March 2025 – Reflections from David & Jonathan
- Hawai‘i Conference Office
- Mar 31
- 3 min read
Our Conference Minister, David Popham, and Associate Conference Minister, Jonathan Roach, take turns sharing reflections each week in our Coconut Wireless e-newsletter. Read their reflections for the month of March 2025 here!
Religious Freedom
David K. Popham, Conference Minister
Religious freedom is a personal issue for me, for I bear the wounds of religious coercion that seeks to deny me entrance to God's presence as a queer person of faith. That is why for me, religious freedom involves recognizing the dignity of all people, allowing them to practice their faith without coercion. The key being "without coercion."
In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a high school coach's right to pray publicly. Yet is the coach's religious expression free of coercion when the team is expected to kneel in prayer with him? States enacting anti-abortion laws have done so in the name of religious principles. However, pastors are now curtailed in the counseling of human health issues when a fetus is involved. Is the state's religious expression free of coercion?
Religious freedom is always an experiment, with times of getting it right and times of getting it wrong. When does my right to exercise my religious beliefs become coercion of another? With such questions I fall back on the image of God as the overflowing generosity of love. Love always comes as an invitation and never as imposition. To impose love morphs it into something other than love itself: the means by which we afflict our own ego-driven agendas upon the world.
May we be called out when our religious freedom coerces others. And may we call out the coercion of others disguised as the exercise of religious freedom.
Thoughts on the Day Before Vacation
Jonathan Roach, Associate Conference Minister
Starting on Thursday, I will be on vacation! My wife, our daughter, and I will be heading off to Seoul, South Korea for a week of night markets, street food, touring palaces and temples, hiking in parks, and maybe even some birdwatching. Taking vacations, observing a day of Sabbath, enjoying time off are vital for healthy, empowering ministry.
I have been studying theologies of work, especially pastoral work, since 2008 and even wrote my PhD dissertation on a theological understanding of this labor of calling and love that we celebrate as ministry. If you really want to read the long-winded story of theology of mundane pastoral work, feel free to read the full 299 pages here! But the short version is that God models the concepts of taking time off from the opening story of creation with that vital seventh day and Jesus reinforces that lesson by heading off to the mountains for peace, quiet, and prayer throughout the gospels.
The theologian James Flynn writes that if our clergy and seminarians "are formed with strong biblical studies, a strong background in church history, a solid systematic theology background, and excellent homiletics preparation, yet have little built into their lives during the formation process to help them withstand the deformative forces commonly encountered in ministry, all may be lost when they fail under pressure and are blown out of the ministry." As I head off on my vacation, please make sure that your pastoral leaders are taking their time off…time to be formed and reformed, time for leisure, time for prayer, time for reflection, time for renewal.
