It was a historic first day!

There are only two morning shuttles per day from our hotels, one that leaves at 6:00am and one that leaves at 6:30am. The conference started today at 9:00am. Those who know me well, know that this presented a huge problem as I am not a morning person. Luckily for me, our hotel is the closest to the convention center and just a quick 12-minute walk from the hotel. So, a group of us left at 7:45am to head over. I got to sleep in and still had plenty of time to check out the site!

Our morning began with worship and a recitation of the Apostle’s Creed. Then an episcopal address by our three active bishops. It was great to celebrate the beginnings of our new church. The rest of the morning was spent in worship, procedural votes, and learning how to use our voting devices.

We had an interesting boxed lunch (see below). The plantain chips were by far my favorite part of the meal.

After lunch we continued with some business, I won’t try to recap EVERY SINGLE vote we take over the next 7 days, but today’s votes were significant, so I want to make mention of a few of them.

• We formally elected Bishop Jones and Bishop Webb as bishops of our denomination. I am not sure why we did not elect Bishop Yohanna, but I assume it had something to do with the timing.
• We passed our Plan of Organization and Covenant for Our Life Together (including the Limited Agenda). So that we will have time to do all the necessary work, this conference will only deal with certain paragraphs in our Book of Doctrines and Discipline. We also had two petitions that had previously been ruled as “outside the scope of the limited agenda” that were allowed by 2/3rds vote to be considered this year. I spoke on the floor in favor of one of these, petition 152.
• We formally adopted what is now our Book of Doctrines and Discipline. It is no longer “transitional”. You may wonder why we did this first. This was a parliamentary necessity. The petitions submitted to this conference were aimed at amending the Book of Doctrines and Discipline. That had not been formally recognized by the body. So, we approved it, and it is now our “church law” for the next 7 days and probably for the rest of 2024. Most of the petitions we pass will go into effect on January 1, 2025, unless stated otherwise.
• We signed a covenant agreement with The Inglesia Evangelical Metodista de Costa Rica. This was part of our reason for coming here for the conference was to align ourselves with this branch of the Methodist Church. We anticipate many more such agreements in future General Conferences. During the signing of the agreement, our outgoing transitional connection officer, Keith Boyette, fell off the stage and had to be attended to by medical staff. After an examination, he was deemed ok and was able to address the conference.

To celebrate our new partnership with the Methodist Church in Costa Rica, we were loaded into buses for a trip to their school here in San Jose for dinner and worship service. It was only 9 miles away from the Convention Center but took us about 2.5 hours because of rush hour traffic! We enjoyed a meal and some entertainment by the students of the school. Then we worshiped in their gym and heard a sermon by Rev. Carolyn Moore (one of our potential candidates for bishop). Then we loaded the busses and headed back to our hotels. (It took considerably less time on the return trip).

Tomorrow will start at 8:00am and we will be in committee meetings all day. I don’t think it will be available on the live stream. Please continue to pray for our delegation. We have had a few members who are already dealing with issues – nothing life-threatening just some back pain for one and another keeps losing their voice. That’s about all for me… I’m ready for some sleep!!!