Sept. 9, 2002
Churches reminded to form United Methodist Men units
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UMNS) – A churchwide agency is mailing information to all local churches reminding them of their responsibility to form an organized unit of United Methodist Men as mandated by the denomination’s Book of Discipline.
"When we ask, ‘where are the men in our congregations?’ it may be an indication that we have not accepted the call/challenge of General Conference for each congregation to have an organized unit of United Methodist Men," said Bishop Ernest S. Lyght, president of the Commission on United Methodist Men. "Churches that answer the call are faithfully building men spiritually and utilizing their gifts in the total ministry of the church."
"The critical need to increase the participation of men at the local church level is well documented," said Joseph Harris, the commission’s top executive. "Regardless of their demographics, churches must learn to disciple men if they are going to have even a possibility for lasting growth." The program’s goal is to "move men toward becoming disciple-making servant leaders," he said.
"Men in today’s church want to do more than usher and chair the trustees," noted Gil Hanke, president of the National Association of Conference Presidents of United Methodist Men. "They want to grow spiritually and lead others to Christ. They want to make a difference for the kingdom." Young men are not attracted to "meet and eat" gatherings but will likely participate if the organization puts them to work, he said.
Many units of United Methodist Men are raising funds to send copies of a book of daily devotions to service men and women around the world. The book, first published shortly after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, has been updated to include meditations by leading religious leaders today. The first shipment of books is en route to troops in Afghanistan and neighboring nations. Other shipments will follow as funds are available.
For information on United Methodist Men, see www.gcumm.org.
*The Rev. J. Richard Peck, communications consultant for the churchwide Commission on United Methodist Men in Nashville, Tenn., provided information for this story.
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Sept. 11, 2002
World summit leaves United Methodists hopeful, concerned
By United Methodist News Service
Setting goals for lifting people out of poverty and improving the basic quality of life worldwide stands as a chief accomplishment of the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development, according to United Methodists who attended the event.
Thousands of people and nearly 200 nations were represented at the summit and related meetings held in Johannesburg, South Africa, Aug. 26-Sept. 4. The 11 United Methodist delegates on the Ecumenical Team gave the summit mixed reviews, but they cited several areas of agreement that hold promise.
Jaydee Hanson, an executive with the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, praised the gathering for adopting goals to halve by 2015 the worldwide number of people who live in poverty, lack clean water or do not have sanitation.
John Dowell, a board member from Tampa, Fla., also was pleased. "I rejoice that this United Nations conference … has set the year 2015 as the date by which half the people currently lacking (clean drinking) water and sanitation will have them."
Water and sanitation go together, he said. "Without sanitation, clean water will not happen. In fact, the lack of proper sanitation denies some 3.3 billion people access to clean water. Furthermore, 2.5 billion people have no sanitation service at all." He added that water-related diseases cause 5 million to 10 million deaths yearly.
Dowell, a business owner, does not favor privatization of water in developing countries, a concept that was being pushed by the United States and several developed countries. "Clear water is a basic right, not a commodity for the highest bidder," he asserted. "Water is so essential that the world community should work to make it available to all."
Water can be the cause of armed conflict, he added. "Water wars are not uncommon in world history."
The Ecumenical Team included the following paragraph in material it prepared for use at the summit: "The United Nations considers the increasing scarcity of available freshwater as a factor critical to world peace and security. The Ecumenical Team urges the member states to create strategies to satisfy the water needs of all, in order to prevent further water-related conflicts, both within countries and across borders. Water access and promotion of peace are inseparable."
William D. Scott III, a voting member of the board and lay leader of the denomination’s Mississippi Annual (regional) Conference, paid particular attention to discussions about science, technology, biological diversity and agriculture.
"I am disappointed that my country, the United States of America, failed to muster the political will to agree with the rest of the world to set some quantifiable targets and deadline dates in the areas of agriculture and biodiversity as means of measuring how far the world is moving along theroad to sustainable development," he said at the end of the summit.
