What I'm Watching at Annual Conference

A pastor's pre-trip notebook as the Great Plains Conference convenes in Kearney this week.

This afternoon I drive to Kearney. The Great Plains Annual Conference convenes tomorrow at the Younes Center North, and for the next four days my attention will rest with the other clergy and lay members of our conference rather than with the day-to-day of McPherson. The work here does not stop because I leave town, but a few days inside the larger body of the United Methodist Church in Kansas and Nebraska belongs to a different shape, and I have learned to let it.

The theme this year is Serve Joyfully. The verse is from 1 Peter 4:10:

And serve each other according to the gift each person has received, as good managers of God’s diverse gifts.

That language is doing a lot of work for a conference theme. Service named as joy rather than burden. Gift named as something received, not earned. Stewardship named as the discipline of managing what was given rather than the anxiety of producing what was not. The verse sets the posture even before the gavel falls.

For readers who have never attended one, Annual Conference is a few things at once. It is worship, with multiple services across the week, each one threaded with the conference theme. It is a family reunion, where clergy and lay members from across two states gather, many of whom only see each other in this one week each year. It is a business meeting, where legislation moves through committees and out to the floor, the budget gets adopted, resolutions are debated, and ministry reports are received. It is a teaching season, and this year Dr. Ashley Boggan from the General Commission on Archives and History carries the teaching thread across the week. It is a service project, with Rise Against Hunger setting up Thursday morning to pack thousands of meals before the business sessions begin. It is a memorial, when the conference reads aloud the names of thirty members who have died since we last met. And it is a sending, when Saturday’s service commissions a new class of provisional ministers and ordains a new class of elders in full connection, all of them going out from our two states.

Hold all of those at once and you have a fair picture of the week. Pull any one of them out and the rest changes shape.

Four preachers will frame the week. Bishop David Wilson preaches the Memorial Service Wednesday evening, where the conference reads out those thirty names. Rev. Charlotte Abram, a retired Nebraska elder, brings the opening worship on Thursday. Dr. Ashley Boggan carries the teaching thread across the week. Bishop Carlo Rapanut preaches the ordination service on Saturday.

The ordination service on Saturday will recognize three classes at once. Three new provisional deacons will be commissioned. Fourteen new provisional elders will be commissioned alongside them, including Pastor Chantel Makarawa, our associate at McPherson First, who is moving from full local pastor into provisional elder. Commissioning is the step that begins the provisional period; ordination as an elder in full connection comes later, after those provisional years are complete. And seven elders, after their provisional years, will receive the laying on of hands as elders in full connection. By the time we leave Kearney on Saturday afternoon, the Great Plains Conference will have sent twenty-four new ministers into a denomination that needs them.

The business is full. Three social resolutions are on the docket: one supporting migrants, immigrants, and refugees; one answering the call of Kairos Palestine II; one supporting the transgender community. Thirteen church-closing resolutions sit alongside them, which is the slow, hard math of a denomination in transition. The Connecting Council brings forward Resolution 17 on the proposed Strategic Priorities for 2026 to 2030, a document the conference has spent months developing. Resolution 18 establishes Great Plains Disaster Response Sunday as a new annual Special Sunday, first observed this September. A standard housing resolution on clergy pension allowance also comes for a vote, the kind of legislation that rarely makes it into a sermon but quietly shapes the lives of retired pastors and their families.

Here is what I am watching for personally.

I am watching for the tone of the room when the difficult resolutions come up. A conference can adopt the same resolution two different ways. One is rancorous, with debate that leaves people more guarded than they were when they sat down. The other is honest, with disagreement that somehow strengthens rather than fractures the fellowship. The same words get voted on. The bond around the table does not survive equally either way.

I am watching for the strategic plan. The Connecting Council has tried to name a faithful path forward for a region with shrinking congregations, aging clergy, and real hope in pockets that do not always show up in the statistics. A strategic plan does not save a church. It does name what we will pay attention to. I want to see whether the plan we adopt actually points us at the work that matters in places like McPherson.

I am watching for Saturday’s service, and especially for Chantel’s commissioning as a new provisional elder. The service holds two acts inside one liturgy: commissioning for those entering the provisional period and ordination for those completing it. Every year that service reminds me that the church keeps choosing to send people into ministry even as the cultural ground shifts under our feet. The new clergy carry a calling and a covenant. The conference is making a promise to them as much as they are making a promise to the conference.

For the next several days, I will write a short post each morning from Kearney. They will be observation rather than transcript. Notes from the floor, not a play by play. I will name what the conference adopts by legislation framing without reporting individual votes or private hallway conversations, because the work of pastoral writing is different from the work of denominational journalism. I want to give readers a window into what an Annual Conference actually feels like for someone who is both a member of the larger body and a local pastor, holding both pieces at once.

If you read along this week, you will get a small picture of a denomination at work. Imperfect, slower than its critics want, more faithful than its skeptics expect. A body still trying to serve joyfully, however we got here.

I will write from Kearney tomorrow morning.