17 June 2008
AC Day One
Please note: This is my “official” report on Annual Conference (AC). If you’d like the more “unofficial” version with more opinionated commentary after you read this, feel free to browse over to my personal blog site, http://danbrowning.blogspot.com.
As promised, here’s your update on the North Georgia Annual Conference proceedings from the first day. I say “as promised” because if I were writing this based solely on the proceedings themselves, I probably wouldn’t have much to say. It’s a very low-key year, particularly in comparison with last year’s election of delegates to General and Jurisdictional Conferences. One delegate I talked with today proclaimed this AC “The Long Goodbye”, in reference to Bishop Davis’ departure from North Georgia at the end of this episcopal term in July, and in fact we have already begun the tributes to Bishop and Mrs. Davis for their twelve years of service in North Georgia.
Perhaps the highlight of today’s proceedings (from my perspective, of course) was a brief presentation on the Nothing But Nets campaign – go check out the website http://www.nothingbutnets.net. Hopefully many of you are already familiar with this great program (when I led a youth program earlier this year, several of our youth already knew about it), but for those of you who are not and don’t want to read the website, it’s a program that distributes insecticide-treated mosquito nets throughout Africa and other regions of the world where malaria is rampant. For $10 the program can purchase a bed net that protects a family of four as they sleep, deliver it to the family, and provide relevant instruction on how to properly use the net. This is a bigger deal than you may think (and bigger than I used to think before I learned about it last year) – roughly 500 million people around the world are infected with malaria each year, and about a million people around the world die from malaria each year, or one person every 30 seconds! To put it bluntly and representatively, a $10 contribution means that four people in Africa probably DON’T DIE from malaria. How else can you save four lives with ten dollars? The afternoon turned into a bit of one-upmanship as various congregations and districts pledged $1,000 here and $2,000 there toward the campaign. By the end of the afternoon we had already raised over $100,000 in pledges. Although Rex and I did not commit Druid Hills to a specific amount, we definitely would like to see our congregation contribute to this program.
In other news from today, we heard a presentation on General Conference from our delegation’s representatives. Basically, the representatives congratulated our delegation on being strong leaders at General Conference, standing up for what was right and fighting back against the forces of reform and change. As you can tell, not so inspiring for me.
I would be remiss if I didn’t report on Monday’s NGUMC AC Golf Classic. Your Druid Hills team of me, Rex, Bill Duncan and Rick Marson acquitted itself admirably. In fact, we only finished a couple of points away from taking the prize…for last place. Nevertheless, we had much fun and good fellowship, and we contributed $500 to the Athens soup kitchen ministry Our Daily Bread.
Tomorrow should be a full day of business, although we do officially have the evening off. No real controversial resolutions to report on, although we do now have one before us that would call on United Methodists to resist efforts by the Georgia Legislature to allow the carrying of concealed weapons in houses of worship. I can only hope this won’t prove to be a controversial measure…
Peace,
Dan
Dan