Annual Meeting 1999 -- Day 1

Annual Meeting 1999

The Annual Meeting has begun!

To begin the meeting, Alban Institute's the Rev. Alice Mann led a large group of clergy in a workshop on helping their congregations understand and deepen their spiritual lives at First Congregational Church, Groton. The workshop looked at the different paths of spirituality, and explored some ways in which pastors might help church members deepen the path with which they were most familiar, and explore new path to discover what spiritual gifts lie there. Rev. Mann was an engaging and inspiring presenter, and her workshop included group work, question and answer, and singing.

Following the workshop, Conference Minister the Rev. Dr. Davida Foy Crabtree and Minister to Retired Clergy the Rev. Hugh Penney honored those celebrating fifty and twenty-five years of service after ordination. The smiles and warmth in all the voices testified to a real gratitude for the privilege each honoree felt in their work, and which others around them felt in having been the recipients of it.

Conference Vice Moderator the Rev. Gordon Rankin opened the Annual Meeting's first plenary at 7:00 pm, and Chair of the Board of Directors Jane Chittick announced that this year's Moderator had had to resign his position earlier this year because of unexpected circumstances in his own life, so Rev. Rankin will fill that role this year. The two led the delegates through the opening business of approving the rules and agenda, and then introduced several distinguished visitors, including a most special guest, the Rev. Dr. John Thomas, newly elected President of the United Church of Christ.

John Thomas Dr. Crabtree noted Dr. Thomas' distinguished service in the church, focussing particularly on his work in recent years supporting and guiding ecumenical unity. Dr. Thomas was instrumental in the 1997 declaration of full communion among the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and Reformed Church in America, and the United Church of Christ (USA). Dr. Thomas will remain at the Annual Meeting throughout the weekend.

Dr. Crabtree then began her Conference Minister's Address, a finely crafted and passionately delivered assessment of the church's current condition and challenge for it future direction. She noted the grief involved in all the changes of recent years, and the astonishing ministry that has been done in that time period. She named, thanked, and congratulated the fifteen Conference churches that have sponsored refugees in the past year, many of them from Sierra Leone, the home of those captives aboard the Amistad in the nineteenth century.

She went on to say,

Through our cooperation as a Conference we are often able to accomplish some things no one church could do alone. We're starting a new Korean church. We're helping the Amistad to be built. We're supporting a special ministry with the churches started after the Civil War by our missionaries. We're building fish ponds for a new industry among the dispossessed of Colombia, and helping their children adjust to being homeless and uprooted, if such a thing is possible. We're helping build affordable housing, advocating for the poor and the working poor. We've helped bring together our ministers in Hartford in response to a community tragedy. We're supporting campus ministers all across the state, and working ecumenically on criminal justice issues, small church ministries, and many other concerns.

Yes, this Conference is engaged in mission and ministry in exciting and important ways! Yes, a resounding yes!

The complete Conference Minister's address is posted here.

Dr. Crabtree offered three challenges for the near future: to engage in ministry to and with Connecticut's inner cities, to develop ministries for and with youth (and especially to involve them in the full life of the church), and to make needed renovations and enhancements at Silver Lake Conference Center so that those resources are available to more generations of Connecticut's Christians.

Following her address, the Rev. Dr. Barbara Brown Zikmund, President of Hartford Seminary, made a special presentation. In her years of service in Connecticut, she has travelled extensively about the state, and on her journeys she brought a camera. The result is a collection of photographs, annotated with historical information and bound in looseleaf binders, of nearly every single church building in the Conference. She gave the collection to Dr. Crabtree and Conference Archivist the Rev. Evans Sealand, and a brief slide show of just some of the images demonstrated the talent and the effort she had brought to this project. These will be kept as a treasure for a long, long time to come.

The evening ended with a reception hosted by four local seminaries: Andover Newton Theological School, Bangor Theological Seminary, Hartford Seminary, and Yale Divinity School.

Tomorrow we go back to work!

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3