The Agenda

I scanned the agenda again to see what the schedule is for the opening days. As I expected, there are some difficulties.

The evening plenary session on Wednesday night has eight items, all of which are usually perfunctory administrative tasks. One of those is “Rules Report and Adoption.” There is no use of the phrase “and Adoption” on two other reports. Look for the presiding officer to hasten the passage of the Rules Report so that the changes being sought are passed without discussion.

One of those rules changes is assigning retired bishops to be parliamentarians in the legislative committees. Bishops who are part of the administration of the church should not have roles as parliamentarian in the legislative committees nor of the plenary, the main legislative body of the General Conference. Many bishops are wonderful parliamentarians. But they are members of the Council of Bishops even after retirement. And they tend to rule in ways that are to the advantage of the bishops’ authority.

The agenda shows that training of parliamentarians is on the night BEFORE the vote that would allow the bishops to be parliamentarians.

Legislative committees are not organized until Wednesday afternoon after more than a day of mostly ceremonial stuff. General Conference has been reduced in length from 13 days to 11 days. The legislative committees face the task of doing their work in two less days because of the schedule change.

Then the agenda announces (I have not seen a rule on this) that there are to be no meetings of the legislative committees on Sunday night (April 27). My experience is that some legislative committees need to meet to do their work until they are done and some have had to work through Sunday night in the past.

This fits into the trend that the less legislative work done, the more likely the decisions are made by the administration. Most annual conferences now are barely legislative (too boring for the lay people, we’re told) and have become celebrations and special privileges for speakers.

I always wondered how autocracies evolved out of democratic institutions.