 Morrison, welcome. We are so glad that you are here. This is the beginning of a beautiful relationship that we will be having with you coming down the road. So let me tell you or remind you or let you know why we're here. The purpose of this time together is to give you information and to share with you anything that we think can help you along this process. So you're going to hear from each of the three rooms that we'll be interviewing you and then there will be time for questions towards the end and so please feel free to keep track of those and make sure that you ask them. We want you informed and we want you encouraged and we want you inspired about your articulation of the gospel. So I'm going to begin with Billy. Billy is the chair of P&Q. So he's over this entire process. It's in your hand brother. Thank you, Tim. Appreciate it. It's great to have you with us this morning. We want to try to give you as much information as we can in as little time as possible and leave time for some questions. So thank you for coming a little bit early so we can have some time just to meet and greet. That's always fun for us. I hope you guys have a good experience for you. I'd like for you to pull out the piece of paper I handed to all of you that says at the top, commissioning provisional membership interview. How does the Water Warden Ministry frame the process? So I'm not going to go over this in great detail because today we have the great honor of having actually the room conveners here. So instead of me talking about the theology room and the worship and proclamation room and the call room, you're going to actually get to hear from the conveners and the people that are in those rooms. So I don't want to take up too much time. I do want to be clear though about what we are assessing as you come before the Water Warden Ministry. You're in a little different situation now than you were and that is we are now assessing you on the basis of readiness. When you went before the district committee, they were assessing you on fitness. Are you fit for ministry? Are you a good fit for ministry? In our case now, that determination has been made and so as you come before us, we are assessing for readiness. What does readiness mean? Okay, readiness does not simply mean you're ready to come for the interview. Readiness means that by the end of this interview, if you are recommended, we are fully confident that we can recommend you to the clergy session and the clergy session upon your election can fully say to the cabinet, this person is ready to take a full-time appointment. This person is ready to serve full-time in a United Methodist Ministry setting. And so that's really what readiness is all about. So in this interview, we don't expect you to have everything figured out. Most of you have not had a ton of experience in ministry. That's okay. But we are clear that you are clear enough about your theology and you are capable enough in a way you communicate and that you are ready to be able to lead in such a way that the cabinet can have confidence that you are ready for whatever appointment that they would send you to. So with that in mind, I think what I'm going to do is just get out of the way and bring up the different room folks that will talk about the different rooms that you'll be in and what goes on in those rooms by way of style from the theology room. Good morning everybody. Good morning. Good to see you. So normally the convener of the theology room is Stan Copeland and when he can't be here for whatever reason I'm usually an understudy so I'm standing in for their old stand tonight. Okay, so you should have a sheet that says the theology room and Billy's already talked about readiness, effectiveness is obviously an ordination standard. The second bullet point under there is that we're praying for you and pulling for you. We want to be encouraging. Look, we have all been through this process if we're clergy and we know that it's pretty high stakes. It's pretty high stress. We get all that and it's like an interview except kind of on steroids because all the preparation you have to do and so we know all that. We want you to know that since we got the full list in September we've been praying for y'all in your preparation and we'll be continuing to pray for you and pull for you as you get ready for the interviews in January in your case, right? So what we do in preparation number three, I'm on, I've told y'all this has prayed for you. Half of us in the room will have read your paper. The other half will not have unless they're overachievers and every room does have an overachiever or two that reads all the papers but the general practice is half of us have read it and then the night before you get there we will process your paperwork as a full room, identify the stuff that we want to ask you about. It feels like a ton of paperwork but of course you can't fully articulate your theology in the limited amount of space you have and so all of us have open spots in our paperwork and we'll push you on those and ask you questions and it's fun, it's supposed to be fun. We hope you approach it that way. So if you've not been in the rooms yet you need to know that we've got a condensed amount of time, 35 minutes. We will have prepared questions ahead of time that we really want to start with but then anyone in the room can follow up on questions. There will be a timer there that will give us a 10 minute warning, a five minute warning, a one minute warning and the convener in the room will try to keep things going. If you get cut off because maybe you're going on too long don't let that throw you off it just means we've got other questions we want to get to and we want to make sure we don't run out of time. So number four, please spend a lot of time on your paperwork so many of you are recently graduated from seminary or will be graduating from seminary in the near term. We do expect seminary level work so keep in mind that our first impression of you as a candidate, as a