Iowa Annual Conference Constitutional Votes

After nearly hour and a half of debate and questions on Saturday morning, Amendment 1 was soundly defeated.  This followed Friday's vote that proclaimed we desire to be a global church and not a bunch of regional churhes by rejecting the amendments related to the change in our structure.  These votes give me more hope for the future of the United Methodist Church than I have had for many months.  If a liberal Conference like Iowa can see the foolishness of these amendments then there's a good chance others will too.

Since only 2 hours was allotted in the working agenda for the debate and vote on the amendments, a number of them were postpone well beyond their scheduled time.  Because of this I was not present for a few of the votes and therefore do not have the results as of yet.  When I get them I will update the results page.

There was a motion from the floor prior to voting on the United Methodist constitutional amendments which would have required the office of communication to publicize the results of the votes on the Conference website.  That motion was defeated.  However, that does not exclude me from sharing with you the unofficial results. 

Disclaimer:  While I tried to carefully record all the votes, these remain unofficial and no figures or other statements herewithin are endorsed by the Iowa Annual Conference.

Vote Results (PDF)

UPDATE:  For reason I cannot explain, the official results of the votes have been posted to the Conference website.  Here's a link to them.  It's a PDF file.  Results are found about 3/4 the way down on page 2.

Comments

[Ken Kerr]

John, your pdf says differently about the vote than your statement. Which is correct?

[John B]

I think where the confusion may lie is in the fact that all the amendments have to pass by 66.7%. Since Amendment One received a simple majority but far less than the needed number of votes to pass, (it received 52.8%), it thus lost at the IA Annual Conference.

[Ken Kerr]

Thanks John for the reminder. That's what I was thinking although I had read on several occassions about needing a 2/3rds majority. Thanks for the correction.

By the way, I appreciate you consertive thinking and look forward to reading more of your blog. It was great getting to know you at least a little last Feb at the Walk to Emmaus in WDM.

Ken