wfn.org | Conference system aims to avoid final-week logjam

["Christopher Took" <storm@indigo.ie>]

ACNS LC040 - 23 July 1998

Conference system aims to avoid final-week logjam

By Allan Reeder
Lambeth Conference Communications

Lambeth Conference planners are working hard to avoid a
final-week logjam of resolutions when the bishops emerge from
their closed section meetings to consider resolutions in plenary
sessions. 

The procedure for handling resolutions is designed to make sure
that the "key issues" emerge, Bishop Michael Nuttall (South
Africa), chair of the conference Resolutions Committee, told an
early press conference.

Bishop Nuttall told journalists that at previous Lambeth
conferences in 1978 and 1988 "we found ourselves inundated with
too many resolutions in the final week."

Under conference procedures, proposed resolutions will only be
allowed from section and regional meetings, and not from
individual bishops, he said.

Each of the sections and regional meetings are also being asked
to keep their motions short. The Resolutions Committee wants "a
limited number of focussed resolutions," Bishop Nuttall said. "We
are requesting that the sections produce a maximum of three
resolutions for the plenary sessions of the conference."

In another procedure designed to allow non-contentious issues to
be addressed, resolutions can be added to an 'agreed list' which
will not be subject to debate. 

If bishops indicate an objection to the wording of a resolution
on the agreed list, Resolutions Committee secretary Philip Mawer
says the matter will be "taken to the Steering Committee and a
way through will be found to deal with these objections."

The system is "genuinely designed to allow issues which are the
key ones to emerge," he said.

For further information, contact:

Lambeth Conference Communications
Canterbury Business School
University of Kent at Canterbury
Telephone: 01227 827348/9
Fax: 01227 828085
Mobile: 0374 800212

http://www.lambethconference.org