Origins of the Old Tennent Church

I subscribe to a Presbyterian History blog written by a man named David Myers, a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America. His posts dealing with the history of that conservative breakaway denomination are of little interest to me, but he does write frequently about our common history: particularly the Colonial era. I find those posts to be of much greater interest.

Imagine my surprise when I opened an email today and found that the subject of his latest historical reflection is the Old Tennent Church!

You can find his blog post on Old Tennent here.

Towards the end of the article David does say he wishes this historic congregation were a member of the PCA. (Sorry, David. We're proud, here in Monmouth Presbytery, that Old Tennent is one of our congregations, and has been such since the day our Presbytery was founded.)

Thornwell's Revenge?

A collection of overtures sent by South Carolina’s Foothills Presbytery to next summer’s General Assembly is attracting a lot of buzz. Some remarks are favorable, but the vast majority of reactions I’ve heard are negative.

Given that the professed intention of the overtures is to streamline and systematize the Assembly’s ponderous and sometimes chaotic docket — a common source of complaints, voiced especially by first-time commissioners — then why the skepticism about these overtures?

It’s because, to many observers, the Foothills overtures seem to mask a darker intention. The friendly- and benign-sounding goal of taming the Assembly’s docket hides a deeply reactionary goal of stifling nearly all change and hobbling the Assembly’s ability to manage its own rules.

Here’s what the eight Foothills overtures do:

1) Devote each General Assembly to considering one of the six Great Ends of the Church (F-1.0304) on a rotating basis, considering in that year only matters that pertain to that Great End. Constitutional amendments could only be considered every third Assembly (which, with a biennial meeting schedule, means every six years). Even then, no amendment could be considered that has not achieved prior endorsement by 15% of the presbyteries.

2) Proposed social-witness policy statements must have the prior endorsement of one-third of the presbyteries.

3) For the next three General Assemblies, block the Assembly’s Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy from proposing anything to the Assembly. The only way for that group to get any business before the Assembly would be for them to convince a sufficient number of presbyteries to generate overtures.

4) For each General Assembly, allow one-fifth of the presbyteries, on a rotating basis, to send their executive presbyter (or whomever most closely approximates that function, if they don’t have one) as an advisory delegate with voice.

5) Require a supermajority of two-thirds of the presbyteries to ratify any constitutional amendments, and require the next General Assembly to ratify any amendments that do gain that level of support, before they could become part of the Constitution.

6) Allow presbyteries to abstain from voting on proposed constitutional amendments (presently they may only vote “yes” or “no,” with any failure to vote being counted as a “no” vote).

7) Allow presbyteries and synods to overture the General Assembly to amend or suspend any of the General Assembly’s Standing Rules (presently they can do this by asking their elected commissioners to do so).

8) Presbyteries and synods may do the same for the Manual of the General Assembly.

In placing a contingent of presbytery executives on the floor of the Assembly as watchdogs (overture 4), and in giving presbyteries and synods control over the Assembly’s own rules (overtures 7 and 8), the Foothills overtures significantly weaken the Assembly’s ability to control its own destiny. In allowing presbyteries to dodge the responsibility of voting on constitutional amendments, overture 6 allows presbyteries to rudely ignore any amendment — notwithstanding the fact that the Assembly considered it important enough to ask presbyteries to vote on. In requiring a two-thirds supermajority for amendments, overture 5 embodies a deep fear of change.

Overtures 4 through 8, therefore, go way beyond mere conservatism to make the church captive to reactionary politics. They resuscitate, for the ecclesiastical context, the sort of States’ Rights and nullification procedures that the United States of America fought a Civil War to overcome.

As for overtures 1 through 3, these seek to summon, like the biblical Medium of Endor, a particularly scary ghost whom Presbyterians have not seen since the late 1800s: the ghost of James Henley Thornwell.

Thornwell was one of the church’s most brilliant theologians and would have been numbered among the greats, were it not for one fatal mistake on his part: he sullied his intellectual reputation by arguing vigorously for slavery as a biblically-sanctioned institution. He did so by promoting a deeply-flawed theological principle he called “the Spirituality of the Church.”

By this, Thornwell meant that the church ought to consider only “spiritual” matters. Because he considered slavery a legal rather than a spiritual matter, he believed the church had no business even talking about it. Such decisions belonged to secular government. Church councils — be they presbyteries, synods or the General Assembly — did best by avoiding such topics altogether.

Thornwell would have made a lousy Old Testament prophet.

