Lobbying by individuals

Successful lobbying at General Conference usually depends on the establishment of a very wide and strong network, often a coalition of a number of groups. I've discussed some of those in another blog.

Then there are the rest of us, each trying to bring our light to shine on some issue or other.

Some individuals have followed the rules wisely and been able to get a petition to stay alive despite much opposition and get them through the legislative process. They are usually delegates with the authority that entails. They can make motions on the floor and they have voice. Without a committed delegate on your side, you are at the mercy of the process no matter how wise nor well prepared your petition may be.

The truth and fullness of the petition to censure Dr. Holsinger helped it make it through the special rule passed early in the conference and got it as far as a sub-committee where it was debated. Without enough delegate support, it may have been misinterpreted as partisan or seen as moot because Holsinger was not even on the ballot for Judicial Council. Or it may have been misconstrued because no one provided the arguments of the reference committee about it's being within the new rules.

I don't know yet.

Petitions from individuals rarely get that far.

Other individuals come in person to monitor the progress of their petitions. They usually know delegates in the legislative committees and have prepared them to sustain the petitions as long as possible so they will get full consideration.

One such colleague has successfully taken concerns to the Judicial Council where his arguments have prevailed on narrow but important matters. Having that history, his presence and his petitions carry a weight that is greater than any most individuals have. He has name recognition among many in the legislative committee.

This year he even invited the whole legislative committee to dinner at his own expense to offer a lecture on how Fair Process works and where its failings are. Only a handful came but his effort meant they were far more ready to deal with all petitions in that area.

About the only thing you can say about my efforts this time around is that I have been persistent. Knowing some of the folks in key positions hasn't hurt. But I don't see the progress that is needed.

Over the years, something of mine enters the Discipline because someone else thought it was a good idea and offered it through a general church agency or caucus. That may be the only way some good ideas are accepted: someone of stature presents it as their own. And maybe they did think of it on their own. I try to provide ideas that are self-evident.

I still have no idea how my petitions fared. The few I tracked were rejected. But some may have been incorporated into other petitions that were passed. Sorting through the petitions that passed is a major project. I have been too tired to do it yet. I'm still napping most afternoons.

One of the delegates who has heard from me since I first started trying to influence the General Conference with my 30 to 50 petitions every four years gave me a hug and teased, "Without you, Jerry, we'd be all done by now." She laughed when I replied, "Well, you can't say I didn't give General Conference a chance to get it right."

Lobbying by groups

An individual trying to get something through General Conference that could change things for the better is thought to be impossible.

Far and away, the most effective at bringing change are organized groups.

The most powerful lobbying group is the Council of Bishops. Their lifetime election gives them so many advantages. They hold the power of appointment over every clergy person at General Conference. They are respected by the laity, especially those who sometimes gain considerable stature in the church by becoming important in the structure.

I am amazed that lay people in positions of serious authority can sometimes be unable to face up to the injustices that come to their attention. I take that to mean there is a dependency on the bishops for their status.

Watching efforts by reasonable people to deal with some of the imbalances caused by the money it takes to have bishops for life shows that it is often very hard to get General Conference to agree.

Getting bishops into the legislative committees as parliamentarians almost died because of the inability to gather enough for this General Conference. But they will be the parliamentarians as of 2012.

And their candidates for Judicial council won.

The next most effective lobbyists are the conservative coalition. Behind them are millions of dollars that support some of their efforts. The cost of cell phones for hundreds of overseas delegates was not raised from the donations of the pastors and average laity. Nor is renting a whole hotel just a block from the conference center.

They provided free breakfasts for any delegates who wished to have them. And they have worked hard to get their delegates elected from the various annual conferences. Their national communications network is second to none. They provide glossy printed materials to hand out to the delegates while most lobbying groups have materials produced by computer but then reproduced by copy machines.

The conservative coalition got some of their legislation through despite having fewer delegates than in previous General Conferences. They did so by successfully lobbying and marshaling foreign delegates for many of their key votes on homosexuality.

