Tuesday, December 06, 2005

PSW Update; Valley Forge Delegation to Meet PSW Reps Wednesday to Urge Return to Dialog



His Barking Dog has learned that a delegation from the General Executive Council will meet with Pacific Southwest representatives tomorrow. This comes one day prior to the PSW board meeting on December 8 where the board will decide whether to call for a regional meeting of congregatons to decide whether or not to withdraw from the Covenant of Relationships (i.e., to separate from the ABCUSA).

During the round of meetings last month at Green Lake, the General Executive Council took three actions. First, they voted to express in writing a desire for PSW to remain in the Covenant of Relationships (i.e., stay in the denomination). Second, they appointed a group of people to craft and implement an intervention strategy to implore PSW to reconsider and then to report back to the GEC in April of 2006. Third, they admitted that the “confluence of events” is “symptomatic of a need for a comprehensive reevaluation of the very character of what it means to be a denomination in this day.”

Tomorrow's meeting will provide an opportunity for the GEC designees to entreat their PSW colleagues to remain within the Covenant of Relationships. This will be in fulfillment of the first two items decided by the GEC last month. His Barking Dog speculates that they will also make their case based upon the "encouraging" signs represented by the third vote: to call for a systematic "reevaluation of the very character of what it means to be a denominaton in this day."

His Barking Dog implores PSW representatives to reject calls for continuing dialog if they appear to constitute more delaying tactics. Unless the GEC comes with concrete assurances of actual willingness to enforce common sense biblical standards, the agreement to delay a vote will represent an unconscionable accommodation. All such irrational pleas should be treated as what they are; based upon emotion, sentimentality, and false notions of unity.

Dennis E. McFadden

[As always, my comments are the opinions of this gadfly only. They have no more authority or standing than Eutyches' Monophysitism at the Council of Chalcedon.]

No comments: