I don’t leave until tomorrow, so I have been checking out the GC web sites to see what is happening.
One smart thing they have done this year is to schedule orientations for delegates all day and waiting to start the opening worship until tonight. In past years the conference opening worship was usually in the late afternoon (1 or 2 p.m.) and folks were rushed to acclimate themselves to work ahead. This year there is a little more time for that work, something that several have advocated for in the past, which will hopefully make the work that they do later go faster.
The fact is that General Conference is an organizational nightmare. Imagine our U.S. government being told that congress will only meet for two weeks every four years and that they have to create the committees and infrastructure of the U.S. Capitol in a different city each time. That is basically what we try to do in our General Conference, and it is frankly a sign of God’s grace that more things don’t go haywire in that process.
By now all of the earnest volunteers that are needed to run General Conference are wondering what the heck they’ve gotten themselves into. But the rest of the day is a calm before the storm, for tonight the work starts in earnest.