The first three of the Foothills overtures sound like pages torn from Thornwell’s polity playbook. They treat social witness policy — as the mid-nineteenth-century Southern Presbyterians treated slavery — like some malodorous topic that doesn’t belong in polite ecclesiastical society. While recognizing that, every once in a while, the church may have no choice but to address such “unspiritual” matters (holding its nose all the while), they so limit the church’s ability to do so that Presbyterians would rarely, if ever, be able to speak truth to power.

It’s incredible to me that, in the twenty-first century, States’ Rights and “Spirituality of the Church” principles like these could gain traction in any segment of the PC(USA).

The Assembly will of course give them due consideration. It's the Presbyterian way.

The Presbytery Consolidation that Never Was

Here's something I ran across as we were cleaning out old files, as we were preparing for the move of the Presbytery Office from Tennent to New Egypt. I meant to post it earlier, but somehow never got around to it.

It's  a map of the old Synod of New Jersey, dating back to around 1959. There were 8 presbyteries in New Jersey at that time, and a special committee had been working to pare that number down to 4. The map indicates where the boundaries of these 4 new presbyteries were to go.

The special committee considered the question long and hard. They learned that the original boundary lines of many presbyteries had been drawn with railroad lines in mind. Towns along a given rail line were clustered together in the same presbytery, so commissioners could travel to presbytery meetings by train.

Even in 1959, many of those original rail lines no longer existed.  America's love affair with the automobile was in full swing. The presbytery boundaries that had once made perfect sense had come to seem random and arbitrary.

The special committee was also trying to create larger presbyteries, so resources could be concentrated and deployed more effectively.

The plan was never implemented. It came up for a vote in the Synod Assembly, but went down in flames. Never again would there to be a move to rethink presbytery boundaries in New Jersey.

There aren't so many people around today who can give first-hand accounts of the debate in the Synod Assembly. (I was only 3 or 4 years old at the time.) I do remember talking with some old-timers in more recent years, who did have firsthand recollections of the vote. They told a tale of an acrimonious debate that left many on both sides feeling bitter.

This was even more widely-known because the old Synod of New Jersey was a "non-delegated synod." When the Synod met, every minister in the state was in attendance, with a corresponding number of elder commissioners.

New Jersey now has seven presbyteries (not counting the non-geographic Eastern Korean Presbytery, which technically covers the whole Synod, but has the majority of its churches in New Jersey).

CLICK ON THIS LINK for a full-size version of the map and take a look at the shaded gray lines. They indicate the proposed new boundary lines of 1959. Today, the overall number of Presbyterians in the state is a good deal less than half of what it was when the special committee was developing its realignment plan. Increasingly, presbyteries today are strapped for funds. You'd think the idea of boundary realignment would come up again: especially since it could be a way of restoring presbyteries to roughly the same overall number of church members each one had before the membership declines of the last quarter of the twentieth century began.

It's interesting to observe the shape of what the committee was calling "Central Jersey Presbytery" (Roman numeral III on the map). Most of Monmouth Presbytery (with the exception of the Southernmost part of Ocean County and a sliver of Burlington County) would have fallen in this new presbytery. All of New Brunswick Presbytery would have, too. Today, Monmouth and New Brunswick Presbyteries are sharing a Regional Presbyter. There are no merger discussions under way, but we all know that topic could come up for discussion in the future.

Maybe the members of the Synod's special committee were ahead of their time. Would it be a good thing to dust this historic artifact off and give it a fresh look?

What do you think?

The Easily-Forgotten Lessons of History

I posted the following text as an online comment to an article on the Presbyterian Outlook website. The editor chose to run it in the July 11, 2011 print edition as a letter to the editor.

(PHOTO: Distinguished Presbyterian William Jennings Bryan: U.S. Senator and frequent Presidential candidate, Moderator of the General Assembly and guest prosecutor at the Scopes Trial, where he promoted a fundamentalist, anti-evolution interpretation of scripture)

I'm dismayed to think that Frank Frieberg's assessment of the reason why some are considering leaving the denomination could be accurate: "What bothers them the most is the departure from viewing scripture as authoritative and instead viewing scripture as merely guidelines."

I hear this a lot. It sounds very satisfying to say, I'm sure. But it's not based on fact.

If it WERE as simple as that, then why are these people still in the PC(USA) after any one of a number of serious, careful reinterpretations of scripture that took place in the 20th Century:
- ordination of women as deacons, elders and ministers;
- toleration of remarriage after divorce; and
- acceptance of miscegenation, or interracial marriage?

(PHOTO: Margaret Towner, ordained in 1956 as the first constitutionally-approved woman minister in the UPCUSA or the PCUS)

At the beginning of the 20th Century, any one of these practices would have horrified most Presbyterians. They would have seen ample biblical reasons for proscribing them.

