Carol Howard Merritt on Reframing Hope-- Webinar

Companions,

Yesterday, August 26, Alban Institute sponsored a 1 hour webinar with Carol Howard Merrit, Presbyterian clergyperson, author and blogger (at http://tribalchurch.org and podcaster at GodComplex Radio (http://www.godcomplexradio.com). 

You can view and hear the whole piece on playback now at the Alban Institute website here.

And, if you're impatient, you can even "skim through it" with the Webex presentation viewer to get to the specific "slides" you might be most interested in learning/thinking/hearing about.

One technical note. I wasn't able to get the viewer to work properly on Firefox 4 Beta 4. My guess is since this is still a fairly "bleeding edge" release, the viewing plugins haven't all caught up yet. But it worked just fine in Chrome. 

View, reflect-- and if you like, post your reflections here.

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

 

With the world changing at breathtaking speed, how can you possibly keep up?

(cue tense yet upbeat techno music in the background)

BBC World Service, on Sirius/XM Radio, that's how.

Well, if I am to believe the "ad" on the"commercial free" service Sirius/XM provides.

Glad we've got that solved. Guess I better keep my Sirius/XM subscription up to date. Wouldn't want to not "keep up." The world really is changing at a breathtaking pace, after all. If I didn't believe that rationally, that techno music in the background certainly communicates a fairly frenetic sense that it might just be the case.

But is it, really?

Is the world really changing at breathtaking speed? 

And even if it is, do I really HAVE to "keep up"? 

What happens if I don't?

What if, instead of attending to the constant stream of change that can only take my breath away, I attend to the Everlasting whose breath gives life? And what does it look like to attend to the Everlasting in the face of the stream of change?

What if instead of attending to the stories the news and other media dish up, I attend to the stories of the people I meet today? And how does it feel to attend to these immediate stories instead of those the media use to demand my immediate attention?

What do I lose?

What may be gained?

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

Photo Credit: High Speed Lights, Public Domain.

Wannabe Cool Christianity?

Companions,

Brett McCracken not only has a new book and website out-- Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide (it's a reasonably hip and cool site, btw!)-- but also was a featured Op-Ed writer in this past Friday's Wall Street Journal.

The site is worth looking at. The article is worth reading. 

But the perspective, at least in the article, represents a serious misreading of the situation of younger adults in our churches on the one hand, but also perhaps a fairly accurate depiction of how many congregations and denominations are making exactly the same misreading.

The misreading in Brett's article is of a 2007 study by Lifeway Research that explores the reasons that 70% of Protestants 18-22 years old surveyed in the study indicated they had essentially "dropped out" of attending a congregation for a year or more during that age range. The deal is the finding is very specific-- 70% dropped out (quit attending regularly) for a year or more during that age range. Further work showed that roughly 65% of these began attending again at least sporadically after their "off period," and over half of those began attending regularly (weekly or more).

Brett McCracken's  article, though, says this:

Recent statistics have shown an increasing exodus of young people from churches, especially after they leave home and live on their own. In a 2007 study, Lifeway Research determined that 70% of young Protestant adults between 18-22 stop attending church regularly.

Well, as you can see (if you go read it!), Lifeway's research does not show an "increasing exodus." It just shows a high incidence of folks in this age range "taking a break"-- and then it goes further to document the reasons that happens. Nor does it find-- as the ending of the second sentence suggests-- that just because they stop at some point for a period of a year or so during that age range that they never re-start after that. Most do! And most who do become regular participants again.

True confession here. I stopped attending a congregation with any regularity  when I started college. I was active in a campus ministry group, and I stayed in touch with the church I was a member of via mail (they'd send me their bulletin's and newsletters in the mail-- I had email via CompuServe back then, but nobody in the church office did, and they were making their bulletins manually-- this was 1982). So I was at best a "mental member."

Why did this happen to me? I was a lifelong Southern Baptist at that point, and there were no Southern Baptist congregations in Gambier, Ohio. The nearest Baptist congregation was about 7 miles away, and I didn't have a car, and it wasn't Southern Baptist, either. We had Episcopal, United Methodist, and Roman Catholic services available-- but no Baptist. (I was actually the only Southern Baptist student on campus while I was there!). So I didn't attend a congregation at all for probably the first six or seven months I was there.