theologian, as a potential pastor, whether you're a deacon or elder, track is the paperwork and so put your best foot forward on that. Make sure you have people reading your paperwork who are not just your cheerleaders, we all have those in ministry, we'll have all of our sermons and all of our letters and all that. Avoid those people if at all possible and make sure you get a have a good editor. Many people choose to do a mock interview if you're if you're not used to kind of a high stakes interview with people firing questions actually about your theology of the Trinity and all that. It wouldn't hurt to do a few of those just so you get a sense for how that goes. It's good to have somebody accompany you to the interviews whether that's a mentor, significant other, friend, whatever. You never know. Ideally what we all hope for is that they're like high-fiving you the whole way back to wherever you come from but if it's a rough day you need it's good to have somebody there with you and the way it works you guys have probably talked about the time frame like if you've got an early morning time slot but the interviews will start at 8 30 each of the interviews are 35 minutes and you'll have some time to go back over to the Lakeview Room at Pro Throne to hang out with your whoever you've brought with you and then there's like this long lag time after everybody's gone through all the interviews where we process what we've experienced in the interviews and that can take like an hour or so so it's good to have a buddy. If you get hung up on a question in the room don't let that throw you off. You can just say uncle can we move on next question whatever. Don't let one left turn derail you. So for number five for commissioning candidates we do expect that you can articulate the faith with passion and relevance. I'm going to read these because they're important and we can unpack them a little bit if you've got I mean I guess we're doing questions at the end. Second one is the ability to demonstrate a theological understanding of and commitment to United Methodist doctrine and Senate evil, Wesleyan understanding of salvation, different atonement doctrines etc. So each of us has our own particular like our own personal ways of articulating the faith and we do not expect there's a diversity of theologies in the room among the interviews with clergy in way so we don't expect you to have the right answer. We do expect that you're in the United Methodist tradition and so if you say something that sounds Calvinist we're going to push you on that. If you don't really care about grace, we're going to really push you on that so make sure you don't listen. Hopefully that has been sifted through by now. A serious next bullet point seriousness and depth in study and openness to growth and theological understanding none of us is a finely formed product whether we've been doing it 40 years or 40 months. So again though at this stage of the game if the commissioning interviews just make sure you're about this. Demonstration of ability to think and communicate theologically with biblical grounding and historical sources in fulfillment of the theological tasks in ordering the ministry in the United Methodist church be ready to name the doctrinal standards. Here's what we mean by that. The very first question is about God and it says talk to us about your understanding of God derived from biblical, historical, and theological sources. So if your entire two-page answer is about Guston and you don't give us any biblical stuff we're going to expect you to be able to do that in the room or if you don't really you need to have no theologian other than Wesley. We love Uncle John but you got to know somebody else too. So just make sure you answer the question. It's really easy not to answer the question because again you're trying to pack a whole lot of content in a small space so make sure you go back when you're done and include stuff. And if the day before the interview you're reading through your stuff and you realize oh my god I don't have any biblical references in my whole section on Christ well that's okay we probably will have noticed that and we'll probably ask you about it. So don't panic, just be ready to engage. It's a lot of fun, right? Jackson. And then on that final standard that's the thing where you go up for ordination and the bishop asks you the questions. When you keep our general rules every once in a while if it's kind of a smart alec you bishop they'll ask you if you can name them, right? And it's good to be able to have that answer. So there's a question in there about final standards it's good to know that they are because if you don't listen if you listen we probably won't ask yet if you don't listen we'll probably ask you. So no pop quiz I want to ask you what they are right now. Over here. I have the great privilege of helping to lead the worship and proclamation room so I'm echoing everything that Chris just said in terms of as you prepare for your time with us and the time constraints and all of that there are just some specifics that maybe will be helpful to you that I'm going to go over more quickly in terms of how we operate which is the same pretty much as the other two rooms. There is a plagiarism policy copied on the back table please take a copy of that just for your own reference. We do check and so as I said earlier just don't just don't do it just don't go the internet and you know go something down we'll know and and it's not you so what we're looking for is your how you are prepared to make the proclamation of the good news of our Lord Jesus Christ and salvation as a westland. We understand that there are differences obviously between dinkins and elders we also understand that not everybody gets the opportunity to preach every week and so we certainly take that into consideration and we are open to alternative forms of proclamation however at this level what we really want to know is if you are prepared to proclaim we want to know if you're Wesleyan