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?

Hello?

It's been a long time!

As you know, I haven't updated in a while, fulfilling any of my ambitions to "think aloud" through the assembly documents publicly before the big event. After having looked for a while at the mocking weekly reminders on my Google Calendar to update the thing, I was ready to scrap this blog as a failed experiment, but since I arrived at CWA there has been enough noteworthy going on to convince me to make this into a report on the proceedings from a participant's perspective rather than primarily an analysis of the business being discussed. Hope you enjoy it!

I could provide a long list of excuses for you (chief among them: in the last 10 weeks we were notified by our landlord that they were selling the property, we found a new house, and moved), but it's still unfortunate. I do regret at least not putting up a more thorough, specific discussion of the Genetics document. To give you the short summary, I was leaning against, until the first part of the very impressive introduction to the statement at tonight's second plenary session (once reminded of specific content, I went back to leaning against). I might explain more fully depending on how late I'm staying up.

Stick around for some posts on the first day's business.

Voting Member meeting roundup

Last Tuesday there was another meeting for voting members in my synod (Southwest MN). My regular life has gotten much busier in the meantime, which accounts for the delay here. As I mentioned, I can't promise dates for future posts, but I can say with reasonable confidence that they will be irregular (in bunches, that is).

One of our voting members is Linden Olson, who served on the Task Force writing the Genetics statement. He gave us an abbreviated version of the presentation he has been using to introduce the statement in talks. He did take questions; he said that in the earliest drafts there was much more of a focus on human experimentation/genetics, but the agriculture experts helped refocus that, making the point that genetic adjustments in agriculture can affect many more people in a very short period of time. I asked whether there was much difference between the original public draft statement on Genetics and the current version, and Linden and the bishop agreed that it was much shorter in the current version and that the structure of the document was different, but Linden did not think that anything important was changed content-wise, just that it was a better, more concise statement after the editing process. Something I meant to ask, but couldn't because of time pressure, was who the specific recommendations are for in this statement (apart from the recommendations on funding). It seemed to me that in many places the statement was trying to contextualize practices (using our own ethical vocabulary) which had already been tested and vetted in the context of a very mature regulatory structure (a friend of mine who has drafted guidelines for working with animals has told me as much). He did provide part of an answer to that in another question however, saying that while we in the USA operate under a firm regulatory structure, this does not hold for experimentation in other countries or for the use of the the products of US genetic research in other countries, which is a fair point.

Another item discussed was the LIFT Task Force recommendations. I'd mentioned previously (about a month ago) that I was interested in it but I couldn't find anything about it, and that the part of the ELCA website devoted to actions of the upcoming assembly did not provide a link. Well, there is a link now with links to all the relevant documents, and it seems like they are (contrary to my original assumption) making every effort to advertise their work. They have a blog, a facebook page, and even a twitter account. I think after the Genetics statement, I'll go straight to the LIFT Task Force recommendations, as they seem to be potentially the most important for the future of the ELCA. Word at the meeting was that the recommendations represent a radical shift in the orientation of the ELCA toward the support of congregations, which our Bishop sees as encouraging: he sees a deep mutual distrust between many congregations and the national church, which at least here has often been able to distract from the church's mission in this part of the state.

Also mentioned briefly was the fact that there will be discussion of a motion to rescind the 2009 Sexuality statement and associated resolutions at the CWA. Southwest MN was considered a likely place for such a resolution to arise (our Synod Assembly has not yet taken place), but another synod has put it on the agenda.

Everyone else at the meeting was going to be at Synod Assembly this coming weekend (I will be unable to attend), so I hope they will keep me updated on any new information.

Social Statements: What are they good for? Part 2

Sorry to everyone anxiously awaiting my next post, I decided to let this notion bake a little more. I'll try to be less glib about post forecasting in future.

