General Conference preserves archives and

Number 172
Bishop Ernest Lyght to address Greater New Jersey annual meeting
The 2016 GNJC Historical Society
Annual Meeting and program
“Celebrating the Ministry of the
Delaware Conference” will be held
on Saturday, November 12, 2016
from 9:45 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. at Mt.
Zion United Methodist Church, 134
Bishop Ernest Lyght. S. White Horse Pike, Lawnside, N.J.
Photo by Mike DuBose The program is co-sponsored by the
GNJC Commission on Archives and History.
The keynote speaker will be Bishop Ernest S. Lyght
(retired). The son of a Methodist pastor and District
Superintendent, Bishop S. Lyght grew up in the bounds
of the Delaware Conference. Ordained as a Deacon and
as an Elder by the Peninsula-Delaware Conference,
he also served as a pastor in both the Southern New
Jersey and Northern New Jersey Conferences, and as
District Superintendent of the Raritan District in the
Northern New Jersey Conference, from whence he was
nominated for the episcopal office. Elected as a bishop
by the Northeastern Jurisdictional Conference in 1996,
he served as resident bishop of the New York and West
Virginia Episcopal Areas before returning to New
Jersey in retirement. Bishop Lyght is the co-author
of Many Faces of the Church, The Confessions of Three
Ebony Bishops, and Our Father. His latest publication is
Have You Faith in Christ?
After lunch a local history tour will include Mt. Zion
UMC and Mt. Pisgah African Methodist Episcopal Church,
historic African American congregations in Lawnside, the
first incorporated African American community north of
October, 2016
the Mason-Dixon Line. We will also visit The Peter Mott
House, a documented site on the Underground Railroad
that is symbolic of the many reasons why Lawnside was
originally known as Free Haven.
Registration is $10.00 per person, which covers the cost
of the luncheon. Please send your check made out to “GNJ
Historical Society” to June McCullough, 2139 E Chestnut
Ave. #15, Vineland, NJ 08361. For more information,
please contact her at mommomsjune@aol.com.
Memories of the 2016 annual
meeting in Dover, Delaware
more photos on page 2
Mark your calendar!
Dr. John Wigger, author of the highly-acclaimed American Saint:
Francis Asbury and the Methodists, will speak at the Barratt’s
Chapel anniversary service on November 13 at 4 p.m. Dr. Wigger
is professor of history at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and
one of the country’s leading historians of American Christianity.
For more information, please contact Barb Duffin at barratts@aol.
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The Northeastern United
Methodist Historical Bulletin
Published 4 times a year by the Northeastern
Jurisdictional Commission on Archives and
History of the United Methodist Church
Editor:
Jane Donovan
3710 Swallowtail Drive
Morgantown, WV 26508-8821
304-594-3914 (home)
donovanjb@comcast.net
All items for publication
should be sent to the Editor.
Subscriptions Office:
Subscription requests or address
changes should be sent to:
J. Leonard Bachelder
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978-346-8410
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Subscribers requesting change of address
should give both old and new addresses
with zip code. If possible, please return
your old address label with your request.
DEADLINE FOR THE NEXT ISSUE OF
THE BULLETIN: November 1, 2016
Northeastern Jurisdictional
Commission on Archives and History
Officers for the 2016-2020
Quadrennium
Executive Committee:
President: Joe DiPaolo
Vice President: Earle Baker
Secretary: Kathy Hanko
Treasurer: Philip Lawton
Archivist: Barbara Duffin
Bulletin Editor: Jane Donovan
Immediate Past President:
Matthew Loyer
At-Large Members:
Janet A. Mills and Donald DeGroat
Letter from the President
Dear Friends in NEJCAH:
I’ve been doing a fair amount of research
into my family history in the last year or
so: interviewing aged relatives, gathering
photographs and written recollections of my
grandparents, browsing online genealogical
sites. My paternal grandparents were
immigrants with minimal formal education
and meagre resources, who came to the
US in the early 20th century – before there
was even trans-Atlantic telephone service.
Yet they carved out a life that has resulted,
a century later, in a gaggle of grandchildren
and great-grandchildren who have excelled
in law, science, business, medicine, and the arts. I have been amazed to
learn of stories I never knew about, yet which I realize profoundly impacted
who I and my cousins (and children, nephews and nieces) became.
Those of us familiar with Wesleyan theology know about “prevenient
grace,” the teaching that God’s grace is at work in our lives well before we
respond in saving faith, doing a work of shaping and drawing us – even
before we even know about it. It seems to me that we might also talk about
“prevenient history,” because much has happened that impacted us, even
before we were born. So much of our upbringing and development has
shaped who we are and how we interact with the world – again, before we
are consciously aware of it.
That is the power and the importance of the ministry of memory with
which we are engaged. We in the Church are impacted by patterns of
thinking and behaving and organizing that long preceded our arrival on
the scene. Being aware of that, and learning from it, can not only help us
better understand who we are, but better negotiate the future.
Joe DiPaolo
...more memories of the 2016 annual meeting
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From the General Secretary
by Fred Day
Tourist or Pilgrim?
It was my delight and privilege to be one of the
leaders as The General Commission on Archives and
History joined Discipleship Ministries and the General
Board of Higher Education and Ministry in sponsoring
the tenth annual Wesley Pilgrimage in England.
