It really is that time again: the Church of God is looking at another General Council and General Assembly in Indianapolis, IN. The agenda itself is here and I’ll be doing a “blow by blow” commentary on same.

Before all of that let’s start with a cautionary note: the most significant part of the Council’s work is to elect our “general officials.” This year there are three open positions (out of five) on the Executive Committee due to term limits. The “post-Constitutional” era we’re in now highlights the fact that we can pass all of the resolutions we want, but unless we have leaders with integrity and insight, we won’t get the result that we need and miss God’s plan for his church.

So let’s get to it:

Global Harvest

This is good; however, it’s worth noting that the model of missionaries coming only from the U.S. is long in the past. Today missions is a) finding people called from wherever they come from and b) sending them to where God has called them to go. I find that Americans don’t quite get that, but we’ve been here at least since the days of Miguel Alvarez, Gordon Robertson and the Asian Centre for Missions, and this will accelerate as we move forward.

Ministry of Evangelism

The Presiding Bishop teed up this discussion earlier this year and I commented on it in my post My Response to “Embracing the Evangelism Opportunity as a General Department…..Again! Let’s Talk About It – Part One.” This item would basically bring back the old department of Evangelism and Home Missions as a restructured Ministry of USA Missions, with elected leadership and a more active board. My comments re the need to include discipleship in this department’s agenda stand.

As an example of this, consider the children’s Bible video series Superbook. It’s certainly evangelistic (it includes the salvation prayer with every video) but it’s also a discipleship tool in that it shows children how to live as Christians. That kind of thing is what we’re going to have to do in cultures—including our own—where the “prediscipleship” of the culture is lacking or absent altogether. Without this our evangelistic efforts will be trapped in a cycle of “blow in/blow up/blow out” without results that stick in this life and the life to come.

One observation: The director and assistant director are limited to one four-year term. Bro. Hill said that he didn’t want this position to become of those going off of the Executive Committee. With the single term, there’s a good chance that the position will become just that.

State Evangelism and Missions Director

I have a couple of questions:

• Why are lay people excluded from this Board? They can serve at the International level (I’m on the Division of Care Board,) why not the state level? Although before the reorganisation the Evangelism Boards (and I’m glad to see them coming back) had oversight over lay ministries at the state level, some states had a state lay board. That was a hit or miss proposition depending upon the state Administrative Bishop. It would be easier to have lay people at the state level on the main board rather than to have two.
• How much have we considered the role of the laity in evangelism and discipleship? Do our ministers really believe that they can do the job by themselves? The New Testament doesn’t support such a concept and neither does experience. Evangelism training for the laity needs to be a part of this effort. This kind of training is both good for outreach and good for those trained, as you cannot share the Gospel unless you know the Gospel.

Biblical Sexuality

This is of a piece with my discussion on “Lee University Doctrinal Integrity and Teaching Fidelity,” where I discuss the issue in detail. I think it’s unfortunate that we have to have a resolution like this but we have to play the cards we’re dealt.

Female Ministers on Trial Boards

This is an attempt to involve women on ministerial trial boards (especially those which involve moral failure) without dealing with the issue of women not being able to be ordained bishops. It’s a good step but we need to come to a happier resolution on this subject.

Generational Harvest

This issue has been something of an obsession with our church leadership, both in terms of the people brought into the church and our ministers. As someone who has taught college students for over twenty years, the most important thing for our people to do (along with the evangelism training mentioned above) is to be real in their Christian walk.

Doctrinal Fidelity

In 2008 we tried to pass a resolution to require our ministers to explicitly agree with the Church of God Declaration of Faith. The effort failed; unless there’s been a major shift of opinion amongst our ministers on this topic, unless we address two issues it will (and should) fail again:

1. Forcing such agreement would basically shut off debate on the Declaration of Faith and the other statements of faith and practice, which is great until you consider these were all passed at a General Assembly in the past and should be amendable by another one in the future. Some provision needs to be made on disagreement with these statements in the context of changing these in a formal way at the General Assembly.
2. Keeping a resolution of this kind from being used as a weapon by one minister against another in order to settle personal scores. Whether that’s successful depends upon the integrity of our ministerial trial system more than the resolution itself, although some mention of that problem would be helpful.

Some of the resolution involves our educational institutions, and I dealt with that in my discussion on “Lee University Doctrinal Integrity and Teaching Fidelity,”

Resolutions re State Overseers and Ordained Bishops

These clear up some technical matters and there is no problem with them.

