GC81 Daily Digest, June 22: Committees meet in person for first time
The Joint Budget Committee holds a hearing June 22 on the proposed 2025-27 churchwide budget plan at the Louisville Marriott Downtown. Photo: David Paulsen/Episcopal News Service
[Episcopal News Service – Louisville, Kentucky] The 81st General Convention is underway in Louisville, as committees met in person for the first time on June 22, a day before legislative sessions are scheduled to convene in the full House of Bishops and House of Deputies, the official start of the June 23-28 meeting.
A lot can happen on any given day at General Convention, and despite the hard work of the Episcopal News Service team, we cannot write full stories on every development, action or event. Shorter news items will filed instead to these daily digests.
Some big news is expected in the afternoon June 22 with the opening remarks by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and House of Deputies Presiding Julia Ayala Harris in a joint session at the Kentucky International Convention Center. Watch for a full story later in the day.
The morning, on the other hand, was all about committee meetings – a lot of them.
This is the second straight General Convention, after the pandemic-altered 81st General Convention in 2022, in which legislative committees were asked to meet online in advance so they could hold hearings and complete most of their business before arriving in person. That allowed convention planners to schedule less committee time here in Louisville, but it also meant a crush of simultaneous committee activity on this first morning.
Nearly all the more than two dozen committees held meetings on June 22, with 13 of those committees starting at the same time, 9 a.m., in first-floor meeting rooms at the convention center. Fourteen of the committees held hearings on recently filed resolutions that they couldn’t get to in their online meetings. In some cases, committee members briefly excused themselves from their own meetings to hop over to a nearby hearing to testify on certain resolutions.
Committee meetings will resume at 7 a.m. June 23. Their workload will decrease significantly once they send their resolutions on to the House of Bishops and House of Deputies for consideration. All resolutions can be tracked on General Convention’s Virtual Binder website.
– David Paulsen
