NOTE: This is a digest of news features provided by United Methodist Communications for May 26 - 30. It includes summaries of United Methodist News Service stories and additional briefs from around the United Methodist connection. Full versions of the stories with photographs and related features can be found at http://umns.umc.org.
News around the connection
Bishop Clark, theologian, relief leader, dies at 93
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UMNS) - Retired Bishop Roy Clyde Clark, who nurtured United Methodist ministry globally and vital congregations locally, died May 27 in Nashville. He was 93. As an active bishop, he led the Columbia (S.C.) Area, served as a director of the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries and was president of the denomination's relief agency. In retirement, he helped develop the denomination's commitment to church vitality.
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Same-gender debate rekindles schism talk
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UMNS) - The latest talk of "an amicable split" along progressive and conservative lines is not something new for The United Methodist Church. The denomination has a long history of disagreements. Still, much has been happening related to church unity and the struggle over church teaching on homosexuality. Here is a survey of recent developments.
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Bishops seek to help church 'find way' in homosexuality debate
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UMNS) - Eight United Methodist bishops from across the theological spectrum recently released a book on the homosexuality debate. The book from the United Methodist Publishing House's Abingdon Press, "Finding Our Way: Love and Law in The United Methodist Church," seeks to provide "more clarity about the challenges and choices facing us," the book's editors say.
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Churchgoers protest electric chair's return
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UMNS) - United Methodists and other Christians gathered at the Tennessee capitol to protest the death penalty generally and ask state leaders to reconsider a new law that allows electrocution when lethal injection is unavailable. A drug shortage for lethal injection is affecting jurisdictions across the United States.
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People in pews, big donors net millions to fight malaria
DONNELLSON, Iowa (UMNS) - As the Imagine No Malaria campaign enters its home stretch, United Methodists can look with satisfaction at $60 million already raised in gifts and pledges, and can have confidence in surpassing the $75 million goal by the end of 2015. Most of the money raised has been from grassroots efforts, but now gifts of $1 million are coming in.
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Germans contribute $185,000 to Imagine No Malaria
SCHWARZENBERG, Germany (UMNS) - Frank Aichele, mission secretary of the United Methodist Church in Germany, recently presented Pittsburgh Area Bishop Thomas J. Bickerton with a check for $185,000 in support of the denomination's Imagine No Malaria campaign.
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University and seminary news
Methodists urge peacemaking through education
HIROSHIMA, Japan (UMNS) - Against a backdrop of gleaming, 21st-century buildings, Methodist scholars from around the globe are recalling the world's first atomic bombing, which decimated Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and sharing ways to prevent the tragedy of war.
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Educating a new generation of peacemakers
HIROSHIMA, Japan (UMNS) - About 70 college students from around the world are here this week to discuss topics of peace, reconciliation and human rights.
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News around conferences
Church extends reach with Church and Society grant
FLORIDA CITY, Fla. (UMNS) - Branches United Methodist Church, a congregation known for outreach, survived a literal trial by fire and keeps on growing. The congregation is among 14 ministries in the U.S. and abroad to receive a Peace with Justice grant from the United Methodist Board of Church and Society. Susan Green of the Florida Annual (regional) Conference has the story.
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Learn more about Peace with Justice Sunday
Upper New York churches help vets
SYRACUSE, N.Y. (UMNS) - The 77 congregations in the Crossroads District of the Upper New York Annual (regional) Conference are more than halfway to purchasing a new van that will help veterans in central New York get to medical appointments. The effort is getting a big boost from United Methodist Men. Beth DiCocco of the Upper New York Conference has the story.
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Vietnam ripe for progress on human rights, says professor
RICHMOND, Va. (UMNS) - Vietnam is ripe for progress in the area of human rights, a United Methodist missionary told seminary students Thursday, May 22. Quynh-Hoa Nguyen, a missionary with the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries and professor at Wesley Theological College in Ho Chi Minh City, described the challenges and hopes of Protestant churches still on the margins of Vietnamese society. Neill Caldwell of the Virginia Annual (regional) Conference reports.
