The reappearance of a proposed policy paper on the changing nature of families in the United States is expected to be a major item before this year’s 216th General Assembly in Richmond, VA.

“Transforming Families,” developed by the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP), documents the changing structure of family life, which today includes many single-parent households, homes in which children are raised by grandparents or other non-parent relatives, and domestic partnerships other than marriage. It speaks of ways in which various kinds of families can raise children faithfully and responsibly.

Critics of the original 43-page report claimed its authors had refused to make moral distinctions and placed families headed by same-sex couples on the same plane as those headed by married heterosexual couples — violating scripture and Christian morality. They prepared a one-page substitute that defined marriage, as PC(USA) doctrine does, as a union of “one man and one woman.”

Neither version passed muster at last year’s Assembly in Denver, CO, which bounced both back to ACSWP with instructions to rewrite it, adding stronger affirmations of the theological value of the traditional two-parent family. Parts of the document were revised as many as 19 times, and a new theological section had been added.

The Rev. Peter Sulyok, the ACSWP coordinator, said he believes the retooled paper will win broad support at the Assembly and in the PC(USA).

He said the revised paper is “broad enough to include all the families in the church, and wide enough to create the space for the church to reach out, both within its own walls and beyond its walls, into society, to seek opportunities for ministries with families.”

The original paper was produced in response to a request from the 1997 Assembly that ACSWP examine “changing families and social structures that support families,” focusing on their impact on children, and suggest ways “to strengthen the church’s ministry to contemporary families.”

“Transforming Families” will be considered by Assembly Committee 10 — National Issues.