This Week in Texas Methodist History December 18 Three MEC Conferences Meet in San Antonio to Complete Merger, December 1926 Previous posts have highlighted the fact that one hundred years ago the MEC had five annual conferences with churches in Texas. Two of them, the Texas and West Texas, had African American members. There were also German, Swedish, and English speaking churches for European-Ameericans. Both the German and Gulf Conferences included churches in Louisiana, but the Swedish Confernce did not. The 1924 General Confernce of the MEC authorized a merger of the three conferences, and the merger was approved by each of the three conferences meeing in San Antonio in December 1926. Three MEC bishops (Neulsen, Mead, and Waldorp) presided over the three conferences during business sessions, but in the late afternoon all three confernces convened in Trinity MEC church for joint worship services. The Southern Gernman Confernce was one of 8 US and 4 European Conferences using the German Language at the time. There were some interesting resolutions that had to be acted upon by the delegates. First the name had to be changed. It was easy for the the Southern German Conference. The name of the new conference would simply be the Southeern Conference. They also had to decided to discontinue printing the Journal in both English and German. The 1926 Journal is a mixed bag of both hEnglish and German, but starting in 1927, the Journal would be in English. There was also the problem of historical continuity. Should the annual conference of 1927 be designated as the first session or the fifty-fifth session? The Southern German Conference had been organized in 1872. Would the new conference be considered a continuation of that conference or a compoletely new one? They decided to call the 1927 conferenbce the 55th. Another question was wheter the Confernce Newspaer, the Texas Stern could continue to publish in German. The answer was that it could. It lasted more than another decade after the merger. Each of the three conferences owned a college. The Gulf Conference actually owned two, Port Arthur College and Alvinn College. The Swedes owned Texas Wesleyan in Austin, and the Germans owned Blinn in Brenham. How each of those colleges would be supported was a question that would be deferred. Evenually Blinn, Port Arthur, and Alvin became public junior colleges. By contrast the German Mission Conference of the MECS had already been folded into the English speaking conferences of Texas. The last session had occurred in November 1918 at New Fountain. That was a completely different matter. As noted above, the MEC had about a dozen English speaking conferences, but the MECS’s only German speaking conference was the one in Texas. That meant that that the MEC could justify a vigorous publishing effort in the German language, but the MECS could not. The MECS often used MEC literature.