[RMC News] News: Delegate report day one April 23rd 2008 General Conference

[Strickland, Skip]

Is This a Jurassic General Conference?
By Charles Schuster

Sitting there where it said on my badge I was supposed to sit I began to wonder what I was watching. I began to speculate on the first worship service in which our church held nothing back.

Singing with 999 others “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing” and observing the parade of bishops and dancers and banners I began to wonder what was happening. We, the delegates, were caught up in the flow of the moment, and General Conference was whistled in. The music was loud, the clapping in syncopation, and the swaying back and forth made me think of the early days of Methodism when our denomination was mostly emotion turned loose. Are we at a crossroads looking down the future of our church? Is the Episcopal pomp a throw-back to a time when our church was a mover and a shaker; reduced now to have become motion that is spastic and adherents who are shaken? Will we come away from Fort Worth looking like the south end of a bull going north to slaughter? Will the pomp lead us to a circumstance that will be a prediction of good things to come? Will the old guard (people my age and younger) give way to new blood so there can be better circulation and an unclogging of the hardening of the categories so our Methodist muscle can be activated in mind and corporate body? Is it possible that our church will end its ten-day marathon with the look of a body of believers who are more resurrected in spirit than a group of the defeated who look cadaverous and entombed?

I, for one, am not fooled by the presumption vision that we witnessed, but neither have I succumbed to an immediate reduction of cynicism. Tonight a little bishop whose name, Janice Riggle Huie, is bigger than she is, delivered one of the most compelling and powerful sermons I have heard on the first day of a General Conference. She said to us, “hope is the nerve center of the Christian life, and we must remember how hope transforms lives and how resurrected lives transform the world.”

One other thing I would like to report. Up on the platform in this auditorium they had some usual chancel furniture. It was beautifully carved wood. The pulpit and the Communion Table were remarkable. The grain of the wood was dramatic and could be seen as far back as the cheap seats where they put us Rocky Mountain people. They let the word out to us; quietly, unpretentiously, subtly. That wood that became the center for our worship service was made out of broken trees taken down by hurricane Katrina. 

I’m beginning to think there is a chance that this General Conference is not Jurassic in its vintage, and we are not looking back toward the days that were; we are looking forward to the days that have yet to be. Yeah, it’s good to be here.

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