Celebrating God's Love
One New Annual Conference--From Four Previous Annual Conferences
Isaiah 43:18-19 (TEV) The Lord says, "Do not cling to events of the past or dwell on what happened long ago. Watch for the new thing I am going to do. It is happening already-you can see it now!
The United Methodist Church operates as a "Connectional" denomination. This means that local churches don't operate independently, they are part of a bigger "team". The first level of our team's organization is our Districts, which are made up of about 70 United Methodist Churches in one area and are supervised by a District Superintendent. The second level of our team is our Annual Conference, which brings together several districts across a larger geographic area and are supervised by a Bishop. The next levels of our team are: Regional Jurisdictions, National Conferences (comprising a whole nation), and finally the General Conference of United Methodist Churches all over the world that meets once every four years.
This past Saturday, about 2,000 United Methodists from all across upstate New York met at the On-Center to merge four previous Annual Conferences into one new Annual Conference. The previous Annual Conferences were: Western New York (Rochester south to PA border, west to PA border), Wyoming (Binghamton region), Troy (Albany region), and our North Central New York Conference (Utica to Rochester, Binghamton to Malone). The new conference is the Upper New York Annual Conference. This conference extends from the Albany area all the way to the western border of New York.
The new Upper New York Annual Conference is comprised of 940 churches, and 12 districts. It covers 48,000 square miles; and has 198,000 members. The journey to merge the four conferences took more than six years to bring to completion.
UPCOMING EVENTS!
June
27 Sunday 8:30 Graduates Breakfast
9:30 Worship
A SMILE FOR YOUR DAY
The Missionary's Horse
There's this guy who had been lost and walking in the desert for about 2 weeks. One hot day, he sees the home of a missionary. Tired and weak, he crawls up to the house and collapses on the doorstep. The missionary finds him and nurses him back to health.
Feeling better, the man asks the missionary for directions to the nearest town. On his way out the backdoor, he sees this horse. He goes back into the house and asks the missionary, "Could I borrow your horse and give it back when I reach the town?"
The missionary says, "Sure but there is a special thing about this horse. You have to say 'Thank God' to make it go and 'Amen' to make it stop." Not paying much attention, the man says, "Sure, ok."
So, he gets on the horse and says, "Thank God" and the horse starts walking. Then he says, "Thank God, Thank God, " and the horse starts trotting.
Feeling really brave, the man say, "Thank God, Thank God, Thank God, Thank God, Thank God" and the horse just literally takes off. Pretty soon he sees this cliff coming up and he's doing everything he can to make the horse stop. "Whoa, stop, hold on!!!!"
Finally he remembers, "AMEN!!" The horse stops 4 inches from the cliff. The man leans back in the saddle and says, "Thank God".