He noted that the summit did set a general goal to reduce the loss of biodiversity, that is, to try not to let a few plant forms wipe out older or different forms. Failure to maintain plant diversity could leave a worldwide crop vulnerable to disease or to monopolization of seed sources that poor farmers could not afford. Both possibilities threaten the world food supply.
Scott said United Methodists were strong supporters of the Precautionary Principle, stated 10 years ago in the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. It says that a need for "full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to preventenvironmental degradation" when threats of damage exist. The United Methodist delegation had hoped to see the Precautionary Principle applied to the issue of genetically modified organisms – a topic of concern to several of the nations attending the summit.
However, all references to the Precautionary Principle were deleted from the summit’s agreements, Scott noted. He would also have liked agreement at the summit to eliminate or at least reduce agricultural subsidies. Such subsidies in the developed countries undercut the agriculture in developing countries, thereby increasing poverty, he believes.
Goals were not set in the area of environmental justice, said John S. Hill, who works on such issues as a member of the Board of Church and Society staff. "While I am deeply disappointed with the intransigence of the United States at this summit, I am heartened by the consensus among other nations, the persistence of the non-governmental community, and the strong witness of the faith community on the issues of energy and climate justice," he said.
He said the United States showed it is increasingly out of step with the global community on this issue by opposing targets and timetables for action. "The result is a document that gives lip service to the concept of cleaner energy but fails to follow through with commitments to achieve targeted goals for reductions in emissions, phase-outs of harmful energy subsidies, or development of renewable sources of energy."
Despite this setback, the final days of the summit saw some progress on global energy issues.
"The Kyoto Protocol will now go into force," Hill said. Canada, China, Japan and Russia announced at the summit that they have ratified or are in the process of ratifying the commitment to achieving reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. He added that the United States and Australia have been notable in their opposition to the protocol. The protocol is aimed at reducing carbon dioxide levels, which are increasing in the United States, he said.
Achieving the goals set by the nations at the summit will require a concerted effort, Hanson noted. He cited joblessness and the debt burdens borne by many countries as significant obstacles. "Most people are poor because they lack work or they have work that doesn’t provide enough income to meet basic needs."
He urges fast action to forgive the debts of poor nations. "Throughout the world, military dictators have stolen the credit of nations, run up huge debts, and (when) they were deposed, their nations were left holding the bill," Hanson observed. International banks made loans knowing the rulers weren’t legitimate, and the lenders should be liable for their own bad decisions rather than forcing the poor to pay the debt, he said. The interest on the loans often outstrips education, health, water and sanitation spending in poor countries, he said.
Hanson expressed disappointment with the role the United States played at the summit. Funds designated by the U.S. government for fighting poverty are "not nearly its share," he said.
The United States and some of the more developed countries were urging privatization and trade as a primary avenue for development, Hanson added. "But the basic essentials for trade are not in place," he said. Those essentials include electricity, communication and adequate transportation, plus safe drinking water and health care to ensure a productive work force, he said. "These essentials don’t exist, for the most part, in the poorer parts of the world."
Linda Bales, a board staff member who works with women’s and population issues, reported that women’s access to basic health care services was threatened at one point during the summit. Language in a draft of the report tied access to health care only to "national laws and cultural and religious values," which, in some countries, work against women and their access to services, she explained. Through the efforts of the European Union, South Africa, Barbados and other countries, language was added that affirmed access to health services as a human right, she said.
"We supported this change," Bales said of the board, "because it is consistent with our (denomination’s) Social Principles statements on women, family and health care. If we’re going to stop the scourge of HIV/AIDS and reduce infant and maternal deaths, we must ensure the availability and access to comprehensive health care and services and view that as a basic right. It’s absolutely imperative."
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Sept. 20, 2002
United Methodists help dedicate Oregon ‘ghost structure’
By Joretta Purdue*
SALEM, Ore. (UMNS) – A "ghost structure" now marks the site of the first Methodist mission in the North American West.
Spectators and dignitaries gathered Sept. 15 in Oregon’s Willamette Mission State Park to view the outline of the mission’s first three buildings, replicated in iron beams fashioned by inmates of the Oregon penitentiary. The ghost structure is on a bluff above the Willamette River flood plain, an area that came to be known as Mission Bottoms.
