Commentary: Waiting on the Lord at General Conference
7/31/2000 A UMNS Commentary By the Rev. Ezra Earl Jones* General Conference is necessary to our United Methodist way of life. We need it to define our common understanding of who we are, to remind us of our heritage and to point us to new visions of faithfulness as a people.
But we need clarity about why we gather as a whole church for conferencing, and insight into appropriate patterns and processes to support that task.
As currently structured, General Conference is:
· Designed inappropriately for the needs of the church today. The people of our church want to know and love God and live like Jesus. General Conference, as hard as we try to make it "spiritual," is designed to tie everything down with rules.
· Incapable of substantive change. If it were capable of change, surely it would note maintain a process that allows and stimulates endless discussions of insignificant details. Imagine 100 people in a committee room spending 20 minutes perfecting a motion asking a general agency to continue offering one of its most popular programs.
· Costly. The cost is not commensurate with the results accomplished.
· A highly politicized tug-of-war that belies our character as a church.
· Better at receiving requests for funding than selecting priorities and saying "no" to some.
In my view, there are two groups of people at General Conference: those who want to win and those who want to love God and neighbor. The problem with this analysis, however, is that you can't divide us up by these categories, abhorring the one group and praising the other.
We all want to win, and we all want to love God and neighbor. So there are times when the agenda brings out the humility and nobleness of spirit within us. At those times, we feel that we can "wait on the Lord" together and help one another through the minefields. Then the proceedings and the argumentative system of rules bring out the selfishness within us and we re-enter the fray. We move from holy conferencing - a means of grace - to unrelenting competition.
This tendency is strong in some of us, and it occurs without our awareness. Our culture of competitiveness (sports, business, emphasis on market share and growth) seems more normal for us than self-giving community, so we have trouble staying true to who we are and who we want to be.
I don't understand why every issue demands a position from all of us all the time. If community, rather than individual decision, is at the heart of the Christian faith, why would we think we could each have a decision until we all have a decision? I'm not talking about conventional wisdom. Does conventional wisdom ever let us walk with Jesus?
And I am not talking about consensus, which Barry Morley in Beyond Consensus (Pendle Hill, 1993) defines as "a process in which adjustments and compromises are made for the purpose of reaching a decision all of us can accept." Rather, I am trying to reach for what Quakers call the "sense of the meeting."
Morley writes: "... [I]n seeking the sense of the meeting, we open ourselves to being guided to perfect resolution in Light, to a place where we sit in unity in the collective inward Presence. Through 'consensus' we decide it; through 'sense of the meeting'
we turn it all over, allowing it to be decided. ... It is the difference between reason and faith."
There are simply too many arguments, rational positions, faith commitments and sources of authority for us to work out our positions on major social issues by rational means. We either wait together with open hands and hearts for God's surprises, or we beat one another up with blunt instruments of logic and words. Oh God, we pray for a system of conferencing that facilitates a difference possibility!
To get a new system, we will have to change the General Conference radically -- its agenda, its methods and its spirit. But who will lead us in this? Who has both the vision and position to start the process?
Maybe we will just have to wait together for Light, turn it over, and prayerfully listen for God's guidance.
# # #
*Jones is the top staff executive of the churchwide Board of Discipleship with offices in Nashville, Tenn.
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