Blessings in your Travel

Hi Friends,

It is summer time in the Texas Hill Country. And some folks are bringing their children to camps along the North Fork or South Fork of the Guadalupe River near us in Hunt, Texas. As schools conclude and graduates make their way across stages, families gather to celebrate family and rites of passage. In all the travel, coming and going, I ask for safe travel mercies and blessings Along the Way.

This week I will travel to Corpus Christi for the Annual Conference of the Rio Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church. With pastor colleagues and lay delegates from churches across our geographical area of South and Central Texas, we shall arrive in Corpus Christi Wednesday and stay through Saturday (and some longer). I enjoy the time in Conference with colleagues and friends and the week always goes by too quickly.

This year, I ask for each of you to join me in prayer for our Annual Conference. We may still be a year away from a potential fracturing of the United Methodist Church, but this year I expect we will be on edge in our words and actions with one another. We all are going to feel the emotion of outcomes from the 2019 General Conference and the subsequent association gatherings.

The Wesley Covenant Association, UM Next, UM Forward - all tribal groups within our UMC connection continue to fine tune next steps on how to either split up or stay together in some fashion. Some expect that Annual Conferences may soon have the option on where to align if some new connectional system is adopted in 2020.

Lots of questions remain. And so we go to Conference with one another. Conference is indeed an event, but more importantly, it is a conversation. I pray that the conversations we hold together will find blessing in the sight of our Lord. I pray that our conversations will yield some form of unity in the midst of separation.

And I hope and pray that whatever the UMC becomes in the future, it will be more about living a life with Christ in which all are included than about arguing over exclusive rules and penalties for not following those rules.

In need of your prayer,
Pastor Paul

​Along the Way