Deputy Booker - Day Eight

We’re in the home stretch now…tomorrow is the final day of General Convention.  Predictably, the day was almost entirely taken up with legislation…seven hours and 45 minutes’ worth.

We did get a lot done.  We voted on 24 pieces of legislation and a bunch of amendments.  Doing a bit of math, that’s three votes each hour.  Legislation that’s already been approved by the House of Bishops comes to us for concurrence, meaning that we’re agreeing with them to approve it.  Recall, if you will, that every piece of legislation has to be approved by both houses in the same form.  Some pieces of legislation were being heard for the first time, so they will have to go to the Bishops tomorrow…or else fade into the legislative ether.

So…what did we vote on?

1.  The triennial budget for The Episcopal Church.  Approved without (successful) amendment.
2. Five Resolutions on Palestine and Israel.  Once you get past the rhetoric, they basically said Palestine=good, Israel=bad.
3. Authorization of a consolidated calendar for the Saints.  If you’ve ever tried to sort out how many Saints we have, it’s tricky.  We have them in the Book of Common Prayer, and A Great Cloud of Witnesses and Lesser Feasts and Fasts and Holy Women, Holy Men, and…probably the Hymnal.  Maybe Enriching Our Worship?  It’s a mystery.  Anyhow, an attempt was made to track down all of the Saints and it isn’t pretty.  There are hopes to clean up the list by 2021.
4. My Committee has a resolution discussing the work we’re doing with the United Methodist Church.  Hopefully a Full Communion document will be available for a vote in 2021.
5. Alternate, expansive-language versions of some of our Eucharist services were approved for trial use.  Most of what they did was pretty much what most congregations do without official sanction.  Two changes were rolled back.  Many people wanted to fix a removal of mention of Israel in Eucharistic Prayer B, and that amendment passed.   There was also a pretty creepy edit which gave us “we are living members of the Body of your Child,” and that was also rolled back.
6. We voted to become “a sanctuary church,” but we were informed that that means whatever we think it means.  That was included with three Resolutions about immigration.
   Once we wrapped up voting for the day, the Deputation and the Bishop had dinner together and then went to the final Eucharist of the General Convention.  Then we has a planning meeting to gird our loins for the final day.