Connecting globally as pen pals and sister cities
BY MELISSA LAUBER
UMConnection staff
'Can there be any doubt that this is the season of Pentecost?' the Rev. Nancy Nedwell asked her congregation as 'coincidences and blessings' unfolded throughout the morning.
The children of Lovely Lane UMC in Baltimore were about to begin a pen pal project with St. John UMC in Gbarnga, Liberia.
Earlier in the week, the Rev. Greg Coates, whose daughter is one of the pen pals, discovered that the mayor of Gbargna, Esther Coaline Warbey, happened to be in Baltimore for a conference with the Maryland Cultural Foundation.
He invited her to church to meet the children. When she arrived, they discovered that Warbey not only knew about St. John UMC; she is the chairperson of its administrative council.
The chairperson of Lovely Lane?s administrative council, Elizabeth Weiblen, was the Sunday School teacher who began the pen pal project.
The two women shook hands in the historic Lovely Lane sanctuary. 'I feel like I?ve come home,' Warbey told the congregation.
In the Sunday School class, the students were trying to decide what to write in their letters. 'The letters you write will begin a relationship,' Weiblen told them.
In letters decorated with their drawings, the children, ages 10-11, wrote of their love for Skittles, dancing, sushi, shopping, soccer, lacrosse, video games, Japanese comic books and SpongeBob SquarePants.
Kwesi Enos, who lived in Ghana until he was 4, added a special postscript. 'PS: Whatever happens to you, it is God?s plan and everything will be alright. Remember that.'
The students also found Liberia on a map and looked at the city of Gbarnga on the Google Earth Web site (www.earthgoogle.com).
Gbarnga is a town of 14,800 and was the base for former president and rebel leader Charles Taylor?s National Patriotic Front during the Liberian Civil War. The town has had a sister relationship with Baltimore since 1972, said Weiblen.
From photos of the town, you can see that they are still living with the effects of war, she said.
Weiblen?s effort to start a pen pal relationship is part of the church?s larger effort to help people grow in discipleship by 'thinking outside themselves,' she said. 'We?re
planting seeds. We don?t know how they?ll grow, but we?re opening ourselves up to the greater world.'
At the end of the worship service, after Mayor Warbey and the children had received Communion, Nedwell delivered a benediction that has become a gbwc_superusering principle for the Lovely Lane congregation, 'Go to the place where God has given you responsibility. Be filled always with all joy and hope as you believe in God the Creator, Redeemer and the Sustainer of your life.'
For the children, Weiblen hopes, that place may become Gbarnga, Liberia.
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