If you would like to read more about Bishop Lowry, click here or here.

Other Bishops elected at Jurisdictional Conference include Bishop Earl Bledsoe who will be assigned to the North Texas Conference and Bishop Jim Dorff who will be assigned to the Southwest Texas Conference. I would encourage everyone to pray for these three men as they transition into these new roles . Particularly in our conference, I believe we are at a critical point in the history of Methodism in Central Texas in need of a strong leader to guide us through the next eight years.

I know that our delegation to Jurisdictional Conference strongly believes that Bishop Lowry was the strongest candidate for that role, and were very pleased to be assigned the candidate we hoped to receive going into this process.

If you’d like to know more about this process or what the role of the Bishop is within our church, click here.

We ate lunch today at Glorias, a really nice Mexican restaurant that is located in the old Montgomery Ward building in downtown Fort Worth. The food was great and that whole area is really neat. 

Here’s two pics of the rest of the First Methodist Mansfield delegation near the end of the day. We’re all a bit tired of hearing reports at this point. 

Luckily, my friends from Starbucks kept me energized today. 

Annual Conference always ends the same way with the traditional “reading of the appointments.” During this time, the Bishop and the Cabinet read the names of every church and every clergy who has been “appointed” to all the churches in our conference. The first picture above is my District Superintendent [my boss] reading our names and the second picture is the handout which lists the names of all our pastors. 

This is a really neat time for me because I can remember as a kid that this was the only time during Annual Conference where I got to go sit with my Dad. Mom would take us all up to the seat where he had been sitting all week to hear Dad’s name read again. 

Finally, this is who I got to end my day with… the staff at GLC. It was a wonderful ending to a very long day. Glen Lake changed my life, and it’s an honor to give back to this ministry. 

Peace, 

David

The last picture is of Jason and I. 

When we wrap up today here on day three, I’ll be heading to Glen Lake to speak to their summer staff as they complete their training week prior to church camps beginning next week. Be back home on Thursday to enter the home stretch to a busy weekend. 

1. You have to like to eat. 

2. You have to be able to stand around. 

3. You have to be able to sit still. 

Anything combination of two of the above qualities can pre-qualify you for Annual Conference 2009. Applications may be received by clicking here. 

If anything exciting happens I’ll be sure and share it here or if Sharon has another injury in her attempt to keep herself occupied, it will be reported here first! 

1. New and Renewed Congregations
   • Find people on the edge of society not now being reached by United Methodist congregations
   • Start 400 new churches outside of the United States by Dec. 31, 2012
   • Recruit 1,000 new church planters to start 650 new churches in the United States with 50% of these being racial/ethnic congregations
   • Develop new international churches and revitalize town & country and urban churches
2. Global Health Initiative
   • Work with international partners to reduce by 66% malaria related deaths of childrenunder the age of 5
   • 60% of all our annual conferences involved in health care advocacy around health care access, disease prevention and infant mortality
   • Deploy 53 new missionaries for global health for Africa, Asia and Latin America
   • Expand our ministry to substance abuse and related violence ministries by 20%
3. Address the eradication of Poverty
   • Increase by 25 % our ministry to the poor through our existing 102 mission groups
   • Place 50 indigenous leaders in poor locales to be in ministry with children and women
   • Develop 5 Pilot Projects to address poverty in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the US
   • Train at least one advocate for the poor in every annual conference.
4. Developing Christian Leaders
   • Short-Term Mission experiences for 100 young persons
   • Train 9,500 persons in Africa and Asia in theology, church administration, evangelism, discipleship formation and mission outreach.
   • Develop a network of 100 prophetic clergy and laity around the world to speak for and work for social justice
   • Increase by 25 % the number of candidates for ordained ministry under the age of 35
   • Increase by 20 % the number of women senior pastors serving large membership churches in the US.

After “the incident” Sharon put her pen away and sat quietly throughout the rest of the meeting. What’s the moral of the story? Boring meetings can be hazardous to your health. 

Today, I finally finished my long journey through Seminary. Pictured above with me here is my favorite Seminary professor, Dr. Feille. I want to say thanks to everyone who has encouraged and supported me throughout school. 

If you want to see some additional pictures, click here. 

Seeing Gray : Adam Hamilton’s Blog, Senior Pastor, Church of the Resurrection
Central Texas Delegate Blog : This is written by three alternate delegates from our conference including our Student Ministries Director, Jake Allen.
Authenticity Matters: A blog by my friend Paul Gravely who is one of the lead volunteers for GC.

You can also subscribe to an official news feed from General Conference here.

One of the main reasons that I was in attendance was to see and support our choir and orchestra who participated in the worship service. It was certainly a special honor for them to be invited and they did a wonderful job sharing several pieces of music during the preservice concert and participating in the mass choir during the worship time. I was so proud of these dedicated volunteers and certainly our excellent staff who leads them.

The actual worship time was an incredibly moving moment. Perhaps you can relate to the experience I had last night when I had to stop singing because my heart was “welling” up, and I needed to take a moment and regain my composure. Seeing hundreds of bishops from all around the world process into the worship space, sharing in songs and hearing prayers in languages from around the globe, and imagining the 11 million United Methodists throughout our world who were represented in that place made me take a step back and recognize the size of our effort… and at that moment, the word effort really felt appropriate.

Now certainly I could go on to talk about the fact that the number today should be more like 30 million… that the UMC faces incredible challenges over the next 15-20 years… that there are issues on the agenda for this week that can either springboard us into revival or further cripple our connection… But last night, as I worshipped with brothers and sisters from all over our world, the prayer that was given to me was this…

God, please bless our efforts. God, please bless the desire that is in this room to serve you well. Even in the midst of our struggle and past failures, bless us because we long to be a blessing in your name in your world.

Bishop Huie’s message last night was so appropriate to begin this gathering. She talked about “Resurrection Hope.” To read more about last night’s gathering and Bishop Huie’s message, click here.

I was blessed to participate last night and to see again our old friend named Hope. Regardless of what your eyes or ears tell you over the next 10 days of General Conference, remember that Hope is alive and well.