The 2015 National Conference of the UB Church met in Grand Rapids, Michigan July 14 through the 18. About 780 people attended from UB churches all over the United States, including 7 from Mt. Olivet.
Each night we enjoyed a worship service with music and a message from guest speaker Dr. Wayne Schmidt, VP for Wesleyan Seminary.
The business session of the conference lasted all day Thursday until 4:30 in the afternoon. It began with the processing of the resignation of Bishop Phil Whipple and the appointing of Interim Bishop Todd Fetters, who will serve the remaining 2 years until a bishop is elected in 2017. There were also 7 reports and 13 proposals to process and the election of 8 Executive Leadership Team members. Some highlights from the proposals: A paragraph was added to the Discipline to state the church's stand against cohabitation. Also under "Family Standards", after much discussion and an amendment, the following paragraph was added to state the denomination's position on same-sex marriage:
"Because God ordained marriage and defined it as the covenant
relationship between a man, a woman, and himself, the Church of the
United Brethren in Christ USA will only recognize marriages between a
genetic, biological man and a genetic, biological woman. Further, the
ministers classified with the authority to conduct weddings shall only
participate in weddings and solemnize marriages between one genetic, biological man and one
genetic, biological woman. Finally, the facilities and property of churches in covenant with
the Church of the United Brethren in Christ USA shall only host
weddings between one genetic, biological man and one genetic, biological woman."
On Friday morning, we were able to attend 2 workshops out of a choice of 18.
On the final morning, there was a special service that included message from new Interim Bishop Todd Fetters, communion and the ordination of 6 pastors.
The next U. S. National Conference will be held in July 2017 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We will be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United Brethren Church.
Global Ministries display tables along with other exhibitors
The conference business session
Worship led by the team from First UB in Holly Hill, Florida
Rev. Todd Fetters speaking at the final service
The ordination service
Below is an excerpt from the July 23, 2015 Connect Newsletter including Bishop Ramsey's prayer for newly appointed Bishop Todd Fetters and Rev. Fetters' subsequent comments:
Bishop Ramsey's Prayer
Paul Hirschy asked Bishop
Emeritus Ron Ramsey to come to the podium and pray for Todd Fetters. As
he stood at the podium, with Todd seated at the table behind him, Bishop
Ramsey said, “If I’m going to pray for Todd, I’d like to have my hand
on him.” There was laughter and applause throughout the room. Todd then
came to the podium and stood beside Bishop Ramsey, who placed his right
hand on Todd’s shoulder and prayed:
Eternal God and Father, we have
come to a point in our national conference, in our denomination, that
probably nobody has enjoyed. But we also thank you for your sovereignty
in bringing to us the skills and capabilities to take care of the
position, and to serve the church in a wonderful way. I thank you for
Todd. I thank you for his life, I thank you for his witness, I thank you
for his testimony, and most of all I thank you for the consistent way
he has walked in the way of the Lord and the way of the Word. And I pray
that as he assumes this new position, that those things will not
change.
Help him, Lord, to face the
discouraging things without destroying him. Help him to accept the
victories and wins without getting a big head. But Lord, I just pray you
would be with him and strengthen and empower him for this awesome
responsibility. Thank you for the years I’ve known him; I’ve known him
to be honest and true and faithful. I pray that your Spirit would be
upon him to continue moving him and directing him in that kind of
fashion. In the strong name of Jesus I pray, amen.
Bishop Ramsey then told the
conference, “Let me just say one thing. I think the denomination, for
the next two years, will be in very capable hands.”
Remarks from the New Bishop
At this point, Paul Hirschy
turned the chairmanship back to Todd Fetters, who asked everyone to
thank Bishop Hirschy for his leadership in the difficult executive
session and afterwards. The delegates gave Bishop Hirschy a standing
ovation. “Consider that happy birthday,” Fetters said. It was, indeed,
Paul Hirschy’s birthday.
