It’s 2:00 a.m. and I’m just getting ready for bed after a long day at General Conference. The day began with in a most amazing way. Bishops and the heads of our General Agencies cast several visions for our denomination for the next four years and beyond - visions that were specific, exciting, compelling and which I believe God is calling our denomination, and our particular church, to pursue. Among these visions is a call to increase our efforts at addressing the root causes of poverty, to develop hundreds of new congregations reaching new people for Christ, addressing diseases of poverty including Malaria in sub-Saharan Africa and the development of “principled Christian leaders” for the church and the world - with a special emphasis on young adults.

These may seem like self-evident goals, and they are each goals that we are already heavily engaged in at Church of the Resurrection, but for the church to name them, to put new resources behind them, and to encourage United Methodist Churches across the country to pursue these goals is exciting. There is also a specificity around these goals I found invigorating. Among the goals announced: Increase by 25% our ministry with the poor through our 102 United Methodist related ministries to the poor in the U.S. while training developing five pilot projects in other parts of the world; work with international partners to reduce by 66% the number of malaria related deaths of children under the age of 5; start 400 new United Methodist Churches outside the U.S. and 650 new churches inside the U.S. and recruit 1,000 new church planters; provide short term mission experiences for 100 young people and increase by 25% the number of clergy under age 35.

Later in the day we divided into our “legislative committees” - these are committees where we study petitions submitted by individuals and churches for consideration. I am in the Faith and Order legislative committee. There are dozens of petitions we’ll read, study, discuss and vote upon. The most controversial of these relate to homosexuality. My hope is that the exciting visions set forth this morning don’t get lost in the on-going struggle over this challenging issue.

In searching for an online photo of the conference I was surprised to see this one, of our delegation from Kansas East including former Resurrection associate pastor Eduardo Bousson on the far right.  I’ll get some better photos of the conference as a whole for a future post.