On Wednesday morning, Bishop Julius Trimble was the featured morning speaker. Before Trimble was the bishop of the Iowa Annual Conference, he was an East Ohio pastor and was formerly the district superintendent of our own North Coast district. He warned us that the message he was going to give wasn’t very warm and fuzzy. It instead was to be a frank reflection on the relationship between the poor and the church. In short- “We don’t give a damn about the poor.” He said if we look were we invest our time, our money, and our attention, where we plant our churches, and where they flourish, its hard pressed to say that the poor are in any way a central focus of the church.
He questioned whether we were truly willing to be “broken for God.” Our God is a God of brokenness. The supreme act of our faith is our savior being crucified on the cross. God is not calling us to be comfortable, Jesus is calling us to get down and dirty, to be infected with the Holy Spirit in such a way that we can never relax comfortably in our pews again. In fact, getting people in the pews, so they can relax, seems to be our central focus. To that, the good Bishop declared “We need to worry less about getting butts into the seats, and more about getting our assets out into the streets.”
Sometime, the Bishop continued, we begin to doubt whether God will answer prayers. However, there is one prayer God will always answer if we offer it up sincerely. If we dare, God will always answer this prayer- “Lord make me an instrument of thy peace, of thy love, of thy reconciliation.”
One of the highlights of the business session was the presentation by Brian Sheetz of the United Methodist foundation. He spoke about the problems many churches face in their stewardship. However, he argued strenuously that the problem is not that our church doesn’t have enough money, the problem is that it doesn’t have enough vision. We come to people and beg for money to fix the roof, but can’t say how we are going to impact the community. He asked if someone came into your church and offered to give you $10,000, could you clearly and concisely articulate how you would use the money to transform people’s lives?
In the afternoon session, we voted to accept the closure of Broadway UMC and Brooklyn Memorial UMC. Loosing two North Coast churches in the city of Cleveland is certainly a blow. I believe strongly that we Methodists who live in the suburbs need to redouble our mission efforts in the city of Cleveland. Should we continue to abandon the city with our resources and our attention, I believe we will be turning our backs on God’s will for his people.
Four more resolutions were adopted by the annual conference. One was submitted by Youth Annual conference and called for the church to invite youth to serve on all of the committees in the church and be proactive about recruiting them. A second resolution called for churches to honor MLK jr. day by closing their offices and engaging in acts of mercy. A third resolution accepted nearly unanimously was a resolution encouraging congregational support of food banks and a call for vocal advocacy at all levels of government to ensure their continued funding.
One resolution that generated a bit of controversy was a resolution that reminded the conference of the UMC’s support of collective bargaining and a call for all to educate themselves about Senate Bill 5 and to vote their faith. Though the resolution did not endorse the ballot issue, a minority felt it was overly partisan and that the church should stay out of the process. Resolutions require a 2/3rds majority to adopt. This one was adopted, but with few votes to spare.
One important piece of business on Wednesday was the “fixing of the appointments.” In addition to my officially being appointed back to Independence UMC, there were several other appointments announced that may be of interest to our congregation. Don Kuntz, pastor of our partner church North Olmsted UMC, has been appointed to Lodi UMC. We will miss his spirit on our work trips and will wish him well in his endeavors. Rev. Mark Steiger, associate at Church of the Savior, will be taking his place. I have met him and he is excited to be involved with our church and our mission trip. Also, we must say goodbye to Pastor Karen Oehl at Brecksville UMC, who is becoming the District Superintendent of the Mid-Ohio District. Rev. Clark Stein, formerly of Mentor UMC, will be taking her place.
On Thursday, we heard the last of the board reports and finished our final rounds of balloting. In the Board of Trustees report, the bishop challenged each local church to look beyond their immediate needs and plan proactively for the building needs in the future. He also challenged us to be more open and generous about opening the church to the usage of the community. If we are not using our church in mission, than we might as well not have a building. One suggestion made was that every local church ought to make arrangements to host GED classes at their facility.
The final clergy and lay delegation to general and jurisdictional conferences were established. We prayed over the members who will be attending on behalf of our conference. The General Conference will be in Florida in April while we will host the Jurisdictional conference in Akron. We’ll talk more about what happens at these conferences as we get closer, but feel free to ask if you are curious.
And thus we concluded another annual conference at Lakeside. It was a long but fruitful week. Dee Nemeth, Linda Short and I will share further reflections about the conference during the July 3rd worship service. I will conclude this blog post with the same song that was the theme and was the conclusion of annual conference.
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