Both sides of the river

The first-ever Tennessee-Western Kentucky UMC Annual Conference begins

Liturgical dance can be polarizing, but this was quite beautiful.

Well, the first day of Annual Conference was a success, I think.

I got to Brentwood United Methodist Church early, and helped welcome people to a Stones River breakout session. The district breakout sessions, and the large group session that immediately followed them, were on the topic of transitions.

Until this year, there was a Tennessee Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, made up, basically, of Middle Tennessee, and a Memphis Annual Conference, made up of West Tennessee and a portion of southwestern Kentucky. In the United Methodist Church, an “annual conference” refers both to an administrative region headed up by a bishop and to that region’s annual meeting, where pastoral assignments are finalized and other various business takes place. On January 1 of this year, the two legacy conferences were merged into the Tennessee-Western Kentucky Annual Conference.

Merging the two conferences has been in the works for years (they have shared a bishop for some time), but it’s a big deal requiring some changes in how we do things. Before the pandemic, an annual conference was exclusively an in-person event. For the past two years, annual conferences have been held online. This year, we have a hybrid — a…