Looking back to orient us moving forward
A few thoughts from Des Moines 2019
No, I won’t be in Louisville this weekend for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) General Assembly, our first in-person since 2019.
That last one, in Des Moines, was a benchmark for me in many ways, not least because I told my father I’d love to have him travel with me, which honestly was the only way he could go. His mobility was decreasing, and energy flagging, though none of us thought he’d be gone before another year would pass.
With dad, I drove from Valparaiso, Indiana to Des Moines, and we shared a number of adventures while I also had my own work to do, including a two-part workshop teaching Disciples history & polity to what turned out to be 82 mostly commissioned minister candidates or persons seeking recognition through other churches’s ordinations. Dad sat in for both, and declared my course “not bad.” That’s as far as he went, generally, so I took it for the good word he doubtless meant it to be.
I also posted each evening, a Facebook overview of the day’s events. Obviously, I won’t be doing that this year for Louisville, but I may have some thoughts as I have in the run-up to GA 2023 (see earlier Substack entries on GA-2343).
But as a prelude, I’m going to repost what I put up on Facebook in July 2019 for the opening & closing entries (there were eight in sum), as a way of setting some context for how it was, and for where we’re going as a religious body of believers. One way or another, this GA will usher in some major changes, even as I trust we will hold onto some continuity with leaders like re-electing Terri Hord Owens as our General Minister and President. First, my Saturday opening post for #Abide2019:
The sound of one hand clapping – Saturday #Abide2019
Our Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) every-other-year General Assembly of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has convened for 2019 at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines. The Upper Midwest region has clearly put their hearts into logistics for this family gathering of our religious tradition, and the venue’s challenges in terms of spaces and movement of people took all of their gracious welcome to buffer! It’s not the same sort of convention center we’ve been able to enjoy the last few GAs, and the passage into and out of the Wells Fargo Arena, a mostly basketball friendly space which presumes a general entry and exit all around, not a funneling through one narrow multi-stairwayed passage, has most of us still baffled – but trust us Disciples, we’ll find a way!
The lodgings for almost everyone are either connected by skywalks or nearby; shuttles from the airport were complicated by (I am told) a large number of flight changes for those who came by plane. I suspect we’ll end up just under 4,000 total for this year’s assembly, but keep in mind that most of our “peer” church groups in mainline/oldline Protestantism like the Methodists of Presbyterians or UCCs have around 700 voters and a couple thousand in attendance in total, and they with many times our membership size. We have the largest participation base of almost any church meeting you can name this side of the Southern Baptists, and even they have seen a huge decrease in attendance – see https://baptistcourier.com/2017/07/why-are-fewer-messengers-attending-the-sbc-annual-meeting/ – and our cousins with the independent Christian Churches, like the SBC not very long ago, used to have 10,000 a year packing their halls, and while the SBC is down to around 5,000, the independents’ North American Christian Convention actually had its last gathering last summer, and is trying to morph this October, in Orlando, into a new “Spire Network” meeting, mostly due to attendance declines and their inability to make the finances work.
I bring all this up because for anyone who has vivid memories of GAs at 8-10,000 and so thinks that 3-4,000 is bad news: we’re actually holding our own, and including more diversity however measured, than any other church gathering I can think of. But the shrinkage does mean some issues about where they can or should be held, and how to manage still large numbers of bodies cost effectively.
There are also certain challenges around managing this level of participation, and the opening business meeting always reminds us of this. We had a sterling pre-recorded presentation from the parliamentarian about participation: who can vote, and how, as well as the guidelines around speaking. Anyone can speak, not everyone gets to vote. The seating is, of necessity, with voting on the main floor and non-voting up the sloping arena sides; as always, if you’re sitting with someone who’s not voting, you have to make some interesting compromises if we get to the level of counting, but the last two GAs pretty much everything was voice vote (more on that in a moment).
