St. Giles’ decision to seek departure from the PCUSA revolved around the passage of Amendment 10A in May 2011. Amendment 10A deleted the explicit “fidelity/chastity” requirement from the constitutional ordination standard, and allows the PCUSA to ordain gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people as deacons, elders and pastors. It removed the requirement for ministers to live in “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or chastity in singleness.

St. Giles Presbyterian Church has been released from the Presbyterian Church (USA) but not without giving up a hefty chunk of change.

The Richmond, Va., congregation was dismissed from the PCUSA during the June 18 meeting of Presbytery of the James (POJ) at a cost of a quarter of a million dollars.

The presbytery voted 137-39 to dismiss the 375-member church, founded in 1937, with name and property after the congregation agreed to pay $250,000. St. Giles has joined ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians.

“It’s kind of a good news and bad news thing,” said the Rev. Keith Hill, pastor of St. Giles for six years. “The good news is we had an Administrative Commission (AC) that had a good feel for what it would take to get a positive vote in our favor. The bad news is we’re paying nearly twice the average (settlement price) as a church of our size. But, had the settlement been closer to the average, the vote might not have passed.”

St. Giles’ decision to seek departure from the PCUSA revolved around the passage of Amendment 10A in May 2011. Amendment 10A deleted the explicit “fidelity/chastity” requirement from the constitutional ordination standard, and allows the PCUSA to ordain gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people as deacons, elders and pastors. It removed the requirement for ministers to live in “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or chastity in singleness.”

Prior to the St. Giles session’s submission of a formal request seeking dismissal from the PCUSA to the presbytery in October 2011 (following an 18-0 session vote), Hill penned a series of blogs (in August and September 2011) that outlined reasons to leave.

http://www.layman.org/st-giles-pays-250000-for-exit-from-pcusa/stgiles1/In them, he noted that “a line had been crossed” by the national denomination in adding such language to the ordination standards, noting that in time it would lead to a “broader crumbling of foundational doctrines.”

He wrote that the standards were changed “in spite of the Bible and not because of it” as well as the church being “in schism, simply by being part of the PCUSA.” The battle over sexual ethics and claims of justice related to them has been an ongoing and tiring debate for some 30 years, and Hill pointed out that a redefinition of marriage will be the next topic of great debate, more so than it already appears to be.

“We had crossed a line,” Hill said, echoing his blog post from nearly two years earlier. “We believed that the consideration about contended matters had become unproductive, even toxic, in the larger church. The practice of new ordination standards outside of Biblical norms had left us to say we no longer could be submissive to our brethren here. It was a crisis of conscience at that point.”
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