefed on the issues and on the intricacies of Presbyterian legislative process, and encouraged to participate fully in debate. Most of us did so and in several instances made constructive interventions that would not have happened without this ecumenical presence.
I encountered no sign of resentment or suspicion from other members of the Assembly. On the contrary, there were many private expressions of appreciation for our being there, several opportunities for pastoral counseling (the outsider-brother was non-threatening?) and endless questions about the Episcopal Church and how it works: e.g., are Presbyteries or Bishops more effective instruments for mission, for church discipline and the guidance of clergy?
Presbyterians rely on the committee system, even more than we do, in preparing legislation for action in plenary session. The entire Assembly is divided into Standing Committees for the first three days, and it was at this crucial level that ecumenical participants had both voice and vote. In plenary sessions we had voice only, and indeed we would have been embarrassed to have had a vote at the final stage, especially on matters of controversy when the Assembly was almost equally divided and the vote of eight outsiders could have made a difference. If the General Convention should ever be persuaded, as I hope it will be, to invite Ecumenical Participants to share in its deliberations, I would recommend a similar provision.
I was assigned to the Standing Committee on Supervision of Lower Courts, somewhat analogous to our Committee on Canons. It reviews recommendations from a Permanent Judicial Commission and seeks to coordinate relationships between the various levels of organization (the Courts) in the Church. Many of its findings had to do with proposed changes in the book of Presbyterian polity, the Book of Church Order, but it also dealt with profoundly pastoral problems such as the rising incidence of divorce among the clergy.
I was much impressed with the sense of mutual accountability within the Presbyterian system. This has a negative side in a cumbersome and time consuming process of approving in plenary session every paragraph of every report of past action taken and the administrative details for the carrying out of new programs as they are proposed. On the other hand, important decisions of the Assembly must be referred to the lower courts for their advice and consent, and then be voted again by the next Assembly before taking effect. It is as though the adoption of a new Prayer Book required not only the action of two General Conventions but approval by a majority of diocesan conventions before a second reading took place. And I wonder how a sense of mutual accountability might grow among us if the minutes of vestry meetings had to be submitted to some diocesan authority and the reports of diocesan conventions were thoroughly reviewed at the provincial or national level.
The list of "issues on the agenda" is very similar in our two churches. I have included some of the more significant papers in the hope that you will share them with appropriate members of your staff. As a confessional church, the Presbyterians also do more deliberate theological study at the national level.