Praise and Lament

NOTE: I am blogging more frequently during the 2024 General Conference, as I did in 2019. These are only my reflections, and in no way are they comprehensive. To keep up with happenings of the UMC General Conference, I invite you to stay connected HERE.

Last evening, I paused to pray and celebrate all that had happened in the work of the General Conference yesterday. We have indeed become a more inclusive denomination, and a new day is indeed dawning. When I awoke this morning, however, I was experiencing something that felt like sadness. I suppose it could have been the storms that passed through the night or the gray morning awaiting me outside.

Ultimately, I realized it was something else.

One of the people who reached out to me via social media concerning yesterday’s blog post was a longtime friend of mine. The Reverend Karen Greenwaldt was appointed from 1981 to 2013 to the General Board of Discipleship (later known ad Discipleship Ministries) in Nashville, and she served the last 13 years as the General Secretary. She offered a celebratory comment to my post linking yesterday’s blog post. When I read it, my heart leapt with the joy and gratitude at my 40+ year relationship with Karen, but it also skipped a beat as I immediately thought about all the years we have lived in the storm.

Karen was one who worked tirelessly to create a denomination that discipled people without regard to the color of their skin, where they called home, who they were, or who they loved. She led with integrity and grace, and every year at Annual Conference, I could hardly wait to see and hug my friend who so boldly led one of our general agencies through some challenging times.

Additionally, Karen was the first women to be ordained a deacon and an elder in the Central Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church. In a day when churches still so often rejected female clergy leadership, Karen was a trailblazer. She served for years as our Director of the Conference Council on Ministry in our conference office. She is one who advanced the causes of female clergy leadership. She is one who fought to defeat the harmful language being consistently added to our Book of Discipline every time the General Conference met. She lived with the tension of being an executive leader in a denomination that did not always share her inclusive worldview. In her retirement, she has remained an advocate for change.

As I let the darkness of the morning settle in on me, I went deeper to that place of lament. As I thought of those, like Karen, who continued to build an inclusive church while swimming upstream against a strong current of exclusive fundamentalism.

I lament how the Church of Jesus Christ, through her history has spent a great deal of her energies (mostly under the leadership of white men from western cultures) marginalizing those who were not white, western males. I lament how we have attempted to silence the voices of women, LGBTQ+ persons, BIPOC persons, and people who have differing abilities.

For those who have worked to get us to this place … for those who have suffered and been harmed just for being who you are and who you love … for those who have stood in the gap at the risk of personal loss and great stress … for those who have advocated for justice even when denominational leadership asked you to stop … WE SEE YOU!

We hold within us both the lament of the ways you have suffered in the past and the celebration of the new day you have helped create!

As we move into the new reality that this General Conference is creating for us, I pause for this prayer:

Holy God who has walked with us in darkness: We come with the realization that the church itself has sinned and fallen short of your glory. We come with the realization that our actions and inactions, our words and our complicit silence have often been the source of harm, exclusion, and even death. We come with the realization that the time is now to open a new chapter of transformational love.
Hear us when we pray!
Loving God who provides pathways forward: We celebrate the new day that has dawned in the United Methodist Church. We celebrate the new vision as we climb ever higher to see over the mountaintop to the kin-dom of your radically inclusive love.
Guide us as we pray!
Surprising God, who dances with us in gratitude and celebration: We offer gratitude for the giants on whose shoulders we stand. We give praise as we watch walls of division crumble before our eyes. May we enjoin your dance even when we don’t know the steps. May we trust your Holy Spirit, through which we live and move and dance and have our being, to take the lead and teach us the dance of redeeming love.
Take our hands, O God, and lead us to the dance floor of your grace and love!
Amen.