Gustavo Vasquez: CIEMAL College of Bishops and Presidents Elects New Board of Directors

Today's post is by Rev. Gustavo Vasquez, Director of Hispanic/Latino Communications at United Methodist News. It originally appeared in a Spanish version on UMNews. It has been translated by David W. Scott and appears here by permission.

In very challenging times due to the effects caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the College of Bishops and Presidents of CIEMAL (Consejo de Iglesias Evangelicas Metodistas de America Latina y el Caribe; the Council of Evangelical Methodist Churches in Latin America and the Caribbean) has elected its new Board of Directors for the 2022-2027 quinquennium.

The election process took place on November 26-27, 2022 virtually via Zoom, where bishops and presidents of the Methodist churches in the Latin American and Caribbean region met to deliberate and choose new officers.

According to an announcement from the group, it is the first time that the process happened virtually, as “this type of election has usually been done in person,” but after the COVID-19 pandemic affected normal air travel and health requirements for international travel, many of the meetings and events have happened online.

The result of the election process has led to a new Board of Directors composed of Bishop Lizzette Gabriel Montalvo, of the Methodist Church of Puerto Rico, who is the first woman elected as president of this collegial body; Bishop Bruno Roberto Pereira dos Santos, of the Methodist Church in Brazil, as vice president; and Dr. Evelyn Wibmer Murdoch, of the Methodist Church in Uruguay, as secretary.

Bishop Gabriel had been president of the entire CIEMAL body in the 2012-2017 quinquennium and vice president in the 2017-2022 quinquennium and now appears for the first time as president of its College of Bishops and Presidents. She was recently elected as the first woman to occupy the episcopacy of the Methodist Church of Puerto Rico.

Together with Bishop Gabriel will be Bishop Bruno Roberto Pereira dos Santos, who for his part was recently elected bishop of the 4th Episcopal Region of the Methodist Church in Brazil. Pereira dos Santos is also the secretary of the College of Bishops of the Brazilian church.

At the same time, Dr. Evelyn Wibmer Murdoch is a lay leader elected as president of the Methodist Church in Uruguay in June 2021 and now will be the new secretary of the College of Bishops and Presidents of CIEMAL.

For its part, the Board of Directors which has been in office since 2017 and ended its term in these last elections was made up of the bishops Juan de Dios Peña Gallegos of the Evangelical Methodist Church in El Salvador as president; Samuel Aguilar Cury of the Methodist Church of Peru as vice president; and Hideide Brito Torres of the 8th Episcopal Region of the Methodist Church in Brazil, who was the secretary of the board.

According to the announcement by CIEMAL, the College of Bishops and Presidents “is a body of CIEMAL whose purposes are pastoral accompaniment for the church in Latin America and the Caribbean and to be a prophetic voice in the face of the new challenges and new realities that confront the church and society in the region.”

Brief biographies of the members of the new Board of Directors of the College of Bishops and Presidents of CIEMAL are below:

Lizzette Gabriel Montalvo has been a pastor in the Methodist Church of Puerto Rico since July 1989. She has had outstanding leadership in the Emmaus Community of Puerto Rico since her participation in Walk #3 in Mexico (1989). She has actively participated in the opening of new communities in Texas, Florida, Georgia, and New Jersey.

She was certified as a Spiritual Director at the Academy of Spiritual Formation #22 held in San Antonio, Texas. She led three Academies in her country and was the first woman recognized as Chaplain of the National Guard of Puerto Rico (1994). Currently, she has participated as a volunteer on the Citizen Interaction Committee, Puerto Rico Command of Caguas.

She has been a member of the Alzheimer's Society of Puerto Rico since 2019 and serves as spiritual director for the Caguas chapter of the support group for Alzheimer's caregivers. She was the first spokesperson for the Faith Based Organizations Advisory Committee for the city of Caguas.

Bruno Roberto Pereira dos Santos is a bishop of the Methodist Church in Brazil assigned to the 4th Episcopal Region, which includes the states of Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo.

He is the current secretary of the College of Bishops of the Methodist Church in Brazil, with 20 years of pastoral ministry. In Rio de Janeiro, he was pastor in the capital and the rural areas of the state and was a district superintendent.

