Opening Worship

On Thursday 4th April 2024, from across the UK and beyond (shout-out to the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland, the Czech Unitarians, and many others!), we converged upon Staverton Park Hotel near Daventry, battling the forces of roadworks, train strikes and uncooperative banners. Having arrived, swiftly ditched the luggage in the storage room, and wrangled the banner poles into something resembling a T-shape, we began the GA 2024 with the traditional banner parade and opening worship hosted by one of our newest Unitarian groups, ‘Unitarians 4 Climate Justice’. They led an engaging half-hour’s opening worship featuring one of our most popular hymns, ‘Spirit of Earth’, and looking back at a very busy 12 months spent campaigning for Climate Justice in and around the UK.

Plenary 1: Motion on Artifical Intelligence

With a short pause to grab a coffee (we now have reusable cups! Yay!), we were into Plenary 1, and following adoption of Standing Orders and confirmation of the Steering Committee (Marion Baker, Angela Maher and Lynne Readett), and a discussion of safeguarding arrangements for the weekend by our Safeguarding Officer Gavin Howell (look forward to hearing more about the Torbay Project, Gavin), it was time for one of the more unusual motions we’ve had before the GA, from Twelve Full Members, on Artificial Intelligence.

This got some attention at the GA Motions Workshop a few weeks ago, I remember thinking that it was an interesting example of a ‘neither for nor against’ motion, which given the subject, is probably most appropriate – in this author’s opinion anyway. AI, like so many human tools, has gigantic potential for good and ill, and a motion urging us to understand it better can only be a good thing. Thinking back to the opening worship; if our  not-very-distant ancestors (watch this space, ancestors will be a theme this year) could have fully understood the forces they were unleashing as the Industrial Revolution began, what might they have done differently? We have the same opportunity now with regard to this new technology, and both the motion and the discussion – four speakers ‘for’ it, and two ‘neutral, none against – reflected this; there was only one vote against and a few abstentions; all other votes were in favour. Though Rev. Jo James did make the point that if people are going to vote ‘for’ a motion asking the Executive Committee (EC) to launch a Response Task Group, they might also like to put themselves forward to volunteer as members of said group.

Liz Slade then gave the Chief Officer’s Report, harking back to the old pledge from some years back, of increasing our quota membership by 30% (spoiler: since then, it has not increased by 30%), and reviewing her past five years in the role. She commented that perhaps our congregations can be thought of as ‘loaves of bread’. Each of us is baking a slightly different loaf, but our liberal religious tradition is the ‘yeast’ that makes it rise. Perhaps this points the way forward; should we be focussing on meeting spiritual hunger, rather than on the size of the oven?

Author’s note: whilst I understand the choice of metric, looking back, perhaps the issue with the old pledge was that a lot of very active people in our movement are not quota members, and I do wonder whether a prolonged effort to get them to sign up as such would have been the best use of everyone’s time. Then again, let’s face it, if we’d known the future when that pledge was made, we’d all have been hiding under our duvets as March 2020 rolled around, so perhaps it’s best to just leave the past behind us sometimes.

Thoughts of bread prompted thoughts of coffee and cake, and the plenary adjourned for a refreshment, and a check-in to our rooms prior to the first rounds of workshops, of which more to follow!