“It’s nine o’clock and all is bleak!” Were there an evangelical town crier in Minneapolis, that would have been his cry as the PCUSA General Assembly took up the matter of same-sex marriage Thursday night.

Earlier, the Committee on Civil Union and Marriage Issues had launched toward plenary four bad-news items, each propelled by the momentum of lop-sided committee votes:
· A special committee report on same-sex unions and marriage that confessed an inability to agree on Biblical standards for sexual expression, but just wanted everyone to get along.
· A set of amendments to the Directory for Worship that would substitute “two people” where “couple” or “a man and a woman” are now used in marriage services.
· An Authoritative Interpretation that would immediately permit Christian marriage for “two people” rather than a man and a woman.
· Recommendations to disapprove overtures that simply affirmed the Biblical marriage morality Presbyterians have always considered as bedrock teaching.

All was bleak for Biblical traditionalists at the weary hour when the General Assembly finally turned its attention to these matters. But a tortured 90 minutes later, things looked much brighter:
· The troublesome report on same-sex unions got itself married to a rock-solid minority report that many consider the better half. Both reports will be “commended” to the church and will have to just get along.
· The “two people” constitutional amendments were never even discussed, much less approved.
· The “two people” Authoritative Interpretation likewise never got considered and never was approved.
· But the affirmations of Biblical marriage were disapproved—by a 2:1 margin.

In short, same-sex marriage did not emerge the victor. That radical transformation never happened. Pastors and sessions will not have to manage the crisis of explaining to their congregations the immediate introduction of same-sex marriage.

Church leaders will receive a dual set of study papers and recommendations to sort out. But half of the material will be nearly guaranteed to be to their liking!

The Odd Couple

Inability to reach consensus plagued the Special Committee to Study Issues of Civil Union and Christian Marriage. Although both the minority and the majority remained locked in a group hug following their experiences together, there remained a minority and a majority that could not finally agree and thus published different conclusions.

Generally, the majority report claimed an inability to reach conclusion on the Biblical meaning of marriage, so it urged study, counseled kindness and vaguely suggested a form of local option for pastoral participation in same-sex union or marriage ceremonies.

The minority report, on the other hand was pointed: “It is the intent of this report to represent the church’s Biblical, historic, and confessional position that, among all varieties of sexual relationships, only marriage between a man and a woman is ordained by God and blessed by our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Similar to the Special Committee, the commissioners’ Committee on Civil Unions and Marriage tried to but could not agree, producing instead a majority report and a minority report of its own for the full General Assembly to resolve.

The commissioner committee’s majority report was essentially the Special Committee’s report. The commissioner committee’s minority report was simple: to substitute the Special Committee’s minority for the majority report, and approve it.

In the General Assembly plenary session, the “of two minds” pattern held. Once the dueling reports were both on the floor, minister commissioner Tim Leslie from Foothills Presbytery proposed amending the majority report in a surprising way: by having the report commend both the majority and minority reports to churches and presbyteries for study.

Seventy percent of the commissioners voted to approve that amendment. So now the majority report contained a recommendation to send out both reports.

Then, Anne Epling, minister commissioner from Giddings-Lovejoy, returned the favor by moving that the minority report include a recommendation to also commend the majority report for study. Commissioners approved that, too.

So now the choice for commissioners was to approve a minority report that also commended the majority report, or to approve the majority report that also commended the minority report.

The confusion of that odd circumstance prompted a “So what’s the difference?” question of Stated Clerk Gradye Parsons. Parsons struggled with an answer but eventually indicated that both options were pretty much the same.

Yet the debate raged on. “Christian marriage is rooted and grounded in the Creation ordinance in Genesis 2 and affirmed by our Lord in Matthew 19,” testified minister commissioner Phil Keevil of Lehigh Presbytery. “It was later affirmed by Paul.”

He added that “the temptation we face in the church is to marry the culture. But the mandate given to the church is to baptize the nations, teaching them what Jesus taught.” And that wasn’t same-sex marriage.

Clergy commissioner Dan Roth of Sacramento Presbytery asked how the minority report writers, so certain of their biblical interpretation, handled Bible passages about concubines. Bill Teng, a minister in National Capital Presbytery and an architect of the Special Committee’s minority report had an answer.

“Surely there are many expressions of sexual brokenness that God does not bless,” he offered. “God never condoned or blessed those relationships.”

Teng said he was personally drawn to Matthew 19 and Mark 10. “Jesus didn’t just answer question on divorce,” he explained, “but went back to the beginning to explain the definition of marriage.”

Wayland Wong, a minister commissioner from Los Ranchos Presbytery, got in the last word before the vote. “If we change the definition of marriage, it confirms what people say who say we are a decadent country,” he contended. “They would be right.”

When the vote finally happened, 53 percent of the commissioners favored the majority report—now amended to have the minority report also commended to the churches. Then, having decided which of the two reports was finally to be considered, the commissioners voted again, and 67 percent approved the majority report—with the minority report commended as well.

When asked later about what will actually be sent to churches, given the confusion of both reports being commended, Stated Clerk Gradye Parsons replied dryly, “I’ll have to draft a pretty good cover letter.”

The Vanishing Revolution

When the commissioner committee ended its work on Tuesday, same-sex-marriage activists held high hopes of pushing through both a constitutional amendment and an Authoritative Interpretation to specifically give ministers permission to officiate at same-sex marriages and to allow churches the ability to use church facilities for such purposes.

It was a potentially potent one-two punch to radically redefine marriage. So what happened? A surprise.

Minister commissioner Ryan Balsan of New Brunswick Presbytery was recognized by the moderator. “I move that item 12-12 [the just-approved majority report] be considered the response to all pending items,” he said, employing a parliamentary procedure not previously used at this General Assembly.

What Balsan meant was that the majority report of the special committee would accomplish as much as the General Assembly would do this year, and so the business items about approving same-sex marriage would be considered answered by that action.

It is common for one item to be approved and then for several other similar items to be considered handled by the approval of the one item. What was uncommon was for that handling of the business to derive from a commissioner’s motion in plenary, not through the planning of committee leadership in the committee process.

Nancy D’Ippolito, a minister commissioner from Plains and Peaks, took a stab at rescuing same-sex marriage legitimization this year. “But this doesn’t answer the actions asked for in the overtures,” she contended. “Consider at least 12-04 [which would substitute ‘two persons’ for ‘a man and a woman.’]”

Minister commissioner Jeff Ogden from Stockton Presbytery had a ready response: “We just passed a study paper,” he reasoned, “and we need to study it before we make any more determinations. It makes no sense at all to pass the paper and then not study it at all.”

By nearly 10:30 at night, the commissioners had had enough debate. The vote that ensued surprised nearly everyone on both sides of the issue.

When the voting results were displayed on the big screen, 51 percent of the commissioners had favored using the action of approving the Special Committee’s report to answer all the business left in the committee—including the would-be gay-marriage authorizations. With that vote, the opportunity to radicalize Christian marriage had simply vanished.