It’s Sunday tomorrow and there are many ways we could take the ideas from this week and make some progress. The hope for this year of Road to General Conference 2019 blog posts is to encourage as many of us as possible to let our voices and hopes for an inclusive UMC be heard, especially in our local context.

Sometimes the biggest hurdle to leap is the first one… how do you start the conversation?

For some of us however, there is a deal of fear attached to the idea of talking with a new person about our hopes for an inclusive UMC. That is why taking some time to prepare and practice our stories is a really good idea.

When we’re launching into a new venture of being more open about our inclusive thoughts we should think about who our first conversation should be with.

While it’s helpful to have an online community, it’s also really important to find community locally – it’s much easier to get brave when we have someone else to be brave with.

As so often in the past, it became clear to me yet again, that our challenge is not that we don’t have enough people in The UMC having inclusive thoughts, we just need more of them to get brave and speak out.