Overtures avalanche warning?
PCAGA paper forecast
To date, only 12 overtures appear on the PCA General Assembly website. By the opening of the assembly last summer, there were 29. There are more to come this year—possibly enough that this year’s number will exceed last year’s. Overtures are requests from individual elders, sessions, or presbyteries to do something or to change something…usually something in the PCA Book of Church Order.1 The “doing” might be to stand up a study committee (which did not happen last year) or petition state and federal government (which did happen last year).
These overtures are funneled to various committees based on what they concern and what they ask. The most important of these committees is the Overtures Committee. Each of the 88 presbyteries may send one ruling elder and one teaching elder. There are never the full possible number of 176 elders in attendance, but this largest committee has a lot of de facto power. It also has the greatest amount of potential time for deliberation, beginning on the Monday morning before the assembly opens on Tuesday evening and sometimes meeting all day Monday and Tuesday. It is often said that the Overtures Committee is where the work of a delegated, deliberative assembly of manageable size is done.
Here’s our favorite overture submitted so far:
This overture would make “constitutional” (binding) the Directory of Public Worship’s chapter on preaching and make more explicit the Book of Chuch Order’s requirement that only qualified men may preach in PCA churches.
We know of several more overtures that have been passed by presbyteries in recent weeks, so stay tuned. The shape of this year’s PCAGA will begin to firm up as these requests arrive.
First two days’ schedule:
For a constitutional amendment request, passage by a simple majority of the General Assembly is just the beginning of the process. Two-thirds of the presbyteries must then approve the change between assemblies, and then the next assembly must approve it again by simple majority.