I couldn’t resist titling today’s post with the College GameDay theme song. Most Saturdays in the fall that’s how I begin my day. Not today…it’s Saturday and I’m not watching football. As much as I love the gridiron…I love Methodist polity more. I would also like to thank the University of Alabama for taking the day off so that I can fully focus on the work before us!

It’s been another good day. We spent the entire day in committee meetings…since 8:00 am this morning. I am on the Ministry and Local Church Committee, and we spent our day in sub-committees (and even broke up further into small subcommittees of those). Lots of discussion and suggestions on how we can improve our Book of Doctrines and Discipline to help those engaged in ministry in the church. We will have more work tomorrow. The other committees are Conferences, Connectional Organization, Constitution, Episcopacy, Finance, and Judicial. I won’t go into the details of their work, because some of it is still in process and I haven’t seen all the work that each committee has accomplished. However, I can tell you that the TLC plan for regional bishops was preferred by the Episcopacy committee and is being perfected right now. This is the plan that our North Alabama delegation supported so we are encouraged by that.

You might be interested to understand how our work is done at General Conference. There are 206 petitions before the General Conference. That is a lot of work for a large body of 360 delegates to handle. So, we have broken the petitions up into the 7 committees. This way the work can be done more efficiently. These committees look at the petitions and determine if they want to pass them as they are written, amend them, or reject them. In this process, we may also start with one petition but borrow ideas from another to get the best possible version of what we want to accomplish. We often refer to this as “perfection”, and this is important work before we send it to the full body. Once the committees have done their work it is sent to the full body or “plenary”. They can do the same, pass as written, amend, or reject. We can also put items on a “consent” calendar if they are passed by 90%. These are items that we expect not to need discussion and are widely favored by the body. We may also have a few small pieces that are ready to come to the plenary, but most of the major changes are still being considered in committees. So, it will be a few days before we have many of these come before the floor.

We have worship tomorrow at 8:00 am our time, followed by a plenary session and the committees to round out the day. Like I said I don’t expect anything earth-shattering tomorrow…but stay tuned. Hope you are worshiping with a Church family tomorrow. I am praying for Russellville First Methodist and Ben Schaefer as he preaches tomorrow. May God bless you and may your worship with God’s people challenge you and strengthen you.