Conference News for March 14

CONFERENCE NEWS

Moving Together in Spirit as a Conference

March 14, 2024

CONFERENCE MINISTER'S CORNER

Rev. Dr. Tony Clark

Transitional Conference Minister

Dear Friends:

The Council of Conference Ministers met last week (Feb 28-Mar 1) in Cleveland, and I was in attendance. We spent a day delving deeply into a set of prayer words that we spoke into the 2023 General Synod; We were asked to name one word prayer for the UCC and these words were set into a picture that is included here.

The meeting also included a day filled with presentations by national staffers. For example, we received an update on the Manual on Local Church, which is in draft version with an expected publishing date by autumn.

Insurance Board CEO Tim Harris stated that insurance is not a maintenance plan; insurance is intended to restore the property to what it was before the damage. Water damage from plumbing failures made up ⅓ of all claims and most of those were preventable. To help with this, the Insurance Board is making available water sensors, and if your church is insured through the Insurance Board, you may want to contact your agent about this program. Many non-weather-related claims are preventable with routine building maintenance and upkeep as well as good facility-use agreements with indemnity clauses. All insurance companies are seeing significant increases in claims for weather related events over the last 10 years as storms and fires grow in severity due to climate change. High costs of labor and materials have driven insurance payouts up, and with poorly maintained properties, insurance companies are reducing coverage.

General Minister and President Rev. Dr. Karen Georgia Thompson talked about concerns for decreases in both clergy availability and lay leadership across the Church. A desire for deeper spirituality, especially among younger generations who are hungering for embodied experiences of the Spirit, is calling the often-times heady UCC to bring mysticism, meditation, creativity, and other spiritual practices into our communities. Younger folk are turned off when we avoid talking about our part in Colonialism, the “Doctrine of Discovery”, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The current trend of Christian Nationalism, which is occurring in more places than merely the US, is another topic that is being avoided, making the church seem unresponsive to modern issues. Except in the Global South, where Christianity is growing with strong engagement with youth, globally, churches are in decline.

The narrative of decline has paralyzed us into inaction, which was named in a joint meeting with the United Church Board, as we named our concerns for our beloved denomination; a better story to tell is how churches are changing lives. People of faith deal in hope, and we struggle with the “hope-ium” effect where hope becomes an opiate deadening our ability to make the changes that are needed. The future-facing nature of hope may make us believe we know what will be; we do not know what the future holds, we only know who holds the future (God).

A particular concern surfaced about the loneliness epidemic that US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Muthy wrote about in an advisory paper and a book. We know, as Murthy states, loneliness has the power to kill while community has the power to heal. Our churches can be community centers for this kind of healing.

I look forward to engaging you with these topics in the next several months.

Blessings on your Lenten practices.

Pastor Tony