Echoes From EAST

June 2010

EAST* met June 21-23 in Uniontown, PA, hosted by Pittsburgh Supt. Jim Jobes. Great discussion occurred around MINE 2011, debriefing Overflow Conference 2010, and General Conference 2011.

General Conference 2011:
The Board of Bishops, responding to directives from the 2007 General Conference, is working on a gift-based approach to their role as overseers, rather than a strictly geographic approach. In addition to a basic core of responsibilities they will be dividing assignments based upon passion, gifting, education, relationship, and calling.
The bishops are working on the creation of a national Overseer Team, consisting of Bishops, Superintendents, and World Missions Area Directors that would meet 4 times per year, similar to the monthly EAST meetings, but on a national rather than regional level. This partnership would create a forum to plan, strategize, initiate, collaborate, and report on a national and global level. Regional teams and other affinity teams may continue to meet.
Along with these developments would be a set of measurements for annual conferences to evaluate the vitality of their churches.
The Board of Bishops is also looking to create a better process for guiding the Superintendent nominating process as well as exploring a different structure for connecting World Missions to the FMCNA to increase the integration of missional efforts.
These ideas are being developed for presentation to General Conference 2011.

Overflow Conference 2010:
The feedback from the Overflow Conference has been amazingly positive! The evaluations revealed:
94% gave it a 4-5 rating out of 5 for the overall experience. Only 6% gave it a 1-3 rating.
92% said it was very applicable to their journey or church situation.
66% said it was a good idea to include annual conference.
89% said we should have another Overflow Conference in the future.

MINE 2011:
Overflow Conference came into being as a result of evaluating MINE. Now that we have
experienced OC'10 we need to decide, do we continue MINE.

With General Conference 2011 happening in our region, we need to decide if it will be a "go to" event like OC'10 and, if so, can we expect our leaders to attend MINE, Annual Conference, and General Conference. If only elected delegates will be attending General Conference, then should we proceed with MINE 2011 and what about Annual Conference; should we have AC at MINE?

Blessings!
Mitch

Mitch Pierce, Superintendent
Northeast Region FMCNA Ð Genesis and Keystone Conferences
supt@northeastregionfmc.org