A statement was made by our moderator, at the outset, that I have to admit I have a little trouble with. Partly because I’m still not sure what the “rule” was or is intended to be – but A statement was made by our moderator, at the outset, that I have to admit I have a little trouble with. Partly because I’m still not sure what the “rule” was or is intended to be – but mostly, we’re not supposed to applaud. Except when we should. Which isn’t when you always think.
I get it, I really do. If we applaud everything, it eats time (and we’ve tried to carve effectively a day out of the GA for reasons I think I’ve covered); if it’s a tough decision around issues that are meaningful, applause can seem like taunting or self-congratulation. But not applaud the reports? They’re already dangerously close to simply being promotional moments anyhow. I know we just receive them, and don’t vote on them, but . . . and then we had people applauding specific speakers, not outcomes, and that was chided (again, I get it, but…), and then there was a moment where the assembly was kind of, it felt like, chided for not applauding something.
Look, I would like to ban standing ovations. Especially when wedged into arena seats on narrow rows with seemingly ceaselessly moving aisle populations coming and going. Sometimes I think we just overdo standing O’s. But announcing that they’re banned I’d object to. I’d rather just convince folks to save them for something really worth one, like . . . okay, the soloist at opening worship tonight was a standing ovation open-and-shut case. So you can’t ban them, even if four or five a night are clearly too many.
The applause “ban” or whatever it was got even more confusing as it was packaged with an extended comment on last GA where apparently we wasted our money on red microphones, because no one spoke against any resolutions whatsoever in the business sessions (hardly anyone voted no, either, for that matter). Allen V. Harris wrote a post on his regional website about this, but I think the statement made from the platform missed Allen’s main points – we heard some frustration that there was opposition, but it was voiced on social media, and the clear implication (to me) was that if you have an objection to assembly business items, you owe it to the assembly to take it to a microphone.
That is wrong on so many levels, I don’t really want to get into it in detail, except that . . . one, you often think of something you’d like to say later that did not come to mind in the moment (the French charmingly call this “l'esprit d'escalier” or “staircase wit”), and for another, the 30 second timer versus typing out what you want to say as you put your thought together may be the heart of our problem here. Maybe taking a microphone, even in a room half full of preachers, is just off-putting enough for most people on a good day, let alone in an era when polemical hostility is the flavor of the day/month/year, that when we had 8,000 there were maybe three or four willing to try their wit on the Jumbotron and not the staircase, but under 4,000, there’s just not enough of us hyper-verbal polemicists to make a line at the red mic.
Plus I’ve been hearing now for years, in many different mildly passive-aggressive ways, how platform leadership in a variety of organizations at meetings express to us their sense that social media is taking away their ability to control the flow of information, and that they wish it were otherwise. My suggestion is that maybe we figure out how to include this stuff into the information flow, and not act like it’s all a distraction from proper debate which is people talking while looking towards large screens with timers in the corner.
Speaking of social media: it’s certainly interesting that if you search the main hashtag #Abide2019 you will notice that a large percentage of the active commenters are . . . personas. Artificial people created and speaking with a personality from pop culture, aka parody accounts. I have NO IDEA what this means, but I’m sure it’s interesting. And means something. And my favorite is @DisciplesLeslie! But when the parodies outnumber the actual people, it’s telling us something. Like the “no opposition” concern, it seems to hint at a felt sense of insecurity that speaking against the general flow of things was not safe to do. I can’t pin that down, exactly, but there’s a “keep your head down” sense that doesn’t seem limited to one end or another of any spectrum in particular. Just “go with the flow” or create a sock puppet. A sort of ominous rumble . . .
We had quite a thunderstorm hit during dinner, and it continued rumbling to great effect during the evening worship; we were told and I have no doubt it is true that this had much to do with the tech glitches of the evening, which were many but, as Teresa Hord Owens said, “All will be well.”