That didn't mean I wasn't involved in a Christian community, however. I became fairly quickly active in a student-run campus ministry that met weekly on Monday nights for fellowship, study, prayer and fun activities and that developed small groups (family groups they were called) that also met weekly for more intensive study and prayer. (Call it "society meeting" and "class meeting" if you like!). These were challenging, broadening, and deepening of my spiritual life and commitments in every way. But if the question was "do I attend a congregation regularly" the answer would be no. In fact, I didn't attend at all. 

Now, a combination of peers who attended the Episcopal church on campus (Kenyon is an Episcopal college) but not the Kenyon Christian Fellowship, and some who attended both, pretty well convinced me that I was missing the boat by not also attending worship regularly, so beginning after the middle of the spring semester that year, I began attending Harcourt Parish on campus, too. And yes, I became a regular there. I was even one of the members of the choir and one of the leaders of the youth group there my senior year. A Baptist-Episcopalian--- or a proto United Methodist!

Back to Brett's article. Yes, he misread the statistics. Or at least he didn't dig into the study he cited far enough to get a fuller picture-- one that actually seems to correlate pretty well with the study cited in the previous post on this blog.

But I think he may well have captured the sort of panic with which congregations and judicatories are taking this kind of misreading pretty accurately.

It does seem to be the case, based on the Pew Forum Report on Religion among the Millenials that about 2/3 of younger adults (ages 18-29) do NOT attend worship regularly (weekly or more). That's fairly close to 70%. This same generation is far more likely to be religiously unaffiliated entirely than any previous one tested (25% versus  16% overall, and 14% ages 30-39). But as we saw in the previous blog, that high rate of non-participation is far more driven by the fact of disaffiliation by their parents, and so actual relative non-affiliation by this generation, than by people in this age group actively leaving the church. Some have left permanently to be sure. But most of those who have left did so only for period of time and later returned to some level of participation in a congregation.

But-- that nuanced perspective is simply not being communicated out there. A far more catastrophic perspective is-- young adults are "fleeing our churches in droves!" And it's that catastrophic perspective that has driven much of the rhetoric at the leadership levels of many US denominations, that has fired up our "anxiety responses," and that has contributed to what might, to the less anxious observer, appear to be "panic moves" to "lure back" these folks. 

Here, Brett McCracken is spot on. And he's a witness for those who haven't left, and the 2/3 of those who have left for a time and later returned. Most of these folks really didn't leave per se. They just stopped attending for a while. And most didn't stop attending by and large because the church felt "irrelevant" or anything like that. For the most part, the facts were that their lives changed (going to college, starting jobs, moving to a different location, getting married-- the kinds of changes typical for this age group) and it took some time for them to re-adjust and re-incorporate a congregation into the mix in such radically different circumstances. 

What that also means is that those who did leave didn't expect the congregations they left to try to "lure" them back. Brett McCracken sums it up this way: 

"As a twentysomething, I can say with confidence that when it comes to church, we don't want cool as much as we want real."

Okay-- so does that mean we ought to start marketing "real church" as opposed to "cool church?" 

I'm afraid that's already underway.

McCracken's point is marketing isn't the way to go. Actual relationships and enduring communities are. And above all, folks committed to living out the way of Jesus with you-- regardless of your age-- that's what matters most of all.

Well-- if you want to be a disciple of Jesus at least!

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

Image Credit: "Cool" Used by permission under a GNU Free Documentation License.

Fewer Younger Folks Are Religious-- But Those Fewer That Are May Be More Loyal

Companions,

A shout out to GBOD's Director of Best Practices, Deb Smith. You go, Deb!

This morning, Deb found links to a news report suggesting that younger adults who are religious may actually be more loyal to their faith communities than some recent research had seemed to present.

But she didn't stop there. She tracked that report to another it was based on.

Then she tracked that report to the actual research both were based on. 

Then she looked at that research to determine whether it was valid before passing it on to the staff.

That's exactly what a good researcher does-- and what we all should do when we hear about "a new statistic" that claims one thing or another about the church-- or anything else for that matter.

Like I said-- You go, Deb!

