South Central Conference Meeting Report

June 6-8, Cathedral of Hope, Dallas, Texas

     The United Church of Christ South Central Conference meeting held on Jun 6^th and 7^th was a positive inspirational and learning experience for me.  The entire organization and management for the Conference were clearly outstanding.  Highlights of the Conference included the times of collective worship with approximately 250 lay delegates, pastors and guests from Texas and Louisiana, break out conference sessions presented by ministers and lay members, fellowship meals around the table, and the keynote speaker’s presentation during the two day event.  It was a pleasure representing Round Grove UCC.  Round Grove, along with approximately 20 other UCC churches, received recognition and a certificate for their annual giving to the UCC programs.  Music presentations by the Conference choir, a church choir from a Carrollton UCC church, worship leaders from the host church, Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, were uplifting and certainly extended the worship experience.  Paul Nixon, the Conference key note speaker and a church planter for the United Methodist Churches in Washington D.C., challenged the delegates and ministers to move out into the local community for inclusive and dynamic mission opportunities.   Two specific break out sessions that Ernie and I attended were “Meaningful Worship” and “Using Media”.   Presenters in both sessions focused on “thinking” out of the box to bring rich, dynamic, cost effective approaches to strengthen the congregational worship experience in both the traditional and contemporary worship service.  Throughout the Conference it was very evident that “God is Still Speaking…”!  Thank you Round Grove church members for allowing me to attend this event.                                                                                                       Homer Terry

 

     Homer Terry and I attended the conference as delegates of Round Grove UCC. One of the real joys of the conference was to participate in worship with hundreds of UCC members from several states.  The theme of this year’s conference was “Renew, Rejoice and Reach Out”.  The keynote speaker was Rev. Dr. Paul Nixon who gave an excellent talk on leading stale or stagnant churches into spiritual renewal.  There were 8 different workshops to choose from and Homer and I just happened to select the same two to attend.  The first workshop was “Can These Dry Bones Live?” with Rev. John Roberts. Rev. Roberts made several points regarding the recharging and restructuring of worship that could be helpful.  His suggestions ran from cutting out or cutting down on the bulletins to offering a weekday contemporary worship service that might be attractive to younger people.  He also suggested the use of multi- media products and the willingness to experiment a bit in the worship service and to inject joy into the service.  The second workshop was “The Mystery of Media” with Rev. Michael Piazza & Paul Taylor.  This workshop focused on the use of multi-media by the Cathedral of Hope church.  While I believe that several of their suggestions regarding the use of multi-media on a small scale (for example a simple power point presentation running in the background before the service using still shots of the beauty of nature set to some inspirational music) have merit, I believe that the large scale use of multi-media can detract from the message of the worship service if one is not careful.  In fairness to the Cathedral of Hope, many of the video segments that they showed us were from their pageants (Easter, Christmas) and not from their normal worship services and the pageant footage was spectacular.

I am very glad that I attended this year’s conference; it was a very worthwhile experience and a wonderful opportunity.  Thank you to all for giving me the chance and the honor to be a delegate of Round Grove UCC at this year’s conference.                     Ernie Evans