as as Chris said we want to know if you can integrate that understanding into the way that your proclamation is affected in the community in terms of liberation and mission and grace and so we want to know how you are observing that proclamation however you do it preaching you know first of all is lived out. I think the designated texts are required to be preached is that correct the designated text the Philippians text has got to be a sermon right but you also have an alternative text and and we are open to alternative proclamation whether you healing services teaching opportunities whatever but just make sure it's thorough and prepared some of you preach a lot and that's great and you preach from outlines we need a manuscript even though it would be its video we really need to see the words as they as you have written them regarding the sacraments again we want to see that you're Wesleyan and that you understand our understanding of grace and salvation and how the sacraments are lived that grace that we have through the segments is lived out in the world that's right we have the Bible saying with you I wish we'd love and we enjoy a lot that I know is a lot of work but it's really really indicative to us of a lot of things and so please please enjoy that process because we certainly enjoy reading them and have asked permission to use them on occasion so anything else I would I would like the members of who are here from our room to stand up just so you'll know Millie Paul Linda John Lisbeth Cassie and then there are several folks who are not here but we are you know as I said open and and shared earlier and Chris kind of shared this as well in a different way we're not gotcha people we're not going to set you up okay we're all we're with you in that room and we want you to enjoy our time together and have some fun okay my name is Henry Lester I'm the leg I in the room and member at first time of church Allen so I have the honor of convening the call room call service of discipline life you should have a handout if you don't have that I'm going to go over it and just highlight some things here first thing I want you to know is the folks that are in the room with us are listed up there I would ask our call folks just many of them have left the Gretchen still here Cheryl still here Tim is here Matt is here Ogana is here so these are folks you can come to and ask if there's anything that you hear about when I'm talking here so everybody said that they're the fun room that's not true we're the fun room so you've been grilled in theology and you've sweated out to your sermon series and stuff you come to our room and we're going to try to get to know you that's what we're all about is trying to get to know you so there's a couple things on here I just I've listed paragraphs from the book of discipline that we're not going to quiz you on those things but if you know those what's in those paragraphs you will probably do better in all three rooms by the way so I would just encourage you to pull out your book of discipline and there's an enormous amount of good information in there read that and become very familiar with it so you can do that go to the one that says commissioning interviews we're looking for readiness and this is literally the list of things we're going to ask you about so I would encourage you as others have said practice and we're telling you what we're going to ask practice your answers so don't you're not making it up on the fly when you get there so a couple things that we're going to do we have some specialized people in our room I do finances I will see your credit report and I do that prior to you coming to the room so if you have an issue of debt that's what we're really worried about we like to see a written plan we'd like for you to have a commerce I want you to have a conversation with me if you have a problem or I will reach out to you if I find it this is there's guidelines on the very back here what the United with North Texas Conference says or your debt guidelines there's a lot of flexibility in this I want to know that you know what your circumstances are and that you're doing something about it that's the main thing for me we've had people that had enormous amounts of debt and they've been able to tell me and show me how they're going to deal with that that's fine that's what I want to know we have Gretchen in the back Gretchen is an MD doctor Gretchen will be looking at medical things that you have and again prior to getting in the room very confidential what she does it's not like everybody in the room talks about it so Gretchen will be looking at medications maybe things that are clues the issues that you may have are you taking your medications if you have them you know we want to make sure that you're taking care of yourself how what's your life work mix some of those kind of things we actually may get to that in the interview we also have a lady Pat Dio who's not here today Pat is someone who reviews your site reports again prior to them to coming to the room to the interview she's looking at that and sometimes we may talk about that in a room we want to know most importantly you take those site reports you pay for those site reports you might as well listen to what they have to say and try to take that that into account in your life how you live your life so that's a really important thing for us to know that you're taking that what your site report says you're following or taking an into account in how you live your day to day life so that's one of the key things we will look at your transcripts your recommendation letters all those kind of things again prior to the interview we're not going to ask you about that we're just looking to see what people say about you to get an idea just to again get to know you before you come into the room so when you get into the room as you've heard we got 35 minutes it's pretty intense and fun and fun we actually laugh occasionally in our room right occasionally but and i've cried in our