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Methodism growing in Cambodia
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (UMNS) - Representatives from around the world gathered May 1-3 to talk about the growing Methodist mission in Cambodia. The United Methodist Church is one of five denominations working in the Southeast Asian nation, which is still recovering from the 1977-79 genocide. Neill Caldwell of the Virginia Annual (regional) Conference has the story.
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UMTV: Veteran dedicated to vets
LANCASTER, Pa. (UMNS) - Lou Riedlinger served the United States in World War II and again during the Korean War. Riedlinger thinks about those currently serving on the front lines every day and he enlisted the help of his United Methodist church to make sure that others also recognize their sacrifice.
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Resources for churches
Grants available for creative older adult ministries
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UMNS) - Local churches with ideas for creative ministries involving older adults can apply for a limited number of special Aging in Poverty Ministry grants from the United Methodist Committee on Older Adult Ministries. The grants are from the committee and the United Methodist Board of Discipleship. The deadline to apply is Aug. 18.
To learn more and apply
Eight summer retreat ideas
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UMNS) - Did you know Methodists in the 1870s started the first Chautauqua gatherings for spiritual learning? Holding a Chautauqua-like weekend is just one of the ways United Methodists can have a spiritually renewing summer, suggests Patricia Bates, writing for United Methodist Communications.
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Lake Junaluska youth events work with Stop Hunger Now
LAKE JUNALUSKA, N.C. (UMNS) - Lake Junaluska summer youth events' adopted theme, "One Bread, One Body," has led to a partnership with Stop Hunger Now, an international hunger relief agency active for more than 15 years. The theme is based on Romans 12:5 and means being the body of Christ in the world through service, worship and community, which includes feeding the hungry.
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Wesleyan conference to reconnect leaders with baptismal living
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UMNS) - Lay and clergy leaders will explore baptismal living and disciple-making in the Wesleyan tradition through prayer, Scripture, worship and interactive experiences at the 2014 Wesleyan Leadership Conference Oct. 23-25 at the United Methodist Board of Discipleship in Nashville.
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History of Hymns: 'Weary of All Trumpeting'
DALLAS (UMNS) - It is likely that many readers have never had the opportunity to sing "Weary of All Trumpeting." The musical setting may require extra effort to learn, but this hymn rings authentically in a post-9/11 world, writes C. Michael Hawn, distinguished professor of church music and director at Southern Methodist University's Perkins School of Theology. The United Methodist Board of Discipleship shares his column each week.
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History of Hymns: “Weary of All Trumpeting”
by C. Michael Hawn in consultation with Christopher S. Anderson
"Weary of All Trumpeting"
by Martin Franzmann
The United Methodist Hymnal, No. 442
Martin Franzmann
Weary of all trumpeting,
weary of all killing,
weary of all songs that sing
promise, nonfulfilling,
we would raise, O Christ, one song,
we would join in singing
that great music pure and strong,
wherewith heaven is ringing*
The origins of this hymn may be found in the Anschluss or "connection" of Austria to Germany in 1938, more realistically known as the occupation of Austria by Nazi Germany. The exploitation of the term Anschluss for the occupation in 1938 recalled its use twenty years earlier during the Anschluss movement, an attempt to unite Austria and Germany into a single country.
This idea was not new, but was a continuation of nineteenth-century debates to unite all Germans into a single nation-state. Following the First World War, the notion of a Kaiserreich (German Empire) was dissolved through the Treaties of St. Germain and Versailles. During the ethos of Nazi Germany, the annexation of Austria was seen as the partial fulfillment of a German destiny along with the absorption of the Balkans and other Eastern territories, sentiments that had long and deep roots in German culture.
Hugo Distler stamp
German poets hailed the restoration of the "connection" in 1938. According to Dutch musician Jan Bender (1909-1994), the Nazi state was looking for a musician to set their propagandist poems. The composer chosen was the young church musician Hugo Distler (1908-1942). Like so many during this time, Distler was engaged in propaganda of a cause against his will. According to musicologist Christopher Anderson, Southern Methodist University, correspondence has recently come to light that confirms that Distler was a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 to the end of his life. However, his high entrance number into the Party indicated "less than total devotion" to Party principles. At the same time, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the Nazi Party, supported his professional advancement. In other words, Party membership helped to guarantee employment.
