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BY AMANDA SAYERS
UMCONNECTION CONTRIBUTOR

Grace and peace to you from the Annual Conference Worship Planning Team!

I know what you're thinking ... Annual Conference! Reports and ballots and voting and speeches! Yippee! Maybe you're thinking about the friends you will see or the speakers you'll hear or the Yummy Chocolate Mousse in the parfait glass we'll likely get for dessert.

Me? I'm joined up with a team of clergy colleagues who've been working hard and praying hard about an even more audacious act than violating Robert's Rules of Order or trashing a waterfront hotel room. This audacious, risky, outside-the-box act is one we do in our churches at least once a week. This act is called "worship." (As chair of the Worship Team for this year, I think I have the most dangerous job in America.)

When we worship together at annual conference, we are reminded that the thing that binds us together is not a WHAT but a WHO, the Word made flesh, the lover of the poor and the downtrodden, the One who said, "When I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself." Whether we come from a little country church or a storefront mission or a tall-steeple urban church, we are one, not in accents, opinions or appearances (praise God) but in Christ Jesus. We are reminded that the One whose church it is, whose Conference it really is, has a way of upsetting the status quo, a way of calling us to do the very thing we least want to do, or the very thing we least feel we can do.

It is a mountaintop experience, to join voices and prayers with our sisters and brothers from around the conference, but it's also a radical act, right there in the middle of the Baltimore Waterfront, proclaiming the Gospel, confessing our sins and daring to come once again into the presence of the One whose kingdom we really serve, whose hands and feet we are in the world.

It is Lent now, and the ashes are barely faded on our foreheads, as we journey together to the cross. By the time we arrive in Baltimore, suitcases in hand, to see our friends and vote and do our business, it will be Pentecost, that season of fire and wind, that unruly season where boundaries of language and ethnicity and who's "in" and who's "out" get all blurry.

It is a dangerous time for the Church to gather, particularly dangerous for us to worship, because, get this, whenever two or three are gathered, God has a way of showing up. And when God shows up, walls come down, lives get changed, and we might leave the place different than when we came, as individuals, as congregations, as a Church. We might be convicted about who we have been, or called again to be who we really are in Christ. It's not for the faint of heart, but it is for a Church and a Conference that seeks after God's own heart.

On behalf of the worship team, my prayer for conference is a Lenten prayer. It has to do with creating space for the Holy Spirit to inhabit, to empty out, to break open and to fill up. Join me in praying for our gathering in May. Register and get ready, friends. Yes, there will be name badges and meal tickets and speeches and resolutions and there will be friends to see. Come ready for all of that.

But also come ready to be surprised again by God's grace. Come ready to worship the One who called you to follow, the One whose Church, whose Conference, this really is. Come open for the message God has for us and the work God wants to do through us. But beware! God has a way of showing up at stuff like this, when we least expect it, in locked rooms, in wilderness, even in "church business" and in a worship service in a hotel ballroom.

Come, Almighty God, we long to worship you. Come, Lord Jesus and be Lord over this Conference, our churches, our hearts. Come Holy Spirit, and have your way.

Don't say I didn't warn you.