SUMC Announcements

This year was an off year for the business of our annual conference with only a few resolutions and no changes to our conference rules. Next year we will be electing members to the General Conference which will be held in Tampa, Florida in 2012. As usual the annual conference budget was the big ticket item on the agenda. A new item is the “Imagine No Malaria” program which was proposed by our Bishop Thomas Brickerton. This program will challenge the United Methodist General Conference to raise $75 million so that malaria in Africa can be stopped by 2015. The Nothing but Nets program is still important, as a means of saving children and adult lives in many places in the world.

We heard how mission share payments are too high and that we shouldn’t need to pay our fair share. The good news is that the shares aren’t going up too much this year but the bad news is that the conference is cutting back programs and staff members to make up the difference. There is an old saying from my home in the mountains, “You have to pay the fiddler to play, in order to dance”. The same is true with our church mission share. We have realized this with our relationship with the Bethany House ministry. If all the churches in our annual conference paid their mission share in full, Keith wouldn’t have to be out begging for money.

I was assigned to Section 7, the corporation business meetings, which was held in the hottest building on Grove City’s campus with no A/C. We did sweat a little but survived the ordeal. It wasn’t all work at Grove City, we had an ice cream social and a pizza party with live music in one of the courtyards, on two of the evenings. It was a great time to catch up with old friends and meet many new folks. Thank you for sending me to represent Sewickley at this year’s annual conference. SUMC will be looking for a delegate to represent our church at next year’s 2011 conference, if you are interested contact the pastor.

Warren R. Kinneer