Methodist conference to kick off

Clergy and lay members from hundreds of United Methodist churches in Arkansas will gather at the Bank of the Ozarks Convention Center in Hot Springs beginning Sunday for their four-day annual conference.

The Arkansas Conference of the United Methodist Church, led by Bishop Gary Mueller, includes 697 churches with roughly 138,000 members. About 1,400 attendees are expected at the annual gathering, which includes a mix of worship and business.

Martha Taylor, communications director, said this year's conference will focus more on worship and less on business with the theme "A Call to Spiritual Revival."

"Everything we are doing is around those things -- our worship, the different gatherings are all around that theme of spiritual revival," Taylor said.

The conference will begin with worship services Sunday night and continue through noon Wednesday.

The Rev. Paul Rasmussen, senior pastor at Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas, will lead worship services Sunday and Monday evenings. Mueller will preach Tuesday evening and the Rev. Lisa Yebuah, pastor at Edenton Street United Methodist Church in Raleigh, N.C., will preach during the closing worship service Wednesday.

In keeping with the theme of spiritual revival, Bishop Young Jin Cho of the Virginia Conference of the denomination will lead a call to prayer Monday morning.

Taylor said a highlight of the conference will be a special service Tuesday afternoon acknowledging past wrongs against indigenous people. A worship service, The Act of Repentance Toward Indigenous People, will be led by the Rev. David Wilson of the Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference. Oren Lyons, a member of Onondaga Nation Council of Chiefs of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, will also participate.

A similar act of repentance was held at the denomination's General Conference in Tampa, Fla., in 2012 and United Methodists were urged to hold services and begin conversations with indigenous people in their own conferences.

In the business portion, attendees will elect delegates to the quadrennial jurisdictional and general conferences to be held in 2016. The general conference includes delegates from around the world, half clergy and half laity. They discuss issues facing the church and vote on resolutions, which are then entered into the denomination's Book of Discipline, or book of law.

The 2016 meeting will be held May 10-20 in Portland, Ore.

Religion on 06/13/2015

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