Methodist Federation for Social Action and groups seeking justice for homosexuals did not have the financial resources but they have been at lobbying longer than the other groups. Their communications network is not backed up with massive funding like the conservative coalition, but they are closer to the public relations model of "Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors" than the other two groups and so tend to be more persuasive on nearly all other issues than the wedge issues raised by the conservatives.

Their successful negotiation of the "witness" demonstration and doing it without arrests this time was quite effective. Their success at voting out Judicial Council members that had been a major conservative block for the last eight years is as good as the conservatives' taking over of the Judicial Council eight years ago.

Beyond those three, there were few others that gained attention.

In particular, the Women's Caucus did not seem active this time around. Beyond having monitors on inclusiveness who were given time to report their counts of speakers' gender, status, and nationality, there seemed to not be much new in the way of legislation.

That monitoring led to the fact that there were few middle aged white men in the leadership on the legislative committees and sub-committees!

Those rolls usually help people who want to be bishop gain "face" time and their performance in those rolls is a serious factor in winning election to the office of bishop. If so, many more women than usual will become bishops in July's jurisdictional elections.

The "Spotted Owl" group was very effective and their effort to shorten the time required to become an Elder appears to have succeeded. Their goofy knit caps should go into some kind of "Hall of Fame" for specific issue lobbyists.

AIA as a bridge group

The laws of the church tend to slow down the way we'd rather mishandle a problem than to learn from the past how better to solve it.

As Dr. Curl and other of my Perkins professors taught, "The Discipline is made up of attempts to solve problems in better ways, 200 hundred years worth of wisdom."

Associates in Advocacy seeks to remind church people about that and seeks to facilitate working through the Disciplinary process under every circumstance.

That means we work with people whose opinions on a wide variety of issues differ greatly.

We have helped advocates defend very conservative evangelical pastors and we have helped very liberal pastors. We have helped men and women, lay and clergy, young and old.

The list of advocates I keep are also across the spectrum of belief which underlies our denomination. I have high regard for all of them even when one or another gives up on me because I happen to have a theological stance of my own which may disagree with theirs.

That still does not stop me from my first question of someone who calls, "What has happened?" We don't have a belief requirement before we will respond to a pastor or lay person in trouble in our system. One of the most liberal pastors in our group is defending one of the most conservative pastors in his conference. I have recommended one of the most conservative advocates in our association as one who can help her sort out a situation to one of the most liberal bishops.

The real problem within our system is not the width of the denomination's theological views. The real problem is injustice. And neither wing has that as its intent.

There are "controllers," "rigidniks" as they are identified by a friend, who operate on their own rules and refuse to allow anyone else including their respective institutions to give them guidance. Those kind use the conscientious of their respective persuasions to be their foot soldiers in their war against their enemies, playing on their beliefs in a cynical way to gain and keep control.

Some of our clients are those who were dumped after helping a controller get what s/he wanted.

Sometimes I avoid speaking out on the hot button issues because others do it so well and I don't want to take sides on some matters.

But as one who believes in the Golden Rule and the General Rules, I am not always content to be silent when I see my conservative or liberal colleagues being used for someone else's rise to power.

I set up this blog not for my opinions but to report what is relevant to the Church in terms of justice matters.

That sometimes opens the door for my opinions. It becomes hard sometimes to avoid crossing that line.

So I've taken a chance by offering opinions.

Excoriate me if you will but if you are in trouble with the Church, call and I'll provide the best help our association can offer.

One result . . .

As I wrote earlier, General Conference had a tendency to give something to both wings of the church. While the main body steered down the middle, the wings got an extra feather or two.

Here's one for the "right" from Riley Case in a recent newsletter from the Confessing Movement:

"One significant abortion-related petition added the phrase to the Social Principles section on abortion: 'respects the sacredness..of the unborn child.' The significance is that the unborn child is called an unborn child and not a fetus."

