promoting innovation

Celebrating the past is valuable, but if the church is to thrive, it cannot live in the past. We can learn from and appreciate our history without becoming prisoners of it.

Our mission is to serve the present age, which happens to be an era of rapid cultural, technological, and sociological change. It can be uncomfortable, inconvenient, and downright exhausting to live in an age that is constantly shifting, but this is our reality. To navigate these times, we must see our traditions and practices as means to an end, not ends themselves. When we act out of habit, without reflection and evaluation, we abdicate our responsibility to serve the present age in favor of doing what is familiar and comfortable.

The way forward is to reclaim and hold onto the essence of African Methodism, while opening our hearts and minds to new ways of being and demonstrating who we are. Reclaiming who we are is not a nostalgic fantasy about going back to the way things used to be. It's about returning to the fundamentals of why God called us and who God called us to be as a denomination.