Happy Dance!!

WHEW! Mission accomplished, almost! And this saga has taken some very interesting twists and turns.

Here's the deal: As Moderator of the General Assembly Committee on Representation, I had to give this big deal report on the work of our committee, along with a team of three others. We've been working on this report for about a year, built on the parameters we were given at the outset. If you've been reading, it wasn't too long ago that they threw a seven-minute overview at us. Sooooooo....after some agonizing, I crafted a 5 minute piece on the work of our committee.

Get to the General Assembly, arrive at the committee meeting where our report will be presented, primed and ready for my 5-minute overview, to discover that the committee has changed the ground rules - no one who is not a member of the committee may speak for more than 3 minutes! Now, you could have more than one person present the overview, but neither could speak for more than 3 minutes. ARGH!! Quick thinking on my part, and the fact that I tend to work from manuscript anyway, led us to splitting the overview in half and one member of the group gave the first part, while I presented the second part. (Good thing I use BIG print!)

We survived round one.

The main committee splits into subcommittees, then we were to give our big report. Remember, we've been working on this thing for about a year. We get to the subcommittee and the moderator decides they aren't going to hear our report, and maybe we can present snippets, but not until they've looked at the outside statistical review of our committee's work.

These are open meetings, so, after a few panicked moments of trying to figure out how to salvage things, I went back inside and began listening to their discussion. It didn't take too long before the moderator relented and let us give our powerpoint presentation. Each of us chopped pieces here and there as we went along and managed to pare the 30 minute presentation down to about 20. That helped the committee and then we got asked a question: What resources would be helpful for your committee to fulfill it's work?

Based on the format we had been told to work from, we'd never dreamed we'd be asked this Christmas in June question, so, of course, we didn't have an answer! Blessings upon the moderator, though, for she had the presence of mind to suggest that we might want to think about it before responding. With permission to come back the next morning, we left to do some dreaming (literally! I asked the committee members present to sleep on it!).

This morning, we gathered in the lobby to do some brainstorming. After about an hour, inspiration struck: What if we got the General Assembly to declare 2007-2008 The Years of Diversity and asked for the resources to make it a whiz-bang affair?! Trekked back to the committee and they thought it was a cool idea, too, and included it in their recommendations. Such an idea has financial implications, so when the subcommittees got back together to develop their final report, the financial implications were a part of the discussion. Since many of the members of the committee did not feel that they could vote for additional expenditures in a time of tightened budgets in good conscience (and I truly couldn't fault them on this perspective at all), the recommendation was more or less decimated.

Truth is, we knew what we were asking was a wild hare longshot, especially as there would be money involved. Something our committee has wrestled with since I first became a member was the issue of visibility. The idea was out there, so how could we make at least a part of it happen? Especially since this would be the perfect GA to endorse the concept, seeing as we're meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, where the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church (one of the Civil Rights Movement National Register of Historic Places) is located.

Once the review committee had approved their report, they let our committee look it over and make comments. As we left the room to make our suggestions, the GA resource person to the committee was returning to the room, so we asked what the financial implications would be if the GA simply declared The Years of Diversity without the additional resources. Learning there would be no financial implications, we ran with it.

The review committee had recommended that our committee "be encouraged to develop a year-long churchwide emphasis to celebrate the diversity of our Church in Synods and Presbyteries". So we asked that the review committee add the following: and that the General Assembly designate 2008 as A Celebration of the Year of Diversity in support of this emphasis.

TADA!! They were so happy at being able to do that that it passed unanimously!!! Mission (mostly) accomplished!! We got our visibility (which was really our goal for this particular situation, afterall)!!

Surely God was in the midst of all this!!

WOOHOO!! HAPPY DANCE!!!!! WOOHOO!! ALLELUIA!!

So ... Now it goes to the floor of the General Assembly. I'm not sure when the report will be voted on by the whole Assembly, but do you really think they'll say "no" to diversity in Birmingham?