At the dawn of the 21st Century, few considered them to be any big deal.



(PHOTO: Richard and Mildred Loving, legally married in Washington, D.C. in 1958, but arrested after they moved to Virginia, where miscegenation, or inter-racial marriage, was still considered a crime. The U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1967 landmark case of Loving v. Virginia, unanimously ruled the Virginia state law unconstitutional.)

What happened in the meantime? Did the church cease "viewing scripture as authoritative and instead [start] viewing scripture as merely guidelines"?

No. The church prayed and agonized over the texts. Presbyterians engaged in protracted, strenuous debates, using all the the scholarly gifts and persuasive powers God had given them. Decorum was preserved, for the most part (we ARE Presbyterians, after all), but there were awkward periods of years when believers in the same city or even the same congregation feared they had little in common, and little to say, to one another.

In the end, the Holy Spirit had its way with the church. Presbyterians eventually came to believe God was doing a new thing in their midst. Change came - at first by only the barest majority, but eventually by much larger margins.

Change has never happened any other way, since the Day of Pentecost. Together we struggle to discern God's will in the scriptures. It's a slow, messy, agonizing process that takes a generation or more. Each time there's a major change, some Presbyterians split from the main body, seeking a more holy community, but inevitably most end up deeply disappointed. The wisest among them return, eventually - faithful to Christ's prayer "that they all be one." Many more, in time, give thanks that they didn't heed the call to schism when they were sorely tempted to do so.

I'd love to hear one of these aggrieved parties make a convincing argument why this historical change in biblical interpretation is different from any of the others that have preceded it. So far, I haven't heard any argument that has convinced me.

The argument that this change has been foisted on the church by unbiblical people, who care more for what society thinks than what the scriptures say, is as old as the hills. It has been trotted out, in turn, for each of the 20th Century changes mentioned above. The charge was false then, and it is false now.

Having said that, I can also say I understand how it happens. Change is hard. Very hard. I can sympathize with those who fear they no longer recognize the church of their youth.

This is a tender and vulnerable time for the Body of Christ. The faithful way to live through it is to try extra hard to think well of those on the opposite end of the theological spectrum from ourselves - not to demonize them as either libertine or prejudiced.

We can get through this, folks, if we just take a deep breath, try listening more than speaking, and practice the fine Christian art of mutual forbearance.

That's what's worked for us in the past. It will work for us again, if we but continue to trust Jesus Christ, the one head of the church, to be our guide.

An Early History of the Presbytery - Online!

There are great "digitizing" projects afoot, these days, whose goal is to get all manner of books available online, in electronic format. Google Books, for example, has been much in the news, as it's been pushing the limits of copyright law (and, in some cases, copyright law has been pushing back).

More quietly - and almost behind the scenes - a number of scholarly libraries have been hard at work, scanning the text of books into computers and uploading them onto the Internet. Mostly these are older books, no longer under copyright.

In the world of theological books, Princeton Theological Seminary has been a leader in this - and, indeed, is now investing millions in rebuilding Speer Library on the seminary campus. Besides serving its residential students and faculty, the new structure is meant to serve Christian leaders around the world, by making free access to digitized books a reality. Through networks like The Internet Archive and OpenLibrary.org, users of the seminary website can link to digitized books from seminary and university libraries around the world.

While exploring this brave, new world of digitized books recently, I came upon an electronic version of a 50-page pamphlet, Historical Sketch of Monmouth Presbytery and Its Churches, by Joseph G. Symmes, published in 1877. It includes brief historic sketches of all the churches in the Presbytery at that time.

Surf on over there, and you'll find references to some of our most historic churches, like Allentown, Old Tennent and Shrewsbury, as well as some that are no more, like Cream Ridge, Holmanville and Oceanic. Squan Village (Manasquan) was in its infancy in 1877, and now-familiar place names like Lakewood, Ocean and Point Pleasant are nowhere to be found (those churches having not yet been established).

Anyway, this little book's a fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of the Presbytery. Enjoy it!

Hall's Index

Through an article in the newsletter of the Presbyterian Historical Society, I've become aware of a newly-completed online resource that's part of the PHS website. It's called Hall's Index of American Presbyterian Congregations, and it's a respository of basic information about every Presbyterian church in the country that's ever existed, of the PC(USA) and its antecedent denominations, as well as the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

The information there is pretty limited: mostly the name and location of the church, and the date of founding.

Still, you may be interested to go to the site and look up your church's listing.

It's mostly a tool for historical researchers, but is available to anyone.

The Presbyterian Historical Society is supported largely by per capita funds.