The Binghams stayed in Hawaii for twenty years and founded the Kawaiahaʻo Church. They also helped to develop a written Hawaiian alphabet. Besides the school, Sybil also started a weekly prayer meeting, attended by more than a thousand Hawaiian women.

Sybil’s admission to the mission field reminds me of a scene of a movie. She was asking for directions to her accommodations when a young man offered to take her there. The man, Hiram Bingham, was preparing to leave as a missionary to the Hawaiian Islands. He just had one problem: the mission board was reluctant to send unmarried people, and his fiancée had just broken off their engagement.
Sybil was a school teacher dreaming of joining a mission. It was common then for young Christian women to seek “higher” service to God by marrying a minister, going to a mission field, or both.
And there they were, in the same vehicle, both thinking of far-off fields. “I had taken cold by a night’s ride over the mountains,” Hiram explained, “and I wrapped a handkerchief about my neck, chin, and mouth, that cold evening, and this awakened ready sympathy in the sensitive heart of the young lady.”[1]
Hiram had heard of a young girl described as “a most amiable and thoroughly qualified companion for a missionary.” During the ride, Hiram’s “mind was intently querying whether this could be the very same.”[2]
When they arrived at their destination, they spoke for a while by the fire. “I measured the lines of her face and the expression of her features with more than an artist’s carefulness,”[3] Hiram wrote.
After discussing the matter with other men, Hiram asked a friend to contact Sybil and ask for an audience. The friend explained the matter to Sybil, leaving her with a verse meant to make a rejection rather difficult: “Rebecca said, ‘I will go” (Genesis 24:58).
But Sybil had no intention of rejecting Hiram’s proposal. She had been waiting for such an opportunity. And there was also a spark of romance. “Since that memorable evening when I was introduced to him, I find that he has secured my love,” Sybil wrote her sister. “God did indeed choose for me.”[4]
She and Hiram married less than two weeks later. On October 23, 1819, they sailed with seven other missionary couples on the Thaddeus, bound for Hawaii.
An Unfamiliar World
The 18,000-mile voyage was difficult, with the missionaries cramped in a small space, most suffering from seasickness – which might have been worse for Sybil and three other women who got pregnant during the trip. She also felt “like a pilgrim and a stranger” with “no abiding place,”[5] while everything she had loved on this earth moved further away.
The ship landed at Kailua-Kona, Big Island, on April 4, 1820. Before Sybil could even leave the boat, however, she had a first inkling that missionary life was not going to be what she had imagined. Before her departure, the secretary of the American Board of Foreign Missions (ABFM) had laid out the missionaries’ great commission.

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One of the greatest gifts by McCormick was endowing four chairs in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary of the Northwest in Chicago. The seminary had struggled to exist for several years in different locations but finally found a permanent site in Chicago in 1859 thanks to a gift of land from some city philanthropists and a $100,000.00 gift from McCormick to endow four faculty chairs.

This biography is not about a minister but instead briefly tells the life of a Presbyterian layman who was an inventor and industrialist. His life began on the farm as did many of the lives of antebellum entrepreneurs. Cyrus’s father Robert was born at Walnut Grove, Rockbridge County, Virginia, June 4, 1780, into the household of a successful and prosperous farmer. Robert was deeply interested in the mechanical aspects of agriculture and was a skilled worker of wood and iron enabling him to improve existing tools and develop new ones. When Cyrus Hall was born to Robert and Mary Ann (Hall) McCormick, February 15, 1809, it was into a home where his future would be directed vocationally towards the machinery of agriculture. But it was also certain his spiritual guidance would be defined by the Westminster Standards held to by his parents as Old School Presbyterians. One biographer of McCormick, Herbert N. Casson, has described the spiritual influences on Cyrus as having been “nourished on” Calvinism from the time when he “first learned to read out of the Shorter Catechism and the Bible” (158). Casson also notes,
From his father he had training as an inventor; from his mother he had executive ability and ambition; from his Scots Irish ancestry he had the dogged tenacity that defied defeat; and from the wheat-fields that environed his home came the call for the reaper, to lighten the heavy drudgery of the harvest. (25)
Cyrus invented his first successful machine for reaping grain when he was only twenty-two years old. It was not perfect, but it was the first step towards reducing the great number of people and hours of labor required for harvesting the fields full of amber waves of grain. He demonstrated his new machine to his father by harvesting rye on the family farm. Cyrus did not seek a patent until 1834 after three years of refining its design to improve the machine’s durability and efficiency. He continued to modify the reaper for another five years while living at Walnut Grove and using his father’s blacksmith shop. The first two machines he sold were purchased locally in 1840 but by 1843 he had sold forty reapers in Virginia. His market expanded until by 1845 he was selling reapers in Michigan, New York, Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri. The market had grown greatly in what is currently called the Midwest, so Cyrus moved his business to Chicago and expanded production with a new factory.
His reaper was described as having provided hunger-insurance for the United States and the greater part of the civilized world, with more than a half million manufactured since the first one was sold in Virginia. (Casson, 188)
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My intent here is…simply to remind the PCA generally and the GA commissioners specifically, that the Bible plainly teaches that an officer in the church must be above reproach and have a good reputation with those outside of the church.  Men who publicly proclaim their status as homosexuals (even though they practice celibacy) should not hold office in the PCA. That is the issue before the GA, and not the views of Missouri Presbytery with regard to her own failures.

Just a few days before the 49th General Assembly (GA) of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), all Presbyteries and their members (which would include all commissioners to the 49th GA) received in their personal email inbox a communication from Missouri Presbytery (MOP).  This was sent from the Stated Clerk of MOP to the PCA Stated Clerk who then forwarded it to each individual Presbytery Clerk. Each Presbytery Clerk then decided whether to send it on to the members of the Presbytery.  The email was a response of MOP to the judicial decision of the PCA Standing Judicial Commission (SJC) in SJC 2020-05 (TE Ryan Speck v. Missouri Presbytery), to make amends to their errors in dealing with Revoice 18 in order to protect the peace and purity of the PCA.  This was to be done in part by interacting with the Ad-Interim Report on Human Sexuality.
After reading the report I came to one conclusion.  It is good Public Relations (PR), but nothing changed with regard to the ordination of men in the PCA who publicly identify as being a homosexual. It does not alter the need for a change in the Book of Church Order.  It should not negate the numerous overtures sent to the GA by various presbyteries to deal with this issue.
It does not deal with the main issue of whether Greg Johnson (and now others) in the PCA should continue as ordained officers, even though they have publicly proclaimed that they are homosexuals, and that this orientation is fixed.
My intent here is not to get into the substance of the report of MOP sent to the clerks via the GA Stated Clerk, but simply to remind the PCA generally and the GA commissioners specifically, that the Bible plainly teaches that an officer in the church must be above reproach and have a good reputation with those outside of the church.  Men who publicly proclaim their status as homosexuals (even though they practice celibacy) should not hold office in the PCA. That is the issue before the GA, and not the views of Missouri Presbytery with regard to her own failures.
I’m not sure that I have ever received a communication from another Presbytery via the Stated Clerk of my own Presbytery. I can understand this being placed into the minutes of the General Assembly, but I am concerned that a document that could so easily sway the Assembly should be sent out in such a fashion, so close to the meeting of the Assembly itself.  It is my opinion that only a Presbytery itself (voting as a court in session) has the right to choose what documents should be received and distributed among its members.
My fear is that as a result of the timing, the means of distribution, and the content of this communication, it may only further divide the PCA.
Larry E. Ball is a retired minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is now a CPA. He lives in Kingsport, Tenn.
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