GA Daily Dispatch

July 5, 2010

Mondays at GA are given to protracted committee work. As I was coming to my room at around 9:00 PM, one of the commissioners walking alongside me displayed utter exhaustion after having spent all day and the evening in intensive committee deliberations. Committees will resume their work tomorrow, which once again is set aside in its entirety for committee deliberations. Slowly the committees are putting together their lists of recommendations to the full General Assembly. On Wednesday, the scene of action will shift to the plenary gathering of the Assembly, where each item of business sent in by the 19 committees will be acted upon. Until then, the Assembly has decided nothing.

You may see news reports about committee recommendations as though they were GA decisions. Please remember that committee recommendations will be debated by the entire GA, whereupon they will be adopted, amended, or defeated. So until the whole GA acts, there is really no news to report.

While committee sessions are “merely” preliminary proceedings, they are perhaps the most intensely demanding segment of GA for commissioners. Please continue to keep our commissioners in your prayers.

Yesterday and today I was privileged to join other presbytery leaders in two major sessions with Phyllis Tickle, a prolific author and expert on church trends. She particularly addressed the themes in her book, The Great Emergence, which I recommend heartily to anyone interested in engaging a compelling account of contemporary church challenges in light of broad historical church patterns.

The GA 2012 booth has kept buzzing as people come by to talk about coming to Pittsburgh for the next General Assembly. We have giveaways to help remind them of their welcome to Pittsburgh. For reasons I can’t fully fathom, the pickle and ketchup pins are especially popular – I see them being impishly worn all over the convention. Enthusiasm for coming to Pittsburgh for the next GA is perceptibly building. We owe great thanks to our COLA team (Committee on Local Arrangements) for stoking people’s interest in GA 2012.

As we face the days ahead, it is with the confident assurance that the Lord is with us, leading us forward into the future for which we have been appointed. Let us not lose hope or good cheer, even when the sledding gets tough.

Leaning forward,

The Rev. Dr. Sheldon W. Sorge, Pastor to Presbytery

P.S. Please note that ongoing updates of GA News from the General Assembly’s Office of Communications are posted at http://ga219.pcusa.org/.

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