1996 General Conference Series, Part 1
Before the conference ends, nearly a quarter-million cookies will be consumed and 3 million words recorded.
Local-church 'prayer trees' will ask God's intervention on behalf of each delegate.
This article is the fourth in a series of Interpreter features designed to help United Methodists understand the issues, people and planning for the denomination's international legislative body, the General Conference. The quadrennial assembly of 1,000 delegates will be held April 16-26 in Denver.
by Robert Lear
End to end, a United Methodist General Conference poses a shopping list to tax the limit of any credit card.
Just for starters, how about 240,000 cookies; 70 tons of paper and enough ink to record an estimated 3 million words; upwards of 800 tables and several thousand chairs; scores of computer terminals with access to nearly 50 telephone lines; a complex electronic voting system for delegates; and enough airplane seats to bring 998 voting delegates and several thousand visitors and staff to Denver from 40 countries, and get them home? Oh yes, and about $3 million to cover basic costs.
When the opening eucharistic fanfare is sounded next April 16 in the state-of-the-art Colorado Convention Center, United Methodism's top legislative assembly will have come a long way from the few score preachers who rode horseback to Baltimore 204 years ago to chart the fledgling denomination's future.
Six Years of Planning
Planning for the 10-day conference in Denver began six years ago when the Commission on the General Conference chose the "mile-high city" from among possibilities in the denomination's Western Jurisdiction. Traditionally, the conference is rotated among the five jurisdictions in the United States; Cleveland already has been selected for the session in 2000.
The glistening Colorado Convention Center in downtown Denver generally is hailed by meeting planners as one of the finest facilities in the United States, affording a wide range of meeting rooms, dining and other supports. Delegates, staff and the estimated 5,000 conference visitors also will find striking views of the front range of the Rocky Mountains.
Space is a prime concern for General Conference planners, headed by Roger F. Kruse, a staff executive of the General Council on Finance and Administration who serves as executive director and business manager of the conference. The Denver sessions will be the first for Kruse since he succeeded the Rev. DeWayne S. Woodring, Indianapolis, who held the post from 1980 through 1992.
The planning commission is chaired by John J. Thomas of Brazil, Ind., an attorney and former state legislator who has been a delegate from the South Indiana Conference continuously since 1964. The Rev. William K. Quick of Detroit heads the program arm of the planning commission, and the Rev. Don R. Locher of Sierra Madre, Calif., heads the facilities committee.
Paula Johnston, Longmont, Colo., a former member of the Commission the General Conference, chairs the host Denver Area committee that has "hospitality in the biblical sense" as its principal theme.
Relatively few convention facilities in the nation are adequate in every respect for the General Conference. In some recent sessions, subgroups of legislative committees have had to meet in corridor ends, or even in storage space. In Denver there will be adequate rooms for all.
Outside the plenary hall, two of the largest and busiest of the rooms will house the conference communications center and the headquarters of the Daily Christian Advocate (DCA), the "Congressional Record" of the General Conference.
New Technology for Conference
Past conferences have attracted several hundred journalists, both church press and religion writers from major daily newspapers and wire services. The news room in Denver will provide graphic evidence of the advance of technology, even since the 1992 conference in Louisville, Ky.
Replacing ranks of typewriters-manual until relatively recently--will be computer terminals with direct access to telephone lines, an innovation first used in 1992. A few key strokes will reveal the status of any particular piece of legislation.
Computer technology will hold the key to production of the DCA as that staff prepares for the printing each night of approximately 6,000 copies of an average 100-page record of the day's business including verbatim floor debate. The latter will be fed directly from the plenary hall into the DCA's bank of computers.
Even before the presses of a commercial Denver printer begin their nightly run, the advance edition of the DCA totaling around 2,000 pages of reports, legislative proposals and other official business will have been supplied to delegates.
Elsewhere in the convention center, members of the secretarial and petition staffs will make up-to-the-minute changes in the hundreds of petitions that must be processed by the legislative committees before going to plenary.
New for 1996 will be a computer center where delegates and visitors can quickly get a status report on any particular petition.
The technology is credited with helping trim hours from the length of the conference. And at an estimated cost of more than $600 for each minute devoted to plenary, legislative committee and worship, any saving of time is welcomed.
One of the major time-savers is the electronic voting system, pioneered in the religious world by the 1988 General Conference. Each delegate has a key pad on which to vote and the results are flashed instantly on the big plenary hall screen. The system also is used for elections such as that of Judicial Council members.
Other innovations since 1980 include big-screen projection of plenary sessions; simultaneous translation via electronics for delegates wishing to hear the proceedings in any of five languages; signers for the hearingimpaired; and an automatic timing device signalling speakers their time is up.
While planning proceeds on the national level, Paula Johnston and her committees in the Denver Area explore ways to demonstrate "there's more to Christian hospitality than cookies" supplied to delegates at breaks.
A banner with a special logo and theme has been supplied each congregation in the Rocky Mountain and Montana conferences. District meetings on hospitality have been held, and congregational "prayer trees" set up to pray for individual delegates.
Special tours to churches and other points of interest are being arranged. Johnston and her helpers are hoping the relatively early date for the conference won't lead to snowy entanglements with Colorado weather when as recently as this July a major tourist road near Denver was blocked at higher elevations by snow drifts. During the last previous General Conference in Denver in 1960, a light snowfall provided a few friendly snowballs for delegates to lob at each other instead of controversial debate points. Contingency plans are in place for unexpected weather.
When April 1996 arrives, Denver will be more than prepared to welcome and accommodate The United Methodist Church for what, hopefully, will be the most productive and promising General Conference to date.
Robert Lear retired in 1992 as director of United Methodist News Service's Washington office. He first attended a General Conference in 1956.