Bishop Pereira dos Santos has been married for 18 years and has three children. A member of the church since he was a child, he entered the theological school of the Brazilian Methodist church and received his first pastoral assignment at 21 years old.

Currently, he is studying for a postgraduate degree in theological pedagogy and was homiletics professor at the César Dacorso Filho Seminary for the training of new pastors.

Evelyn Wibmer Murdoch is a lay leader and current president of the Methodist Church in Uruguay.

She was born and raised in Montevideo, the capital of the country. Married, months away from her golden jubilee, mother of four children, and grandmother of five grandchildren, she comes from a Methodist family of several generations.

She has been a member of the church since she was a teenager, member of the committee of directors of Central Methodist Church, representative to national assemblies, vice president of the National Board of Life and Mission (JNVM) between 2012 and 2015, and president of JNVM from July 2021 to this date.

She is a medical doctor with postgraduate experience in internal medicine and nephrology and studies in health management and the management of dialysis centers. She developed her career at the Mutualista Evangelical Hospital, where she was General Manager from 2015 to 2019. She was representative of the mutual sector to the National Resources Fund from 2011 to 2015; co-founder of an acute dialysis center, two chronic dialysis centers, and a kidney transplant center; and president of the medical guild of Mutualista Evangelical Hospital in two separate periods.

Brazilian, Eurasian Perspectives on Mission

Good News Magazine recently published two articles about mission by Methodists outside the United States. Both are worth a read because of the ways in which they strongly convey central points of contemporary mission thinking.

In an article entitled, "A New Path for the Mission," Luciano Pereira da Silva, the Secretary-General of CIEMAL, the Council of Evangelical Methodist Churches of Latin America and the Caribbean, writes of the importance of "empowering indigenous leaders within the mission." He adds, "We desire and envision a relationship with agencies and missionaries abroad as follows: the relationship must be cultivated, but from a vision of interdependence, not dependency. The mission’s agenda should never be imposed by outsiders, but rather be contextualized and mutually shared.

In an article entitled, "The Mission Movement in the Post-Soviet Context," Eurasia Bishop Eduard Khegay of the UMC condemns missionaries, including short term missionaries, "who make little effort to learn the local language and understand our culture." He also advocates for the importance of building relationships in mission, saying:

"It is much harder to invest in building relationships and patiently wait when local leaders would have their own dreams and strategic plans. But isn’t genuine discipleship about building relationships? Westerners feel that we go to extremes and drink too much tea and don’t reach the goals. And they are right. We do talk a lot. We need to work more. But going to another extreme – reaching your goals and missing building relationships – can damage our mission as well."

There is certainly a lot of division within Methodism currently. But this division must not let us lose sight of an important fact about mission theology: There is a remarkable degree of agreement about what good mission looks like, and that agreement holds across cultures and other theological issues.

Local leadership, avoiding dependency, contextualization, mutuality, cross-cultural learning, and relationship building aren't Progressive or Traditionalist takes on mission theology. They aren't US American or developing world takes on mission theology. They're just good missiology.

Will the Future of the UMC Look Like CIEMAL?

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Director of Mission Theology at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

While General Conference 2019 was a divisive experience and the legislative results hotly contested, the one thing that everyone seems to agree on in its aftermath is that The United Methodist Church cannot continue in the same form it has. Our present ecclesiological system is unable to respond adequately to the challenges of our life together, and it is necessary to find new ways of being Methodist together, or quite likely, apart from one another.

It is entirely possible that if the UMC splits, the remaining parts would have no relation to one another. Yet there are many who do not want to give up on our global connections even while there is some form of separation. How then can these connections continue?

Robert Hunt, in a recent blog post, asserts that "true unity is found only in the world-wide mission of the apostolic church," but sees such an understanding of unity as compatible with "a global Methodist Church made up of autonomous annual conferences."

What would such a global Methodist Church look like? One possibility is that it would look a good deal like CIEMAL, El Consejo de Iglesias Evangélicas Metodistas de América Latina y el Caribe (the Council of Methodist Churches of Latin America and the Caribbean).

CIEMAL is an organization that brings together fifteen autonomous Methodist churches. It "acts as a convener, guide and director of the service and the testimony of Latin American Methodism."

