Regarding the business session, I’m not sure if people were really prepared for it to get mired down in the discussion the way it did, regarding the voting privileges of retired ministers. I wonder if that happened in part due to the structural changes we made four years ago – now that we don’t have regional conferences, perhaps there are more voices/opinions than we expected? Does this warrant a reevaluation of this process?

Regarding music, I understand that you cannot make everyone happy. I may be a minority view here, but my church was one that ranked the music on the lower end. This isn’t because we are “clinging to our hymnals with a death grip” or anything like that. We actually have quite a contemporary worship band, and strive to use worship songs that have a broad appeal. I think that’s the reason why we ranked the music low – the actual musicality was great, as usual, but song selection was as disappointing as it was two years ago. It may be that we just do different songs as Christians on the west coast, but we hardly knew ANY of the songs, and we all listen to AirOne, Klove, The Message (XM), etc.

So I guess I’m saying that the statement, “and music (music is a huge point of disagreement in local churches, so you would expect the same at a national church conference)” could be misleading. I think a more in depth break down as to why it was ranked that way could be a helpful thing.
Thoughts?