37 clergy, 44 laity offer selves for election as General, Jurisdictional conference delegates

Profiles from people who have offered themselves for election as delegates to the 2020 General Conference and Jurisdictional Conference are available to be downloaded from a page on the Great Plains Conference website.

The profiles are broken out for clergy and laity, and each can be viewed either individually or can be downloaded as a single document to make printing easier.

Each profile contains demographic information for the person and includes their answers to questions pertinent to the conference and denomination.

In all, 37 clergy and 44 lay persons have offered themselves up for election as delegates. Both are increases from the 32 clergy and 27 laity contending for the 2016 General Conference.

Clergy members at annual conference this year will elect seven delegates to the General Conference, seven delegates to the Jurisdictional conference and three alternates. Lay members will elect the same number of laity in their selections, separate from clergy.

Look at the profiles for the delegate-hopefuls at this page on our website.

Among the clergy candidates:

• Six candidates identify as African or African-American, and one as Latino.
• Nine are in their 30s, eight in their 40s, 14 in their 50s and six in their 60s.
• Twenty-three of the clergy candidates are male, and 14 are female.
• ·Kansas has 27 clergy who have offered themselves for election while Nebraska has 10.
• The KC District has nine clergy who have offered themselves for election, followed by the Blue River District with four. The Five Rivers, Gateway and Great West districts have no declared clergy candidates.

For the laity candidates:

• There are 22 women who have offered themselves for election and 22 men.
• Thirty-six of the declared laity candidates are from Kansas, and eight are from Nebraska.
• Two are in their teens, 10 in their 20s, four in their 30s, eight in their 40s, three in their 50s and 16 are 60 or older.
• Three identify as African-American; two are siblings.
• Nine declared lay candidates are from the Kansas City District, five from the Topeka District, five from Wichita East and four from Wichita West. Dodge City and Elkhorn Valley are the only two districts not represented.

All clergy will be issued a four-digit number as their identification for voting machines used during the annual conference session May 29 to June 1 at the Expocentre in Topeka. All declared lay members will be issued a three-digit number for identification in the election, with others added to the digital ballot via a write-in procedure that will be explained toward the beginning of the annual conference session.

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