Morning-LIFT Hearing

If you talk to anyone who's at CWA, they'll be sure to impress upon you the full schedule. No side trips to Disney World for us; I doubt I'll leave the hotel for the 5 days of the Assembly. This day also starts pretty early for me: the travel agency booked me for a late arrival in Orlando, and in addition to that I spent a couple extra hours in Memphis when the connecting flight was delayed. By the time I got to my hotel room it was 2:00 this morning (I wanted to make sure I checked my email before barging in on my roommate, whom I'd never met, so late at night).

I an alarm for 7 so I could be sure to grab some breakfast and register in time for the hearings at 8:30. I was ready in time, but mistakenly went to the area for plenary sessions. Once I finally realized my mistake and organized my Asssembly stuff, it was almost time for the second round of hearings. I went to the LIFT hearing, as I'd heard some intriguing things about it, but was a bit overwhelmed by the scope of the project. I came away reassured about the direction of LIFT.

LIFT (Living Into the Future Together: Renewing the Ecology of the ELCA) is a project taken on in response to questions of how decisions are made in the church. It has really gotten legs; it's grown into quite a list of recommendations and constitutional changes, billed as a radical refocus on congregations as a denomination. Since the recommendations, if adopted, would change our consideration of other business so much, debate for the LIFT recommendations and proposed constitutional changes were front-loaded in the schedule for the assembly, and throughout the day we got many reminders that 9:30pm today was the latest they could take any proposed amendments relating to LIFT.

One interesting isolated concern relating LIFT was a question related to the schedule for future Churchwide Assemblies. One of the proposed changes is to have a CWA every 3 years instead of every two. The thinking behind this is that having big national church conflicts every couple of years is distracting from a focus on mission and local congregations. Also, it's expensive, and we don't need a national gathering that frequently (several other denominations meet every three years, or even less frequently). The question was: with a three-year schedule, does that mean we won't have to worry about doubling up on gatherings with WELCA or the Youth Gathering? Each of those are on a three-year schedule, and it was confirmed that if this provision goes through, the Youth Gathering will be in 2014, the Women's gathering will be in 2015, and CWA will be in 2016.

Most of the rest of questions focused on constitutional changes based on reorganization of the denomination. Under the recommendation, the Church Council will increase a bit in size, and will be given more latitude to select new members based on "demographics, experience, and expertise in Church Council responsibilities". As it is now, there are hard quotas in a few respects for several of the positions up for nominations: To pick out a couple of examples, there's a slate of candidates for a specific seat on the Church Council listed as "Clergy (Lower Susquehanna Synod, 8D)". Another seat on the council is listed as "Lay Female (PC/L)", meaning nominees for that seat would have to be female, not members of the clergy, and "people of color or whose primary language is other than English." Under the LIFT proposals, there would be more latitude in selecting members according to current needs of the Council. Some people were wary of this, one person flatly asserting that "experience and expertise" was code for excluding minorities and youth. However, under direct questioning, those on the council and those as a part of the LIFT Task Force made it quite clear that having all the groups represented was one of those needs they'd be attending to, and that one of the benefits for expanding the council would be to have all the demographic diversity they were looking for, and still have the flexibility to be able to recruit for specific skills as needs arise.

Other controversial proposed changes were the intention to reduce the group of paid advisory members to the Church Council, and to do away with Program committes. This, in combination with a proposed larger Church Council, was viewed by some as promoting a more top-down model of the Church, which is at variance with the stated intention of the LIFT report. In talking about the paid advisory members, there was some discussion of wanting to "increase participation", the subtext (I thought it was pretty clear, though I could be wrong) being that they weren't getting much in the way of information or advice from these members generally. This made intuitive sense to me, as I could see how if you wanted to make sure certain voices were heard, that hiring a designated paid advocate to represent that constituency probably wouldn't be the most effective option. Similarly, as far as the Program committees are concerned, a LIFT Task Force representative made the point that grassroots activists would be more effective organizing themselves and getting the attention of the Church Council as issues arise rather than forming their petitions around a semiannual meeting for the Program committee intended to represent the designated community.

Most of the challenges seemed to me to center around the idea that if these quotas/representatives/committees were not built into the constitutional language, that such groups would not have a voice. I was persuaded from those living under the current arrangement that having these was no guarantee of those groups having an effective voice, and that institutionalizing these concerns could actually stifle advocacy. One of the questioners worried that we wouldn't be leaving room for the Spirit to work by getting rid of these committees. This struck me as exactly wrong, as the system as it is now is very law-based. It is a law based on legitimate concerns, certainly, and the Spirit can work even with red tape. But imposing multiple demographic restrictions on certain seats and setting up official bureaucratically-approved channels for issue advocacy pretty obviously gives the Spirit less wiggle room to work with, right?