A small band of missionaries began working in the area in 1834, before Oregon was part of the United States or even a territory. The group had been sent by the Methodist Episcopal Church’s mission board, a year after the agency had dispatched missionaries to Africa, an easier-to-reach destination.
Bishop Edward W. Paup of the church’s Portland (Ore.) Area and the Rev. Patricia Thompson, president of the Historical Society of the United Methodist Church, led the ceremony, which began with a welcome from Michael Carrier, director of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. The audience consisted primarily of members of the churchwide Commission on Archives and History and the historical society.
John Hook of Salem portrayed early missionary leader Jason Lee as he offered a prayer of thanksgiving. The prayer was based on Lee’s diaries and correspondence. "Our Father in heaven, we came to Oregon to bring your word to the native people," he said. "… We found much illness in the native population from diseases to which they had little or no immunity. We took in orphans of these declining tribes.
"And as the white settlers arrived in ever-increasing numbers, we realized that our mission was to serve them also. We petitioned the Congress of the United States with these opening words: ‘We are the germ of a great state, and are anxious to give an early tone to the moral and intellectual character of its citizens.’"
Paup said it was important to remember that at the 1976 General Conference in Portland, Ore., then-Governor Robert Strobe promised his support for preserving the mission site, "which was not only the beginning of Methodism but also of American government, education, industry and agriculture in the Pacific Northwest."
‘Eden-like qualities’
When Lee, nephew Daniel, and three other men established the mission in 1834, the area known as Oregon did not have defined borders, but included all of the current states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, as well as parts of what are now Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, western Canada and California. By then, Oregon’s Native American tribes had been decimated by diseases transmitted through earlier contact with sailors. Both Great Britain and the United States had interests in the area.
Carrier noted the importance of the mission established on this site in determining the future of the area. "It was a letter sent back (to the United States) by those missionaries that described the Eden-like qualities of the Willamette Valley, including record-breaking wheat crops, that set in motion the lure of following the Oregon Trail," he said.
"The early settlement of the valley was the result of the establishment of the provisional government that many of the Methodist missionaries had a hand in creating," he explained.
The decision to build the ghost structure grew out of a desire to better interpret the importance of this mission. "The structure is based on the main mission building complex as described by Daniel Lee, Jason Lee’s nephew, and supported by an 1841 drawing of the buildings, as well as 1980 archeological investigations," Carrier said. "The structure replicates the size, the shape, the orientations and the chimney locations."
Paup suggested that the ghost structure is not only a reminder of the buildings that were in this mission but also of the people and the ways in which lives have been changed by mission and ministry throughout the years.
He called for remembering that before Methodists ever arrived, God’s story was being told among people native to this place, "and so we have had the privilege of joining with all those stories in order to help continue to tell the story of God’s created world and God’s people."
"We are grateful to God for the ways in which God called forward leadership like Jason Lee, but we know there were so many others – not only those named, but those unnamed, who participated in the way in which this mission had its beginnings and the contributions that it made to the Pacific Northwest," the bishop commented.
Illness and hardship
The original missionaries – the two Lees, both clergymen, along with teacher Cyrus Shepard and two lay assistants – were sent by the mission board to serve the Flathead Indians but reached instead an outpost of the Hudson Bay Company called Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. From there, they followed the Willamette River south to an area inhabited by another tribe.
They found unoccupied land beyond the farms of many retired French-Canadian fur trappers living in the valley. The missionaries picked a site and struggled to build their first all-purpose building. Later, Shepard opened a school in part of the building, and 14 children were enrolled – most of them orphans who also lived at the school. A second building later was erected.
The missionaries’ crops did well in the valley. However, illness and the pervasive dampness of the area threatened the settlement. In the school’s first 10 months, four children died and one was dismissed, but the school and the other mission work continued.
