GracePoint Leaves UMC a New Paradigm

I have been thinking about the whole situation with GracePoint Community Church choosing to leave the United Methodist Church quite a bit this week. I have googled as many different ways as I could to find all the information available both from new sources and blogs. Overall, the reaction from most of the UM bloggers has been grace filled but not overly hopeful. I would like to suggest a new paradigm for how we can view this situation.

My experience tells me that the way I think about a particular situation will change my emotional response to it, and the way I react to it and can in the end change the situation itself.

So, if I think a particular situation is terrible and a catastrophe I will treat it as such and it will more likely become a catastrophe.

If however, I think of a particular situation as being hope filled and full of unexpected possibilities I will treat it that way and it will, once again, more likely become so.

I would like to suggest that GracePoint UMC and the leadership of the KS West District of the UMC view GracePoint Community Church as a daughter church of GracePoint UMC. Granted this was not an intentional church planting, but unexpected and even at first unwanted children are often an amazing blessing. True, they can be inconvenient and they may even cause a scandal when they first arrive if they do so in an “unorthodox manner.”

GracePoint Community Church started out within the UMC and will always have some of United Methodist genes, so it truly is a daughter of the United Methodist Church and of GracePoint UMC. Sometimes our children grow up and don’t choose a direction we would want them to choose. Sometimes they even do things and make choices that hurt us. But the time comes when we just have to let them go and trust God to take care of them. After all they are his children too, even more so than they were ever ours.