May 2017 – Free Methodist Conversations

RACE

DRAMATIC RISE IN INTERMARRIAGES – PEW RESEARCH by Gretchen Livingston and Anna Brown

May 20, 2017 By dwayman

One of the indicators that American culture is uniting the races in shared life is not only the number of intermarriages but also in the increased support of these marriages. In a recent PEW study the increase in both has been found to be significant in the last twenty years in the United States. The authors are GRETCHEN LIVINGSTON AND ANNA BROWN

In part the research has found:

In 2015, 17% of all U.S. newlyweds had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity, marking more than a fivefold increase since 1967, when 3% of newlyweds were intermarried, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.2 In that year, the U.S. Supreme Court in the Loving v. Virginia case ruled that marriage across racial lines was legal throughout the country. Until this ruling, interracial marriages were forbidden in many states.

More broadly, one-in-ten married people in 2015 – not just those who recently married – had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity. This translates into 11 million people who were intermarried. The growth in intermarriage has coincided with shifting societal norms as Americans have become more accepting of marriages involving spouses of different races and ethnicities, even within their own families.

The most dramatic increases in intermarriage have occurred among black newlyweds. Since 1980, the share who married someone of a different race or ethnicity has more than tripled from 5% to 18%.

WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP

FREE METHODIST WOMEN LEADERS BRING UNIQUE ABILITIES

May 19, 2017 By

By Dr. Denny Wayman, Lead Superintendent of the FMCSC.

At the 2017 Annual Conference in Southern California I presented the findings of an informal study I made asking Free Methodist Women Leaders what it is that women bring to the leadership position that is unique. These are my findings and presentation:

In Genesis we are told that the curse of the fall is such that women have been subjected to men (Gen. 3:16) – AND – it is the Gospel message that this subjugation will be so no more within the Kingdom of God (Matt. 20:25-26) This imperative given to us by our Lord involves both humble diligence toward our own personal prejudices and a consistent commitment toward our church systems such that our sisters are empowered and encouraged to fulfill their God-given purposes.

This year we decided as your superintendents to not divide into workshops as though some of us are interested in missions, and some in leadership, and some in multiethnic ministry, and some in empowering women. All of these five values we all share equally. They define us as Free Methodists!

It has been said that the 21st century is the century designed for the Methodist Message. Our commitment to relationships allows the postmodern world to be engaged in conversations that reach beneath the resistance to religion into direct relationships with God.

RACE

WALKING WHILE BLACK: GARNETTE CADOGAN ON THE REALITIES OF BEING BLACK IN AMERICA

May 15, 2017 By

Listening to the experiences of our people of color is vital to our understanding, compassion, wisdom,identification and unity: Read this account. This articles is written by a Jamaican who loved to walk and then came to the U.S. His name is Garnette Cadogan.

Excerpts:

“My only sin is my skin. What did I do, to be so black and blue?”

–Fats Waller, “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?”

On my first day in the city [New Orleans], I went walking for a few hours to get a feel for the place and to buy supplies to transform my dormitory room from a prison bunker into a welcoming space. When some university staff members found out what I’d been up to, they warned me to restrict my walking to the places recommended as safe to tourists and the parents of freshmen. They trotted out statistics about New Orleans’s crime rate. But Kingston’s crime rate dwarfed those numbers, and I decided to ignore these well-meant cautions. A city was waiting to be discovered, and I wouldn’t let inconvenient facts get in the way. These American criminals are nothing on Kingston’s, I thought. They’re no real threat to me.

What no one had told me was that I was the one who would be considered a threat.

Within days I noticed that many people on the street seemed apprehensive of me: Some gave me a circumspect glance as they approached,

SEXUALITY

CHASTITY AND HOMOSEXUALITY in CATHOLIC CATECHISM

May 10, 2017 By

In the Catechism of the Catholic church this is the teaching on Chastity and Same-Sex attracted people. What do you find that you appreciate about this teaching and what questions does this raise for you:

Chastity and homosexuality

2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,141 tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”142 They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.

2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity.

RACE

THE COLOR OF LAW: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

May 4, 2017 By

In his book released May 2, 2017, Richard Rothstein writes about the United States’ government programs that segregated our neighborhoods and created much of the economic and educational inequities we experience today.

Rothstein presents a comprehensive explanation of various government programs and how the result of many was the segregation of the poor into areas of a city which then produced a lower tax-base with inadequate funding for education, police and other aspects of life taken for granted by the middle class, primarily white citizens.

He writes;

In 2014, police killed Michael Brown, a young African American man in Ferguson, a suburb of St Louis. Protests followed, some violent, and subsequent investigations uncovered systematic police and government abuse of residents in the city’s African American neighborhoods. The reporting made me wonder how the St. Louis metropolitan area became so segregated. It turn out that economic zoning – with a barely disguised racial overlay- played an important role.

To prevent lower-income African Americans from living in neighborhoods where middle-class whites resided, local and federal officials began in the 1910s to promote zoning ordinances to reserve middle-class neighborhoods for single-family homes that lower-income families of all races could not afford. Certainly an important and perhaps primary motivation of zoning rules that kept apartment buildings out of single-family neighborhoods was a social class elitism that was not itself racially biased. But there was also enough open racial intent behind exclusionary zoning that it is integral to the story of de jure segregation.

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Free Methodist Conversations

DRAMATIC RISE IN INTERMARRIAGES – PEW RESEARCH by Gretchen Livingston and Anna Brown

FREE METHODIST WOMEN LEADERS BRING UNIQUE ABILITIES

WALKING WHILE BLACK: GARNETTE CADOGAN ON THE REALITIES OF BEING BLACK IN AMERICA

CHASTITY AND HOMOSEXUALITY in CATHOLIC CATECHISM

THE COLOR OF LAW: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

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