Although the issues at the heart of the legal wrangling from the 2010 action of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Synod’s planned changes to the Erskine Board structure have been settled, two related judicial cases continue to proceed through the denomination’s courts.

Both First Presbytery and Second Presbytery met on Tuesday, March 8 to deal with separate cases. A separate story will appear on these pages concerning the case before First Presbytery. However, the case before Second Presbytery was dealt with through a simple one sentence recommendation in a committee report and the official receipt of a complaint.

A quick review of the case will be helpful. ARP Minister Jay Hering is a professor at Erskine Theological Seminary. He along with two other professors (both PCUSA ministers) and one other employee, when learning that the original lawsuit filed by Erskine officials against the ARP Synod was being withdrawn, filed legal documents with the South Carolina Circuit Court to seek to keep the lawsuit alive.

As a result of that action, a Session (the Elders) of a congregation within Second Presbytery brought charges against Professor Hering. The story was reported on these pages in October. The complete copy of the charges presented by the church can be seen here. At that meeting, the Presbytery declined to proceed with the charges

Immediately after the October meeting, a group of five ministers and two elders filed an official complaint against the actions of the Presbytery at that meeting. The details of that complaint can be found here.

There are two central issues underlying the complaint. One was that the Presbytery acted hastily to come to the decision not to proceed with the charges based primarily on the fact that the Presbytery’s investigation had determined that civil action was not officially filed with the Court. The Complainants presented evidence that the civil action had, in fact, been recorded in court records.

The other issue underlying the complaint was the Presbytery’s conclusion that Rev. Hering believed damage would be done to Erskine and to the church if the lawsuit were dropped and that it was a necessary action for him to take to go into civil court.

In the ARP (contrary to other denominations such as the PCA) a complaint against an action of Presbytery goes directly to the next higher court without requiring the Presbytery to reconsider the matter. However, a Presbytery having been complained against may on its own volition, change their decisions. In this case, there was no official change, but there was a more detailed explanation of the facts which led up to the October meeting and a change of the record of what happened.

In the report of the Minister and His Work Committee (the group with oversight of active ministers in the presbytery) the Committee apologized to the Presbytery that they had wrongly communicated the legal process on which they made their recommendation. In October, the MHW Committee stated that the men filing the civil papers had been ‘sent home’ from the courthouse, thus indicating that the papers were not filed. The committee stated this was in error. Rather that paper had been filed, but the court immediately rejected the filing based on the fact that the lawsuit had already been withdrawn.

The MHW Committee also further reported, which was not detailed at the October meeting, that in their investigation they had “admonished Mr. Hering that we believe he should not have attempted to take the matter to civil court; we counseled him that he should have let the providence of God play out through the decision of the body (Synod) and that if he wished to appeal it should have been done through the courts of the church, and we asked him to reconsider his actions in light of our counsel.”

In approving the report of the MHW Committee at the February meeting, the Presbytery approved a motion “that Presbytery correct the information reported at the Fall Meeting regarding the complaint against Jay Hering, according to the information provided herein.

This complaint will be on the docket at the June 2011 meeting of the General Synod.

[Editor’s note: One or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]