Lewis L. Wilkins, “The American Presbytery in the Twentieth Century” in Milton J Coalter, John M Mulder and Louis B Weeks, The Organizational Revolution. Presbyterians and American Denominationalism, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992, 96-121.
[Extracts used with permission of the author. Footnote links not yet included]
The American presbytery in the twentieth century has been shaped by multiple forces past and present: the canon law legacy of Reformation polity; the rise of the evangelical denomination as a distinctive American form of the church; fascination with "frontiers" as objects of mission; mid-nineteenth-century arguments over how to reconcile the denominational form with traditional Presbyterian polity; and the shifting environments for mission.
Setting the Stage: The Origins
The "presbytery" has been a distinctive and important element in the polity structure of all churches that trace their lineage back to the Church of Scotland.1 Churches that stand in the streams of the continental Reformation strongly influenced by the work of John Calvin also have bodies similar to presbyteries, but call them by other names.2
Roots in Canon Law
Reformed approaches to ordering and organizing the post-Reformation church were set firmly within the tradition and concepts of Western Catholic canon law in which many of the founders of Reformed churches were well schooled.3 Their redefinition of medieval canon law concepts and reassignment of ecclesiastical powers formed the basis for rules for presbyteries in the Presbyterian forms of government.
The Reformed founders relocated the "particular church" from the diocese to the congregation, retaining the terms "particular church" and "bishop" but applying them to the congregation and to the pastor, who was authorized to preside over the congregation, to preach, and to celebrate the sacraments in it.4 The Reformed founders vested "powers of jurisdiction" (legislation and government, reserved to a bishop in canon law) in groups of persons, an ordered hierarchy of "assemblies" or "judicatories"5 composed of ministers and lay "governors" or "elders. "6 They lodged the power to "make ministers" in the presbytery. This power has two aspects, one governmental and the other liturgical. The governmental decision about whether a particular candidate was qualified to be ordained belonged to the presbytery, and each minister and elder cast an equal vote. Until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries7 the liturgical right to ordain by the laying on of hands with prayer was reserved to ministers; at least three ministers, the quorum of a presbytery, were required to perform the rite.8 As in the medieval church, ordination granted certain "powers of order" to an individual minister: power to celebrate the sacraments, to pronounce forgiveness of sins to a congregation, and to bless the people in God's name. Like their predecessors in the medieval church, Reformed ministers required additional authorization ("granting of faculties" in canon law) from a session or presbytery to exercise these powers in a particular place and at specified times.
Overseeing ministerial candidacy, ordaining and overseeing ministers, and seeing to the calling and installing of pastors in congregations are core responsibilities of every American presbytery in the twentieth century. These responsibilities are erected on the basis of a revision and redefinition of the canon law of the Western church catholic.
Reform in Scotland
A fully developed polity with a clearly defined "presbytery" did not emerge in the sixteenth-century Scottish Books of Discipline, which set forth changes to be made and abuses to be corrected within the traditional Scottish framework of parishes, dioceses, and synods.9 Presbyterian polity evolved in Scotland through acts of the General Assembly and Parliaments.
Organizing the Diaspora
In 1645, a half century after the Scottish Books, the Westminster Form of Presbyterial Church Government was written to serve the needs of a church that existed as a relatively stable diaspora minority in England, not for a community living in pre-Reformation dioceses. For the diaspora, the Westminster Form sought to give Presbyterianism a recognizable identity distinct from Anglicans on the one hand and congregationalists on the other.11 It was a more concise and "constitutional" document than the Scottish Books. Its language aimed for precision in definitions of key terms and concepts; its architecture is comprehensive. The Westminster Form marks the first appearance of the later "presbytery" as a body made up of ministers and lay representatives of congregations and charged with government and ordering ministry.
Transplanted to America
The presbytery that evolved in Scotland and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was codified in the Westminster Form of Presbyterian Church Government was well suited for organizing a distinctive Presbyterian Church in America.
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Since presbyteries relate directly to congregations, they became the front line for thinking about how to deal with issues of mistrust and threats of schism.47
The union presbyteries, formed after 1969 as full members of both Presbyterian churches and governed by mandatory provisions in both church constitutions, found themselves in a situation that forced them to rethink basic questions of meaning and purpose that presbyteries in only one system did not have to face.
Also contributing to the emergence of this presbytery type were the translation and application of new concepts, techniques, and leadership models from organizational development and conflict theories into language and forms usable in Presbyterian judicatories. Robert Worley and Hugh Halverstadt of McCormick Seminary were central figures in this theological appropriation of social science into presbyteries, and the middle judicatory executive track in the McCormick doctor of ministry program was a means by which this knowledge was disseminated into the presbyteries of both Presbyterian churches.
The identifying characteristic of this presbytery type is a focus on enabling congregations to be healthy and effective in mission. This focus leads the Congregational Mission Support Presbytery to take its own members and churches seriously as sources of wisdom about God's purposes and the principles that will guide their work together in the presbytery. It does not assume that purposes and principles are given to it from without or that its only task is to conform its structure and mission to denominational norms. Distinctive patterns of presbytery life are built on the foundation of this perspective. These presbyteries began, for example, to make regular periodic visitations to sessions. They placed high priority on the work of their committee on ministry as an important center of innovation, trust-building, and problem-solving in the presbytery's relationships with congregations.
A Presbytery for the Twenty-first Century: The Presbytery as Parish and Particular Church?