She’s right, and not just because she’s our General Minister and President. All will be well, tech or social media or forbidden applause aside. It will be well, she went on to preach, because we root ourselves in the Word (yes, she said precisely that), because we stay together in support of each other as we walk in the Word together (you got the impression that Biblical shared study and reflection is important to this woman or something), and because we find ourselves going somewhere together not because we are getting our way or even because we’re right, but because we are paying attention to where we are fruitful together. If we are dry and broken and fruitless, people aren’t attracted and why would they be? If we’re producing fresh growth and joyful community that’s refreshing and life giving, that’s where people want to be.
Call it too obvious a message, and some of those parody accounts certainly did so, but it felt like a reminder we needed as congregational representatives. Will more Bible study lead to justice and activism? I didn’t hear her say that it’s that simple, but what I did hear was that it might just be more sustainable if we can find our way to shared courses of action from the common root-stock of scriptural teaching, understood and reflected on in community.
The rest of the service included a diversity of languages, not just persons, and a diversity of musical and liturgical styles, and the usual assembly experience of “how much is too much?” where it felt like something needed to be cut, but please don’t ask me to tell you what it would be.
What was striking to me at the opening worship service was the closing musical number, and what it said about how far we’ve come in at least some ways. It wasn’t that long ago (to some of us) that an actual pipe organ was rolled into place for convention center worship services, and not only ethnic diversity but worship style differences came along slowly, sometimes painfully, among the traditional hymns and standard responsive readings.
Tonight, the moment when you could feel the hall “click” into unity and shared experience was when the worship leader started up Chris Tomlin’s “How Great is Our God.” Not long ago, that would have been an edgy, contemporary choice. Tonight, it felt as if that was when the majority of the hall reacted as if to say “ah, something we know and can all belt out!” And they did. “To God Be the Glory” people struggled with, and not just because the words didn’t go up on the screens as planned. But when the opening notes of “How Great is Our God” were played, most weren’t even looking at the screens anymore. They were smiling, looking at each other, and singing out.
Do we have more changes ahead as a church? I am certain of that. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue; tomorrow starts with worship in local churches, then workshops in the afternoon, and our own evening worship back in the arena. I hope we don’t have many standing ovations . . . no matter how good anything is!
[Jeff in 2023 — Let me add in a roughly contemporary comment from Chuck Blaisdell:
"...even in a room half full of preachers." I think you inadvertently touch on something that is one (but only one) of the reasons for the continuing decline in Assembly attendees in the last 20 years: fewer and fewer congregations are able to pay the expenses for **congregational** representatives (not to mention so many of those folks who would need to take vacation time or lose pay to attend), while many clergy still have at least some portion of their expenses paid. I would be interested to know if the percentage of clergy has risen over that same time period. Clergy reunions can be fun, but clergy are not their **congregation's** voting representatives; they vote in virtue of being clergy-with-standing. And, as I have argued here (text: https://brite.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Blaisdell.pdf or videos: https://brite.edu/.../lifelon.../The_Design_at_50_Symposium/ ) that has increasingly distanced the life of the general church and General Assembly from the actualities of congregational life.]
[Jeff again: that link doesn’t work now, but I can get you access to the papers if you want them . . . they also have been published in a volume with some interesting oral history around Restructure in the 1960s, titled “Seeking God’s Design” - https://chalicepress.com/products/seeking-gods-design]
[Jeff, still in 2023: there were six more entries on Facebook, and finally four days later after returning home . . .]
Triggering Changes - Wednesday & Wrap #Abide2019
There are always assemblies within the General Assembly. Just as there’s a “canon within the canon” for most of us preachers, the passages and books of the Bible we’re used to and tend to stick with, a GA has certain subgroups and patterns that you can live within and miss another set of assembly experiences right next to you.
For instance, there are workshops during a GA – simple math tells you that a clear majority never go to a single workshop session. After seminary, I went to a number of GAs and was in that majority. I’d just spent four years going to classes, and was ready for a break.
