An address given by the Revd Mark Slaney after being elected and inducted as President of the Methodist Conference 2026-27
A prayer: Great God, Father Son & Holy Spirit, your Word in our words, your thoughts in our minds, your love in our hearts and your life in our lives we pray. This day and every day in the name of Jesus. Amen.
I am very grateful to be here, having grown to understand and appreciate and feel the weight as well as the honour and privilege that this role brings.
I am grateful to Caroline, Vice-President, for the friendship and ease with which we have worked together thus far, and for the address she offers to us.
I am endlessly grateful to God for our salvation and life in Christ Jesus, for that divine call on our lives that accepts us just as we are and offers us a vision of who we could become together, giving purpose and reason and making us better people and the world a better place in partnership with Holy Spirit.
Thanks to my parents to whom I owe the beginnings of faith and a place in the Methodist Church. I reflect that I inherit both their Christian convictions & their experiential and discerning questions.
To my dear wife, who has taught me much about love and life and increased my trust in both, thank you.
And there are many more folk to whom I owe a debt of gratitude and for whom I hold deep affection for the ways in which you have supported, accompanied, challenged and borne with me. Let me mention one person as an example of you all.
Roy remains a Local Preacher and a member of Baildon Methodist Church. I was 15 years old, recently returned from youth camp where I had committed my life to Christ. Youth Fellowship, to which I belonged, had been invited to contribute to a Sunday evening service. Following the service Roy approached mum and I and asked if I would be willing to accompany him when preaching and read the Bible passages. Later that week I stood at the front of church reading from the Bible and Roy stood at the back and said encouraging, helpful words like – louder, slower, clearer!
After three months of readings, Roy said something like: ‘you’ve done readings now, why don’t you lead prayers next time?’ ‘But I don’t know how to do that.’ So, I was invited to Roy and Jean’s home. Jean made fresh coffee and there was cake. Roy taught me about preparing prayers – written, extempore, adoration, confession, thanksgiving, intercession. For the next three months I prepared and led prayers and Roy would offer encouraging, helpful words.
Then Roy said, something like: ‘you’ve done readings and prayers. Why don’t you preach next time?’ ‘But I don’t know how to do that.’ So, I was invited to Roy and Jean’s home. Jean made fresh coffee and there was cake. Roy taught me about prayerful preparation, lectionary readings, expounding the word. At a Sunday evening service at Baildon MC I preached my first sermon. As I recall I tried to tell everyone everything I thought I knew about God and stuff. And Roy offered encouraging, helpful words. A good number of them.
And, I am sure, that at some point on the way Roy must have gotten me a note to preach from the Superintendent Minister and Local Preachers’ Meeting.
Roy saw the preacher in me before I knew it was there. And he made it his business to draw it out, to give space for learning, reflection, practice, mistakes, successes, growth and development.
It feels a long way from local preacher to President, from 15 years old to 55.
As I have discovered the Presidency is not just one or two persons, it is always at least six! (Past, Current and Designates) But even that is but a pool of the river of spiritual wisdom in which we stand. An annual theme does not do justice to endless outpouring of spirit and truth, of wisdom and experience that flows through presidents and vice presidents over the years. It’s worth remembering this flow, listening to the babble and bubble and splash and dash, rather than simply bottling it with the year on the label and laying it down in the cellar.
2019 Barbara Glasson: “We will need to be people of reconciliation and peace in an increasingly angry and divided Britain … to commit ourselves to not only making the church inclusive but allowing those who we might think ‘on the edge’ to challenge and transform us … to listen”
2020 Richard Teal: inducted during Covid mitigations spoke the prophetic word – order, disorder, reorder as transformative journey.
2021 Sonia Hicks: “God’s Table: An Invitation for All”, reflecting on racism, marginalisation and how the Church can respond to injustice and division in society today. But what I remember is the story of Great Aunt Lize, who had arrived from Jamaica with her Methodist membership card only to be rejected from her local Methodist Church and told that the church for her kind was down the road.
2022 Graham Thompson: “And who is my neighbour? … our lifestyles and the choices we make … have an effect on those who are as loved by God as we are. For we are all equal under God …’
2023 Gill Newton: offering "Hidden Treasures" to bring encouragement, inspiration and healing at a time of turmoil, weariness and darkness in the church and in the wider world. God is constantly active, offering to breathe new life into us, and into the challenging situations with which we all frequently wrestle!
2024 Helen Cameron: Diversity is a gift from God. Difference is a strength of the church.
2025 Richard Andrew: “generations before us have had to rebuild in the midst of ruins or forsaken power and status only to recognise that the vulnerability they discovered along the way placed them in the company of Jesus. The Church has a future, not because of our plans, projects and visions – as important as these are – rather the Church has a future because God is faithful.”
