Rev. Jeff Markay and Rev. Rachel Callender traveled to the World Methodist Conference in August as GNJ’s delegates. Today they share their reflections on all they experienced.
Proverbs 20:24: “The Lord directs our steps, so why try to understand everything along the way?”
By Rev. Jeff Markay
My wife Julie and I arrived at the hotel in Gothenburg, Sweden on August 12, 2024, and went for a walk around the neighborhood, looking for something to eat. We walked a few blocks in one direction reading menus along the way, and then made two or three more turns to different streets. We spotted a non-descript grocery store and thought we’d explore. As I walked through some of the aisles exploring the Swedish names of things like I was in IKEA, I heard someone say my name: “Jeff!?” I looked up: “Brother Paolo!?” What are the chances!? I’ve known Brother Paolo of the Taize Community in France for decades but had no idea he would be in Sweden, let alone the same obscure grocery store in Gothenburg. We had a lovely dinner and conversation that night, before he flew back to Taize the next morning. Thus began a new chapter in what Brother Roger of Taize called “A pilgrimage of trust”
Each morning during our week of meetings, worship services, workshops and meals at the World Methodist Conference, I would pray that God would guide me to the people, conversations and inspirations that I could not plan. God honored this prayer in so many ways.
I have been elected to a quinquennium (5 year term) as a member of the World Methodist Council, representing the Greater NJ Conference of the UMC. For two days, the WMC met in Gothenburg, Sweden for reports, worship, elections, voting (by consensus!) meals and conversation led by the General Secretary of the WMC, Bishop Ivan Abrahams, from The Methodist Church of Southern Africa, and President of the WMC, the Rev. Dr. J.C. Park from The Methodist Church in Korea. During one of the plenary sessions, the speaker welcomed a special guest from the Vatican in Rome. “Would Father Martin Browne from the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity at the Vatican, and our partner in the Catholic/Methodist Dialogue please stand up so we can warmly welcome you.” Fr. Martin happened to be sitting right next to me. At the break, he and I had some very interesting and delightful conversation. Our conversation continued that week, and through emails over the next months, resulting in him preaching the sermon at the United Methodist Church in Chatham, NJ for World Communion Sunday on October 6, 2024! We had a round table conversation after worship, both of which were filmed and posted on our website (www.chathamumc.org) and social media platforms. Vatican Official Fr. Browne said, “this has been the first time I have ever preached in a United Methodist Church in America! Thank you for your generous and gracious welcome!”
The Holy Spirit also led my steps to some wonderful workshops offered at the World Methodist Conference in Sweden on topics such as “Guarding our Souls in Times of War.”
That workshop was facilitated by Bishop Christian Alsted, who serves as bishop of the seven conferences in the Nordic, Baltic and Ukraine Episcopal area of the Northern Europe and Eurasia Central Conference. Bishop Alsted moderated a conversation with a dean of a seminary, and Christian pastor from Kiev, Ukraine. Bishop Alsted began the session by asking who in the audience had first-hand experience of living in a war zone. A good number raised their hands. His pastoral words then honored their experience, their trauma and their faithfulness. He prefaced the session by saying that this topic of conversation would be difficult, serious, and at times painful. The bishop asked the panel, how, in the midst of the ongoing war, they wrestle with Jesus’ call to forgive their enemies. Their answers were honest, vulnerable, and faithful. One of the speakers admitted that this call of Jesus is important, and that one day he would engage this seriously, but that at this time, he was focused on Jesus’ call to love neighbor and care for the vulnerable.
Throughout the 2 days of meetings of the World Methodist Council, which represented 80 million Pan Methodists, and the 4 days of the World Methodist Conference of over 1000 delegates and participants, I had a profound sense of the Spirit guiding us to delight in our oneness in Christ. We didn’t need to legislate or settle on words by which would govern and guide ourselves. We could worship together, pray together, eat together, enjoy friendships together, and recognize that though we had different expressions of following the teachings of Jesus, and John Wesley, we were family.
