Task Force discusses how to close meetings
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, Posted Monday, August 11, 2003
CHICAGO – The Theological Task Force on Peace, Purity and Unity wrestled briefly with how to exercise its recently granted authority to close its meetings to the public without resolving the issue.
On the last night of its August 6-8 meeting in Chicago, Jean S. “Jenny” Stoner, co-moderator of the task force, broached the subject.
Stoner, an elder at East Craftsbury Presbytrerian Church in Craftsbury, Vt., and a former employee of the Presbyterian Church (USA), offered a suggestion: The task force might have its planning committee schedule time for an executive session at each meeting and then have a voice vote when that time came to decide whether to tell members of the press and other observers to leave the room.
But that proposal didn’t get a vote – just as there has been no up or down vote on any issue before the task force in its two and one-half years of meetings. It did, however, stir up some conversation.
Jack Haberer, pastor of Clear Lake Presbyterian Church in Houston and president of Presbyterians For Renewal, balked at the idea of the task force’s planning committee setting up time for a closed meeting without a specific reason for dismissing observers.
Haberer said the task force should leave the possibility of executive sessions “open to everybody.” Jose Luis Torres-Milan, a pastor in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, agreed with Haberer that the full task force should decide whether to close the doors.
Barbara Everitt Bryant, a Michigan social scientist who served as director of the U.S. Census Bureau under former President George H.W. Bush, opposed closing task force meetings. “I am an open meeting person,” she said. “I won’t ever vote to close the meetings.”
Gary Demarest of Pasadena, a retired minister, said permission to ban observers from parts of the task force’s meetings was a “privilege given to us by the General Assembly. We didn’t request it.”
He also suggested that the task force should be careful about closing its meetings. “I think we have a very good relationship with the press. I hope nothing we do will tarnish that relationship.”
In May, the 215th General Assembly voted to exempt the task force from the denomination’s requirement that all denominational meetings be open to the public except for the purpose of dealing with personnel issues, litigation and property acquisition.
The General Assembly gave the task force permission to close its meetings – upon vote of two-thirds of its members – to discuss issues, but not to vote on those issues.
Before the General Assembly exempted the task force from the denomination’s open-meetings policy, a number of task force members had complained that press coverage made them uneasy and reluctant to float ideas about controversial issues.