In response to the groundswell of local and global justice work, Pioneer United Methodist Church and the Neighborhood Engagement Program at the City of Walla Walla are hosting a monthly series of speakers and storytellers on a variety of critical topics in our city and surrounding area.

January 2021: Life After Prison

Our next gathering takes place on Tuesday, January 12th at 6:30 pm via Zoom Webinar and will feature Becky Turner, Executive Director of The STAR Project. Founded in 2004, The STAR Project helps people with felony convictions as they reenter the community after incarceration, serving around 150 Walla Wallans each year. Come begin 2021 with stories of fresh starts with your friends and neighbors! This free event lasts one hour and includes a moderated Q and A.

You can join Tuesday’s webinar by following this link:

https://greaternw.zoom.us/j/91762095329

Contact Us

If you have questions about our program, please email livg@pioneerww.org or zgalant-laporte@wallawallawa.gov. We hope you’ll join us for listening and learning!

You can find recordings of previous months’ WWS HERE.

In response to the groundswell of local and global justice work, Pioneer United Methodist Church and the Neighborhood Engagement Program at the City of Walla Walla will be hosting a series of speakers and storytellers on a variety of critical topics in our city and surrounding area.

Our next gathering takes place on Tuesday, December 8th at 6:30 pm via Zoom Webinar and will feature Becky Betts, MSN, RN, Population Health Manager for Providence Medical Group. We’ll be talking about COVID’s impact on high-risk and underserved populations in the Walla Walla Valley. A moderated Q and A will follow.

You can join Tuesday’s webinar by following this link:

https://greaternw.zoom.us/j/93658130881

More about our December speaker:

Becky Betts, MSN, RN, CRRN

Manager, Population Health SEWA, Providence Medical Group

Becky Betts has been with Providence for 29 years, spending most of her career as a bedside nurse and case manager. In 2019, she left the hospital to build Providence’s Population Health Southeast Division.

Ms. Betts is currently pursuing a Doctorate of Nursing Practice in Population Health at Washington State University with the long term goal to radically change healthcare systems.

Contact Us

If you have questions about our program, please email livg@pioneerww.org or zgalant-laporte@wallawallawa.gov. We hope you’ll join us for listening and learning!

“There is nothing like the local church when it’s working right. Its beauty is indescribable. Its power is breathtaking. Its potential is unlimited. It comforts the grieving and heals the broken in the context of community. It builds bridges to seekersand opens its arms to the forgotten, the downtrodden, and the disillusioned. It breaks the chains of addictions, frees the oppressed, and offers belonging to the marginalized of this world. The potential of the local church is almost more than I can grasp.” *

In this time of chaos, confusion, political strife, racial inequity, poverty growing by leaps and bounds, families being beset by food insecurity, isolation and unbridled death and dying, how can we carry that hope to others? Some days it feels as though we Christians have nothing much to offer the world.

Historically, we have not loved our neighbors as we should, our buildings are closed for now, and our communities are not meeting in-person. I don’t know about you, but to me it seems the needs are growing exponentially but we can’t keep up; we don’t have the means; we don’t have the organization; we don’t have the position in the community or the funding.

But the hope we bring to the world, in the end, has very little to do with means, or organization or position or funding. The hope we bring to our community and the world is not through OUR strength, but God’s. Even when we feel like we have nothing to offer or not enough to give, we have Jesus…we have the good news.

We can and do intercede on behalf of our community and our world through our prayers and the actions we can take. That, my friends, is more than enough.

I know of no greater blessing in my life today than to be a part of the church. Not just the universal church but I have a church family. You are my church family. And although we are not physically together, we are still church and although the building is closed for the time being, we are still ‘being’ church in the world.

Through our ministries of Pioneer Kitchen, connecting with Sharpstein, collecting food for the Food Pantry, supporting justice through Justice for Our Neighbors, Walla Walla Immigrant Rights Coalition and Walla Walla Speaks, creating meaningful on-line worship, our Whitman Fellow, our bible studies and justice classes — we are being church.

When we think unselfishly with the mind of Christ, reach out and to care for and restore those in need and those who are lost, the church becomes the hope of the world. We, dear friends, stand in the breach for all those who cannot. We offer ourselves, our prayers, and our actions on behalf of the world…and when we do, God shows up. Thank you church!

*[Bill Hybels, Courageous Leadership, 2002]

Walla Walla Speaks

In response to the groundswell of local and global justice work, Pioneer United Methodist Church and the Neighborhood Engagement Program at the City of Walla Walla will be hosting a series of speakers and storytellers on a variety of critical topics in our city and surrounding area.

Our next gathering takes place on Tuesday, November 10th at 6:30 pm via Zoom Webinar and will feature Abigail Scholar, Executive Director of Central Washington Justice for our Neighbors and Dr. Aaron Bobrow-Strain of the Walla Walla Immigrant Rights Coalition. Come hear these leading advocates reflect on the current state of immigration and immigrant rights. A moderated Q and A will follow.

You can join Tuesday’s webinar by following this link:

https://greaternw.zoom.us/j/96692891676

More about our November speakers:

Abigail Scholar

Abigail has worked as part of the coordinating committee of the Walla Walla Immigrant Rights Coalition, she is a founding member of the Spokane Immigrant Rights Coalition, the Tri-Cities Immigrant Rights Coalition and is a member of Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network and sits in the steering committee for their bond fund. She is also on the steering committee for All In for Washington and works closely with the ACLU of Washington. She has worked in community organizing for a number of years and she has extensive experience in developing community led programs and supporting leaders within the community to advance capacity building.

