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Hoosier United Methodist News Archives
| Hoosier United Methodist News |
March 2002 |
Going around; coming around
You've heard the expression, "What goes around comes around." That frequent phrase is quite apt for this month's Hoosier UM News. In this issue, particularly, you can see something of the life cycle of Hoosier United Methodists, from youth feeling the first stirrings of a holy Call, to the evolving state of our Church-related retirement homes.
An e-mail message from a retired UM layman living on the West Coast sparked an idea. His mother is a life-long Hoosier Methodist, he said, and would like to live in a safe retirement community here, preferably a Christian one. He wanted to know how he could find out about our six "homes," as they used to be called, from far-away California.
His query prompted us to publish an overview of our church-related retirement communities in Indiana. Read Mary Lou Howey's article. Once serving as a kind of rest home for retired pastors to spend their final days, they are now "user-friendly retirement communities." -- something entirely different and pertinent to today's living, and no longer limited to pastors.
At the other end of the Hoosier UM life cycle, we wanted to share an article looking ahead to the next generation of potential clergy, and to examine how well we're encouraging our gifted young people to consider following a call to ministry. Lisa Schubert's story, "Youth answering the call" .
In the process of working with these two stories, we discovered that "what's going around," may not necessarily be "coming around." That is, while we may be providing for our retiring pastors who are living longer and more active lives, we're not drawing in and mentoring a comparable number of promising young people to be future spiritual leaders of the Indiana church.
If the cycle of leadership is to remain strong, we have work to do.
Keep reading …