Then friends of mine were leading workshops, and that got me into a couple; I moved from associate roles to senior pastor and found out there were gaps in my giddyup that led me into a few workshops of which some helped me, and others left me remembering when I didn’t go to them.
Leading workshops myself, I’m now entirely immersed in that side of the GA experience. Which means I essentially missed out on the Exhibit Hall, which is a part of GA life that you can easily spend all your non-worship time in.
And then there’s official and less official after-sessions. I heard after the fact about StoryHour and #Fail stories, and that sounds like a God blessed and Spirit breathed way to spend an evening at a GA, especially for pastors. Plenty crosses my mind to share at such an event. I’ve tended to miss most after-sessions, and go to breakfast meetings, which smarter clergy friends say is simply a pathology, that whole 7 am thing. Anyhow.
I haven’t heard an official-official number, but pieces I’ve picked up tell me it was about 3,100 paid registrations; that’s down from about 3,800 the last couple --
https://disciples.org/our-identity/our-structure/the-general-assembly-and-general-board/past-general-assemblies/
-- even if it inches up to about 3,400 or so, the trend is down. But it’s fairly solid across the last four GAs, and holding at a point that makes the whole convention center option possible.
What folks need to know is that the modern convention and conference center rental is mostly an interlocking set of perfectly legal and above-board kickbacks. I’ve heard people say “well, we go where the convention center is free” to explain our location selection process, and that’s mostly inaccurate and misses a number of other factors, but the reality is that we tend to go where the deal works like this: we sign an agreement years ahead to reserve a date, and we get the spaces in question for our plenary and worship, the meal events and workshops, and the exhibit area in return for hitting a target number of room reservations in the surrounding area. Once we hit that number of reservations (not so much registrations per se) there are many relieved people in the GA planning process. If we miss that number, someone writes a big check. I’m pretty sure that’s what killed our cousins at the North American Christian Convention (NACC) – they were much bigger than us not very long ago, but their numbers plunged south of 5,000 registrants . . . and they missed their room count numbers, meaning someone had to write a $100,000 or $150,000 check. I’m guessing too many one or two night attendees, plus lots of doubling and tripling up or even non-hotel lodgings, added up to what was a bigger number for the event, but worse numbers for the event organizers.
For at least the next two biennial cycles, it still looks like we can do this sort of event. Ten years from now? I don’t know, but as I’ve already said (and said in my workshop to the class in Disciples history and polity), if you’d asked me ten years ago if the NACC or the GA would be effectively ended “as we know it” by 2019, I would have guessed GA, no question. And I would have been wrong. So while I think we will need to revisit how or how often or what venues we use in the near-term future, I hate to predict. But I don’t find it unlikely, now, after Indianapolis two years ago and Des Moines last week, that we can successfully hold GAs in Louisville and Memphis in 2021 and 2023.
In part, because as a friend pointed out to me as we walked down a flight of stairs (a very common experience at this GA), this is really turning into a kind of “donor development” event.
That is NOT a slam, or snark. It’s a useful point to keep in mind. The Pension Fund of the Christian Church, Disciples Church Extension Fund, and Week of Compassion in particular have constituencies which they are continuing to work with, who send them money. Pension dues for pastors, sure; churches which don’t ask for mortgage support as often but have services they need as well as regions looking for new church consultations; congregations and individuals who appreciate the mission work of relief and development and are ready to give and give more.
Universities hold “Homecoming” weekends that have an autumnal glow about them of bright college days, but lift the hood and the campus development office have plans worked out to the last detail as to how every part of the event supports ongoing giving to the Annual Fund or special gifts to the endowment. Non-profits of all sorts have donor development events that come under a “Person of the Year” heading or “Jazz and Java” nights; cancer research in my neck of the woods gets major support from a bicycling event that is the focal point of a months long series of smaller events . . . but it’s all donor development.
