Getting started

Here I am in Fort Worth, Texas at General Conference. The hotel is about 15 minutes by shuttle from the convention center, but the room is great! :)


Today we did the training for recorders. I like working on the computer with this kind of program, so I think it will be fun. And I get to see how the legislative committees work up close and personal.


Some things I learned today about the process:

Anyone, whether an individual member of the church or a group in the church, can enter a petition.

There were over 18,000 petitions in 1988 and about 1560 this year, in part because the petitions that are duplicates are all put together.

The petitions propose changes to the discipline or the book of resolutions. The committees propose changes to the petitions.

ALL petitions have to be voted on at the plenary sessions, even if only on the consent agenda.

The committees cannot propose a change to anything in a particular paragraph of the discipline if there is not a petition that addresses that paragraph. The converse of that is that if there is one petition that addresses a particular paragraph, then the committee can propose any changes that they want under the guise of that petition.


Tomorrow is the opening worship of General Conference and I am really looking forward to that.

Signing out for now . . .
Martha