Iowa Annual Conference

I have returned back from the Iowa Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church! I left last Thursday and was back Sunday afternoon. It was 4 days of voting, debating, worshipping, and meeting up with friends I only get to see once a year.

Perhaps I should explain a little about why I get to go? Each Methodist pastor in Iowa "gets" (has) to go to annual conference, then each church elects a delegate to go from their church. As you might imagine there are some church's that have more than one pastor and some pastors in positions besides serving a church well to make the total number of clergy and lay equal the districts (there are 8 in Iowa) elect what are called equalization members. I have gone the last two years as an equalization member, and I have to tell you it is a very eye opening experience as to how our church is set up and run!

I didn't take a lot of pictures but I did take a few that I wanted to share with you as well as one awesome video! This video was taken at the opening worship and it is the African's Children's Choir! They are the cutest and most spirited young kids I have ever seen, by far the highlight of all of the worship times we took part in while we were there! The above picture was taken from my seat at conference, and as you can see we were pretty close to the stage this year. The stage is where our Bishop (Bishop Trimble) sits with his people and they run the whole thing. So you can get an idea of how big of an event this is there are around 1200 people from across the state that attend annual conference each year. Well that's a pretty good summary (I think!), but if anyone out there in the blog world has any questions please feel free to leave that in the comments section, or if you attend annual conference let me know that too!