I’m sorry that I won’t be able to attend the RMN Convocation at Vanderbilt next month. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to Nashville. So long in fact that the Grand Ol’ Opry was still at Ryman Auditorium, and Opryland hadn’t been built yet. I was not one of the pilgrims to Elvis Presley’s Graceland, preferring to visit Andrew Jackson’s home “The Hermitage” and the reproduction of Parthenon.

In addition to the Upper Room facilities cited in the program, Nashville also is home to the United Methodist Publishing House, Cokesbury Bookstores, Abingdon Press, General Council on Finance, General Board of Discipleship, and General Board of Higher Education and Ministry. You’re going right into the “lion’s den.” You might even get to bootleg a copy of the Book of Discipline (as long as you promise not to read it.)

Although Vanderbilt is a great and beautiful university, I doubt that they will be able to equal the old-time, campground revival feel of the convocation at Lake Junaluska in 2005. That was really “old-time religion” that I thought the Methodists had forgotten about. Now we’re so “high church” that we have everything but the incense.

We will have one of our own preaching, Gayle Felton, and it would be worth going just to hear her. She inspired us at the North Carolina Annual Conference a few years ago with fervor comparable to Martin Luther King, Jr. I understand that several rummies will be going, and I wish you God Speed.

I guess that my message to you would be not to get too caught up in the preparation for General Conference strategies that you forget our real purpose to make the Methodist Church more inclusive for all – and not just the minorities that we represent. We’re all brothers and sisters and Christ, and however much we may differ in our biblical interpretation of the scriptures and our understanding of how the church should function, we cannot exclude anyone no matter how much we may disagree with them.

In recent years we’ve had lots of battles on many issues, but I think the single episode that upset me the most was the ruling that provided a “litmus test” for church membership that allows a local pastor to interpret whether or not a person is eligible for membership. If you take the vows and agree to be baptized, how can the clergy judge what is in your heart or whether you’re “qualified” to become a Methodist? Seems to me like we’re reverting back to Catholicism where the priest was the intermediary between you and God. I’ve known too many preachers and too many bishops to know that they’re not saints, however you might interpret that label.