Does fate of clergy group
foreshadow UMC’s future?


As the nearest relative, it was up to me to decide to disconnect the life-support. It was a sad choice, but I felt a necessary one.
I was pushed into many memories. I attended the Southwest Texas Annual Conference session for the first time as a pastor in 1977. (It seems like a lifetime ago.) We met at Travis Park UMC in San Antonio.
I heard a lot of pastors talking about their old professors and classmates at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology, but I didn’t go to Perkins. I read that there was a breakfast for Perkins graduates. I didn’t have a breakfast.
Then I realized that other pastors hadn’t gone to schools in Dallas as well. An idea began to take shape.
At the annual conference session in 1979, it was announced that the Non-Perkins Alumni were having a breakfast at Travis Park. Our first speaker was Dr. Will Mathis-Dunne.
Over the years our number reached as many as 30. We developed traditions. We would begin with introductions, including the schools we attended. They were such places as Union and Claremont, Emory and United, and even seminaries
in England and Germany.
We couldn’t seem to remember what happened the previous year, so Clifford Zirkel would move that the
minutes be approved as forgotten.
We developed an Ethics Committee, consisting of George Ricker, who would give his annual report in verse.
Our slogan was “We are the only group in the conference that admits it has no purpose.”
We were even developing some guidelines for being non-purpose driven. We were basically a moment in the conference for humor, good fellowship and speakers on preaching, pastoral care and other relevant topics for which we could find a speaker.
(Along the way, I was elected president-for-life, a dubious honor at best.)
Alas, over the years, other groups got the idea to organize. The Austin Presbyterian alumni started,
as did the Emory and Asbury grads.
The Clergy Women began to meet at the same time. We began to struggle to get enough people to make it worthwhile to meet.
Sadly, I called the Seaman’s Center to say we would not be meeting for lunch this year.
Maybe we served our purpose even though we didn’t have one. Maybe we didn’t replace our members that fell by the wayside. Maybe we didn’t get the word out to new clergy members who didn’t know who we were. Maybe people didn’t feel
we met a need any more.
So I pulled the plug, and we bade farewell to a footnote in the life of the conference.
The problem is that the story sounds vaguely like the direction of the whole United Methodist Church. I hope we are not a club that has lost its purpose, that has not gotten the word out and whose day is done.