So the question on the table is, why don't the ELCA's Social Statements have more of an impact, at least for members of the ELCA? Since I was already in mind of Dr. Burtness, I started thinking of the question as framed by the introductory Ethics courses I'd taken. There are a few generally recognized approaches to ethical issues, so let's look at them and see how helpful ELCA-style Social Statements are in light of these approaches. I'll take them one at a time:

Virtue Ethics

Virtue (or Character) Ethics is an approach to ethical issues based on acquiring a habit of virtue. That is, one becomes virtuous by doing as well as you can until being virtuous becomes second nature and even more virtuous living is possible. Likewise one's ability to judge the right course of action is improved the more you do good. If you're confused about a proper course of action, you probably wouldn't have as much trouble if you were in better moral shape. There's a lot of esoteric discussion about this approach (Aristotle is recognized as its originator), but there is wide popular support as well (think of the WWJD phenomenon). Quite a lot of ELCA Lutheranism is constitutionally opposed to this kind of thinking about ethics however; try starting a conversation about the Third Use of the Law in the Luther Seminary cafeteria if you don't believe me. I think there is much to be said for this approach as long as it's recognized that being habitually virtuous doesn't make one righteous before God or justify the sinner, but many view any discussion along those lines by Christians as at least on a slippery slope to preaching works righteousness.

In any case, a Social Statement would have limited value from a virtue ethics perspective, as according to this view the expertise necessary to deal with the big ethical issues comes from living out an ethical life, or in a more limited way, from emulating those who are more virtuous. In the ELCA's case, the Social Statements we write are short on practical directives (I believe in part to avoid offending people by telling them what to do), and while it's common for statements to have sidebars detailing a situation someone might find him or herself in related to the issue in question, I can't recall one where the subject of the example was presented as someone to emulate. Neither can I recall an example where someone makes a decision or acts beyond the posing of the question.

Deontological Ethics

The root for the first part of this term is the Greek word deon, meaning duty. The main idea here is that there are certain rules for moral behavior that ought not be violated, and that these are more or less clear to everyone. For the Christian, these rules would be represented by, but not limited to, the Ten Commandments. On the other hand, what is neither prohibited nor commanded can be assumed to be permitted: that is, one doesn't need to worry about moral content in the mundane details of life outside of one's ethical duty.

As for how this ethical approach would receive the idea of hashing out social statements in assembly, I doubt it would be favorably: "So you guys read a report, and on that basis you take a vote on what's right or wrong this year? That's different.*" From a deontological perspective, a discussion of an ethical issue properly consists of what is commanded and what is prohibited, and people with this tendency can be roused to action if a Social Statement at odds with their principles is being considered. However, since ELCA Social Statements tend to avoid explicit commands and rules, they are mainly viewed as safe to ignore.

Situation Ethics

This ethical approach concerns itself primarily with the context of the decision to be made, usually in reference to an all-important principle. For example: Joseph Fletcher, the Episcopal priest who coined the term "Situation Ethics", declared "Love" to be the overriding principle, so for him the question to be asked for any ethical dilemma was how, in the given situation, love could best be served. Ethical rules can be employed and consulted, but in this view they take on the flavor of "guidelines" or "rules of thumb", since everything should be subordinated to the facts of the situation and the principle in question.

ELCA-style Social Statements would seem to be a poor fit from this perspective; contextual realities can be discussed (as in the previously mentioned sidebars), but at such a distance from any deciding subject, a Social Statement would be of limited help in assessing an actual extreme situation or setting it next to the principle in question (that is, if the Social Statement and the deciding subject were to agree on principles!).

Teleological Ethics

The Greek root for the first part of "Teleological" is telos, meaning end or goal. In this ethical perspective, we should act in a way that would produce the best end, and this is usually decided with some difficulty, as it requires some deliberate thought and a bit of predicting the future. There is also the matter of choosing proper ends to judge the results of your actions against. So in teleological reasoning, especially of the Christian variety, you will often find "natural law" discussions about what the proper end is of a given part of creation or institution. For example, Catholic teaching on sexuality relies heavily on natural law arguments: what is the purpose of our sexual organs? What is marriage and what is it for? After reasoning to a proper context and role of sexual expression, rules are then decided for those who are unable to achieve the ideal. Another feature of this form of ethical reasoning is its all-encompassing nature: mundane actions can have consequences with moral content, and just about any action could have been done better, with more forward thought involved, and producing better results. So we are in a position of constantly weighing relative goods, or at times choosing the lesser evil. Most of the time, we aren't afforded such a clear choice as what is "the right thing to do" or "the wrong thing."