The member denominations of CIEMAL are entirely autonomous. They are responsible for their own doctrinal standards, worship guidance, clergy credentialing, and structures of authority and accountability. They also each have internal structures for joint mission and ministry and for shared fellowship among their members.

Yet the denominations of CIEMAL recognize that they have something to gain through the joint mission, joint ministry, and mutual fellowship provided by the wider body. CIEMAL does such things as promoting coordination between member bodies, facilitating fraternal exchange among member denominations, mutually training cross-cultural missionaries, recognizing and supporting newly-forming Methodist churches in the area (such as Columbia and Venezuela), resolving conflicts between Methodist bodies (as in Venezuela), and engaging other Methodist bodies around the world (such as the Methodist Church in Britain). All this happens through a Program Commission, a Council of Bishops, a four-person Executive Committee, and an occasional General Assembly.

CIEMAL was formed in the late 1960s when United Methodist Church annual conferences in Latin America were becoming autonomous but wanted to avoid becoming insular and instead maintain some connection to one another and The United Methodist Church, which participates in CIEMAL through Global Ministries.

If The United Methodist Church breaks up into two or more autonomous bodies, there could still be a role for some organization to play in facilitating conversations between members of these bodies, coordinating mutual mission and ministry work, training and sending missionaries, and supporting the creation of new Methodist churches in areas around the world. Such an arrangement could provide current United Methodists with enough space from each other through autonomy without surrendering the global sense of mutual compassion and fellowship that at best characterizes our international body as it is.

On the Methodist Church in Britain, CIEMAL, and learning from our global partners

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Director of Mission Theology at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

I recently saw a surprising flyer put out by the Methodist Church in Britain. The flyer was for an advertisement for a new program to assist with evangelism that the Methodist Church in Britain was offering. This itself was not surprising.

What was surprising to me was the program itself: the Methodist Church in Britain was offering for local churches in Britain to receive missionaries from CIEMAL, the Consejo de Iglesias Evangélicas Metodistas de América Latina y el Caribe (Council of Methodist Church in Latin America and the Caribbean), who would assist these British churches with their evangelism programs over the course of three years.

The Methodist Church in Britain pointed out that Methodism is growing in many places in Latin America and the Caribbean and left unspoken the contrast that Methodism is shrinking in most places in Britain. If Methodism is growing in Latin America and the Caribbean, might not Latin Americans and Caribbeans have something to teach the British?

That seems logical enough, but what was surprising was the embrace by the Methodist Church in Britain of a very different sort of relationship with some of its descendant churches than the one it traditionally had. Don't get me wrong - I think the shift is very laudable, but it is still surprising.

Traditionally, the Methodist Church in Britain was the one exporting missionaries elsewhere. Those missionaries went out and told other people how to do their evangelism. British Methodists did not receive missionaries or need anyone else to tell them how to do their own evangelism. They were the ones with the money, the power, and the answers.

That attitude has been changing for some time in Britain. The post-colonial and post-Christendom British church realizes it can no longer expect to project itself as the center of money, power, and knowledge, among Methodists abroad or within its own society, in the same way it used to.

Yet this recent flier represents a further step, and a necessary one. There is a progression - from "we will go out as missionaries with the answers," to "we will go out as missionaries in partnership with others, where both sides have answers," to "we may still go out as missionaries, but we also need to receive missionaries and answers from others."

Some of my surprise, I am sure, comes from being an American. It is difficult enough to get many American Christians to shift from the first mindset to the second on the above continuum. That denominational leadership would promote the shift to the third mindset seems unthinkable. What would be the reaction if The United Methodist Church offered to deploy Congolese evangelists in the United States? How would US churches respond to the suggestion that they needed to place themselves under the tutelage and leadership of Africans?

Yet that is the direction that Western Christians should go. We must recognize that it is not only us who go as missionaries, nor only us who have the answers, nor only others who have problems with which they need help. All Christians are called to mission. All Christians have knowledge to share. And all Christians, including Western Christians, have problems with which they need help. We, too, must be willing to listen to others who have aspects of the gospel to share with us so that we can hear them with fresh ears. We, too, must be willing to receive from others just as much as we seek to share with them. The church in the United States may not be at that point yet, but I pray it gets there.