Since
participating as a delegate to the General Conference of the United Methodist
Church this past spring, I have become interested and invested in the idea of inclusiveness
in the UMC. After the conclusion of General Conference, a group of people,
including myself, started a movement on Twitter called DreamUMC. The mission of
DreamUMC is to connect United Methodists via social media in order to create
change in the UMC. DreamUMC encourages all voices to speak up and be heard. In
order to do this, DreamUMC has “tweet-chats” two Mondays per month on Twitter
to discuss various issues of concern within the UMC. There is a facilitator who
prompts conversation with different discussion questions and the conversations
move from there. Previous conversations have addressed inclusivity, social
justice, mission, polity, discipleship, global issues, and much more. Once the
tweet-chat is over, people are encouraged to continue discussion and the
summary of the night’s conversation is posted on DreamUMC’s website.
Having
participated in many tweet-chats I became interested in what these ideas
actually looked like, visually. Because we use Twitter as a mechanism for
conversation, our thoughts are limited to 140 characters of text per tweet. I
wanted to know more about what people thought of, visually, when they thought
of the words, “an inclusive United Methodist Church.” Therefore, I plan to
create a collage encompassing what an inclusive UMC looks like to these “DreamUMC-ers.”
I will host a tweet-chat of my own where I will ask people to tweet a picture
of what an inclusive church looks like to them. After the tweet chat I will
print out various tweets with their accompanying pictures and make a collage of
these visual dreams. As a visual learner, I believe this will help me, as well
as others get a better picture of what our goal is in terms of an inclusive
United Methodist Church.
This
artwork will be displayed at an event I am co-hosting with another student and
the pastor of a local church. We are in the midst of planning a live “tweet-up”
of those who participate (or are interested in) DreamUMC in the Chicago area.
It will be held this coming spring in the heart of Chicago in order to give
people a chance to meet in person and take action on the ideas discussed during
DreamUMC’s tweet-chats. I am hoping that my artwork will help people see what
our goal could look like and inspire action within the movement.
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