World Methodist Council — Thematic Keynote - El Salvador, 15 August 2026
My thinking as I prepared:
JOY, in the Wesleyan and global Christian witness, is not the absence of suffering but the sign that suffering does not have the last word. It begins as longing, is costly won, survives as defiance, matures into communal practice, and ends in universal doxology. That five-step dance defines our lives as people who live in the joy of the Lord.
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From the lands of the Adnyamathanha, Barramattagal and Awabakel in my homeland of Australia, I pay may respects to the custodians of this land of El Salvador, and I bring greetings from the Council for World Mission – an ecumenical partner of the World Methodist Council on key commitments and projects, like NIFEA the NEW INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL and ECONOMIC ARCHITECTURE.
Introduction
On the way here, I took a stopover in Los Angeles. While there I FOUND MYSELF in the hospital … the hospital had closed to conventional medicine and now housed a special exhibition called the Hospital of Emotions. 80 hospital rooms had been converted with art installations to explore eight key emotions, one of which was JOY.
Although the whole experience took me on a journey through wide ranging emotions, each of the ten rooms about joy was self contained. Each artist used imagery, space, colour and sound to prompt interaction with JOY and a kind of reflective practice. In this time together, I am hoping to follow their lead, not with a logicked linear essay about joy, but with a patchwork of pieces that prompt and provoke us to grapple with and seek JOY.
This presentation has five “installations” and a poem of joy remembered.
I— Joy Longed For (Advent / Desire)
Every year in the Land Down Under, the Australian Broadcasting Commission Radio station does a survey of the Top 100 classical hits. Every year, in a secular, hyper-multicultural and pluralistic country, the #1 is the same piece:
Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken, Himmlische, dein Heiligtum.
… Joyful, joyful, we adore thee, God of glory, Lord of love…
Beethoven, Ode to Joy – from Symphony Nr.9
I have to admit, it is not my vote — but I do understand why. In a world of violence and sadness, of war and anxiety, that major-key, dance-like hymn offers a moment of JOY. It stirs the positive and optimistic. It invites us to sing a faith that offers a foretaste of a fully restored heaven and earth bowing down before God. This is the first thing spirituality does for our wellbeing: it gives us permission to long for AND BE PRESENT TO what is not yet here, without shame and without despair. JOY doesn’t belong in our left-brain logic world. It is part of our right-brain activity, but not at the base level of emotion. It goes deeper and drives us higher…
— KOOKABURRA Do you feel the JOY?
My Indigenous Aboriginal Adnyamathanha sister, Denise Champion (theologian-in-residence at Flinders University), sings of the Spirit that danced across Country to create. We talk of the land-country as the expression of the presence of God, and we say Anaditj — always was, always will be … the God who was, and is and is yet to come.
God's presence in the Pacific is found in the MOA-NA, the deep blue life of the second day of Creation. It is bounded by the firmament that separates the atmosphere of air and the atmosphere of water. The ocean is alive with the life and love of God. It is made in the image of God, and it makes us conscious of the Divine.
As Jione Havea wrote: Out of the mighty oceans, baby earth was birthed.
God's presence in the Pacific is found in the WHENUA-FENUA, the land of the third day of Creation. In the rest of the world, land separates the waters; in the Pacific, the waters surround the lands, reminding us of the symbiotic and amniotic relationship between the waters of life and the incarnation of the earth and its Day Six inhabitants.
Te Aroha Rountree, President of the Methodist Church of New Zealand, says: I am the environment, and the environment is me — grounded in kai-tiaki-tanga. (Responsible relationship within creation/guardianship)
You shall go out with joy … the mountains and the hills shall break forth into singing. Isaiah 55:12
At the top of a mountain peak, we en-JOY the vista before us. In the dry heat of the thirsty desert, we en-JOY the oasis with its spring of water. At Africa's Lake Kivu, in between war and Ebola and the political and poverty tensions of surrounding nations, the fish swim and the birds fly the dance of life God breathes into them. The way they live is an expression of JOY.
This fellowship with Creation reminds us of the Missio Trinitas — the mission God calls us to, which exists to reflect divine relationship. In Trinity, the relationship of JOY collides in the One who is fully Divine and fully Human… the WORD who was born a wordless baby…
I remember well when my late husband made a recording of our grandson laughing. He kept it as his ringtone. For the next few years, whenever someone phoned him, mothers would come running.
