What are your experiences and areas of service that you believe will be valuable in your role as a General Conference delegate?

I have served 40 years in ministry as a Youth Director, Associate Pastor, Campus Minister and as Senior Pastor. I have had a wide variety of experiences serving in the North Georgia, Louisiana and South Georgia Annual Conferences giving me some unique insight. Every church I have ever served during those times has disaffiliated. I was one of the first to declare my intention to join the GMC and did so as soon as possible. I believe I bring a wealth of educational experience as well having taken classes at Asbury and Perkins culminating in a DMIN in 2022.

It has been my desire from the beginning to actively participate in shaping this new denomination to help create a Holy Spirit infused entity truly dedicated to making disciples of Jesus Christ and disciple-makers to recapture a vision for evangelism as well as to serve those in the margins. I want to help form this new movement of God to avoid mistakes of the past certainly, but far more than that to help equip it to grow into the vehicle for Spirit-led ministry that our Wesleyan inheritance and vision should always have led us to be.

Describe why you believe that God has potentially called you to serve as a General Conference delegate.

Being a General Conference Delegates was not something I was giving a lot of thought to, but upon seeing the announcement I began to feel that familiar gentle inner nudge to put myself forward as a candidate. From the beginning I've had the desire to be part of the formative process of the GMC and believe that my experiences in the politics of our former denomination, both good and not so good, provide a deep internal motivation to see this done well. Unless the Lord builds the house they labor in vain that build it. I want to help build something that is His idea, His plan, His dream, not mine. I don't want to build something He will have to later tear down.

There are many issues we will have to deal with such as the scope and role of the episcopacy. We will need to safeguard the bottom up corporate model with the local church as the nexus for ministry. I would like to see opportunities for Youth to grow in their identity as Christians and Global Methodists through retreats and conference gatherings and to establish our own College Ministries while having a laser focus on Children's, Youth and Campus Ministries.

We should work to develop an intentional culture for this new enterprise in which we embrace some older traditional forms and structures while always innovating and remaining organic so as the Spirit of God moves, our structure moves with Him. We will need to be liturgical, evangelical and charismatic.