GCCUIC

The Rev. John L. McCullough was awarded the Council of Bishops 2012 Ecumenical Award May 1 at the United Methodist General Conference in Tampa, Fla.  The award, given every four years, recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to strengthen Christian unity and interreligious relations.

“John McCullough brings commitment and great energy to international, national and regional ecumenical work, ” said Bishop Sharon Rader, ecumenical officer of the United Methodist Council of Bishops. “Under his leadership, Church World Service (CWS) has strengthened its international reputation as an innovative, adaptive and transformative leader in its programmatic fields. ”

McCullough is President and CEO of CWS, an international humanitarian agency that works with partners to eradicate hunger and poverty and to promote peace and justice around the world through programs of sustainable development and humanitarian assistance, advocacy for social justice, and services to immigrants and refugees. Many United Methodists annually partner with CWS through the CROP Hunger Walks, which are community-wide events sponsored by CWS and organized by local congregations to raise funds to end hunger in the United States and  developing countries around the world.

A UMNS Report
By Rich Peck*

Saturday, April 28, 2012 | TAMPA, Fla. (UMNS)

 A delegate picks up and holds a stone in the center aisle  during an April 27 "Act of Repentance toward Healing Relationships  with Indigenous Peoples" at the 2012 United Methodist General  Conference in Tampa, Florida. A UMNS photo by Paul Jeffrey.

“There’s a lot of history that has been concealed; you have to go and dig it up,” said the Rev. George Tinker, a citizen of the Osage Nation and a professor at Iliff School of Theology in Denver.

Tinker began that excavation by recalling the 1864 massacre at Sand Creek, where John Chivington, a Methodist pastor, led 700 Colorado territory militia in the killing and mutilating of some 165 peaceful Cheyenne men, women and children.

Tinker also told a lesser-known Methodist chapter of that tragic event.

After refusing to meet with Cheyenne leaders, John Evans, a Methodist serving as governor of the Colorado territory, ordered the massacre.

In spite of that action, Evans is celebrated as the founder of the University of Denver, Northwestern University and Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, a city named for the Methodist leader.

A United Methodist and Roman Catholic Statement on the Eucharist and Ecology

Preamble

On May 9, 2008, Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker of the United Methodist Church and Bishop William S. Skylstad of the United States Conference of Bishops agreed on a mandate for the seventh round of the dialogue between their churches.  They would assemble an equal number of scholars and theologians from both churches to discuss the precise topic, “The Eucharist and Stewardship of God’s Creation.”  The stated goal was to produce a consensus document, the exact scope of which was left for the participants to determine.  At subsequent meetings, the members decided to aim at a document that would raise up for our respective church memberships issues about the Eucharist and the environment for reflection, prayer and action.  It also became clear in the course of the meetings that the sources of Catholic teaching about the Eucharist  were not matched by similar sources for the United Methodist partners, and vice versa.  For example, unlike Catholics, United Methodists give great theological weight to hymn texts sung at the Eucharist.   All of our respective theological, magisterial and liturgical sources were mined and discussed in the course of the dialogue with great respect, profound learning and mutual enrichment on both sides.

As we present this agreed statement, we realize only too well its limitations. We aimed to frame the statement according to the historic liturgy of both churches.  In doing so we respected the ancient axiom, lex orandi, lex credendi (“what the church prays is what the church believes”). At the same time we also fully realize that this statement does not reflect the breadth of what either church holds to be the total content of its Eucharistic belief or practice.  Catholics and United Methodists will not find in this text all of their Churches’ pivotal theological understandings of what the Eucharist is and does.  But in the end we judged that our mandate was more focused and precise. This agreed statement is modest, focused, grounded in what we can say together and what we could say to each other. Our task was to put these two rich traditions in dialogue and to discuss them in words and to pray about them together in the Liturgy of the Hours and the Eucharist (experiencing painfully the lack of full communion which prohibits intercommunion). No document can say everything, especially an ecumenical document of this sort. All such ecumenical documents are a work in progress about the topic(s) at hand and about the movement to grow together in faith and practice with the eventual goal that “all may be one.” We submit this text to the faithful of both our churches for their consideration in the hope that it will elicit prayerful and critical discussion not only about out differences but also about how much we share as Christians.