Aaron Bobrow-Strain

Aaron is a professor and Baker Ferguson Chair of Politics and Leadership at Whitman College, where he teaches courses on food, immigration, and the U.S.-Mexico border. He is the author of White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf and Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas. In the 1990s, he worked on the U.S.-Mexico border as an educator and activist. He is a founding member of the Walla Walla Immigrant Rights Coalition.

Along with academic journals in the U.S. and Mexico, his writing has appeared in The Believer, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Salon, Gastronomica, and The Huffington Post.

The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story (Hardback – Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2019 & Paperback – Picador 2020) won the Washington State Book Award and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, was named a Southwest Books of the Year Top Choice, a Goodreads People’s Choice Award Semifinalist, and an AudioFiles Magazine Best Audio Book of 2019, and was shortlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Award.

He has an MA in Latin American Studies from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. He’s received grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation and Social Science Research Council and won teaching prizes from UC Berkeley and Whitman College.

Contact Us

If you have questions about our program, please email livg@pioneerww.org or zgalant-laporte@wallawallawa.gov. We hope you’ll join us for listening and learning!(Edit)

DENVER, Colo. (Oct. 7, 2020) – The Western Jurisdiction of The United Methodist Church is beginning preparations for the next General Conference by recommitting itself to be a faithful, inviting, open, safe and loving place for all people.

As The United Methodist Church awaits a delayed decision on the proposed Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation, “Where Love Lives” is a nearly year-long campaign centering on the faith values that have undergirded the jurisdiction’s long-term commitment to a scripturally based fully inclusive ministry. It advocates approval of the Protocol by the General Conference.

“The Western Jurisdiction is committed to living out our belief that God’s church is open to all,” said Bishop Karen Oliveto, president of the Western Jurisdiction College of Bishops. “The Protocol for Reconciliation and Grace through Separation offers a way forward to begin easing the five decades of pain created by the wounds inflicted on LGBTQ persons by the church.”

“Your home – our home – remains open,” the Jurisdiction declares. “The United Methodist Church is and will be safe, secure, open, and built on faith in God, trust in one another, and with love for all in all we do.”

Bishop Oliveto said the idea for the campaign came from conversations within the Western Jurisdiction leadership focused on the great divisions the church and nations around the world are experiencing. “We wanted to make sure there is an alternative vision for people to embrace, a vision that comes out of love that informs our actions as Christians.” She said.

The campaign comes in the midst of global uncertainty – heightened by the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic – over the future of the denomination. Because of the pandemic, the 2020 General Conference, where the Protocol had been scheduled to be considered, was postponed and rescheduled for Aug. 29-Sept. 7, 2021 in Minneapolis, Minn.

“As we await the… General Conference and Protocol vote, let us recommit ourselves to creating, protecting, and sustaining a United Methodist Church that welcomes all, in Christ,” The jurisdiction said. Since 1982, two years before the denomination officially barred the practice, the Western Jurisdiction has ordained and assigned LGBTQ persons to be pastors. In 2016, the jurisdiction elected the denomination’s first openly lesbian bishop. And in 2019, the Jurisdiction committed itself to be a safe harbor for LGBTQ+ clergy from across the denomination.

The Protocol awaiting action in the postponed General Conference offers a path forward through the nearly 50-year-old dispute over the role of LGBTQ+ people in The United Methodist Church. Simply put, it would create a reshaped United Methodist denomination where LGBTQ+ persons could be ordained as pastors and churches could hold same-sex weddings, while simultaneously allowing opponents of LGBTQ+ inclusion to leave and form a new, more conservative denomination. Those persons would retain their former United Methodist pension benefits and congregations would be able to keep their buildings to be part of the new denomination.

In addition to promoting the Protocol, Bishop Oliveto said, the campaign will create opportunities for United Methodists across the Jurisdiction to engage in conversation about what its adoption could mean for local congregations and their pastors. These could be gatherings in homes, Sunday School classes, other small group settings, and all church meetings.

Monthly themes from October through the convening of the postponed General Conference in 2021, will focus conversation and discussion on topics related to the Jurisdiction’s commitment to inclusion, scriptural faithfulness, and the theological teachings of John Wesley, the denomination’s founder.

Here are the opening themes of the campaign:

• Oct. 2020 – Strongly committed to radical inclusion of all people.
• Nov. 2020 – We will always keep scripture primary.
• Dec. 2020 – Grounded in social action.
• Jan. 2021 – We will ordain and consecrate LGBTQ+ people.

These themes, Western Jurisdiction leaders believe, build on the progress made across their jurisdiction over the past dozen years, and could provide a solid foundation for other conferences across the church after the completion of the postponed General Conference. It keeps the historic United Methodist name, and focuses on its commitment to Wesley’s teachings on piety and social holiness.

This is planned as a multi-faceted campaign. It can be adapted for use in annual (regional) conferences and local congregations. The range of tools that can be created for the campaign include blogs, e-mail posts, Zoom calls, congregation-wide events, locally-generated articles on the importance of being an inclusive church, newsletter posts, prayers, short videos, calls to action, and the utilization of social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Watch the WJ’s campaign video HERE.

About the Western Jurisdiction of The United Methodist Church: The Western Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church encompasses the eight westernmost regional conferences of the United States, including United Methodist churches in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, Guam, and other territory in the Pacific region. The president of the Western Jurisdiction College of Bishops for 2020-2023 is Denver-based Bishop Karen Oliveto of the Mountain Sky Area of The United Methodist Church, the region covering Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and a small portion of Idaho.