It was a long, but fascinating day. We began with Sunday morning Eucharist, which of course was familiar and uplifting. Following the service we got to work, with the typical opening procedures and perfunctory steps required by the Canons of the church. We elected a secretary and treasurer for General Convention, and various people were appointed to various positions that only the people who inhabit them know what they do.

Most of todays session was spent debating potential changes to the Rules of Order for the House of Deputies. One might think that spending nearly 4 hours on this was a waste of time, but I would argue otherwise. The purpose of the rules is to ensure that all voices have a chance to be heard, and while several of the proposed changes were nothing more than the tweaking of procedure, House Resolution A151 led to a great deal of debate. In a nutshell the resolution called for a change in the rules of how to remove a resolution from the consent calendar. According to house rules all resolutions are placed on the consent calendar unless the the committee reviewing it chooses to remove it, the President of the house chooses to do so, four deputies make the request to do so, or by several other means I won’t go into. The proposed change would require that 15 deputies request removal, and the committee proposing the amendment would no longer have the authority to do so by a simple majority vote, they would need to be unanimous as each committee has 15 members. Some deputies believe that this change would limit democracy because even though a Committee could still vote to remove a resolution from the consent calendar, that vote would need to be unanimous as there are only 15 people on a committee. This limits democracy because the recommendation of a committee to either approve a resolution or not, does not need to be unanimous. So under these rules a resolution could be recommended for adoption that only 8 members of a committee support, but because of the rules, it is very possible that the resolution would be approved without objection from the floor and without discussion. Proponents of the amendment felt that we should trust the wisdom of our committees and simply approve their recommendations through the consent calendar. The problem with this is that the opposition’s views have a good chance of not being heard on the floor because finding 15 deputies to pull a resolution from the consent calendar can prove difficult when you do not know most of the more than 800 members of the house. Ultimately the resolution did not achieve the 2/3s majority required to pass.

While this might sound boring to most, I found the debate around resolution A151 fascinating because it was a sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit. People on both sides passionately voiced their opinions, and all with the same goal, which was safeguarding the democratic process and ensuring that the House of Deputies is able to complete its work in a timely and efficient manner.

The adoption of rule changes complete we turned our attention to two resolutions that felt more church centered. The first was D008, which called for the protection of drinking water from damage caused by US government agencies and the US military. The heart of the resolution is about abandoned military facilities in Hawaii that have caused the contamination of the ground water used for drinking. Many people are becoming ill because of this. The speakers were very passionate and while I would have gladly voted to approve the resolution as a part of the consent calendar, if we had done that we never would have heard the important reason we were approving the resolution.

In a similar vain we were asked to approve Resolution D014, which called upon the church to recognize gun violence as a Public Health Epidemic. As with the resolution on ground water contamination we could have easily approved this resolution as a part of the consent calendar, but instead the decision was, made by the committee to bring it before the house so that we could learn more about why it is important to address the issue.

One might think that passing a resolution on such things doesn’t feel very churchy or Christ like, but you would be wrong. Assuming these resolutions also pass the House of Bishops, it means that the Office of Government Relations will not be able to lobby congress and other government agencies to make policy changes and hopefully bring about real and lasting change and that is the work of Christ. We learned during debate that the Diocese of Hawaii had gone to the Office of Government relations to act for their help in getting the US Military to clean up their mess, but were told that they could not help because they did not have authorization from General Convention to do so.

There are some things that one person is just unable to do on their own, sometimes we need the backing of the larger community in order to bring about the life giving change God desires.