About the road to General Conference 2019 revisited
The letter I hoped to deliver by hand, and John W.
It's been nearly two weeks since I returned from my journey home from St Louis, retracing the steps and churches I visited on my way to the special General Conference in 2019.
In 2019 I was literally driving to St Louis to go to the special called General Conference, from my home (at the time) in Weaverville, NC. I had opened Google maps, set the destination of St Louis and then told Google to avoid highways. A route was set for me (I love technology, and maps!)
My next step was to go to the Find A Church page on umc.org and find the United Methodist Churches on the route. I found 66 churches. When I set out I thought I was going to have time to visit all 66 churches on my two day trip - that proved seriously over optimistic. In the end I visited 35 churches, and ended up having to abandon stopping at churches at the Kentucky/Illinois border, otherwise I would have been late to General Conference.
I had no particular plans to speak to people at those churches - of course, I would speak to anyone who happened to there, but I did not plan in advance or reach out to anyone. In the end I had a small handful of conversations - maybe about 5 or 6 out of the 35 churches.
It was a very meaningful trip to me, I called it a prayer pilgrimage. I prayed at each church and left them a letter.
It's 2024 now and I happened to be heading to St Louis again for some meetings and a conference. So, with the trip to St Louis approaching, and knowing I was going to be driving there and not flying, an idea germinated. How about visiting those churches again? But this time, I would take a few days longer and try to have conversations at each church. I wrote a new letter, and included some leaflets from the Parents Reconciling Network. My hope was to hand deliver each letter, but failing that I would leave the letter in a mailbox, or send it via the post office.
My plan had been to reach out to each of the churches two or three weeks before my trip and ask if someone would be able to meet me at the church for a conversation. In the end the lead time between reaching out and arriving at the church was sometimes less than 48 hours - my actual job responsibilities and some procrastination on my part led to this less than ideal situation. I did visit each of the 35 churches and had 7 planned conversations, and 10 serendipitous conversations, sometimes with a person from the church and sometimes with a neighbor to the church. I attended one Sunday School class, one worship service, a trivia night, one lunch with a pastor and one dinner with another pastor.
Of the 35 churches, 24 remain United Methodist and 11 have disaffiliated. I found 3 of those disaffiliated churches have joined the GMC - others may have too, but they are not on the GMC map yet and there was no signage to suggest they have.
This pilgrimage was at times life-giving and at times heart wrenching. Over the next several posts I will tell some of the stories from along the way. These are not in chronological order, as I have tried to ensure that the stories are separated from the specific location where they happened.