That’s a big reason to keep doing GAs as we do them right there, and why we have the sponsors we do – those entities need to keep our ties vital and strong, because in today’s religious economy EVERYONE has choices. Whom to give to and how to give. I think a church would be goofy to walk away from the Pension Fund, let alone for a preacher to choose that route, but it happens. And various advisory services or relief organizations are flooding our email inboxes. Why give yourself, or have your church give, to Week of Compassion versus Samaritan’s Purse? Please don’t flood my inbox with reasons why, I know them all – but there are many Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) congregations making different choices. Usually because they’ve lost those living links to the rest of their Disciples of Christ family.
If your minister is non-DoC in background, bivocational and part-time, and the church doesn’t pay their expenses to go to regional gatherings, let alone the GA, and there’s a member who shows up at the Outreach meeting of their congregation saying “we should send more money to World Vision” who will speak for why there’s a major commitment of that local church to a particular mission like Week of Compassion? In years past, it’s not that this DIDN’T happen, but there was at those meetings even in a smaller church a CWF president who had been to Quadrennial, a member of the regional CMF commission who went to Sessions, and a pastor with a Disciples’ seminary degree who was on a regional commission or two, or at least went to General Assembly. They explained why we gave to Disciples Mission Fund in general and Week of Compassion in particular, why the minister’s health care was being covered “through the church” even though there were cheaper ways to buy that benefit, and how Pension Fund dues not only ensured your minister’s retirement but helped other clergy with less assets to have retirement security after a life in ministry.
In many, many churches, we’ve lost this. There’s one person, and maybe not that individual, to speak up. And they need to know WHY Disciples. Why is the regional and general work worth supporting? Because Samaritan’s Purse and Compassion International and World Vision and many more such parachurch ministries have really, really good development material that they pump out to local churches. And if you’ve been that one person, especially that one person who is also the minister, and someone gets up to say money should be diverted from DMF or Week of Compassion to the cause they’ve become moved by while watching a video on their tablet at home last night . . . and that person is key to your employment or raise or just peace of mind, you don’t just casually argue with them to “stay with what we’ve always done.” You need reinforcements.
That’s what, at it’s best, a donor development event can be. Reinforcement of why our shared ministries together in Christ’s name are right for us as Disciples of Christ. Those stories and illustrations and yes, arguments for why we should stay in covenant and on course with the work of the general church of which our local church is a part.
I know, I was supposed to talk about Rev. Dr. Barber’s sermon first or how worship and oneness at the Table is our center – but that’s all been said. And it’s important for us to know our identity as Disciples of Christ in faithful action and witness. But I’m talking about the overall idea of a “General Assembly” and whether this can and should continue as a multi-day convention center type gathering – and how the not-inconsiderable bills get paid. If we just wanted to host a series of worship services around the country on a series of dates, streaming video online for each of them, we could do that. Dr. Barber could preach in Charlotte, Rev. Gowler could preach in Portland, Rev. Briley from either Oklahoma or Missouri, but all three could have done so at a big hall set up just for worship for maybe a thousand onsite, and we’d push hard for simulcasts at local churches and get thousands, not just hundreds, to watch three nights running in their own sanctuaries or fellowship halls, and if you wanted to pick one to travel to and be present for, you pick the nearest one and they could rent a dorm for a night at a per head rate.
You’d just have worship that way, but quite possibly more total watching and worshiping in their own way at home. If numbers in shared worship was the whole point, that’s one way to go.
If our business meetings were the main reason for doing the current GA model, there are ways to do that entirely online. And having gone through the resolution process from every possible angle myself, I can assure you that even when you’re onsite you don’t entirely understand or connect with what’s going on. If the plan, or at least hope, is to put more people in the path of new ideas, different possibilities, and invite them to affirm a greater openness for our mission and ministry, I think you could make a strong case for more active participation by NOT having a thousand or two (at most) in one room paying actual attention, and putting the emphasis on an interactive video process which is already perfectly doable. I’m not sure sitting in arena seating listening to people on jumbotrons changes hearts and minds, and I was one of those faces this last go-round.
