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The Very Rev. George Werner (left), president of the House of Deputies, chats with Channing Horner (center), a deputy from the Diocese of West Missouri, and Horner's wife Louise, following a talk by Werner at Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kansas City, Mo. on Sept. 16.   Photo by Melodie Woerman

House of Deputies leader sees challenges ahead

By Melodie Woerman

Editor, The Harvest

The Very Rev. George Werner is a man who has to plan ahead. As president of the House of Deputies, he is responsible for the way deputies elected from every diocese in the Episcopal Church will conduct their legislative business at General Convention. And that requires a lot of planning.

Werner, who was in Kansas City, Mo., Sept. 16 to address the Lay Academy of the Diocese of West Missouri, said he already is working on how important legislative matters will be considered at General Convention when it meets in June 2006 in Columbus, Ohio.

Windsor response

Top on the agenda will be issues surrounding the relationship of the Episcopal Church to other parts of the Anglican Communion. To help with that, he and Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold have appointed a Special Commission on the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.

That body has been charged with preparing the way for General Convention to receive and respond to the Windsor Report, the February 2005 communiqué of the Primates’ Meeting and the actions of the June 2005 meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council.

Werner said he hopes this group will help speed consideration of this issue by deputies next summer. “One of my hopes is that as they get things from all over the church they will pull them together in a way and write something helpful,” he said.

And even though this will be a hot-button issue, Werner said it likely won’t hit the deputies’ agenda until the waning days of General Convention. That’s because the House of Bishops will be concentrating much of its early attention on the election of a successor to Frank Griswold, he said.

“They’re going to be obsessed with electing the next Presiding Bishop,” Werner said. “I’ve seen it three times now. It’s hard to get them to concentrate until they have elected the new ‘beauty queen.’”

Werner said he doesn’t have a sense yet of what response the church might make to the Windsor Report, but he said he has a “gut feeling” the bishops won’t extend their moratorium on confirming new bishops beyond convention.

He said that the House of Bishops, when it meets in March 2006, could come up with “Son of Moratorium,” as he jokingly suggested, but he said the number of bishop elections on the schedule would seem to prevent that.

Werner said he isn’t sure how the bishops will begin to deal with this issue.

“The House of Bishops will have to decide on some things on their own,” he said.

“Our tradition is that the House of Bishops is the steady group, they’re always there, they are the ones who always start with theology, they’re not worried about getting elected. We [the House of Deputies] are the one who keep things moving and from getting deadlocked. That didn’t happen. I’m not sure what the plan is.”

Fewer debate hours

Werner has a plan of his own — a plan to keep legislation moving through the House of Deputies so matters can be discussed in a shortened format.

“We’re doing a lot of work inside our office, planning, because we have about six or seven fewer hours of legislative time,” he said. “We’ve given all the dioceses a day less out in convention, which will compute into a lot of money. We shortened it to try to get more people there who couldn’t come otherwise.”

Werner said the House of Deputies early on will tackle proposed revisions to Title IV of the national church canons. Those deal with matters of discipline for clergy and will represent a major canonical revision.

“Title IV issues will be very big,” he said, “and I’m really leaning on them to make sure they can get them out by Friday and get them really done, because if you have everything coming up in those last three days, it doesn’t work well.”