In a short while today, Friday June 26, the plenary sessions of the 224th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) resume. Looking ahead at the GA business on the docket it will be interesting to see how the next two days develop.

Meeting Structure

The approved docket has the meeting starting at 11 am EDT on both Friday and Saturday. On Friday it begins with Worship followed by a recess of one hour. On Saturday it begins with an order of the day for the election of the Stated Clerk to serve another four-year term.

The order of business, proposed by the Business Referral Committee, is posted and awaiting Assembly approval.

The objective is to do two hours of work followed by an hour recess to help avoid videoconference fatigue.

On Friday the meeting is docketed to recess for the day at 6 pm EDT and on Saturday the adjournment is docketed for 6:30 pm EDT. There are a total of nine and a half hours of business meeting time listed. Will that grow?

Growing list of business

Coming into the meeting the Assembly Committee on Business Referral and the Committee on the Office of the General Assembly (COGA) brought a list of business items sorted into categories of Information Only, Critical Business, and Referred to the 225th General Assembly.

From that, the Business Referral Committee constructed a consent agenda from which a few items were pulled last Friday night so that 17 items remain.

Also last Friday night some more items were added to the list of GA business. The first was a list of late-submitted items to add to the Critical Business list. Most of these were information items or routine but necessary matters.

From that list, there is a new item from COGA “On the Church in this Moment in History” [00-29]. There is also a separate item from Business Referrals that was added: “On Responding to the Covid-19 Pandemic” [00-30].

And from the opening night, while there were several items proposed to be moved from the referrals, only two items related to Native American ministry and related property were approved to be pulled from the referral list. These are now numbered [00-95] and [00-96].

After that work on Friday night, on Saturday morning the motion has been made to reconsider the action on Item 01-04 that contains the list. At the time the Assembly closed debate on the item on Friday night the Moderator let it be known that there were up to eight commissioners waiting to move that other items be pulled from the referral list. I am not sure what all of these items might be, and I suspect that there are multiple people proposing the same ones, but a clear favorite is one of the actions to add the requirement for family leave to the Book of Order. ( Items 02-092 and 02-122) Another item I have heard a suggestion of is fossil fuel divestment, maybe Item 02-126. And I would expect at least one more social justice-related item to be moved. It will be interesting to see how some of these topics are handled when there are multiple overtures or recommendations related to them in the referral list. UPDATE: The motion to reconsider was not approved by a commissioner vote of 97 to 377.

So we will first see if the motion to reconsider is successful – it is one of the first items when business resumes, right after adopting the order of business. Then we will see which items are requested and whether the Assembly agrees. And as most of these are not routine matters but will probably have a certain amount of debate, we are most likely looking at extending the meeting if a couple of them get added.

Assembly Operations

One of the interesting things to watch in Plenary 1 (last Friday night) and Plenary 1A (the election of the Co-Moderators) was how the Assembly operated in the virtual format. As noted previously, the Co-Moderators of the 223rd General Assembly, Ruling Elder Vilmarie Cintrón-Olivieri and Teaching Elder Cindy Kohlmann, did a great job of running the meeting from their multiple screens. What we learned is that extra time is needed because of the latency and time delays in the videoconferencing system as well as the time necessary for translation for some commissioners.

The other component is that commissioners and advisory delegates have none of the visual and audio ques that they have in person. Cindy Kohlmann had to announce that there were still eight individuals waiting to make a motion rather than commissioners looking around to see the lines at the microphones and what color cards each waiting speaker was holding. The other interesting thing is that with an in-person meeting it was common for an advisory delegate to find a commissioner to make a motion for them to get something on the floor and then they could speak to it. In the virtual setting we discovered that this assistance is harder to get and it seems that some networking has been established in the last week.

So considering everything mentioned above, I have to wonder if an extra session will be tacked on tonight or tomorrow night to get everything accomplished. The good news is that there is no physical conference center that the Assembly has to be out of at noon on Saturday. But with the anticipated extra business and the necessary deliberative pace of the Assembly we saw last Friday night, how much will the Assembly fall behind schedule? We will see that as today goes on.

UPDATE (Friday afternoon): So yes, the business agenda is sliding. Plenary 3 has gone almost two and a half hours and the only business completed was 00-29 “On the church at this moment in history.” The Assembly agreed to recess for just over an hour and pick up the other three items on the Plenary 3 agenda. At least it will be caught up in the morning.

The other thing that would extend it, of course, is a long debate or set of parliamentary motions on controversial items. Right now nothing strikes me as controversial enough to add significant amounts of time, but maybe if something like fossil fuel divestment makes it into the necessary business a longer debate might be in the offing. As understand the rules of engagement the Assembly, on a controversial business item there will probably not be a minority report and the time necessary for that process to happen. And will the SFTS/COTE debate arise again? I suspect it will, but based on the tone of the Assembly Friday night it will probably not get very far. That topic will be left for the remedial case now before the GAPJC.

So get ready and buckle your seat belts out there all you GA junkies. As the first virtual General Assembly, today will be interesting even if everything proceeds smoothly today. And will one of these days go long? I have to think it will. But we will see if it is for technical reasons, parliamentary reasons, or because a lot of GA business needs to be accomplished in a relatively short amount of time.

Stay tuned…