The 2024 Convention resulted in the election of the following people and the passing of these two Standing Resolutions and one amendment.
Election Results
President: Rev. Dr. Jim Lawrence
Vice President: Kurt Fekete
Secretary: Karen Conger
General Council: Herb Ziegler, Kei Pang, and Rev. Thom Muller
Standing Committee of Communications and Information: Tara Conklin
Standing Committee of Education and Resources: Rev. Shada Sullivan
Standing Committee of Financial Accountability: Tom Neuenfeldt and Kurt Fekete
Committee on Admission to the Ministry: BJ Neuenfeldt
Board of Trustees CSS Rep. Class: Rev. Dr. Gard Perry
Standing Committee of Nominations: Pastor Kelly Milne
Standing Resolution: Repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery & Statement of Support for Indigenous Peoples in Pursuit of Restitution & Reparations
The Swedenborgian Church of North America (SCNA) publicly repudiates the so-called “Doctrine of Discovery” starting in the 15th century that was employed by European Christians to colonize and subjugate the lands and indigenous peoples they “discovered” outside of Europe and force upon them European laws, cultural, practices, languages, and religious dogma. Swedenborg revealed that Divine Providence intends for humans to think, intend, and act in spiritual freedom, and not be compelled by outside force. The SCNA encourages all its constituent bodies to recognize, affirm, and support the right of indigenous peoples to celebrate their languages and traditions, pass on their stories, practice their religious rights, and, to whatever extent practicable, to return to their role as stewards over their sacred ancestral lands whereon to reclaim, tend, and protect the resources they once managed and depended upon in the lands they revere.”
Standing Resolution: Standing Resolution on Climate Justice
Within the Swedenborgian traditions, our innate connection to nature is deeply valued as a means for communication with the Divine, a way for us to encounter spirituality through the power of correspondences. Swedenborg’s theology has long fertilized a history of environmental justice, from the foundation of the Sierra Club in 1892, in San Francisco, to the motivations behind some of the first movements for animal rights in the United Kingdom. For many involved in these movements and traditions, nature was not something corrupt or sinful, or base matter that we humans had to transcend, or turn into profit; it was intrinsically, instead, an interconnected web, a ladder extending between all created things, whose dynamic relationships should “stun” our minds with wonder (DLW no. 332).
Our churches have also long esteemed the critical insights afforded by modern science; that we are “now permitted” (nunc licet) to enter into the secrets of faith with a scientific understanding of the cosmos. It is with gravest concern that we join the faith leaders of other religious traditions in acknowledging the ongoing consequences of anthropogenic climate change, and the present and future harm that our mistreatment of the environment continues to inflict. With this standing resolution, we affirm the consensus and evidence provided by the scientific community about our quickly warming planet, and believe that we are called upon by our Swedenborgian faith to put our moral concerns into action, to be “of use” to our neighbor, in its broadest sense, to work for the greater good of all living things which refract God’s Divine Love and Wisdom.
The catastrophic consequences of climate change are not equally distributed, and we acknowledge how the brunt of the environmental crisis is most seriously impacting marginalized societies and persons (the poor, the disabled, and various black and brown communities in the global south and elsewhere, indigenous peoples, women and youth). As Christians, we are called to justice and solidarity with those who are suffering — “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters, you have also done it for me” — and as Swedenborgians we embrace all persons as members of one universal family in which we share.
We affirm that while a call to climate justice will accordingly take many different forms, that the Swedenborgian faith nevertheless shares a grounded orientation towards the presence of the spiritual as intrinsically part of, and entangled with, the goodness of the natural world (“And God saw that it was good”). We believe that the Divine calls for us to be better stewards of this gift of Creation, so that future generations of human and other-than-human life may flourish, continuing to actualize a heaven on earth, an earth as it is in heaven. We mourn the ongoing, unnecessary loss of biodiversity caused by human greed—this sixth great extinction the earth is undergoing—and commit to regenerating not only our individual selves, but this collectively shared and most precious planet we all call home.
Heeding a call to have radical hope, we encourage Swedenborgian communities in all their varieties of use to consider taking and encouraging the following actions:
For individuals: to be conscientious consumers taking the time to research the impacts of the greener alternatives they are considering. For congregations: to offer creation care worship & education centering environmental justice, socially-responsible investments, and the local advocacy & support of environmentally just, green efforts. For the denomination as a whole: to explore socially-responsible investments, join/support/promote lobbying efforts of grassroots movements which center environmental justice and aim to build support across bipartisan lines for climate justice legislation.
Bylaws Amendment: Common Fund
Article XVIII
Common Fund Investment Committee
Amended
An Investment Committee of five members shall be appointed by the General Council for a term of five years, and each member may be reappointed without term limits. The Treasurer of the Convention shall serve as Chair of the Investment Committee ex officio with voting rights.
