General Council

To those who were interested,
Our next General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God is.... to be announced tomorrow. After 3 votes, George Wood was the runaway best vote getter, followed by Alton Garrison. It would be very surprising if he did not get it as of the vote we did just prior to closing today. This afternoon I had to leave the assembly hall for awhile to deal with urgent phone calls, but when I came back there was a big discussion going on about whether the next GS had to be full time. Someone put forth a resolution suggesting that he did not have to leave his Pastorate, and after discussion is was defeated by what I would guess would have been a 2/3 majority.

So that idea will take some more time to get accepted. But even having discussion about it is a HUGE step forward, which even impatient people like me have to admit. And 1/3 of the people being for it was amazing, given that it is a new idea to most, I guess.

After that decision was made, John Lindell, Pastor of James River Assembly there in Springfield, asked people not to vote for him because he would be unwilling to leave his Pastorate. He was the third highest vote-getter.

My good friend Ron Johnson did not get very many votes, to our great surprise. He would be a terrific leader I think.

The Relational Districts resolution was not considered today. There were something like 14 more resolutions added and passed out today, so the Constitutional resolutions went first. Whatever all that means exactly, I don't know, but I hope to impress you-all with phrases like "Constitutional resolutions". And I'm not betting that you are still reading this as of this point.

All I know is that they tried to squeeze about 8000 people into a space for about 5000, which left about 3000 grumpy people, and 5000 people squeezed together so tight it was mind numbing. However, even the mind was not as numb as other regions after sitting through 4 hours of parliamentary procedure.

Oh, and we are using electronic gadgets to vote. Very cool, with results of 7000 votes in about 10 minutes.

There you go...!

Gerry