Prayers, Presence, Gifts, Service and Witness

The Love Your Neighbor Coalition (LYNC) calls on the Council of Bishops to challenge efforts to withhold giving by local churches. LYNC is a partnership of 12 United Methodist Church related caucus groups working for a just, inclusive and grace filled denomination. We recognize that The United Methodist Church is a flawed vessel, but we commit to staying in connection and working to confess our sins, repent, heal, grow, and improve our denomination.

With heavy hearts we mourn the actions by some who seek to divide us further; specifically, the punitive call by the Wesley Covenant Association (WCA) that urges congregations, who are in the midst of good faith disaffiliaton negotiations, to withhold their shared giving. These congregations within nineteen of our annual conferences have prayerfully discerned just and equitable expectations consistent with paragraph 2553 of the BOD for disaffiliation.

Although the WCA recommends placing the funds in escrow, there is no indication where these funds would go once negotiations are complete.

United Methodists vow to give our prayers, presence, gifts, service and witness. Despite our differences, members are committed to biblical stewardship of the land and property entrusted to congregations while they call themselves United Methodist.

We reject this lack of grace that not only disallows exercise of a spirit of generosity but even more displays to the world a callous lack of care for generations of connectional ministry and mission. These ministries and mission sustain more than 158 United Methodist colleges and universities including Africa University and schools in Europe, the Philippines, the Caribbean and the U.S. This tactic deliberately and directly harms already vulnerable people who are served through over 300 United Methodist hospitals, clinics, and health centers.

Withholding funds impairs Christ’s life transforming work of healing and wholeness offered by our many camps and retreat centers who form our youth and adults; rejects ministries of inclusion, diversity, and equity that affirm women and people of color and people living with disabilities through our boards, agencies and caucus groups; and it dismisses our conference led efforts to engage in ecumenical relationships, provide for disaster relief, and to alleviate hunger and poverty. Diverting funds turns congregations away from the gospel mandate to build equitable communities and promote a just peace, and dismisses the urgency of ministries that recognize dignity and secure human rights, and care for creation in the public square.

LYNC invites congregations and conferences to renew their collaborative commitments to the United Methodist Church and to discern the very best practices that will demonstrate to the church and to the world that a Methodist is one who has "the love of God shed abroad” in our heart for a connective witness.

We call on the denomination to end harm in every place where the Gospel of love is preached. We commit to love each other and stay in relationship with the global Body of Christ. We pray for the global, common good of the United Methodist Church.

We confess that John Wesley’s 1741 sermon “Character of a Methodist,” is so often cited and so infrequently put into practice. Yet we are convinced that without a hint of coercion and with an all abiding desire to demonstrate the love of a gracious and generous God, Wesley summarized those essential values that must both define and guide a Methodist; “A Methodist is one who has ‘the love of God shed abroad in his heart, by the Holy Ghost given unto him;’ one who ‘loves the Lord his God with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his mind, and with all his strength.’

Assured of God’s immeasurable and limitless love, we applaud, affirm and pray for the Council of Bishops; their wholehearted pastoral posture to continue the abeyance and cease selective pursuit of injurious complaints and trials is sign of their love for the church.

Read an update from the Florida Conference on the withholding of apportionments.