The big news yesterday is that the General Council on Finance and Administration is asking the Council of Bishops for a special session of General Conference. I could be persuaded otherwise, but at the moment this seems like an expensive waste at best and a colossal mistake for the future of the denomination at worst. Fortunately, I don't think a special session is actually likely to be called.
The biggest problem is the timing. The called session would discuss two issues: pension plans in the United States and recommendations from the Call to Action Task Force of the Council of Bishops. The Task Force is scheduled to make their recomendations in the fall of 2010. Unless the timeframe for their work is moved up, that means a special session could take place no earlier than the spring of 2011, roughly 12 months before General Conference is already scheduled to meet. Additionally, meeting that soon after the proposals from the task force are announced would minimize the amount of time for conversation and debate. For some matters a few months is plenty of time, but the scope of this task force is tremendous. There are only two tasks - reconsidering guaranteed appointments for elders and restrucuring the church (including the frequency and size of General Conference and the number, kind, and size of general boards and agencies) - but those are two of the biggest tasks we face as a denomination.
Changing guarateed appointments will generate tremendous debate. Personally, I've gone back and forth a dozen times on whether this would be good or not. The reccomendation to change the church strucuture is even more important. This is the kind of decision that we have to get right. We don't get a second chance. It definitely needs to happen. Anybody who has been to General Conference knows that it is broken. The world has changed so much since the formation of the UMC that all of our strucutres need to be reconsidered and reformed. But it must be done carefully and it must be done correctly. It is not a decision that can be rushed.
My opinion is not as informed about pensions. The Conference I am in is not struggling at all in meeting pension obligations. Perhaps we need a special session just to deal with this. If we do, I hope that the question will be broadened to include pensions of clergy from countries outside the United States. I am sure that many of them would feel fortunate to have the pension funding crisis that some of our conferences have. A partially funded pension is much more than most of them get.
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2 comments:
It sounds like we do and we don't need a special session. My goodness. Lots of change and difficult issues to discuss. Sadly, we still fail to address our main struggle. That struggle is two fold- Why does the UMC continue to decline in the US? Hundreds and thousands of answers can be generated for that question.
How do we turn it around?
Few viable answers have been suggested.
Agree with Jeremy, and I also agree that a special General Confrence wouldn't be needed. Not gonna lie, when I first saw it I figured that it would be a good idea, but with time constraints, it seems like a waste of time and would make hasty decisions on VERY important topics. Part of me wonders if we are in a panic mode and we are just trying to figure out things as soon as we can, instead of discerning our decisions. Hopefully I'm wrong.
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