Brothers and sisters in Christ,
It is a great joy and privilege for me to greet you, our Ministry Matters readers. Dorena and I loved moving back to our farm in Wilmore (about eight minutes from our FAS Ministry Center). Finishing our final year in local church ministry in the Greater New Jersey Conference of the United Methodist Church (our 43rd year of ministry, 38 together) was a strange experience altogether due to COVID restrictions. Our state was under strict shutdown regulations: Churches were closed and no gatherings in homes of more than six people, preferably masked and outside.
On July 1, we began our third term of service with the Francis Asbury Society. We joined a wonderful staff of colleagues, although we met remotely for our first few weeks together. We LOVE our new context for ministry at FAS! Yet we face unbelievable 2020 challenges for ministry! What can be said about the logistics of life in 2020?
We now minister in a nation that is ever-changing, but with some very new realities. Life has gotten desperate behind our masks:
- Suicide has gone up, according to statistics, between 20 and 30 percent! Those are not over exaggerated. In our final year of ministry in our NJ parish, I performed 12 funerals due to suicide! I have colleagues in ministry who did not have 12 suicides in their entire career. How frightening the reality that it became the horrific commonplace in ministry?
- Financial hardship due to the COVID culture has forced many small business workers and owners into catastrophic difficulty.
- The family is under severe stress. Divorce due to increased hardships has proliferated.
- Societal tensions have grown at an alarming rate, with people citing political and racial injustices as a catalyst for adversity. In addition to the paramount reality that murder marked the adversity, more than a billion dollars of personal and public property was destroyed, leaving the owners destitute and our nation wrestling with feelings of panic and depression.
I want to share with you the hope that Mrs. Cowman, in her devotional classic, wrote for Election Day: “Our capacity for knowing God is enlarged when we are brought by Him into circumstances that cause us to exercise our faith. So when difficulties block our path, may we thank God that He is taking time to deal with us, and then may we lean heavily on Him.” (Excerpt from Streams in the Desert, November 3r)
Cherished friends and colleagues, will you lean heavily on Him with me for the urgent task of ministry to those behind the masks?
Under the burden for our people,
