Day 2 - Part 3 - New Moderator Elected

At GA we have approximately 700 commissioners - 1/2 elders, 1/2 clergy. We also have Youth advisory delegates & missionary delegates. We also have maybe 1500 - 2000 observers and staff, task force members and volunteers. It's big. The commissioners are the ones who vote on issues including who becomes our next Moderator. We began the Moderator selection process at 7pm on Saturday. Each candidate got to speak for 10 miuntes (so many candidates - total of 60 miuntes). We had questions for 90 miuntes. So it's 9:30 before we start voting. The assembly is high tech too where all the commissioners and advisory delegates have electronic voting devices. Like remote controls for the TV. A candidate has to have a simple majority before the election is called. With 6 candidates this was bound to take several iterations. Well that was fine except for the glitches in the voting devices. We realized that abuot 100 votes were not being counted. We worked through the problems and the final vote came in about 10:45pm.

The new moderator voted in was Cindy Bolbech. Cindy's characteristics that I observed; she has a great sense of humor, she loves the church, she was the only non-minister candidate, she seemed the most liberal although it did not sound as though she was interested in pushing an agenda except to make the church stronger by being creative. It seemed like a great choice, I suppose we will see when we measure our progress at the next GA.