God is Still in the House

The wrangling goes on. Words take on an importance of their own. The nuance between “Making disciples of Jesus Christ and saving souls for the transformation of the world.” is sooo different from “Making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.” The delegates keep burning time on such as this without realizing that time will become very precious in the days ahead and major issues (without financial implications) will get very little attention in the penuries because there was so much of the time burned up with minutiae.

Significant things have happened at GC08 that will bring new vitality to the United Methodist family.

If you had a great day of joining at your church and 50 to100 people joined, it would be an event of note, right? On Monday, April 27, action was taken to complete the addition of the United Methodist Church in Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) to our family. This regional conference is the largest of the church. On this great day of joining, 677,355 members joined the family. The Virginia Conference was the largest with 341,264 members. God will expect more us on the 28th of April than on the 27th of April. It took four years to get all the procedural issues dealt with, but will we in the US church add 677,000 new members in the next four years?

After considerable wrangling, a study team was approved to look to the future of the UM in terms of the way we organize globally. The present system is becoming unmanageable because of cultural differences from nations. These cultural differences cause each of the Central Conferences to write their own version of the Book of Discipline. Issues that are distracting to the US are not handled in the same way in Africa, Europe or Asia. Different cultures have different language and word meanings are not the same when translated. The Study Team will have recommendations by 2012 for a more orderly division geographically. The possibility of a Central Conference that encompasses the US and a Global Conference for worldwide ministries. We will just have to stay tuned for how this plays out.

Today, there was a historical event when Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President, Republic of Liberia addressed the GC. She is an active UM laywoman. The first woman elected to the Presidency in an African nation. The GC08 theme of A Future With Hope is being lived out in Liberia. She told us that when she was elected that her motorcade caused children to run in fear that they were to be harmed or their possessions taken. Now, they run after her motorcade wanting her to stop and greet them. The Conference greeted Ellen with several minutes of standing applause. The African delegates greeted her with the traditional high-pitched trills. Not many years ago, there were only about three democratic governments on the continent. Now, there are 18. With here support there many UM supported schools and hospitals and clinics in Liberia. The university will move into a new facility shortly.

Maybe God just doesn’t have time to worry about the parliamentary procedure and wordsmithing; because God is definitely still in the house!