Districts of The Texas Annual Conference
The Texas Conference is divided into 9 districts that cover subdivided areas of the conference territory. Districts are the United Methodist equivalent of a Roman Catholic diocese. McMahan Chapel, the oldest Protestant church in Texas and one of the oldest Protestant congregations west of the Mississippi River, is located in the East District and is celebrated each year with an annual Conference wide worship service and gathering, McMahon Chapel Day . The original Methodist missionary to what was then the Mexican territory of Texas, the Rev. Littleton Fowler, is buried under the pulpit of McMahon's Chapel. The Rev. Sumner Bacon, the first Presbyterian missionary to Texas, is buried in the nearby Chapel Hill United Methodist Church cemetery.
District Superintendents (commonly referred to as a "DS") supervise each district. The superintendents serve for six years but they can serve for as long as eight if the presiding Bishop feels that there are exceptional reasons to do so. A superintendent may serve up to 12 years in total during the course of their ministry, and there are no exceptions allowed to this rule. Each of the nine districts coordinate, supervise, and support all of the work of the Church within its geographical boundaries. The West District in the Texas Annual Conference is currently the highest apportionment paying District in the entire United Methodist denomination or "connection'. The southern and eastern districts of the Annual Conference were deeply affected by the damage of Hurricane Ike in the Fall of 2008, with several coastal congregations being wiped out completely.
Read more about this topic: Texas Annual Conference
Famous quotes containing the words districts, texas, annual and/or conference:
“Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.... for really new ideas of any kind—no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be—there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“The safety of the republic being the supreme law, and Texas having offered us the key to the safety of our country from all foreign intrigues and diplomacy, I say accept the key ... and bolt the door at once.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it.... He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”
—Adam Smith (1723–1790)
“The peace conference must not adjourn without the establishment of some ordered system of international government, backed by power enough to give authority to its decrees. ... Unless a league something like this results at our peace conference, we shall merely drop back into armed hostility and international anarchy. The war will have been fought in vain ...”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)