By Walter Fenton Like many people these days, my wife and I cancelled our vacation plans. We were hoping to hike in the Colorado mountains where we enjoy the cool air, the cold mountain lakes, the deep blue sky during the day and the star filled sky at night. Sometimes when we gaze at the …
By Keith Boyette In Ecclesiastes 3, Solomon reminds us that there is a time for every activity under the heavens. The times we live in seem strange indeed. Any sense of normalcy has been replaced by the knowledge we have never walked this road before. Many routines have been disrupted. The journey we are on …
By Bishop Eduard Khegay Pastor N’s wife from Kazakhstan was forced to take a “vacation” without pay. Suddenly raising three small children got extremely difficult. In a large Russian city, a pastor and his wife ran an after school program, but as the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, they had to close their tutoring agency and …
By Keith Boyette The new traditional Methodist denomination that will be launched in September 2021 will be global in character. We fully embrace Jesus’ directive: “You will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere – in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” The Great Commission compels us to …
By Walter Fenton Doing something new is hard in the best of times. Since its inception the Wesleyan Covenant Association believed there were only two hard ways forward for The United Methodist Church: one where its leaders rededicated themselves to teaching the apostolic, catholic, and historic confessions of the Christian faith grounded in Scripture, or …
By Chappell Temple “Part Eight – Connectional Organization” is not exactly the most scintillating, cannot-put-it-down, section of the Wesleyan Covenant Association’s draft “Book of Doctrines and Discipline.” For when folks get excited about their church it is not usually because of the compellingly great connectional organization that it has. On the other hand, Methodists have …
By Keith Boyette At its founding in its Statement of Moral Principles, the Wesleyan Covenant Association declared, “We believe that all persons are of sacred worth…. The WCA specifically renounces all racial and ethnic discrimination and commits itself to work toward full racial and ethnic equality in the church and in society.” Recent events in …
By Thomas Lambrecht “Conferencing” is at the heart of Methodist history and tradition. In 1744, only a few years after starting the Methodist movement, John Wesley called together the small group of preachers who formed the core of the movement for a “conference” meeting. They gathered to discern “how we should proceed to save our …
By Keith Boyette On May 5, the day The United Methodist Church’s General Conference was set to convene, UM advocacy groups, representative of each of the theological streams in the church, released comments on the significance of its postponement. Each of the groups (Mainstream UMC, Reconciling Ministries Network, UMForward, and the Wesleyan Covenant Association) remain …
By Keith Boyette Today, we were to be meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota for the convening of The United Methodist Church’s 2020 General Conference. But as we are all aware, the COVID-19 virus radically disrupted those plans as it has disrupted nearly every other aspect of our lives. The world has changed. I hear people longing …