Stories

Transforming the world in a rural cooperative ministry
Shirley Townsend-Jones, a Church and Community Worker missionary in South Carolina, works with a rural African American cooperative ministry. Her ministry pulls together people from nine churches to face challenges, transform their communities, and celebrate the small victories of each day.
Laos Mission Initiative grows and extends ministries
Global Ministries’ Laos Mission Initiative celebrates 20 years of service with increased membership, new clergy members and local pastors, and more engagement with local community members.
A short history of Global Mission Fellows
The first Methodist short-term, young adult missionary program began in 1948, sending young adults to serve 3-year assignments in Asian countries devastated during World War II. Today, Global Mission Fellows come from many different countries and serve in placements around the world.
Sowing and harvesting in Hungarian Roma communities
Urs Schweizer shares a story from The United Methodist Church in Hungary, which has developed a backyard farming program with a few Roma communities who raise more nutritious food and some extra income.
Creative community engagement
Global Mission Fellow Warren Alfeche explores new settings and outlets for ministry in Northern Ireland.
Multicultural church’s history inspires support for immigrants
Decades of support and funding from Global Ministries’ Community Developers Program has helped Buena Vista UMC increase outreach within its community.
Food relief helps in Liberia’s COVID-19 fight
Liberia is combating COVID-19 through both health and food security: the health board received an early solidarity grant from UMCOR for prevention training and the conference received a more recent UMCOR Sheltering in Love grant to provide food packages to the elderly, the physically challenged and at-risk children and youth undergoing rehabilitation at a facility in Monrovia. UMNS shares the story.
The enduring resiliency of North Macedonia
Missionary Jennifer Moore reflects on life lessons she has learned from the Macedonian people, especially as they face a pandemic.
A creative response to grief
Originally from Minneapolis but now serving in Tampa as a Global Mission Fellow, Abigail Reeth envisioned a way for her community - especially the kids - to process and respond to racial injustice: painting a mural together.
United Methodist mission in Morogoro, Tanzania
Missionaries Umba and Ngoy Kalangwa send a mission update from Morogoro, Tanzania – a reconstructed dispensary that reopens just as COVID-19 starts to spread, members of a sewing workshop who learn to craft hundreds of masks and the first woman to pastor a UMC church in the Morogoro District.
Sifting through the ashes
UMCOR supports Western conferences responding to 2020 wildfires.
Strength upon strength; Michigan United Methodists pour hope on troubled waters
For communities devastated by May flooding, the road to resilience is paved with support coming from federal, state and local sources – and from United Methodists.