As Our Illinois Great Rivers Annual Conference Opens Today…

Philip Amerson wrote this earlier this week and has graciously given me his expressed permission to share it with you here —

Gonna miss the Indiana UMC annual conference this week. Of course, I am about two lifetimes ahead clocking my time at such UMC gatherings.

INUMC’s program (yawn) seems to be (yawn) “Journey Inward and Lost in Space.” Individualism, quietism, implicit-congregationalism and conflict-avoidance are poor substitutes for imagination, community, relationship and visioning beyond survival.

Sad, truly sad, to watch a circling of the wagons rather than a sending of the saints.

Meanwhile, many of our best young clergy and laity have departed, or are invited or encouraged to leave.

Meanwhile the emptying circus swirls in eddies of self-concern.

Theologian Ann Morasy commented that Methodism was once “transformational on an industrial scale, conversion (personal and social) and conversation mattered.”

Anxiety over future viability (yawn) has turned this once vibrant corner of the church into the mouse that has forgotten how to roar.

I’ll be enjoying a good book and delighting in what God is doing beyond such gatherings, among my neighbors, near and far.