As of February 4, 2023, at least 69 presbyteries have voted and the results thus far indicate that ten of the proposed amendments have received the necessary approval 2/3 of presbyteries, receiving at least 59 presbyteries voting in favor. Two of the amendments were not approved, with Overture 15 garnering approval from 57% of the presbyteries, and Overture 8 approved by 55% of the presbyteries.

The 49th General Assembly (2022) of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) approved twelve proposed amendments to the Book of Church Order (BCO). For these amendments to be approved, requires that 2/3 of the eighty-eight presbyteries must approve them, and those approved by 2/3 of the presbyteries would have to be approved one more time by the 50th GA.
As of February 4, 2023, at least 69 presbyteries have voted and the results thus far indicate that ten of the proposed amendments have received the necessary approval 2/3 of presbyteries, receiving at least 59 presbyteries voting in favor. Two of the amendments were not approved, with Overture 15 garnering approval from 57% of the presbyteries, and Overture 8 approved by 55% of the presbyteries.
Overture 15 was seeking to amend BCO 7 by adding a fourth paragraph on qualifications for church office. The amendment stated: “Men who describe themselves as homosexual, even those who describe themselves as homosexual and claim to practice celibacy by refraining from homosexual conduct, are disqualified from holding office in the Presbyterian Church in America.”
Overture 8 was an attempt to fix an area of dispute concerning how a higher court (General Assembly or a presbytery) could assume original jurisdiction over a lower court in a case of doctrinal or public scandal. Those who presented the amended wording were seeking to remedy the differing interpretations of BCO 33-1 and BCO 34-1.
Two overtures that have been receiving very favorable approval are Overture 29 and Overture 31. Both of these amendments arose from issues related to Revoice. The proposed overtures were quite similar to overtures approved by the 48th General Assembly but did not receive the necessary 2/3 approval of presbyteries. They were redrafted and both passed the 49th GA overwhelmingly, and presbyteries have been approving Overture 29 with 98.5% in favor and Overture 31 with 94% in favor. Overture 29 would amend BCO 16-4 on qualifications for church office. And Overture 31 would amend BCO 21-4 and 24-1 on requirements for ordination.
The rest of the amendments were not seen as controversial and are being approved by 94% or more of the presbyteries. The votes on the amendment are being regularly updated on this spreadsheet.
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Ordained Church of England Clergy have repeatedly made dubious statements in the public domain, the Bishop doesn’t care and believes facts are debatable and merely opinions (except, of course, those facts which suit him). The one person who might have steered the Bishop to a different conclusion has used his own belief in climate change nonsense to uphold the Bishop’s decision. As the Church of England descends into a woke hell of its own making – and its absurd fixation on climate is just one manifestation of this.

At the last count, fewer than a million people worship regularly in the Church of England. I am one of those, having so far resisted the almost overmastering desire to extract myself from the Church’s increasing wokeness and ever closer conformance to – and infiltration by – the secular society it is meant to serve. My frustrations are usually vented by strident comments on social media and the occasional email calling individuals to task, but the straw which really threatens to break the camel’s back in my case is the Church’s obsession with ‘climate change’.
Why the Church of England is so vocal on a subject about which it clearly knows nothing is beyond me, but when it makes completely unsubstantiated statements in the public domain, easily capable of being refuted by facts, it is time to take action. One source of the Church’s outlandish statements in this regard is the Community of the Resurrection (CR) in Mirfield, West Yorkshire.
Most people – even many churchgoers – think Religious Communities died out forever in the Reformation, but they actually staged a comeback in the 19th Century and to this day there are vowed monks and nuns, many ordained to the Priesthood, living in Communities as part of the Church of England. I came to know the one at Mirfield and it was therefore a great disappointment to witness CR jump on the woke climate bandwagon and promulgate in its official publication, CR Review, what appeared to be climate facts but which, in reality, were nothing more than personal opinions – although this was never once made clear.
I endeavoured to call CR to account and the Community was gracious enough to include in its publication my rebuttal of one offending article, although radically edited. I hoped this would be an end to the matter but no, CR continued to pump out articles and videos making outrageous climate assertions. Each time these appeared I contacted the Community with detailed facts, evidencing the untruthfulness of the statements, but, unlike on that first occasion, the Community became unyielding, refusing to publish any retractions even though the Superior later admitted to me “we are not climatologists”.
Matters came to a head earlier this year when yet another article appeared in CR Review full of inaccuracies and clearly written to scaremonger and possibly to influence voting (the local elections were just around the corner). Yet again, I provided detailed evidence disproving each assertion and once more CR refused to recede from its position. Having reached deadlock, I decided it was necessary to escalate matters.
My initial approaches were to those holding some degree of responsibility for the Community, its doings and its members. However, neither the Archdeacon of Halifax nor the Bishop of Blackburn, Chair of the Advisory Council for Religious Communities in the Church of England, had the courtesy to reply. The Bishop of the Diocese in which CR resides, the Rt Revd Nick Baines, Bishop of Leeds, responded claiming that the Community was “not accountable” to him and making it apparent that his sympathies were entirely with the climate alarmists (unsurprising, given his own actions and public proclamations on climate matters). The appointed ‘Visitor’ to CR (a kind of overseer for the resolution of disputes), the Bishop of Lichfield, replied saying the matter lay outside his area of responsibility. Thus, the buck having been well and truly passed, the only route left to me was to raise a formal complaint against CR under the Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM).
With whom does such a complaint have to be lodged? The Diocesan Bishop. Yes, that meant the Bishop of Leeds, who originally said he had no accountability! Of course, I asked that he recuse himself because, in my view, he had already prejudged the matter. It appeared obvious to me, when he summarily dismissed my initial communication to him asking for help, that this Bishop is part of the Church’s groupthink on climate.
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Be AGITATED, GRIEVED, MOVED by the way poverty assaults the dignity of every poor image-bearer of God. We cannot be Christ-like and be apathetic. We cannot be Jesus-followers and be passive about the plight of the poor. Cherishing every human being is required of anyone who claims to love God—because there is a direct link between loving God and loving his image bearers.