We have a prayer statement that we have committed to pray at the beginning of meetings, times of prayer, and some worship services held at the United Methodist Church in Chatham, NJ. It comes from the Great Thanksgiving in the United Methodist Hymnal and is on our website home page so that the prayer can be widely prayed beyond our own Methodist context: Come Holy Spirit, on us gathered here, and by Your spirit make us one with Christ, one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world.
The Holy Spirit responded to this prayer in so many wonder-filled ways as we gathered at the World Methodist Council, and World Methodist Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden. The Spirit led our steps to one another from throughout the world, from being strangers to friends to family. At the end of our time together at the World Methodist Council and Conference in Gothenburg, we were reminded that the Spirit leads our steps on a journey from our churches into the world that God so deeply loves. On this pilgrimage of trust that we walk together, the entire length of the path is not fully illumined but, we take heart that God gives us enough light to take the next step.
Living a “dirtified faith”
By Rev. Rachel Callender
By the time my husband, Matthew, and I landed in Gothenberg, Sweden, it was his 30th birthday! The hotel had a lovely little gift bag in the room for him, and I had dinner reservations at the thoughtfully named: Heaven 23, which looked out over the beautiful skyline of the city. It was obvious quite quickly that we were surrounded by others here for the conference because when we let our ears wander, we overheard fascinating conversations on theology. I restrained myself from jumping in – I knew there would be plenty of time for that!
And that proved to be very true! Having been elected as the Young Adult Delegate representing GNJ in the World Methodist Council for a quinquennium, the first two days were filled with council meetings with powerful preaching, like from the Rev. Dr. Upolu Vaai of Fiji who preached on a “dirtified” faith, where he said, “A church that is not dirtified enough is a church that is not fit to carry the vision of a dirtified God.” Despite all of us being Wesleyan in our roots, the many cultures and traditions represented in the room took me back to my time studying at the Bossey Ecumenical Institute in Switzerland, where I lived alongside 31 other students representing 19 different countries for 5 months, as we navigated what it looked like to be unified in Christ despite our differences. In fact, two of those I met through that journey, the Rev. Dr. Jean Hawxhurst (the Ecumenical Staff Officer for Leadership Development for the Council of Bishops of the UMC) and Joy Eva Bohol (the Regional Migration Specialist for Europe of UMCOR), were both at this conference, and it was a true joy to catch up with them after 5 years.
Through panels on topics like Migration and Christianity in a Post-Modern Era, and workshops on What’s Happening in the Holy Land from the perspective of two Christian Palestinians, the Receptive Ecumenism Pilgrimage Project, and Guarding our Souls in Times of War (which concluded with a laying of hands of the Ukrainians present) – I felt a spark in the Spirit that I feel as though the years of COVID stole from my ministry. And this spark was the realization that I’ve done too good of a job of having a squeaky-clean, “don’t rock the boat” kind of faith.
After the conference concluded, the council got back to work – but this time, the conversations had more energy, and perhaps more urgency. It seemed as though I was not the only one moved by the Spirit. These are people who truly believe that the church universal, and also the Methodist churches of the world, have a new and significant future ahead, and that we all felt deeply about what that would look like. It was a stunning example of how to disagree in ways that were respectful and uplifted differences in culture and tradition.
There’s a detail about all of this I have neglected to mention: I was at this conference pregnant with my first child. Being a pastor’s daughter myself, there’s nothing that I want more than for my daughter to love God and love the church as I do. But with all the schism within the church, and division in our country, the desire to hide her away, shield her from as much as I can has felt so instinctual. But it is in experiences like this one where the God that will lead the church into a new future is found. Both in the passionate worship, and in the heated debates: that diritified God that the church so desperately needs, that the church has done too good of a job of cleaning up, reveals Themself. In a new season of meeting God in the role of parent, of loving my daughter purely because she is mine just as my Creator loves me, I can feel God reminding me how important it is to dig in the dirt of what it actually means to be Christian and to be Methodist because it’s the only way forward.
My daughter, at some point, is going to eat a handful of dirt (despite my protests), and she’ll learn from it. Perhaps I should grab a handful too.