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2012 General and Jurisdictional Conferences

          

General Conference     SE Jurisdictional Conference

April 24 – May 4, 2012               July 18-20, 2012
Tampa, FL                                   Lake Junaluska, NC
 
Logo above is a link to info.           Logo above is a link to info.  
 

 Scroll all the way through for lots of useful information.

Countdown to 2012 General Conference: Click HERE.

Memphis Conference Delegation to 2012

General and Jurisdictional Conferences

Front row from left: Sandra Burnett, Sandra L. Clay, Selena Henson, Randy Cooper, Michael Blake. Back row from left: Roger Hopson, David R. Reed, Sky McCracken, Mary A. Mooney, Solomon Christian, Gary D. Lawson, Jr., Beth Brown, David P. Comperry. Not pictured: Madison Lane. Click HERE to read delegate bios.

The Memphis Conference delegation to the 2012 General and Jurisdictional Conferences was elected at the 2011 Memphis Annual Conference in Paducah, KY in June 2011.

These elected delegates will represent the Memphis Conference at General Conference (Tampa, FL) and the Southeast Jurisdictional Conference (Lake Juanluska, NC) in 2012. Click HERE to read their individual bios.

The complete elected delegation from the Memphis Conference includes: 

  • Lay delegates elected to General Conference: Selena Henson, Collierville, TN; Sandra Burnett, Paducah, KY.
  • Clergy delegates elected to General Conference: Rev. Randy Cooper, Martin, TN (head of the delegation); Rev. Sandra L. Clay, Memphis, TN.
  • Lay delegates elected to Jurisdictional Conference: David R. Reed, Martin, TN; Dr. Solomon Christian, Memphis, TN.
  • Clergy delegates elected to Jurisdictional Conference: Rev. Sky McCracken, Paducah, KY; Rev. Roger Hopson, Lebanon, TN.
  • Lay alternates: Beth Brown, Union City, TN; Mary A. Mooney, Millington, TN; Madison Lane, McKenzie, TN.
  • Clergy alternates: Rev. David P. Comperry, Memphis, TN; Rev. Gary D. Lawson, Sr., Eva, TN; Rev. Michael Blake, Martin, TN. 

Handy Resources for 2012 General Conference

2012 General Conference Web site    www.umc.org/gc2012

Social Media

Pre-General Conference News Briefing (Jan. 2012)
 
Free Training: 'Exploring General Conference"
“Exploring General Conference” (EGC101) is a free, basic online course that outlines how General Conference operates and how it can affect the lives of United Methodists.
 
Constitution of The United Methodist Church 
 
Daily Christian Advocate
 
Prayer
Call to Action
 
Four Areas of Focus of The United Methodist Church
 
Worldwide Nature of The Church proposals
 
How the UM legislative process works
 
About Tampa, FL
Short video of the interior of Tampa Convention Center
 

Episcopal Elections, Southeastern Jurisdiction: Info HERE    

  • Episcopal Election Process
  • Episcopal Assignments
  • Episcopal Nominees
  • News
  • Ballot Results (available during the Southeastern Jurisdiction Conference)

Rev. Randy Cooper

Rev. Randy Cooper endorsed

by Memphis Conference delegation

as nominee for bishop

The Memphis Conference delegation to the 2012 General and Jurisdictional conferences has endorsed the Reverend Randy Cooper as their episcopal nominee.

Cooper will join nominees from other conferences under consideration for the episcopacy at next summer’s Southeastern Jurisdictional Conference at Lake Junaluska, N.C.

The Memphis Conference of The United Methodist Church includes West Tennessee and Western Kentucky.
 
Currently pastor of Martin First United Methodist Church in Martin, TN, Cooper has been a delegate to three Jurisdictional Conferences and one General Conference. He is the Chair of the 2012 Memphis Conference delegation.
 
In 2008, Cooper was the lead clergy delegate from the Memphis Conference and the Memphis Conference-endorsed nominee for the episcopacy. He speaks of his second candidacy as “a form of obedience within the church.” 
 
