Rev. Mary Huycke hopes for Spirit-led discernment at 2019 General Conference

First-elected PNW Clergy Delegate to General Conference 2019, Rev. Mary Kohlstaedt Huycke, shares this short message expressing her hopes for the time next month in February. One hope is that delegates will engage not in “decision-making” but in real discernment that is open to the Holy Spirit.

Transcript:

I keep hearing people talk about the big decisions to be made next month at General Conference. Well, I want to invite you to join with me in praying that what we do there is not decision-making but is instead discernment, real discernment, because those are different things. 

To come together in an attitude of decision-making, we would surface and share information, we would apply our best thinking and we would wrangle with one another until together we figured out for ourselves the best way to move ahead. A very human approach, when it could be, and should be, and can be so much more for people of faith.

See, anytime the question on the table is: “Is God trying to bring something new into the world? Is God trying to lead us into new understandings of ourselves and one another and what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus Christ?” Well, then that’s a moment for discernment and of listening to God as well as to ourselves and one another. It’s a time to surface and share information, to bring our best thinking and then for all of us to set our egos aside with everything else on the table and say, “God what could you create in the midst of this?” And then listen.

My prayer for General Conference is that the Holy Spirit breaks in and that those of us present are open and present enough that we notice—and that we collaborate with it for what God could do in our midst.

My hoped-for outcome of General Conference is that we could increase the United Methodist way of bringing life-giving, life-saving, life-transforming love into this world; that love that we know through Jesus Christ. 

I invite you to be with me as I and the rest of the delegation prepare ourselves for work in St. Louis. And please be in prayer for us, and with us, in St. Louis that we might not just be doing the work of Church but that we might be Church and bring and embody the best of what it means to be the body of Christ.

Rev. Mary K. Huyckeis the first-elected clergy delegate from the Pacific Northwest Annual Conference to the 2019 General Conference, meeting in St. Louis in February. She also serves as district superintendent for the Seven Rivers Missional District.