Renewing Covenant Task Force Proposes UU "General Conferences"

Rev. Susan Ritchie, of Columbus, Ohio, reported to the GA yesterday morning on the Recommendation of UUA Board Task Force on Re-Imagining Covenant. The Task Force recommends that the UUA implement regularly scheduled General Conferences [GCs] where participants would talk about theology and create relationships of accountability. These GCs and the business-oriented GAs would be scheduled for alternate years. The GC would "be smaller than our current General Assembly, so that meaningful discussions can be held..... Every effort should be made to make these conferences affordable, so that attendees are not limited to older people of means. Further, so that these conferences can build for the future of our movement, we should actively engage youth, young adults, UUs of color, and other historically under-represented groups." The GCs  would "engage in one or two large questions in depth over the course of several days.  It should be without activities that not directly advance the focused conversation. Rev. Ritchie explained that American Unitarianism conducted GCs until the merger with Universalism, which had a more decentralized structure. After the merger, only the business-oriented General Assembly survived.  Rev. Ritchie pointed out that, while the GA is a business meeting, the true work of Unitarian Universalism is not business, but theology, and that is the focus of a GC. 

The Task Force report also "strong[ly] urges the systemic reexamination of the roles and responsibilities enshrined in [the UUA's] current bylaws as we know this organization to have been derived from explicitly racist, sexist, and classist principles," explaining that the structure of nonprofits like the UUA is derived "from a nineteenth century small business model that consolidated power in a small number of patrons."