GC 2020 – PlaneGrace’s Ground Rules for Sorting Out the Petitions

Frank Holbrook 1 GC 2020

Now that September 18 is in the rearview mirror, the deadline for submitting proposed denominational legislation has passed. We now enter the period when thoughtful analysis of proposals may occur. Due to time constraints, I suspect most people will form impressions about various petitions based on the public statements concerning the plan. At PlaneGrace I intend to review the actual filed petitions and discuss them as they are written. Other people and other sites may take a different approach; however, I feel obligated to let my readers know how I intend to think and write about the plans as they are embodied in their petitions.

To this point I haven’t read a single petition (other than the Plain Grace Plan). However, over the next few months I’ll be offering thoughts about the petitions as I read and consider them. I thought it would be helpful before embarking on that process to briefly outline, for my own benefit, the things I’ll be considering as I read and study. I hope that sharing my outline will give readers some insight into what my critiques will attempt to do.

A lawyer’s mind works in a funny way. I’ve told people that attending the first year of law school is like attending military boot camp. The process is designed to break you down mentally and then rebuild the way you think. Your old way of thinking is gone and a new analytical way has been created; the new way becomes second nature and is usually extremely annoying to those around you. You pay a lot of attention to language and you spend a great deal of time learning to “spot issues”. Issue spotting is a shorthand way of saying “looking for potential problems”. Lawyers spend a lot of time thinking in terms of “If the client does this, what can go wrong?” That’s issue spotting. I guess it could be described as controlled methodical pessimism. It’s a check on many people’s unbridled optimism.  Retiring from law practice didn’t reboot my legal mind and return it to its original operating system.

As I read and study the petitions I’ll be issue spotting. If you’ve read the Plain Grace Plan, found here, you’ve probably guessed I did a lot of issue spotting in that plan as it was drafted. That’s one of the reasons it may seem long and detailed. It attempts to consider issues that may pop up along the way and preemptively offer a solution to the potential issues.

What things will I be looking for in the various petitions as I engage in issue spotting?

Here is my initial short list:

One – Ambiguities will be identified. Can a petition be read in several ways? If so, then it’s possible that the petition’s intent will be frustrated when it is implemented. Sometimes negotiators will leave ambiguity in a document because agreement can’t be reached on an issue and it’s possible a dispute will never arise about the issue. It’s a way of saying “We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it.” Ideally, language should be unambiguous.

Two – Open questions will be identified. Open issues are different than ambiguity. Open issues are ones that are left unaddressed in a petition. For example, the Plain Grace plan doesn’t directly address the issue of human sexuality. Under the Plain Grace Plan it is an open issue; however, the plan does address the issue indirectly. The Plain Grace Plan indirectly addresses the human sexuality issue by making it an issue that is highly likely to be decided at the organizing conference of a new expression. Open issues aren’t inherently good or bad, but they should be identified so people understand the follow up work that needs to be done at some later point.

Three – Is a petition self-enabling? May a plan be implemented without additional legislation or a constitutional amendment? The early press release for the UMCNext plan envisioned a step in its plan as follows: “Call a Special Session of the General Conference in 2022 that would serve as a Constitutional Convention. The purpose of this meeting is to ensure that The UMC takes the next faithful step to create a new structure of The UMC according to a renewed/resurrected mission, vision, and values.” This foreshadowed a plan that was not self-enabling (As noted, I have not read the UMCNext petition so the petition itself may or may not retain this feature).

Four – If the petition is not self-enabling on an issue, does it properly delegate the issue? An example from the Plain Grace Plan will demonstrate this point. Clergy pensions need to be addressed in a plan but the subtleties and nuances of secular pension law makes it impossible to legislate a pension plan. However, the Plain Grace Plan delegates that authority to Wespath (using language largely drafted by Wespath in 2019) and provides enabling legislation for Wespath to take care of the issue. That has been the historical approach used in the Book of Discipline.

Five – Are there suggested amendments that might improve the clarity of the plan, without altering the substance? As I write, I might attempt to note areas that amendments might help clarify the petition or deal with an open issue. In doing so, however, I will not attempt to suggest amendments that change the petition’s intent or desired result.

Six – Compare the petition to the Plain Grace Plan. I’ll confess that at this point I will slip into advocacy for the Plain Grace Plan, if I think it offers a better solution.

In addition to these six global issue spotting concerns that comprise the initial list, as I read and study petitions there will be specific issues I address. For example, how does the petition address asset division?

I will confess, as an initial matter, that one area I won’t spend time on is attaching labels to the drafters of the plan. In some circles, much has been made about who had input into the plan. For some it appears to be the sine qua non of plan evaluation. For example, the Indy Plan has received support and/or criticism based on who was and wasn’t at the negotiating table. Similarly critiques have been made about the UMCNext plan. I think such critiques miss the mark and I don’t intend to spend much time on this. To me it seems that judging a plan based on who drafted it is like saying a cake tastes better if it’s baked in a Whirlpool oven rather than a Kenmore oven. The real test is how does the cake taste, not which oven was it baked in. The important part of assessing petitions is the actual plan, not who drafted it. Giving inordinate attention to who drafted a plan focuses on imagined motives and suspicions behind the plan rather than the plan itself.  Focusing on the drafters of a plan is merely a way of continuing ad hominem attacks that were so prevalent at GC 2019. Hopefully, GC 2020 will move beyond destructive ad hominem attacks that are totally inconsistent with the church’s mission.

As I started to consider this post a word popped into my mind that I hadn’t thought of in many years. The word is “kluge”. I first heard it when I was representing a company in a significant lawsuit involving a complex software project. One of the software experts with whom I was working used the word to describe a software system. Wikipedia contains a pretty good definition of kluge: “A kludge or kluge is a workaround or quick-and-dirty solution that is clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain. This term is used in diverse fields such as computer science, aerospace engineering, Internet slang, evolutionary neuroscience, and government.” I’m hoping that the petitions I read are elegant, efficient, simple to extend and easy to maintain.

Keep reading future posts for more of my thoughts.  Thanks for taking the time to read this post.