He then thanked Gary Dilley and
the ELT for their hard work and “your helpful, honest, thoughtful
presentation today.” More applause.
Todd Fetters then made the following remarks (with slight editing) to the conference.
I’m not an alliterator when I do
messages. I’m just not big on it. It’s a lot of work to come up with
points that all have the same letter. And yet, I’m going to do it right
here, right now.
Let me just say, the events that
you in executive session have heard and that we walked through—they are
heart-breaking. I want to speak on behalf of the national office. It’s
been a heart-rending, heart-challenging season for us. And yet, I think
as you’ve looked at the national staff just in the last 24 hours, you’ve
seen that they came to work, and they came to help, and they came to
serve the church. I’m grateful for their ability to process challenging,
difficult, heart-rending decisions and still come to do this, knowing
that our calling is to Jesus Christ and to His Church, and to help all
of us point in that direction of our Lord and Savior. So would you just
thank our national office staff.
[Applause.]
We have had the opportunity to say it to Bishop Phil and to Sandy,
that we love them and enjoyed working with them, and we have enjoyed
working for our bishop. We will be continuing to pray for them, and we
will continue to serve in the vein that he has led us to this point.
So the first H is heart-breaking.
Let me follow that up by saying I am humbled by this body’s
confidence in me. I walk into the office every day and go down a long
hallway on purpose. The hallway into the office from the back door is a
whole long line of bishops’ pictures. Usually I’m troubled by the fact
that most of them are cockeyed, and I sort of tilt them back into place.
Whether that’s a message from the Lord or not, I don’t know.
But as a kid growing up in the United Brethren church, and not far
from headquarters, those are the people I knew as bishop. Those have
always been individuals that I was taught to respect, and whom I learned
to respect. I’m humbled to follow in that line for these two years.
When I think in terms of our church, I think in terms of the modern
era. One of the key parts of our modern era is when we went to one
bishop, and that was Bishop Ray Seilhamer in 1993. He served us with a
vision for two things—healthy churches, and church planting. A big part
of that was endowing for church planting. So he got us in mind for
healthy churches and planting churches. His illustration was a
two-winged plane—which, by the way, is the only kind of plane I would
want to fly.
And then following Bishop Seilhamer was Bishop Paul Hirschy, who has
given us leadership in transition to who we are. Between 2001 and 2005,
we processed whether or not we wanted to be United Brethren, and we
cinched it down. We are United Brethren. That’s who we are going to be.
That’s what we want to be. So we said in 2005, this is who we are.
At that national conference, we had a sea change in our structure,
our organization. Ron Ramsey was handed the baton to make sense out of
something we just sort of threw up in the air to some degree and said,
“Make this work.” And we’ve been making this work.
The other thing that Bishop Ramsey brought to the table was a renewed commitment to the Great Commission as our
commission. Growing healthy churches was a big part of where we were
going. And so, again, when you make a big decision to say this is who we
are and this is what we are going to be about as the United Brethren
Church, we had the right leader at that moment to say, “Simplistically,
it’s about the Gospel—about getting people to hear the Gospel and to
yield their lives to him.”
And so in the succession in this modern era, we got to that point
where we said, “We are United Brethren, and we are committed to the
Gospel of Jesus Christ and to the Great Commission. That’s what we are
called to do.”
Then the baton was handed off to Bishop Phil Whipple. For the last
six years, in a volatile culture when it comes to Christianity, he
helped us cinch down what we are all about in upholding that one name
once more—that we are All for Christ. That’s what we are about.
Unashamedly, All for Christ. I look forward to keeping that theme, and
the themes that got us to that point, as we move forward.
So I’m heart-broken in the
circumstances we are in. I’m humbled by your trust. And I’m hopeful that
we will work together in collaboration for the great and glorious
Gospel that is ours, given to us by Jesus Christ.
Thank you, folks. It’s been my
privilege to serve with our staff and with our bishop and with you. I
look forward to what the Lord wants to do in the United Brethren church
during the next two years.
