When the United Brethren branch of the United Methodist Church gathered at the York Opera House in York, Pennsylvania for its General Conference in 1889, they were a growing church in a growing nation that presented new possibilities for mission their founders could hardly have imagined.

​

    Change was in the air. Changes in the church’s constitution had been debated in United Brethren Church publications for months. Votes had been taken in local churches. The results were collected and carried to the general conference. There they would consider proposals concerning the ordination of women, giving laity a voice and vote in annual conferences, changing seminary curriculums, empowering the church’s growth on the Pacific coast, and removing from the church constitution language that prevented members of secret societies from church membership.  All of them were approved. The church created on a wave of German immigration in the early 1700’s re-imagined itself to offer Christ to a nation in a time filled with unprecedented opportunity, growth, and social change.

​

    Not everyone approved. Bishop Milton Wright said he’d rather leave than change. He, and a few others, did just that. His two sons, Orville and Wilbur, would go on to invent the airplane. Throughout their gathering, members of the United Brethren Conference talked about “the work.” Leadership development was for “the work.” A resolution to plant a new church in the nation’s capital was approved, provided that the person sent be gifted for “the work.” The United Brethren Women’s Missionary Association was celebrated as a “grand work.”

​

When the conference moved to adjourn, it gathered in the sanctuary of First Church, York, located at the corner of East Philadelphia and North Newberry Streets, which had been an unprecedented “work” for the church. There Bishop Weaver read a few words he had penciled down for the occasion. These past four years, he said, have left us “better prepared for aggressive work; …we go out, not to contend about questions of church polity …but to win souls for Christ. Let us go out into the field and work until the Master shall say, ‘It is enough, come Home.’”

​

    Many changes have come and gone since Bishop Weaver said those words, and we will see many changes more. The work, though, will stay the same. Christ will add new souls to our churches. The Holy Spirit will lead us into new fields of labor. Our lives will yield the greater fruit of the Holy Spirit until that day when every work done in the name of the Lord is shown to a work of God bringing life from death.

​

Pastor Skip