room by the way when i hear some of the call stories so uh those are the big things of the heart let me hear that we will ask you about your call story when you come here when you get the ordination we don't really spend much time on that because we would have heard it at this level but so be precise be concise we only have 35 minutes you know so kind of think about how that works practice this with somebody before you get there practice it with somebody before you get there i'm going to say that multiple times uh we're going to ask you about uh maybe your management style how do you deal with people i mean if you're going in the ministry whether deacon or elder you're going to be dealing with people and we want to know how do you perceive things how do you handle conflict we're going to ask you about those kind of things we want to know about your experience with inclusivity and justice ministries you're early in your ministry but i bet somewhere in your life you have had some circumstance where you've had to stand up for something or you did inclusivity inclusivity covers a wide range of stuff okay so just again prior to coming to the room we will ask you about this okay there are individuals in our room who kind of like i want to ask them about that and they will ask you about it we want to know about i've mentioned here i'm going to say it again how do you take care of yourself physically are you are you you know are you doing things if you're a you know a runner or something like that we want to know just what do you do to take care of yourself physically if you have some sort of a problem or something don't hesitate to talk to us about that we have medical and psychological advice that we can help you with those kind of things that's what we're here for it um one of the big deals is and uh we talked about this with the folks coming in for donation but it's a promise to you as well and that is will you if you're in an elder will you my tenorite the bishop literally was here before everybody came in the room and told us about that there are you know that is a big deal if you're going to be an elder in the united methods church you when you somebody lays hands on you you commit to do what the united methods church says you're going to do in one of those things is itinerant and uh that's a difficult thing i know that but uh we will ask you about that what do you think about it and why is that important in the united methods church we will ask you about that probably too so again think about those things prior to coming in the room um and again i'll say practice practice practice all those people that uh you seem to stand up with the theology room uh the colorum and worship the sacraments room they are all willing we are here for you we want to help you get through this we want to help you understand where you want to go in with with your ministry and that sort of thing we are here to help you so do not hesitate to ask so anyway that's what i have to say and we'll be around later for questions marcia mittleton i'm the board of boarding ministry um officer here and so it's my job among other things to collect in um uh document your documents that makes any sense so the thing i'm most concerned about today is you got is um cares plus which is a software that we use to have you all move through the track um which is the 2020 commissioning candidates and so if you are not already on you in cares you need to um get there quickly just as soon as you can because you've got folks um way ahead of you who who have already sent in a whole bunch of stuff and and they're making really good progress so i would just invite you to be aware of the need to do that there is a document you should have received that gives you basic instructions once you log in where you go and how that works so um i can help if you get stuck let me give you a word this is not the software of the century so occasionally you will panic and i promise because this has happened to me you will go on you will um have put a document there you know it's there you've seen it there you will log on and it's not there and you will call me sometimes very late at night in a panic and go what happened to my whatever i put it in there and so what i will tell you i'm just going to tell it to you now log out um turn your computer off turn your computer on wait 30 minutes turn it back on again upload it again and it will probably be there who knows where it goes i'm telling you this will happen it's happened it happens to those of us who are looking at the documents too we'll look in one minute you know if i read half a paper and i go back to read the other half it ain't there and i'm like what in the heaven's name what happened to that so want you to be aware of that glitch and um it is there if it doesn't come back let me know and we'll we'll work to rectify that um on the steps you all received from me a sheet of instructions for the steps there are a bunch of steps please read the instructions please read the instructions read them carefully because there are dates on there that are different um for some of the items then for the big paper submission in December you all actually have some things to do next week and it's really important for me to be able to contact you or references and whatnot to get those as early as possible if we wait too long particularly around the holiday season i don't get those back and since you all go up for your interviews in january i've got to be sure i have those before folks really break for the holidays so please be aware of getting all those things to me read the instructions in the steps also when you open the step it'll have a little blurb it'll tell you how to work it and please read that and that'll answer a whole bunch of your questions but um look don't don't think and if this is your second time around um congratulations there have been a lot of people here um second time around too so don't worry about that just do your best but you may notice a few changes from