Educated at Leipzig Conservatory, Distler was the organist at St. Mary Church in Lübeck, he and taught at the Lübeck Conservatory. In 1933, he was appointed head of the chamber music department at the Lübeck Conservatory. He taught church music from 1933-1937 at the lay-academy in Spandau and taught at the Hochschule für Musik in Württemberg (1937-1940). His employment in these prestigious positions was undoubtedly contingent upon Party membership. He assumed a teaching position in Berlin in 1940 and was appointed the conductor of the State and Cathedral Choir in 1942. Pressures by the Nazi regime ultimately led to his suicide at age 34. Musicologist Nick Strimple states, "it appears that he saw the futility of attempting to serve both God and Nazis, and came to terms with his own conscience unequivocally."
Distler’s tune, TRUMPETS in The United Methodist Hymnal, was paired to the text "Deutschland und Deutsch-Österreich" (Germany and German-Austria) by Nazi propagandist poet Hermann Harder. The last two lines of the second stanza cement the relationship from a German perspective: "Österreich und Deutsches Land/sind nicht mehr zu trennen" translated as "Austria and Germany are no longer to be separated," implying that the two countries were never actually separate except politically.
Following the war, Bender remembered the tune from the earlier days during the war and used TRUMPETS as the basis of his Six Variations for Organ on a Theme by Hugo Distler, Opus 38 (1966). Bender, who taught at Wittenburg University in Springfield, Ohio, during 1960-1976, sought a new poet to write words to this tune. In 1970 he asked Martin Franzmann (1907-1976) to provide the text that was published in 1972.Franzmann received his education from Northwestern College in Waterville, Wisconsin (1928). Following graduation from Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary, he pursued further graduate study in Classics from the University of Chicago, returning to teach at his alma mater, Northwestern College, from 1936-1946. From 1946 until 1969, he taught New Testament at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.
Franzmann wrote many hymns, the first of which were published as Christian Hymns (1934). Hymnologist Robin Leaver prepared Come to the Feast: The Original and Translated Hymns of Martin H. Franzmann (1994), which is not only a collection of Franzmann’s hymns, but also contains four of his sermons and an analysis of his creative process. Concerning the latter, Professor Leaver notes, "the great pains Franzmann took to write, re-write, refine and enhance his poetic texts."
The first stanza of "Weary of all trumpeting" is reminiscent of the opening verses of Psalm 130, "Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!" (ESV) Just as Psalm 130 begins in the depths of despair and ends in "hope in the Lord," so does the first stanza begin with weariness of war and killing, and ends in a song of hope that joins with "great music pure and strong/wherewith heaven is ringing." Rather than supporting one country – a unified German state – the first stanza supports "one song" that is raised to Christ.
In stanza two, the captain of war is replaced with "Captain Christ," who paradoxically is the "servant King" who "bade us sheath the foolish sword," a reference to Peter in Gethsemane who, after drawing his sword to protect Christ, was rebuked and told to sheathe it (Mathew 26:52; John 18:11). The trumpet in this stanza is brought to life by the "Spirit’s breath" and "call[s] us all to follow."
The final stanza finds "triumph" in Christ’s cross. All are summoned "to live by loss," and in doing so, we "gain. . . all by giving." Through "suffering" we find "triumph." This triumph culminates when we become "partner’s in [Christ’s] splendor."
The Rev. Carlton Young, editor of The United Methodist Hymnal (1989), places the militaristic language of this hymn in context: "Like 'Onward Christian Soldiers,' this hymn employs military metaphors to call and spur on the faithful, but in Franzmann’s audience, unlike the Victorian children for whom the processional was written, there are many who remember and felt the demonic and destructive force of Nazi-Germany and fear the present threat of nuclear holocaust. The poet transforms the shrill sounds of martial trumpets, the symbols and metaphors of violence, hate, and war, into God’s clarion call to celebrate Christ’s triumph. . .."
