A Painful Day

The day began with wonderful music from the Africa University Choir and from The Spiritual Image of the South Hayward, CA United Methodist Church. Both of these choirs joined with a young adult choir (age 18 to 40-ish) made up of delegates, visitors and General Conference staff in providing music during worship. The preacher for the morning was Bishop Violet Fisher of the New York West Area. Bishop Fisher preached on Jesus’ encounter with the Woman at the Well. The phrase that sticks in my mind from the sermon is “Was this encounter The Necessity of the Call” or was it “The Call of Necessity?”

As a part of the early morning reports, Liz Lopez for the General Commission on the Status and Role of Women participated in bringing the monitoring report from yesterday’s plenary sessions. A summary of this report is printed in the Daily Christian Advocate each morning. It is called the H.E.R.O. report. This is an acronym for Honest, Empathetic, Respectful, Open-minded. Generally speaking there has been a good balance of speaking on the floor between men and women, clergy and laity, ethnic delegates and white delegates. Intentionality regarding inclusiveness has been shown in virtually every quarter of General Conference.

Much of the morning and the entire afternoon plenary was spent talking about issues relating to human sexuality. The General Conference took action during the morning session that deplored violence towards anyone for a reason of sexuality or gender. The action also called for education of church members and the society at large to work against the practice of violence.

During the afternoon session with much debate and discussion the General Conference inserted more restrictive language into the Social Principles relating to homosexuality and marriage. This was a very painful time with much passion on both sides of the issue.

I suspect because of the way in which the afternoon session ended and the action taken, the evening session seems to be subdued. I found myself regularly exasperated with the number of persons who came to microphones and either did not have any understanding of how the general conference rules call for the body to operate, or they were intentionally trying to tie up the body and keep it from taking any action. There is a third possibility – given the number of questions that could have been asked of one’s seat mate but instead the delegate comes to the microphone. The issue may well be one of ego. To come to the microphone gets your name into the Daily Christian Advocate in the verbatim transcript of the session. The General Conference rules call for one to not move from their place to a microphone until they are recognized by the presiding officer. I estimate that for every person who comes to the microphone the body waits from 15 to 30 seconds or longer for persons to get to the microphone. Given the number of persons who speak each day, it would not surprise me if the body spends 30 to 60 minutes a day waiting for persons to come to the microphone!

The evening session is spending a major amount of time debating whether or not the pastor has the right to determine who can or cannot become a member of the local church. There seems to be a lot more concern about the church being taken advantage of by someone joining the church for ulterior motives than for the ecclesiological and theological issues involved. The minority report which wanted to give pastors the authority to set the standards for membership was defeated. The majority report which specifically denied the pastor that authority was then debated and then the body defeated that item, but by a very narrow margin! Sometimes ambiguity is the preferred posture!

Although there is still approximately 90 minutes left in the session (it’s 9:30 p.m.) I am going to file this blog entry. There are 122 items left to be dealt with before adjournment on Friday evening.