wfn.org | Commission backs away from creating inclusiveness council

["NewsDesk" <NewsDesk@UMCOM.ORG>]

March 5, 2004	News media contact: Linda Bloom7(646)369-37597New York7
E-mail: newsdesk@umcom.org 7  ALL AA-AS-HIS-KOR-NA-WI{092}

NOTE: For related coverage of the United Methodist Commission on the Status
and Role of Women, see UMNS story #093.

By United Methodist News Service

Members of the United Methodist Commission on the Status and Role of Women
have decided not to support a petition that the agency had submitted for
consideration at the denomination's upcoming General Conference.

The petition, approved last September, asks the legislative body - which
meets April 27-May 7 in Pittsburgh - to agree that the commission and the
United Methodist Commission on Religion and Race start planning for a single
"Council on Inclusiveness" that would handle all issues of gender and race
discrimination within the denomination.

Such planning would occur during the 2005-08 quadrennium, with the new
structure to be submitted for approval to the 2008 General Conference,
according to the petition.

Meeting Feb. 27-29 in Pittsburgh, the Commission on the Status and Role of
Women agreed that members sitting in the General Conference legislative
committee on independent commissions would move for a vote of
"nonconcurrence" - or no support - on the petition.

Bishop Bruce Ough, a COSROW member, told United Methodist News Service that
the concern was not so much about the proposal itself but the process for
presenting it. Specifically, he said, there had not been enough consultation
between the two affected commissions before the petition was approved.

Ideally, he added, such a proposal would come jointly from both commissions.

A larger issue, according to Garlinda Burton, COSROW's acting top executive,
is that the work of the two commissions is far from over. 

"The church is still just beginning to deal with issues of institutional
racism and institutional sexism," she explained. "What we'd like to do is
find more common ground, find more ways to work together." 

Ough agreed that "we do not want to send a signal to General Conference that
the respective work of these two commissions is done."

But he credited the Rev. Gail Murphy-Geiss, COSROW's president, for her
vision of dealing with issues of inclusiveness in the church in a new way and
said the discussion should continue into the future.

When Murphy-Geiss introduced the petition for a council on inclusiveness, she
said that such an agency could advocate for social justice for people in any
number of categories, not simply race or gender.

 
 

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United Methodist News Service
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