What I've never understood is why a Roman Catholic doctrine based on Original Sin, which says that a baby's life has priority over the mother's because the mother has accumulated more sin over her lifetime since the mother's baptism than the child and the baptized child has far less, is now a plank of the right wings' platform.

The United Methodist Church has held a balanced and wise policy on abortion for as long as I can remember. We have wanted abortion to not be used unless there was a significant medical problem that endangered the mother or child. We believe that only after serious counseling with pastoral and appropriate professionals should abortion be used.

Adoption is our first choice when a mother is not in a position to care for the newborn.

One of the reasons this balanced view was taken by our denomination was because of "Our belief in the sanctity of the unborn human life . . . . But we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother. . . ."

Isn't the real issue not just nobly taking a stand but seeking how best to insure that abortions only follow humane counseling? And at the same time seeking what is the best outcome for any human life that is born?

The alternative is to leave everything in God's hands and not interfere with the natural course of events. But that logically leads to taking a position that says we should not intervene medically in any situation.

I believe there are folks on both sides of this set of arguments who are deeply Christian and compassionate. They would not be likely to take the extreme logical position.

What bothers me is that there are some who do not want to admit the truth of that reality and want only to have one side WIN, their side.

That is a symptom of "party spirit" which the Scriptures is not a gift of the Holy Spirit!

Logical inconsistency is not the worst of sins, though it leaves us open to making horrendous mistakes. What pains me is the way it can be used to block deepening the discussion.

For example, the "evangelical" wing has been pecking away at the Social Principles a phrase at a time, focusing over the years in getting the General Conference to finally say "the sacredness..of the unborn child" without beginning the conversation about how to help individual pregnant women avoid future pregnancies that are unwanted, how to get China to stop its rural populations from practicing gender selection abortions, how to raise the economic level of families that cannot afford another mouth to feed without harming the children they already have, how to help a young woman face families bent on disowning them for having a baby out of wedlock, how to ease the "tragic conflicts of life" which make abortion seem the only way to resolve them even if it means crossing state lines to go into back alleys to medically incompetent people willing to help with an abortion.

One of the great qualities of our denomination is that it has attempted to take wise stands based on Scripture, mainly Jesus' teachings. That puts us into offering more complex answers because no simple answers take into account the harm that come can from just thinking in black and white.

Frankly, I wonder if the desire to win and to not want to face the possibility that there are Christians on the other side of the argument is to make abortion a wedge issue to undermine the denomination and split it.

But the General Conference plows on, giving one side this feather but being misconstrued so that the right wing feels like it can best help the denomination fly by beating the left wing into submission.

Estonia

In 1952, several students from Latvia attended my hometown Waukesha's High School. They escaped the Russian take-over of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. That history came back to life when I had the honor of going to dinner with Tarmo Lilleoja.

Tarmo was elected as one of two delegates to General Conference from Estonia. I met him at the Reference Committee. He represented the Ministry Legislative Committee. So I saw a good deal of him the first week.

Tarmo's command of English is very good so we had an extensive conversation about him, his family, the church in Estonia, and his country's history.

When the Russian occupation ended in 1991, Estonia was left in a shambles, its economy ruined, its infrastructure in desperate need of help, and its humanitarian needs tremendous. The influx of aid from Europe and England was handled through the church which had maintained its connections during the occupation. He became one of the administrators for that program.

Estonia being a small nation of around a million and a half citizens, it pulled together, restoring its original governmental system from before the German occupation during WWII and later the Russian occupation. It held elections and became re-established very soon after the Russians left.

It meant a great deal to Estonia that its ambassador to the US was recognized here as Estonia's government in exile from the time the Russians took over in 1944. The rest of the world recognized the Russian-formed government after WWII. The US decision made it easier for Estonia to become re-established as an independent nation and it explains how it is that Estonia has been a part of the "Coalition of the Willing" in our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Tarmo said that the German take-over had been peaceful. Estonia was seen by them as a former German colony (Germans had invaded Estonia in 13th century). During WWII, Estonians were conscripted into the German army. When Russia invaded, they hunted down and killed many of those former "German" soldiers. Russia's occupation was cruel.

