Third Plenary

First of all, one funny note I neglected from last night: after all the talk surrounding the malaria project and before the end of the session, Bishop Hanson asked us to sing "Thy Holy Wings", which drew some snickers from the Church Council. He wasn't making a joke, but he did think it was funny after he said it.

One feature of this assembly has been all the swag we're accumulating. Yesterday we got a collapsing water bottle, today we got an insulated coffee mug, an insulated lunch bag, and a few other things. These are reusable, which means that instead of throwing them away, you keep them forever, storing them away with all of your other mugs/cups (as someone who has just moved house, I'm sensitive to such things). I'll keep you posted, and am contemplating building a little altar to sustainability at my seat tomorrow with all of it.

Bishop Hanson started the session by giving some instructions related to the votes for the day and testing out the voting machines.

"And now I'll hand it over to Vice President Pena"
"Ladies and Gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson" (backing away and applauding)

So we got a rousing speech by Bishop Hanson to start off the day. He's a fan of throwing out applause lines, and only half-jokingly asks why he isn't getting "amens" in certain places. I've been consciously trying not to applaud ever, as I'm trying to do my part not to draw things out (today that didn't apply, since they ended up stalling to make sure there were copies of proposed amendments to the proposed LIFT changes for everyone), and also I don't entirely trust myself to remember not to applaud once speeches start happening (when they care about restricting applause). So if I am applauding, it's because either 1) I forgot I decided not to (this has happened a few times), or 2) if everyone is rising for a standing ovation (I don't have the personal strength to refuse to join in at that point).

River of Hope, the new ELCA church that was formed in Hutchinson when every ELCA church there voted to disaffiliate from the denomination, and their new pastor Laura Aase were name-checked in Bishop Hanson's address, and we got to see a picture of their parade float "Hope Floats" on the big screen. It was a nice mention.

My favorite story from Bishop Hanson during this talk was this: he was walking through an airport, and someone shouted across the hallway (noticing his collar and purple shirt): "Who are you a bishop of?"
"Lutherans!"
(louder)"WE LOVE LUTHERANS!"
"Who's we?"
"FEMA"
They talked for a minute, and according to this FEMA agent, Lutherans had the reputation of showing up immediately when disaster strikes, and sticking around till the work is done. It was definitely said to make us feel proud, and it sure worked!

As I mentioned, they were drawing things out to get paper copies of the proposed LIFT changes distributed, and Bishop Hanson asked us not to leave the hall while we were waiting (this failed). A couple of minutes later, he managed to round up the heads of the Memorials Committee to give their summary introduction early. This assembly, there are 97 memorials (recommendations for the assembly to act, given by synods within the church). A lot of them are grouped together and edited by the committee, and some are already being removed from en bloc consideration (so for example, all of a group of immigration memorials were to be grouped under a single vote, but one of those will now be considered separately).

Then we started on the main business of the morning, the LIFT proposals. There were seventeen proposed amendments to the implementing resolutions of the LIFT report. The Parliamentary Procedure got a little thick here, and some were having trouble keeping track. The situation was that there were recommendations from the LIFT report that people had to offer amendments for by last night. The Reference and Counsel Committee reviewed each of these suggested amendments and offered their recommendation for each (their count was 15). So as each issue came up, the question under discussion was whether to accept the Reference and Counsel Committee's recommendation for each item. If you wanted to discuss the actual amendment, or amend the amendment, one would first have to defeat the question on accepting the Committee's recommendation, and immediately propose the original amendment from the floor (this has not happened yet: so far, all of the Committee's recommendations have been followed.

The first group of proposed amendments (10 of them) dealt with Social Statements. One of the LIFT recommendations was (excepting the Genetics statement), to not consider any more Social Statements until at least 2013, by which time a review of how Social Statements are formed will have been completed. There was to be business later in the week related to Social Statements, so the recommendation here was to defer discussion of this recommendation and proposed amendments until that time. That course of action was approved.

The rest of the action related to recommendations (that we dealt with: we ran out of time), was mainly concerned with emphasis. One person thought that the importance of Pastoral development should have explicit mention in the recommendations. Another thought that relationships with institutions should be explicitly considered in the recommendations, etc. For each of these, the Reference and Counsel Committee said either that the recommendations were broad on purpose to be more flexible, or that the proposed additional content was already included in the recommendations or the report as a whole, so the proposed action was "to receive the proposed amendment with thanks" and to forward it to the body within the church responsible for dealing with the issue in question (e.g., the Church Council). Some objected, saying that more specific language was necessary for accountability. One Voting Member explicitly asked what happens to amendments that get forwarded: does the Council, etc., have to pay any attention to those? Bishop Hanson assured us that they did pay attention. Each of the recommendations to forward a proposed amendment, leaving the original recommendation unchanged, was passed by close to 2/3 of the assembly. This was very encouraging to me, and in keeping with the spirit of the LIFT report as I understand it so far. It was a willingness to give the Council and other bodies within the church more freedom to operate, and the initial institutional trust to discharge their duties well, taking into account the concerns of the assembly without needing the force of explicit legislative language as a guarantee. Of course, part of the motivation behind LIFT was the notion that protecting specific interests by legislative language and bureaucratic structures was both ineffective at promoting the interests in question and indeed could stifle the proper workings of the Church. So while it is a risk to give church officers more freedom and trust them to act properly, it was a risk taken with some judgment that the alternative had been tried, and had been a failure so far.

This led into the Program Committee discussion, which I'll handle in a separate post.