President’s Message

Knitted Together for God’s Good Work

Greetings, my sisters in Christ!  As we start the new year, we will be continuing along the same route that started in 2019, but we are a experiencing some new changes as we navigate 2021.

Our theme this year is Knitted Together for God’s Good Work with the scripture verse, “You are the body of Christ and parts of each other.”, Corinthians 12:27  (CEB)  This explores how we as children of God are joined and linked together as the body of Christ.  Even at times of social distancing or other obstacles may keep us physically apart, we are knit together in community to transform the world.

We have changed our District structure in keeping with the decision of the North Georgia Conference and have gone from 12 to 8 Districts.  This will be a challenge as we learn more about our new churches and new District leaders, but we are being knitted together in a new way.  Given the legacy of the formers Districts reminds me how supportive you all are of in supporting women, youth, and children and the amazing ways you give of your time and talents.  Remember, things may be shifting around us, but our PURPOSE remains the same no matter where we are.

This is my first year serving as your Conference President.  I hope that I can continue the legacy of our past Presidents and will try my best to keep what is most important to United Methodist Women in the forefront.  Our Executive team has already been busy planning for 2021 and we have sone new initiatives and a new mission focus.  The Conference will be focusing on Climate Justice this year and we have been given a grant from United Methodist Women (National) to lead a learning series on this issue in partnership with Georgia Interfaith Power and Light.  Given the struggles with the past year, we have partnered with Alliant Health Solutions to provide to our membership and the community to provide online courses dealing with suicide prevention as a way to help others who might be in crisis.  The dates and additional information can be found on this website.  We now have two Limitless Coordinators who will be working with the young women in our Conference to get them acclimated to United Methodist Women while allowing them to focus on issues that are important to them.  One of our coordinators will work with the middle and high schoolers and the other will work with the college age and older women.  Our complete calendar is also located on the website and I invite you to participate in any way you can in our events.  While we are still socially distancing, we have planned to host most of our events this year in a virtual setting. We have also updated our Mission Today requirements to allow smaller units to participate and we hope these are used as a guideline to help you in your planning for 2021.

I hope and pray that we can meet together in person before the end of 2021, but everything happens in God’s time, not ours, so until we see each other, please stay safe and God bless.

Stephanie Dressler