Bishop Jonn Yambasu, leader of the Seirra Leone Annual Conference of the UMC, died this week. That’s him on the right of the photo next to me at Wrightsville UMC in August 2016. I got to meet him and talk to him that weekend, and I’ve heard him preach and speak at annual conferences and other events since then. Bishop Yambasu was also the person responsible for bringing together the group who wrote the “Protocol of reconciliation and grace” after General Conference 2019. He was upset with how poor a witness of Christ’s love he thought that Conference had been to the world, and he wanted us to be better, so he felt compelled to do something about it and gather those leaders. As the Council of Bishops, the United Methodist New Service, and other groups have published articles about him over the past few days, I keep seeing phrases about the pandemic interrupting the approval of that protocol, and about how Bishop Yambasu’s work was not done.
My impression of Bishop Yambasu is that he wouldn’t mind his work not being done. He was a leader who sought peace, and that’s a job that’s never done. And he was a leader who expected that the next generation of believers would be, as the Psalmist soberly yet hopefully wrote, better than those who came before. May we know that our part in God’s reconciliation of the world is not done. May we be better than those who came before. And may we teach the next generation to be better than ourselves.
