Key points:
- Participants at the Council of Bishops Leadership Gathering spent their second full day reflecting on practices that can help United Methodist congregations thrive.
- Speakers suggested practices including prayer, deep listening and building relationships with God and neighbor.
- Multiple speakers talked about the importance of not trying to go it alone.
After a day discussing the difficulties The United Methodist Church faces, Leadership Gathering participants delved into how they might address those challenges in concrete ways.
The focus of the second full day of the unprecedented gathering initiated by the Council of Bishops was moving from named reality to new living practice.
Stephanie Henry, a lay woman who helped organize the event, reminded those gathered that the bishops will receive the recommendations that the participants are developing and ultimately are responsible for what comes of this week’s work.
“Yes, I know you could leave here and develop legislation for General Conference,” she said, referring to the denomination’s top lawmaking assembly next set to meet in 2028.
“If something comes out of your deliberation and encourages you to do that, I encourage that. That is your power. And yet, our bishops have power and control beyond General Conference. That is reality, and so this is why we’re here.”
She opened the morning plenary session sharing a summary of the denominational struggles that participants identified when they met in covenant groups the previous day. More than 230 participants met in covenant groups in person, while connectivity challenges resulted in only nine of the 46 participants outside of Canada meeting online.
Among other things, covenant groups named:
- The need to deepen spiritual practices that lead to a transformed life in Jesus.
- Concerns about financial sustainability, institutional self-preservation and rigid, U.S.-centered structures.
- Issues with hierarchy and a lack of access to positions of power and leadership.
- The need to improve stewardship, including caring well for the United Methodist story and using money, gifts and power to serve God’s mission around the world.
The rest of the morning, participants heard from United Methodist speakers about both new and familiar practices that might help address these longstanding challenges.
In his sermon during morning worship, the Rev. YoungHak Joseph Lee emphasized a chief spiritual practice of prayer.
He introduced many of his listeners to the Korean practice of tongsung prayer — in which worshippers pray aloud their individual prayers at the same time.
“Tongsung prayer is not simply about praying to God,” said Lee, a newly ordained elder and lead pastor of Paoli United Methodist Church in the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference. “It is a way of crying out to God from our wounded hearts and from the wounded world in which we live.”
He told them that Korean Christians’ prayer life strengthened their faith and led to revived churches even as they struggled with a lack of freedom under Japanese occupation and later a series of military dictators.
He then encouraged the assembly to pray in the same passionate way, not for their own institutions or for the future but for the wounded world that God so loves.
“I want us to repent because we have not always been faithful stewards of God’s creation. We have failed to love our neighbors. We have failed to hear the cries of those in need,” he said. “Sometimes, we have been so concerned about protecting our churches and our institutions that we have forgotten the people Jesus called us to love.”
Other morning speakers, like Lee, encouraged United Methodists to embrace practices that help them look beyond their own concerns to where God is calling.
Multiple speakers, many of whom also gave presentations on the first day of the gathering, talked about the importance of not trying to go it alone.
The Rev. Chris McAlilly, lead pastor of Oxford University United Methodist Church in Oxford, Mississippi, cautioned that people can use the language of discernment to justify what they already wanted to do.
“None of us has a handle on everything that God is doing in the world at any given time,” he said. “So, we need Scripture, we need prayer, we need the tradition and the wisdom of the saints. We also need one another, particularly those who challenge our assumptions. That’s why we need friendship.”
The Rev. Anne Klitgaard Thompson, a United Methodist elder in Denmark and expert on children’s ministries, added that older adults can learn from even younger Christians. She noted that many people make the decision to follow Christ before the age of 5. She suggested in helping children develop in Christian love, United Methodists can take guidance from John Wesley’s doctrine of sanctification.
“Now, sanctification is responding to the call of God in a way that makes us partner with God in building His kingdom on earth,” she said. She suggested children can engage in that work, too, in age-appropriate ways.
As an example, she pointed to a little girl who had an aversion to physical activities, yet walked to church each week lugging two stuffed animals. When asked why two, the child answered: “One is for me to play with. The other one is if a baby starts crying.”
In other words, Klitgaard Thompson explained, the girl’s first thought is to comfort a younger child even if it meant taking on an extra burden. “I wonder if that might be an example of holiness in the life of a child,” the pastor said.
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The Rev. John Yambasu Jr., in a recorded address, also emphasized that relationships are key to the difference a local church can make.
He shared his experience of looking for a church when he first moved to Atlanta.
The first three welcomed him as a first-time visitor. But at the end of the service, he said, that was it. But after visiting the fourth, Haygood United Methodist Church, he got an email from the pastor who invited him to lunch.
“We talked for almost an hour, and he invited me back and told me that if I ever needed to talk, he was available,” Yambasu said. “Now, think about that for a moment. And all four churches welcomed me. All four churches could have counted me as a first-time visitor. But only one went beyond welcoming me to intentionally building a relationship with me.”
That is the church Yambasu joined. Now an associate pastor at Ben Hill United Methodist Church, he emphasized that Jesus also made disciples by building relationships.
The Rev. Beth Ludlum of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington urged those gathered to take lessons from asset-based community development, which emphasizes helping communities leverage the gifts they have rather than focusing on what they lack. But identifying those gifts requires deep listening.
She talked about a time her own church was overwhelmed with trying to help unhoused people who would come one day a week to receive bus passes and access other social services.
“So, we sat with some regulars and, instead of asking what they needed, we asked what gifts they had to share,” she said. “It turned out each had hard-won expertise — navigating social services, getting ID, finding safe places to sleep or a hot meal.”
The church reformed Wednesday morning services around these experts, turning lines for bus passes into small, facilitated groups where people at the margins could share their wisdom.
“It stopped being about what the church could do,” she said. “Rather, the gathered community was becoming the body of Christ, serving one another with dignity and courage.”
The Rev. April Casperson of Methodist Theological School in Ohio said making disciples of Jesus requires building relationships across difference.
“Building bridges across difference is not a program,” she said. “It is a practice: the slow, intentional work of deepening relationships, first with one another and then beyond our walls. Congregations grow stronger when members intentionally deepen relationships with one another; those relationships build the trust that makes collaborative mission possible.”
Casperson wanted to give churches permission to experiment in this disciple-making work. She suggested reviving John Wesley’s concept of the class meeting.
Such a class meeting would not be a small group following a curriculum, she said, but “a handful of people who did not choose each other and do not share the same background, meeting to ask each other one honest question on a fixed rhythm.”
Bishop Rodel M. Acdal of the Baguio Episcopal Area in the Philippines, said he felt the gathering was off to a good start in naming the church’s challenges, but he is even more excited for the ideas the participants will bring to address them.
“We are on the right track,” he said.
Laura Althaus, an elder candidate and member of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Houston, said she, like other participants, was excited to be part of this effort to reinvigorate The United Methodist Church.
She also appreciated how much effort she witnessed in her covenant group to make sure everyone has a chance to speak.
“It is such a joy to hear from United Methodists from around the world,” she said.
Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.