Responsible Use of Social Media/Digital Platforms

In 2012 a resolution of this kind was put before the Council and failed. It was in the wake of the “Missional Revolt” that led to the cut in the “tithe on tithe” and the reorganisation of the church. I said at the time I felt that the purpose of the resolution was to prevent a rerun of the Missional Revolt. My experience in the Anglican/Episcopal world told me that what has happened in that world—which resulted in the formation of the ACNA—would have never succeeded on the scale it did without the internet and social media, which is basically what happened to the Continuing Churches in the 1970’s. In a church which has the deficient transparency and redress of grievances that ours does, social media is frequently the only way those concerns can come out, although I have reservations about how most of our dissenting social media gets that job done.

Although the present resolution is more carefully crafted, I still don’t like it. The way we conduct ourselves on social media is an extension of how we conduct ourselves face to face and on “legacy” media. We badly need to learn how to discuss issues in a constructive manner, but social media isn’t the cause of that problem. The Scriptures and other governing rules should be enough on social media and elsewhere.

Biblical Worldview

This is something we need to have, although a lot of what passes as a “Biblical worldview” in Protestant churches isn’t up to the status of a worldview. Some of that relates to the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, and there’s a resolution dealing with that, too (see below.)

Priesthood of All Believers

This is one of those things which people like to say more than they like to implement, which speaks to the role of the laity I discussed earlier.

Ordinances of the Church (Communion)

This particular topic came up in the last General Council. It was sent back for reconsideration because, as written then, it implied that the proposed change was the actual position of the original General Assembly in 1906, which was not necessarily the case. This addresses that problem, but in the meanwhile two other problems have arisen that need consideration:

1. We need a serious “tightening up” of our whole approach to the Holy Communion, something I discussed in my post About Those “Loosey-Goosey” Communion Theologies, Episcopal and Otherwise. At this point our Communion practice is little better than that of some left-wing ministers of that “gay-friendly church.”
2. Although the Holy Communion (along with Baptism and Foot Washing) were classified as ordinances at the start, that isn’t carried through in our subsequent statements. We need to figure out whether we consider them as mere ordinances or ascribe a more sacramental nature to them.

Sexual Abuse of a Child/Sexual Exploitation of a Minor

I have no problem with the revocation of ministerial credentials in this case. This extends the penalty to being cast out of the Church of God altogether. My guess is that, for one or more situations, it was too easy for a minister with revoked credentials to go join a church and continue the nasty activities. The practice of permanent exclusion for serious sin has precedent going back to subapostolic times and has sanction in the New Testament; it’s drastic but in some situations it’s necessary.

While on the subject, as a practical matter the Church of God’s first response to problems like this is simple: call the cops. All things considered, that’s the best approach. If the state changes its opinion on paedophilia (and that’s a real possibility) we may be in an entirely new situation, as we are with other matters we thought were “settled” in our society.

Ministerial Reporting

This is a technical measure that should be passed.

Statement on Racism

Every time I link to my 2015 post What Working for the Church of God Taught me About Race, the response is almost always the same: crickets. The problem in the Church of God isn’t racism but ethnocentrism, and until we get past that we’ll never be the church God wants us to be. We only need to look at the example of the Assemblies of God to see what happens when we transcend the limits of ethnocentrism. That also applies to some of our more progressive voices, as I pointed out during the “Think Younger” movement.

Institute of Leadership Development

Personally I’m getting tired of the American obsession with leadership and leadership development. The more we seem to harp on this subject the poorer the quality of leadership we seem to get, and I’m speaking of our secular world. Leonard Sweet told me that what we need more than this is to teach followership; I’m inclined that this is right and that, if we started with this, those who come up in the system would be better leaders when their time came.

Statement of the Old Testament

There isn’t much in Evangelical Christianity that indicates the retrograde state of thinking than the need for a statement like this. From its start the Church of God, in concord with virtually every other Christian church, has regarded the New Testament as the rule of faith and practice. A century or more of levelling hermeneutic has opened the door for turning Christianity into a form of synthetic Judaism, and that’s not what Our Lord had in mind. The whole meaning of a Biblical worldview (discussed earlier) hangs on how we understand the relationship between the testaments, so this is an important issue.

These then are my thoughts on the 2024 Church of God General Council Agenda; I hope they have proven helpful.