{"id":1065,"date":"2012-05-02T19:35:25","date_gmt":"2012-05-03T02:35:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/gc2012\/?p=1065"},"modified":"2012-05-03T08:25:08","modified_gmt":"2012-05-03T15:25:08","slug":"rev-craig-parrishs-thoughts-day-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/rev-craig-parrishs-thoughts-day-8\/","title":{"rendered":"Rev. Craig Parrish&#8217;s Thoughts &#8211; Day 8"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>What can be said about our church?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The last few days have not gone well for progressive Christians.<\/p>\n<p>If you value open conversation, many of you saw, or have heard, that the <strong>guaranteed appointment<\/strong> went by on the consent calendar because of a duplicate signature on a petition to remove it from the calendar. A motion for reconsideration failed soon thereafter. Whether you supported the end of appointment security or not, no discussion was not healthy for our church. \u00a0The fear and uncertainty among women , racial\/ethnic and prophetically-minded clergy was clearly evident.<\/p>\n<p>The next big matter brought before the body today were the proposals to<strong> restructure<\/strong> the church. \u00a0There is a lot to like but the heavy concentration of South Eastern Jurisdiction and Central Conference delegates on the new General Council of Strategy and Oversight gives me pause. They will have the power to hire and fire their Executive Secretary, confirm all of the General Secretaries, and reallocate funds &#8212; when they judge that they are not being used effectively for making disciples. This concentration of power is just too scary for me. \u00a0The best of intentions of this year&#8217;s General Conference may have just created a structure that will create a church unrecognizable to many of us in a few, short, years.<\/p>\n<p>Finally the <strong>divestment<\/strong> debate. \u00a0\u00a0The General Conference certainly disagreed on this one. \u00a0What I find it troubling is that we are willing to let bulldozers destroy homes and farm land rather than have our lay people lose money from their investments in Caterpiller, Motorola, or HP should their stock price drop due to divestment. People grow &#8216;tired&#8217; of the debate and then we spend 30 minutes discussing whether of not we should call people lay speakers or lay servants.<\/p>\n<p>I am really fired up. \u00a0\u00a0Hope I can sleep tonight.<\/p>\n<p>Craig<\/p>\n<p><em>Rev. Craig Parrish is the Conference Treasurer for the Pacific Northwest Conference and head of the PNW delegation to Tampa, Florida for General Conference 2012.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What can be said about our church? The last few days have not gone well for progressive Christians. If you value open conversation, many of you saw, or have heard, that the guaranteed appointment went by on the consent calendar because of a duplicate signature on a petition to remove it from the calendar. A [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1071,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1065","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-conversation","8":"category-pnw-delegation"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/7135609503_44afc7bb94_b.jpeg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2l75j-hb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1065"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1073,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1065\/revisions\/1073"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}