last year and that's because we've tried to update and clarify what some of those steps mean and how they work so i'm going to go ahead right now quickly any questions from you all regarding um the documents or um cares plus yes sir hi marcia i think i think you may have answered this question before me previously but i'd just like to ask it again because i don't remember what your response was um so our our psychological reports those those would have been sent to you from or hopefully they've been sent to you from let's say carol uh at the district office or or alice uh my question was i can't remember the psychological report uh whether that's among them or if we we need you need us to send you a new copy somehow of that so i probably have it um but it's always good to check on that and the way you do that is you just send me an email and i will email you back and list all the documents that i have in your file if you have been in the system a while um there are folks who are coming after having been out for a while and haven't gone through consent you know just consecutive years um it is possible we do not have materials um if you came through last year i should have all of your materials so um if you will email me we will double check that i'm trying to mark everything off i i file documents every day when i get here to work and i try to mark things off but sometimes those are tough um because you have multiple documents asked for in a step if i mark the step complete i may not have all the documents and it's confusing so um it's best to just send me an email and i'll get back to you as soon as i can with that anything else it's an amazing moment in the life of the board of four-day ministry we have saved plenty of time for questions so we want to entertain those questions now about anything in the process um anna and chris and henry will answer questions about any of the rooms i'm happy to answer any questions about the process for marsha will as well so what questions do you have what um would you please explain kind of what the day looks like and the space and uh get them all prepared for sure okay so we meet at the pro fro center um which is up at lake texom it's a beautiful place and it's a wonderful retreat setting one of the reasons we go up there so that we can get in a real retreat setting and get away from everything that we've got going on back home and we can focus on you and on the holy spirit um so there's two sessions each day and three candidates are in each session so if you're in the morning session we start at eight thirty in the morning we like you there at eight o'clock so that you can be ready for us to start at eight thirty uh by the time we take you through all three rooms and then go through the process of deliberation uh about your application and whether or not we're going to recommend you uh it usually is not done until about 12 15 sometimes 12 30 okay so you just need to block out that amount of time if you would like to stay out at the pro throw center the night before because you live far away and i'm just going to go that it's fine but you need to make those arrangements okay i'm not going to do that for you you just need to call pro throw center and and see if you can make that work if you're in the afternoon session we started 130 130 in the afternoon again and it's about another four hours by the time we get everything done it's usually 515 530 uh before we are finished so you'll be either in the morning or the afternoon setting um somebody mentioned this chris i think did it's really great to bring somebody with you or somebody's with you now what i'm going to tell you is bring somebody that is not going to induce more anxiety in you like you want to bring the not anxious presence you might have somebody that really loves you the best but they are going to be so anxious that they're just going to make you more anxious so you know choose somebody that's not going to make not going to induce more anxiety into the process than is already present so uh that would be a good thing um we have a prayer room set up uh we'll pray with you before we get started uh and it's it as i think chris described it's it's kind of this rhythmic sort of you go into an interview for 35 minutes you step out for 15 you go to a second interview for 35 minutes you step out for 15 minutes you go to a third interview uh for 30 minutes 35 minutes and then you're out for 15 more minutes and then there is about let's say about an hour sometimes to an hour and 15 minutes uh for deliberation on the whole so um that's what the day looks like yes did you tell them there are hosts and yeah right so there there will be in uh with your hosts and hosts yes hosts that will be there to basically get you from place to place so you'll show up at pro-throat center you'll come to what's called the lately room which is the great big room that's right by the dining hall and from there there will be people that will help you get to each one of the rooms and bring you back yeah okay is that kind of enough on that okay yeah thank you kelly so uh in late december after i know that uh you are that everything has been turned in and that you actually uh are going to be coming for the interview uh then i will send you an email with that information now prior to that uh so we're doing this i think the 27th through the 29th of june or that's a monday tuesday wednesday if there is one day that is really better for you than another i need to know that um if you are needing a morning time instead of an afternoon time or vice versa i need to know that i will attempt to accommodate that but i can't always promise that if everybody says oh well we all have bible study on wednesday and everybody needs to go on monday somebody's got to go on wednesday okay so we just have to have to be able to make that work but i'll send that to you late in december i try to wait until all the paperwork's in and then it's all been checked and everything because occasionally what'll happen is is that