Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church Proceedings Daily 2015 Journal E Daily Proceedings SECTION E DAILY PROCEEDINGS Texas Annual Conference May 24-27, 2015 Hilton Americas Houston, Texas Opening of Annual Conference Opening Celebration Sunday, May 24, 2015, 7:00 p.m. Lanier Grand Ballroom Mr. Ed Gibson – “Good evening friends and family. If I could invite you to come on in to our worship space and quickly and quietly take your seat. My name is Ed Gibson and on behalf of the worship committee of the Texas Annual Conference, welcome. This year we are working towards reaching beyond our immediate circle of influence when it comes to both praying for others and seeking prayers of our own concerns. The worship team of the Texas Annual Conference wants to encourage you to participate in the prayer this evening in one or both of the following ways. If you have a prayer request and are willing to share that request with others, we invite you to use Twitter or FaceBook by using hashtag TXAC. Again, that’s hashtag TXAC. If you are willing to pray for others you can also search for hashtag TXAC and pray for the requests that are found there. If social media is not your thing, that’s o.k. too. As you entered our worship space this evening you should have received a prayer card just like this that I am holding in my hand and you can write those prayer requests on the prayer card and then at the end of this evening’s worship service you can drop it off in a box at the exits…and these prayer requests will be taken to the conference prayer room and at some point during our time here for the next couple of days, we invite you to enter the prayer room and pray for and over those requests. Now I’m going to invite you to join me in song.” Mr. Gibson led the congregation in an acapella singing of Woke Up This Morning With My Mind on Jesus. Rev. Chap Temple introduced the opening hymn And Are We Yet Alive. After the singing of the opening hymn, Bishop Janice Riggle Huie made the following statements during the welcome and greeting: Bishop Huie – “Amen. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Welcome to each one of you. I give God thanks that you have made it here this evening through these rain soaked roads in East Texas. Some of you looked a little wet coming in, but we are so glad that all of you are here. I know that many of you know that some of the area around the Louis Dam in our own annual conference is under a mandatory evacuation and that the Rio Texas Annual Conference has had some catastrophic flooding. Our disaster response folks are on it. So we can be here this evening to worship God and give thanks for what God has done already and for what God will yet do. So I declare that the 46th session of the Texas Annual Conference is opened. And I invite you to turn to one another and greet one another with signs of welcome and peace.” The remainder of the worship service followed the order of worship presented in the booklet 2015 Transforming Lay & Clergy Leaders. The remainder of the worship service is archived on audio and video recordings, but for these Daily Proceedings, only the Episcopal Address is included here. E - 1 Daily Proceedings The People Called Methodist – 2015 Episcopal Address – Bishop Janice Riggle Huie Video “I am a Methodist.” Good evening. I’m a Methodist because Wesley taught me to look for and love the image of God in every human being—including the ones I don’t particularly like.” It’s your turn now. We all need our elevator speech where we can explain why what we believe is important. What is important to you personally about being a follower of Jesus in the Wesleyan tradition? If you have a smart phone, tweet it. If you don’t, turn to someone on your left and then your right and tell them why you are a Methodist. Not a paragraph. One sentence. 146 characters. The hash tag is on the screen, #txac. Ready, set go. Just look around the room: you are a marvelous community of the people called Methodist. You are making disciples of Jesus in 58 counties in Texas, from Texarkana to Matagorda, from Burkeville to Thorndale. Your capacity for doing “all the good by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can as long as ever you can” encircles the globe. These words from Charles Wesley come to mind, “Come, sinners to the gospel feast. Let every soul be Jesus’ guest. You need not one be left behind, for God has bid all humankind.” This annual conference is a gathering of leaders among the people called Methodist. We are heirs of John and Charles Wesley, Francis Asbury, Harry Hoosier and Barbara Heck. Our forebears here in America planted thousands of congregations so that the people called Methodist could be shaped and formed as disciples of Jesus Christ. Methodists started schools, colleges and universities so that every child could be educated and have the prospect of a better future. Methodists built hospitals to care for the sick, and retirement homes to care for the old. Methodists started community centers so that immigrants and the poor could learn the skills to create better lives for themselves and their children. Methodists spoke out against injustice wherever they found it—slavery, Jim Crow, child labor, and more. Methodists advocated for the right of women to vote and to preach. Over and over again, Methodists invested in the larger community and in a better future for all God’s children. Today, two hundred twenty five years later, our leadership is challenged. All Christians, including the people called Methodist, have entered a season of changing realities in America. The Pew Research Center study published just two weeks ago finds that the percentage of Americans who define themselves as “Christian” has dropped seven percentage points or about five million people over the last seven years. Among our young, decline is even more dramatic. Pew found that over one-third of young adults now say they are unaffiliated. That’s up 10 percentage points in just seven years. The speed of this change has surprised even the experts. Why is this unaffiliated group growing so rapidly? There are a number of reasons, but the Pew research indicates the primary reason is that so many people are actually leaving church. One-third of Americans who were once active in church are no longer in church—“de-churched” is the new term. They came, they saw, they tasted and they left. That trend is particularly pronounced among young adults. Over the last ten years, the superintendents and I have seen this reality right here in the TAC. When a congregation drops 20% or more in worship attendance over a relatively short period of time, and people quit coming, we no longer see the level of recovery that we took for granted just ten years ago even though the congregation and the cabinet make changes to improve the situation. When people leave, they leave. Again, that trend is particularly pronounced among young adults. There is some good news in the latest research. In a survey conducted last year by LifeWay Research, guess which denomination has the most positive image in the culture? The Methodists. 62% of respondents claimed a favorable view of United Methodists compared to five other faith groups. The authors state, “If [the Methodists] will show and share the gospel with their neighbors and plant evangelistic churches … they can turn a good reputation into a gospel opportunity.” E - 2 Daily Proceedings We must seize this opportunity. We are blessed to have Dr. Gil Rendle with us during this annual conference to help us learn better how to lead in these changing realities. He will help us think more clearly about our purpose and the need for pastors, congregations, and the conference to work both on improving our current ministries as well as experimenting and creating whole new ministry paradigms. Tonight I want to focus on how we Methodists might lead from our historic Wesleyan strengths to connect with the yearnings, hopes, and the hurts of people today. What might we glean from our own Methodist DNA that allows us to swim in these rough waters with realistic hope of a better future? Where would we begin?” I posed those questions last month to Dr. Greg Jones, professor and former dean at Duke Divinity School. He’s a good friend of this annual conference. He pointed to four qualities of Methodism that are both traditional and contemporary. These qualities form a Methodist lexicon that offers deep wisdom for living into our new reality. Each quality is characterized by one word. Tonight I offer you this four-word lexicon that links our best past with our yearning for a better future along with some specific examples of how I’m seeing these qualities lived out in our annual conference. I’m hoping that you will listen and ask yourself, “What might that mean for our church and our community?” 1. Opposable The first word is opposable—opposable not oppositional. The relationship between our fingers and our thumb looks oppositional, but it is really opposable.