GA briefs
Writer who helped repair family paper is spurned
John H. Adams, The Layman Online , June 20, 2006
217th General Assembly
Birmingham, Ala. BIRMINGHAM — Two people who faced off in a confrontation over a family paper that was submitted to and rejected by the 2003 General Assembly were rivals for a seat on the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy.
The winner was Dr. Gloria Albrecht, a social ethics professor at the University of Detroit who served as a consultant and writer for the first rendering of the family paper. It was rejected because opponents viewed the document as a endorsement of same-gender couples. She was nominated by the General Assembly Nominating Committee.
Alan Wisdom, vice president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, was her opponent. Wisdom had written detailed critical analyses about the family paper. He also attended ASCWP meetings to monitor its considerations. Wisdom was nominated from the floor.
After its first family paper was rejected, members of ASCWP invited Wisdom to become a member of the writing team for another version of the family paper. He played a key role in getting the committee to acknowledge the significance of traditional families.
The paper that was rewritten — much of it by Wisdom — went to the 2004 General Assembly, which approved it by a large margin.
On Tuesday morning, the commissioners to the 217th General Assembly voted 318-176 to favor Albrecht over Wisdom.
Les is more hitches
Les was more for many of the 534 commissioners at the 217th General Assembly — more hitches, that is.
Les is the term the techies in the Presbyterian Church (USA) use in reference to the first mostly paperless meeting of the denomination’s national governing body. Instead of stacks of paper clogging three- and four-inch binders, commissioners sat at their assigned seats with laptop computers that contained electronic versions of the material.
The trouble is that Les was often balky — unable to retrieve files for commissioners in a timely fashion. Sometimes, they voted on a issue before they could coax committee reports and other material onto their screens.
The commissioners complained several times, Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick pleaded for patience and Moderator Joan Gray seemed sometimes flustered. Then there were emergencies when a commissioner’s laptop could retrieve nothing. For those occasions, commissioners raised purple cards and a techie with a purple badge rushed over to provide CPR.
But Les worked more often than not, which delighted the environmentalists in the PCUSA because it spared a sizable forest that otherwise would have been pulped into piles of paper to clog the binders of yesteryears.
Moderator gigs
After a two-year stint as moderator, Rick Ufford-Chase turned into a song leader — with a fine voice and much gusto — before he gave up the gavel to Joan Gray.
Let’s sing, he announced, during a slack moment when Les was acting up. And with his voice booming through the microphone — worthy of American Idol competition if the youngish-looking moderator could slip under the age limit — Ufford-Chase led the commissioners through some lively songs.
Gray didn’t lead any singing, but she did have a gig of her own: as a storyteller. Like the one about the monk who lived a holy life cloistered on a hill. After wandering down into the village at the foot of the mountain, the monk was asked about his holy life.
According to Gray, the monk said, “I fall down and I get up. I fall down and I get up. I fall down and I get up.” Gray offered no interpretation. She told commissioners they would have to figure out the moral of the story.