in a few minutes i'll be heading over to the "methodome" for the first full day of our annual conference. the first balloting order of business is to elect our candidates for general conference. we will elect five laity candidates, which i am part of that pool. the church has wi-fi, if it actually has signal in the sanctuary i'll be live blogging my results. if not, i'll just post results as i can.
i'm excited to see how this all turns out. there wasn't much "campaigning" on my part, just hanging around and talking to friends of mine yesterday. fortunately or unfortunately most of those friends are clergy and may or may not have mentioned to their delegates to vote for me..
let's see where the day takes us
8:39am i have arrived a few minutes ago and taken my perch in the balcony of the "methodome." side note: i call this the methodome as brentwood umc is the largest church in our conference, their sanctuary has a large dome architecture, plus, it's really really big. seems logical to me to call it such. we have started to do the initial vote on clergy and are now taking up votes for laity. not sure how long the ballot counting takes.
9:13am we apparently are counting a vote. had some report on standing rules and now we are listening to a bible study by dr. waite willis, jr. he has a nice presence, has thrown in some funny jokes, plus shared some stories about bishop wills as they are apparently brother-in-laws.
9:43am.. bible study is still going on.. i am noticing that people don't know how to turn off their cell phones.
1:37pm... they are announcing the results of the 2nd clergy and fist laity ballot. two elections for clergy. lynn hill, cathie leimenstoll.. from what i've been hearing, par for the course. clergy ballot #3 is being taken, voting for 3 persons.
as we wait on that.. some fun stuff. i ran into art & stacie just after the memorial service. they look just like i imagined.. or the pictures they put on their blogs. we loosely skated around doing lunch, but it is so crazy here. i did have lunch with some of the young adults brett & bill being two of them. jay, though not a young adult (nor am i) joined us.
1:52pm... the lay ballot #1, 316 valid ballots. 159 votes needed for election. don ladd & joe williams elected with the first ballot. it looks like over 80 people were written into the ballot. me, i got 50 votes. very close to getting elected is betty alexander.
4:37pm... clergy ballot 4 came in. no election. bettye lewis, john collett, barbara garcia are the front runners getting 50plus votes, but less than the needed 73. new clergy ballot being taken.
as i am waiting on all this.. i am beginning to wonder if the espiscopal process for elections is much better... hmmm..
4:44pm... lay ballot, 353 ballots, 334 valid ballots. number needed for an election 168. no election. closest was 147, which was actually a small drop from the last ballot. me, my votes got cut into half. no standing at 24. gross, suppose its due to all the write ins. unfortunately there isn't any close candidates at the moment for election, so this might be awhile.
7:05pm... i left.. the dinner break and waiting for a ballot result i felt that wasn't going to be promising, i left to have dinner with erin. got a text from a friend. we did elect a 3rd laity member betty alexander. a great person indeed, but like the two before her, they have a long history of participating in gc. maybe too long. there was a motion to not report those who had less than 40 votes, so i wasn't reported. rachel, one of the other young adults with a decent amount of votes was not mentioned either. guess there wil be no young adult representation on our gc delegation. i have some thoughts i'll expand on after conference. so let's see how things pan out in the end.
