Lake Neuron

Jay Voorhees has an excellent post about Loyd Mabry’s defense of the recent reorganization in the Tennessee Conference UMC office. I was extremely unsatisfied with Mabry’s posting and think Jay does a great job of critiquing it.

I haven’t blogged before about this situation, which happened several weeks ago. For out-of-towners and non-Methodists, the Tennessee Conference of the United Methodist Church (which basically includes all of Middle Tennessee) did away with two staff positions a few weeks ago, including the one held by Beth Morris, who was responsible for the conference’s youth programming and who I was very slightly acquainted with because she represented the conference on the Mountain T.O.P. board. The other position was related to children’s ministries.

The conference says that a reorganization is needed, but even if that is true, these specific changes were handled in an extremely poor fashion, without debate, discussion or warning, and the youth ministry workers and children’s ministry workers who would be most affected by the change weren’t consulted or even warned. The impact on some of the activities already scheduled apparently wasn’t fully thought through either.

Here’s a timeline from Gavin.

HPIM2009

Originally uploaded by jicarney.

We did not have a church “bonfire” tonight, because we could not get a burn permit. But there is no permit required for “campfires,” so we had a church “campfire.”

It was fun. We had burgers, hot dogs and chicken breasts from the grill, and then roasted marshmallows and had s’mores.

They had encouraged people to bring instruments. I have not picked up my harmonica in months, but I brought it anyway, assuming that someone else would bring a guitar or something. No one did. I did a couple of things on the harmonica, but I’m so out of practice I couldn’t do too much.

Here are the rest of the photos.

I forgot to add a link to the rest of my Galilean Service photos.

HPIM1963

Originally uploaded by jicarney.

First UMC has, for years, had a tradition of holding a cookout and worship service on the shores of Normandy Lake. The youth conduct the worship, which usually ends with one of the youth, portraying Jesus, coming ashore on a boat. This year, because of the drought, the levels of the lake are way, way down, and the water is so far from the normal shoreline that there wasn’t any practical way to do Jesus’ arrival the normal way. So they did something different, and it all worked anyway. It was a nice evening all around.