Opinions welcome

Since being elected as a General Conference delegate last May, a full 11 months before General Conference, I have been waiting for the work to start. Which it is beginning to but the past four months have been pretty quiet. I realize that people all over the denomination are working very hard to get ready for the party in Tampa but since I am a 1st time delegate they haven't really invited me to the pre-party.

Not that I'm feeling ignored. Far from it. In the first days after being elected I found my name on a GC delegate Twitter list and also added to a Facebook group for Young Adult delegates (in this case defined as under age 40, which is really stretching the definition of young adult. I guess no one wants to tell the 37 year olds they are no longer young.) Being added to those groups is about as far as the social media interaction has gone but it was a signal to me that some people really want to know who is going to General Conference. Why? So they can lobby.

There are currently 11.4 million members in the United Methodist Church world wide. Only 1000 of us will be able to vote on any given piece of legislation in Tampa next spring. You can imagine that some of those 11,399,000 other members of the UMC have ideas, even passionate ideas, about how we 1000 should vote.

So far I have received (I think) six communications that I would call "lobbying" related to GC. All six have been about...can you guess?...homosexuality. More specifically 4 or 5 out of the six have been requests to repeal or replace any discriminatory language in the Discipline related to gay and lesbian persons. I have received several letters (one hand written) an email, a phone call and a book. I take this to mean that the Reconciling Ministry Network is winning the communication race at the moment.

It's not really a surprise that this is the issue that has people energized the most and the earliest. We have been struggling with language related to sexuality in the Discipline since 1972. That was 4 years before I was born. And, I am sure, United Methodists were struggling with how to interpret scripture and live with gay people who love God long before that. No matter what happens, I don't anticipate that GC 2012 will be the final chapter in the debate.

I do find it interesting that none of the communications have asked me to support a specific piece of legislation or referred to a specific paragraph number in the Book of Discipline. They have been general instead, asking me to vote for "justice" or to "uphold biblical standards." I assume someone has submitted petitions on all sides of the issue but I guess the lobbyists felt they couldn't wait until the legislation is published.

I also find myself wondering what effect such lobbying has. Are there delegates elected last spring who are saying, "I don't really know how I feel about the ordination of gay and lesbian people." Or "I have been thinking I need to decide if UMC clergy should perform same-sex unions." These seem pretty entrenched opinions to me. I would guess the chance of an outcome different from the past lies more with who got elected to GC from around the world and less on changing the minds of already elected delegates. I could be wrong on this, some of those letters may have a deep effect.

I am sure there will be more letters/phone calls/emails to come on this issue. I wonder, will I be lobbied about anything else? Or do we only have this kind of political energy for issues of sexuality? We've got seven months to find out.