Each December on the first Friday and Saturday of December, all Stated Clerks of the various Presbyteries in the Presbyterian Church in America are invited to a meeting in the Atlanta area to discuss matters of interest to those in a similar work.

While the PCA currently has 79 Presbyteries, only 30 or so actually attend each year. When you realize that the Presbyteries are responsible for the funding of travel and housing (AC feeds the group for two meals), it is obvious why attendance is not higher.

However, as one has been a fairly regular attendee over the past dozen or so years of having served first New River and now Blue Ridge Presbytery I would encourage all Presbyteries to put funding for attendance for their Clerk to attend this meeting in their budgets. It is one of the most practical, helpful projects each year to help increase careful application of Biblical principles of church government, as well as a venue when up to date information of the work of the Administrative Committee can be communicated to the churches (as we hope this story will demonstrate).

This year there were several items reported and discussed which should be of interest to our readers.

Top among these was a special presentation made on Saturday morning by Dr. David Coffin, a Teaching Elder in Potomac Presbytery (serving as pastor of New Hope PC in Fairfax, VA) who presented a paper on the Spiritual Nature of the Church, giving a historical account of the Dabney/Thornwell (and even Hodge) position that the church has no Biblical warrant to speak, as the church, on political and social issues. However, he made clear that this doctrine never did nor does now take away the liberty of individuals (even Pastor/Theologians) to address public issues as individuals.

Two other special presentations were made to the group on Friday.

Tom Cheely, Missions Director at Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, introduced a new ministry being developed there to identify, train, and promote the use of Interim Pastors in the PCA. He advocated the position that many (if not all) churches could find great value of a period with an Interim Pastor during times of pastoral change. (Since training and advising Pulpit Committees is a major portion of the work of Metokos Ministries, this definitely got my attention!) Interested men are being invited to attend the Embers to a Flame training weekend in January at which times further plans will be discussed.

Robert Clark, Director of Relief Ministries at he PCA’s RBI office, briefed the assembled Clerks on a new project his office as sponsoring. Outlining the certainty of a growing number of widows of PCA Ministers in the near future, as well as an even larger growing number of retired ministers and wives, all of whom will be in need of support from the denominations relief fund in future years, Clark described a plan to do a professional survey of this demographic of the denomination in the near future.

In late December each Teaching Elder in the PCA will be asked to participate in a survey conducted by Price, Waterhouse consultants on behalf of RBI gathering data concerning their financial planning for retirement in order to have sufficient income to support their family, and especially their widows, in their old age. This demographic information is needed to help RBI plan for needed relief funds in the future. The survey research will report only numerical data; no identification of any personal financial data will be available to anyone – even RBI staff. All Clerks will be receiving a document in a few days describing the project and asked to pass this on to each Teaching Elder so they understand what this survey is about before it arrives in the mail.

As always, the PCA Stated Clerk, Dr. Roy Taylor, gave an update report to the gathered clerks. Here is a synopsis of that report:

· The letter directed to be sent by the General Assembly to the President concerning the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ issue (See report from GA with content of the letter here http://bit.ly/h4SLrR. Dr. Taylor reported he had received a post card with a printed response thanking “Mr. Brown” for his letter. The address of the Clerk’s office is 1600 North Brown Road! Dr. Taylor has sent this post card to the PCA Archives for safe keeping.

· Gave an update on the work of the Standing Judicial Commission, including an explanation that the decisions of the SJC do not become public until parties are officially notified by the Office of the Stated Clerk.

· Reported the following vote counts from Presbytery on BCO amendments (these number were those received as of December 1, 2010)
From 2010 YES NO
o BCO 14-1 15 8
o BCO 14-2 15 8
o BCO 5-2,3,4,8 23 0
o BCO 5-3 19 4
o BCO 9-7 23 0
o BCO 15-2 21 0

From 2009:
o BCO 37-7 63 4 (has now been approved)
o BCO 13-7 67 0 (has now been approved)
Editor’s Note: On November 22nd we reported the count on BCO 14-1 and 14-2 as 17 Yes, 16 No http://bit.ly/fF8PCc

· From the recent NAPARC meeting, Dr. Taylor indicated that the Korean American Presbyterian Church (Kosin) has indicated they will seek to join NAPARC in 2011 and the Protestant Reformed Church in America send an observer to this year’s meeting.

· A meeting was held including Dr. Taylor and TE Craig Higgins, Chairman of the Interchurch Relations Committee with representatives of the L’Église Réformée du Québec and, in a separate meeting with members of the OPC, on matters of mutual interest

· At a meeting of the NAPARC Committee for the Review of the Purposes of NAPARC, the point was made that the purpose adopted in 2006 indicated a desire of the members to become one church. However, due to the significantly greater size of the PCA, it is likely that – should any mergers occur – it would not affect the PCA until other smaller mergers took place.

After the reports, the gathered Clerks then moved to open discussions of issues of interest to those who were in attendance. It should come as no surprise that the first topic was that of the proposed BCO amendments to revise the format of funding the AC.

During the discussion Dr. Taylor was asked what the AC would plan to do should the amendment not be approved. Since the question came from one of the newer clerks, Dr. Taylor took some time to discuss the historic background of the proposals. He related that when he and business manager, TE John Robertson, came to their offices back in 1998, the first major issue they tackled was to raise the funds needed to pay off the mortgage on the office buildings. During that process, the consultants working with the PCA indicated that many of the agencies of the denomination had individuals or departments in charge of development/fund raising and that, perhaps, the AC should consider doing the same. The decision was that the committee did not have the money to hire additional staff. However, should the amendments fail (which, of course, Dr. Taylor indicated was not expected), the AC would be forced to hire additional staff to assist in fundraising.

On behalf of all the Clerks present, we would thank Angela Nantz, the AC Office Manager for her assistance to the clerks during the year and especially for her help in setting up this meeting and providing an OUTSTANDING bar-b-que dinner on Friday night. We would also thank TE David Dively, who is the moderator of our email group and also moderates these meetings each year.