The Kansas East members of the Nebraska-Kansas Episcopal Area Transition Team asked conference members to help answer three big questions with which the team has been wrestling. The questions were presented during the transition team’s report to the Kansas East Annual Conference June 10.
“We’ve been telling you in the past that the day was coming when the South Central Jurisdiction would assign only 10 bishops to the annual conferences in this jurisdiction,” said Bishop Scott Jones. “We did not know a year ago exactly how that was going to be done.”
In September, the College of Bishops announced that Nebraska and Kansas would share a bishop beginning Sept. 1, 2012. Bishop Earl Bledsoe made the announcement and both Jones and Bishop Ann Sherer-Simpson responded in a webcast.
“It means change,” Jones said in the webcast. “While change is never easy, it’s one of the constants in life.”
Seven people from each of the three annual conferences were named to a transition team that has been meeting since November. Members from Kansas East are Oliver Green, Nancy Brown, and Revs. Gary Beach, Eduardo Bousson, Jan Todd, and David Livingston.
“As you may imagine, there was some anxiety among the team members,” Bousson, campus minister at Washburn University, said.
But the team learned from its consultant Gil Rendle, senior consultant with the Texas Methodist Foundation Institute for Clergy and Congregational Excellence, that in times of great change there are two types of questions the organization should address – adaptive questions and technical questions.
“Often we focus only on the technical aspects of change. We have learned from the experiences of other annual conferences that first we ought to ask ourselves adaptive questions,” Bousson said. “These do not deal with the nuts and bolts, but instead with bigger picture issues that are more related to the identity of the organization.”
Bousson admitted the process has been difficult for team members.
“Being in ministry together, our three conferences will strengthen our ministries and could give United Methodism a new paradigm of what it means to be the church in the 21st Century, but first we need to ask ourselves these questions,” Bousson said.
“Are you ready for a challenge?” asked Todd, pastor at Topeka Pleasant Hill UMC and team member. “These three questions are important. We ask them of ourselves. We realized each time we met that we are a team that represents each of the conferences, but we represent a whole people, and we need your whole heart. We need your whole mind to think about this. The answers are not just from us. They are from all of us.”
Todd asked members to read the questions aloud with her.
What is the missional purpose of the Annual Conferences?
“Think in your mind and your heart,” Todd said. “If you think about your Annual Conference and then think about the Kansas and the Nebraska area, what is our conference? It’s about who we are as people, and what’s your mission and how do we share that together?”
How do we best develop lay and clergy leaders for these three conferences?
“It is important for us to remember our common mission, to continue to develop leaders and continue to bring them forth into the 21st Century and beyond,” Todd said. “And to think of these things as part of our task.”
What factors should we all think about with regard to the configuration of conferences in this new Episcopal area?
“One of the most common questions we hear is, ‘Are we going to become one conference?’ We do not know,” Todd said. “But at this point, if we don’t get answers from you, we cannot discern for you.”
Todd invited conference members to think and pray and write their answers to the questions on cards to leave in baskets at the entrances and to take the handout sheet with the questions home with them to discuss in their congregations in preparation for the upcoming district listening events.
To leave answers to any of these questions for the Transition Team, visit the team’s Facebook page.
