2 Florida United Methodist Review Online

Member visits, studies Russian churches

By Michael Wacht

LAKELAND — John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, said, “I look upon the world as my parish.” Jody Moxley, the Florida Conference’s representative to the denomination’s General Council on Ministries (GCOM), considers the world her classroom as part of GCOM’s project to study what is happening in United Methodist churches around the globe.

Moxley and two members from other conferences traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, last October to visit four United Methodist congregations and their pastors.

“We went to see what’s happening in the ministry of [United] Methodist churches,” Moxley said. “What are their customs, their backgrounds? How are they sharing Christ and evangelizing?”

Moxley and her team found a church that has no buildings and is meeting in homes and public buildings, including nursing homes. They found pastors and district superintendents who have been Christians for five years or less and are leading congregations after receiving just a year of formal training.

Moxley said the Russian church was kept alive during communist rule by the babushkas, or grandmothers, who told their children and grandchildren about Jesus. Today, the Russian United Methodist church is attracting a large number of women, especially those called to the ministry. She said the Baptist, Pentecostal and Russian Orthodox churches there do not accept women as pastors.

“They’re [Russian Methodists] doing the best they can with what they have,” she said. “They had such hope. They knew that Jesus was going to follow through with them and support them.”

The information collected has been shared with the Council of Bishops and the denomination’s Connectional Process Team (CPT), a 38-member team charged with recommending ways to renew and reshape the structure of the United Methodist Church in the new millennium and give it a more global focus, according to a GCOM recommendation adopted by the 1996 General Conference.