General Conference 2010 - #9

The Steering Committee met this morning and discussed a couple issues that the delegates constantly raised. First, the issue of more involvement of youth and women: They committed to involve more youth and women in leadership; to have more mentoring of them to prepare them for leadership; and to form a committee to do further analysis on how to involve more youth and women in the structure of the church. Second, they recognized that the function and practice of ordination is an important fact of church life. The GC administration commits to establishing a process to review this subject and will report to Annual Council during the next 5 years. Most of the rest of the business was dealing with some minor constitutional changes. And thus the business of the 59^th General Conference Session ended. And now I was free to go and find and mingle with people.

The first exciting meeting was members of the Caribsda listserv who are here met at high noon (of course they were late!). And what a time we had! Many on the listserv had never met face to face; but as they chatted it was as if they had known each other for decades! And what a typical Caribbean “performance”! We were all talking at the same time with the same intensity that is characteristic of the chatroom. It was sad that some like Sylvan and Lael who were on their way there never arrived. I suppose that they were cornered by numerous past friends and acquaintances. That was the joy of the rest of the afternoon as you can see from the website: http://www.wallawalla.edu/campus-life/spiritual-life/gallery/general_conference_2010. Meeting and reacquainting with many from the past was heavenly! But the greatest delight for me was to see 2 of my very special WIC friends: one from College days in the 60s – Esther Zonicle-Vincent; and one from the 70s who was a great student and assistant – Marie-Lucienne. It was so good to spend a long time with Marie, just catching up. Maxwell Blakeney (who just retired as an Associate in the GC Auditing Department) is going to be jealous (all 3 of us worked closely together especially at Junior Church at WIC)! I’m sorry that I didn’t get to spend more time with Esther. She was one of my early friends at WIC when I arrived at College in January 1967. I taught her piano, and was always her accompanist – the piano back-up to her angelic voice. I heard that NCU/WIC had a jam packed, blast reunion, “meet and greet”, last night. I’m so sorry that I couldn’t make it. But we’ll be there in November for our 40^th class reunion. I also missed tonight in the Dome. Our daughter, Natasha, and her husband and 2 year-old daughter arrived in from Florida during the meeting. But I caught some of it on Hope Channel in the hotel room. There is nothing like the sound of, “Grandpa!”