Voices

by Vic Jameson

The Year the General Assembly Didn’t

(The following is a work of the imagination of the author writing for the entertainment of the reader and anyone who takes if for anything more than that should have his/her own imagination arrested and carefully confined.)

It was a General Assembly like no other. Or perhaps one should say, it was totally unlike any General Assembly ever held.

Because it wasn’t.

Wasn’t held, that is.

Maybe I should explain.

What it was was the first time in nearly two hundred years when Presbyterians from far and wide did not gather in one place to do what at least some of them felt to be God’s work.

It was a time no one was elected, amid applause and cheers, to be the presiding officer of this meeting and indeed the highest elected officer of the two-point-something-millon member Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

The stated clerk of the General Assembly is the highest ecclesiastical officer (one might say, the chief hired hand). How one can be in charge of a meeting when there is no meeting is another question.

There has been a stated clerk of the General Assembly ever since there has been a General Assembly. The stated clerk of the General Assembly, whenever there is a General Assembly, makes all manner of arrangements, interprets all sorts of rules, and sees to it that things are done properly.

And—this is important—puts together a staff to handle small and large details involving the hard work of 600 or so commissioners (voting delegates) who chart the course of decision-making that, over a period of about ten days, will establish what kind of churchly things the denomination ought to worry and argue about.

This meeting, called the General Assembly, has occurred in every June (or sometimes May) every year. At first these meetings were held in Philadelphia. But as time went on, they came to be scheduled in other places. Sometimes they were as far away from Philadelphia as Portland, Oregon, or Orlando, Florida, or Boston, Massacusetts, or even Albuquerque, New Mexico.

General Assembly staff people would work long, hard hours to make life comfortable or at least bearable for all sorts of volunteers, including commissioners, who are the lifeblood of any GA.

As I say, these get-togethers were got together every year. This was simply a fact of life. People looked forward to them as faithfully as sunrise or sunset building their lives, vacations, even their locations around the times, places, inspirations, and, sometimes people would criticize the irritations started by all the above. In more recent times, the quiet but persistent group of Presbyterians had thought to change all this. Nearly every year for the past half dozen or so years, some Presbyterians have argued that annual meetings of the General Assembly are cumbersome, costly and critical, overtaxing the staff, voting on whether to continue the religious roundup games every year. But in 2002 proponents of every-other-year prevailed and a timetable was established for doing our part of God’s work on this earth. Some new things began to happen. Some old things stopped happening.

Overtures (some might call petitions for action) were not dealt with as they had been for years because there was no one to deal with them. Many an inspirational or educational speech went unspoken because no one had been chosen to make them or even listen to them. Grizzled veterans grumbled at this state of affairs. Exuberant youths roamed the neighborhood looking for causes to support. Women, men, clergy and laity, would have formed eager new caucuses except that there was no one to form them or to populate them.

It was not all as bad nor as good as it seemed. But in the end, commissioners and onlookers agreed that things rarely are.

(The End. Please return to reality decently and in order.)