Is bottled water at Synod really truth serum?

“Absolutely not,” said Bette Thomas, who thought up the idea of the liquid giveaway.

The 3,000 bottles sport the message “First Congregational United Church of Christ of Atlanta welcomes you to General Synod.” Thomas, an administrative assistant at the church, is also is in charge of operations for the local arrangements committee of the hosting Southeast Conference.

Thomas said she first used bottled water as a memento at her daughter’s wedding a few years ago. That was only 500 bottles but 3,000 for Synod? “Now that was a challenge,” she sighed. First Church bought water and assembled volunteers to peel off the commercial label and apply the new.

Souvenir water is something new at General Synod. Since 1985, delegates to the biennial meeting had munched on homemade cookies, thousands of them, provided by the host committee

“We broke the tradition,” Thomas said, adding that the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control thought it wasn’t a healthy idea to supply so many cookies from so many sources. The hot and soggy local weather, however, is likely to make the water popular even if it doesn’t entirely replace the missing cookies.

When apprised of the rumor about “damyankee” truth serum, Edith Guffey, UCC associate general minister, quipped, “Did it do any good?”