What a week!

It's Friday evening, and I am finishing a 7-day period where I preached at a dedication service for a friend's child, attended the Arkansas Annual Conference, worked like crazy to get caught up on all the Latin work I missed while I was away from Durham, and logged about 2000 miles in travel. It's good to be home!

Since this was the year we elected delegates to General and Jurisdictional Conferences, it was an interesting annual conference session. I'll share a few thoughts:

-- As always, it is really good to attend annual conference just to see friends and colleagues in ministry. That was especially the case this year, since I am now living in North Carolina and haven't gotten to see those folks Emily and I have missed over the past year. I also had a lot of people express the desire for us to return to the conference when I finish my Th.D., something that I hope God provides a way for us to do.

-- This year marked the third year in a row that Eric Van Meter has organized a Gen X clergy supper. We had 30 or so clergy and clergy spouses who gathered in the Arkansas Tech University Wesley Foundation building on Monday evening for good ol' Arkansas barbeque (this is a noun rather than a verb for those of you not from the South). Eric does a good job of resisting the temptation to set an agenda at these gatherings. And so the conversations just naturally flow from what our concerns and hopes happen to be. This year, we focused on the need to keep in touch with young seminarians while they are in school as well as talking about how to get better involved in connectional conference structures such as the Board of Ordained Ministry and other appointed bodies. We believe this is important to add our voices to conference leadership. This year, we made the firmest commitment yet to keeping in touch and making progress throughout the year. We had some volunteers offer to serve as 'point people,' and I think we are going to use the new 7 Villages website to build an online connection. Kudos to Eric for all his work in this area. He has shown real leadership. And good luck to him as he starts a new appointment in campus ministry at Arkansas State Univeristy in Jonesboro. The Gen X clergy gathering is, by the way, something I would highly recommend for other annual conferences to do.

-- Billy Reeder and his group Sanctus led an emergent-style worship service outdoors following regular worship on Monday evening that was pretty well attended. The Holy Spirit was obviously in attendance, which was awesome.

-- This was the first conference session that I have attended where we have elected delegates to General and Jurisdictional Conferences. For all the horror stories I have heard about how nasty elections can be, I think this one went pretty well. We ended up electing a balanced group including Conservatives, Liberals, and Moderates. I think that is important, since it reflects the makeup of our annual conference. For the record, I personally voted for people who would generally be categorized in all three groups.

-- Kudos to Revs. J.J. Whitney and Aubrietta Jones, who were elected as General and Jurisdictional delegates, respectively. They are both Gen X'ers and help to bring a young clergy voice to our delegations. Sarah Steele, a Millennial teenager, was also elected as a lay delegate to General Conference. And Jay Clark, youth ministry guru who has held positions in the Arkansas Conference, New England Conference, and the General Board of Discipleship, was elected as a Jurisdictional alternate. Jay is soon moving from Nashville to become the minister of youth at Pulaski Heights UMC in Little Rock, and my only regret is that he was not elected as a General Conference delegate in his own right. But then, there's always 2012!

One final note: In her e-mail recap of annual conference, SMU professors (and Arkansas Conference elder) Rebekah Miles wrote, "There is nothing like the sound of a group of preachers and lay people singing hymns loudly and enthusiastically at annual conference." Amen to that! "And are we yet alive?" You bet we are. And the work of the kingdom goes on.