Given Local Option, What Can the Faithful Do?

So, what can a Biblically and Confessionally Orthodox Presbytery (BACOP) do if the PCUSA allows local option, which means that other presbyteries within the PCUSA begin legally to ordain Self-Acknowledged Practitioners of Homosexual Acts (SAPHAs)? Some possible responses would only serve to strengthen the concept of local option.

For example, a BACOP could state that it will no longer be in full fellowship with SAPHA- Ordaining Presbyteries (SOPs). This would in effect mean that a candidate or minister from a SOP would be examined more strictly, perhaps as if he or she were transferring from another denomination. But this is exactly what local option allows. Local option already recognizes the right of every presbytery to examine its members in whatever way it sees fit. To affirm this principle of local option while remaining in fellowship with unorthodox presbyteries would continue to tar the BACOP with the brush of their heresy.

Other potential responses would not currently be allowed by the constitution. In the main, Bush v. Pittsburgh was good news for orthodox Presbyterians, as we have seen. Bush says that every constitutional standard has to be followed, and thus that no presbytery or session can allow candidates to be exempt from any behavioral requirement in the Book of Order. But because of this, Bush also says that presbyteries and sessions can’t say ahead of time that they will in fact enforce certain parts of the constitution: “Restatements of the Book of Order, in whatever form they are adopted, are themselves an obstruction to the same standard of constitutional governance no less than attempts to depart from mandatory provisions.” This is because, according to Bush, such restatements imply that specific standards can, in fact, be neglected or ignored. And so, Bush requires the standards of the church to be applied to candidates only on a case-by-case basis. The bottom line is this: Bush prevents orthodox presbyteries from stating ahead of time that they will not allow any exceptions to G-6.0106b. It is thus no longer possible for any BACOP to build a firewall around itself, saying that it will not allow SAPHAs to be ordained within its bounds.