General Conference: Week 1

Today, April 24, 2024, marks the second day of business for the United Methodist General Conference: a global legislative gathering of the United Methodist Church that, when times are normal, meets every four years to enact reforms and changes to our denomination’s budget, rules, and other matters of business.

It is also where the UMC, a worldwide denomination, gathers together to worship and speak as one voice on behalf of the entire denomination.

General Conference over the past decades has been a flashpoint for many of the sharp disagreements that have schismed and created conflict in other churches (and, frankly, politics in the US in general). Every time we gather at General Conference as a UMC, I choose to have a sense of hope that our church can enact the changes that end the perennial harm our church rules have inflicted and inflict on queer people. Since 1972, our denomination has maintained and strengthened language in our Book of Discipline that discriminates against the queer community, reducing their humanity to who they love and describing that love as “incompatible with Christian teachings.”

There are people longer in the tooth than me who have come to the General Conference time after time with this hope, only to have it defeated by the church’s inertia, a powerful and well-funded conservative movement, cultural misunderstandings, among so many other things.

And yet this year, I wonder if there is still reason to hope and not pivot immediately into cynicism and despair before the work even begins—and I’m just being real with you, if you have seen this work done in the past, it is really easy to do that.

But what I am starting to see hints of is something different: perhaps a different spirit of comity and consensus. There just might be a different narrative that will come out of this General Conference, which gives me hope of a different narrative of our denomination, and thus hope for our church in Lakewood, Colorado.

And that is a narrative of abundance, and surprising moments of commonality, and a witness of God’s radical love that isn’t just something we say with our mouths and yet behave differently.

There is a lot of work left to do, but I dare to hope that the Holy Spirit is moving through this gathering. Hopefully, it moves through our denomination. And as it moves through us at Lakewood UMC, I hope we raise our sails to catch that wind. And I look forward to where that Holy Spirit wind might take us!

I look forward to sharing updates with all of you next week! If you want to follow along with the action at General Conference, you can do so by checking out our denomination’s news agency, UMNews! Click here for commentary and updates on General Conference.