annual conference

We are off to annual conference, ours being held at Lake Junaluska, near Asheville, North Carolina. Annual Conference is a mixture of the sacred and the profane, the inspirational and the tedious, the significant and the trivial, the urgent and the irrelevant. It is a business session, a camp meeting, an ecclesiastical gong show, a family reunion, a political convention, but in the midst there are moments of transcendence, when the sense emerges that this is a tradition worth inhabiting, a movement worth renewing, a way of life worth preserving. If you are going, I look forward to seeing you under the trees.