And workshops? Hey, I loved what I got to do this time, and actually meeting 75-80 people to teach them our tradition’s history and how it shaped our congregational and regional polity, but I see all around me in local schools, colleges, and seminaries how the emphasis is more and more on distance learning, virtual lectures, and interactive education. If the real concern is bang-for-buck on how many get taught, a “General Assembly online” could be scaled to a much larger audience than we reached in Des Moines.
But if you wrap up into one package the ribbons of worship, business, and workshops around the solid package of donor development, of building up the bonds of fellowship within and among the agencies and organizations of our shared tradition, you have good reason to have GAs as we do. And I think we should, for at least a little while longer.
Make no mistake, there’s serious money involved in this spiritual practice of holding assemblies. If we had 3,400 present in Des Moines, I would conservatively estimate that at $1,500 a head, you come up with over $5,000,000 on the table. That’s not all church-paid-out money, but in one form or another, it comes from believing Christians who have choices and options, and who spent money (reimbursed or not) to go to a General Assembly. Five nights at $100 a night (I can hear some of you laughing) for lodging, a couple hundred for registration and event meals, other meals on the road or at the assembly (and boy did people miss the options available nearby the last two GAs), and finally the plane or auto costs to get there . . . and back.
So $5,000,000 minimum, and more likely closer to $7,000,000 spent if you say it’s more like $2,000 per head to attend, and that’s on top of what I am sure the event costs actually were to the general units who sponsored it and paid for cameras and screens and audio and projection and yes, the darn smoke machine and flashing lights (tone it down, crew, when it’s pointed out at us, okay?), but those bells and whistles and some of the catered meals and such . . . if I said $10,000,000 of money belonging to the Realm of God was spent so we could sit next to each other, see into one another’s eyes as we spoke, and stood in lines with our siblings in Christ waiting for pricey coffee, I don’t worry about overstatement.
That’s the reality of such an event, but the larger question is “as opposed to what?” If we don’t hold these gatherings, how many millions slosh around into other ministries, other causes, different purposes for which we won’t necessarily be able to affirm together? NOT having a General Assembly doesn’t mean we suddenly have access to $10,000,000 to feed orphans in the Sudan; it means those dollars get dispersed into myriad directions, and in so going they might just take tens of OTHER millions out of our church budgets with them, into new and even more problematic directions.
Dr. Barber’s sermon? It was awe-inspiring, and I think if you give it a fair listen, it was unifying. He rang some progressive changes on the bells he had to pull on, but he was ringing out the old, old story – as he so beautifully said, “where the Bible speaks, we speak,” and he said he just had to speak. This was what made all the preaching so uplifting for me as a local church pastor: lots of local church preachers up in front for the big services, and messages of conviction and commitment that I could take home. Not to just plagiarize, but to motivate and inspire me to preach from about the ties that bind, our unity in Christ, our oneness in God’s glory.
Which brings me to a quick note about “triggering.” It’s a term that’s come into vogue about the need to offer warnings to audiences, which is not really a new thing as we’ve heard for years from people like Walter Cronkite: “what you’re about to see or hear might be disturbing for some audiences.” And it’s also true that many worry we’ve taken this a step or two too far in terms of defining what might trouble or disturb a potential audience. It makes sense when you’re about to deal with a painful subject, and you want to alert people about what’s coming up, and I do that as a pulpit minister myself, but when it becomes a belief that some things shouldn’t even be said for fear of “triggering” a sensitivity, it can go over a line.
In our opening and closing worship, there was on the floor and definitely on social media some complaints about triggering. The first service included “To God Be the Glory.” I will state this: I’m a traditional worship kind of minister in a fairly traditional and even somewhat conservative congregation . . . and I was surprised the organizers went with that one in the opening worship. It’s very male in pronouns for God, and very atonement-focused; I’d affirm it if it went with a particular sermon and the preacher had a chance to articulate the choice, but as almost the first song we sang together out of the blocks, I thought as I sang “people gonna get upset about this.” And they did.
