When EF Talks

General Conference 2024 Daily Updates

I’m going to update this blog post each day during the 2024 General Conference, as a way of keeping folks informed, and offering my own view as to what’s happening.

Some quick background, before we get started…
Feel free to…

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An Honest Accounting of “Missing” African Delegates

There are as many as 100 International Delegates not at United Methodist General Conference this year, many of whom are from Africa.

This has caused many questions. Allegations have been made that General Conference failed to communicate with them quickly…

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Table Rules (“Crowded Table,” Highwomen Cover)

General Conference starts today, and I am thinking about this song and what might happen these next few weeks.

I don’t think it’s an accident that I was introduced to this song by clergywomen colleagues.
We were all sitting around…

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The Ah-h-h-h! Moment

Frederick Buechner once described “Prayer” in a way that leaps to my mind this week, in these days after our communal experience of the Eclipse.

Buechner wrote:

“We all pray whether we think of it as praying or not. The

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The Eclipse, “The Rapture,” and St. Augustine

These days after a solar eclipse are probably a good time to remind ourselves of this extended quote from St. Augustine of Hippo.
(picture taken by me during “totality”)

St. Augustine was a wordy writer, so I’ve edited it down…

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A Deeper Sense of “Faith”

Increasingly, I am convinced the opposite of “faith” is not “doubt,” but “fear.” This is because the deepest level of “faith” is not “belief,” but “trust;” and the opposite of “trust/faith” is “fear/anxiety.”

Instead of faith’s opposite, doubt is a…

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Constantine’s Greatest Trick

The greatest trick Constantine ever played on our world was to convince us that the Empire that killed Jesus should actually embrace the religion that bears his name.

Why this isn’t self-obviously shocking to us today is a symptom of…

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