224th General Assembly to be conducted online only
224th General Assembly to be conducted online only
Committee on the Office of the General Assembly votes for shortened assembly
Rick Jones | Office of the General Assembly - April 21, 2020
FacebookTwitterEmailPrint
LOUISVILLE
For the first time in the history of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the denomination’s General Assembly will be held online only. The Committee on the Office of the General Assembly (COGA) voted unanimously Tuesday to approve a plan for a reduced assembly gathering that will require everyone involved — commissioners, advisory delegates, corresponding members and staff — to participate in a digital assembly.
The final decision was expected to be voted and announced on Thursday; however, staff from the Office of the General Assembly received information Tuesday that prompted a quick call with COGA.
“As we have discussed, we knew we would reach a point in time in our contract with the Baltimore Convention Center and hotels where they would not be able to meet the agreed upon services listed in our contracts and that day is today,” said Julia Henderson, OGA’s interim director of assembly operations. “This is a force majeure. We need to let them know we are canceling because they cannot meet their obligations.”
Force majeure is a clause in contracts that frees both parties from liability or obligation when an extraordinary event or circumstance beyond the control of the contractual parties prevents services from being performed.
In this case, the COVID-19 virus has resulted in numerous conference cancelations. The General Assembly was scheduled to be held June 20-27. The convention center has converted space into a field hospital for infected patients.
Over the last few weeks, COGA and staff of the Office of the General Assembly have been working on contingency plans should the convention center not be available. The assembly will take place over three days; Friday, June 19; and Friday and Saturday, June 26 and 27.
Details are still being worked out, but the plan includes:
Question and answer session (town hall gathering) for moderator candidates followed by the election of a new moderator/co-moderators on Friday, June 19
Opening worship, two plenaries on Friday, June 26
Critical business, three plenaries, including stated clerk election and budget, on Saturday, June 27.
Some COGA members asked whether the church would be able to recoup all deposits to this point. OGA officials believe they will. Further discussions with the convention center will take place.
Now the attention turns to preparing for the upcoming assembly.
“We will send invitations to mid council leaders to attend one or two sessions next week with OGA staff,” said Henderson. “We will appeal to them to help us to ensure commissioners and advisory delegates are ready to go. We are also urging those commissioners who are no longer available to serve to let the stated clerk know as soon as possible.”
Other planned events will include technical training for commissioners and advisory delegates, participation in a virtual Poor People’s Campaign event, Bible study and electronic group gatherings.
COGA will conduct another virtual meeting on Thursday, April 23, to continue work on finalizing the assembly agenda.
Faith Biscuits: Don Shrumm interviews Paula Steinbacher
Don Shrumm, pastor of Genesis Presbyterian Church (Littleton) has a podcast called Faith Biscuits. Don recently interviewed Paula Steinbacher, pastor of Church of the Eternal Hills in Tabernash.
Paula confesses, she is terrified to do interviews. ”It has something to do with my being on television in high school and feeling completely idiotic. In any case, my good buddy Don Shrumm invited me for an interview (or another way of looking at it is that I twisted his arm and forced him to invite me) about ministry in the mountains and I ended up singing songs from Into the Woods.”
Paula reveals, she had a great time and feels Don made her sound better than she thought.
There are two parts to the interview with Paula, be sure and listen to both.
Don also interviewed Dan Doloquist. Dan is currently serving as Interim Pastor at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church in Denver.
Subscribe here and listen to Part 1 here Part 2 here.
Emergency Grant Funds Now Available!
Tuesday of Holy Week Devotional from Becoming a Beloved Community
Sharing a COVID-19 Story: Carrie Doehring, PhD at Illiff Seminary
Last week I asked Carrie to be a part of our Wednesday Zoom Conversation for Pastors and Church Leaders to offer Pastor Care for our Pastors during this time.
Carrie is a professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling at Iliff Seminary. As a minister member of Denver Presbytery, Carrie is an instrumental voice on our Committee on Preparation for Ministry Committee. Carrie shared her story for some reflection. Her written words and video are provided.
What’s my Covid-19 challenge?
My challenge is getting my 92-year-old mother, who lives alone in Montreal, to stay home. My sisters and I call ourselves the Mom Squad. We confer daily on how to ensure she has everything she needs so that she doesn’t leave her apartment. My mother has a fierce sense of independence. She doesn’t like being bossed around by us. She also has a strong Catholic sense of duty to authority.
Our Mom Squad includes the Premier of Quebec, the Pope, her pharmacist, doctor, and tax accountant. We invoke them freely to bolster our authority. Our COVID-19 challenge brings out the worst and best in us. The worst moments are being overwhelmed by fear that our mother will have a COVID-19 death. The best moments are loving conversations about mortality, past experiences of struggles, and what makes us resilient. We also laugh a lot with each other.
What helps me cope? What helps me when I feel overwhelmed?
My stress response is like a fingerprint with unique patterns shaped by my life experiences, especially of trauma, and my psychological vulnerabilities. My spiritual fingerprint is the unique patterns shaped by formative experiences, values, and beliefs that coalesce when we use body-aware practices to calm ourselves (Doehring, 2020). I offer my ways of coping in cultural humility, wary of insidious inclusive beliefs that there is ‘one God’ at the heart of all religious traditions (Prothero, 2010).
My ‘spiritual fingerprint’—my particular experiences of beauty and goodness, values and beliefs about suffering and hope—is shaped by childhood experiences of connecting with beauty through sacred choral music. I have been listening to British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’ cantata Dona Nobis Pacem. He composed this in 1936, in remembrance of the horrific suffering of World War I that he witnessed during military service on ambulance teams. His unit brought the wounded out of the months-long Third Battle of Ypres at Flanders, where one and a quarter million British, French, and German soldiers were killed. The Latin title Dona Nobis Pacem means “Give us Peace.”
In this cantata, Vaughan Williams set to music Walt Whitman’s poem “Reconciliation.” Whitman was a “wound dresser” in the United States Civil War. Listen to Whitman’s word of hope as he recalls the trauma of caring for wounded soldiers :
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
And the hands of the sisters, Death and night,
Incessantly softly wash again and ever again,
This soiled world. (Whitman, 1865/2015, p. 131)
When I listen to Dona Nobis Pacem, I try to take into my body the beauty of this poetry and music. I envision being part of a web of life that includes war veterans like Ralph Vaughan Williams and Walt Whitman.
I envision the ways my sisters and I are incessantly knitting a web of life that holds our mother.
I envision how so many of us, in our own ways, are knitting a web of life to hold the most vulnerable.
References
Doehring, C. (2020). Coping with moral struggles arising from coronavirus stress: Spiritual self-care for chaplains and religious leaders.
Fawson, S. (2019). Sustaining lamentation for military moral injury: Witness poetry that bears the traces of extremity. Pastoral Psychology, 68(1), 31-40. doi:10.1007/s11089-018-0855-8
Prothero, S. (2010). God is not one: The eight rival religions that run the world and why their differences matter. New York, NY: HarperOne.
Whitman, W. (1865/2015). Drum-taps: The complete 1865 edition. In L. Kramer (Ed.). New York, NY: New York Review of Books.
_____________________________
1) Shawn Fawson, a Ph.D. graduate of the Iliff and DU Joint PhD program and chaplain at Children’s Hospital in Seattle has described how to use Whitman’s poetry in sustaining lamentation for military moral injury (2019).
Do you have a COVID-19 story to share? Contact Communications & Administrative Manager, Beth Carlisle.
Join Wednesday Zoom Conversation for Pastors, click here.