Annual Conference — Day One

Well, here I am. It’s 7 a.m., Thursday, and I’m in the hotel lounge waiting for breakfast with Andy. Arrival at the Waterfront Marriott in Baltimore yesterday was uneventful. There are very few places in our region that can accommodate roughly 1400 people, and allow them to meet in one room and satisfy accessibility requirements, and some of those are prohibitively expensive.

Today there will be a meeting of all the clergy and a meeting of all the laity. Worship, a speech by the bishop on the state of the church, more worship, and a speech by Paul Monteiro, the president’s religion liaison. In addition, the conference will consider various pieces of legislation. We will debate and vote to ratify 32 amendments to the Constitution of The United Methodist Church approved by the General Conference of the church last year. Most of the amendments address the global nature of the church. At present the church in the United States dominates the church in other parts of the world. These amendments propose that there be a balance in the church around the world. While at first blush this might seem an obviously good thing to do, not everybody agrees. The arguments against it have merit.

For a review of conference preparations and pre-conference news, see the UM Connection Daily for Thursday.

I am not the only one here. Glen Mar sends four lay people to the conference as members of the conference. As such we vote our consciences for the good of the whole region. Why four? It’s not based on size relative to other churches, but rather on how many ordained clergy we have. Our ordained clergy are Andy, John, Al, and Ruth, who are members of the conference, not Glen Mar. Our lay members this year are: me, Dottie Byers, Karol Hess, and Lynne Phillips.

The laity session was so-so. The speaker, Joseph Robinson, Jr., was average. We heard the usual reports from the United Methodist Women, United Methodist Men, the Lay Speaking leadership and Young Adult Council. Nothing remarkable happened. Lunch was a nice fish dish.

Sadly, I will miss the entire afternoon while tending to family matters. I should be back for the evening session. Tomorrow’s conference daily newspaper should be able to fill you in.

Well, I got back in time for the elections of conference officers for the next year. Andy, Al, Dottie, and I went to dinner. After dinner we approved the consent calendar and discussed the 32 proposed amendments to the constitution. After an hour of questions and speeches we completed our ballots and adjourned for the night.

Glen

This entry was posted on 4 June 2009 at 09:13 and is filed under News Item, General Nourishment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.