Bishops adopt calls to action for United Methodists

By Linda Green*

MAPUTO, Mozambique (UMNS)-The bishops of the United Methodist Church are calling members of the denomination to "live the United Methodist way" in their daily lives and public witness and be a community of believers who offer hope to the world.

Nearly 80 bishops affirmed that call to action Nov. 6 during their first meeting outside the United States. The bishops accepted the concept but are seeking to clarify what living the United Methodist way really means.

The council also introduced an action plan that includes starting new churches across the globe, reaching and caring for children throughout the world and leading the effort to stamp out the killer diseases of poverty: malaria and HIV/AIDS.

West Ohio Bishop Bruce Ough, chairperson of the bishop's plan team, said that the call to action is an attempt to chart a response to the council's adopted seven vision pathways and focus those pathways into four areas of emphasis to compel United Methodists to action.

He said these calls reflect a strategy under development by the council, the church's general agencies and members of the Connectional Table, the denomination's program coordination group.

Ough explained that the action plan is rooted in the denomination's mission to make disciples of Christ, in the church's Wesleyan traditions "while spoken in ways that resonate with members of the 21st century United Methodist Church" and the commitment to be a global church, "grounded in our fervent belief that through Christ, there is hope for a fractured world full of hurting people."

Starting new congregations
According to North Georgia Bishop Lindsey Davis, the council seeks to put hope into action by creating new congregations that serve all people.

The bishops not only envision planting at least one new church every day outside the United States, where there is significant membership growth, but also starting a new church every day in the United States, where the membership has declined for 40 years, he said.

Currently 75 new U.S. churches are begun each year. "Our team is discovering what it will take for us to ramp up from 75 new church starts per year to 365 a year," Davis added.

Since the church in the United States "is at a crucial tipping point," Davis said a way must be found to challenge United Methodist churches in the country to "rekindle our Wesleyan passion for souls with the same kind of enthusiasm and spirit that we see lived out … throughout Africa."

According to the bishops' plan team, new churches are started so that disciples can be formed and the world can be changed. These churches, the team said, must pay attention to new immigrant and refugee communities, to expanding racial/ethnic populations, to new generations of children and to "those places that have not yet received the Good News of Jesus Christ."

Reaching and caring for children
Ough told the council that 30,000 children from across the globe die each day of hunger, preventable diseases and violence, while 13 million children live in poverty.

"The current generation of children is the largest the world has ever experienced," the bishops' plan team said, noting that the fastest-growing population of children being from racial/ethnic communities. "If the United Methodist Church is to be the hope for the world, we must offer hope to the world's children."

The call to action encourages the bishops to focus on transforming the lives of children while working to eliminate poverty. "If the United Methodist Church is to be the witness to Jesus Christ and be the hope for the world, we must be engaged in those places where hope is most absent" and extreme poverty is the norm, the team pointed out.

United Methodist Bishops Eben Nhiwatiwa of Zimbabwe and Jose Quipungo of East Angola spoke on the pandemic of malaria and AIDS, its impact on the church and the world. During a workshop, the two bishops said both epidemics annually claim 4 million people, cause 300 acute illnesses and favor the poorest countries in the world.

Quipungo noted that the impact of malaria on the continent "is terrible because we have been losing lots of children, which is losing the nation since they are the future of the nation."

The United Methodist Church is engaged in a malaria-prevention campaign called "Nothing But Nets." Partners include the United Nations Foundation, Sports Illustrated, the National Basketball Association, Millennium Promise and the Measles Initiative. The United Methodist Board of Global Ministries and United Methodist Communications are coordinating the church's participation in the campaign to raise funds to eradicate malaria in Africa, where the mosquito-borne disease causes the death of one-fifth of all children under 5 years old.

HIV/AIDS has gone beyond clinical and medical parameters, Nhiwatiwa said. "Its tentacles are economically, socially and even politically felt. It is no longer a health issue alone but an issue that is affecting all aspects of human life."

*Green is a United Methodist News Service news writer based in Nashville, Tenn.