I wanted you to know that Sarah Reid is serving as a page. She has been working at Henderson Settlement in Kentucky and she and her husband, Eric Yetter, who is a reserve delegate to General Conference are here. So, there is two on the Marshal/Page team from the Wyoming Conference.
Most everyone who reads my name tag as to where I am from thinks I'm from "where the buffalo live". When I explain that I'm a Pennsylvanian, they typically have a skeptical attitude. I then share the whole story about the Wyoming Valley and some understand.
This morning, we heard the Episcopal Address. It was an address filled with a call for us as a People called Methodists to share who we are with our communities and share our love with the world. We heard from the chair of the Connectional Table, which replaces the General Council of Ministries. Bishop John Hopkins shared, in the midst of a report lifting up hope, that a little 9 year old girl raised over $40,000 for Nothing But Nets. The denominational total for Nothing But Nets is 18 million dollars.
Vision Pathways (7) and Areas of Focus (4) call us to be about many of the things we have begun in Paupack: reaching out to our community, serving the poor, reaching out to children. There is much to do as a denomination and there is much to do in the local church, and the focus is in getting the local church to do its mission at the local level with the support from the denomination. I was encouraged by the fact that four heads of General Boards: Higher Education and Ministry, Global Ministries, Discipleship, and Communications are about integrating budgets and work to achieve this vision and these areas of focus. We heard a report from General Council on Finance and Administration that called us to be about stewardship from a position of abundance, celebrating what we have, not what we lack or do not have. More about these in tomorrow's blog.
A quote from this morning: Hope is false when it hides what is real. Real Hope can only come when realities are named.
The delegates are in workshops to help them understand the legislative committee process. In short, these committees examine every petition to come before General Conference and decide wether to include or to change or to not consider. Tonight, and for the next four or five nights, they will be about this process.
This morning, as I said earlier, I guided visitors into seats and kept traffic moving. Tonight, instead of Independent Commissions (they told me Marshals and Pages jobs were about change) I will be working at the Judicial Administration Legislative Committee. Not sure what they will be covering, but it should be interesting.
One of our jobs is passing a lot of things out to delegates and Bishops. I handed things out at the Bishop's table this morning and visited with Bishop Susan Morrison, Bishop William Boyd Grove, Bishop A. Frederick Mutti, (who I served with in Missouri before he was a bishop), and Bill Lawrence, formerly from the Wyoming Conference and now Dean of Perkins School of Theology. Bill will be speaking at the session of Wyoming Annual Conference this year.
Another warm day (87 degrees) with wind. Texas always seems to be hot!
For a flavor of conference or to see if you can find me, you can go to www.umc.org and click on the General Conference logo on the right. You can watch live streaming video and archived video from yesterday and this morning.
Talk to you soon.
Grace and Peace,
No comments:
Post a Comment