With a grant from the United Methodist Committee on Relief, the church distributed food and other aid to those struggling during the coronavirus pandemic. Future such outreach may be lost if Cameroon, now a district of the departing Cote d'Ivoire Conference, follows the conference in exiting the UMC.
Effectively, a million members left the UMC in a single day, an astonishing and eyeball-popping accomplishment. But something else happened that day, which has yet to be acknowledged or remarked upon.
For the first time in over twenty years, Cameroon and Senegal do not have an official United Methodist presence. I take this news personally, because I served as the mission superintendent of the Cameroon Initiative from as a commissioned UMC missionary. After all, the objective given me by Global Ministries was to grow the Cameroon Mission into a self-sustaining annual conference of The United Methodist Church that would be able to make its own determinations about ministry and mission.
Instead, the Cameroon Mission was unable to nurture capable, stable indigenous leadership and build strong, flexible institutions and systems needed to enable its growth.
The Mission was turned over to an annual conference located over 1, miles away, where it is merely an afterthought. However, the truth about what happened in Cameroon is a complex, messy, and intrigue-filled tale of the wrong way to start mission ventures.