Ordained a deacon in 1976 and an Elder in 1981, Cooper has served in ministry for 33 years with rural and small town United Methodist churches in Kentucky and Tennessee. Additionally, he served the West Delhi Presbyterian Church in upstate New York from 1978 to 1980 while a United Methodist Deacon. 
 
Cooper has held several leadership positions with the Memphis Conference. For a full eight years, he has served as Chair of the Order of Elders and has held a seat on the Conference Board of Ordained Ministry. 
 
Among Cooper’s missional commitments are seats on the Boards of Directors of the Interfaith Campus Ministry of the University of Tennessee at Martin, TN, and We Care Ministries in Martin, TN, an ecumenical program that provides assistance to families of his community. He serves, too, on the Board for the Memphis Conference’s Reelfoot Rural Ministries, a ministry to the rural poor in west Tennessee.  He also was an early endorser of the Ekklesia Project, an ecumenical network of Christians who have found friendship in their common love for God and the church.
 
Cooper, now 58 years old, received his Bachelor’s degree in Religion from Lambuth College in Jackson, TN in 1975.  His Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1979 included a year studying the New Testament at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He obtained a Doctor of Ministry degree from Memphis Theological Seminary in Memphis, TN in 1994.  For eight years, while still serving as a pastor, he participated in the continuing education work of the Pastor Theologian Program of the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, NJ.
 
Soon after Cooper and his wife, Gayle, married, they lived in residence with mentally-challenged women in Jackson, TN as part of a two-year ministry. From 1987 to 1993, the couple served as co-directors of Plowshares Chapel House, then located in Trenton, TN, a retreat house dedicated to the work of prayer and peace.
 
Today Gayle works as a physical therapist assistant.
 
The couple has two daughters and three grandchildren. Daughter Margaret is a church organist in Chicago. Daughter Rachel is a pediatric nurse practitioner in Birmingham, AL, and her husband is a baseball coach at Birmingham Southern College.
 
 

Conference as a Means of Grace —Jurisdictional Conference Elects Bishop

By Rev. Gregory Waldrop, Fountain Avenue UMC, Paducah, KY and member of Randy Cooper Election Committee

 
Means of grace are the regular and repeated activities that bend our lives in line with our Lord, Jesus. Means of grace are the traditional ways we Methodists are invited to wait for the Lord to work within and among us. In the language of the youth, the means of grace are where we hang out to hook up with the divine lover, Jesus. The means of grace encourage us to go where Jesus is sure to be found; the more regularly we partake of the means of grace the more they do their holy work and the more fully we find ourselves shaped by God into holy vessels.
 
The last means of grace that Wesley himself added to the other four more traditional means of grace (Communion, Bible Study, Fasting and Prayer, and Worship) was conference. Wesley reminded the people of God that often things were made divinely clear by gathering people together and talking candidly and heartily about confusing matters that lay ahead. Methodists have organized our church lives and time by conference. Every year we have a charge conference in order to talk about our local church matters; also regional church leaders gather once a year for an Annual Conference in order to gain a wider perspective and conversation; every four years Jurisdictional and General Conferences are convened to discern issues that deserve the full breadth of our denominational wisdom and discernment. Thus the conference is one of God’s special gifts to Methodism and, through Methodism, to the world.
 
We United Methodists elect Bishops at our Jurisdictional Conferences. In the various regions of the United States and the world, delegates—half clergy, half lay folk chosen from local churches—scrutinize prospective candidates and elect new Bishops by secret ballot. Once elected, new Bishops are consecrated to their special work.
 
Conferring together is the way we find our way forward, confident that God works through our conferencing to make straight our paths. Conference is what we ought to call our board meetings and our other “business” sessions because our main work is to find God’s work and join in it. Conferring is the way we help each other discover God’s work among us. Conference is not trying to get our own way but rather to insure that God’s way is welcomed as our way. In genuine conferencing, we are not so much making our case; instead we are listening for the case God is making for us to follow through those with whom we are conferring. Conferencing includes many of the people often left out of important conversations. In the church that includes the children, the youth, the homebound, and the disaffected. Full conferencing graces the church broadly. 
 