Dr. Anderson notes that German composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) also used the image of the trumpet symbolically in his post-war composition, A Survivor from Warsaw, Opus 46 (1947). The trumpet is "used to invoke both the horror of the 'reveille' in the concentration camp and the victory at the end of time."
It is likely that readers of this column have never had the opportunity to sing this hymn. Indeed, there are those who might question its inclusion in the hymnal since most congregations may never sing it. Hymns, however, reflect parts of human history and allow us to recall the struggles and sufferings of the past and remember that God continues to work even in our darkest hours. The musical setting may require extra effort to learn, but this hymn rings authentically in a post 9/11 world. Just as Distler’s original melody, written to serve the Nazi propagandist machine, was redeemed by Franzmann’s text, hate, violence, and death are redeemed by the "servant King" allowing us to become partners in the ultimate splendor.
**© 1972 Chantry Music Press, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
By C. Michael Hawn, University Distinguished Professor of Church Music, Perkins School of Theology, SMU, in consultation with Christopher S. Anderson, Associate Professor of Sacred Music, SMU.
Korean UMC website launched
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UMNS) - The United Methodist Church has a new website highlighting Korean ministries and resources. KoreanUMC.org went live this week as the portal for Korean-language resources and content in the church. Designed by United Methodist Communications, it will aggregate resources from around the denomination and provide original content.
News of interest
Maya Angelou, celebrated author and poet, dies at 86
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (UMNS) - Maya Angelou, 86, died May 28 at her home in Winston-Salem. The award-winning author of autobiographies, essays, and poetry was a familiar face to many United Methodists. She was a strong supporter of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco where she visited in 2012. The year before, she delivered a lecture at St Paul's United Methodist Church in Houston. She also was an emerita trustee of United Methodist-related Bennett College in Greensboro, N.C. Many will remember her reading a poem at President Clinton's 1993 inauguration.
The New York Times has the article
Maya Angelou, the memoirist, poet and author of “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” died Wednesday. Her manuscripts are being preserved at the Harlem-based branch of the New York Public Library.
Maya Angelou, whose landmark book of 1969, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” — a lyrical, unsparing account of her childhood in the Jim Crow South — was among the first autobiographies by a 20th-century black woman to reach a wide general readership, died on Wednesday at her home in Winston-Salem, N.C. She was 86.
Her death was confirmed by her literary agent, Helen Brann. The cause was not immediately known, but Ms. Brann said Ms. Angelou had been frail for some time and had heart problems.
In a statement, President Obama said, “Today, Michelle and I join millions around the world in remembering one of the brightest lights of our time — a brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman,” adding, “She inspired my own mother to name my sister Maya.”
Though her memoirs, which eventually filled six volumes, garnered more critical praise than her poetry did, Ms. Angelou (pronounced AHN-zhe-low) very likely received her widest exposure on a chilly January day in 1993, when she delivered her inaugural poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” at the swearing-in of Bill Clinton, the nation’s 42nd president. He, like Ms. Angelou, had grown up in Arkansas.
Maya Angelou in 1969, the year of her landmark memoir. Credit Chester Higgins, Jr.
It began:
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow,
I will give you no hiding place down here.
Long before that day, as she recounted in “Caged Bird” and its sequels, she had already been a dancer, calypso singer, streetcar conductor, single mother, magazine editor in Cairo, administrative assistant in Ghana, official of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and friend or associate of some of the most eminent black Americans of the mid-20th century, including James Baldwin, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
Afterward (her six-volume memoir takes her only to age 40), Ms. Angelou was a Tony-nominated stage actress; college professor (she was for many years the Reynolds professor of American studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem); ubiquitous presence on the lecture circuit; frequent guest on television shows from “Oprah” to “Sesame Street”; and subject of a string of scholarly studies.
In February 2011, Mr. Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.
