| Church needs remediation, bishop says BY MELISSA LAUBER
UMCONNECTION STAFF  Theres a fungus among us. This was the message Bishop Felton Edwin May gave to the more than 1,100 people in Essex Jan. 11 and Hagerstown Jan. 18 as part of three 2003 Leadership Days. Held every January, Leadership Days is one of the largest training events for local church leaders in the denomination. It is coordinated by associate council director, the Rev. Vivian McCarthy. Although the number of people who attended was down from last year, participants expressed enthusiasm as they moved throughout the daylong event among their three classes. This year, 67 classes were offered in all aspects of leadership within the local church. Bishop Mays sermon on fungus was not just talking about the mold that has temporarily closed the Baltimore-Washington Conference Center in Columbia and made several employees ill. He drew parallels to a larger church whose energy is waning and that needs remediation and cleansing. Citing war and rumors of war, Bishop May cried out for peacemakers. Have we become so numb and so affected and infected by a world gone mad that we cant stand on our feet and say that Christ is Lord? he asked. The bishop told about becoming so frustrated about threat of wars, that he flipped through the New Testament, page by page, trying to find any word from Jesus justifying what the United States is doing internationally. There was nothing on the page that said Jesus said, strike before youre struck. There was nothing that said its all right to kill the innocent just so we can get that demon called Saddam Hussein. I saw nothing in Scripture that gives me any confidence that, as a child of God, I had to go along with the flow, Bishop May said. He called on those present to shine the light of Christ that can kill the spiritual apathy and malaise that lurks like a fungus around them. When we take up the cross of Christ we open ourselves to the empowerment of Gods holy Spirit and we let the chips fall where they may, the bishop said. Either were a nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, or we are a fungus-growing mishap that will need to be corrected, and I mean corrected in the name of Jesus the Christ. Bishop Mays message was part of a worship service that included the music of a praise group from First UMC in Berkeley Springs, hymn singing and a dramatic presentation delivered by the Rev. Mary Kay Totty, pastor of St. Paul UMC in New Windsor, who portrayed a message from the prophet Isaiah. Drawing on the Leadership Days theme of Repair the Breach, Restore the Community, Totty asked participants to look around them and discover where the spiritual walls and the walls of their communities had been breached. Children in peril, racism, a damaged environment, threats of war, capital punishment, legalized gambling all these things stand in need of repair. The wall has been breached, said Totty, who called upon each person to undertake a fast that will be acceptable to the Lord. Hope endures, she said. So what is the fast you will choose? She encouraged people to do a number of things during Lent to restore Gods community. Among them: - Fast from television and images of physical violence;
- Fast from consumerism by not buying anything more than perishable food and medicine;
- Fast by using personal resources to feed the hungry and clothe the naked;
- Fast by working to maintain the moratorium on the death penalty and praying for peace.
Tis hard work ahead, Totty said. It will require letting go of comfortable patterns of behavior. Do you trust your savior? | 
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