One veteran member of the General Assembly Council shared some reflections on the meeting held at the end of February.

Cathy Cummings Chisholm, who served as chair of the Council a few years ago, was impressed by the overall tone of this meeting. It was, she said, "totally different from the hostile, contentious, emotionally-draining meetings from my first year or two on GAC and the typical rounds of power plays and ego-battles."

She continued, "The division that is supposed to exist out in the church is just not obvious at GAC. Diversity, yes. Disagreement, often, and often quite pronounced. But not divisive or destructive. Not personally antagonistic, but a great deal of respect and community. We can do better in many ways, but I just kept thinking all week how far we have come in less than 6 years and how much more we are a model for the church of how a governing body can and should function."

Even in dealing with the protests and demands for action on the address to the Peacemaking Conference last summer, the consensus was that "we shouldn't be spending time on it." When former Moderator Marj Carpenter offered that opinion the discussion came to an end, with "really no disagreement within the council." The unanimity of the group was shown clearly by the fact that a co-sponsor of the motion was a strong proponent of the evangelical side of the church, and the voice vote was unanimous -- with not a single No vote or abstention.

In that discussion, she added, "Sara Lisherness did an excellent job of summarizing the Peacemaking Program's process for planning and evaluating conferences and putting it all within context. Because they knew that the conference addressing faith in a multi-cultural context would raise just these kind of issues, they were very intentional about the theme of the preceding conference to address Christology: 'Who do you say I am?'"

There have been reports of the Council's action to provide funding for curriculum resources, which have implied that this marked a failure of the church's educational programs. Chisholm sees it in a much more positive light:

"One action which may be as significant as any is that after years of demanding that those who publish curriculum and educational resources follow a business model of being 'self-sustaining' and then having to provide additional funds at the end of the year as if they had 'failed,' we voted to switch our philosophy to that of providing a service and budgeting the additional funds at the beginning of the year. In effect, we are finally saying that Christian Education and curriculum are vital parts of the mission of the PCUSA and that work should be supplemented by mission funds, not just what they earn from sales. Finally! After all, GA requires that we provide materials for special topics and for specific constituencies (disabilities, Spanish and Korean language, etc.) that are unlikely to produce a 'profit,' in addition to producing good quality, affordable, denomination-specific curriculum for all churches."

She also offers some perspective on the budgeting process and the staff people who have been involved in it:

"We also approved a description of our budgeting 'process' and time-line so that what we do and how we do it is information available to the church at large. (All these things you would have thought we would have already done!) Again, a great deal of credit goes to Joey Bailey, along with Kathy Lueckert and John Detterick. We have a good staff team of faithful, effective leaders, committed to working in partnership with each other, with the other agencies, and in support of elected leaders."

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PVJ's Facebook page

Mitch Trigger, PVJ's Secretary/Communicator, has created a Facebook page where Witherspoon members and others can gather to exchange news and views. Mitch and a few others have posted bits of news, both personal and organizational. But there’s room for more!

Voices of Sophia blog

Heather Reichgott, who has created this new blog for Voices of Sophia, introduces it:

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