This form of reasoning is perfectly suited to the the crafting of Social Statements as we have them in the ELCA: long discussions about what our values are and how we fulfill them, discussions about how the topic of the statement has far-reaching implications, and how Christians can best respond to those issues. I would go so far as to say that production of such statements are a natural outgrowth of this ethical perspective: this kind of analysis is hard work, and to do that work on behalf of others who don't have the resources and/or ability to put it together on their own would enable many others to make more ethical decisions, which would be an end worth achieving.

The problem is, most people don't think about ethics this way, and I doubt that the ELCA wishes to establish one ethical paradigm as normative (though reading through the Genetics document, there are claims along those lines; more on that later). If I had to guess, I'd say most people, even in the ELCA, look at ethical problems from a deontological perspective, and look at the specific directives/recommendations of any Statement in question, deciding whether to approve them on that basis: if the document doesn't have directives/prohibitions that that person agrees with, the document is inoffensive at best and unacceptable at worst. That audience of readers who are aware of the documents, share the teleological perspective of ethics and don't think they already have the issue figured out by themselves is a small one, and so the potential benefit from the work of those who write our Social Statements remains low.

For those in the Assembly who don't share that perspective, the institutional bias seems to be to vote in favor of adopting the document unless there is a flaw so egregious as to disqualify it from consideration. This has led, even with sizeable majorities voting for the documents, to many people feeling dissatisfied and unheard: these same people may approve documents they view as inoffensive enough, but which don't represent their perspective.

What's the solution to this? I really don't know. As I've said, the genre of the Social Statement naturally lends itself to a teleologically-minded treatment of the subject, and I'm not sure that there's a more intellectually inclusive way of doing it. Encouraging the statement of more concrete, generally-applicable commands and prohibitions would certainly garner more attention for the documents, but that doesn't look like a direction anyone wants to go. At the moment, I'm pinning my hopes on some people in the Communal Discernment Task Force having similar thoughts and coming up with some great new paradigm-shifting ideas, but I'm not counting on that. I just wanted to get this (now slightly more than) half-baked notion about what the current status of Social Statements is in the ELCA at large before I tackled the proposed Genetics statement.

And there is a lot to talk about in that document! In an effort to not embarrass myself further, I promise to start blogging about it "soon". If you want to be sure to catch these posts as they come, click the subscribe link below.

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*"That's Different" is the highest expression of disapprobation available in the native rural Minnesotan dialect; feel free to adjust for regional differences.

Social Statements: What are they good for? Part 1

I mentioned I had some half-baked notions about Social Statements in general before diving into the Bioethics statement on Friday; here they are.

I was lucky enough to have a couple of Ethics classes with the late Dr. James Burtness at Luther Seminary, and in his Intro courses he would tell the class about when he took a guiding role in the drafting of the ELCA Social Statement on Abortion. It had the flavor of an epic in his telling, which sounds odd but the facts bear him out: if you're exercising the office of an Ethics professor at a seminary, this is as close to Achilles as one could expect to be, unless you're Dietrich Bonhoeffer (coincidentally a special favorite of Dr. Burtness).

From the composition of the group, Dr. Burtness suspected that there was an intended outcome on one side of the issue (the initial viewpoints were diverse but lopsided in his account). As they were making attempts to start a discussion, Dr. Burtness got up and asked if there was anyone who thought an ectopic (tube) pregnancy had an absolute right to be born. When no one raised his or her hand, he made a mark at the edge of the board he was standing next to. He then asked if anyone thought a woman in labor after 9 months of pregnancy with no health risks due to pregnancy and a healthy fetus had an absolute right to an abortion. When again no hands were raised he made a mark at the other end of the board. He then declared the existence of common ground: all that was left was to hash out the middle portion, between those marks.

