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General Council Update Aug. 11, 2009 PDF Print E-mail

General Council Update for Tuesday August 11, 2009:

God's Spirit is Spinning in the Potter's House.

I am trying to figure out how to filter a truckload of information for you. So much has happened in 3 days here at General Council in Kelowna. So here goes a couple of hi-lites.

General Council got off to a slow start on Day 1 (Sunday) as we spent a significant amount of time deciding how we will spend our time. But the energy began to rise on Monday with morning worship as we celebrated the United Church being an inter-cultural church that reaches out in mutual partnership with various cultural groups (women, children, gay/lesbian, First Nations, French).

Today (Tuesday), among other things, we spoke about Designated Lay Ministry (DLM). The United Church Manual states that once a person who is a DLM retires from a congregation they are no longer members of Presbytery and many spoke about it being a call and should not be time restricted. We will continue that conversation tomorrow (I think). We also got into the Israel/Palestine issue. Basically (and this is really simplifying a complicated issue) Israel is playing one card and that is, "If you vote to boycott, then we won't be your friend." Palestine is saying that Israel is oppressing them and choking the life out of them (which according to many reports of people who have been there and have spoken today in this court is true). A motion was made to do nothing and refer all of it for further study but the court voted against that, and decided to continue the conversation again on Thursday. The court was definitely leaning towards doing something (perhaps boycotting Israeli products but we don't know at this point). If you hear about it in the news the truth is that the issue is still unresolved, but leaning towards doing something whatever that something may be.

Tomorrow we are going to hear the nominees for moderator speak and on Friday we’ll vote for a new moderator.

Joey is right into General Council. His energy is inspiring and he truly is a gift to the church. We'll definitely have some awesome songs to bring back home.

Barbara