St. Louis Day 2

What a day.

Reflecting before sleep just a few thoughts…

There was a longer wait this morning to get in… much longer. From no crowd to this:

Please watch Bishop Carter’s sermon from this morning. It is simply amazing. The text is here. There’s so much here and these words remind me why I’m a United Methodist and why I am an elder of the church.

Following opening worship, we heard three women share, each about one of the plans. I’m thankful for my friend, Jasmine Smothers, who shared abou the One Church Plan. Following the presentations, delegates began their work in earnest as they began prioritizing the different petitions. You can see the final rankings in the gallery below:

A couple of notes on the voting. First of all it made perfect sense that the WesPath petitions got the highest preference. They lobbied all groups to get their petitions heard. Now as for analysis on the ranking. I think the only thing that is certain is that the Simple Plan and Connectional Conferences Plans are both undesirable in the eyes of this General Conference. We’ll see if that proves to be the case. Also, the only thing that these preferences indicate is order in which the petitions will be taken up. They do not relate to a any vote as to what goes before the plenary session.

Once the preferences were set, there was the election of the officers of the One Legislative Committee. A little background…. normally, a scheduled General Conference will have multiple committees. As many as 13. As each committee processes its work, they send their approved petitions to the whole body or plenary session to vote on. Most items, especially those overwhelmingly supported in committee, go on a consent calendar that lets delegates approve many petitions at one time. The more controversial ones can be debated on the floor one at a time.

For this called session, there is only one legislative committee of the same 800 and something delegates as the plenary. Also, there will be no consent calendar. Everything will be heard by the full plenary.

So the election of the legislative officers happened—three people who have served and been trained as legislative committee officers were elected and immediately went to work on their jobs.

• We heard that Judicial Council made a ruling on a declaratory decision had been decided before (nothing to see here).
• There were two petitions related to Pensions—one that churches leaving from the denomination must pay the tail on their pension. Also another petition freezes and quantifies a pension, flipping it into a 403b.

One of the interesting rules in the Plan of Order is for all business to be done by 6p in time for worship and 6:30 adjournment. As so once these two WesPath petitions were approved, with about 15-20 minutes remaining, the chair tested the body as to whether or not they wanted to take up the Traditionalist Plan (with all of its Constitutional issues, per Judicial Council) or adjourn. The body overwhelming chose to adjourn early.

Do you want to know how the afternoon felt? Take a look at the floor below. The tables are supposed to be full. Instead when the committee adjourned for worship to begin, no one really stayed around.

Folks just left. Maybe they were worshipped out… we did have several 20 minute long singing breaks to figure out technology. Or, maybe, people were tired and needed to retreat.

There’s a lot of work to do tomorrow. Anything going to the plenary has to be handled by the committee tomorrow. I understand that the Standing Committee will be reporting on their work in the morning. Blessings, folks.