if i put the schedule together before that and it's all a matrix right of who's going where and what room at one time uh if i do it before that and then somebody decides to self defer and pull out of the process that has to be done all over again so usually late december i'll send you know something really fun like the week after christmas you'll get an email for you but hey ready for your more to more date ministry and uh yeah that'll be good yeah matt uh billy it's been said to us from the top down Bishop down the importance of itineracy and the preparation for that um how does that apply for candidates for dean right so so we don't have our cabinet uh representative in the room at the moment but yeah i think one of the things that's really important is that if you are the deacon track uh you need to be very much in touch with your district superintendent about your appointment okay because one of the things that you will find out is that you finish your interview and if at the end of your interview you are wreck are being recommended one of the things we're going to tell you is that you're commissioning is contingent upon an appointment okay let's be real clear the board of ordained ministry does not make appointments okay so we we have nothing to do with your appointment so if you come out and are recommended in late january uh then what you're immediately going to want to do whether you are a deacon track candidate or an elder track candidate is you're going to want to contact your district superintendent and make sure they've gotten that clear and on the list and you know if there's if there's some things that are unusual about that or some not sure about that you need to be checking with your ds and continuing to check in with your ds uh about that but um yeah that's that's a really good good question for everyone not just elder track candidates but for deacon track candidates as well okay all right what else i bet jack has some answers all right do you have that do you have some answers jack i'm not going to give you the microphone if you don't have answers yeah there you go so uh this is very important um as we talk about this we talk about it being fun being enjoyable it may not be uh what it is is serious it's very serious if you were going before the bar association you would take it very seriously and you wouldn't expect to have fun if you were going before the american medical association you would take it very seriously and i encourage you to do that to take it very seriously you have been given guidelines that are clear and you also have a board of ministry that would welcome a phone call from you anytime any one of us would be more than happy to give you whatever wisdom or guidance we might have so do really well with this because we're going to expect that and uh we trust that you are prepared you wouldn't be here if you weren't and so exercise that and the enjoyment that you experience will be when we say you are going to be recommended for candidacy so uh commissioning that's right okay so that's the only answer i have okay what else questions about submittals questions about any of the things that you heard about in the rooms question anything yes so i'm curious i'm thinking about the the proclamation room and i'm thinking about the sermons that we'll be submitting now one of them of course is going to be the philippians text but for the other one let's say you have a few let's say you have a couple of choices like you videoed a couple of sermons i guess how would we how should you have any guidelines or recommendations for how we decide which other sermon or whatever our alternate expression is to submit like what what's something maybe that we should be looking for in those that would the board really would like to see yeah don't put your worst sermon out okay um we want to see authenticity in your proclamation right so um and well let me give you which i neglected to do earlier one of the several of the things we're looking for we want a central message be concise we want to know you did your exegetical homework we don't need 20 minutes of exegesis explaining it to us we we need to see that it's there okay but we don't need to we need to know that you did that um we need to see a clear form and good language and imagery and good presentation in whatever venue so um if you can and i have those rubrics i've got those copied if y'all want them but um so put the the authenticity of the proclamation as you proclaim it is what we're looking for sure that's great and i guess i would just add to that that um this is probably not the time unless you are doing something really fantastic uh that you go way outside the box in terms of the kind of proclamation yeah right i mean now if it's great if it's so fabulous that everybody's gonna go wow that's what we all need to be doing in the next 20 years then that's fabulous but if it's something that's sort of experimental and it kind of went okay but the technology wasn't really good when we were watching it and you couldn't really tell what was being said and it was kind of hard to understand what the central message was or what the scripture was or any of those kinds of things i would not recommend that's what you want to submit okay yes uh yeah well we stood up you can write our names down i mean you take her yeah we don't mind doing that here we'll do this right quick go jelsie i mean where's the worser i'm i'm in i'm in jelsie i'm there anna john kassie paul kassie did you say earlier that you were going to try to yeah i will i will send okay all right anna's going to send it jelsie did you hear that anna's going to send okay and i'm going to tell you just so that you'll know um you know a lot of things happen and so normally every room has about 10 to 12 people in it on certain days and certain times there might be nine or there might be 12 something like that the other thing is occasionally we will also at times do a little moving around so everybody today that is in that room there might