Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Eyewitness Report: ELCA Church Council
The ELCA Church Council met in Chicago this past week. I made the trip to sit in as a visitor on the Plenary sessions (March 28-30), and it wasn't what I expected, but it was, umm, an adventure, with snow and everything.
My main interest was to see how the Church Council would make decisions about the proposed ELCA social statement on sexuality (Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust) and recommendations on rostering for LBGT pastors that accompanied the social statement. Both these documents are the work of an ELCA task force that was established in 2001. For any of these proposals to become church policy, they must be adopted by the ELCA Churchwide Assembly. The next assembly is in August, and this Church Council meeting would decide how these issues would be presented to the assembly.
This was not my first Church Council meeting, and I expected this one to be like the meeting I attended in 2005: differences of opinion among council members would be clearly visible and the discussions might be contentious.
But before the council could talk about either the social statement or the rostering recommendations, they had to revisit a procedural decision made last year.
In November, 2008 (before the task force had released any of its conclusions), the Church Council recommended procedural rules for the 2009 Churchwide Assembly, and it recommended that a simple majority (anything over 50%) be enough to pass the recommendations on rostering. (ELCA bylaws require that social statements must pass by at least a two-thirds, a "super majority", but the rostering recommendations are not part of the social statement.)
Since November, the church council had received resolutions from 18 synod councils regarding that decision: 15 synods encouraged the church council to reconsider and to require a two-thirds majority for the rostering recommendations; 3 synods encouraged the church council to stand by its original decision.
A 20 minute debate ensued that centered on fairness: was it fair to change the rules now that the task force had published its findings? What did it mean that 47 synods had not responded? When the vote was taken, the council rejected the super-majority proposal (10 in favor; 21 against; 2 abstentions). It's worth noting that the Church Council can only pose this as a recommendation to the assembly: the voting members at the assembly have the final say on their procedural rules.
On Saturday afternoon, the social statement came up for consideration, and the speeches introducing it took more time than the debate. Various speakers talked about how the social statement had evolved (Restructured! Shorter by 1000 words!), the exact moment at which it was handed over from the task force to a committee of the church council (10:26AM on March 27), "responsibility ethics", and "left hand governance".
After the speeches, the council went into a 30 minute "committee of the whole" session from which visitors were excluded. When the open session resumed, the council approved en bloc a set of friendly amendments (minor editorial changes) and then, without further discussion, voted unanimously to recommend the social statement to the Churchwide Assembly.
It was snowing on Sunday when the council took up the rostering recommendations. The rostering recommendations are a set of four resolutions intended to be considered in sequence.
The first resolution says that the ELCA will commit itself to finding ways to allow congregations that choose to do so to recognize, support, and hold publicly accountable life-long monogamous, same-gender relationships.
The second says that the ELCA will commit itself to finding ways for people in publicly accountable, life-long, monogamous, same-gender relationships to serve as rostered leaders in the ELC.
The third resolution says that the ELCA will commit itself to the sharing of burdens, love of the neighbor, and respect for the "bound consciences" of all.
The fourth, finally, outlines the changes that would allow people in publicly accountable, life-long, monogamous, same-gender relationships to serve. This resolution has 7 "resolved" clauses which together call for the removal of the current prohibitions for non-celibate gay or lesbian candidates for ministry and describe a candidacy process that would facilitate "structured flexibility" (an approach to the call and candidacy process that is intended to protect any of the participants from being compelled to make any conscience-violating decisions).
The stage was set for this to be a more complicated discussion and it was. At the start, the committee chair who introduced the resolutions suggested an abbreviation ("PALMS") for "publicly accountable, life-long, monogamous, same-gender relationships". The chair ruled against the use of abbreviations, so speakers were lumbered with having to say the entire 20 syllable phrase over and over.
Again there was a 30 minute committee of the whole from which visitors were excluded (timed perfectly so I could print my boarding pass for the Monday flight back), and it was followed by another 30 minute committee of the whole for which visitors were re-admitted.
The unusual thing is that the discussion was not about LGBT people and ministry standards. It was chiefly about ethical reasoning (how do Lutherans make ethical decisions when they don't all agree?) and what on earth "bound concscience" could possibly mean. Really: most of the discussion time was spent on the third of the resolutions mentioned above, the "bound conscience" resolution. After that, the next most prominent topic was speculation on how "structured flexibility" might work and that was less a debate than getting churchwide staff to clarify the fine points of the proposed system.
Each of the four resolutions was considered separately and amendments to make minor clarifications to resolutions 1 and 4 were proposed and adopted. By a large margin (there was only one council member who felt the resolutions were not in the church's best interest), the council voted to transmit each of the four resolutions to the Churchwide Assembly.
So that was that and it was not so contentious after all, though I suspect that things will be more hotly contested at the Churchwide Assembly.
It's worth reporting that I spent the entire weekend seated next to Pr. Mark Chavez of Lutheran CORE (which has lobbied vigorously against both the proposed social statement and the rostering recommendations). There are not many topics on which he and I agree, but we managed to be cordial throughout the weekend. I introduced myself as the publisher of Lutheran (True!) Confessions and he mentioned that he'd always wondered who was behind that.
At one point Presiding Bishop Hanson led a Bible study and Bishop Hanson ALWAYS asks you to turn to your neighbor and discuss something, so Mark Chavez and I talked about various features of Acts 3: 1-16. At the end of the study, Bishop Hanson asked us to turn to our neighbor, trace a cross on their forehead, address them by name and say "Child of God, you are marked with the cross of Christ forever." And there we were, two people with profound disagreements, touching each other and pronouncing a blessing.
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