The Expatriate Minister

I love going to Annual Conference; the changes which Texas has made to make it more accessible, more interesting, and more vibrant has really changed my attitude. And worship–wow. I’d put Melissa Burnham and DeAndre Johnson up against anyone in the country for their ability to lead an amazing group of people into new heights of worship planning awesomeness. Ever year I think wow, I don’t think it can get any better than this, and the next year I’m proven wrong.

Nonetheless, we could still make some improvements in our annual conference. No doubt, it will be different next year at the George R Brown Convention Center, rather than at The Woodlands UMC. However, let’s think about trying some new things…here are my 10 (not so) humble suggestions for next year’s Annual Conference session.

#1: A Laptop Bar. Okay, my biggest gripe has to do with how I’ve done Annual Conference for the last few years. I take my laptop as a “citizen journalist” and blog or tweet through the sessions. (More on why in a moment.) But finding a place to do that is a nightmare. Having a notebook computer in your lap in a pew (while wearing a suit) is just difficult no mattter how you slice it, and finding an accessible outlet makes the whole thing almost undoable. I sat behind the sound booth this year, which was better, but still not good. Let’s set up a designated area where people who are supporting the Annual Conference by sharing information can have a table and a power strip. Unless, being at the convention center, we get that at every seat! Either way, that brings me to…

#2: More online engagement. Let’s face it, the way we communicate is changing dramatically. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, email newsletters, online photo albums & journals…we need to be in the middle of this, not rejecting it because we think it’s beneath us or it means people aren’t paying attention. On the contrary, if you are live-tweeting or composing a post, you are very invested in the conversation…just in a different way than people have participated in the past. What would it look like to podcast interviews with conference speakers and presenters like Tom Long or Grace Imathiu? But wait, you say, lots of our members don’t know how to do that! Well, I’m glad you brought that up: it highlights the need for…

#3: A Social Media Training Session. Think about it! During the laity and clergy sessions Monday morning, we could have a 15 minute time slot devoted to 1 or 2 ways the rank-and-file, clergy-and-lay membership of the Annual Conference could share the good news of what is going on in Texas Methodism. And then we could invite people to tweet or post at the beginning of each business session or worship service. Instead of a dozen or two, there might be an hundred or two who are communicating to communities all over the state (and probably much further!) about our church. We could set up some computers in the lobby area afterwords to get people set up with Twitter and Facebook accounts, or to answer questions about blogging and taking photos/video. Maybe Cokesbury would sell some Flip video cameras?  (Hat-tip to Meredith Gould, who proposed this idea for a different kind of conference.)

#4: Youth Worship. This year was the first time I’ve seen such active youth involvement in Annual Conference, but it was unfortunately mostly restricted to Sunday night’s Memorial service. The Collide lockout was a great idea for Sunday night…how could we make it bigger and bolder for next year? My wife is fond of telling me that at her Annual Conference growing up, there would be an entire worship service that was led by the youth of the conference! It coupled letting youth speak out of their experience to the church as well as a time set apart for the church to call young people intentionally to ministry. This would go hand-in-hand with some of the excellent work being done at the conference level with youth and clergy recruitment. I think this would help our youth — who lead us in missions work and so many other things — to engage in connectional ministry, and for us to begin to see the potential for doing ministry with them, and not solely to them.

#5: Sacraments. One of the most compelling threads of our Wesleyan heritage is a commitment to the evangelical use of the Sacraments and sacramental rites. Yet we only celebrate Holy Communion one time during conference and I’ve never seen a baptism. What about a service of healing that including anointing or footwashing? Do you think that our conference might have a need for healing and reconciliation (especially given that next year is an election year)? As I’ve said above, the worship this year was better than ever, but my hunch is that there’s still a time management approach to worship (“well, we only have time to have one Eucharist”), which strikes me as falling short of our core values of “fervent prayer” and “passionate worship.”

#6: Books. I know, I was just advocating for a heavy use of new media at annual conference, but print media is far from dead. We used to have a share/giveaway/sell-for-cheap table at conference, which I would love to browse. We could help the conference Cokesbury store up their game with author signings (or at least making sure they get to sell the books by the conference speakers). Let’s show the codex some love!

#7: Invite Ecumenical Guests. Invite other clergy and church leaders from the Houston area and around Texas to see how Methodists do business. We haven’t had a bishop from another tradition to asisst at ordination in a few years…could we invite the Bishop Doyle (Episcopal) or Bishop Rinehart (Lutheran) or someone else to witness that ordination is God’s gift to the entire church, untrammeled by doctrinal or denominational lines? What about having an ecumenical day, in which we celebrate the ways in which our church is at work with other congregations and judicatories, Protestant, Catholic, or non-denominational? Another great Wesleyan tradition is our commitment to the visible unity of the Church of Jesus Christ: how do we make that concrete today?

#8: Resolutions. One of BP’s two main offices in the continental United States is located in Houston. Our conference is one of several that fronts directly onto the Gulf of Mexico. Where is our voice? No official language about immigration came to the floor, or education, or the death penalty, or many other issues which confront us in Texas, as Christians and Wesleyans, on a daily basis.

If the United Methodist Church is seriously going to Rethink Church, we have to speak on social issues, and not just do yard sales and community athletics. United Methodists need to renew our grassroots commitment to “spreading scriptural holiness across all the land,” and our annual conference speaking up on a few of the many issues that confront us daily would be momentous. We can’t agree on everything — clearly! — but surely we can agree that caring for our beaches, oceans, and the earth right beneath our feet is something God calls us to do.

#9: Go To An Astros Game. We will be literally blocks from Minute Maid Park. Baseball and Jesus go together well. I think this is a no-brainer. Methodist Night could be during Annual Conference this year!

#10: Mission Project. We may not be able to knit mosquito nets by hand or assemble radios for Cote d’Ivoire’s “Voice of Hope” radio station, but surely we can put together health kits to send to UMCOR’s Sager Brown depot for global distribution. Lousiana Annual Conference met in New Orleans in 2009 and had a missions day where the conference went out to do disaster recovery work. What could we do to share the Gospel in a tangible, hands-on way with an afternoon or a day in the heart of Houston?

UPDATE: Andrew Thompson wrote, shortly after I finished this post, about getting back to the basics of conferencing. And Steve LaMott’s taken up a similar challenge in thinking about his Pennsylvania-Delaware Conference. What about you? Do you have suggestions for your own annual conference?

What was your favorite thing about Annual Conference this year?
What could we do to make it even better?