Throughout her writing, Ms. Angelou explored the concepts of personal identity and resilience through the multifaceted lens of race, sex, family, community and the collective past. As a whole, her work offered a cleareyed examination of the ways in which the socially marginalizing forces of racism and sexism played out at the level of the individual.
“If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat,” Ms. Angelou wrote in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
Hallmarks of Ms. Angelou’s prose style included a directness of voice that recalls African-American oral tradition and gives her work the quality of testimony. She was also intimately concerned with sensation, describing the world around her — be it Arkansas, San Francisco or the foreign cities in which she lived — with palpable feeling for its sights, sounds and smells.
“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” published when Ms. Angelou was in her early 40s, spans only her first 17 years. But what powerfully formative years they were.
Marguerite Johnson was born in St. Louis on April 4, 1928. (For years after Dr. King’s assassination, on April 4, 1968, Ms. Angelou did not celebrate her birthday.) Her dashing, defeated father, Bailey Johnson Sr., a Navy dietitian, “was a lonely person, searching relentlessly in bottles, under women’s skirts, in church work and lofty job titles for his ‘personal niche,’ lost before birth and unrecovered since,” Ms. Angelou wrote. “How maddening it was to have been born in a cotton field with aspirations of grandeur.”
Her beautiful, volatile mother, Vivian Baxter, was variously a nurse, hotel owner and card dealer. (Ms. Angelou’s 2013 account of life with her mother, “Mom & Me & Mom,” became a best seller.) As a girl, Ms. Angelou was known as Rita, Ritie or Maya, her older brother’s childhood nickname for her.
After her parents’ marriage ended, 3-year-old Maya was sent with her 4-year-old brother, Bailey, to live with their father’s mother in the tiny town of Stamps, Ark., which, she later wrote, “with its dust and hate and narrowness was as South as it was possible to get.”
Their grandmother, Annie Henderson, owned a general store “in the heart of the Negro area,” Ms. Angelou wrote. An upright woman known as Momma, “with her solid air packed around her like cotton,” she is a warm, stabilizing presence throughout “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
The children returned periodically to St. Louis to live with their mother. On one such occasion, when Maya was 7 or 8 (her age varies slightly across her memoirs, which employ techniques of fiction to recount actual events), she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. She told her brother, who alerted the family, and the man was tried and convicted. Before he could begin serving his sentence, he was murdered — probably, Ms. Angelou wrote, by her uncles.
Believing that her words had brought about the death, Maya did not speak for the next five years. Her love of literature, as she later wrote, helped restore language to her.
As a teenager, living with her mother in San Francisco, she studied dance and drama at the California Labor School and became the first black woman to work as a streetcar conductor there. At 16, after a casual liaison with a neighborhood youth, she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. There the first book ends.
Reviewing “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” in The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called it “a carefully wrought, simultaneously touching and comic memoir.”
The book — its title is a line from “Sympathy,” by the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar — became a best seller, confounding the stereotype, pervasive in the publishing world, that black women’s lives were rarely worthy of autobiography.
The memoirist and poet recited her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” in 1993 at President Bill Clinton’s first inaugural ceremony.
The five volumes of Ms. Angelou’s memoir that follow “Caged Bird” — all, like the first, originally published by Random House — were “Gather Together in My Name” (1974), “Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas” (1976), “The Heart of a Woman” (1981), “All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes” (1986) and “A Song Flung Up to Heaven” (2002).
They describe her struggles to support her son, Guy Johnson, through odd jobs. “Determined to raise him, I had worked as a shake dancer in nightclubs, fry cook in hamburger joints, dinner cook in a Creole restaurant and once had a job in a mechanic’s shop, taking paint off cars with my hands,” she wrote in “Singin’ and Swingin’.” Elsewhere, she described her short-lived stints as a prostitute and a madam.
Ms. Angelou goes on to recount her marriage to a Greek sailor, Tosh Angelos. (Throughout her life, she was cagey about the number of times she married — it appears to have been at least three — for fear, she said, of appearing frivolous.)
After the marriage dissolved, she embarked on a career as a calypso dancer and singer under the name Maya Angelou, a variant of her married name. A striking stage presence — she was six feet tall — she occasionally partnered in San Francisco with Alvin Ailey in a nightclub act known as Al and Rita.