Haven’t you been involved in conversations that were clearly holy and a means of grace? This is the gift God yearns for us to live out and that God invites us to share. It is a gift of hearing rather than dominating, a gift of discerning rather than deciding, a gift of faith rather than fact. Conferencing makes room for other people and other perspectives and even other opposing ideas so that God’s will might find its full fruit. Conference is a means of grace; conferring is one of God’s ways to be deeply present with us.
 

The Methods of Methodism: A Distinctly United Methodist Way To Make a Bishop

 
By Rev. Gregory Waldrop, Fountain Avenue UMC, Paducah, KY and member of Randy Cooper Election Committee
 
Do you know our uniquely United Methodist recipe for a Bishop? Have you ever wondered how we make Bishops in our denomination? Sometimes Bishops, good Bishops, have been made through unsightly processes and worldly ways. Other times, good Bishops emerge through clearly spiritual methods and practices. God works in many ways, human and divine. All United Methodist Bishops arrive through a distinctly Methodist process which centers on the quadrennial Jurisdictional Conferences which happen next in July of 2012. Every four years at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, the representatives of all fifteen Southeastern Annual Conferences elect the pool of Bishops from which our Memphis Conference Bishop arises.
 
Did you hear the good news that a candidate for Bishop has emerged here in the Memphis Conference? We, the Annual Conference, identified and discerned The Reverend Randy Cooper as one whom we sense has the special abilities of a Bishop. He did not come to the Conference seeking the position; his work in the local church satisfies him deeply. His pastoral qualities have been affirmed at each of his pastoral appointments in Kentucky and Tennessee, currently in Martin, Tennessee. People describe his preaching as spirited and fresh and penetrating. He knows well his appointed business of Word and Table. Randy Cooper lives for the church and its vital work. However, many of his clergy colleagues and several of the lay folks with whom he has served, recognized a growing breadth in his thought. Clearly his work and words showed themselves worthy of a wider hearing. His fresh, Biblically-based leadership, easily and naturally, spread to Conference and Regional levels. One day, very nearly in unison, many of us looked up and saw in Randy Cooper the latent spirit and character of a Bishop. We asked him to consider standing for Bishop.
 
We hope you know Randy Cooper or that you will get to know him. He grew up the youngest child of a farm family immersed in the United Methodist Church in Humboldt, TN. He still loves the land with all its Biblical distinctiveness and centrality. Randy and his wife, Gayle Emro Cooper, have recently celebrated their 38th  wedding anniversary. hey have raised two daughters, Rachel and Margaret, to adult lives of faithfulness, marriage, and call. He and the cluster of people who surround him are worth hearing and getting to know—knowing him, you will sense his humility, his compassion, and his deep Biblical roots, all essentials in strong Bishops.
 
Recommending and adequately supporting a candidate for Bishop requires much from a United Methodist Conference. We must continually uphold Randy in prayer as well as pray for the entire process into which together we now enter. Several of us are working to get his preaching and writings out to larger circles—perhaps you are an able editor or printer who can provide the necessary skill to help that happen with excellence. Others are preparing a DVD to introduce Randy Cooper to the delegates of the Southeastern Jurisdictional Conference—can you help us? Many whose spiritual gifts include generosity will send money to the conference office to undergird Randy Cooper’s candidacy—it will take several thousand dollars to fund this effort fully. Maybe you know neighboring United Methodists in Conferences across the southeast and can recommend Randy to them and to their Jurisdictional Conference delegates. Many ways remain to support Randy Cooper as our Memphis Conference candidate for Bishop this quadrennium.
 
It is time to consecrate five new United Methodist Bishops in the Southeastern Jurisdiction. In our midst, a fine candidate has arisen; we have discerned his gifts and graces; we recommend him for this humble, holy work of leadership; we now work faithfully for his election. 
 
Godspeed the United Methodist Church and Randy Cooper, a candidate for Bishop from our delegation of General and Jurisdictional Conference delegates!