Special Committee explains how it wrote a new confession for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
Monday’s webinar is part of a series touching on important items of business at the 227th General Assembly
LOUISVILLE — Members of the Special Committee to Write a New Confession shared their work Monday during a webinar that’s part of a series informing Presbyterians about some of the work before commissioners and advisory delegates to the 227th General Assembly.
Next week the General Assembly’s Reformed Identity in the United States Committee will take up RUS-10, the report of the Special Committee. The Rev. Dr. Margaret Aymer and the Rev. Dr. Edwin Aponte were co-moderators of the Special Committee; they’ll present to the GA committee next week during online proceedings.
In a confession, the Church “declares to its members and to the world who and what it is, what it believes and what it resolves to do,” Aymer said. “Confessional standards are subordinate to Scripture, but they are nonetheless standards that ought not to be ignored or dismissed.”
The new confession is structured like the Eucharistic Prayer, she said, and has four movements: “In the Image of the Triune God,” “Turning Away from God’s Image,” “God’s Response,” and “Returning to God’s Image,” or metanoia, and what that requires of us, Aymer said.
During a question-and-answer time following the brief presentation, another member of the Special Committee, the Rev. Dr. Martha Moore-Keish, said the Special Committee’s recommendation is to appoint another committee of at least 15 people to do further work and come back to the 228th General Assembly in 2028 with a final report. The new confession must be approved by at least two-thirds of presbyteries and would become part of the Book of Confessions in 2030 at the earliest. “The Book of Confessions [which is included in the Book of Order] takes more time to amend than the Book of Order does,” Moore-Keish said.
“It’s really hard to amend the Book of Confessions, and that’s a really good thing,” said the Rev. Dr. Charles Wiley, another member of the Special Committee. “It takes the wisdom of the whole church multiple times to change it.”
The Rev. Kai Moore, who’s also a member of the Special Committee, said one challenge faced by Presbyterians and other people of faith “is how we as people with such different identities are living together as a community, a church and a nation.”
“People were brought here against their will,” Moore said. “How we came to be such different people in this place is deeply tied to economic realities and the racial capitalism that has been established in this country.”
“These threads of power and money underlie our relationships with one another, especially across political and economic differences in our communities,” Moore said. “They are issues we have to talk about if we are going to confess and move through those.”
The length of the proposed confession “was an ongoing conversation,” Aymer said. “We ended up erring on longer rather than shorter so we could say more fully and completely what we wanted to say.” The new confession can easily be excerpted, she said, adding, “we wanted it to be liturgically useful.”
“If you haven’t done it already, I recommend you read it out loud,” Aponte said. “It has a different impact.”
Learn more about and register for upcoming 227th General Assembly informational sessions here.
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