be one or two additions or subtractions from that room so yeah but i wouldn't like you know take our pictures and put them up on a board and try it yeah yeah right it's exactly right okay we're not about that okay anybody else what else paul you had something i just what anna was saying just a word about um not just giving us the sermon but like reviewing it before you come and see us and then being ready to just talk about it it's like we all know that even the best sermon will have some words of well i would have done this different or i wish i could have done that in that space it's almost always in the midst of sermon preparation we're going to ask how you got started right i mean what was the process you went through to preach the sermon we all have some good things like that john if you are evaluating different sermons one one of the things that i would suggest is um pay attention to the response that you've gotten and the response you don't want to go with is that was a really nice sermon pastor if there's if there's something substantial that happens out of that that's a really really good sign um the other thing i'd like to just say about in general is if someone on the board offers you help with something take them up on it that's a sign that they're seeing something that you might need help with so don't think of that as just a casual kind of a thing we're pretty busy people so they really need to take us up on that so i also want to clarify something i said just a moment ago um so all all preaching uh is prophetic right yes but uh when i talk about you know be careful about not doing something to anybody but i don't want anybody hearing me say we don't want to hear prophetic sermons we don't want to hear sermons about it in fact we'd love to hear something very rich in terms of how you're going to be able to preach prophetically and speak a word of justice and those uh on those particular topics so we're not asking you to avoid that either so i want to be real clear about that if there's a what some people might say is a more controversial subject and you've got a really great sermon then let us have that that'd be great okay what else yes are we allowed to bring anything into that is a great question yes we are uh we want you to be welcome to bring uh your stuff in with you particularly your questions because at times in your paperwork one of the board members might say on page 13 you said this and i wondered if you could clarify well it's only fair to you if you know what you wrote on page 13 so uh yeah we want you to be able to bring those things in now we hope you will bring those things as as reference right so we hope that you're not scripting your answers anticipating what we're going to ask and then when we ask you a question you open the book up and just start reading out of your notes it's you know we we want you to have a real conversation with us and but we know that if we want you to do your best uh we're not trying to trick you up on what you wrote we want to have a real conversation about what you wrote so it's fine to bring your notes and everything in with you at that point uh we just want you to know that when we get into it we want to have a real conversation and if we need to refer to something you wrote then that's fine okay yes um i've heard this could just be here saying that some board members will take your notes and ask a question is this true not anymore okay okay not anymore yeah yeah everybody's got an old story about somebody that did something to them when they went through the board of ward A ministry and those stories are probably true okay um as our bishop said to us earlier um the board of ward A ministry like all good Christians are going through a process of sanctification and we are hopefully going on in perfection so you know someday many many years from now when i retire if you and i want to sit down i'll tell you some stories about things like that that we're done but no we don't know that is not no one on the board is going to pull your notes away from you and say you can't do that but thanks for asking here was uh here who said earlier if someone's was talking about the uh in theology talking about how you know in your paperwork you want to want to be referencing more than than just Wesley and i guess i was curious about um you know because i've also heard sort of advice from other board members in the past like make sure you're not you know filling a chock full of you know all this like too many references to other theologians so i guess i would just curious uh you might offer some clarification on that like you know sort of you know how many maybe uh just an example how many theologians or should we kind of preference or should we just give you a little more just a little more detail what you're thinking about that yep so when you're comparing like ordination papers to commissioning papers commissioning papers much more academic um you don't just want to spend two pages in your god answer citing people but it does need to show uh reference to to i mean answering the question historical political theological sources there's not really a magic number you know when you see it but i i would say showing some kind of a breadth of reading is important and more so commissioning than at ordination because this is the more um i mean we really do in the theology room uh you know down the line we'll work we'll be talking about integration of theological concepts with the practice of ministry but now we really just need to know that you know your stuff so it's not like uh paper you would submit for systematics but it's um it looks a little bit like that in terms of references so the way i would parse that is to say uh in this paper we want to know what you believe and why you believe it and so it's not just a process of can you impress us academically by quoting a lot of sources we want to know that whatever sources you do quote that matters to you a great deal in what you believe yeah so yeah i think chris