This morning with the Lewis Center D.S. Cohort...

Yes, it's another picture of people sitting around a table talking (and dreaming and imagining and laughing). This is my "first year d.s. cohort group" that was brought together last December by the Lewis Center for Church Leadership (yes that is Lovett Weems down at the end) with the help of Miss Lilly (aka Lilly Foundation grant) at Wesley Seminary, to help identify what practices help and what practices hinder development of superintendents in the first year. We really like each other. A few persons I already knew--Gail Ford Smith I know (run, girl, run.) Liz Lopez across the table from Gail, I heard preach at the Clergywomen's Consultation in 1976 in Dallas, which of course would have been the 20th year anniversary of full clergy rights for women. Kay Scarborough (I know that's not the right spelling) who did a great devotion today, knows French AND Finances and I again said we would try to meet someplace to visit (She serves in Kansas East) Wow. Three fifths of the 50 years we celebrate this year have been lived by us since that 1976 consultation. It is very hard to describe what we talked about at the d.s. cohort meeting today. There were 10 of us I think, all from different conferences. Today, we dissed our ds training two years ago and brainstormed new ideas for the Junaluska event, the "finishing school" event the first summer of one's dsship. We all came in the year of the "experiment"---and didn't feel like we got what we needed. We also decided to come back together next December to check in and to work through issues that the Lewis Center will help identify as significant ones for dss. I had a momentary feeling like I do in cabinet sometimes, of a real disconnect with what others around the table were talking about---but then, someone today would say something that would make me know that maybe I'm just coming at it all a bit differently.
I just think that everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, about our structure, our practices, the patterning of keeping doing what we have experienced, needs to focus around getting our folks ready for/willing to/eager to be open to change. And it is so hard to get perspective when you are in it (that is, in the midst of an institution that too often seems to value most persons who will maintain the structure). Many of our younger clergy and others are both culturally literate (and I mean culture NOW, not the way it was in the 1950s) AND who are deeply commited to the Wesleyan spirit.
I am just too tired tonight to make any pithy comments or wise cracks. Maybe tomorrow the better articulation will come. I am home. And will be until I go to Myrtle Beach for the Congress on Evangelism. And BTW, Taylor from our General Board of Discipleship called to tell me about an event in October that is being sponsored by the GBOD on the emerging church. Hope we can all get to know what the other hand is doing and come together as denominationally interested.