Contrariwise, when we shifted from Bible study to the last worship on Wednesday, I suspect it was a last minute call on the part of the platform team to pick up from a comment of the teacher’s to sing John Lennon’s “Imagine.” It was beautifully played and sung, just piano and solo, and I applaud the musicianship of it . . . but it might have come as a surprise to some that this song is, well, triggering to many conservative Christians. They hear it as the anthem of un-religion, a secular chorus against faith and the familiar, and receive it almost as a finger in the eye. I sang along, thinking “people gonna get upset about this.” And they did. Not as many, to be sure, but it’s another whole essay about how our traditional caucus has responded to the entire GA process. I used to be moderate, I know for certain I was thirty years ago, and for good or ill I haven’t really changed that much in my stances or outlook, but now I’m on the conservative fringe (whether I own that label or not).
Isaac William Nicholson said in introducing me to someone that I was “the last centrist.” I hope he’s wrong, but he generally isn’t. If I’m the last centrist, then what happened to our conservatives? Again, that’s another essay in itself, but it’s interesting that for the independent Christian Churches, and even among Southern Baptists, they’re staying home. They don’t come to these events, it seems. Even “Women of Faith” has come to an end, and the Willow Creek “Global Leadership Summit” has seen sharp drops after controversy over their own leadership abuses. I think it would be in all our interests to watch and learn from where our audiences are migrating to, and it’s certainly a journey in process.
While I do think the whole “triggering” deal can be overused, I think it’s also true that there’s a sort of triggering we need. We have to be willing to let developments and challenges trigger change in our institutional expressions, from our boards and trustees and governance processes, to how we meet and what we say we’re trying to accomplish. We need to be triggered to step away from complacency, and mobilized to step into some new aisles and avenues of assembling, and online/virtual parts of the assembly will have to become a bigger practical part of what we’re doing.
We also should remember how fond memories and long-standing traditions trigger associations. Those triggers of family feeling can help to break down not just the divisions we bring with us from the world into the church, but they also help bridge some of the gaps between the “assemblies within assemblies,” the internal constituencies that are always going to be part of who we are in full. That’s what singing together does in a shared space; that’s what communion together even with 150 deacons does. That’s why we’re not going to let go of physically meeting anytime soon, because we need those shared experiences that include the inconveniences and the challenges and chicken-based banquet meals and wondering why the music is so loud. Our shared experience is a faint echo of the greater banquet most of us speak directly to each Sunday back home, that hope we have together, and the way to proclaiming that hope which is common to us as Disciples of Christ.
I would close this lengthy but still not comprehensive consideration of this and General Assemblies in general by sharing the following link, one of those traditions of the GA gathering that got interfered with a bit by the technological glitches that plagued us this year. It’s the full list of those in service to the church, through the expansive filter of those participating in the Pension Fund and anyone else reported through them, as having passed since the last General Assembly. Not everyone reads these as they scroll by, but for many of us, we realize that with each passing gathering we know more and more names on that list, and it makes us pay a little more attention each biennium, and even think about when our names will be on that roll, and what that reality should tell us about how to spend our time and money and energies right now.
https://ga.disciples.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/NewLife-deceased4-1-17to3-31-19.pdf
See you in Louisville in 2021, God willing!
[Postscript in 2023: obviously, God did not so will. We had a virtual assembly without business last summer, in 2022; we are meeting this weekend in 2023 to possibly approve having virtual meetings for two years then in-person the third, with that pattern beginning after a Memphis meeting in 2025. If you want to hear more about my thoughts on those changes and others to the General Board, see my earlier post on a “midrash” of sorts on GA-2343 here, which is free to anyone to read.]