We experience JOY when we hear the contagious laughter of a baby. It is full of delight. It is in the moment. A moment that communicates pure JOY before there are words to express it. It is a celebration of life in all its fullness and a promise of life yet to be lived.
That baby is now a towering sixteen-year-old, whose overflowing JOY and laughter is expressed when Australia scores a goal at the World Cup, or when he experiences the hospitality of homemade pasta. It is not a superficial JOY — in that moment, the suffering and pain of the world is suspended. There is celebration in the fullness of life… it is not a celebration of personal gratification, but an overflowing or, a breaking through, of life to be shared.
I have come that you may have fullness of life. - John 10:10
When our hearts overflow with JOY, we can't help giving voice to it. It becomes the fuel for things yet to be birthed.
In Advent, Charles Wesley has us singing “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus,” in which we sing: “Israel's strength and consolation… JOY of every longing heart.”
JOY doesn't start as the achievement. It starts as a promise, a longing, an ache — a people naming what they don't yet have, yet strive for. It is expectant…
When we join in Mary's song of JOY, it is a testimony that, in this moment, I will live in JOYful expectation of what God has in store. It is a song of the now and the not yet. I choose to live JOYfully, in faith in the God of Life.
II — JOY Costly Won (Cross and Resurrection)
Christian JOY is not naive. Neither is it mere happiness. Its greatest value is understood beyond suffering — or, better still, as something greater than suffering. Each time we partake of Communion we proclaim the threefold testimony of Death, Life and Promised JOY:
Christ has died. Christ is Risen. Christ will come again.
It is a reminder that the gospel is not simply a story of death losing its sting, but the promise of a great feast with the saints who have gone before and those who are yet to come.
Just because we are ministry leaders, praying for JOY in the world, does not mean we are immune to sorrow and suffering. Many of you have experienced heartbreak or terror. Some of you have lost parents, or children, or — like me — your beloved spouse. Some of you have ministered with victims of violence, or perpetrators. Many of you have served the most hopeless, and, in empathy, their despair has touched your soul. Yet each of you has acted in faith to make this journey, to be in this room, to come here to find and offer grace … and through grace, to live towards JOY.
For the JOY set before him, he endured the cross. Hebrews 12:2
Weeping may endure for a night, but JOY comes in the mornin.g Ps 30:5
Every year at Easter, acknowledging the empty tomb, we sing “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” (Charles Wesley): “Love's redeeming work is done … raise your JOYS and triumphs high.”
And Gustavo Gutiérrez — the Peruvian liberation theologian — insisted that the JOY of the poor confounds the powerful; that JOYful laughter is itself testimony that sin and death do not have the final word.
When I was 16, I assisted on a Christian Camp for Disabled young people. Some of the campers were only a little younger than me. One boy I got to know had muscular dystrophy. We talked and prayed and laughed. The next year, he was unable to hold his head up without assistance. One of his carers told me he didn’t have long left. When we said goodbye, he told me “I will be released from this body”.
This is where spirituality and wellbeing meet, and where I want to be honest with you: joy is not in the absence of what has broken us, but in the discipline of staying tender inside it. Ministry that forgets this becomes brittle. JOY — costly, embraced, practiced — is what keeps a leader's soul supple enough to keep attentive to good news.
III — Joy as Defiance (Theological Reflection)
JOY is closer to an act of resistance than a mood.
“Count it all JOY … when you meet trials of various kinds.” James 1:2
Not because trials are good — but because JOY refuses to hand them the final word. Karl Barth called this a defiant “nevertheless”: gratitude and gladness spoken not instead of suffering, but straight into the middle of it.
It's worth remembering that Barth did not always practice what he preached about who gets to stand at the centre of the church's speech. It was Georgia Harkness — the first woman to hold a full theology professorship at an American seminary — who confronted him directly over his theology of women, and who kept teaching, kept writing, kept insisting that JOY in the Spirit was not a man's to grant or withhold. It is these defiant battles that bring the possibility of exercising JOY as a spiritual discipline — and, for those of us in ministry, a wellbeing practice we cannot afford to skip.
Centuries earlier, in a small cell in Norwich, a woman we know only as Julian survived plague, war, and the loss of everyone she loved — and still wrote: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” That is not naivety. That is defiance, written by a woman with nothing left to lose and everything left to trust.
In 1994, as South Africa held its first democratic election, the Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako described the long lines of voters — people who had waited a lifetime, and then waited hours more in the sun — as a joyful leap of faith.
And last year— an Asian UMC Minister, Lizette Tapia-Raquel, Academic Dean at Union Theological Seminary in Cavite, the Philippines, stood in the streets holding a sign that read: Terminate the political dynasty. Take responsibility. A feminist theologian, trained in the theology of incarnation, choosing to incarnate her theology on the pavement. That is what JOY as defiance looks like when it stops being a metaphor.
Joy exists under pressure. It is the theological centre of gravity for a global body like ours — one that includes churches under real persecution, poverty and war. It is not the reward for having survived. It is the practice that makes survival mean something.
IV — Joy as Communal Practice
JOY is not private property. It is made — and only fully known — in community and relationship.
Jesus (on the eve of his suffering) said:
“I have said these things to you so that my JOY may be in you, and that your JOY may be complete.” John 15:11
Paul, writing from his prison isolation, could still exhort the community: “Rejoice in the Lord always” (Philippians 4:4). It was a shared inheritance, not a personal achievement.
Desmond Tutu named it simply: Umntu ngumuntu ngabantu — a person is a person through other persons. Ubuntu is not sentiment; it is theology. My JOY is not complete until it is shared, and neither is yours. This is also, quite practically, a wellbeing claim: isolation is one of the great occupational hazards of ministry, and JOY shared in community is one of its best protections. JOY shared does not just express my wellbeing, it boosts your wellbeing too.
You show me the path to Life; Your presence fills me with JOY,
and by your side I find enduring pleasure. Psalm 16:11
Mercy Amba Oduyoye, the Ghanaian theologian known as the mother of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, built her network on that relational conviction. She created a space where African women could do theology together rather than alone.
Nearly forty years later, Zambian Methodist Minister, Lilian Siwila, of the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a member of that same Circle, carries the work forward, writing on how African women's practices of hospitality — feeding, welcoming, making room at the table — are themselves acts of theology, and acts of JOY.
In the Pacific, Brian Kolia, an Australian-Samoan biblical scholar, has been reclaiming mālie — a Pasifika sense of humour and delight that missionaries once tried to suppress as unserious. He is putting laughter back into the reading of Scripture, where it always belonged.
And closer to home for me: my colleague Dr Carmel Villar and I have spent the past several years developing what we call WITHNESS — not witness in the sense of standing apart and testifying to what we've seen, but with-ness: the practice of accompaniment and solidarity, of staying present alongside another person or another church, without needing to fix, direct, or conclude. It is a small word carrying a large theological claim: that JOY, like mission, is not something we deliver TO each other. It is something we discover only by staying in the room WITH each other.
A connexional, worldwide body like the World Methodist Council is not incidental to JOY. Connection – relationship - is one of the conditions that makes JOY possible at all.
V — JOY as Universal Doxology (Coda / Sending)
We lost one of the great voices of Pacific theology this year. The Rev. Prof. Jione Havea — Tongan Wesleyan Methodist pastor, biblical scholar, and the man so many of us called the prophet of the Pacific — taught us to read Scripture with what he named “mischievous delight,” using talanoa, the practice of inclusive storytelling, to open texts that had been closed for centuries.
JOY, as we have said all along, is not the absence of grief — it is the sign that grief does not have the last word. JOY is strong in the face of death.
Charles Wesley wrote:
Lift up your heart, lift up your voice; rejoice, again I say rejoice.
“The joy of the LORD is your strength.” - Nehemiah 8:10
We began with the laugh of a baby, and a Kookaburra, and the ocean as the blue life of the second day of Creation. We end it the same way we began: not with an argument for JOY, but with an invitation into it. Longed for. Costly. Defiant. Shared. And now — sung, together, by a room that spans every ocean God ever made.
Spirituality and wellbeing were never two separate pursuits. They are one and the same discipline: staying tender, staying honest, and staying — somehow — joyful.
35 years after I said goodbye to the boy at that camp, I wrote a poem, in the week after my husband died.
Let it be our benediction.
Alegría bendijo nuestra vida con conversación,
comidas en familia y paseos en bicicleta.
Alegría nos llevó a largos días de partidos
y a caminatas por jardines y parques nacionales.
Alegría cantó y jugó, sirvió vino, sembró hierbas,
viajó en carritos de golf, saltó a los trenes,
paseó por los mercados, llenó canastas,
cocinó con amigos, comimos juntos
para redefinir la familia... una familia de ALEGRÍA.
Hoy, puedo ver la ALEGRÍA...
Aparece en la compañía de muchos,
en los mensajes y en la presencia navideña.