She was cast in the Truman Capote-Harold Arlen musical “House of Flowers,” which opened on Broadway in 1954. But she chose instead to tour the world as a featured dancer in a production of “Porgy and Bess” by the Everyman Opera Company, a black ensemble.
Ms. Angelou later settled in New York, where she became active in the Harlem Writers Guild (she hoped to be a poet and playwright), sang at the Apollo and eventually succeeded Bayard Rustin as the coordinator of the New York office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization that he, Dr. King and others had founded.
In the early 1960s, Ms. Angelou became romantically involved with Vusumzi L. Make, a South African civil rights activist. She moved with him to Cairo, where she became the associate editor of a magazine, The Arab Observer. After leaving Mr. Make — she found him paternalistic and controlling, she later wrote — she moved to Accra, Ghana, where she was an administrative assistant at the University of Ghana.
On returning to New York, Ms. Angelou helped Malcolm X set up the Organization of Afro-American Unity, established in 1964. The group dissolved after his assassination the next year.
In 1973, Ms. Angelou appeared on Broadway in “Look Away,” a two-character play about Mary Todd Lincoln (played by Geraldine Page) and her seamstress. Though the play closed after one performance, Ms. Angelou was nominated for a Tony Award. On the screen, she portrayed Kunta Kinte’s grandmother in the 1977 television mini-series “Roots,” and appeared in several feature films, including “How to Make an American Quilt” (1995).
Ms. Angelou’s marriage in the 1970s to Paul du Feu, who had previously been wed to the feminist writer Germaine Greer, ended in divorce. Survivors include her son, three grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
Some reviewers expressed reservations about Ms. Angelou’s memoiristic style, calling it facile and solipsistic. Others criticized her poetry as being little more than prose with line breaks. But her importance as a literary, cultural and historical figure was amply borne out by the many laurels she received, including a spate of honorary doctorates.
Her other books include the volumes of poetry, “Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie” (1971), “Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well” (1975), “And Still I Rise” (1978) and “Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?” (1983).
She released an album of songs, “Miss Calypso,” in 1957.
But she remained best known for her memoirs, a striking fact because she had never set out to be a memoirist. Near the end of “A Song Flung Up to Heaven,” Ms. Angelou recalls her response when Robert Loomis, who would become her longtime editor at Random House, first asked her to write an autobiography.
Still planning to be a playwright and poet, she demurred. Cannily, Mr. Loomis called her again.
“You may be right not to attempt autobiography, because it is nearly impossible to write autobiography as literature,” he said. “Almost impossible.”
Ms. Angelou replied, “I’ll start tomorrow.”
Dave Itzkoff contributed reporting.
Ask him anything about Godzilla
CONWAY, Ark. (UMNS) - The incoming president of United Methodist-related Hendrix College happens to be an authority on Godzilla, as well as an economic policy expert. William Tsutsui comes to Hendrix from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he's been dean of the Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences. KERA in Dallas has the story.
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Foundation to study effectiveness of confirmation programs
PRINCETON, N.J. (UMNS) - The Lilly Endowment will be studying confirmation and equivalent practices in the United Methodist Church and four additional denominations. Housed at Princeton Theological Seminary, the study will examine how effective these youth programs are in strengthening discipleship. Other denominations to be studied are the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the Presbyterian Church (USA).
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Blogs and commentaries
Take time to laugh, pastor suggests
MACON, Ga. (UMNS) - After watching Jimmy Fallon for two weeks on the Tonight Show, the Rev. Ben Gosden, associate pastor of Mulberry Street United Methodist Church in Macon, suggests United Methodists should set disagreements aside and find time to "laugh, be silly and love."
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Millennial generation
WASHINGTON (UMNS) - Asa J. Lee, of the Lewis Center for Church Leadership, gives an overview of recent Pew research about today's young adults and what it means for churches.
This item corrects an incorrect link in the May 23 Weekly Digest.