So here are the reports:

http://www.getreligion.org/?p=40297

http://in.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-506921201000806

And here is the peer-reviewed research paper it was based on:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2010.01511.x/full

And here's the gist. Yes, there are far fewer younger persons who are religiously affiliated. But that's not as much because this "generation" cares less about religion per se. It's because it was likely that they were never affiliated in the first place because they were raised by parents who quit being affiliated and grew up around fewer people who were. What the research finds is that the status of non-affiliated or dis-affiliated at this point has more to do with whether you were raised as part of a religious community than any "cohort effects" per se. 

So it's just not the case that "Gen-Y" or "the Millenials" care less about religion than previous generations do. For those who are affiliated, their affiliation is as strong or stronger than some previous generations. The deal is that because we've had this major "uptick" in dis-affiliation, beginning in the 1960s-- we've created a generational, and therefore a nearly geometric upsurge in non-affiliation in every age cohort since.

This isn't cause for panic-- but adaptation.  What it means is that primary evangelization and basic formation in the way of Jesus-- not only for the "young," but also for a good number of aging "baby boomers"-- is more important now than ever. 

This is no time for "dumbing down." It's a time for "boning up" on what matters most-- and for making sure we say it, transmit it, and live it compellingly.

And not just for the young. 

But for the world around us-- people of every age and station in life.

It's not that the sky is falling. It's that the environment has changed. 

It's no longer "glorious summer." But neither is it the winter of our discontent. Or if it is winter-- it's late winter.

Time to get out there and get the land ready for some new planting!

Who's with me?

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

Twucifying Rick Warren... Where Was He Right?

Companions,

Yesterday, a tweet from Rick Warren started making the rounds-- a splash, or maybe a cannonball splash. It genuinely was there, though it's since been deleted by Rick.

Here's the tweet as it was:

I challenge any church in America to match the spiritual maturity, godliness & commitment of any 500 members of Saddleback

Now, as you might suspect, those 140 or less characters generated a lot of excitement in the Twittersphere and subsequently the blogosphere. Here's just a small sample.

If you go to Rick Warren's Twitter Feed page, you'll notice he's still sort of responding to yesterday's kerfuffle, though, as previously noted, the original tweet is no longer there.

I have no interest in the kerfuffle. I also have no interest in bashing my brother in Christ. 

I happen to think there was something deeply right in what he offered-- something that can and should challenge us and all of our congregations.

I mean really, shouldn't we seek to outdo each other in showing love? Aren't we admonished in scripture and by Wesley to run the race and indeed work for just these things in our own lives and the lives of the communities we are part of? 

There's another tweet, from today, that says boatloads about how he could make this "challenge" now. 

"For 30 yrs our plan was to turn spectators into participators, consumers to contributors, an audience into an army. It worked!"

30 years. Yes, that was his plan-- a plan for a long-haul commitment (30 years so far) to leadership among the same people in the same place so that the mounting results could be what he challenged the rest of us to match-- "spiritual maturity, godliness and commitment." 

And so those who were spectators could become participants, those who were consumers could become contributors, and those who were an audience could get out there and turn the world upside down. 

In other words, so those who were lost could be found, and those who were found could find others with good news, embodied good news, of God's kingdom made known in Jesus Christ.

Sounds like Methodism to me!

Any takers?

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

Catapult Conference

Companions,

I with two other colleagues from GBOD (Steve Manskar and Sandy Jackson) had the joy of being with some vibrant emerging missional leaders in the Alabama West Florida Annual Conference (Don Woolley, Brian Miller, Pat Bethea, and Rob Couch)  for a partnership conversation between these leaders, a DS (Tonya Elmore) working with them in the conference, and a staffer from the General Board of Global Ministries (Patrick Friday) in Birmingham this past Tuesday. These younger pastors have been working away at missional leadership, and in particular with Alan Hirsch, and the conference has been supporting them in spreading The Forgotten Ways as both a conversation starter and as a serious study guide for what missional leadership and missional engagement can look like in and beyond the congregations of their conference. It's been hard work-- obviously. But also very rewarding-- also obviously.

A serious "step up" for their work in that region (though any of us from anywhere who are able are certainly invited to be part of this) is the first Catapult Conference that Alan Hirsch is offering in the United States, coming up September 22-24 in Mobile. Full details-- regularly updated-- are on their website. 

