By Laura Heikes

My mother became a Christian when I was four. From that day forward, we were in church every Sunday…almost. Stewardship Sunday was the one day Mom encouraged us to skip church. Now that we are both pastors, we hope our people don’t feel the same way we did. But we know they do.

By Liza Kittle
At the 2012 General Conference, the Women’s Division (the leadership organization of United Methodist Women) will petition the worldwide church to become their own separate general agency called United Methodist Women, Inc. If this action is passed, the impact on women and women’s ministry in the UM Church may be dramatic.

By Rob Renfroe
I spent the first ten days of August in India, landing in Delhi, spending a day seeing the Taj Mahal, and then seeing what God is doing in the cities of Hyderabad (4 million residents) and Patna (6 million residents in India’s poorest state of Bihar).

In order to keep the lines of communication open between evangelical renewal groups and the Council of Bishops, a gathering of representatives from both entities will take place in Chicago on October 21, 2011. This is a follow-up meeting to one that took place two years ago.

By Diane West

When I was informed that Jimmy Creech had recently released a book of his “memoirs,” Adam’s Gift, I thought about whether or not I wanted to read it. I was raised in First United Methodist Church in Omaha, Nebraska, and my family and I were very much involved in the situation that transpired there over a decade ago when Creech was appointed to the church as its pastor and was eventually put on trial for conducting a high-profile homosexual union ceremony.

By Jason Vickers
The Western church is presently immersed in yet another age of anxiety. It is characterized by pessimism and despair over the current state of the church and by uncertainty and fear about the church’s future.

However, our current situation is also like previous ages of anxiety in that it is teeming with prophetic figures who are promoting visions and dreams for the church and who are often critical of the church’s leadership.