Finding Peace Within A Storm

By Shannon Hicks

Attendees of last weekend’s Church Women United World Day of Prayer service may have been reminded of Matthew 18:20 (“For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”) due to the small number who gathered for the annual service. Those who did attend, however, brought an enthusiasm that was shared by the pastors and CWU-Newtown members who presented the service.

Following a program that had been prepared by women of Papua New Guinea, a region that continues to be plagued by civil war and AIDS, the local service mirrored those done in more than 170 countries and regions around the world last weekend. While many groups presented their services on Friday, the Newtown chapter of Church Women United decided to present theirs on Saturday, March 7, at Newtown United Methodist Church. Guests were then invited to join CWU members for the monthly spaghetti dinner in the church’s gathering hall.

The Reverend Mel Kawakami, the senior pastor of NUMC, offered a Message of Peace that drew upon Mark 4:35–41 and continued the afternoon’s theme of finding peace within a storm. Three members of CWU-Newtown had set the stage for Rev Kawakami’s message by offering narratives that represented women of Papua New Guinea and their actions of collaborating across classes to save their families.

Rev Kawakami tied those stories, of working through a crisis toward justice, peace, healing, and wholeness, together with a reminder that Jesus promised his followers they could be calmed during their own crises.

“Our founder, John Wesley, was anything but a timid man, but even he lost his nerve during one of his trips across the Atlantic” during a terrible storm, said the pastor. “Finding the calm in a storm is something we all wish for, whether it is in the midst of a literal storm or finding peace and calm in the middle of the crisis in Papua New Guinea, where civil war and AIDS continue to ravage lives.

“Jesus does not promise to calm all the storms in our lives,” Rev Kawakami reminded everyone. “He instead promises to calm you during the storm.”

In addition to the CWU-Newtown members who presented the service (Reverend Sue Klein, deacon of NUMC; CWU-Newtown President Darlene Jackson, and members Jean Conover, Linda Manganaro), NUMC Associate Pastor Dick Yerrington and Leo McIlrath, coordinator of Corpus Christi, also helped present the service.

A pair of offerings were received on Saturday. The first has been promised to support World Day of Prayer efforts in helping meet the needs of families who are victims of violence and poverty worldwide.

The second offering was CWU’s traditional Fellowship of the Least Coin (FLC) collection, which asks for donations of a country’s least coin. In the US, of course, the collections are fueled by pennies and in 2008, according to Linda Manganaro, those pennies and other least coins around the world added up to more than $200,000. The international movement asks for Christians to pray for peace while setting aside a “least coin” of her currency as a tangible token of her prayer.

At the end of each fiscal year the total amount collected is granted by Church Women United to groups around the world who can use such funds to further their missions of literacy, children’s health, self-help, and other peaceful initiatives. FLC is a stewardship in the sense that when put together, the coins become a large amount in the same way individual prayers offered by many can become a strong force in bringing about reconciliation, peace, and justice.

Rev Kawakami returned to the idea of peace and calmness in his Benediction, which followed the FLC offering, saying, “If we think we are helpless in the face of a storm, we can find faith in the strength of the least coin.”

The overall theme of the 2009 World Day of Prayer was “In Christ there are many members yet one body.” The program encouraged participants to have the courage of Ruth, who left what was familiar to her and went with Naomi to another land. It also reminded attendees of the country of the women who wrote the service, which has one of the most heterogeneous populations in the world, with a rugged landscape that has caused diverse living conditions and more than 800 languages spoken within the 178,000-square-mile region.