August 1, 2005
By Linda Green

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Leaders of children's ministries must ensure that children know themselves as members of God's beloved community.

During the July 26-29 Focus event at Brentwood (Tenn.) United Methodist Church, speaker after speaker emphasized the importance of raising the quality of the care for children in the church and raising the vision of what it can mean to be in ministry with children in the truest sense.

The 2005 Focus conference was designed to show those who teach and care for children how they can build community with children, both collectively and individually.

"It is not just about Sunday School or sending them out to play. It is about including them in the whole of the church community," said Mary Alice Gran, director of children's ministries at the United Methodist Board of Discipleship.

The emphasis on the "Beloved Community" is a component of the vision of the denomination's Council of Bishops to reshape the future of the church. It was based on the statement from the council's Initiative on Children and Poverty called "Our Shared Dream: The Beloved Community."

Participants came from across the United States, Africa, the Philippines and Canada to gain skills and resources, enabling them to learn how to hear the voices of children and their vision of community.

Speakers, workshops, worship services and concerts provided the tools needed to help make the premise of beloved community – that all people are created to live in community with one another as beloved children of God – more real.

The "Beloved Community" document notes that the plight of children is tied to economics, politics, globalization, war, family breakdown, the AIDS epidemic and other problems. It also states that the root causes of poverty and the neglect and abandonment of children "lie in a society in which people live in fear."

According to the "Beloved Community," the church must broaden its understanding of local mission because too many congregations and individuals are satisfied with being involved in direct-service ministries with the poor without the faith-sharing and congregational inclusion essential to Christian community

Because children are an important part of the church, Gran said the focus of the 2005 event sought to provide those on the frontline of ministries with children with strategies on becoming part of a movement aimed at building a community where all are together regardless of neighborhood or church size.

Conference participants examined the meaning of being leaders in ministries with children in light of the call to live in and toward a beloved community.

"The beloved community is a movement, a realized eschatology. It is God breaking into the world and we as the church are to be instruments of that movement," said the Rev. Fred Smith, associate professor of the practice of mission and ministry at United Methodist-related Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington.

"We are to become the beloved community so that we can create a world that is ruled by love and justice," he added. "This means creating a world where people do not die because they have to because they lack the means and resources."

Smith explained that the vision of the church's Beloved Community, also an emphasis of the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is toward a movement of a worldwide universal community of love to eradicate poverty.

The nearly 800 participants attending the Focus conference were told that in the "beloved community: " Love and justice rule; " Everyone's worth is affirmed; " Diversity enriches all lives through common memories and a shared future " Stories inspire hope; and " All are loved unconditionally and forever."

Establishing a vision that unites all people, regardless of their station in life, creates a beloved community, according to Smith. He challenged participants to respond to God's call for "shalomalization," the end of poverty and the global spread of shalom.

As he provided a myriad of facts on the plight of children and adults domestically and globally, Smith said the responsibility of each individual is to make a commitment to make the world better and safer for all. At the heart or the center of the beloved community is love, he noted, a love that moves beyond self-importance and self-interest, to a love that prompts action.

The task of United Methodist Church "is not globalization but to a faith-based global development based on shalom," Smith said.

He explained that "Sha," is the fire of God and "lom" is the earth and "we are to take God's fire and plant it into the earth." Health, prosperity, justice, and character are all the biblical elements of shalom. "It is wholeness. It is how God intended the world to be. Shalomalization is the obligation of the church to return the world to God's intention."

Proclaiming that "the beloved community" is not a dream but a reality already broken into the world by Christ, Smith urged the participants to remember that as the church assisted in eradicating slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow laws and apartheid in the past, the church today must "become instruments of God's peace by bringing light into darkness, hope into despair to bring joy into where there is sadness."

United Methodist News Service
Linda Green is a United Methodist News Service news writer based in Nashville, Tenn.