The Alabama-West Florida Conference Bishop’s Discernment Task Force met February 3-4 in Pensacola, FL, to continue the vital work of processing information related to General Conference 2020.
The members represent various ministry areas of the conference and bring a collective set of gifts to the table. After several meetings in the fall of 2019, the group invited a professional facilitator who is familiar with the conference, Julia Kuhn Sharp, to lead the remaining meetings.
The committee members are:
Rurel Ausley
Larry Bryars
Dunford Cole
Ashley Davis
Celeste Eubanks
Bishop David Graves
Cortney Howard
June Jernigan
Bill Kierce
Emily Kincaid
Suzanne Krejcar
Beverly Maddox
Bob Northcutt
Mary Catherine Phillips
Audrey Rodgers
David Saliba
Roman Shaul
Terri Turner
Jeff Wilson
The mission of the task force is to empower and equip the Alabama-West Florida Conference to discern its future through these objectives:
-develop a structural and strategic process to produce a guiding document;
-resource our congregations to assist them in effective decision making;
-provide systems of care for our leaders in transition; and
-create a communications strategy.
In light of the release of the Protocol on January 3, 2020, the group is anticipating the release of formal legislation in the coming days and will design their work around this next step.
“In these uncertain days, I humbly ask for prayers on behalf of the task force,” stated Bishop David Graves. “These servants are giving their time and expertise to help lead the conference in the best way possible by providing relevant and necessary information as it becomes available to educate clergy and laity.”
The task force is committed to transparent work and will provide updates on a consistent basis. Those updates, along with pertinent documents and links, will be posted to www.awfumc.org/taskforce.
This committee is no longer actively serving in this capacity since 2019. It concluded its work prior to the pandemic.