Moving Towards the Margins at GC

It was just like any other early May morning in Tampa, hot and muggy. The General Conference of The United Methodist Church, the main decision-making body of The UMC, would soon be coming to a close. We knew that it was the big day, the day that whether or not The UMC would agree to disagree on human sexuality would be on the table.

No legislation had made it out of committee to be passed on to the main body, but in one last-ditch attempt to salvage the dignity of queer folks, a replacement was proposed. While effectively stating that The UMC agrees to disagree on human sexuality, the compromise offered was less than satisfactory in some regards, but the legislative strategists among us knew that it was likely our only chance to remove the statement that “The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and considers it incompatible with Christian teaching.”

You Can’t Stop the Beat: Bringing Change to The UMC

This was originally posted at In Our Words, a blog a friend of mine from DePaul started. As it is part of my reflections on General Conference, I have decided to re-post it here with a few edits so those who do not follow IOW or who didn’t see my facebook posts of this article could know a little more about my activities at and reflections on General Conference.

Dancers from the flash mob
Photo from UMCOM GC Photostream

For the last week of April and the first week of May, I spent my time in Tampa, FL. No, it wasn’t some sort of Girls Gone Wild-esque Spring Break misadventure. Instead, it was a misadventure of much more epic proportions, or so it felt at times. It was the General Conference of The United Methodist Church, or, more simply, a conference of 1,000 United Methodists from across the world coming together to talk about the structure, management, and social stances of The UMC for the next four years.

Open Letter to Pastor Andy Langford from a Young United Methodist Leader

I have recently seen many blog entries reacting to General Conference, many of which touch or focus on the failure of any restructuring proposals to pass at this General Conference. One in particular which did not resonate well with me was a post by Pastor Andy Langford called “An Open Letter to United Methodists” [click the title for a link to the post]. The following began as a comment on his post, but got so long I decided to make it a blog post in response to the original. Please keep the discussion going.

March 2012 Newsletter

Below you will find my March 2012 newsletter. Running a little later than my six-month mark due to a number of big events that set me back in my ability to put it together, but you’ll be able to read about that soon!

Take care, and I hope to hear from y’all soon!

For reasons of complications with another Mission Intern, I’ve needed to remove the newsletter from my blog, but if you want a copy of it, let me know at kara.gbgm@gmail.com and I’d be glad to send it to you!

Martyrs for Love

For me right now, Valentine’s Day could have easily passed by without my batting an eyelash. Colombia (thank goodness) has not caved to the consumerism of the holiday. When I saw the notifications that all of my friends were talking about Valentine’s Day on Facebook for the past few days, I decided to not let it bring me down; I would reclaim the day. I began by reclaiming the day as Singles’ Self-Empowerment Day, because I’m not fond of the idea of Singles’ Awareness Day; that just seems depressing and like it continues placing coupled people on some sort of pedestal. Of course, it’s also the birthday of Anna Howard Shaw, so it is already reclaimed as a feminist holiday. But this morning, I saw that a friend had posted the following, a history of St. Valentine:

Convirtiendo en una Prima // Becoming a Cousin

Whoops, I haven’t blogged for a month and a half. I guess time really does fly when you’re having fun. But also, other than my travels around  Colombia during the holidays and going back to work, I really don’t have much to report on. So I guess I’ll share some reflections on one of the lessons I’ve learned over these holiday travels, and maybe I’ll be better about getting back into the habit of regular blogging.

Family. It’s an incredibly complex concept, one holding different meaning for each and every person, a concept that psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists spend their fair share of time trying to reach some sort of understanding about. Growing up as the daughter of two United Methodist pastors, I  learned from a young age the importance and meaning of chosen family (my first set of chosen grandparents were in the town we moved away from when I was two years old, so I’m not sure whether they were assigned or chosen, but they were significant nonetheless).  But I think that since I  moved to Colombia, alone, as a single young woman whose biological family is thousands of miles away, family has taken on a whole different meaning for me.

There’s Something About Muppets

Muppet Christmas Carol has always been my favorite Christmas movie for as long as I can remember. Ask my family. They will confirm that every year I begin insisting that we watch it around Thanksgiving, and when we finally do watch it, I sing along, recite all the good one-liners (most of which belong to Rizzo and Gonzo), and am generally as happy as a five-year-old gearing up for the annual visit to Santa at the local mall. I spend the entire Christmas season singing my favorite songs from the movie. I even recall shedding a tear or two when our VCR ate our VHS copy, making it so I couldn’t watch it in the pre-Christmas season…last year.

December 2011 Newsletter

Hey all! Sorry it’s been almost a month since my last post. This month has been nuts; soon I should be posting some updates on what I’ve been up to in the past month, but for now, here’s a link to my first quarterly newsletter!

Building “hailpeople”

On Tuesday, it poured hail. I’m not joking or exaggerating; if you imagine a massive downpour and then change the raindrops to pieces (balls? bits? I don’t even know the correct terminology) of hail, you get a perfect picture of what happened. Little pellets of ice were pouring from the sky. One coworker joked that it was the beginning of the end of the world; the precursor to what’s supposed to happen next year: 2012.

I was entranced; never before in my life do I recall having seen hail, and definitely not of this epic proportion. Guess I got my Colombian Snowpocalypse after all (only this one was Hailpocalypse). There was, to all intents and purposes, a literal river of melted hail flowing down the street in front of work, and the unmelted hail covered the ground, at a distance looking like a blanket of snow. To me it was a fascinatingly and somewhat hauntingly beautiful sight.

Va Dios Mismo en Nuestro Mismo Caminar

I really enjoyed church this past weekend. Like, a whole lot. I really felt spiritually connected in the worship setting for the first time in a while. I’d found spaces to feel spiritually connected in other ways, but not in the context of worship. But worship and the church activities after the service really resonated somewhere in the depths of my soul. And it was well with my soul.