The Vice-President ably promotes the work of Action for Children.
Our second chosen charity for this coming year is All We Can with a focus on the Middle East Justice Appeal.
Right now, people are living through suffering and terror. Our partners remain on the front line of a relentless humanitarian crisis, supporting communities affected in Gaza and Lebanon. To support them, All We Can has relaunched its appeal with the Methodist Church and the United Reformed Church, continuing to fundraise for partners delivering life-transforming and essential work.
I visited one of these partners earlier this year. Princess Basma Centre, located on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, has supported Palestinian children with disabilities since 1964 through rehabilitation services and an inclusive school. It combines clinical care, education, and family support, working closely with children and their parents. The Centre aims to ensure all Palestinian children with disabilities have access to quality healthcare, inclusive education, and future opportunities. Its school serves around 450 students annually, offering both inclusive and specialised classes to help all students achieve success and improve their futures.
The Centre was posed to launch its new outlying work in Gaza just as the attacks of October 7th 2023 changed everything. The new work was reimagined, despite the ravages of terrorist and military action, and operates with a small team of educationalists, nurses and doctors from a tent in Gaza. This team meet weekly online with the wider staff of the Jerusalem base. It is a remarkable, resilient, courageous and vulnerable piece of work.
The Vice-President and I ask you to consider supporting The Middle East Justice Appeal through either this weekend’s collection, All We Can’s stall during Conference, or All We Can’s website.
Thank you.
SORROW JOY
The Vice-President and I have chosen two words for the year: Sorrow Joy
I resist these words being identified too strongly as ‘our theme.’ Think of them more like grid references on a map; or compass bearings, revealing where we are or a direction of travel. Or like ingredients mixed and baked in a batch of bread, distilled and blended for Uisge Beatha (oosh-ka beh-ha) the water-of-life, creating the unique flavours of our lives and places across this world with all their bitterness and sweetness.
Any number of paradoxical words could have served us well but we chose ‘sorrow joy’, because maybe they run and flow through each other and through each one of us, because maybe one is the way to the other, because Jesus holds them both with us and there is no lack of either in the Bible, because we warmed to the visual impact of these two words intertwined in cross-form. The cross offers the paradox holding Jesus who is human and divine; mortal and eternal; suspended between earth and heaven; the innocent one executed between convicted thieves.
We are particularly grateful to Mary Fleeson, an artist based in Holy Island/Lindisfarne, who has created ‘sorrow joy’ images for the Methodist Prayer Handbook.
Some months after choosing these two words we heard the following poetry of former monk William Brodrick, words encountered on our Holy Island retreat during Celtic Morning Prayer which offer a better commentary on ‘sorrow joy’ than I can muster:
We have to be candles,
burning between
hope and despair,
faith and doubt,
life and death,
all the opposites.
That is the disquieting place
where people must always find us.
And if our life means anything,
if what we are goes beyond the … walls and
does some good,
it is that somehow,
by being here,
at peace,
we help the world cope
with what it cannot understand.
‘But out of all the Lord has brought us by his love; and still he does his help afford and hides our life above.’ 1
Here comes joy.
God is love. You are loved and you are enough. (if you hear nothing else I say in the next 12 months just hear and contemplate and rest in that)
It took me 40 years or so to learn, to know, to trust that I am loved by God. That I can rest assured in divine compassion.
I remember in my early twenties, fresh out of Cliff College, being the newly appointed Youth Worker with Methodist Churches in and around Sunderland. There was a roundabout on the sea-front road. One of those roundabouts that is sometimes blessed and bubbling over with the contents of several bottles of washing up liquid. I remember, driving round that roundabout one night through the foam, round and round, wondering ‘what if God takes the blessing away? What if I am not good enough?’ I arrived home with a very clean car. I have come to trust that God is not like my fears and insecurities. That to some wonderful degree it is my lack of, not being up to it, not good enough that makes room for God to be God in and through and around and, at times, despite me.
‘Love divine, all loves excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down, fix in us your humble dwelling, all your faithful mercies crown. Jesus, you are all compassion, pure, unbounded love you are, visit us with your salvation, enter every trembling heart.’
It is also true that God has a vision, a dream, an imagining of who we could be, how we could be, what we could be – each one of us, all of us together, sharing holiness and demanding justice, making better people and a better world.
