With the emphasis on Sand Creek during this conference session, we managed to do most of the “business” portion of the weekend on Saturday. This is one of those years when there isn’t that much legislation to ponder, which is nice in advance of next year’s pre-General Conference voting and petitioning. So, today was all about hearing reports from various conference agencies, voting on the few petitions we had in legislative committees, and spending the afternoon in clergy and laity sessions—all the things that our Discipline requires of us.
I was humbled to hear some of the stories told this morning about the ways in which members of our annual conference pulled together during the devastating fires and floods that ravaged Colorado this past year. It seems to me that we Methodists are consistently at our best when helping others, which was also evidenced by the mountain of health kits and flood buckets in the main entry hall of the convention center which were ready to be loaded on trucks for shipment to the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) Depot in Salt Lake City. From there, those kits will be shipped out to make a difference in the lives of people around the world.
But we also heard about some things we can do better. The conference statistician, Dennis Shaw, presented some of the stark reality that we’re not doing as well as we used to at impacting new Christians with the gospel. The “Imagine Team” was formed to look at some new ways of reversing those trends and we heard a little about their work in that direction. We were given the opportunity to tweet in our answers to questions about our hope for the conference going forward. Whatever we hope for, the truth is that we have a lot of work ahead of us!
Being a clergy type, I hiked up to First UMC Pueblo for the clergy session this afternoon, where we commissioned some folks who have responded to a call to ministry and approved the ordination of some others for tomorrow morning. We celebrated those who are retiring from active ministry this year and remembered others who have died. The laity had their own session, and while I haven’t had a chance to catch up with the lay delegates from our church in Monument, it usually sounds like a great time.
This is the kind of business we do every year—sometimes tedious, occasionally maddening, and often enlightening. It’s a reminder, however, that the word “administration” contains “ministry” with in it. “Business as usual” isn’t always a negative. Sometimes it reminds us, again, of who we are as a church and what we are to be about.
