Desert Southwest Greetings to All Conferences Get Warm Response

by

with warm regards

Martin Kukla

Times are fraught in The United Methodist Church during this season of splintering, but members of the Desert Southwest Annual Conference are sending all United Methodists cordial greetings no matter what.

Attendees at the 2023 session of the annual conference wrote personal messages of greeting that were dispatched this summer to all annual conferences across the worldwide United Methodist Church.

Billie K. Fidlin, Director of Outreach & Justice for the Desert Southwest Conference, wrote Aug. 31 that the wave of good feelings dispatched from the Phoenix-based conference drew its first response from Urs Schweizer, bishop's assistant in the Central Conference of Central and Southern Europe. She posted his letter on the conference website:

Dear Brothers and Sisters of the Desert Southwest Conference,

On behalf of Bishop Stefan Zürcher, who was newly elected bishop of the Central Conference of Central and Southern Europe in November 2022, I would like to thank you for your kind letters that you have sent to the various Annual Conferences of our Episcopal Area.

Thank you for this wonderful initiative and for providing the laity, clergy and staff of your Annual Conference with an opportunity to experience that the worldwide nature of our Church is not a theoretical concept that is just written in the Book of Discipline but something that can turn into an encouraging reality.

Thank you for your prayers, for your kind words, for your love.

We are living in challenging times – our Central Conference borders to both Ukraine (where still a terrible war is going on) and to Italy and Greece (where still dozens of refugees from Africa and the Middle East arrive daily – if they succeed in crossing the sea…). It remains our task to be a light of hope and love and to share the Gospel with words and deeds.

Thank you so much for your encouragement on this journey.

May God bless you and make you – through your initiatives and programs – a blessing to many.

Urs

UPDATE: Desert Southwest communicator Christina Dillabough wrote Sept. 14 that project organizers had received another thank-you letter, this one from Martin Kukla, head of the district office of the UMC in the Czech Republic:

Dear brothers and sisters in the Desert Southwest Conference,

Please allow me to thank you for your kind letter and cards sent through the Bishop's Office of our Central Conference.

Thank you so much for all your prayers for our Annual Conference, we will be thinking of you in our prayers as well.

I wish you an abundance of God's blessings,

With warm regards

Martin Kukla

The project was the brainchild of Rev. Rachel Gilmore, conference Director of New and Vital Faith, who collaborated with Ms. Fidlin on the effort.

"Billie always does an incredible job of coming up with impactful mission projects for annual conference like the offerings we took up for Ukraine and the huge amount of medical debt that we were able to pay off," Rev. Gilmore told United Methodist Insight in an email.

"I thought it might be nice to add another element to our outreach activities that was relational and 'hands-on' so the 'Walk, Run, Write' campaign was born through a partnership between Billie and myself," said Rev. Gilmore.

The two staff persons printed maps of all UMC annual conferences "so that we could gain a greater awareness of how large the UMC family really is," Rev. Gilmore said.

Then they printed postcards with each annual conference's name and address in hopes of getting at least one greeting for each conference.

"We ended up with two to five handwritten postcards for every annual conference," said Rev. Gilmore. "It was great to see some volunteers randomly selecting the annual conferences that they would write to and then finding them on the map and Googling information about the UMC in that region. Other volunteers looked through all the cards, hoping to find an annual conference that they felt deeply connected to, so they could write more personal notes.

"We wanted to encourage our UMC siblings throughout the world and let them know that we are grateful for our connection and are in ministry together," Rev. Gilmore said.

Rev. Gilmore added that Desert Southwest Bishop Carlo Rapanut, Ms. Fidlin, and she wrote a shared letter that was sent to every annual conference with the postcards that were written to them. The text reads:

Dear siblings in the (annual conference name)

Greetings from the Desert Southwest Annual Conference!  We acknowledge that our United Methodists meet on land belonging to 22 tribal nations and we repent and seek to serve and heal the trauma from centuries of colonialism here in the Desert Southwest.  Our annual conference includes over 120 United Methodist churches where ministry is happening from Las Vegas, Nevada to Tucson, Arizona and from the Grand Canyon to the Quechan Indigenous Land near Winterhaven, California.  This year at our Annual Conference in the Phoenix area, we wanted to live into the beauty and love of our connectional system and let every other United Methodist Annual Conference throughout the world know we are praying for them.  

As part of this project, we met one morning to pray for every individual annual conference by name as we walked or ran laps in a church gymnasium.  With all of the volunteers who participated, your annual conference was prayed for seven separate times on that day.

We also put out postcards so that our clergy and laity could write a handwritten note to you along with a prayer.  Here are the postcards that were written to your annual conference.  Please know that our prayers continue to be with you, your conference leaders, your clergy and laity and our entire connection as we seek to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world!

Grace and peace,

Bishop Carlo Rapanut

Billie Fidlin, Director of Justice and Outreach

Rev. Rachel Gilmore, Director of New and Vital Faith

Signed on behalf of the laity, clergy and staff of the Desert Southwest Conference

The "Walk, Run" part of the project came when volunteers gathered one morning in the gym of St. Marks UMC in Phoenix to walk or run around the sports court, praying for all the annual conferences on each lap. A video of the event was posted on TikTok at https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT82a6tx9/ 

Thus far the project has hit only one snag – getting postcards to Russia, where international mail service has been suspended because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"We weren’t allowed to mail cards directly to Russia because of the war so we are exploring ways to get the Eurasia Episcopal Area their cards," Rev. Gilmore said in her email.

Some of the greetings also may be slower to arrive because of international mail delays, but as Ms. Fidlin wrote on the conference website: "The hearts of our Conference continue to bless many, near and far."

Veteran award-winning religion journalist Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, which she founded in 2011 as a media channel to amplify the news and views of marginalized and under-served United Methodists. This article may be reproduced elsewhere with credit to United Methodist Insight and link to its original posting.