Jean Michel Quoist, French Catholic worker-priest, wrote: ‘We are not God. We are simply made in the image of God and our task is to discover that image and set it free.’ 2
Earlier this year I visited Jerusalem. On the first Sunday of the trip, at the invitation of Archbishop Hosam, I read the creation poem of Genesis chapter 1 in the service at St Georges Episcopal Cathedral. In that passage God says, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness …’3
There is ancient wisdom here. Who we image God to be is what we become, what we become like, how we are made. You image God to be exclusive, retributive, violent even – you’re more likely to exclude, punish, hurt and harm in the name of God. You image God to be inclusive, forgiving, non-violent – and you’re more likely to include, reconcile with, non-violently resist in the name of God.
Jesus is our image of who God is and what God is like, showing us how God relates to, responds to and treats human beings who themselves are made in the image and likeness of God.
Jesus is not just our image of God and what God is like. He is also, and equally so, our image of humanity, what a human being can be like at our very best and enduring the very worst.
As Christians, as disciples and followers of Jesus, we want to be like him in our humanity, re-made in his image to become our very best, even in enduring the very worst that humans and this world throw at and upon us.
‘Jesus new commandment of love,’ writes Brain McLaren, ‘meant that neither beliefs nor words, neither taboos, systems, structures nor that labels that enshrined them mattered most. Love decentered everything else; love relativized everything else; love took priority over everything else – everything.’
I have come to believe that God loves and accepts us just as we are and that such acceptance is the first delight of divine forgiveness – it is at least some of what it means to have your sins forgiven. Because you can only work with what is – not with what you wish was. You can only start towards the better you, a better world from where you are, not from where you ought to be or want to be, right?
Let me try to illustrate with one of my favorite stories from one of the places where I’ve been a stationed Minister.
The only battle on English soil during WWII took place in the Lancashire mill village of Bamber Bridge on the evening of 24th June 1943 between USA military forces personnel. This was the 1940s, before MLK and Malcolm X, and the US soldiers were under strict racial segregation. Black soldiers barracked in a camp on Mounsey Road, one street over from the Methodist Chapel. White soldiers, MPs and officers barracked in Cuerden Valley Country Park with senior officers in the big country house.
On the night in question, Military Police were on their evening patrol and discovered two black soldiers frequenting Ye Olde Hobb Inn, drinking with and entertaining locals. But these two soldiers neither had the correct passes nor were they wearing correct uniform. Heated discussion led to a bit of a fracas, locals defending the black soldiers. This broke out onto the street. The MPs went back to the Valley to get reinforcement. The soldiers to Mounsey Road where they broke into the armory as well as bringing others out of their huts.
The gun-fight then ensued on Station Road. Eunice Byers, who lived to the grand age of 106 and was a life-long member of Bamber Bridge Methodist Church, watched it from the upstairs window whilst the shop below, owned and run by her parents, suffered a bullet through a pane of glass. Unfortunately, a MP also suffered a bullet wound to his buttock and one black solider was shot dead.
Eventually senior officers came down, stopped the fight, jailed some black soldiers and sent everyone else back to barracks.
The following morning the highest-ranking US officer came down to read the riot act in Mounsey Road camp. He then visited the landlord of Ye Olde Hobb Inn and insisted, for the sake of peace and calm in the village and the safety of residents, that the landlord make his inn into a single race establishment. The landlord agreed.
That evening MPs came down on their patrol. The streets were quiet. Outside the Inn was an A-frame sign on which were painted the following words:
BLACK
SOLIDERS
ONLY
I love that Bamber Bridge landlord for that alone.
The landlord had no option but to accept it as it was imposed upon them. But with a bit of creative genius and non-violent resistance they acted for something better, for something just and dignifying, a suggestion of who we could be, how we could be together.
During this springtime’s visit to Israel/Palestine we spent one day in the West Bank planting olive and fruit trees, Israelis and Palestinians together (plus two British Methodist Ministers), organized by Rabbis For Human Rights. An intentional act for what the future could be, what it looks like when folk work the land together rather than fight over it.
What troubles have we seen? What conflicts have we passed? Fightings without and fears within since we assembled last!4
‘My daughter is under the rubble … she’s afraid of the dark.’5
Sorrow.
We’re living in a world of increasing conflict and division. It might serve us well to remember that when, in Jesus, God-with-us acted for our salvation and the redemption of everyone and everything, the context was one of conflict and division. An invading Roman army, living under rule of Empire, soldiers on the streets, violence and resistance, religious and theological disagreement on what to be and do.
The Gospel reading from Matthew, The Beatitudes, was chosen because Palestinian Christian theologians draw on it deeply in their understanding and practice.
