"Wouldn't it be great," Mary Elva leaned over and whispered, "if the GAC would elect two women to lead the GAC?"

Yes, that would have been great. Most of the four days I spent in Louisville attending the General Assembly Council meeting's I was either at Mary Elva Smith's side or somewhere near one of the other "strong woman" presences at the meeting. Still, when the election of the GAC's chair and vice chair came around, I have to admit that I wasn't even thinking about gender representation.

Ok, ok, I was a little overwhelmed by the notion of spending four days at the Brown Hotel in Louisville (note to self: see "Elizabethtown") listening to the people in power discuss and decide the future of the Council and the Church.

Because I was identified as a visitor to the meeting, I had no official voice and no vote, but thankfully Carol Hylkema (remember her from the 2005 Leadership Event?) and Karen Breckenridge from the Advocay Committee for Women's Concerns, along with other bigwigs with big hearts and mouths, were quick to officially vocalize the words I said. I sat in on the committee meetings for the National Ministries Division, one of three administrative divisions of the church, and learned so much not only about how the church works but also about some ways to tackle an issue are more effective than others.

A lot of the four days were spent talking about the Mission Work Plan and the restructuring of the Council itself. There's a more detailed version of the Mission Work Plan online that points to young adults specifically, and the end product of the restructuring process was to meant improve communication and representation. Check out www.pcusa.org/gac for more on those issues.

Of course, the GAC elected Allison Seed, a charismatic and fair pastor from Kansas, and Charles Easley, an astute African American man with years of experience, to lead the GAC after General Assembly this summer, and that guarantees some diversity. On the other hand, the Council rejected an amendment to the proposal to restructure the GAC that called for intentional representation of people with disabilities. Young adults will now occupy four of the 39 seats on the restructured Council, but one member of the National Ministries Division Committee protested that young adults were overrepresented in relation their actual activity in the church -- instead of questioning why young adults are leaving the church more often than ever before.

Ted Wardlaw from Austin Theological Seminary spoke to the GAC on Friday, the last day I was there, about the church's dwindling membership. "By 2040 there will be one Presbyterian," he said, "and he or she will spend all of his or her time on a plane back and forth to Louisville." People laughed, but it's something to think about. How effective is the work we're doing? "There's no retirement from the Kingdom of God," Allison Seed told a woman who had just left the Presbyterian Center after 30 years. She's right: we have to keep plugging along if we want to see some change.

Peace to you all,
Hillary

Is there fair representation of left handed people? How about Balding people? Just playing with you ;-} By the way, Allison Seed is from Missouri not Kansas.