UMC Resources

There are three resources I would like to point to here.

1. Although I don’t live in Philadelphia anymore, some visitors to this site still might be interested in viewing the walking tour of Philadelphia Methodism I created a few years ago which takes folks on a tour of 22 Methodist-related sites in the National Historic Park in downtown Philadelphia.
2. In 2012 I created an extensive annotated bibliography and guide to help persons who are seeking to be commissioned as either elders of deacons in the United Methodist Church.  In my experience on the Board of Ordained Ministry in Pennsylvania I realized that some students were a bit lost in knowing where to turn for assistance in helping them write their doctrinal examination papers.   A Bibliographical Guide for the UMC Doctrinal Examination is intended to help them do that.  I have tried to make this guide inclusive of rather diverse theological perspectives, but I encourage other United Methodist scholars to modify and continually update this resource for their own students as they wish.  It is saved as an MS Word document to facilitate that editing.  To be clear, no Board of Ordained Ministry has officially approved this resource to be used by candidates, but a number of people from around the country have expressed their gratitude to me for making it available.
3. Finally, one of the ways that I serve as a deacon in the United Methodist Church is that I attend a couple of ecumenical gatherings as a UMC representative of the Council of Bishops.  The Wesleyan Holiness Connection is one of those and the National Council of Churches of Christ is the other.  For the latter group I am co-facilitating a study process over the next few years that will seek to respond to a World Council of Churches document that provides guidance for Christians in thinking and acting rightly in an increasingly pluralistic world.  Although this is not directly a “United Methodist Resource” I wanted to make the two documents we will be working with available here as I may refer people to it in the coming months.  The first (and longer) document below is rather difficult to find elsewhere on the internet.
   1. “Who do we say that we are” WCC document longer version
   2. Christian Witness in a Multi-Religious World. This document was approved by the World Council of Church, the Roman Catholic Church, and the World Evangelical Alliance.