Young People’s Address

By Eveline Chikwanah

To thunderous applause, Alejandra Salemi of the Florida Conference said the denomination’s lawmaking assembly is being held “in the midst of what feels like an emotional whirlpool that only something like divorce proceedings can stir up.”

…Over the past four years, more than 7,600 U.S. congregations have disaffiliated from The United Methodist Church.

“When time and money and energy go towards a divorce, it has to get subtracted from somewhere else, and I believe that our young people and local congregations are paying that price while resources go toward settling disagreements,” Alejandra Saemi (FL) said.

She said what is happening in the church is a microcosm to what is happening in the rest of the world and the most difficult thing to hear in an echo chamber is the quiet, knowing voice of the truth: God’s loving whisper that reminds people “to be still and know.”

Across the ocean, Senesie T.A. Rogers, who was unable to get a visa to travel to the U.S from his home in Sierra Leone, delivered his recorded address, reminding delegates that splits were normal in the Methodist Church.

“An inconvenient truth in our tradition is that the seeds needed to explore dividing the church were planted in the first General Conference in 1792, which was attended only by clergy. We have thereafter felt the effects of nine splits and one major schism in the first 100 years, or so, of the Methodist Church,” Senesie T.A. Rogers said.

Because of that history, he said, it is pointless to worry about splits and their effects when we already know that splits and Methodism are intertwined.

“Do you know that there is something else that is part of our tradition? Indeed. Reconciliation and coming together is part of our tradition. We must be more about uniting than dividing at this point,” Rogers said.

Chikwanah is a correspondent for UM News based in Harare, Zimbabwe. Image: Senesie Timothy Arounah Rogers, native of Sierra Leone, the Chairman of the United Methodist West Africa Central Conference Organization on Youth and Young Adults; and Alejandra Salemi, a PhD student at Duke University (photo from UMCYoungPeople.org)