Looking Ahead
Here are some of the activities ahead for United Methodists across the connection. If you have an item to share, email newsdesk@umcom.org and put Digest in the subject line.
African American Summit, Tuesday-Wednesday, June 3-4 - Retired United Methodist Bishop Ernest S. Lyght will be the guest speaker for this Peninsula-Delaware Conference event at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, 11868 Academic Oval, Princess Anne, Md. $25. Call the Rev. Sheila Hunley at 410-810-4612. Details.
Deadline for Distinguished Evangelist nominations, Wednesday, June 4 - The Foundation for Evangelism is seeking nominations for the 2014 Distinguished Evangelist of the United Methodist Church Award. To nominate someone.
Stop Human Trafficking of Children, Friday, June 6 - An interdisciplinary training for practitioners and students in nursing, medicine, social work, law, business, law enforcement, and those who serve youth will be held at The Lunda Center, Western Technical College, in La Crosse, Wis. Details from Wisconsin Annual (regional) Conference.
Pentecost, Sunday, June 8 - Throw the church a Spirit-filled birthday party with resources from the United Methodist Board of Discipleship.
Day 1, Sunday, June 8 and Sunday, June 15 - The Rev.Charles Reeb, senior pastor of Pasadena Community Church (United Methodist) will be the featured speaker on Pentecost and Trinity Sunday on the nationally syndicated radio program "Day 1." To listen.
Free webinar "Children's Ministry: Preparing Children for Kindergarten and Other Milestones," Monday, June 9 - 10 a.m. CT. Looks at ways that the church can support and celebrate children as they embark on new stages in their lives. Details.
Free webinar "Key Responsibilities for an Effective Camp and Retreat Ministry Board," Wednesday, June 11 - 3 p.m. CT. Looks at specific aspects of the board's work that must be done effectively to ensure a strong future for the mission and ministry. Details.
Free webinar "Sunday School Curriculum Review," Thursday, June 12 - 7-8 p.m. ET, A discussion of the different types of curriculum available and factors to consider in selection, led by Debbie Kolacki, a certified Christian educator and United Methodist lay servant. Details.
Lake Junaluska Summer Youth Events, June 12 - July 20 - Lake Junaluska Youth Events will focus on being the Body of Christ through service, worship, and community, with afternoons free for groups to customize their trip and explore the mountains of North Carolina. Leadership includes Shane Claiborne, Duffy Robbins, Andy Lambert, and more. Register at http://www.lakejunaluska.com/youth.
Peace with Justice Sunday, June 15 - The offering taken during Peace with Justice Sunday will allow The United Methodist Church to advocate through a broad spectrum of global programs. Details and resources.
Deadline to register for online course United Methodism 101, Monday, June 15 - Course offered June 18-July 30. Course from United Methodist Communications gives overview of church history, structure, beliefs, ministries and challenges. $9.99. Details.
"Fierce With Age: Aging as a Spiritual Path," retreat, Monday through Wednesday, June 23 - 25 - Carol Osborn, bestselling author of "Fierce with Age: Chasing God and Squirrels in Brooklyn" will lead retreat at Scarritt-Bennett. Costs range from $152 to $272 depending on whether guests stay overnight. Details.
Prepare: A Training for New Leaders, Monday-Tuesday, June 23-24 & Summer Institute, Tuesday to Friday, June 24-27 - Both events at Emory University's Candler School of Theology in Atlanta aim to address that need by training, equipping, and building a network for new, seasoned, or prospective United Methodist collegiate ministers. Combined cost of events is $100. Details.
Deadline to apply for CORR Action Fund grants, Monday, June 30 - The United Methodist Commission on Religion and Race will award grants of $20,000 to $80,000 to "innovative, bold, high-impact initiatives" that will increase intercultural competency or support vital conversations about race, cultural diversity and systemic equity. Details.
Free webinar "Finding Treasure: The Story of our Newest Stewardship Resource," Thursday, July 10 - 6:30 p.m. CT. Jacob Armstrong, pastor and church planter, will share how he helped his congregation discover that "where our treasure goes, our hearts will follow." Details.
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