Jason Lee asked the mission board to send people with practical skills. He requested that newcomers bring their families and that single men not be sent. The board complied and also selected Anna Maria Pittman, a 33-year-old teacher, to be Lee’s wife.
Pittman sailed from Boston in July 1836, rounded the tip of South America and disembarked in the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) just before Christmas. Her party also included a physician and a blacksmith with their families, a carpenter, a female schoolteacher and Shepard’s fiancé. It was April before they were able to obtain passage on another ship headed to Oregon. More than a month later, they arrived at Fort Vancouver, almost 10 months after their voyage began.
On July 16, 1837, Lee and Pittman were married. At the same service, Shepard and Susan Downing were wed, as were a young Native American woman and a white resident of area.
The following spring, Jason Lee needed to obtain board approval for a plan to expand the mission. He departed for New York on March 23, 1838. The couple’s son was born June 23 and died two days later. Anna died the next day, less than a year after she became a bride.
Letters from the Oregon missionaries and personal appearances by Lee and some of the school children generated financial support for the mission and interest in the Oregon area. The board sent a third and final group of more than 50 people, who arrived in 1840 and were dubbed the "Great Reinforcement" by the Willamette Mission residents.
With the river threatening to carry off the buildings, the settlers eventually moved the mission to what is now the city of Salem, where they built a gristmill and a sawmill. The Oregon Institute, a school the missionaries established to serve the growing number of non-native children, later became Willamette University, the oldest institution of higher learning in the West.
Jason Lee also established branch missions in other Northwest locations, including what is now the Dalles, Oregon City and Astoria. Oregon City has been designated the end of the Oregon Trail – the route many settlers followed to the West between the mid-1840s and the 1860s. Estimates of their number range from 300,000 to half a million.
Final days
Many of the early travelers were influenced by accounts from the Lees and other missionaries, according to Nancie Fadeley, a former Commission on Archives and History member.
Lee married again and brought Lucy Thomson with him to Oregon. She, too, died soon after giving birth, but their child, Lucy Anna Maria, survived.
The settlements and commercial enterprises with which Lee was associated thrived, but he was never able to report large numbers of converts among the Native Americans. Allegations of financial mismanagement also were circulating. The difficulties of communication – letters took months, if they ever arrived – and perhaps the complaints of disgruntled missionaries led Lee to journey back to New York to defend himself in person.
After hours before the board, Lee was exonerated, but in the meantime a new superintendent had reached the Willamette Valley. He closed the mission and sold its property. Some of the missionaries stayed in Oregon and prospered, one of them becoming the state’s first governor.
Lee, however, was not well after his appearance before the board and died the following March. He was 41 years old.
*Purdue is news director of United Methodist News Service’s Washington office.
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Sept. 17, 2002
NBA player helps church open high-tech youth center
By Dawn M. Hand*
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (UMNS) – Plaza United Methodist Church is going high tech in its outreach to young people, thanks to a collaboration with the YWCA Central Charlotte and a grant from NBA star Dell Curry’s foundation.
Curry played professional basketball with the Charlotte Hornets before the team moved to New Orleans. Though he’s been a Toronto Raptor for the last four years, he’s still scoring big in Charlotte.
He opened the Dell Curry Foundation’s Youth Educational Computer Learning Center at Plaza United Methodist Church on Sept. 10. The church, at 5600 The Plaza, is in a multi-ethnic area of East Charlotte. This marks the fourth center in Charlotte-Mecklenburg and the first United Methodist congregation to receive the grant.
"Thank God, who gives us the opportunity to be in service," Curry said. "It’s important to give back to the community." During the opening prayer, the Rev. Percival "Percy" Reeves, pastor of Plaza, also thanked God for the opportunity to provide this kind of ministry to the community.
Curry, a 16-year NBA veteran, brought along friends Hersey Hawkins, a former NBA player, and Raptors teammate Vince Carter. Hawkins and Carter spent time signing autographs, talking with fans and surfing the Internet.
