A little marginally informed speculation on the ebb and flow of General Convention:

While most of the 800+ deputies and alternates, the 280+ bishops and the several thousand exhibitors and interested parties will be in Columbus by Monday night, my hunch is that significant news will no be made until Thursday or perhaps Friday. It takes awhile for legislative committees to organize themselves, and our veteran deputies tell me that when they do get organized, they tend to dispense with Mom and Apple Pie resolutions first, just so that they have something to move forward for consideration in the full legislative sessions of the House of Deputies and the House of Bishops. Those sessions begin on Tuesday morning.

The committee dealing with issues raised by the Windsor Report will hold its public hearing on Wednesday night. Given the topic, I imagine that this hearing could run well on toward midnight. Having met late, I can’t imagine that the committee will have modified resolutions crafted by morning. It may even be difficult to have anything to put before the Houses until Friday. But perhaps I underestimate the committee.

It seems possible that these resolutions, once formulated, will be introduced quickly because I would imagine that the Convention will want this piece of business finished before the election of the new presiding bishop on Sunday. This would spare the Church the possibility that a new PB would make an 11th hour decision to put his or her personal stamp on resolutions that committees have been laboring over for more than a year.

My hope is that whatever we do about the Windsor Report, we don’t do it on Thursday. Senator John Danforth is the keynote speaker at the Presiding Bishop’s forum on Thursday night, and I think it is in our Church’s best interest to let the world hear what he has to say. If we introduce Windsor-related legislation on Thursday, reporters may give his presentation short-shrift and focus on the latest development in our sex saga. And that would be dispiriting.