It is hope in disguise.
Ayush Roy
Member, RTMC since 2008 • Writing in 2025
Bangalore, 2025
Richmond Town Methodist Church
To the congregation of 2075,
🌿 A Young Voice, Looking Forward
I volunteered to write this letter in the hope that you will understand how at least one member of the youth of 2025 feels about the Church — and what we are trusting you to become.
I don’t claim to speak for every young person who has sat in these pews.
But since I am one of them, I imagine my voice carries some weight.
A few hundred grams at least.
A Complicated World
The world we inhabit in 2025 is a complicated one.
It is a world of extraordinary connection and, at the same time, extraordinary fragmentation.
A world where information travels faster than wisdom, and where the loudest voices do not always carry the most light.
It is a world where conflict has become a familiar backdrop — where divisions between people, between communities, between nations, seem to deepen a little more each year.
I will not pretend that the Church has been untouched by these troubles.
No institution is.
Faith communities around the world have, at times, been part of the problem — using the Word of God to build walls rather than to tear them down, to exclude rather than to welcome.
Our generation notices this.
We are, perhaps, the most informed and questioning generation the Church has ever had to speak to.
We hold it to account.
✨ OUR QUESTIONING IS NOT HOSTILITY
“But here is what I want you — the congregation of 2075 — to understand: our questioning is not hostility. It is hope in disguise.”
The scepticism that many of my generation feel toward the institutional Church is not borne of indifference.
It is borne of the same longing that brought our parents and grandparents to these pews:
the desire to belong to something good, something true, something that stands for more than itself.
We are not walking away.
We are watching, and waiting, and asking the Church to be what it says it is.
🌱 What We Believe the Church Can Be
What we believe the Church can be is not complicated.
It is written plainly in the Gospel, and in the Fruits of the Spirit that have always defined the Methodist tradition:
Love • Joy • Peace • Patience • Kindness • Goodness • Faithfulness • Gentleness • Self-Control
These are not relics.
They are not bound to any era, culture, or faction.
They are the reason the Church exists, and they are the reason we, despite everything, still believe in it.
🕊️ A Church That Stands Within the World
We long for a Church that is courageous enough to speak plainly in an age of noise.
A Church that does not echo the voice of any particular political faction, but the voice of humanity itself.
A Church that stands not above the world, pointing fingers, but inside it, sleeves rolled up, doing the long and patient work of love.
We want a Church that calls things by their right names —
injustice, injustice;
exclusion, exclusion;
fear dressed as faith, what it is.
💛 We Have Seen Something Here
And we believe RTMC can be that Church.
We have seen it in our own small ways —
in the Sunday school teacher who never stopped showing up,
in the choir that filled the building with something that felt, on the right morning, like grace itself,
in the congregation that gathered again after the pandemic years with a quiet determination that moved us more than we knew how to say.
There is something in this place that has held.
We have felt it.
✨ KEEP ASKING THE HARD QUESTIONS
“What I am asking of you — the congregation of 2075 — is to keep going.”
To keep asking the hard questions.
To challenge the Church to grow, to listen, and to respond to the needs of the world around it.
To hold the institution accountable, gently and persistently, the way a loving family holds one of its own.
📖 From Weapon to Lamp
I hope that by the time you read these words, the conversations that are still difficult in 2025 have been resolved — not by silence, but by the slow and honest work of discernment.
I hope that the Church has found the courage to read Scripture not as a weapon to be deployed but as a lamp to be carried into dark places.
I hope that those who lead have proven themselves worthy of the trust placed in them — that they have served the congregation with integrity and transparency, and that the congregation has held them to that standard with grace and firmness in equal measure.
🌿 A Living Church, Not a Monument
I hope the youth of 2075 look to RTMC not as a monument to what once was, but as a living example of what the Church can still become.
I hope they find here a community that has earned its authority, not by avoiding difficult questions, but by walking through them together and emerging, still faithful, on the other side.
💚 What I Am Grateful For
What I am grateful for, in 2025, is this:
I was given a faith worth questioning.
I was given a church with enough history to carry us, and enough honesty to face itself.
I was given, alongside the doubt, the Fruits of the Spirit —
and I have found, to my own surprise, that:
Love is in fact the most durable thing there is.
✞ KEEP THE DOORS OPEN
The doors of Richmond Town Methodist Church have been open for 150 years.
I am trusting you to keep them open.
Not just as a building, but as a welcome —
to the stranger,
to the questioner,
to the one who arrives not sure they belong,
and discovers, as generations before them have discovered,
that they do.
In great faith, and in great hope,
Ayush Roy
A member in their twenties • RTMC member since 2008