I actually cannot be there because of commitments at GBOD... just need to say that up front. But I do urge any of you who can to consider either how you can get there or who in your social networks might find this event to be catalytic or "catapulting" for missional engagement and missional discipleship where you are or where they are. 

Now, neither I nor they have any illusions that if you attend this you'll get the "10 Surefire Steps to Becoming Missional in 40 Days." I think what you'll get out of this is encouragement, an expansion of networks, and the realization that there are people, resources and support to engage this basic missiological work, which is always work for the long haul, though also work that can begin today.

So check it out... and share this widely.

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

Back to Church Sunday

Companions,

United Methodist News Service recently reported that a number of United Methodist congregations will be participating in Outreach, Inc's National Back to Church Sunday. As of this writing, 2490 congregations of multiple denominations/non-denominations have signed up to participate.

Check it out... and share your thoughts about this.

What seems helpful here?

What seems missional?

What seems problematic? 

What might you do to overcome such problems? 

Will you ask your congregation or faith community to participate? Why or why not?

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

The Consumer Church Gone Wild?

The plethora of issues that clergy face must be real, because the conversation has now moved beyond the Christian blogosphere and the mutual complaint societies that spring up whenever clergy get together. Last week, an article in the New York Times highlighted the problems of clergy burnout and argued that pastors need to take more time off. Back in the blogosphere, I’ve read reactions from clergy that run the gambit from “duh!” to relief that the issue is being recognized by such a mainstream media outlet.

A few days later, another article that was equally interesting and a bit more provocative Op-Ed by G. Jeffery MacDonald appeared in the pages of the Old Gray Lady, arguing that the chief reason for clergy burnout is the pressure that pastors get from their congregations to do things they way they want. MacDonald cites the example of his congregation requesting that he keep his sermons under ten minutes, focusing on funny and uplifting stories to make people feel good about themselves rather than challenging them to live differently in response to the gospel.

The tension and conflict that MacDonald identifies exists on many levels. On a personal level, the tension exists within every professional pastor, as MacDonald says, “between paths of personal integrity and those that portend greater job security”. On a broader level, this conflict raises questions of what the identity of the church really is. Are we just another player in a consumer oriented society, trying to end up on top in the “marketplace of ideas”? Should we do whatever it takes to get as many people in the pews and dollars in the plate as possible? Those that, consciously or not, answer “yes” to this question are the target of MacDonald’s critique.

Andrew Thompson over at Gen-X Rising sees MacDonald’s question as primarily one of preaching. Thompson contends that it’s actually the church’s fault that such pressures come at the clergy. “It’s possible,” Thompson says, “that feel-good preaching is not a result of such shifts but rather a cause of them.” In other words, he’s playing with the idea that if the church had really done its job, the culture wouldn’t have become so shallow and consumption-oriented, and thus wouldn’t put pressure on the church to give feel-good nuggets of spirituality rather than challenging us to deep shifts in the way we think and live.

So what’s the answer? Like any complex and systemic problem, it’s all of the above, the chicken and the egg. The culture around us promotes endless, mindless consumption as the real purpose of life. And the church has largely done a very poor job speaking to that culture without pandering to it or condemning it wholesale. We have failed to create meaningful alternative narratives by which to live our lives. Like any complex, systemic problem, we all share in some of the blame, and thus we all have to play a part in the solution.

Perhaps one way to wrap our minds around the issues churches face in truly speaking to a consumer society is to consider the phenomenon of “church shopping”. My wife, Jessica, and I have very different takes on the issue and even talked about it on our podcast a while back. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with visiting different churches to try to find the one that is the best fit for you. But in a society where we are bombarded by advertisements every second of every day, we get lulled into the assumption that the perfect product that will solve all our troubles is out there, if we can only find the right one.

Since that’s what the culture tells us to look for, churches try to respond in kind and market themselves as having all the solutions to life’s problems. But what happens after the newness wears off and we realize that this new product we’re consuming isn’t exactly what we hoped or what was implicitly, if not explicitly, promised? We move on to the next big thing, hoping that will be the miracle cure, only to be disappointed over and over again.

