General Conference opens with hope
Personal ministry makes disciples
UMC formally admits Ivory Coast
Madam President, Mama President
Church retains stance on human sexuality
Pain and protest: A Good News response
Young people: a church to call home
Doubts arise following cellphone gifts
Sometimes a cellphone is just a cellphone
Deeds, not words, make disciples
Former abortion clinic owner shares story
U.S. Christians don’t feel persecution pain
Moved by the “water and the Spirit”
Church key to fighting AIDS crisis
Episcopal address focuses on hope
General Conference tackles global issues
Points of order, points of grace
CONFERENCE COMMENTARY
United Methodist teambuilding: Acevedo
Looking to the future with hope: Hamilton
Priorities transcend differences: McCurry
The dilemma of 3 Simple Rules: Reisman
COLUMNS
Editorial Reflections on the 2008 General Conference
RENEW Women’s Network Aftermath
Culture in View To Be a Friend of Caspian
Next Generation Responding to Speakaphobia
The Great Commission Brokenness
From the Hear Prison Praise
More often than not, General Conference appears to observers as a collision of a Sunday school picnic, a mud wrestling match, and the South Carolina primary. There are buttons, ribbons, pamphlets, stickers, drumbeats, and colorful stoles. The General Conference provides pageantry, preaching, and protest. For ten days, United Methodists gather to plot out the future missionally and administratively, and to take our stand on a multitude of social issues. We come together to address long-term concerns regarding vitality, unity, and relevance.
The folks back home are keenly interested, however, in knowing if United Methodism still is part of God’s redemptive plan to transform the world with the life-giving gospel of Jesus Christ. Do we care about the poor? Do we care about the broken? Do we care about those who look differently than we do? Do we care about those outside the four walls of our sanctuary?
Ultimately, our friends in small and large congregations all across the United States and around the world want to know if we are still a vibrant, faith-filled Christian body—or are we playing church?
It would have been great to have spent our time together dealing with the Four Areas of Focus: leadership development, church planting, ministry with the poor, and eradicating killer diseases.
These are the kind of endeavors that are worthy of our support. They are visionary and engaging. Unfortunately, their emphasis seemed to play second fiddle to the normal pet issues we deal with every four years. While it is easy to Monday-morning-quarterback at the tail-end of General Conference, is it not worth wondering if our mile-high stack of resolutions and petitions kept us from what could have been a unifying focus?
Even with our Four Areas of Focus, we have still got a serious vision problem in United Methodism. The membership decline in the United States is well-known and only needs to be repeated to point our dependence back upon God—the giver of life and the sustainer of our church. The real raw deal for United Methodism is that we have failed miserably to capture the spiritual imagination of those under 45.
There is no way that we are going to reach the next generation based on denominational loyalty, tradition, or parlimentary procedures at General Conference. We need to offer a world-transforming vision, authentic engagement, Scriptural stability, redemptive social action, and vibrant worship.
Who among us is not haunted by John Wesley’s great concern? “I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America,” he said. “But I am afraid lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power. And this undoubtedly will be the case unless they hold fast both the doctrine, spirit, and discipline with which they first set out.”
In truth, spiritual transformation of the world will be motivated more by prayer than by petitions, more by revival than by resolutions, and more by sweating on a missions trip than a restructuring plan with a proper majority vote.
General Conference is important; but Sunday schools, confirmation classes, recovery ministries, vacation Bible schools, youth camps, soup kitchens, Bible studies, short-term mission trips, prayer vigils, and prison ministries are where the vibrancy of our faith most deeply engages our souls and touches the world that is desperately looking for redemption.
We trust that the Holy Spirit will breathe life into the legislation. And while constitutions and disciplines are revised, we returned home, hopeful that our God who sees the sparrow fall cares about paperwork, too, and grants our United Methodist leadership a fresh sense of wonder at the expanse of his grace.
Steve Beard is the editor of Good News.
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