From our home base, Sarum College, the awesome
spectacle of Salisbury Cathedral greeted the group of
nearly forty clergy and laity from around the global
UMC each morning. The ten day trek included Wesley
Methodist Church, Christ Church Cathedral, Lincoln
College and St. Mary’s in Oxford; Francis Asbury’s
boyhood home in West Bromwich; St. Andrew’s Church
and the Old Rectory in Epworth; The New Room and
Charles Wesley’s house in Bristol; and in London,
Methodist Central Hall, Westminster, Wesley Chapel
City Road, The Museum of Methodism, and a walking
tour of the Wesleys’ London, culminating in Evensong
in the quire at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
This sounds like the typical itinerary for a Wesley
Heritage tour, but the way we engaged the places and
their stories made this more than just another packaged
tour. Event founders Drs. Steve Manskar (Discipleship
Ministries) and Paul Chilcote (Ashland Theological
Seminary) asked participants the question: “Will you
be a tourist or pilgrim?” At first glance tourist and
pilgrim look the same. They are both travelers, after
all. But their relationship to their surroundings is
entirely different.
Tourists are escaping the stresses of everyday life;
pilgrims are embracing them. Parker Palmer notes
that “In the tradition of pilgrimage . . . hardships are
seen not as accidental but integral to the journey
itself.” Tourists are trying to forget, pilgrims are trying
to remember. Tourists hate to be surprised; pilgrims
believe surprises open them to new insight.
I not only found the pilgrim/tourist contrast useful
in exploring the stomping grounds of our founders
but continue to find it insightful and inspiring for
our work as Commissions on Archives and History,
Historical Societies and friends of Methodist history.
Our work, the mandate to “promote and care for the
historical interests of the United Methodist Church
and its antecedents” (2012 Book of Discipline, para.
1703), and our efforts for the wider Church is a sacred
sojourn to understand the past in order to better
engage the present and envision the future. It is more
about connecting with what it means to be founded,
formed and functioning as “people called Methodist”
than reveling in the warm-fuzzies of Methodist history
everyone seems to know by heart. Our work is
about inquiry into the strands
of the denominational DNA,
discerning how Methodist
legacy lives on.
Pilgrim or tourist? I think
you know the answer as far
as our work is concerned.
We are on a pilgrimage –
an embracing, engaging,
enduring,
awakening,
insightful,
“ministry
of
memory,” visiting the past,
to be present in the present,
Alfred T. Day III
using all that to form and
shape the future.
The 2016 Wesley Pilgrimage in England affirmed
more than ever the ways in which our Methodist
heritage can speak to God-seekers in the times in
which we live. Our heritage is one of a people whose
relationship with God is grounded in a theology of
love and inclusion. Our forebears believed, sang and
gathered in ways that made it plain that God’s love is
a force to be reckoned with. It is fully available, to be
experienced and made accessible to everyone.
The Wesley Pilgrimage in England not only affirmed
this Methodist paradigm, but it also provided daily
immersion in how this way of being the church comes
alive in small discipleship groups, meeting for mutual
support for keeping the faith. This experience ignites
piety -- not the holier-than-thou stuff -- and differencemaking acts of compassion, justice and mercy in our
very lives and communities. The experience engages
and loses the means of grace.
The General Commission on Archives an History
will co-sponsor The Wesley Pilgrimage in England
next year and in the years to come. For more
information, see http://www.umcdiscipleship.org/
leadership-resources/wesley-pilgrimage-in-england
http://www.umc.org/what-we-believe/the-wesleypilgrimage-walking-the-path-of-early-methodists
http://www.umc.org/what-we-believe/wesleypilgrims-visit-the-past-to-shape-the-future
Fred Day, General Secretary
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P.S. Have you friended The General Commission on
Archives and History on Facebook?
John Wesley and Belief about the Christian Church
“Although John Wesley did not identify a doctrine of the church as a ‘necessary’ or essential Christian doctrine,
he considered the Christian community itself to be necessary for Christian existence. The first point of his fourth
sermon in a series on the Sermon on the Mount was that ‘Christianity is essentially a social religion; and that to
turn it into a solitary religion, is indeed to destroy it’ and he went on to claim that Christianity ‘cannot subsist
at all, without society, – without living and conversing with others.’ . . . The point
he made here is that although a doctrine of the church might not be strictly
necessary, the church as a ‘society’ of believers is necessary for the Christian
life. Consistent with this, he included teaching about the church among the
Articles of Religion he sent to the American Methodists in 1784. . . .To
[the] elements of ‘church’ defined in the Anglican Article that Methodists
used, the Reformed tradition had added a fourth element, namely, church
discipline. . . . Discipline in small groups would become a distinguishing
mark of the Methodist movement, but this raises a further complication
in John Wesley’s thought about the nature of the Christian community,
namely, the issue of which elements of ‘church’ Wesleyan communities
claimed or needed as they existed initially within the Church of England
and then as they came to exist as churches apart from the Church
of England.”
– Excerpt from Wesleyan Beliefs: Formal and Popular
Expressions of the Core Beliefs of Wesleyan Communities by Dr.
Ted A. Campbell (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 2010), 46-48. Ted
received the 2016 Distinguished Service Award from the General
Commission on Archives and History for his services to United
Methodist history and education.
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