We’ve all bought into the mentality that we can shop for or transform ourselves into the perfect church. We’re all part of the problem. So the first step is to repent of our idolatry, thinking that anything less than God be the answer. Repentance will free us up to be part of the solution: making this deep shift in our thinking and our practice and quit treating the church as another product to be consumed.

If we’re looking, let’s quit “shopping” for the “perfect” church, because it doesn’t exist. Let’s find a faith community that seems like it works for us, and invest some time and energy in the relationships we form there. Let’s resist the temptation to walk away the first time someone annoys us or we don’t like the color of the drapes.

On the other side, church professionals need to quit pretending that their services, discipleship programs, or small group ministries can cure all of life’s problems. We’re not selling snake oil, we’re developing relationships and growing together as disciples, and that’s a very messy process. Let’s put our best foot forward, and always work on being the best of who God made us to be. But let’s never make promises we can’t keep. Let us never be the ones who create the idol for others to consume just so we can look good on paper.

We’re all part of the problem, and with God’s help, we can all be part of the solution. It will take a lot of time and effort for the church to get out of the mess we’ve created for ourselves, and casting a bright light on these issues and calling them out for what they are, as these articles in the Times do, is a very good first step.

Are We at Isaiah 9?

Companions,

A wondering. A pondering. A mulling.

Yesterday's reading from the Revised Common Daily Lectionary was from Isaiah 9, which includes these words:

The Lord sent a word against Jacob,

 and it fell on Israel;

and all the people knew it--

Ephraim and the inhabitants of Samaria--

but in pride and arrogrance of heart they said:

"The bricks have fallen,

but we will build with dressed stones.

The sycamores have been cut down,

but we will put cedars in their place" (Isaiah 9:8-10, NRSV).

As I read that I was struck by some of my own thinking, and even sort of "evangelism" for restoring a Methodist way.

So the congregations have lost any strong commitment to their task of teaching and embodying real theology-- we'll find ways to strengthen congregations for their basic theological tasks. So the class meetings were essentially cut off from Methodists in the 1840s-- we'll go start new ones, maybe not exactly quite like the old ones, but they'll have the same function.

And then the prophet speaks.

"So the Lord raised adversaries against them,

  and stirred up their enemies,

the Arameans on the eat and the Philistines on the west,

and they devoured Israel with an open mouth." (Isaiah 9:11-12). 

And so I wonder. I ponder. I'm still mulling. Really.

For you who have ears to hear, what do you hear?

 

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

Google Wave Fail... Implications for UMC and Your Leadership?

It's official.

Google Wave, which promised to be a revolution in online synergy, marrying real-time collaboration and social networking and image sharing into a single, seamless platform, has washed up on the shore. The machinery will still be out there for a while, at least to the end of 2010. But after that, and even now, its code is being chopped up for repackaging by others.

ZD Net, one of the technology news sources I regularly follow, posted a piece analyzing what went wrong and what "big dogs" like Google should learn from it. The lead line of the article is this: If you’re going it alone you better have a business model. Or have something truly innovative. Even if you’re ginormous. The whole article is here. It's worth a read, and the comments there should be interesting.

Here's how the ZD Net article "parses" it's opening statement:

Going It Alone — An individual or small group going it alone is courageous. A behemoth going it alone is suspicious. Without allies, without external support, a Google project run by Google alone is in trouble.

Business Model — Google has a tendency of going with cool stuff first and worrying about how the money will come back later. That’s how it bought Blogger and YouTube. That leads to trouble.

Truly Innovative — Wave sounded innovative, but it really just combined a lot of services that already existed. Was it a service or a user interface — I was never certain.

Ginormous — Google is huge, humongous, enormous, the 800-pound gorilla. It bought fiber when it was dirt cheap, it innovated on server farms, it focused like a laser on electricity costs, it became the low-cost producer of all Internet services. But that also put a target on its back. 


I'm thinking there may be some implications here that we might draw both for leadership in our own sort of "small initiatives" and "small group efforts" in our local contexts, and perhaps for the ways that United Methodist leadership functions at a macro level. I don't think there are direct connections either way-- but rather that these four points may provide a sort of platform for some interesting-- and I hope fruitful-- conversation.

