Musings on General Convention

From Scott Gunn -

Our bishops continue to show an unhealthy love of secrecy. Do our bishops need to begin every day with a private, closed-door session? Since I don’t know what they do in there, I can’t say for sure, but it strikes me as antithetical to much of what we stand for as a church. Surely conversation — even frank, difficult words — can be had in public? And the bishops’ ban on Twitter (which, I am told, includes an unenforced provision against tweeting from the visitors’ gallery) seems pointless, since the public proceedings are live streamed. What’s the harm in someone posting news and comments on what the bishops are doing? The bishops can take a page out of the deputy playbook, where we learned that twitter did not harm our deliberations, and quite likely improved them.

The schedule is inhumane. Long-time deputies speak with bravado about the days which begin at 7:30 a.m. committee hearings and end with 10:00 p.m. deputation caucuses. This is a ludicrous way to treat a human body. We need to find another way to do things so that people can rest. Getting thousands of us in one place every three years is a precious opportunity to celebrate together, and we should have more social time. Oh, and more prayer time would be a good idea. First-time deputies, even though they have been warned, are often horrified by the grueling nature of the convention, which might explain why so many of them do not come back. We need to fix this.

Much of what we do is a waste of time. In one of my committee hearings one morning, we were in the midst of a lengthy discussion of how to rewrite a particular sentence. It occurred to me that this was entirely pointless, because few people would even read the resolution we were so carefully wordsmithing. What else might we have done with our time at Convention? What would happen if we set aside our legislative sessions one afternoon, and deputations spent time with another deputation from across our vast church? What would it be like if we prayed more? What if we did a service project together? With so many deputies and bishops, every minute is precious. We can’t afford business as usual next time. The opportunity cost will bankrupt us.

More here-

http://www.sevenwholedays.org/2012/07/30/musings-on-general-convention/#more-5279