Getting Started With Committees

American delegates tend to wear travel-friendly black.
International delegates, who travelled much farther,
do not seem to ever wear black.

Committee work at General Conference is a fascinating, tedious and inconsistent task. Shortly after our election to General Conference last June, our delegation met via conference call to choose the committees that we would follow. There are 13 committees and 12 delegates, so our conference is not represented with a voice in one of the Church and Society committees. (Fortunately, we have Laura Whitley here as an alternate delegate to cover the proceedings of this committee. She can sit in, watch, take notes, etc. But she has no voice and no vote.) Our alternate delegates each chose a committee to "shadow," so our delegation could learn as much as possible about the proposed legislation.


 My committee is Ministry & Higher Ed. We handle issues related to ordination & appointment of clergy, some issues of clergy conduct, and issues related to our institutions of higher education (included Ministry Education Funds, which is one of our apportioned items.) I think our committee has the most petitions to consider, and we have been working hard to get through them all.

Lunch break with the delegation. We ran into a Bishop.
Can you spot the Bishop?

On our first day of committees, we met as a full group, with a Bishop presiding, to elect a chair, vice-chair, secretary and three sub-chairs. Elections went very smoothly. Bishop Marcus Matthews took nominations from the floor, then had all nominees come to the microphone for no more than one minute to share their name, clergy/lay status, conference and which Bible leader they identified with. Brilliant. I understand other committees' nominees were given time to talk about why they wanted to do this/why they should be chosen. I personally liked our method better - less focus on the leader and more focus on staying rooted in why we are here.

Elections go very fast. In very little time, we had elected David Bard as Chair, which has proven to be an excellent choice. The chair of the sub-committee I am working with is Rev. Amy Gearhart and this was also a very good choice. So far, so good.

We did take time to introduce ourselves as a whole group, which took a fair amount of time (there are over 80 people on the committee). It was good to get an idea of where everyone is from, to begin to learn something about our international delegates, and to start putting faces to names. It's such a huge process, but you have to start somewhere.

An infograph showing something like
how committees work & relate to the whole.
I haven't seen anything like this illustrating
our United Methodist procedure.
Maybe I'll get on this after I get home.

I was told before this began that the selection of the Chair and Sub-Chairs is critical, and I see that this is true. You have to have people who understand parliamentary procedure and who know how to keep things moving forward. They also have to ensure that we are letting all voices be heard and not allowing two or three people to debate the issues. When in danger of getting mired in details, the sub-chair has to know when to table something or move it to a smaller committee. I have heard from some of our other delegates that these gifts are not present in their sub-chairs, and their committee process has been painful.

I see many signs of positive affirmation
of the church's need
to recognize gifts of young people.

Some sub-chairs are fairly young and fairly inexperienced. This is not necessarily a problem, and it is in fact encouraged for young people to take leadership roles (in some committees). I was certainly encouraged as a first-time delegate to put my name forward for leadership (I did not, however, as I wanted to give my attention more to the issues than to the procedure). However, if a sub-committee chair is inexperienced and (dare I say) clueless, this can cause a train wreck. I am extremely thankful that we have such a competent leader in Amy Gearhart.

The future's so bright, she's got to wear shades.
Rev. Brenda Wier is sporting lovely pink
GC Commemorative sunglasses
from Cokesbury ($3.99!)

Our first order of business following elections was to divide into three sub-committees: one for higher ed. concerns, one for Study of Ministry concerns, and one for all other concerns. I chose the Ministry Study group, and was glad that we were able to self-select. Our sub-committee then divided into three sub-sub-committees and divided the petitions (we have well over 100 to consider in our sub-committee). Our sub-committee met to quickly vet the petitions and put them in different categories: those we had consensus on, those we thought the whole group should debate, those we wanted to reject, and those whose language was simply dependent on other legislation passing (i.e. If we do away with commissioning, petitions related to striking the word "commissioning" would pass; if we don't, they won't)

Again, this was a very positive experience. It's early in the process, but so far, this seems a pretty civilized way of going about the work of the church.