Wednesday's update

After staff meeting, Andy sent an email to his youth leaders, which included the following:

Bill informed us this morning that the Session made some decisions last night, the details of which will be communicated in a letter going to today to all Covenant’s membership (you should receive it tomorrow). The Session chose to turn down Presbytery’s proposal to leave quietly in the next weeks, choosing instead to continue with our plans to formally request dismissal from the PCUSA at the Presbytery meeting on the 14th. Our conviction is that that we worked hard over many months to honor Presbytery’s process and meet its benchmarks, and we did: 76% of our membership present, and 76% of those voting in favor. At this point, it will be in Presbytery’s hands as to how things will unfold. Of course, we do realize the likelihood that they might refuse the request and take the property anyway, so we are continuing to pray and plan, plan and pray.

You may be asking what exactly our presbytery proposed since I haven't told you that yet. Honestly, I do not know the whole of it, but apparently it offered Bill and Stu the chance to be released to the EPC and a window of time for any members to quietly follow – but without any property. On the face of it, this might sound friendly and peaceful, but (disclaimer: everything following is Robin's opinion, not necessarily the official stance of our staff or leadership) what it says to me is that they want us to simply cast aside the time and expense (both considerable) which our church spent on this effort and simply fade quietly away. I'd like to remind you that our session upheld the requirements imposed on us by our presbytery. The numbers, the percentages, the time: all of those were set by presbytery, not by our session or pastors. Our church faithfully followed the process set out for us and I think it would be foolish not to follow through with the process. The vote did pass. Why should we pretend it didn't?

What does this mean for us at this point? It means that we hold our breath and pray for the next week. If our presbytery rejects our session's request for dismissal, the likely effect is that both of our pastors will be fired. Is that preferable to quietly resigning? In this case, I think it is. We could have left quietly, as the presbytery is proposing, at any point in the past year or more. If our action to seek dismissal was the right thing to do, and I think it was, then we cannot quit now. I, for one, am thankful that our session is not taking the presbytery's deal. We are waiting and pray that our presbytery will honor the vote and allow our church to stay together.