Grace Notes from Space for Grace 2026

“Come as you are. Come you weary. Bring your doubts and your scars.”

Dr. Jeffrey Haggray, executive director, American Baptist Home Mission Societies, opened the 2026 Space for Grace and Spiritual Caregivers Conference with a heartfelt invitation. “Welcome home,” he announced to the conferees, a greeting that visitors regularly hear when they arrive at ABHMS Leadership and Mission Building in King of Prussia, Pa.

The hymns, performed and sung under the direction of Dr. Tony McNeill, praised the diverse Body of Christ which includes saints and sinners, the faithful and the faint, the broken, the strange, and the searching. From the beginning, the conference showed that storytelling begins with invitation.

“We are paperless people,” said Rev. Dr. Lauren Lisa Ng in her keynote. Drawing from 2 Corinthians 3, she contrasted the letter with the Spirit; the letter is enshrined on paper and contains documentation or endorsements; it signals legitimacy within the Empire. The Spirit is lived and relational; it embraces the fullness of our humanity.

One story Ng told to illustrate this contrast was that of “the Chinese Lady,” Afong Moy, who arrived in New York in 1834 on a trade ship. She posed among “Oriental” vases and rugs: wares mass- produced by Carnes brothers, who realized that her performances would act as advertisement for their business. No recorded personal narratives of Afong Moy have survived; her story is reconstructed from newspaper clippings of the time, which reveal more about how Americans perceived her, than her actual story. Before she mysteriously disappeared in 1851, Afong Moy was made into a spectacle. Her story was written down by others in ink, but without her voice. We know, deep down, that it was not really her story.

Papers and documents sometimes have the power to erase large parts of our lives. They can define who belongs and who does not. But they can also be used to circumvent exclusion, as the story of “paper sons” shows. These were Chinese men and boys who arrived as sons of the Chinese already living in America. When the town hall and its records were destroyed in the San Francisco fire in 1906, they claimed to have been born on American soil.

“Come as you are” is therefore a call to resist the Empire, which reduces people to what can be documented, because we are a letter that is written down in the Spirit of God. At this conference, all we need is the willingness to connect to one another not through the papers that define us, but through the lives we carry in our “bones and sinews,” as Ng evocatively put it. Her keynote called for us to be Spirit-filled storytellers, not record-keepers; truly paperless people.

During the evening plenary, Friends of the Groom, a theater company from the Cincinnati area, enacted a story of three trees based on the book by Angela Elwell Hunt. Three little trees had dreams of wealth, power, and stature, but as they grew and were cut down, none of their dreams materialized. They were transformed into practical, modest objects. It looked like they were destined to be forever disappointed, but for each of them, there was a surprise in store: eventually, they served Jesus Christ: the first one as his cradle, the second one as a bench on a fishing boat, and the third one—as the Cross. Their purpose turned out to be much more significant than it would ever have been had their dreams of worldly grandeur come true.

This message—that true importance is often borne by modest lives, humble people, and deep dedication to living out God’s plan for us—was also carried by the plenary keynote by Rev. Dr. Jim Somerville. Somerville framed his story with Mark 8:31, in which Jesus told his disciples that the fate of the Messiah was not to enjoy worldly power, but to suffer, to be killed, and after three days, to rise again. As Peter rebuked him, Jesus responded:” You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Somerville’s story, “Class of ‘77,” was about his years at an elite prep school, Phillips Exeter Academy. He told the audience of his perpetual sense of being the odd one out, a poor preacher’s son on a scholarship among the children of the wealthy and powerful. He recounted his visit to his classmate’s vacation home at Thanksgiving, where he decided that he would follow the path of success and money. His eyes were opened to the limitations of wealth when he understood that his poor family had given him what his friend’s family lacked—love. What looked like less was actually more. The story that he initially envisaged for his future self was not a life-giving story. This realization was so spiritually groundbreaking that he decided to become a minister.

While Ng’s morning keynote challenged the authority of what is written on paper, Somerville’s evening plenary exposed how deeply those “letters” still shape our idea of success. The tension between the things of God and the things of the world was profoundly embodied in Somerville’s own story of early ambition and eventual reorientation toward God’s love. Both messages remind us that we tell stories, but we are also shaped by them, and that some stories can diminish the soul, even though they may look like success.

By Rev. Dr. Anna Piela, ABHMS senior writer and editor of The Christian Citizen.

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