Other times in history going back to Middle Ages were frequently under Russian domination. The Bolsheviks tried to keep Estonia within Red Russia, but failed. Estonia established its independence following the Russian Revolution of 1917.

He told me his dad had been conscripted by the Germans but somehow escaped detection by the Russians. However, they conscripted him without realizing he had served in the German army.

During the Nuremberg trials, Estonian conscripts guarded the German officers. One of the officers recognized his guards who had also served under him. But he never told on them.

Tarmo has three sons, all as different as they can be. One has exceptional athletic ability and Tarmo was in touch with college coaches while he was here to see if they had a scholarship program for which his one son would qualify.

Tarmo's wife is dean of the United Methodist Theological Seminary in Estonia. When I told him I wrote a manual for first-time pastors, he said she might be interested in seeing it so I sent him a copy by e-mail.

It is long past time that we were more clear about how the churches in other countries are not "mission" churches but full-fledged national churches like ours is. We are fortunate to have a relationship with them.

I have no trouble looking at that relationship being as equals.

The Value of this General Conference

Probably the most important value was that so many United Methodists got to meet so many others and rediscover just how many wonderful fellow Christians there are world wide!

I've mentioned the saints I've met. The volunteers from the Central Texas Conference are way up there on my list. The folks who I have known as far back as 1984 who still attend General Conference are mostly among the saints. I dealt with a number of media folks working for our denomination and they proved to be worthy of genuine esteem. The friendships across national lines may become invaluable.

Whatever machinations or political moves or failures of this quadrennial event, the relationships that we developed will mean something to us for years to come. I really think this is the highest value we received for our time in Fort Worth.

Despite shoving the censure of President Bush under the rug, this body of United Methodists made some policy votes that say how we feel about what the Bush Administration has done:

96% voted that war was incompatible with Jesus' teachings

96% voted urging peaceful resolutions be sought with Iraq, North Korea, and any other world nations and against pre-emptive military actions

96% voted to reduce man-made greenhouse gases

98% voted in opposition to building the Bush library at SMU because of the separation of church and state.

Similarly high percentages voted for protecting undocumented workers and their families with broader immigration reforms

While General Conference voted to retain "homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching" (60%), it also voted to add definitions of homophobia (fear of homosexuality) and heterosexism (discrimination against homosexuals) (60%).

As in so many past General Conferences, this one maintained a steady course down the middle as these delegates perceived it, giving something to the left and something to the right.

But finally, it stayed together. Considering that serious attacks to divide the church by use of hot button issues for the last 36 years, maybe the second greatest value is that we did not divide.

Accomplishments

In 1988, the General Conference accomplished something, establishment of Africa University. The twentieth anniversary of that decision was celebrated as a significant event in the life of our denomination.

We celebrated a large number of such anniversaries: 40th anniversary of the dissolution of the Central (Negro)Jurisdiction and their integration into the rest of the American church; 60th anniversary of Advance, our special process of offering ways to collect money for specific mission projects; 40th anniversary of the Commission on Religion and Race; 100th anniversary of United Methodist Men; and the 100th anniversary of the General Board of Pension and Health Benefits.

I'm not sure we will celebrate anything that was done at this General Conference in twenty or forty or a hundred years.

The most important decision made this year was to call Central Conferences "regional" conferences, with the implication that the U. S. church is one "region" among many, and no longer the dominant one. That change in terminology must be supported by the annual conferences, a result which will not be known until mid-2009.

The reality, of course, is that the U. S. church will still be dominant in four years when a task force examining the implications and future direction of United Methodism will report back with possible concrete steps to decentralize the denomination.

As was mentioned earlier, there are those who want the American church to dominate world Methodism in order to dominate its theology and its resources. They have four years to disrupt the study commission and then to torpedo any plan that undercuts their dreams of complete control.

Otherwise, this General Conference will go down in history as doing little for which to go down in history.