Day 4 of 365 - what's the plan for this year ahead?
I thought it might be useful to get some background on why I launched this somewhat audacious project and to give you a sense of what I hope it will achieve.
Here are some underlying values or ideas I have about why this is important:
We all can use our own agency and voice - what sets us apart from other denominations is our connectional nature and the structure of holy conferencing that exists at various levels in the church. This means that each individual United Methodist has a voice somewhere. For most of us this is grounded in our home church, others of us have roles at the District, Annual, Jurisdictional, Central, or General Conference levels.
We all have circles of influence and we need to use them - beyond the structure outlined above, we all have circles, or spheres, of influence, people we know spread across both our local church and beyond. I was first introduced to the idea of circles of influence through Stephen Covey's book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People several decades ago. It's part of habit one - Be Proactive. Proactive people focus on the areas where they have influence.
We all have stories that can help change hearts and minds - some people say to me "I don't have a story about inclusion that will help others". I fundamentally don't believe that is true. I believe all of us have taken journeys in our faith life that have changed us and have the power to change others.
We all need help getting brave and speaking out - it's never easy claiming our space, and naming our hopes, especially in places where we might feel isolated and in the minority. We all need community and encouragement to be brave and speak out.
These are the four areas I hope this blog will help us all make progress in together. I don't have a master plan, with the whole year mapped out - far from it :)
I doubt the daily posts will follow a nice orderly path, through each of the areas outlined.
But what I hope is that we can weave together, somewhat haphazardly as it may be, a purposeful, proactive, engaged approach to the called General Conference in 2019. A journey that includes us as active participants, not simply passive observers. A path that we can walk together in community with each other.
Action: Invite others to join us on this journey. Share a link to this blog post, or maybe the one we started with last week. Invite a friend from your Sunday School class, or UMW Circle.