Social Principles booklet credits 2 Southwest Texans

By Claudia M. Williams
Staff Writer
Two Southwest Texas Conference laywomen helped shape the way United Methodists will be learning about the denomination’s Social Principles for the next four years.
The General Board of Church and Society credits Martha M. Rogers and Wanda Holcombe, both of Austin, in the introduction to Social Principles of The United Methodist Church 2005-2008 booklet. The acknowledgment reads:
“Several exercises in the guide were designed by the Southwest Texas Conference Board of Church & Society of the United Methodist Church using methods of leading studies of the Social Principles led by GBCS staffpersons Neal Christie and Annette Vanzant Williams. Special thanks to Martha M. Rogers and Wanda Holcombe.”
Rogers, 2000-2004 chair of the conference Board of Church and Society, is a member of Northwest Hills UMC, Austin. Holcombe, conference Peace with Justice coordinator, is a member of Asbury UMC, Austin.
For the first time, Rogers said, the quadrennially published booklet includes a section on teaching the Social Principles.
Exercises, which were used in Southwest Texas, are designed to help leaders become discussion moderators as they engage individuals and local churches in working with the Social Principles.
“There’s a lot of sensitivity around the Social Principles,” Rogers explained. “With these tools, leaders can teach the Social Principles in a nondivisive way. There can be rational discussion; people can express their opinions without argument.”
The genesis of the teaching guide was a Methods of Teaching Social Principles seminar conducted by the General Board of Church and Society in the Southwest Texas Conference in 2001.
“We asked GBCS to bring their seminar to our conference because the Social Principles are little understood by people in the pews,” Rogers said. “There were about 40 people at the seminar representing all the districts. The people were excited about the excellent teaching methods and wanted to go back to their churches to teach the Social Principles to their congregations.”
Holcombe and Rogers recognized a need to make the teaching methods available so that anyone in the conference—not just those who attended the seminar—could lead a workshop.
“We gathered materials from the GBCS and reformatted and organized them into exercises appropriate for the conference,” Rogers said. Used in successive conference workshops and offered at a display during the 2002 annual conference session, the Social Principles Workshop Kit became a popular resource.
At a 2003 meeting of chairs of all conference boards of church and society, Rogers was asked to present the workshop kit and explain how the Southwest Texas Conference was using it. Impressed, the General Board of Church and Society staff began distributing the kit, subsequently incorporating part of it into the 2005-2008 booklet.
“We’ve been using the teaching exercises in Social Principles workshops at leadership training for the Corpus Christi, McAllen, Austin and Kerrville districts,” Holcombe said.
In addition to offering Social Principles workshops in the conference, Holcombe is leading similar workshops throughout the South Central Jurisdiction for the General Board of Church and Society.
Found in both The Book of Discipline and The Book of Resolutions, the Social Principles represent a prayerful and thoughtful effort by the denom-ination’s top policy-making assembly to address current human issues from a sound biblical and theological foundation. The principles are meant to be instructive and persuasive, but they are not church law.
The Social Principles of the United Methodist Church 2005-2008 booklet is now available at Cokesbury bookstores and from the General Board of Church and Society.