So here's a bit of a start to where some of that conversation:

Going It Alone
Frankly, I wonder whether an individual or small group in the church context "going it alone" is in fact all that courageous, or whether it may really set us up for rather savage defeat. Yes, Google's "cannonball splash" was rather dramatic here. It was one colossal failure on their terms. But anyone in the open source world who is honest about how things really work there will tell you that going it alone as an individual or a small group tends to generate thoursands if not millions of failures. The only reason they don't show up is because they're not big-- they're small. And then they just disappear. But they do add up.

So I'd say, without allies of some sort-- whether you believe in the power of "Connectors" like Malcolm Gladwell does, or whether you follow social network theory that says the generation of "tipping points" may be essentially random most of the time-- almost everything is doomed to fail-- whether by individuals or small groups or large companies-- or not get much beyond the level of influencing a very, very small number of people.

Business Model
Frankly, trying stuff to see what happens or what sticks IS a business model-- and often a fairly good one, if you have the resources to pick up the pieces, learn what you can, and then try something else tomorrow. Or the next day.

And Google does. And it likely will for a while to come. And based on their blog entry about the closure of the Wave project, it sounds like they really are going to repurpose large chunks of this technology. Already they have done bits and pieces of this with GoogleDocs and the incorporation of similar code from the EtherPad project to allow for real-time instant collaboration.

Still, that's the question isn't it. Do you go into a true experiment not only recognizing it can fail, but with the capacity to keep delivering at least some of the promises-- or the guts to walk away from them!-- you made when you started out even if it will have to be by other means?

A business plan does not mean "a roadmap to surefire success." Only business consultants who want you to pay them for their "secret sauce" will try to sell you on that bit of snake oil! It means much more about being wise as serpents, gentle as doves. We Christians might be a bit better on the second part than the first. Let's remember that Jesus was not complimenting "the children of light" when he said that the "children of darkness" seemed to have more savvy about how to get things done well in the world than they did. Following Jesus does not mean checking your brain at the door. It means using your brain-- with those of others (like-- whom did he EVER send on a solo mission-- ever?) in ways that open you and others to the possibility to see the reign of God breaking into our midst and re-align your behavior accordingly.

Truly Innovative
The emphasis here is on the first word. Truly. No one actually does "a new thing" because they say they're doing a new thing. And frankly, if we don't actually know enough about what we're doing, we may well think we're coming up with something really new and therefore great, when in fact we're coming up with something old and at best half-baked. That whole "tyranny of the present age" stuff that G.K. Chesterton liked to talk about.

And in fact, a "new thing" is not actually always the best thing to try. At least not when there really are a lot of old things that get the job done pretty effectively still.

Back to Jesus in Matthew 13:52-- "Therefore, every scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a houseowner who takes out of the store room old things and new things."

Ginormous
Yes, the UMC is still Ginormous! We are a multi-million member and multi-billion dollar set of entities, if you add it all up, from congregations through General Agencies. Ginormous isn't bad. It's also not necessarily good. But Ginormous we are. We are still the 800 pound gorilla in American Mainline Protestantism. And among the mainlines, we're actually the ONLY significantly global denomination as such. With such great size and scope comes great responsibility.

And it does in fact put a sort of target on our backs-- through frankly, as fewer and fewer Americans care about us or any religious group, the importance of that target continues to diminish.

What the article goes on to say is the existence of that target should give Google pause before launching anything significant-- make sure it gets all its ducks in a row, as it were, so that failure is not an option. Or at least it is the last option ever likely to be taken.

I couldn't disagree more. Yes, as mentioned above, we need business plans-- openings and awareness of all the best ways in a variety of contingencies to deploy our resources and develop new ones. And yes being ginormous means that we ought to have enough sense not to do terribly stupid things, or even to think that WE ourselves can be the purveyors of THE disruptive technology. We Christians, if we're confessing our own faith, consider God to be the ultimate disruptor, and God's reign to be the disruptive technology of human history. Humility is in order here.

So yes-- circumspect but not fear-bound. Always, always love-bound-- which sometimes means prophetic, sometimes means listening, and sometimes means we admit we have no clue or that the clue we thought we had turned out not to be what we thought it was.

What implications for your leadership and for the leadership of The United Methodist Church do you see here?



Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards