General Conference Legislation to be Available in January 2024
From Heather Hahn, UM News
Now that the September deadline to submit legislation to General Conference 2024 has passed, we're closer to a fuller picture of the proposals up for consideration when The United Methodist Church’s top lawmaking assembly next meets.
Work is already underway to prepare the new legislation for the Advance Daily Christian Advocate in a format that is readily accessible for our multinational and multilingual denomination. (The Daily Christian Advocate is the official journal of the United Methodist General Conference. The Advance DCA contains the agenda, rules, delegate listings, petitions, reports from church organizations, and other information for delegates.)
By denominational rules, the Advance Daily Christian Advocate must be available to delegates in four languages: English, French, Portuguese, and Kiswahili. It also must be available at least 90 days before the assembly begins. That date is Jan. 22 for next year’s gathering.
Legislation previously submitted when General Conference was set for 2020 will still be before delegates. That includes more than 700 petitions. (The Advance Daily Christian Advocate containing those properly submitted petitions and reports is available in PDF form.)
However, the postponement of General Conference reset the deadline for submitting petitions.
The Commission on the General Conference will release the supplement to the earlier Advance Daily Christian Advocate that contains the newly submitted petitions and new, updated reports from the denomination’s general agencies.
The new petitions won’t be the only changes in the coming supplement.
The current delegate handbook from 2020 “contains an accurate but now very irrelevant map of the Minneapolis Convention Center,” Brian Sigmon, the editor of the Daily Christian Advocate and its advance edition, told General Conference organizers during their May meeting.
“New information with the correct dates and times and a map of the Charlotte Convention Center that is just as accurate but now also helpful and relevant will need to be published.”
This new material as well as the previously submitted legislation will be available by Jan. 22 at dailychristianadvocate.org. Delegates will be able to access the site for free, and others will need to pay for a subscription. Free PDF versions of the supplement also will be added to generalconference.org.
Read the full story at https://www.umnews.org/en/news/what-comes-after-general-conference-deadline.