Conference

It's Annual Conference time again. This seems to roll around every year...and it comes around more quickly with each passing year!

For those who may not be aware (or are not United Methodist), Annual Conference is the gathering, each year (hence the name "annual"), of all the clergy and representative laity in a geographic area to take care of business, ordain new clergy (and remember those who have gone home to be with Jesus), worship, celebrate God's faithfulness and mourn our failures. It's also a time for friends to reconnect, friends who may not see each other all year due to being spread out all over, in our case, the state of Indiana. To me, that last part is the most important.

But there are serious, important matters facing the Annual Conference. Things like...

• How do we continue to provide ministry and worship and all the things we have always done in an age when people's giving seems to include the church as "last" or "if I have have any left over"?
• How do we respond to cultural issues and remain faithful to the Scriptures? The most obvious issue (because it's in the news all the time these days) is the matter of homosexuality and same-sex marriage, but that is not by any means the only issue the continues to challenge us as a people of faith.
• Are we truly making disciples or are we just making church members? Are we faithful to our mission of "making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world"? And if we are, why is the world not transformed?
• With decreasing membership and the increasing age of both our clergy and our laity, can the church survive? Some "futurologists" (I don't know if that's the correct term or not) say the United Methodist Church can, in simple economics, only last fifteen more years without a turnaround (known in the church as "revival").
• This year, we will be electing delegates to go to the 2016 General Conference (the body that speaks for the entire denomination, which meets only once every four years) in Portland, Oregon. Eight clergy and eight laity from Indiana will be part of that body, which numbers 850 total.

These and many other issues lay before us in Indianapolis this week. Please pray for us. Pray that we will be faithful to listen, hear and follow God's desire for us. Pray that we will be faithful disciples in all that we say, do and vote. And pray that God will forgive us when we, as we inevitably will, fail him on some points.

God is good, and his church will endure. Of that I am sure. I am praying that we, as a small part of God's kingdom, will continue to be faithful and be used by God. So I invite and covet your prayers.