ANOTHER DAY /ANOTHER COOKIE BREAK

The first actions of GC2008 involved the Procedural Rules. After the high of an awesome worship service, there comes the tedium of setting the proper wording of all the rules. I am reminded of Piggy in Lord of the Flies, when he announced that the group of boys on the island would need to have “lots and lots of rules.” There was concern over the way subcommittee chairs would be elected; whether or not the bishops would be involved; and would there be secret ballots or not. I guess this affects the ultimate coming of the Kingdom of God, somehow. Ultimately, it seems that all items on the evening’s agenda were covered and Bishop Huie moved the body to the conclusion of the day. I have served on the Commission on The General Conference, this quadrennium. The chair of the commission, Dr. Gail Murphy-Geiss, presented the collusions of the commission. In that speech, she knotted that the cost of General Conference is about $500 per minute. By shortening the meeting by on day we have lowered the total cost, somewhat. The cost of hold GC is approximately, $6,000,000. The largest expense is the travel, housing, and feeding of the delegates. A recommendation of the commission (presented as a petition) is that we reduce the number of delegates from a maximum of 1000 to 600. The current GC has 950+ delegates. The reasoning was that it would be better to have a smaller number for better communication and dialog in the meeting. It would reduce the number of representatives from each conference. The cost is high, but does the church want the power concentrated in fewer people? A plan for restructuring is being presented the Connectional Table (comparable to the Ad Council in the local church) that may take care of the issue. I will get to that in a later Blog.

Thursday saw the presentation of the Episcopal Address. This is the State of The Church as viewed from the Bishop’s perspective. The Young People’s Address presented by six dynamic young people from around the world. The Laity Address was after lunch. I will try to give highlights of these addresses later on; so as, to keep these to a readable length.

Thursday evening, the legislative committees were set to their task of dealing with the petitions that have been assigned to them. This evening was spent in the attempt to get officers elected and subcommittees organized to accomplish their monumental task before May2. Interestingly, the task of the Commission office is to resource these committees and the major item is—You guessed it—PAPER and COPIES. Some must have had a problem getting the officers elected because we were called on to provide small pieces of paper for ballots. These are the nights that go on until morning. It would be nice to have a golf cart to run our “paper route”. This is the part of the conference that is new to me and now, if aware of the servants that have served others and me over all these years. A major component of the next week will be caffeine. Your can take pride in your conference’s servants at the cookie breaks. It takes, not only, many dollars to run a GC, but it takes thousands and thousands of cookies.