[The following, by Will Spotts, is crossposted from The PC(USA) on Israel and Palestine.]

The 219th General Assembly of the PC(USA) is scheduled to begin on July 3, 2010. Among many things on their agenda, the assembled commissioners are yet again being called on to pass judgment on the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians. I sometimes wonder if the gathered commissioners (or the Presbyterians who send them) comprehend the magnitude of the task they are being asked to do.

General Assemblies are often littered with lofty words and phrases - things like 'discernment', 'justice', 'prophetic', and the 'guidance of the Holy Spirit'. In spite of this elevated language, I'm inclined to wonder if commissioners know going in of the unprecedented complexity of the issues upon which they are being asked to sit in judgment. Do they know the sheer volume of literature on Israelis and Palestinians? Do they know that every fact offered in support of one agenda or another is disputed? Do they know that multiple competing narratives of the history of the region exist? Do they know the competing legitimate claims to justice? Do they know the notorious biases that afflict dialog on this subject? Do they know the demonstrable biases of the committees, agencies, and officials of their denomination? Are they even expecting the volume of information they are actually being presented in the proposals themselves? These proposals total literally hundreds of pages of text. Even if the commissioners intentionally sat down and tried to sift through the information, to give a fair hearing to all sides, to verify the statements presented to them as facts, it is doubtful that they would be able to come to a fair and true conclusion. Going farther, the likelihood that they, in their week or so together, would be able to propose any productive policy solution is, to put it diplomatically, slim. At best they have before them a Solomonic task.

But that is not the way General Assemblies work. Far more issues come before a General Assembly than the Middle East. The commissioners have their work divided into committees - so that only a portion of the commissioners consider any given issue in any depth. It is the committee that hears testimony and makes recommendations to the whole assembly - who then votes. But the gathered assembly votes without having heard the testimony or understood the committee's process and rationale, often without being particularly familiar with the issues in question. In order to form recommendations for the entire GA, the committee itself has only a portion of the time of a General Assembly. In short, only a fraction of commissioners will spend much time with the various proposals on Israel and Palestine. Even these will be very limited in what they are able to consider. The procedures of a particular committee can be strongly affected by the moderator - who can, depending on personal temperament and agenda, guide the conversation toward a particular end. Additionally, officials, committees, and agencies of the denomination have far more (essentially unlimited) time to make their case than do overture advocates or others who testify. Since these are the very people who are often providing information that reflects a particular (in this case anti-Israel) agenda, it is highly unlikely that both sides will get a full, fair, and unbiased hearing. Yet the commissioners must still make a judgment.

Now those of us outside the PC(USA) - and the vast majority of members within the PC(USA), are powerless to alter this system. It can, in theory, be done; but the process required is daunting enough to be prohibitive. Instead, I think it would be better for us to actually examine and speak out about those things the commissioners are being asked to consider. So what is coming before this assembly?

Items of business for a General Assembly in the PC(USA) come from three basic sources. Individual presbyteries overture the General Assembly with proposals about issues of common concern to Presbyterians. These can either originate at the presbytery level or they can be proposed to a presbytery by an individual session (a congregation's governing board). National Committees of the General Assembly can make proposals - for example, the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy has provided a Human Rights Update 2010 that includes three action items, and the Committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment is proposing that the PC(USA) strongly denounce Caterpillar. Sometimes proposals from national Committees of the PC(USA) stem from their standing mandates; at other times, specific items are requested by referral from a prior General Assembly - as in the case of the report from the Middle East Study Committee. [As a point of clarification - these national committees are either permanent or have been given a specific mandate; they are not the same as the committees that consider business before a General Assembly.] Additionally, commissioners to the General Assembly can author individual resolutions.

At this time (May 10, 2010) there are Sixteen items of business are scheduled to come before the General Assembly. Eleven are overtures from presbyteries; five are from national committees. Both these are listed below. I will present more information about their specific contents in my next two posts. Additional items may still appear, and commissioner's resolutions will, naturally, not be available until the event begins. All the overtures and committee recommendations can be found on the PC(USA)'s 219th General Assembly website.

Overtures from Presbyteries:

Item 14-01 and 14-02 “On Divestment from Caterpillar, Inc.” – from the Presbyteries of Newark and San Francisco.

Item 14-04 "On Recognition that Israel's Laws, Policies, and Practices Constitute Apartheid against the Palestinian People” – from the Presbytery of San Francisco.

Item 14-05 “On Commending, ‘A Moment of Truth: A Word of Faith and Hope from the Heart of Palestinian Suffering,’ as an Advocacy Tool” – from the Presbytery of San Francisco.

Item 08-09 “On Referring 'Christians and Jews: People of God" and "Understanding Christian-Muslim Relations'” – from the Presbytery of San Francisco.

Item 14-09 “On Seeking Compliance to U.S. Government Policy in the Use of Military Aid by All Parties in the Middle East” – from the Presbytery of Chicago.

Item 14-10 “Toward Peace and Reconciliation in the Middle East” – from the Presbytery of Baltimore.

Item 14-06 “On Middle East Peacemaking” – from the Presbytery of San Joaquin.

Business Brought to the GA by Committees:

Item 11-04 “Human Rights Update 2010″ (A Report for General Assembly full consideration from the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy).

Item 14-03 “MRTI Report of Its Engagement with Corporations Involved in Israel, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank.”

Item 14-08 “‘Breaking Down the Walls’--From the Middle East Study Committee.”

Item 08-03 “Approve the paper, ‘Christians and Jews: People of God.’” – sponsored by the General Assembly Mission Council.

Item 08-04 “Toward an Understanding of Christian-Muslim Relations” – sponsored by the General Assembly Mission Council.

There are two additional scheduled items that are not directly related to Israelis and Palestinians that would have an effect on advocacy of this kind.

Item 09-03 "On Amending the Process for Forming Social Witness Policy" - from the Presbytery of Grand Canyon.

Item 16-01 "On Commending Confessions that Uphold the Oneness of All Believers, and Discontinuing Efforts to Include the Belhar Confession in the Book of Confessions" - from the Presbytery of Sacramento.

In just looking over this list of titles - even without seeing their specific contents - three things stand out.

First, these items of business do seem to be weighted in one direction. There are, of course, three or four exceptions, but the general trend does not bode well.

Second, at the General Assembly they will handled by five separate committees. Most will be addressed by Committee 14 - Middle East Peacemaking Issues. The papers on Christianity and Judaism and Christianity and Islam will be considered by Committee 08 - Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations. The "Human Rights Update 2010″ will be considered by Committee 11 - Social Justice Issues B: The Exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the World. The overture about the Belhar Confession will be addressed by Committee 16 - Theological Issues and Institutions. And the formation of social witness policy will be considered by Committee 09 - Mission Coordination. One effect of this distribution will be to make it very difficult for observers to follow all of the issues - as these committees will be meeting simultaneously.

Third, the relevant overtures come from seven presbyteries. Four of them (out of ten or eleven depending on how you count the divestment overtures) come from the Presbytery of San Francisco. The PC(USA) consists of 173 Presbyteries. This can hardly be considered a groundswell of interest or support from the church as a whole. Given that fact, I find interesting that five items are coming from national committees of the denomination.

Will Spotts