First: you want to know why the UMC is so stuck? Read this piece I wrote for the United Methodist Reporter. We’re a muddy administrative impossibility.
As for me, it is Tuesday, late afternoon. Still one more hour of legislation. The presiding Bishop decided to speak in French as an act of hospitality to our many African delegates. so all the US delegates get to wear earphones. Have no idea what/if the observers hear. In the press room, we just get the English translation.
We have slogged through a fair number of petitions, shooting some down, but nothing controversial. Some misunderstanding over a petition to make extra funds available for African theological students was debated for thirty minutes until the Bishop was finally able to clarify that the person amending the petition simply didn’t understand the language properly and actually wanted it to pass as is. Sigh.
The requisite demonstration by the groups pushing for a fully inclusive church was pretty well ignored although demonstrators walked around the convention center singing and with their hands bound in front of them. The Presiding Bishop told everyone to put on their earphones and moved on with the legislation.
Part of my job today was to track legislation as it came to the floor so we know exactly what did and did not pass. This is a tedious job, requiring the tracker to follow closely all the instructions to first find the piece of legislation in something called the Daily Christian Advocate (DCA), a massive publication that has to be put out daily with a complete word by word transcript of the previous day’s proceedings, all possible legislation to be considered, and various other reports. It’s about 1 1/4 inches thick, printed single space, double sided on cheap newsprint.
In order to look at a piece of legislation, the presenter has to give the page number in the DCA, a different page number in the A(advance) DCA, the item number, and the petition number. In the right order, and precisely so everyone can follow. And nothing in the DCA is in the order in which it will be presented.
Most of this stuff contains minor alterations to the Book of Resolutions or the Book of Discipline. At this point, if anything is even mildly controversial, it just gets referred to another committee where I assume it will lie untouched, eventually to die after being smothered by a choking layer of dust.
So, we sit and pass/fail items with everyone knowing that a giant elephant is placing mountain-high piles of digestive detritus all over the floor.
Yes, we fiddle while Rome burns. Not one little bit of this matters if, at the end of the week, we don’t actually have a church. And that is a real possibility.
We are at a nearly complete impasse.
My team got wind of numerous confirmations that the Bishops were going to offer a plan to split the church today. We were up late last night, looking for confirmed sources. A couple of us got up at 4 am this morning to write the release, ready to shoot it up there as soon as the formal announcement was made. Thank goodness the senior editors know to practice restraint before hitting the “publish” button.
Effectively, the Council of Bishops bailed. They abdicated their leadership, noting that they are not of one mind, and told the delegates that they needed to come up with something.
This is seriously disastrous. Well, it is if you love the church, as I do. It is if you seriously think that the message of grace, hope, forgiveness, reconciliation, and growth toward perfection in love are best offered by an accountable body of Christians who together discern the will of God and best ways to address societal concerns and justice issues.
But I’m a student of history. I know that empires rise and fall, and so do institutions. We’re in our death throes, but I also think there is great hope for a glorious resurrection. But we’re going to have to have the funeral first.
And if this post is full to typos and grammatical errors, just chalk it up to exhaustion. I keep going by not thinking of the minute ahead.
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