In April delegates from around the world will gather in Fort Worth for the United Methodist Church’s General Conference.  General Conference is held once every four years and lasts nearly two weeks.  It includes worship, reports from the mission field, and budget proposals for the general boards and agencies of the denomination.  It will be a time when the church considers new visions and seeks to discern where God is leading us for the next four years.  It is also a time when the church wrestles with hundreds of petitions submitted by individual United Methodists, local churches, and other bodies within the denomination.  Anyone can submit a petition, and hundreds (thousands?) are submitted each year.  Some are innocuous.  Some require little debate.  But others are contentious and spark strong feelings on both sides.  Over the next two months I’ll be making weekly posts regarding some of the issues that will be debated at General Conference.  I am a delegate to the Conference.  During the Conference I’ll be giving you updates letting you know how the General Conference voted on the issues we’ll discuss on these pages.  My plan is to shed a little light on these topics that you may read about in the news, and to invite you to participate with one another in the debate.  I’ll post my first posting tomorrow, regarding the debate stirring over a proposal to locate the Bush Presidential Library along with a conservative political think tank on the campus of Southern Methodist University.