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Building community with children, focus of conference

Aug. 1, 2005

NOTE: Photographs are available at http://umns.umc.org.

By Linda Green*
United Methodist News Service

NASHVILLE, Tenn.-Leaders of children's ministries must ensure that
children know themselves as members of God's beloved community.

During the July 26-29 Focus event at Brentwood (Tenn.) United Methodist
Church, speaker after speaker emphasized the importance of raising the
quality of the care for children in the church and raising the vision of
what it can mean to be in ministry with children in the truest sense.

The 2005 Focus conference was designed to show those who teach and care
for children how they can build community with children, both
collectively and individually.

"It is not just about Sunday School or sending them out to play.  It is
about including them in the whole of the church community," said Mary
Alice Gran, director of children's ministries at the United Methodist
Board of Discipleship.

The emphasis on the "Beloved Community" is a component of the vision of
the denomination's Council of Bishops to reshape the future of the
church.  It was based on the statement from the council's Initiative on
Children and Poverty called "Our Shared Dream: The Beloved Community."

Participants came from across the United States, Africa, the Philippines
and Canada to gain skills and resources, enabling them to learn how to
hear the voices of children and their vision of community.

Speakers, workshops, worship services and concerts provided the tools
needed to help make the premise of beloved community -- that all people
are created to live in community with one another as beloved children of
God - more real.

The "Beloved Community" document notes that the plight of children is
tied to economics, politics, globalization, war, family breakdown, the
AIDS epidemic and other problems. It also states that the root causes of
poverty and the neglect and abandonment of children "lie in a society in
which people live in fear."

According to the "Beloved Community," the church must broaden its
understanding of local mission because too many congregations and
individuals are satisfied with being involved in direct-service
ministries with the poor without the faith-sharing and congregational
inclusion essential to Christian community

Because children are an important part of the church, Gran said the
focus of the 2005 event sought to provide those on the frontline of
ministries with children with strategies on becoming part of a movement
aimed at building a community where all are together regardless of
neighborhood or church size.

Conference participants examined the meaning of being leaders in
ministries with children in light of the call to live in and toward a
beloved community.

"The beloved community is a movement, a realized eschatology. It is God
breaking into the world and we as the church are to be instruments of
that movement," said the Rev. Fred Smith, associate professor of the
practice of mission and ministry at United Methodist-related Wesley
Theological Seminary, Washington.

"We are to become the beloved community so that we can create a world
that is ruled by love and justice," he added. "This means creating a
world where people do not die because they have to because they lack the
means and resources."

Smith explained that the vision of the church's Beloved Community, also
an emphasis of the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is toward a
movement of a worldwide universal community of love to eradicate
poverty.

The nearly 800 participants attending the Focus conference were told
that in the "beloved community:
"	Love and justice rule;
"	Everyone's worth is affirmed;
"	Diversity enriches all lives through common memories and a
shared future
"	Stories inspire hope; and
"	All are loved unconditionally and forever."

Establishing a vision that unites all people, regardless of their
station in life, creates a beloved community, according to Smith. He
challenged participants to respond to God's call for "shalomalization,"
the end of poverty and the global spread of shalom.

As he provided a myriad of facts on the plight of children and adults
domestically and globally, Smith said the responsibility of each
individual is to make a commitment to make the world better and safer
for all.  At the heart or the center of the beloved community is love,
he noted, a love that moves beyond self-importance and self-interest, to
a love that prompts action.

The task of United Methodist Church "is not globalization but to a
faith-based global development based on shalom," Smith said.

He explained that "Sha," is the fire of God and "lom" is the earth and
"we are to take God's fire and plant it into the earth." Health,
prosperity, justice, and character are all the biblical elements of
shalom.  "It is wholeness. It is how God intended the world to be.
Shalomalization is the obligation of the church to return the world to
God's intention."

Proclaiming that "the beloved community" is not a dream but a reality
already broken into the world by Christ, Smith urged the participants to
remember that as the church assisted in eradicating slavery,
colonialism, Jim Crow laws and apartheid in the past, the church today
must "become instruments of God's peace by bringing light into darkness,
hope into despair to bring joy into where there is sadness."

*Green is a United Methodist News Service news writer based in
Nashville, Tenn.

News media contact: Linda Green, (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org.

********************

United Methodist News Service
Photos and stories also available at:
http://umns.umc.org

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