Breaking news out of Alexandria Va.: Anglican Watch is putting the Episcopal General Convention in charge of answering that question for the ages — how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Here are the details:
For starters, we’ll need to involve about 10,000 people. Nothing worse than poorly governed angels.
Of course, we can’t have all 10,000 deputies running around without a say. So let’s plan on 45 committees, 15 task forces, and a few consultants here and there. These are serious issues, folks.
And with all those deputies, we’ll need employees to keep the wheels turning behind the scenes. Total headcount, about 540.
Nor are we going to let anarchy reign. With all those committees’ reports, recommendations, and proposals, we need some serious rules of order.
Nor can we make do with just any old rules of order. We’ve got big plans for our angels, so we’ve got the chancellor and a bunch of people hammering away on tweaking the rules. After all, what good is a consent agenda if it’s not managed appropriately?
Speaking of, we want to get this right, so only key officers of General Convention are on the rules committee. Don’t even go there.
But hey, this is a democracy, so we’ll hold a listening session. Some might not be able to attend the listening session, so we’ll also take written comments. After all, democracy is at the very core of how we do things.
When we do meet, once every three years, there’s a ton of stuff to consider. So we’ll need about a week; believe me, some of our delegates will still feel rushed. And meeting space for an event this size doesn’t come cheap–we’d better budget about $1.5 million annually.
Wonder what all this costs? We bet you do.
We’ve laid it all out for you in our 26-page budget. It covers everything—from the advisability of angels doing the minuet versus the cha cha, to making sure all the angels are welcome on the dance floor, to committees studying which angels should be on which pins. Didn’t consider that, did you?
By now, you probably think that this meeting is enormous. We hear you, but must respectfully disagree. It’s only a little more than three times the size of the Chinese People’s Congress, which has 2,980 members.
Actually, we feel bad for China. With 1.4 billion people, they are clearly cutting corners on governance. They should have at least 9 million members in the People’s Congress. Slackers!
I forget: what was our original topic? Oh yeah, angels doing Donna Summer on the head of a pin.
Well, we hate to break it to you, but there are only about 1.5 million angels are out there. So no one’s all that worried about whether it takes one pin, two pins, or even 20 pins. Not to mention only about 300,000 turn out when it’s time to get down and boogie.
That said, don’t go getting all crazy with the angels or the pins. Money’s tight. We need to negotiate on the price of those pins.
In fact, things being what they are, we probably will wind up cutting the number of pins. I get that our mission is all about those damned angels, but it’s not like we’ve got unlimited money, so we’d better cut back.
45 committees and 15 task forces, and yet absolutely nothing will change about the one question that matters: why is our church disintegrating in front of their eyes? Imagine being so bad at your job, you’re still asking that question without any clue about why this mass exodus is happening. I stand by it, the national church is about the most useless organization that mankind has ever assembled.