Dr. Milton Loyer, Conference Archivist
September – 100 years ago.
Thursday and Friday, September 25 and 26, 1919, the Sunbury District of the Central Pennsylvania Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church held two special events. On Thursday, 145 young men and women from across the district gathered with “wholesome vigor and intelligent purpose” at St. John’s Church in Sunbury for a youth Christian Activities Conference that was “a high day of interest and enthusiasm.” On Friday, 59 of the district’s 63 pastors met at the same location for their first annual retreat. “A program full and suggestive had been prepared, in which the ministers engaged in full and frank discussion of their various problems, and out of which conference and discussion came the program of the District for the year.” The Sunbury District of 1919 stretched all the way from Pleasant Gap to Hazelton. Wolfsburg native Rev. John S. Souser, who organized these innovative events, passed away 19 months later, in April 1921, in the third year of his superintendency.
October – 50 years ago
Representatives from five United Methodist conferences [Susquehanna (former EUB), Central Pennsylvania (former Methodist) Eastern (former EUB), Philadelphia (former Methodist) and Western Pennsylvania (former EUB)] met in Harrisburg at the Scottish Rite Cathedral on October 18, 1969, in a uniting session to form the Central Pennsylvania Conference of the United Methodist Church. This was part of the state-wide re-organization of overlapping conferences created by the 1968 Methodist-EUB denominational union. In the weeks that followed, similar uniting sessions took place to form the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference and the Western Pennsylvania Conference. In 2010, in connection with receiving the Pennsylvania churches and pastors of the former Wyoming Conference, the corporation known as the Central Pennsylvania Conference of the United Methodist Church filed change of name papers to become the Susquehanna Conference of the United Methodist Church.
