by Chris Ritter

It was good to end Day One with our hands in the air, praising God. This helped our sleeves roll up for a full Day Two of legislative committee work. I wanted to post last night, but my two remaining brain cells were no longer in communication with one another after 13 hours of detailed wordsmithing with sixty of my new closest friends. All the legislative committees had important work to do, processing petitions to come before the plenary body. Like all the other committees, ours is the most important.

The Episcopacy & Superintendency Committee made some weighty decisions Saturday. We will have an episcopacy based on general superintendency, not bishops resident in each annual conference. With a 54 to 9 vote in that direction, the framers of the proposed Hybrid Plan shared that they would not bring a minority report to the plenary floor. This seems a settled matter.

What is still on our legislative table is the process for electing interim bishops at this General Conference to serve the next two years. Saturday’s work moves toward giving the process back to the General Conference by allowing annual conference delegations to nominate afresh from the floor. We still have work to do as to not disenfranchise Nigeria which previously offered nominees, has no delegation present, and desperately needs episcopal leadership upon the imminent retirement of Bishop Yohanna. There is also at least one current episcopal candidate nominated from outside their own annual conference and forwarded to the delegates by the Transitional Leadership Council.

We seem to be tightening the parameters under which an interim bishop may continue after 2026. The current language says no more than half the interims can be continued, and only with permission of 75% of the delegates of General Conference. Refinements to Petition 114 governing our 2024 election process will continue Sunday.

A significantly modified process for electing bishops in 2026 and beyond (Substituted Petition 29, Par. 504) was unanimously approved in the sub-committee and will be further perfected by the whole. If approved in plenary, a democratic process would create episcopal areas each six years so that General Conference can elect bishops directly to them. In doing so, General Conference delegates will benefit from prior vetting, interviewing, and ranking work done by each area committee on episcopacy. (The previous version tasked the General Committee on Episcopacy with the creation of the episcopal areas.)

Episcopal areas, groupings of 6-8 annual conferences, need not be geographically contiguous and may be international in composition. These are nothing like jurisdictions or regions (I hear that any reference to even the possibility of regions is being eliminated from the Constitution). An area committee on episcopacy is the only area-specific structure and bishops will be elected, of course, by the General Conference. The composition of the episcopal areas will be revisited every six years and modified as best serves the mission.

Let me conclude by saying a word about the spirit of the work thus far. Disagreements are being handled lovingly and respectfully. I hear anecdotal reports of delegates apologizing to one another when things become intense. The chair of the committee on which I serve often pauses our work for prayer. I believe this is the case in all our committees.

As expected, the process is not perfect. We struggle to meaningfully engage with brothers and sisters who are with us via Zoom. Time differences and language barriers are a factor, in spite of amazing technology being used with diligence and care. I trust we will learn much from our time in Costa Rica and find ways to allow the democratic processes in our Global Church to go on to perfection. But the overwhelming mood among the delegates is one of optimism and hope. We have a church, and it is doing its work in a way that reflects well upon the Gospel we profess. Keep praying for us.