Our church order is not a jot and tittle creature, rather it sets frameworks in which elders deciding together have great discretion and latitude. The doom-cry and the hand-wringing against 23 & 37 is not in fact a criticism of what the amendments will do. It is a criticism of what presbyteries will do with the amendments.

My denomination is discussing rules regarding the ordination of men who are gay and celibate. About this you may have no interest, and you have ended up in the oddest corner. If you have interest, step here to get started.

I’m in the pass-it-fiddle-with-it-in-the-future camp. It’s the Book of Church Order, we do that. I don’t see problems with the language, but I recognize that use and observation could discover need for improvement. That is why the BCO is amendable, and why it receives amendments most years. The purported dangers advanced by some are not mandated by the actual language of these amendments. They could well occur even without these amendments. Some remind us that there are elders who wouldn’t ordain a graduate of San Salvatore Academy, because in the opinion of those knuckleheads SSA is an acronym for unordainable– and the same fretful voices pass on that the knuckleheads claim that is the meaning of these amendments. The advocacy of those simplistic absolutists will not advance a whit by asserting that their previous opinion is actually now codified in the BCO. People disagree about the construal of BCO (did you know that?), and they vote accordingly (did you know that?): these amendments don’t change who or how many construe SSA this way or that way.

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The link (URL) to the original article is unavailable and has been removed.]