LYNC is 'the church we hope to become'
By Erik Alsgaard
Sprinkled throughout every General Conference, advocacy groups and coalitions form a part of the legislative process that is central to this meeting. Among those, you can find groups coming together to advocate for a fossil-free United Methodist Church; Mainstream UMC, a group trying to advance regionalization in the church; Methodists Federation for Social Action (MFSA), a group advocating for peace and justice; and many, many more.
Trying to get all these different groups to work together can be tricky, but that’s the goal of the Love Your Neighbor Coalition (LYNC), an umbrella organization with no fewer than 15 advocacy groups counted among its members.
According to its website, the LYNC “is a group of organizations and individuals who aim to love our neighbors around the world and within our church.”
The chairperson – she’s actually called the “co-convener” – of LYNC is a lay woman from the Baltimore-Washington Conference, Mittie Quinn. The other co-convener is also from the BWC, the Rev. Neal Christie.
“We’re the church that we hope we become,” Quinn said, sitting in a small vacant meeting room at the hotel serving as LYNC headquarters for General Conference. “We’re a rainbow coalition in many ways. We’re the only place where the ethnic caucuses are talking with the full-inclusion caucuses… (I)t’s been beautiful to see it all come together.”
Quinn is hopeful that this General Conference will adopt three key working areas for LYNC: approving the so-called “Three ‘R’s’” of Regionalization, Removing the restrictive language from the Book of Discipline, and Revising the Social Principles.
“We provided resources on each of these areas to our organizations,” she said. “Unanimously, each of the organizations has affirmed these three ‘R’s. So we, as LYNC, are behind that.”
Quinn, a long-time member of Dumbarton UMC in Washington, D.C., became co-convener in 2019 after helping in various leadership positions in the organization. At the 2019 Special General Conference in St. Louis, while serving as the volunteer coordinator for LYNC, its convener suddenly died during that meeting. Due to that, retirements and the pandemic, a leadership void formed that Quinn helped fill.
Bringing together these 15 groups can be like herding cats, Quinn admits, because even within each group, its members can disagree on certain key issues.
“Not all of the coalitions agree 100 percent,” she said. “Their constituents are divided around the issues around homosexuality and LGBTQIA inclusion.”
For this all-volunteer organization, Quinn said that this General Conference has been a huge undertaking.
“We raised $120,000 to fund our work here,” Quinn said. “Without having any grants, that’s the first time we’ve done that.”
LYNC is also committed to helping have and enable conversations “on the outside” of official plenary sessions of the conference. With translators at the ready, LYNC is also ready to answer questions and staffs a 24-hour hotline during General Conference.
During General Conference, LYNC is hosting a World Craft Market at its headquarters, located one block from the convention center in the Hilton Garden Inn.
The Love Your Neighbor Coalition was founded 12 years ago, Quinn said, making its debut at the 2012 General Conference in Tampa, Fla. It was the brainchild of the Rev. Steve Clunn, who at the time was active in MFSA and thought that it would be a good idea for all the caucuses to come together.