Exploring the 3rd of the beatitudes Mitri Raheb seeks to make sense of the claim that the meek inherit the land: ‘When occupied people face empire, they generally become so overwhelmed by its power that they start to think that the empire will remain forever … Jesus wanted to tell his people that empire would not last, that empires come and go … Who remains in the land? The meek, that is, the powerless! Empires come and go, while the meek inherit the land.’6
Into and out of such a context Jesus profoundly challenges those in power and authority and teaches his followers to love their enemies, to be peacemakers, to put down the sword.
Palestinian Liberation theologian and Principal of Bethlehem Bible College, Munter Issac, suggests that we read the Beatitudes as Jesus’ way of challenging power and introducing the people of The-Kingdom-of-God-on-earth to qualities that are radically different from the kingdoms of this world:
The poor in spirit – not the proud
Those who mourn – not those who live in prosperity.
The meek – not the powerful, not empire builders
Those who hunger and thirst for justice – not for money, comfort, power or fame.
The merciful – not the powerful or ruthless
The pure in heart – not those who seek a ‘pure’ society.
The peacemakers – not those who are indifferent to suffering.
Those persecuted for justice’s sake – not the ones who stay in their comfort zone and do not speak the truth.7
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) aims to promote world peace and security through international cooperation. In its opening constitutional declaration, we read: ‘since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.’8
So, we must begin with our own understanding. How we think of and handle conflict and division. To be transformed by the renewing of our minds, as the writer of the Letter to Romans puts it, because ‘True purification begins from within’ according to Bishop Elias Chacour, also reflecting on the Sermon on the Mount.
The Methodist Church offers training for churches, ministers and members, called ‘Growing Through Conflict.’ Those trained to lead this training are invited to fill in a questionnaire which reveals their personal preference in conflict situations. Most Methodists preference is avoidance. I, however, prefer to ‘get it out on the table and deal with it!’ Imagine my surprise to learn that sometimes avoidance is the best policy. Here’s why and how I came to an epiphany:
About a week after the train the trainer training, I was walking the dog, alongside the woods, in the local park. As we came to turn a sharp corner, we met a young man walking another dog on a lead. My dog barked. His dog barked and pulled on its lead. Further barking followed. The young man began to shout and swear, indicating that I should get my dog on a lead and quickly or he’d … well you can imagine. Everything in me wanted to engage, to ask if he thought his shouting had a calming effect on our dogs. When he told me that his dog was worth a lot of money I, uncharitably, thought “you spent too much money on a pet and not enough on your track suit mate” – it would not have helped to say this out loud. I knelt down and called my dog over – it took three calls and he came. I clipped the lead on, stood up and said, over my shoulder, ‘there, no harm done pal.’ We walked off to a continued hail of abuse.
It took all morning for me to calm down. I was full of adrenaline. Only mid-afternoon did I begin to think: ‘perhaps he had experienced a dog attack previously’ ‘perhaps the dog wasn’t his and he was anxious to get it back unscathed’ ‘perhaps he was just a complete ….’
I also realized that by holding back, whilst this conflict was not resolved, it did not escalate any further. It did not escalate.
As President Designate, I was privileged to visit the Holy Land back in mid-February. 11 days after my return conflict in the Middle East escalated with the initial bombing of Iran by USA & Israel.
The Methodist Liaison Office in Jerusalem invites all those who visit to ‘come and see, go and tell.’ There was much to see and much to tell. The Methodist Church in Britain through our Global Relations team chose a focus of WITNESS and SOLIDARITY for our visit. We witnessed through mission partners and others the insidious dehumanizing, destructive, dismissing of people and communities – some of them amongst the oldest Christian communities in the world. We offered the solidarity of the Methodist people in Britain and returned with three clear acts of solidarity which Palestinians ask and which I now ask of The Methodist Church in Britain, through our Conference.
I am aware of how much passion and anger and division and difficulty the conflict in the Holy Land engenders in people. The sensitivities and tensions that exist across faiths, differing theologies, scriptural interpretations, political persuasions, historical narratives and legal understandings of The Land, ecumenical and interfaith colleagues and friends. I advocate from one side in a complexity of sides. It is not my intention that the words I share be used to further hatred or prejudice. It is not just Palestinians who have been harmed and killed and traumatized by the violent and terrorizing actions of others.
I have tried my best to simply, straight report what I saw and heard. To amplify the voice of those Palestinian Christians I met who feel unheard, abandoned by the Church in Europe and failed by international law.
These are the three acts of solidarity they want us to hear, and I am privileged to bring to us:
- That we support Karios 2 as the authentic voice and vision of Palestinian Christians. Kairos 2 is a Document, issued by the Palestinian Christian Ecumenical Initiative in 2025.
