You are here
Highlights of the 179th General Assembly, part 2.
Primary tabs
Download
- speakerFollowing the election [Election of Eugene Feeland Smathers as Moderator] the assembly got down to business. And mighty expensive business it is. Most
- speakerof the eight hundred twenty one commissioners that had voted lived east of the Mississippi. When
- speakeryou fly that many men and women to Portland, Oregon, and recommend that they accept thirteen
- speakerdollars and twenty five cents per day for their living expenses, you begin to get the idea.
- speakerAnd a few unhappy commissioners. May I speak to that briefly. This
- speakeris a real problem. I speak as a commissioner now. Not my experience on the General Council.
- speakerI'm under the impression that most of the presbyteries get all of their commissioners together once they are elected to a
- speakergiven General Assembly for briefing. You've made a very good point and this is the kind of point
- speakerthere should be part and parcel of the integral briefing of commissioners from the presbyteries.
- speakerBy and large unless you come with your wife, and then we do understand there are some complexities in reshuffling
- speakerthe deck. But if you come alone like like Noah's Ark, you
- speakercome as commissioners two by two. If you read your yellow pages, it's clearly indicated
- speakerthat the per diem each year is calculated upon the basis that wheresoever possible at
- speakerleast two commissioners will find a congenial experience during a given assembly in sharing a twin
- speakerbedded double room. This ought to be part of the briefing on the presbytery level. We can't do it from here. Mr.
- speakerModerator! Stated Clerk. Yes ma'am number five. I'm Ardluise Spurgeon
- speakerfrom the Philadelphia Presbytery. I came here with twenty three men.
- speaker[laughter] [Smathers] Dr
- speakerLittle [Little, Ganse], will you answer that? For the record I have a single room. Thank you.
- speakerI would observe that there is always safety in numbers. For those who
- speakerwere stuck with a fourteen dollar a day room. They began each day with a seventy five
- speakercent deficit. And no money left over for food or cabs or fun and games.
- speakerWhen the federal government does this it is called deficit spending. When the church does
- speakerit, it is called stewardship.
- speaker[Hymn "God of Our Fathers, Whose Almighty Hand"] It wasn't all
- speakercommittee meetings and business sessions, toil, and trouble. During
- speakeran ecumenical worship service, the commissioners heard a twelve hundred voiced mass choirs from
- speakerthe churches of Portland. And, at the popular meeting, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia
- speakerOrchestra. The last assembly to be
- speakerheld in Portland Oregon was back in eighteen ninety two. That assembly
- speakeris remembered today primarily because of the heresy trial of the Reverend Dr Charles
- speakerAugustus Briggs. What many people may have forgotten is that
- speakerduring that same assembly an effort to introduce the idea of writing a new confessional statement
- speakerfor the church was defeated.