makes a really good point this is not simply a systematics paper you're writing for theology you're writing very deeply at a very good level about what it is you believe and at a very deep level why you believe it i'm in the theology room i would just say that don't add sources just add sources you've got to be clear where you stand on something and then you want sources to support your argument as you would in any kind of persuasive writing right um so you don't just add the add the sources for the heck of it you're going to like have a point to it which i know you know but so are you wanting enough diversity to why i'm not just using Wesleyan scholars like Outler or Asbury or like do you want more of that even a variety of that i would say um it just depends on the question yeah some of them are a lot more inclined to be through the Wesleyan than others some of them from just historical uh perspective you're going to have to go back way before that so i think it just depends would you say on the question yeah thanks yes thanks is there a desired like um sourcing like exciting our sources do you want Chicago terapia or do we just want to do parenthetical kind of sourcing is that what we're looking at i would encourage you not to do parenthetical okay i would encourage you to do end notes or footnotes i personally like um footnotes because i think they're easier to follow would you say that to be true but um i don't think we care about the particular if it's AMA or you know which which of the which of the fluji use i just think parenthetical probably is not the way to go unless it's just a biblical text yeah i'm guessing to you want it to be consistent throughout the paperwork so like you don't want to do one style for two or three questions and then the next two or three questions you've done some others yeah oh i was just following what he answered i was gonna say does that include biblical references this could be parenthetical or try to have this but no i think they can be for me i'm fine if you're being parenthetical um i you sort of just don't want anything really long in there to mess the flow of your argument about her this is Cheryl Murphy um i'm in the call room so i'm gonna say something quite different than what you just heard from theology you've all made it through d com so i imagine you have your call story down if you tell your call story and you don't include god jesus or the holy spirit the call room is going to have an issue with you we need spirit somewhat spirit filled answers just like you need to be academic there we need to know that you've been called to be a disciple of jesus christ and to be a leader and part of our connection if we don't hear that it's going to be a problem for me and probably some of the others in the call room so just know as important as the academic is is the spirit work in our room okay anybody else okay do you think she'd like to say yeah just close okay all right last chance for question 14 closes it up it's like a surgery all right yes angela so yeah it's a good question comes up so um right you're going to submit a lot of things so what i'm speaking to now are the disciplinary questions all right the disciplinary questions and we are not rigid about a page limit because some of us format the paper differently i personally like it when a new question is started at the beginning at the top of a page so in other words instead of so if you do that that means there's going to be depending on where the question and the answer ends i'm sorry depending on where the answer ends you may have three quarters of a blank page so the counting pages doesn't make as much sense i would tell you with that your disciplinary question paperwork is going to come out somewhere between 30 and 35 pages also this year um one of the things i did was i put an additional page count on the questions that are asked in our annual conference right so there's another step for that you get another four pages for that so roughly two pages a question roughly um but i did not include that in the 30 pages which we've done before because i just didn't think that was a reasonable so what you need to know also is that the disciplinary questions get sort of spread out among all three rooms but not equally the balance the largest amount of the disciplinary questions go to the theology room and then there are another set of questions that go to the call room and then the uh worship bar commotion room gets the one question regarding the sacraments okay yes i'm worried about the formatting for the bible study are we expecting similar so like mine is like a lot of questions and a lot of like discussions so it's not formatted like a paper right it's formatted for a bible study sure sure and one of the things we want to hopefully is that we want to know one either you've taught it or you're getting ready to teach it so it needs to be in a format where you've fought through or had the experience of what was it like to teach it you know where would i've done some things differently um i will say however that it's important that the other qualification there is could you hand this bible study off and so if there is uh for example you know some really important exegetical work or introductory work and things like that that needs to show up in the paperwork in the in the actual bible study because then we would know okay you could hand this off to somebody you're not just handing them a bunch of questions you're also handing them the informational stuff as well so would have preferred instead of footnotes perhaps in the bible study would have potentially yes yeah that'd be great sure that'd be that'd be awesome yeah okay all right just a quick question on them so the software you and cares basically that that's done throughout the nomination or using that or that the she makes some adjustments make some adjustments for the actual confidence sort of good yeah so the you and cares plus software is software that the whole denomination uses we pay we pay for that