I moved around several committees today, seeing what was going on.  The first full day of committee meetings is usually a little slower as the committees tackle some of the less controversial issues to get their “sea legs” before tackling their controversial issues.  I even heard a report that one of the committees that would be using consensus instead of parliamentary procedure spent the morning trying to come to a consensus about how they were going to work by consensus.

Some of the meetings had interesting topics going.  Some of the committee meetings were getting bogged down in polity at times. (What else is new)  And I saw a couple of cases where the commissioner presiding seemed overwhelmed by the polity.  One such case was where a committee member made a motion to allow the committee members to ask questions of the speakers at the open hearings.  After some back and forth a vote was taken, then the front table huddled for a few minutes as Robert’s Rules was pulled out.  I suspect there was something else going on, but the ruling by the chair was that since the vote was tied the motion was defeated.  I would hope that an elder or minister in the PC(USA) would not need Robert’s Rules for that.  The irony of course is that in our quest to do thing decently and in order they probably used up more time than the questions to the speakers would have taken.

One of the interesting discussions was in Committee 3 – General Assembly Procedures.  I caught the committee debate on overture 102 dealing with the continuation of Hanmi Presbytery.  An interesting coincidences in this was that the YAD from Hanmi Presbytery was on the committee so she was able to provide some very moving testimony.  She was in favor of the overture and said that the Presbytery, while technically being transitional, is beloved by the second generation as well as the first.  Much discussion was spent on whether there should be a “sunset clause” or if the presbytery should be authorized indefinitely.  It was noted that of the four Korean language presbyteries two do not have sunset clauses.  In the case of Hanmi it is 25 years old and began with a 15 year life and that was extended by another 10 years which is about to expire, hence this overture.  It was also noted that past transitional presbyteries had lifetimes as long as 40 years.  The discussion was complicated by a motion to call the previous question that the committee moderator did not recognize the second to, and that caused some groans.  But the parliamentarian also noted that the original motion to call the question was out of order to begin with because the maker of the motion spoke to the issue first.  The next time that a motion was made to call the question there was a resounding chorus of “Second!” from a bunch of committee members.  After the motion with a sunset clause was defeated the committee passed the overture as delivered to them to let Hanmi continue indefinitely.

I then sat in on the end of the open hearings on Committee 6 – Form of Government Revision.  It should surprise no one that there were plenty of speakers to this and the ones that I heard at the end were almost all against it.  One even ripped off the current Form of Government section from his Book of Order to show that it was not any shorter.  (For my analysis of the size you can read my comments from January.)

There were a couple of comments that were sort of “neutral” in the sense that they presented some points that could be corrected now by amendment.  Among these were points made by a representative of the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission.  These include the fact that the new FOG does not recognize GA PJC decisions as authoritative, that changes to G-9.0505b and G-9.0705 removing time limits to give more flexibility (something the rFOG does a lot of) could lead to the loss of due process, and that any wording change to a section in the Book of Order causes the loss of existing “Interpretation History” and that would need to be rebuilt through PJC decisions and GA Authoritative interpretations.  This is part of the loss of “institutional memory” that has concerned me.

A bunch of other comments as well.  One person wanted the Committee on Representation explicitly put back in as a mandated committee because it is a “foundational block” of our polity.  (Not sure exactly where foundational block defined and not sure I would agree if I knew.)  Another pointed out that this is the longest overture in the history of the PC(USA).  There were several comments about being missional:  Some saying churches are doing plenty of mission now with the current polity, others questioning the definition or “missional” premise behind the rFOG.  While the Task Force used one definition of “missional” it still means many things to many people.  And there was one speaker who mentioned the “elephant in the room” and questioned why synods were still included in the rFOG at all since they are only marginally useful and expensive pieces of our infrastructure.  I did a quick check back on the committee at the end of the evening and from the commissioner debate going on it sounded like an up-hill battle for passage by the committee majority.

So those are some of my business observations for the day.  I’m turning in now but I’ve got a lot more non-business observations to share if I ever get time to set them down.