Strengthening the Black Church for the 21st Century New Ministry Spotlight

The Mississippi Conference has two new ministries that are helping churches move to the next level of service. These new ministries are Online 2009 and Communities of Shalom. Both ministries have been received very well in the Mississippi Conference.

Online 2009 is a program designed to give Mississippi churches a way to reach out to their local and world communities for Christ by establishing a presence on the worldwide web and assisting pastors who have been reticent of the technological advances around them to establish e-mail accounts. The first phase of Online 2009, known as the pilot, recently sent out solicitations for churches to complete an application requesting assistance in establishing a website. The web development service is free for the selected churches. The only cost for the selected congregations is the webhosting fee, i.e., the cost to have their website on the worldwide web. Three churches were selected as pilot churches. They are Asbury UMC, Holly Springs, Haven UMC, Winona, and Mt Pleasant UMC, Gulfport. After the launch of the pilot websites at annual conference, other churches will be selected on a rolling basis. The goal of the program is for every African-American church in the Mississippi Conference to have a website.

Communities of Shalom is a ministry birthed at the General Conference of 1992. The purpose of this ministry is not only to address social justice issues on the surface, but to examine the root causes of economic and social disparity and solve problems via systemic changes. Several churches just completed the initial training for Communities of Shalom. They are: I Challenge You (ICU), a community program based at Revels UMC, Greenville; Unique Learning Center for Children (ULCC) based at Wesley UMC in Greenwood; Holmes County Town and Country Ministries based in Goodman; Cluster of Love, an ecumenical ministry based at New Zion UMC in Crystal Springs; and, Cornerstone Ministry, a cooperative ministry in the Forest Hill community in South Jackson which includes Middlebrook UMC and Forest Hill UMC. After the initial training, the selected sites, as a group, will go through five training sessions facilitated by the National Communities of Shalom representative, Will Dent. The training sessions will rotate sites to allow the national representative as well as Shalom participants to be exposed to as many sites as possible. After completing the five required training sessions, each site will be certified as a Communities of Shalom site and receive a start up grant from the National Communities of Shalom organization.

For additional information on these ministries, you may contact Rev. Fitzgerald Lovett, the Mississippi Conference Representative for SBC-21 and Communities of Shalom, at fitzgerald@mississippi-umc.org, or Sandra Randall, Online 2009 Program Coordinator, at sandra@sbc21ms.com.