SUNDAY MORNING

from the pastor

June 9, 2002

I returned last night from our annual conference, being held this year in Peoria, Illinois. The conference will be finishing up this afternoon around 3 p.m., but I wanted to get back to Urbana for our worship services this morning.

United Methodists (about 8 million of us in this country) are organized into annual conferences, about 70 of them. There are two  annual conferences in Illinois: the Northern Illinois Annual Conference (mostly consisting of the area north of Interstate 80) and the Illinois Great Rivers Annual Conference (mostly the rest of the state). The annual conference establishes churches, organizes itself into districts (we have 12 districts), deploys clergy to churches, organizes mission projects within the annual conference, and coordinates the efforts of churches to do good beyond what any of them would be able to do on their own.

An  annual conference usually meets annually (hence the name!). It consists of an equal number of clergy and lay members. All active and retired clergy are members. Smaller churches send one lay person, larger churches send two. Other laity are picked by the districts in order to equalize the numbers of laity and clergy.

When the annual conference meets, it sets the annual conference budget for the coming year, ordains new pastors and deacons, recognizes pastors who are retiring, holds a memorial service for pastors and their spouses who died during the last year, and conducts a ceremony for appointing all the pastors to their churches for the coming year.

The conference also has a number of worship services, lectures, display booths, dinners, and debates, which allow members to express their opinions on important social, missional, organizational, and theological issues. It is also a time for fellowship, meeting new friends, and renewing old acquaintances and friendships.

This conference is not done with all their business yet, but I can report some things from the 2002 session. We reported 972 local churches in our conference, divided into 625 pastoral charges (some pastors service more than one church). We have 1,115 active and retired clergy and an equal number of lay members of the conference. There are 168,829 members in our various churches, down over 4000 from last year.

The conference will approve their budget this afternoon, approximately $16.5 million. About $6.1 million of that will be for ministerial pensions, approximately $5.6 million for administration, approximately $1.5 million to general church agencies, approximately $2.6 million for benevolence work in our own annual conference, and $.9 million for seminaries and universities. We retired 21 pastors. We ordained 6 new pastors. We had 23 retired pastors die last year and no active pastors die. And during appointments to churches yesterday, I was appointed to my second year at Urbana Grace. --Mike