April 29, 2003

DALLAS - Describing Christian community as "our DNA," the president of the United Methodist bishops called on her colleagues to lead the church in creating a community that overcomes divisions and gives hope to a world gripped by fear.

"Christian community is embedded in our United Methodist identity," Bishop Sharon A. Brown Christopher told the international Council of Bishops. "It is our DNA. The practice of our Christian faith, (John) Wesley style, is all about connection." In her president's address April 28, she emphasized the need for building "transcendent Christian community" as an antidote to the anxiety and division she sees in the United Methodist Church and the fear at large in the world.

Her remarks came in the opening business session of the bishops' week-long, semi-annual meeting, being held in the Dallas suburb of Addison. "With the United States engaged in a global war on terrorism that apparently has only just begun, with international relationships defined by shock and awe, and for many other reasons ... I believe our human family is scared to death," she said. "Fear has found us, and we are not prepared. Our fear is jeopardizing our faith."

People around the world are searching for a sign of hope, she said. "We long for another way that pulls the human family together in a manner that leads to life, not death." The Christian movement offers such hope, she said. "I believe that the antidote is Jesus Christ, given and shared in transcendent Christian community." She described personal experiences of being "profiled" by others - as both a liberal and a conservative - and then "pushed aside."

She noted that incidents of profiling based on skin color or other characteristics are increasing around the world for the sake of "international security." Profiling, she declared, is "judgment not based in reality."

"Throughout our church, as I listen and watch, I am observing a fierce hardening of mental and spiritual categories tha leads to behavior that is brittle and rigid and causes assuming, judging, controlling, closing," she said. "The behavior is filled with the spiritual malaise called arrogance - 'my way is the right way,' or more to the point, 'my way is God's way.'" That, she said, "smells like anxiety." When insecurity and anxiety take charge, encounters become confrontations, and the other person becomes an enemy who must be discounted or changed, she said.

"We attempt to secure ourselves and maintain control of our own lives by diminishing others, by reducing their threat to us through profiling. "Profiling is a sign of the smoke and fire within our world and church and emblematic of the deeper issues facing us in the church," she said. "I note that this behavior is not the exclusive property of one side or the other." The church's malaise centers on "our faith having gone to our heads, resulting in battles of ideologies as if our lives depended on them, while forgetting our hearts that shape our relationships with one another."

Drawing on biblical accounts of Jesus and the early church, the bishop said, "life in God begins in relationship." It begins in Christian community - one not defined by the absence of disagreement but characterized by how the members love one another as Jesus loved, she said. How, she asked, can the council help the church remember its baptism, teaching, preaching and living so that all Christians on all sides "will know deep in their hearts that they are loved unconditionally" by Jesus? What conditions must be created so that the newspaper headlines during next year's General Conference will reflect United Methodists' love for one another - in contrast to the stories in 2000 that focused on division in the church?

"How do we so order the life of the church that the anxiety that binds us and sets us against one another is transformed into the courage, confidence and hope required for us, as one body, to engage and defeat the powers and principalities of our world that hold the human family hostage?" he bishop said she prayed that the bishops would lead the church "so that conditions for transcendent Christian community are set, our church touched again by the transforming power of Jesus Christ, and our splintered world given a fresh ... sign of the hope that we know in God through Jesus Christ." Christopher leads the denomination's Illinois Area, with offices in Springfield, Ill. Her one-year term as president of the council expires May 2, at the end of the council's meeting. Bishop Ruediger Minor of Russia will succeed her.

United Methodist News Service