Bishop Ward and the NC Conference Cabinet are meeting this week with the Western NC Conference Cabinet and Bishop Paul Leeland. She shares what topics they plan to discuss.
Grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus Christ. Blessed be the ties that bind our hearts in Christian love.
This week, we are reunited in a profound way with an old and dear friend, Bishop Paul Leeland. Bishop Leeland and Janet have moved to Charlotte, where he is now assigned as Bishop of the Western North Carolina Annual Conference.
As our cabinet meets with the Western Conference cabinet today and tomorrow, we will engage together with our dear friend and our partners in the Western North Carolina Conference. We will continue to think and pray together about priorities that we have identified in previous meetings with the Western North Carolina Annual Conference, priorities that extend across our entire expanse of North Carolina.
We will engage together around Congregations for Children, our initiative to connect every congregation with a public school. We will continue to move forward in our partnership with children and public schools, Congregations for Children, connecting every local United Methodist congregation with a public school – helping children have the basic necessities for school; helping them learn to read; helping their parents and caregivers be engaged and helping our churches understand the impact of poverty upon the lives of children.
We will also engage in ministries resisting hunger, having learned together in our last meeting the impact of hunger upon the lives of so many families in North Carolina. We will also engage in racial reconciliation across our state, learning new patterns, new ways to convene, new ways to combine our efforts so that people may live in greater peace and prosperity in their communities. We will continue together in partnership in Armenia through Project AGAPE.
In these and other ways, we give thanks for the rich, long and enduring partnership of United Methodist people, from the mountains to the beautiful coast.
Thank you for your prayers and welcome to North Carolina, Bishop Leeland.