According to the January 2019 report in Psychology Today, nearly half of all Americans report feeling alone, isolated, and left out. Loneliness is the fastest growing public health concern, according to the US Government’s Health and Human Services website. Essentially due to our vocational mobility, lack of stability, and cultural stresses, making friends is a lost art.
Rev Greg Moore spent Thursday evening of annual conference focusing on how the people called Methodist were first and foremost, people who make friends. Planting new churches and renewing existing ones is more than “being friendly,” it is actually about being friends with those who are missing from our communion.
The night was filled with interactive conversation, as participants experimented in an accelerated way, how creating holy friends should mold and shape us as disciples. This is not new; this is how John Wesley created the system that spread scriptural holiness across England and the emerging US colonies.
The office of New Faith Communities provided pocket-sized handbooks and table tents with gathering prayers to be used around dining tables to resource continued friend- making. The gathering was sent out to replicate making holy friends across the conference since, as Rev. Moore say, “Every Methodist is a church planter. Go, make friends, and plant churches.”