Thus began months of intense and often angry debate, and more than once people went home crying. After much effort, they drafted a measured and nuanced document presented with the unanimous approval of the committee. There were amendments offered at the Churchwide Assembly, but the amendments were voted down and the statement was adopted unaltered.

What happened next?

Well, since presumably most of you reading are ELCA, and since the Statement was in some sense for you, I could leave the question for you:

• Has the Statement changed the way you think about abortion?
• Does the Statement at least inform the way you think about abortion?
• If someone from a different church asked you what the ELCA teaches about abortion, how would the Social Statement inform that answer as you gave it?
• Have you read the Social Statement?
• Have you heard the Social Statement mentioned in preaching or discussions with fellow Lutherans since the year it was approved (1991)?
• and the last in a scary series of questions for those involved in drafting Statements like this one: Are you aware that the ELCA has a Social Statement on abortion?

You might think that last question is going too far, but I suspect that there's an ample number of relatively well-informed ELCA members who are not aware of that Social Statement. Speaking for myself, at the time I heard Dr. Burtness's story, I'd heard that we had such a statement but had not read it. The couple of people referencing the Statement that I remember (1 pastor, 1 professor) characterized it as permissive or "for" abortion, and while I wouldn't characterize the Statement that way I don't think their inferences were borne of bad faith or were without foundation. And this is on the ultimate national hot-button social issue of the day for the last 40 years. What about the rest of our 10(!) Social Statements? Feel free to brag in the comments if you can name the subject of 8 of them without peeking (I've given you a free one). I only just managed to myself, and I've visited that page several times today and over the past week.

I haven't yet read the "Policies and Procedures of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America for Addressing Social Concerns", which should provide some clarity on the intended role of Social Statements generally in the ELCA. Before I do that, in my next post I'll give my current impressions of why it is that social teaching in the ELCA seems to go unheard and unheeded. Evidence to the contrary would also be welcome, but I don't think it's just me!

Note about the delay

I had a preliminary post ready to go last night, and shortly before I tried to post it blogger went down. In the meantime I split off part of that post, and started a couple of other preliminary posts.

Since I think this will flow better if I hold to one post per day (also since I have quite a bit of home/church related stuff to prepare for this weekend), I'll post my initial teaser for the general Social Statement discussion, and after that one post per day until the main discussion of the Bioethics document.

A bit more focus

So if you were wondering what what was in that 5-inch binder filled a bit over its capacity with double-sided letter-size sheets, several examples of that kind of thing are available here. That's a list of highlights of what's going to be in the pre-assembly report for this year, and it's where I'm beginning my investigation.

For next Friday's regular post, I thought I'd dive right in to the statement on Bioethics, since it seems to be the highest profile bit of business before the Assembly to this observer (not saying I expect it to be the source of most contention). Before that I may post some half-baked notions I've been mulling over about social statements in general; I figure it would be better to compose them before looking at the material too deeply, that way if I'm repudiated by the facts it might be instructive to some readers.

After that, the Malaria statement looks superficially like a straightforward read, but in these next couple of weeks, I expect to be looking into the LIFT task force recommendations and especially the Communal Discernment Task Force recommendations if I can find them, as they could potentially be contentious and very difficult to assess. If anyone out there can provide me with some idea of what people are talking about with regard to these items, I'd be grateful.

I'm still a bit overwhelmed with the volume of material we're expected to evaluate. At the meeting of VMs for our synod, I asked if these items would be available electronically. The answer was a qualified yes: they would be available electronically, but at the last CWA (where the big sexuality statement decisions were made), laptops and other electronic devices were not permitted on the floor, in order to preempt any attempts at coordination by demonstrators. It remains to be seen whether they will be allowed this year; it would be nice, if we are to read and process that much information, that we at least wouldn't be required to carry it around in printed form all week.