The Dell Curry Foundation’s grant didn’t come as a check, but instead took the form of a learning center with 18 student computers and one teaching computer, all networked, plus training and resource classes and staff support. Through the foundation, Time Warner Cable provided high-speed Internet access for each computer, and Wachovia Bank outfitted the center with boardroom-style tables and chairs. Philip Morris USA and several other businesses partnered with the foundation in providing financial support for the center.
Through the Youth Educational Computer Learning Centers, the Dell Curry Foundation is partnering with community organizations and corporations to enhance the lives of youth and young adults in Charlotte-Mecklenburg communities. As outlined in its mission statement, the foundation plans to offer support in adult and youth peer mentoring, counseling, educational and computer enrichment, self-improvement skills, decision-making guidance and team concept awareness.
Executive Director Jeff Hood wants the church and community to know the foundation is committed. "We just don’t drop off stuff and move on," he said. "This is a full program complete with resources and assistance. We offer a 16-week program, including financial and investment planning, guest speakers and workshops on building healthy communities." The church will also be required to file monthly reports on the center’s progress, he added.
Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, along with other city officials and business representatives, attended the opening. Addressing the crowd, the mayor reflected on the heightened awareness of terrorism. "The best way we can help fight terrorism is to be active in the community and to help educate all of our children," McCrory said. The mayor thanked Curry for his continued dedication to the Charlotte area.
Walking around the center and greeting after-school participants, Reeves said the center was the next step in ministering in the community. The church already houses an older adult care center, as well as an after-school program staffed by the YWCA Central Carolina.
"We are excited about this computer center, and our doors are wide open to this community – all ages, all ethnic groups," Reeves said. "We will use this center for adult education and tutorials for children and youth." The church’s goal is to reach 70 to 75 people using the computer center on any given week. The church is also working on starting an English as a second language class.
Those ministries are part of the 262-member congregation’s efforts to be a community church where everyone feels welcome.
*Hand is director of communication for the United Methodist Church’s Western North Carolina Annual Conference.
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Sept. 20, 2002
South Korea will host 2006 World Methodist Council
By Kathy Gilbert*
OSLO, Norway (UMNS) — Seoul, South Korea, has been chosen to host the 2006 World Methodist Council.
The decision came Sept. 18 after the World Methodist Council executive committee took two votes on potential sites for the next meeting. Brisbane, Australia, and Durban, South Africa, were the other two possibilities.
The council, representing 77 denominations with roots in the Methodism, meets every five years. It brings together the council’s 500 members plus church delegates and other accredited visitors. The last gathering was held in Brighton, England, in July 2001.
At the Sept. 16-22 executive committee meeting, the South Koreans made an impassioned plea for their country to be chosen as the council’s next site.
"We are a country of 10 million people belonging to a separated people by the division of Korea. Many are old and worrying about dying without meeting their families," said Jong Chun Park, Methodist Theological Seminary in Seoul. The Korean Methodist Church pledged that its 1.5 million members would contribute to the higher cost of hosting the event in their country.
"This is the fourth time we have come and invited the World Methodist Council to come to Korea and help us," he said.
Bishop Mvume Dandala, Methodist Church in South Africa, told members of the committee the people of his country see visitors as "blessings sent by God."
"In the midst of darkness, the light of their faith has not dimmed," he said. "Methodists have played a large role in that.
"If you come to South Africa, you will arrive not as tourists, but as pilgrims," he said.
The representative from Australia admitted that hosting the event would be difficult for his country because the date would come on the heels of a large gathering of the Uniting Church.
Methodist Bishop Sunday Mbang of Nigeria, chairperson, gave executive committee members time for reflection and prayer before a vote was taken. In the first round, 127 votes were cast: South Korea received 58, South Africa received 52 and Australia received 17. Australia was eliminated from the second round of voting. With 122 votes cast, 64 went to South Korea and 58 went to South Africa.
After the vote, the members decided to hold the executive committee’s next meeting in Durban, South Africa.
The Rev. George H. Freeman, top staff executive of the council, will visit South Korea in October. Afterward, the executive committee will make a formal announcement of the site selection, he said.
*Gilbert, a news writer for United Methodist News Service, is on assignment in Norway.
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