I’m grateful to have led our ’04 delegation!

The best of times

“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom; it was the age of foolishness. It was the epoch of belief; it was the epoch of incredulity. It was the season of light; it was the season of darkness. It was the spring of hope; it was the winter of despair. We had everything before us; we had nothing before us. We were all going direct to Heaven; we were all going direct the other way. In short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
This passage could be a description of our 2004 General Conference. It is, in fact, the preface to A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
General Conference was an unforgettable experience. I am grateful to have led our delegation. I believe that we represented our Southwest Texas Conference very well. The worship was moving. The music was rapturous. Some of the legislative committees and plenary sessions were endless. We did many things of great importance, and many things of insignificance.
Bishop Janice Riggle Huie did us proud, presiding over the conference during the Soulforce demonstration. Reinhold Niebuhr in Leaves of a Notebook of a Tamed Cynic said, “To be a pastor requires a high tolerance for ambiguity.”
I think that observation needs to be expanded to include laity as well. The General Conference voted to retain the disciplinary language of Paragraph 304.3, and the next day Bill Hinson, president of the Confessing Movement, proposed an “amicable divorce.”
No divorce is amicable. Praise be to God, the motion to remain together was thunderously adopted. I think there were 41 votes to split, out of nearly 1,000. We voted to welcome the Cote d’Ivoire Church of more than 1 million members into The United Methodist Church. Maybe it is God who has a high tolerance for ambiguity.