A vision for General Convention’s future: less legislative time, more time for formation, fellowship

[Episcopal News Service – Hendersonville, North Carolina] Churchwide leaders got a first look Oct. 21 at a vision of what The Episcopal Church’s General Convention soon could become.

When the churchwide governing body meets next in 2027 in Phoenix, Arizona, mornings would be devoted solely to worship and formation. Legislative sessions, held only in the afternoons, would benefit from better coordination of the hundreds of resolutions considered every year by bishops and deputies. Evenings would be reserved for “joyful fellowship,” and the weeklong meeting would “harness the capacity of all the leaders who gather” and “send then home empowered and inspired.”

Those were some of the ideas generated by the General Convention Reinvention Steering Committee, which was formed by Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe and House of Deputies President Julia Ayala Harris to consider new ways of planning for and gathering at General Convention every three years.

The Rev. Scott Gunn, who co-chairs the steering committee with Minnesota Bishop Craig Loya, presented an overview of the committee’s work and its vision to Executive Council at its Oct. 20-21 meeting at Kanuga, an Episcopal conference center and camp south of Asheville, North Carolina.

“If we can do this and make some of these changes and increase our transparency and our formation time, we can build trust in our church,” said Gunn, executive director of Forward Movement, who joined Executive Council via Zoom. “And we can do all of this without getting rid of our cherished governance and our polity, the sacred work that General Convention does.”

General Convention, typically held in a different host city every three years, is The Episcopal Church’s largest churchwide gathering and functions as a hub for fellowship, networking, social events and church governance. The bicameral convention divides its authority between the House of Deputies and House of Bishops.

In 2024, General Convention passed Resolution D022 to ask church leaders to launch a study and report back to the 82nd General Convention with recommendations on how to convene future meetings. The presiding officers formed the Reinvention Steering Committee to work with the Joint Standing Committee on Planning and Arrangements on plans for the 82nd General Convention, to be held July 3-8, 2027, at the Phoenix Convention Center.

The six-day convention will be shorter than the church’s historical norm but longer than the pandemic-shortened four-day gathering in 2022, held in Baltimore, Maryland. Last year, when bishops and deputies gathered in Louisville, Kentucky, for the church’s 81st General Convention, it also convened for six business days.

Executive Council is the church’s governing body between meetings of General Convention. Gunn, in his presentation to Executive Council, explained that his committee’s task was to study the church’s current practices and propose a vision for General Convention’s future, leaving it to other church leaders to decide on and finalize the details.

He also assured Executive Council his committee is confident that General Convention’s legislative sessions, which previously have extended to all hours of the day, could be limited to afternoons while still getting all necessary work done.

“The legislation geeks – and I say that lovingly – who have looked at this believe we can get our work done with our current rules in the afternoons and have this vision of the schedule,” Gunn said.

The reason for limiting legislative sessions to afternoons would be to give more time for the experiences that many Episcopalians say can be lost in the shuffle of General Convention business, particularly worship, formation, deliberation, discernment and fellowship.

“We want to rebalance our time,” Gunn said. For example, future morning plenary sessions at General Convention might involve Bible studies and small group conversations. Bishops and deputies would have more time to break bread together and learn from each other, “and just share the joy of being followers of Christ together.”

How to make that possible is still being worked out, but Gunn presented several of the committee’s suggestions, grouped by improvements to pre-convention planning, changes that can be implemented at the coming General Convention and longer-term structural reforms that could require constitutional or canonical changes.

Gunn started by sharing a snapshot of the legislative process as it now exists. Of the 300 or so resolutions considered by the 81st General Convention last year, 170 of them were proposed by interim bodies and 80 by deputies. Three-fourths of all resolutions are considered “substantive,” as opposed to resolutions related to the dispatch process or “privilege” resolutions, typically honoring groups or individuals.

The General Convention Reinvention Steering Committee proposes breaking down all resolutions into four types and replacing the current A-B-C-D labeling system based on the resolutions’ proposers with new labels that match the four types: resolutions changing the church’s governing documents (GC), measures relating to liturgy and music (LM), those that issue directives to interim bodies (DI) and “common discernment” resolutions expressing the church’s positions on various issues (CD).

The committee then is proposing a series of reforms that would help streamline the legislative process leading up to the in-person meeting:

• Require resolutions to be submitted through a template to ensure the correct format.
• Gather interim bodies for a pre-convention consultation, while encouraging them to consolidate similar resolutions.
• Implement a resolution review process to suggest text refinements before resolutions are officially proposed.
• Develop training for drafting and considering resolutions.
• Standardize the legislative committees’ online hearing schedule so it is easier to plan for observing and testifying on resolutions.
• Add the ability for committees to report information on their deliberations, so the public can see how they decided whether to modify, recommend or reject resolutions.

General Convention also could improve the flow of legislative business without sacrificing deliberation by consolidating resolutions before floor debate. Gunn’s committee suggests the General Convention Dispatch of Business Committees could be empowered to consolidate duplicative resolutions, and each legislative committee would be encouraged to do the same. Most of the proposed constitutional and canonical changes, for example, could be taken up together, and liturgy and worship resolutions could be grouped together by type, such as calendar changes.

Gunn also presented two proposals that would amplify the General Convention’s work to the wider church after each triennial meeting concludes and bishops and deputies return to their dioceses.

The first would be – Gunn noted the name is negotiable – a “Book of Common Discernment.” It would collect all discernment statements adopted by past General Conventions, and after each subsequent General Convention, newly adopted statements would be added, creating “a living thematic theological resource” for the church.

The second proposal would group all resolutions enacting new churchwide directives into three strategic directives: governance, worship and mission/justice. They would be outlined in a way similar to the churchwide budget, so the full breadth of each directive category could be easily understood.

Executive Council was generally receptive to the proposals, though some members posed questions and raised concerns about how they would be implemented and the potential burden on those responsible for implementation. Heidi Kim, from the Diocese of Minnesota, said she feared the committees on Dispatch of Business would be expected to work even harder so others would have more time for fellowship.

“It sounds like a lot of work to consolidate all of those resolutions,” Kim said.

Katie Sherrod of the Diocese of Texas asked who would be responsible for overseeing the so-called Book of Common Discernment. Rowe acknowledged there is no answer yet to that question.

Dianne Audrick Smith of the Diocese of Ohio echoed some of the other sentiments.

“I encourage you to think about the people power in general that will be needed to make this happen, because we are still a personal relational church,” she said. She also encouraged church leaders to keep General Convention’s history and tradition in mind as they plan changes to the gathering.

“General Convention is not an isolated thing. It’s part of a continuum,” Smith said, and it is important to plan for following through after General Convention “so that we’re really doing the full job.”

Rowe and Ayala Harris, who serve respectively as Executive Council’s chair and vice-chair, said they and other church leaders have not yet taken any steps to put these proposals into action, but they welcomed the work of the General Convention Reinvention Steering Committee in advising the church on possible ways forward.

– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.