An Iowa woman leaves today (Monday) for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she’ll deal with some worldwide issues as a delegate to the United Methodist Church General Conference. Twila Glenn says the conference is where delegates from across the nation meet to decide policy for the organization. She says international growth will be one of the big points of discussion. She says they have a enormously growing church in Africa. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, the church is growing in northern and eastern Europe, the church in Asia and the Philippines is rapidly growing. Glenn says they’re trying to help the new churches grow.She says the challenge is how to support these churches with infrastructure and clergy to be a highly-evangelical church without making them exactly like the churches in the United States. She says the churches have to be able to develop to meet the needs of their own individual cultures, but she says it’s not easy to provide help while not dominating their policies. She says the folks who hold the resources sometimes want to make the decisions about how things work, and most of the resources are held in North America. She says, “how that will all play out is going to be very, very interesting.” Glenn says the massive growth abroad is something most Christian churches are experiencing.She says the political clout of communism, particularly in Africa, has really withdrawn. She says they discovered that Christian churches were vital and underground during the communist rule, and she says they’re now “popping up like Daffodils in the spring, and it’s a wonderful thing to behold.” Glenn is one of the delegates representing the nearly 200-thousand Iowa members of the United Methodist Church.
