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Transition team reports progress, shares questions

Written: 6/4/2010

By Lisa Elliott Diehl
Communications director
SALINA—The Kansas West members of the Nebraska-Kansas Episcopal Area Transition Team reported May 28 to the Kansas West Annual Conference.

Dixie Brewster, team member and former conference lay leader, said she was at first disappointed when she heard that Kansas and Nebraska would share a bishop in 2012. But then, she started praying about the change and thinking about it. She began to change her mind and get excited about the opportunities before the three annual conferences.

“As I was making gravy the other day, it boiled over and it went down the side of my stove,” Brewster said. “I had to move out the stove to clean it. Then I cleaned underneath it. Then, I was motivated to clean out from underneath the refrigerator. Then I was motivated to mop the entire kitchen floor and dust the upper shelves.”

Like the gravy mess, combining episcopal areas is an opportunity to clean out from under some things that haven’t been touched in years and make something new and fresh.

Wichita West District Superintendent Rev. Gary Brooks said team members have prayed a lot. They also have hired church consultant Gil Rendle to help guide the process of forming the new episcopal area. He said Rendle is guiding the team away from technical questions such as where the bishop will be located and how clergy will be affected. Instead, he is directing them toward adaptive questions, which will help shape the big picture for the new episcopal area.

“We are trying to deal first with the bigger picture issues more related to our identity as United Methodists,” Brooks said.

So far, team members have learned a lot about each other and their conferences, said Rev. Cheryl Jefferson Bell, pastor at Newton’s Trinity Heights UMC. Many commonalities have been identified as well as many areas where the conferences can resource each other in different areas of ministry.

“We could give United Methodism a new paradigm,” Bell said.

It would be fitting for Nebraska and Kansas to lead the way into a new paradigm. The two states were once part of the same annual conference, said Bob Cox, a lay member of the transition team from Hays.

Rev. Pat Ault-Duell, senior pastor at Hutchinson Trinity UMC, compared the transition to the process of becoming acquainted with a new roommate. To help members of the conference become more familiar with the other two conferences, Ault-Duell recommended reading the information on the other conference Web sites to see what’s important to and what’s stirring in those conferences.

The second thing Ault-Duell encouraged members to do is to contact members of the transition team and share their thoughts and concerns.

Everyone in attendance received two pieces of paper. The first was a half-sheet with three questions printed on it. The second was a full sheet with the same questions and instructions for accessing information about the team’s work on Facebook and on the conference Web site (www.kswestumc.org/transition).

“The greatest wisdom lies in our collective body today,” said Corey Godbey, a lay member of the team from Dodge City.

Attendees were invited to share their thoughts on the half-sheet and drop them into specially marked boxes at the arena entrances. They were asked to take the full sheet home and discuss the questions in their own congregations and share their thoughts with the team through e-mail, phone or mail.

The three questions are:

What is the missional purpose of the annual conferences?

How do we best develop lay and clergy leaders for these three conferences?

Considering answers to the previous questions, what factors should we all think about with regard to the configuration of conferences in this new episcopal area?

The next meeting of the transition team will be Oct. 1 and 2 at K-State Wesley in Manhattan.