A First Time Deputy to General Convention

I was fortunate enough to be a deputy to our General Convention in Kentucky the last week in June. This was my first General Convention.

For those who may not know, General Convention is the main legislative body for the Episcopal Church. Similar to the federal legislature, it has two houses:  the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies.  In a few cases, the Houses meet jointly, but for most business, we meet in separate chambers.  Resolutions before Convention only become official acts of Convention after both Houses agree and adopt the same language for the resolution.

As I discovered as a first-time deputy, the work of General Convention begins long before the first legislative session. In past conventions, the work really didn’t start until deputies were on-site, when the first several days would consist of committee meetings. Every resolution proposed to General Convention is assigned to a legislative committee. Most legislative committees meet jointly with bishops and deputies both present.

Normally, first-time deputies do not get appointed to committees. There is enough to figure out as a first-time deputy that the custom is to give deputies their first convention just to learn how everything works. A result of COVID, one that I believe is a good change, is that legislative committees now start meeting months ahead of Convention by Zoom. The side benefit is that committees can hear testimony from a much broader population in the church since witnesses do not have to be on-site at Convention.

One committee, Agencies and Boards, is a more technical committee. It focuses on all the institutions that the General Convention has influence over, like Church Pension Group and the Church Archives. Because this committee works on very technical legislation, I was appointed to it since I work at a technical level with these issues as a diocesan administrator.

Our bishop, Bishop Susan, was also on this committee for the house of bishops. She was also chair of a task force on reducing our health care costs, and the report of that task force was received by our committee. Our committee also heard testimony and evaluated resolutions about parity of pay between priests and deacons, lay and clergy parity, and a resolution on finding a permanent home for the Church Archives. I was especially proud of our bishop and her co-chair from the house of deputies, Episcopal Jeopardy sensation the Rev. David Sibley, as they presented their report on the challenges of our church health care plan. It is very dense and complicated stuff but they made it very accessible. The changes they recommended to how the Church Medical Trust calculates premiums passed in both houses, and we can expect to see medical premiums adjusted starting with the 2025 plan year.

Committees evaluate all resolutions that go to the floor of Convention. The Committee votes on each resolution (after hearing testimony in some cases) and decides whether and how it will forward the resolution to Convention. The Committee has a big impact on the action the Convention will eventually take- for example, the Committee can recommend that a resolution be placed on the consent agenda of the house, where multiple resolutions are voted on in bulk and the resolution will not get as much scrutiny. Or it can recommend changes that then go to debate on the floor of the house. They can also recommend that the house take no further action.

My committee finished all of our work before we even got to Lousville, but the schedule allows for committees to work on-site at Convention as well. Some committees did not meet until they were on-site. 

It matters because the schedule for Convention is pretty grueling. This was a six day convention, but the six days don’t include about two days of pre-convention meetings and activities so it was really more like eight days. Conventions before COVID were sometimes 14 days long. 

A typical day might look like this: 

-7:00 – 9:00 am – Committee meeting (which was why I was glad my committee finished before Convention- I never had to be anywhere this early!)

– 9:00-10:00 breakfast

– 10:00-11:00 Eucharist or Morning Prayer

– 11:00 – Noon – Legislative Session

– Noon – 2:00 – Lunch

– 2:00-5:00 – Legislative Session

– 5:00- 6:00 – Dinner

– 6:00-9:00 – either additional legislative session or special events

It’s a demanding schedule! I’m grateful for the compressed schedule. I can’t imagine working from 7am to 9pm for 10 or 12 days in a row.

Legislative sessions were interesting to learn about. The House of Deputies operates on Rules of Order, similar to Robert’s Rules. The idea for the rules is to provide an ordered and equitable way for all voices to be heard. I started Convention really engaged about being part of a body that a) wants to hear from all of its voices and b) also has many voices that are passionate about any given topic. I appreciated all the voices, but by the end of Convention I was not quite as appreciative of those rules because they also do not allow a vote unless 6 minutes of debate has occurred or three people have spoken to one side of an argument without anyone rising to speak to the other side. That meant that a lot of the time in session was spent hearing from deputies who were very passionate about whatever the issue was but where the outcome was never really in question. 

The debate is not secular either; before contentious votes or votes of deep gravity, the president calls on the chaplain to center us in prayer. The chaplain of the House of Deputies is a really dynamic priest, the Rev. Lester McKenzie, and he does a great job of reminding us we are not there to vote for any kind of ideological partisanship but instead to listen for the call of the Holy Spirit and vote accordingly.

The debates on our response to the situation in Palestine were especially heavy.  A lot of the initial debate focused on human suffering, both as a result of the Hamas attack on Israel but especially for the suffering in Palestine. The House of Bishops initially voted to support all of the proposed resolutions calling for peace but modified some of the language to omit words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’ from the descriptions of Israel. The House of Deputies then voted to add the language back, which meant it had to go back to the House of Bishops. The House of Bishops again amended that language out, which sent the legislation back to us without enough time remaining in Convention to amend it and send it back to the Bishops; we had to concur or let the resolution die. Floor debate at that point centered on how and when to compromise to pass something, with opponents feeling like the amended resolution was so watered down that it wasn’t worth passing. We eventually concurred with the bishop’s version of the resolution.

That spirit of compromise and discernment of God’s will for this church is what makes General Convention a really exciting place to be: while we all come together with different experiences and hopes, the job of the convention is to discern how we come together as the Episcopal Church to do the important work God calls us to.

Thank you for electing me as your deputy and allowing me to serve. It was truly an honor to participate in the Church in this way.