07/10/2026
Global Young Persons Convocation in Dublin, Ireland
DAY 2
Where yesterday's focus was planting sanctuary, today shifted toward shaping and healing it. Our morning opened with a prayer from Mending Wings, a Yakima Nation ministry, shaped around Matthew's parable of the wheat and the weeds growing up together and our participation in healing. We heard from Discipleship Ministries, from the General Commission on the Status and Role of Women, and from voices from Equmenia in Sweden, each adding a piece to the picture of what healing actually looks like across a global church.
The afternoon workshops leaned into some of the harder and more important conversations of the week. Sessions on who gets to speak and lead, on identity and culture and building beloved community, and a return to the lament and mental health workshop, this time framed around communal grief, gave our group language for holding both faith and honesty together.
Some of our group also spent time exploring world Methodism, working through the metaphor of a window, the idea that the wider Methodist family opens the local church to a larger family of faith and widens the responsibility we carry for the whole body of Christ. The room worked through what that connection actually looks like once everyone flies home, landing on the truth that it becomes real through practice, through prayer, leadership, advocacy, and the way we receive one another's stories, not just through the memory of a good week together. You'll see the words written on the notepad come from young people across the world naming what they love about their local churches.
Audrey said it is important that people have real ways to share and communicate about themselves, and that the local church has an important role in making sure all voices are represented in worship and in leadership. Monitoring and tracking who speaks helps keep the reality in front of us, not that we should get lost in the data and numbers of monitoring, because at the end of the day it is about the people.
William found himself in the Call to Lead and legislative learning sessions, hearing how young people are invited to find the place where their deep passions meet the world's deep needs, and how taking on leadership within the United Methodist Church is one real way to live into that. He also worked with a group of young people who wrote their own prayer of lament together.
Averie reflected that faith is not about having all the answers but about staying curious, since so much of who we are keeps changing over time. Her group spent time exploring the difference between fitting in and belonging, and she came away holding onto the truth that you do not have to change the world next week, but you can change someone's experience right now.
Kathleen carried two things out of her sessions. The first was a simple charge to be proud of who the creator made her to be, paired with a teaching on seven generations, the idea that we learn from the three generations before us and then carry the responsibility of shaping the three generations after. The second was a gentler challenge around receiving love, noticing how much easier it is to accept being blessed than it is to simply feel loved, when really both are the same gift. She also picked up a small practice for daily prayer, letting something ordinary you see every day become the trigger to stop and pray.
Phillip's afternoon took him into lament as well, and for someone who did not fully know what the word meant walking in, he came out with new eyes for how issues like gun violence and mental health touch people every day, along with a real sense that his own voice matters in speaking to them.
We closed the day down at the beach, debriefing everything we had taken in, swimming, playing games, and just being together as a group before another full day ahead. Grateful for every conversation, every workshop, and every moment of worship and rest this group has gotten to share.
