Dear Fremont Family:
I leave tomorrow, Thursday, 6/18, for Boise, Idaho to attend this year’s Oregon-Idaho Annual Conference. For those who may be new to Fremont and even new to United Methodism, our founder, John Wesley, instituted an annual gathering for clergy and non-clergy delegates from every congregation across regional areas. These annual gatherings are the authorized body for what we call, “the work of the annual conference.” This work includes things like passing new legislation that pertains to all congregations, ordaining and commissioning new ministers, honoring the clergy who have died in the last year, adopting an annual budget, etc. It is intended to be what John Wesley called, “Holy Conferencing.” Often, they can be beautiful gatherings, but more often than not, Annual Conference can be quite superficial, performative and tedious as well. In other words, I do not always look forward to these gathering.
However, this year, we are doing what I consider nothing short of a miracle. We are engaging in a series of 3 conversations around what is called, “decolonial futuring.” As a result of an Action Request adopted last year on the floor of Annual Conference, I was selected by our Bishop, Cedrick Bridgeforth, to lead a Design Team through a year-long process with the help of an outside consultation group called Mazorca Facilitation. Our task was to conduct 1:1 conversations and listening sessions with both our “innovators” (those engaging in non-traditional ministry) and Conference Stakeholders (the administrative committees that hold bureaucratic power) in order to begin to identify some of the barriers for future flourishing ministry. Our very own, Cynthia MacLeod, as the Columbia District Lay Leader, was also named to the Team.
The process was unbelievably powerful, and now, as part of the Design Team, Cynthia and I, will take the work we have done and present it back to the Annual Conference in Boise. But, first, you may be asking yourself, “what in the world is ‘decolonial futuring?'” Admittedly, it’s not an easy concept to define, and so often, as humans, we are used to needing to primarily understand a concept intellectually. But ‘decolonial futuring’ is probably a much easier reality to embody or to practice, than it is a concept to understand. According to the internet (I promise if you Google it, this is what it will say), “Decolonial futuring is a framework that challenges dominant, Western-centric visions of the future. It interrogates the legacies of colonialism in our current systems and creates spaces for historically marginalized worldviews and diverse temporalities (non-linear time) to co-create multiple, equitable futures.” Clear as mud, right?
Maybe it’s easier to say something like this instead: when the People called Methodists arrived in the American Colonies over 300 years ago, we established missions and forms of ministry based on a colonialist worldview. We considered land a “possession” that we could own (in contradiction to Indigenous worldviews), natural resources that we could extract for consumption and profit (financial ‘capital’) and hierarchies of worth among peoples (men over women, white people over Natives and Blacks, etc.) that were based in white supremacist biases. As the American Methodist church grew and spread, we embedded these colonialist assumptions into our structure and policies. That structure and those policies still guide our behavior today.
Because it’s such a difficult concept to understand, it can also be a challenging pathway to introduce within an institutionalized structure (questions emerge like, ‘how does this fit into our current system?’, quick answer, ‘it doesn’t), but lo and behold, the Holy Spirit moved mightily last year at Annual Conference (it can happen!), and we have begun this extraordinary and substantial work. I will look forward to sharing with you more about what takes place in Boise when I return, but in the meantime, would you be willing to pray for me, the AR8 Design Team, and our upcoming presentations in Boise? Please pray that the Holy Spirit will continue to move in our midst and take us to places we can’t yet even imagine. Thank you for your love and care. See you on Sunday!
Grace and peace,
Erin