- That we call upon and seek to influence the UK Government to meet its full obligations under international law in relation to the ongoing situation in Israel/Palestine.
- That we call upon the UK Government to challenge the Israeli Government’s recent law of death penalty meted out by military court for Palestinian prisoners.
Let me restrict myself here to sharing one story, which had a profound effect on me. In Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Senior Palestinian Christians shared with us the Biblical passage which helps them hold and make sense of the situation they are in. They told us that they were with Jesus in Gethsemane, praying ‘if this can be taken away from us…’ 9
I made the mistake of pointing out that if in Gethsemane then what follows the death is resurrection. I proclaimed resurrection! And it fell flat. Resurrection fell through my fingers like sand, like water rushing down a drain.
I was rushing ahead in hope of hope, but they were in Gethsemane. What was it Jesus said to his disciples? Stay here with me, remain here with me, watch and pray. I couldn’t last a few minutes let alone an hour!
Stay here with me. Solidarity. Watch and pray. And Witness.
Solidarity and witness understand that sometimes you cannot change the outcome, but you can change the experience.
All We Can and the Methodist Church are amongst those endorsing partners of the recently launched Just Peace Coalition and its campaign ‘Time to Act’ which seeks to build and resource a movement across national and local churches in costly solidarity with Palestinian Christians seeking a just peace for all who call the Holy Land home. You can find out much more about the Just Peace Coalition and Time to Act at Christian Aid’s stall in the market place here at Conference as well as online.
Frank Esack is a South African Muslim scholar, writer, and political activist known for his opposition to apartheid, his appointment by Nelson Mandela as a gender equity commissioner, and his work for inter-religious dialogue. He writes: ‘It is not going to be easy. What we do know is that our world has become small and dangers threatening it, multifarious … Humankind, especially the marginalized and oppressed, need each other to confront these dangers and the challenges of liberation. Let us hope that, because of, and not despite, our different creeds and worldviews, we are going to walk this road side by side. Let us hope that we will be able to sort out some of the theological issues whilst we walk the road … All of us participate in the shaping of the cultural and religious images and assumptions that oppress or liberate the Other, and thus ourselves,’10
In summary: be more Roy; the greater flow of spiritual wisdom; God is love; a Church that seeks to grow through conflict, learning to live with contradictory convictions, seeking justice, dignity and solidarity.
And let me finish with a story from Scotland, a monstrous-sized Celtic gift.
On August 22 in the year 565 St. Columba became the second person in written history to encounter the water beast of Ness. The Loch Ness Monster. Nessie.
Columba and some of his monks were headed from Iona north-east to the Moray Coast with a mission of preaching the Gospel of Christ to a Pictish King and his people in the hope of conversion.
Having travelled the length of Loch Ness they arrived at the river wishing to cross it. The ferry-boat could be seen laying on the far bank. Along the side of the river on which they stood came a funeral procession carrying the ferryman on a stretcher followed by his wife and children. Columba enquired as to the cause of death.
The ferryman had been swimming across to fetch his boat (the legend doesn’t tell us why the boat was on the opposite side of the river) when he had been attacked by the water-beast rising to the surface and biting him with its many big, sharp teeth. He had managed to get back to the bank but died of his injuries leaving wife and children bereaved and without means of income.
Columba asked the bearers to lay the stretcher down. He placed his staff on the body of the ferryman, made the sign of the cross and commanded the man back to life in the name of Christ Jesus.
The ferryman was restored to life, family and community.
But the boat is still on the other side. Columba asked Lugne Mocumin, his bravest monk, to swim across and return in the boat. Lugne immediately dived into the river. But half-way across, ROAR, up surfaced the monster, charging at Lugne, mouth gaping wide open, teeth at the ready!
Columba raised his hand, making again the sign of The Cross, “You will go no further,” he bellowed, “Touch not the man! Leave at once!” and he dismissed the beast to the depths. St Columba’s 7th-century biographer, Adamnan wrote ‘ it was if the beast were hauled down by mighty ropes’ and it sank, banished, into the darkness never to be seen again …
Until two cheeky blokes took a black and white photo in 1933 and we became fascinated with The Monster. Does it exist? Where is it? Made it into a cuddly toy, a pin badge, put it on a box of fudge, a t-shirt, a baseball cap. But the story isn’t about the Monster, is it?
It’s about life that is stronger than death. Light that is stronger than darkness. Goodness that is stronger than evil. Truth that is stronger than lies. The poor lifted up and the powerful brought low and banished.
Thank you for taking the time to read.
Thanks be to God. Amen.