wfn.org | Call Made for Council of Bishops' Special Session

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

CONTACT: 	Linda Bloom
(10-21-71B){193}
		New York (212) 870-3803			 March 31, 1998

NOTE: This story is accompanied by a sidebar, UMNS #194.

Special session of Council of Bishops requested to address disunity in
church
	
	NEW YORK (UMNS) -- The United Methodist Council of Bishops
should have a special session to address issues of disunity within the
church.
	That's the call being sounded by the executive committee of the
churchwide Commission on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns
based here.
	The committee adopted a resolution March 28 requesting the
bishops to convene the session this year. The bishops are being asked to
address the content and recommendations of the document entitled "In
Search of Unity" in relation to turmoil stirred by a recent church trial
in Nebraska.
	The unity document was developed during the Dialogue on
Theological Diversity within the church, a two-part series of
discussions sponsored recently by the Commission on Christian Unity.
	During the March 11-13 church trial, the Rev. Jimmy Creech  of
Omaha was found innocent of violating church law by conducting a
same-sex covenanting ceremony. His defense argued that the prohibition
against such unions had been placed in the denomination's Social
Principles, which is advisory rather than church law. The Social
Principles are in a special section of the Book of Discipline, the
denomination's book of law.
While some opposed to the trial's outcome have called for a special
session of General Conference -- the church's top legislative body -- to
deal with the issue, the commission's executive committee disagrees. 
A legislative setting would place any discussion in a win-lose context,
"which would be most harmful," said the Rev. Bruce Robbins, the
commission's general secretary. 
The bishops, he said, "can work on behalf of all of us to try to work
through the seemingly irreparable differences we're facing."
In its request to the bishops, the executive committee pointed out that
Wesleyan "holy conferencing" is what the church needs now.
"We are hopeful that such nonlegislative 'listening to each other and to
God' can occur in the Council of Bishops," it said.
Quoting the church's Constitution, the committee said the Council of
Bishops is responsible "for general oversight and promotion of temporal
and spiritual interests of the entire church. . . . "
"The episcopacy has been understood historically, and is seen today, as
both a symbol and agent of unity of the church," the committee observed
in its statement to the bishops.
A special session, "free of other agenda, would enable the bishops to
pray together, to seek discernment, to model for the church disagreement
without disunity, and possibly to develop covenants related to the
responsibility of the bishops for the unity of the church." 
The council, including 67 active bishops and about 65 retired bishops,
meets twice each year. Its next session is scheduled for April 25-May 1
in Lincoln, Neb. The fall meeting is scheduled for Oct. 31-Nov. 6 at
Simpsonwood, a church-owned conference center north of Atlanta.

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