March 2, 2023
Nashville, Tennessee — In a “Mid-term State of The United Methodist Church Address,” Bishop Thomas J. Bickerton, president of the Council of Bishops, called members to “be the architects of a renewed, revived and reclaimed United Methodist Church.”
A video of the entire address is available on the official United Methodist denominational website at UMC.org/Renew, along with a companion downloadable discussion guide.
“I believe it’s time for us in The United Methodist Church to have a new conversation,” stated Bishop Bickerton — suggesting that we begin “to inject hopefulness, vision and faith into the sentences of our conversations.”
Bickerton said that the current narrative “has clearly diverted our attention away from the real reason we have this church in the first place – to fulfill the mandate of loving God and loving neighbor through a mission to make disciples in order to literally change the world.”
During the March 2, 2023 presentation, he encouraged United Methodists to discover what it means to be a beloved community.
“Rather than celebrating diversity as a gift, we have placed one another in silos of prejudged categories that set us all up to fail, instead of embracing the time-honored spirit of connectionalism; a spirit that once proudly said, ‘We are stronger together than we are apart,’” said Bickerton.
Bickerton pointed to the example of former members of congregations that have disaffiliated from the Texas Annual Conference who are now pulling together to form a new United Methodist family. “I think that’s how beloved community is formed. This is what it means to reclaim, revive and renew.”
He reflected that, “The theme around how to find unity among ourselves is simple: You’ve got to love your neighbor. It’s all about honoring gifts, valuing relationship, seeing the good in one another and seeking God’s presence to remind you of it when you stray away.”
“If the goal is to create a beloved community with more love, more peace, more compassion, and more joy, if we believe that it is time for a new narrative, then we must be the ones to help architect it,” said Bickerton.
Members can expect to see reclaim, revive and renew elements reflected in upcoming #BeUMC messaging that rallies members around the mission and ministry entrusted to United Methodists as people of God.
