We have been here for 90 minutes, ninety precious minutes,
and we are nowhere further along than we were. I keep thinking about the ways
Hawthorne Lane, the street, has been dug and re-dug for 2 years, now, and in
Tommy Lawing’s words, “we’ve yet to see a foot of track.”
A bit of background… the Traditional Plan is before us. Las
fall, several sections of it were ruled unconstitutional according to the Church’s
Constitution. Today, the folk who are advancing the plan are trying to amend it
on the fly to make it pass muster. It would be a long process if it could be
done. But this is the stated agenda of Good News and WCA—the more conservative
of our brothers and sisters.
We have spent a good amount of irreplaceable time debating
and voting on the amendments, while the main question about the Traditional
Plan has received only two speeches so far, both in the negative.
The mood among the supporters of Once Church, Connectional Conference
and The Simple Plan is pretty somber. It is reported this morning that Adam
Hamilton, one of the leading voices behind the Once Church Plan, was weeping
last night with the realization that OCP is, it would appear, dead.
Now, a ruling this morning says that today the delegates could
advance both the Traditional Plan and
another plan to tomorrow’s “plenary” (technically, while the delegates are the same
one to the other, today’s meeting is a “legislative” session to consider all the
motions before us, so as to decide which are up for a final vote and in what
form; the “plenary” tomorrow is vested with the authority to pass the actual
legislation). It is hard to imagine, though, that we would advance more than
one, or that tomorrow’s votes would not echo yesterday’s prioritization or today’s
vote (if we ever get to it)…
If we do, though, we duke it out tomorrow. I suspect the
fight will begin in a few. Already the clichés are being weaponized: Love! Bible! Exclusion! Doctrinal
Unity!
The second speech in Russian has taken us to break as the translation
equipment has failed. They are working to fix it.
Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment