January 1, 2024, marked the ten-year anniversary of the Great Plains Conference and the united effort of United Methodists in Nebraska and Kansas to share in covenant relationship with partners in Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria. God used these partnerships, first established by the predecessor conferences Kansas East (Haiti), Kansas West (Zimbabwe), and Nebraska (Nigeria), to bless many lives and ministries.
In 2017, the Great Plains Justice & Mercy Team made the strategic decision to align each of the international partnerships around one central missional purpose: education and leadership development. This purpose reflected the Team’s discernment that what we could do with excellence in these long-distance relationships as a Conference was to support pathways to higher education for promising young United Methodist leaders.
We celebrate that we have now fully funded the university education of three graduates from Africa University from the Jalingo Orphanage in Nigeria in 2022, as well as four students from Port-au-Prince University from the island of La Gonave, Haiti, who completed their studies in 2023-2025. We have also made contributions to Africa University to support Zimbabwean students. Two more university students in Haiti are nearing completion. Our prayer for these young graduates is that they may be God’s instruments of justice, peace, and blessing in all the places that God calls them to serve throughout their lives.
With our commitments to our individual graduates nearly fulfilled and with the expiration of our formal Covenant Relationships/Memorandum of Understandings, the Justice & Mercy Team, as the Great Plains entity responsible for our mission partnerships, has made this decision: upon completion of our promised commitments to individual students, we are releasing the Great Plains Conference from these three formal relationships and returning the relationships among United Methodists in the Great Plains and Methodists in these places of historic partnership (Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria) back to the individuals and congregations who have loved each other in the love of Christ over the miles and over the years. We give thanks for the special gifts of this season in ministry we have shared together!