After loving the Lord, Himself, with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, the Christian’s second responsibility is to love our neighbor as ourselves. When asked what this command meant for our everyday living, Jesus told the outrageous story of a man walking down the dangerous road between Jerusalem and Jericho, being attacked, robbed, and left for dead but how the good Samaritan, at risk to his own safety, stopped, bandaged his wounds, transported him on his own donkey to an inn where he spent the rest of the day caring for him. The next day he left a considerable sum of money with the inn keeper to continue to care for the wounded man, saying, “if this is not enough, I will cover the extra costs when I return.” Commenting on this passage, author/pastor Tim Keller writes:
“Jesus commands us to provide shelter, finances, medical care, and friendship to people who lack them. We have nothing less than an order from our Lord in the most categorical of terms, ‘Go and do likewise.’ Our paradigm is the Samaritan who risked his safety, destroyed his schedule, and became dirty and bloody through personal involvement with a needy person of another race and social class. Are we as Christians obeying this command personally? Are we as a church obeying it corporately?” (Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road). This episode seeks to look at poverty through a biblical lens, understanding it’s causes, misguided attempts to solve it, and especially what fulfilling our responsibility to care for the poor looks like.
God’s Design for Mankind to Flourish Econimically
As we saw in the first episode in this series, God’s design to provide humans with the sustenance they need to flourish was not just a lush garden full of fruit trees; it was a plan for them to “subdue” the earth. The command “to subdue” implies that, although all that God made is good, it is, to some degree, underdeveloped. God left creation with deep untapped potential for cultivation that humans are to unlock through our labor. Tim Keller elaborates:
We are not to relate to the world as park rangers, whose job is not to change their space but preserve things as they are. Nor are we to “pave over the garden” of the created world to make a parking lot. No, we are to be gardeners who take an active stance towards their charge. They do not leave the land as it is. They rearrange it to make it more fruitful, to draw the potentialities for growth and development out of the soil. They dig up the ground and rearrange it with a goal in mind: to rearrange the raw material of the garden so that it produces food, flowers, and beauty. And that is the pattern for all work. It is rearranging the raw materials of God’s creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people, in particular, thrive and flourish (Every Good Endeavor).
The development of creation’s potential is built upon and requires shalom—the OT word for harmony and flourishing in relationships. God’s design for economic flourishing as described above in Genesis 1 requires harmony in the four basic relationships of life:

Right relationship with GOD—My mission is to exercise dominion over all of life for him, out of love for him.
Right relationship with SELF—My worth and dignity are eternally assigned to me by God who made me his image bearer and equipped me with the abilities to do the good works he planned for me to do from eternity.
Right relationship with OTHERS—My responsibility is summed up in the second greatest commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Right relationship with CREATION—I am to be its steward developing the potential God placed in it for God’s glory.

The Cause of Economic Poverty
In his book, Walking With the Poor, Bryant Myers describes the fundamental nature of poverty, “Poverty is the result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable. Poverty is the absence of shalom in all its meanings.” Due to the comprehensive nature of the fall, every human being is poor in the sense of not experiencing the flourishing of these four relationships in the way God intended. Every human being is suffering from a poverty of spiritual intimacy with God, a poverty of internal wholeness and emotional health within himself, a poverty of community, and a poverty of stewardship. Let’s dig deeper.
Adam and Eve were designed to be God’s image bearers, reflecting his nature as a worker and moral ruler. As moral rulers who had the law of God written on their hearts, they were to exercise dominion in a way that pleased God as culture developed and diversified. Human flourishing was the result of shalom in the four relationships of life: 1) Walking in harmony with God’s righteousness, they would have respected private ownership (theft forbidden by the 8th commandment), honest business practices (lying forbidden by the 9th commandment). 2) Experiencing pre-fall wholeness–internal peace with themselves—no sense of inferiority, insecurity, competitiveness, or envy. Sinful selfishness has not exerted itself—and their call to vocation was the call to use their talents, innovation, and resources to make products to serve others. 3) Experiencing pre-fall harmony in their horizontal relationships with each other; their hearts were not governed by greed, selfishness, cheating each other, or jealousy. 4) There was harmony in the created order. There was no poverty that had resulted from natural calamity like earthquakes, floods, or volcanoes erupting. Let’s use this lens to consider the holistic, biblical approach to alleviating poverty in our cities—restoration.
A. Overcoming the poverty of being. Only God knows how profoundly slavery and racism have crushed black men and women’s dignity. I wonder how many centuries it may take to undo such evil attacks on the self-esteem of those who bear the image of God. I’m told by those engaged in city ministry that this shattered self-esteem is linked to many outward symptoms of this brokenness:

a teen boy’s desire to prove himself a man through his sexual prowess.
a teen girl looking for love in the arms of a male who just wants sex.
a teen girl who wants to feel needed by getting pregnant and having a baby who needs her and, to some degree, loves her back.
a boy committing violence to win the respect of the others in his gang.

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