ALEGRÍA es recordada y prometida.
Se esconde y juega a las escondidas... aquí estoy, ahora no.
ALEGRÍA vive en el Cielo y se hace presente
en el amor que nos rodea.
No les deseo una feliz fiesta, (¡una amenaza superficial y vacía!)
En cambio, les deseo una ALEGRÍA profunda —
la ALEGRÍA del amor recordado y prometido.
Que conozcan la ALEGRÍA de un amor tan profundo
que se les corte la respiración y se les llenen los ojos de lágrimas al recordarlo.
Esta es la ALEGRÍA donde la vida y la muerte se encuentran.
Que sean bendecidos con una ALEGRÍA que los lleve a la eternidad.
Joy blessed our life with conversation
Family meals and Bike rides.
Joy took us to long days at test matches
and walks in gardens and national parks.
Joy sang and played games, poured wine, planted herbs,
rode in golf buggies, jumped onto trains,
wandered markets, filled baskets,
cooked with friends, ate together
to redefine family... a family of JOY.
Today, I can see the JOY...
It appears in the company of many,
in the messages and Christmas presence.
JOY is remembered and promised.
It hides and plays peek-a-boo... now you see me, now you don’t.
JOY is housed in Heaven and becomes incarnate
in the love surrounding.
I do not wish you a happy holiday, (a superficial and empty threat!)
Instead, I wish you deep JOY -
the JOY of love remembered and promised.
May you know the JOY of a love so deep
your breath catches and your eyes leak at the memory.
This is the JOY where life and death intersect.
May you be blest with a JOY that carries you into eternity.
© 2019, A. Koh-Butler
The session included three responses from: Heather Morris (“Enlarging the Circle”), Sarah Friswell (“Pilgrimage”), and Tercio Junker (“The Joy of Worship”), moderated by Junyoung Kim.
APPENDIX — References cited
Movement I
• Beethoven, “Ode to Joy” (Ninth Symphony, 1824)
• Charles Wesley, “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus,” Hymns for the Nativity of Our Lord (1744).
• Dr Xiaoli Yang — personal communication, IAMS conference, July 2026.
• Rev Dr Denise Champion, quoted in “Season of Creation Week 5,” Uniting Church Australia (2022); see also Anaditj (2022).
• Te Aroha Rountree, President, Methodist Church of Aotearoa New Zealand — quoted via Eco Church Aotearoa, “Takapuna Methodist Church and the Puriri Centre.”
• Psalm 16:11, The Inclusive Bible translation.
Movement II
• Charles Wesley, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739).
• Fanny Crosby, “Blessed Assurance” (1873).
• Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (Orbis, 1973/1988); “confounds the powerful” per Mario Campos, Latin America Press (1984) — confirm exact wording if quoting directly.
Movement III
• Karl Barth — the “nevertheless” framing is a widely used summary of Barth's theology of gladness (cf. Church Dogmatics III/4)
• Georgia Harkness (1891–1974) — first woman to hold a full theology professorship at an American seminary; her confrontation with Barth is documented at Boston University's “A People's History of the School of Theology.”
• Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, c. 1395
• Kwame Bediako, discussed by Tim Hartman, “Anticipating Joy,” Barth Center Substack (2024), re: the April 1994 South African election.
• Rev Dr Lizette G. Tapia-Raquel, Academic Dean, Union Theological Seminary, Philippines — anti-corruption rally, September 2025, reported in United Methodist Insight.
Movement IV
• Desmond Tutu, “Ubuntu: On the Nature of Human Community.”
• Mercy Amba Oduyoye — founder, Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians (est. 1989, Legon, Ghana).
• Zambian Methodist, Rev Prof. Lilian Cheelo Siwila, University of KwaZulu-Natal — member, Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians; research on African women's practices of hospitality and liturgy.
• Rev Dr Brian Fiu Kolia, Pasifika biblical scholar, on reclaiming mālie in Pasifika readings of Scripture.
• Rev Carmel Villar — co-author with Amelia Koh-Butler of WITHNESS concept papers, IAMS Pretoria 2026 (submitted for peer review).
Movement V
• Rev. Prof. Jione Havea (1965–2026), Tongan Methodist pastor and biblical scholar, died 29 April 2026. Tributes from WCC, WCRC and CWM describe him as “prophet of the Pacific.”
• Charles Wesley, “Rejoice, the Lord Is King,” Hymns for Our Lord's Resurrection (1746).
