Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote, “the ones who are best prepared can best serve their moment of inspiration.”

Today was a day of both preparation and inspiration for General Conference delegates. We spent the morning in a time of helpful training, offered by well-prepared leaders and officers. We learned about the General Conference rules and the parliamentary procedure by which we will operate, so that delegates might be ready to engage with our future legislative work in an informed and consistent manner. We learned about the various General Conference teams and committees so that we might better understand the particulars of our processes and procedures. We also trained on our electronic voting devices so that we might utilize them skillfully during deliberation and voting. (Holding my electronic voting device today inspired a smile or two over the remembrance of the handheld colored placards with which we used to vote at General Conference. Technology has made it a much different process, to be certain.)

Following lunch came some spiritual inspiration in the form of opening worship. Because of the pandemic, it has been five years since I have worshiped with a truly global congregation of United Methodists in a setting of the general church. Hearing the many robust voices joining together in hymns of praise and prayers of thanksgiving inspired within me both a freshly warmed heart and tears of gratitude. Bishop Thomas Bickerton preached a truly evocative and inspiring sermon, clearly and truthfully naming some of what we have gone through as a denomination over the last four years while also casting a bold vision for the reconfigured, revived, and mission-driven church we are becoming. It was the kind of sermon that established a deeply hopeful tone for this General Conference and life beyond it. 

After the opening worship, the General Conference was officially called to order and we experienced our first plenary session during which we cared for preliminary organizational matters, including the adoption of our now-amended and perfected Plan of Organization and Rules of Order. To put it simply, before any General Conference can officially do its extensive work, it has to agree on the means and methodology by which it will accomplish that work. We successfully approved the rules and processes that will provide both structure and accountability throughout General Conference. 

The day concluded with a 6:30 dinner, from which I just returned.

At one point in the day, I had some conversation with a group of volunteers who have come to Charlotte on their own dime and time to volunteer at General Conference. They had nothing but words of gracious encouragement for me. Throughout the morning and afternoon, I received over twenty texts and e-mails from people in Western Pennsylvania and New York letting me know that they are holding me (and us) in fervent prayer. I cannot put into words how life-giving it is to my spirit to know that so many people are praying. It makes prayer feel less like an activity and more like a sanctified communion of manifold souls.

Between lunch and opening worship today, I found a quiet and empty banquet room in a back hallway where I could experience a few moments of solitude—something important for this introvert to do periodically, especially in a conference where people are almost everywhere. During my moments of solitude, I rewrote one of my past prayers, contextualizing it specifically for day one of this General Conference. After writing it down, I prayed the words out loud this afternoon, simply for the purpose of allowing my heart to be shaped by its petitions.

This was my prayer:

Holy God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who both transcends time and occupies it; who is intimately present with us in both our solitude and our conferencing; who has built the church on the rock of a grace-shaped faith, and who will preserve the church so that not even the power of death will prevail against it:

We have prayed and pondered for many months, and now we come together…

Many voices;

Many perspectives and temperaments;

Many different hopes, fears, and longings;

But with hearts joined in a common love for Jesus and the ministry of his beautiful church.

We come with a spirit of repentance, depending wholly on your reconfiguring grace that is always greater than our sinful rhythms and our distorted priorities.

We come in a spirit of vulnerable availability, eager to hear and to be heard; to see and to be seen; to love and to be loved.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Come, be the center of our discernment and our deliberation.

Come, be the thoughts that we think, the words that we speak, the air that we breathe.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Come, be the window through which we see one another differently; through which we recognize one another’s sacred worth; through which we glimpse what your church can be at its most vibrant.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Come be the Window, the Word, and the Way.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Amen.

I share this prayer with you here in the hope that it will deepen your spirit of intercession. Thank you for reading this post. And please, friends, keep praying.