Wesley’s Covenant Service has been recommended for Methodists who gather on New Year’s Eve to worship, leave behind a year, and cross the threshold of a new one. More deeply, Methodists were to receive new life afresh. The core petition of the prayer at the heart of the service is, “I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.” 

After last year’s annual conference session, I asked many what theme they might suggest for 2024. I prayed on the question on long drives and evening walks. I knew early on that I did not feel drawn to a slogan. I felt called to pray and call us to prayer.  

God took me to the heart of the Wesleyan Covenant prayer. In the center of the line is a word, a practice, and a prayer: to “yield.”  This struck me as an appropriate theme. Please reflect on it for our annual conference session and our life together. Join me in prayer for the conference and the yielding God would call us to do. 

I know to yield seems un-American—downright un-Methodist. Practical people who built eight-sided chapels on the American frontier—inspired by the knowledge that eight-sided corn cribs held more corn—would surely be suspect. I simply believe we are in a moment for yielding. Let me explain. 

You’ve heard me quote Susan Beaumont’s observation from her book How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going that “the Christian story is by design an invitation to liminality” (p. 4). It’s a call to yielding, letting go, and letting be so that we have hands open to grasp God’s newness.  

Risking something different 

In my own writing, a poem starts shyly at first, and then I have a choice. I could write what I know, something safe, something I have enjoyed success with in the past. Or I could have the presence of mind to surrender to the poem that wants and needs to be written, a new emergence and risk. It may take countless unhappy drafts, but at least it is not the thing I have trotted out before—and what no longer works. I believe this is the yielding of soul required for this moment and for the work of creative ministry. 

One congregation I served obtained a demographic study that indicated that very few in a ten-mile radius of the church were likely to seek out a Sunday worship service. It also told us the neighbors were multiracial, spiritual but not religious, and observers of many faiths.  

We could have ignored the facts, powered through with our familiar patterns, and maligned the messenger. However, the only way we could be in ministry with our neighbors was to serve them not on Sundays but during the week. That started us on a course that led us to develop nonprofits that served children. The prayer whispers, “I yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.” 

Disruption may bring opportunity  

Another enjoinder from Beaumont remains with me: “In an age of disruption, healthy leaders create an environment where the new can emerge.”  We do not disguise the disruptions; we create space for God’s newness and we live in a Holy Saturday season, between Good Friday’s losses and before Easter’s rebirth. 

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul offers the church a living, practical Christology: Jesus “emptied himself” and “humbled himself” (2: 7-8). I invite you to empty your thoughts of the familiar and ask yourself: 

• In your walk with Jesus, what wants to emerge?  
• In your ministry, what wants to emerge? 
• In our world, beloved community or ubuntu is crying out; how can we yield to achieve it? 
• What wants to emerge in the Northern Illinois Conference?  
• What wants to emerge in your church? 

At conference session in June, we will gather after the General Conference and its successes and failures. We are also planning now for how we may share an episcopal leader with the Wisconsin Conference. Can you pray with me to engage the newness God is bringing? Even if it is not yet visible? Might that help us draw closer to God and grow as a learning organization?  

Please pray for me to be open to God and lead us according to the way of the Spirit.     

Know that I am praying for you.