Notes from Kearney: A Closing Word
The final morning in Kearney, an ordination, and a question about what is already in our hands.
The last morning opened not with a business session but with music. Jaron Bell led it, more a solo set than a full service, and partway through he set the songs aside and told us about his own changed life. After a week heavy with reports and motions, that plain testimony was the right way to begin.
The nine o’clock session moved quickly. The conference adopted its strategic plan for 2026 through 2030 and its 2027 budget, both without debate. The extended cabinet was introduced, our foundations and camps reported, and we learned that next year we gather in early June at the Church of the Resurrection in Leawood. I would like to think a plan adopted without argument means a body settling into a shared direction.
Later in that session came the nominations report, which Esther Hay and I gave together. Without planning it, the two of us had shown up in matching Serve Joyfully shirts, the kind of small thing that lightens a long morning. The work of nominations is mostly hidden, the patient matching of people to the places they are needed. Esther has led that team, and I had the chance to thank her for her service before the bishop presented her with a plaque. I was glad to recognize her. I take up the chair of the team for the year ahead, following someone who did the work well.
At eleven we came to the service that gives the week its center, the Service of Ordination, Commissioning and Recognition, and the Setting of Appointments. Bishop Carlo Rapanut preached on the burning bush, on God’s question to Moses, “What is that in your hand?” Moses was holding a shepherd’s staff, the badge of forty hidden years he likely counted as wasted. The question reframed the whole story. Read together, Moses’s chapters told a different story than the one he had been telling himself. God had been with him all along, and not one chapter was wasted.
Then the bishop turned it to us. He traced the long chain of ordaining hands, from Coke and Asbury down through the generations to Bishop David Wilson, whose hands would rest that morning on the women and men being ordained. He did not land the chain on himself. He landed it on Wilson, and through Wilson on the ones kneeling to be sent. The promise underneath it was the one God made to Moses: “I am the God of your ancestors, and I will be with you.”
My phone shuffles my favorite photographs across its lock screen. Most days they are a small spark of joy in a passing moment, a glance down and a good memory. Twice during the service I glanced down and found one waiting, and this time it went deeper. The first was the last picture taken of my father and me. The second was of my children on a first day of school, headed into a new year. I had not arranged either one, and I would not have known to. The Spirit is not particular about the means, and that morning it worked through a phone’s shuffle of favorites. Ancestors at the start, the next generation at the sending, and me somewhere in the middle of the stream. It did not feel like two stray images. It felt like one word, addressed to me.
Then came the laying on of hands, and the fixing of appointments for the year ahead. I was sent back to McPherson First for another year, glad to be returning to you.
I came into Saturday tired, and I left it in a better place than I had been the day before. The familiar words, the next generation taking up the work, the long chain of hands reaching back and reaching forward, all of it brought me back to why I do this at all. A conference can wear a person down. A service like that one sends you back out remembering you were called, and that you are not making the journey alone.
We came to Kearney to serve joyfully. By Saturday I understood the charge a little better. The joy is grown into, in the serving and the sending, and the call is not somewhere out ahead of us. It is already here, in what God has placed in our hands.