The era of the American evangelical denomination as a connected, coherent, and potent mission enterprise is over. 49 The central element that made that enterprise powerful was its underlying consensual foundation: a strong and widely held belief that mission defined as churching the unchurched in the West was what God was calling the denominations and their members to do. That consensus made it possible for presbyteries, as parts of larger denominational systems, to play clearly defined roles that contributed positively to the overall enterprise. While the roles were defined differently by the two Presbyterian churches after the Civil War, clarity more than content of definitions seems to have been the factor that enabled their positive contribution to the whole. A generation of efforts since World War II to find surrogate frontiers to pull the denominational mission wagon has failed. Church membership has declined; mission giving has stagnated. The target populations for mission in the past two decades are no exception: apart from new Korean immigrant churches, racial ethnic membership has not grown; membership among groups traditionally served by Presbyterian mission (Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans) has not increased significantly overall and may actually have declined in the last two decades.
Churchwide denominational understandings and visions for mission long were the most important single factor that shaped the evolution of presbyteries. While General Assemblies did not have coercive hierarchical power to force presbyteries to play assigned roles in mission, the mission frontiers they defined made sense to presbyteries as targets for concerted denominational effort. .
Since about 1960, presbyteries have not been pulled by a convincing denominational vision and have been left to their own devices to decide what role they will play in the mission of the Presbyterian Church. The reality of presbyteries today is diverse, even chaotic. A typology of the presbytery structures that have developed in response to mission demands in the twentieth century has been used in this essay to sort, categorize, and interpret the diversity. Yet these presbytery types offer little guidance for the future.
Perhaps it is time to give up the illusion that any new mission frontier is going to restore the power that has slipped away from the American denominational church. That need not be an act of institutional resignation or suicide. It could be a clue to the institutional vocation and direction a church guided by the principle "reformed yet always to be reformed" is called to move at the threshold of the twenty-first century.
American Presbyterians have been an evangelical denominational mission enterprise since the l840s, but before that they understood themselves in the terms they brought to America from the Reformation in Europe: as a church, settled and rooted in particular places, secure in an identity grounded in the elective love of God and answering a call to discern and seek God's will for the good of all who lived in each place. Their "mission" was not something the church did to or for people who lived somewhere else. It was living a life of responsibility before God in a disciplined, worshiping community of persons certain of the love of God (that is, of their election), free from anxieties about their eternal destiny and free to embody as best they could, for themselves and their fellow citizens, God's will as they understood it from scripture for the place where they were put. Embodying God's will meant for them a disciplined piety, passion for education and learning, compassion and generosity toward neighbors in need, and freedom to organize and advocate politically on behalf of the public good when circumstances warranted.
The American Presbyterian Church did not organize congregations formally on the European parish principle. There membership in a congregation is assigned on the basis of where one lives in relationship to geographic parish boundaries. Presbyterians long practiced, however, a parish, communitarian assumption that one should belong to the church in the place where one lived and worship with whoever else shared one's persuasion and lived in that place.
A geographic, "parish" principle was applied in the definition of presbyteries, however. All Presbyterian constitutions in America have defined presbyteries as ministers and congregations within particular geographic boundaries. When the Old School and New School were dividing, one argument was whether ministers and churches could pick and choose presbyteries on the basis of elective theological affinity; in their reunion, geography won.
In looking for new language to give clarity in defining the role of presbyteries in a fresh and coherent way that is not dependent on the concept of a denominational "mission," perhaps the church can recover and reformulate a metaphor akin to the "settled church" imagery that Presbyterians used to define their corporate identity before the westward movement began.
Geographic parish language, applied to one particular place, might sound something like this:
Palo Duro Presbytery is a parish of 14,000 Presbyterians in a territory a little larger than the state of Pennsylvania. These Presbyterians worship in 65 places and are served by a team of 75-80 ministers of Word and sacrament.
This parish seeks to build its purposes and principles on an assumption that all its members have experienced the love of God and therefore have valid perceptions of God's will, not just for themselves but for all humankind.
It shapes and directs its ongoing life by celebrating what God is doing in this time and place and by listening with respect to what all of us discern in our life together as God's calling to care for and support one another, to love and serve the communities and region where we live, and to extend God's love as far as our imagination can reach.
The members of the presbytery and the team of ministers are led by a presbytery pastor, or general presbyter. The presbytery pastor leads worship, preaches, teaches, visits, cares for people in need, administers affairs of the parish, and helps us work together to focus on what God is doing and on the opportunities God is providing us.
This parish understands itself to be a full partner in a larger system called the Presbyterian Church and with sisters and brothers in other churches who share our responsibility for the temporal and spiritual well-being of the place where we are.
We believe that our experience of God is real and valuable, and we are eager to speak and listen to other presbyteries, to our synod, to the General Assembly, to other fellowChristians and people of good will.
This description of the Parish Presbytery recaptures an old Christian and Presbyterian notion that the "particular church," the smallest unit that can be viewed as bearing the "marks of the church" in the fullest sense (worship, sacraments, order, as well as mission and racial ethnic diversity) could be the presbytery, not the congregation. It affirms a presbytery's being "particular," uniquely rooted in God's love for a place with its history and its culture, without competing with, or asserting prerogatives at the expense of, other less or more inclusive parts of the church. It allows and requires describing the work of presbytery staff as ministry in the same language Presbyterians use to describe the work of ministers who serve congregations. It lies in the trajectory of the Congregational Mission Support Presbytery and frames core elements of that type in language borrowed from presbytery experience before the frontier transformation began. Consistent with reformata semper reformanda, it can claim both continuity with the past and promise for the future.
The Parish Presbytery is a presbytery with boundaries, but no frontiers.