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Friends United Meeting |
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July/August 2000
Commitments
My Friends United Meeting Wish List
By Johan Maurer
In this, my final "Commitments" column as general secretary of Friends United Meeting, I have a favor to ask of you. I would like you to look at the following list of my wishes and dreams for FUM. Evaluate each one, please, and then choose one or two that appeal especially for you, and make it a matter of prayer. Consider whether you yourself have a role in fulfilling that wish, maybe by providing resources or getting personally involved or being committed to regular intercessory prayer. My wishes for FUM:
¥ Spiritual passion among FUM Quakers: A joyful commitment throughout the constituency to be faithful to Jesus Christ, our head, and to help each other stay faithful as individuals and meetings. Remember what a difference it made in your life to know in your bones that Jesus is trustworthy? Consider how you can communicate that difference more effectively, and how you and your meeting can help new people to come to that same knowledge. For the prophets among us: pray for the right words and actions to help Friends everywhere to overcome the temptation to quench the Spirit through traditionalism, caution and old habits.
¥ A general secretary who loves FUM: On an interim basis, my wish has already come true, as Wayne Carter takes over from me this month. Wayne has already served Friends in FUM at every level, and now he will lead the staff while the general secretary search committee completes its work and reports a recommendation to the General Board, hopefully in October. We need a general secretary who loves FUM--who cherishes our unique position and vocation in the world family of Friends, and who sees his or her service as a unique, blessed opportunity to express that love in administration, fundraising and public leadership.
¥ Good financial management: It has taken all seven years and five months of my service to get our unnecessarily complicated and confusing bookkeeping systems fixed. During this past May and June, Retha McCutchen took time out of her World Missions responsibilities to lead a team of staffers (including Carolyn Rhoades, Cheryl Stoner, Nancy Maeder, John Myers, Pat Sickmann, Staci Newsome, and Kristi Nicholson) along with treasurer John Bell and auditor Larry Ness, to install a new and far more logical chart of accounts and enter financial data in time for the June Board meetings. My hope is that FUM will remain committed to this new standard of more helpful and transparent financial systems.
¥ Thoughtful and generous donors: FUM needs yearly meetings, local meetings and individuals who are willing to support our work together at a higher level than before. Those of us who are accustomed to giving all our money to specific concerns also should consider that FUM cannot supervise our ministries adequately without sufficient unrestricted funds to pay administrative costs. Many Friends are responding generously to our appeals, but we also need more of us to consider large gifts (gifts that are too large to come from our last paycheck) and deferred gifts. We are blessed to have Henry Freeman and Mike Johnson working with us to help Friends arrange annuity gifts and other deferred gifts. Much of the money in FUM's permanent investments came from Friends who included bequests for FUM in their wills; we need to continue to encourage Friends to include us in their estate planning. I hope that enough Friends reading these words will send gifts to FUM now, to give Wayne Carter's interim administration some breathing room and give the new general secretary a strong start.
¥ More readers for Quaker Life: I specifically hope that at least two new yearly meetings join Indiana and Western on the every-household plan. The magazine is a central ministry in building a sense of identity among FUM Friends, as well as providing inspirational and practical articles, testimonies of God's work among us, and the information you need to support and govern FUM. While I am at it, I hope that our new editor, Patricia Edwards-Konic, will receive many articles, proposals for articles, letters to the editor, and news stories from you.
¥ Christian unity among Friends: FUM occupies a central place in the world of Friends; as someone said at the February meeting of our General Board, FUM at its core is "unapologetically evangelical and authentically Quaker." Based on this identity, FUM is well-placed to work with Christian Friends from every corner of the Quaker world. During my time, we have collaborated with Friends General Conference on publications in Russian and with Evangelical Friends International on work in Ramallah and pastors' conferences in East Africa and Latin America. At one point, we had field staff working together in Palestine from Northwest, Iowa, North Carolina and Philadelphia Yearly Meetings. Eventually it will make sense for Friends United Meeting and Evangelical Friends International to merge, but in the meantime, whenever collaboration allows us to be more faithful, we ought to jump at the chance.
Thank you for letting me serve you for these years. Please give Wayne Carter and all your servant leaders in FUM your heartfelt prayer support.
Copyright (c) 2000 Friends United Meeting
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