A respite in Lima

Okay, so I'm in Lima now with a little more time to write and let you know just what the heck I'm doing in Peru. Most of you probably remember the terrible earthquakes that Peru suffered in August of last year. Those quakes struck the very area where I've been working through nearly-annual trips since 2001. The epicenter of the quakes was in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of the Department of Ica (equivalent to a state in the U.S.). The departmental capital city of Ica, together with the cities of Pisco and Chincha, suffered widespread destruction and a loss of life that topped 500.

Soon after the earthquakes occurred, many people who had accompanied me in mission trips in past years started sending e-mails to see what could be done. The first matter, of course, was to join with our brothers and sisters in the Methodist Church of Peru through prayer for their healing and recovery. And the second task was to begin sending down assistance for relief supplies, which many people did. But the third task was to start a conversation about how we could physically travel down to Peru to help out with recovery efforts. The original hope was to go in January, so that we could be there as soon after the earthquakes as possible. When airfare costs made that time frame impossible, we rescheduled for May. The group that formed promised to be interesting in its makeup: a number of young pastors with previous Peru mission experience, current seminary students with a heart for mission, and a couple of spouses with past experiences in Peru as well (including mine!). There was no rhyme or reason to the group's roster, which included pastors from North Dakota, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Alabama, and seminary students from Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. It was simply those who responded to the call to go, help as they could, and join with the Peruvian church in witness and mission. We set our dates for May 1-9, and I also accepted an offer from my alma mater, Hendrix College, to lead a subsequent mission team of Hendrix students that would follow this first trip from May 11-21.

The interesting wrinkle for this group was that all of the people who signed up - whether they had been to Peru before or not - expressed an interest in learning how to lead short term mission trips. Some of these folks are already serving in ministry positions, while others are in school. But they all discerned a call to connect with Peru through learning to lead trips themselves at some point in the future. So my partner in leading this trip, Danny Redding-Rhodes (who directs the Cal Turner Fellowship Program at Vanderbilt Divinity School and is soon to be commissioned in the Arkansas Conference), and I together began to envision the trip as both an outreach to the earthquake damaged areas and a 'Leadership Development' experience where we could help our team members work through the nuts & bolts of mission logistics, purpose, and theological undergirding.

The long story short is that the trip has been great. We did not do nearly the amount of actual manual labor that we thought we would do. The Methodist churches themselves did not suffer much earthquake damage, and it has been long enough since the quakes that the acute needs have long since been taken care of (although signs of the quakes are everywhere, in the form of piles of rubble on sidwalks and streets). But what we did do, under the direction of Pastor Pedro Uchuya, the district superintendent of the Ica District, was engage heavily in forming relationships, bearing witness, strengthening the sense of connection in the district, and joining in worship with the churches around the city of Chincha Alta. The trip ended up being heavy in the education area, which was great for the aforementioned Leadership Development component we were aiming to emphasize. We had the opportunity to visit a great diversity of churches and communities, and then afterward to talk about what we saw, what it showed us about the Peruvian church's ministries, and how we could connect with those efforts through future trips. This was great for helping my team members think through their own calling to mission, and it was also clearly what Pedro thought was most important for us to be about while we were in Chincha.

In Ephesians 4:11-12, Paul writes about the gifts God has given so that the saints can be equipped for ministry. I think there is something to be said about both the development of the spiritual gifts of leaders and the way those gifts can be used for forming the discipleship of the whole church. The great folks on my team have all been gifted by God for the work of ministry, and it was a blessing to be with them so that they themselves might be better equipped to form disciples in mission in the future. I give thanks to God for that.

I want to write more about the specifics of some of what we saw and did, but I'll save that for another post. My team has returned to the U.S. now, and I am in Lima for a couple of days waiting for the mission team from Hendrix College to arrive. For me, it is a chance to relax and catch up on sleep before the second half of my own time here begins. That's important, since the group from Hendrix will be focused much more on manual labor. I have access to the Internet at the hotel where I'm staying in Lima, so maybe I can write more before I head back down south.

Chillin' in Chincha

We've been in Chincha since late Thursday night ... Hard to write a lot because of the Spanish-language keyboard and the crowded conditions in the Internet cafe. This has been a wonderful trip, different in some significant ways than trips I have taken to Peru in the past. Because of the large number of seminary students and young pastors on this trip, we have been focusing heavily on forming relationships with local churches and communicating the story of the Methodist churches of this area to the group. This is all in the hopes that some of the folks will want to lead groups themselves in future years.

Pastor Pedro continues to amaze me with his energy, his leadership, and his love for Jesus. They have been working through some difficult times here lately, due to theological differences with the iglesias libres, the free churches, which tend toward an over-spiritualized gospel and a tendency toward 'prosperity preaching'. Pedro has been sharing a lot of this with me and with the group as a whole, and in some strange ways, it is nice to see a church struggling bravely with divisions that are truly theological in nature (not that our church's struggle over moral issues is not rooted in theology, but our debates over them rarely reach the level of theology from which they spring). As the district superintendent for the Chincha District, it is Pedro's task to help the church through its current struggles and grow it stronger.

As always, the church's ministry with children is among the most awe-inspiring example of God's work that I have seen. In a few days, I'll have some free time in Lima and will try to write more then. For those of you out there who have been to Peru with me before, you would be interested to see a lot of what is happening here.

Your continued prayers for this mission are appreciated!

Worlds enough and time

Well, the last 24 hours of my life have been crazy. I'm in Nashville, ready to fly to Lima, Peru, very, very early tomorrow morning with a mission team I'm leading to work with a community in Chincha Alta. This is the same community I've visited several times before, and it is led by Pastor Pedro Uchuya, who is a friend, Christian brother, and spiritual hero to me.

The last day of my life has been spent grading final exams, packing, praying, and generally not getting a lot of sleep. I had planned to do one big General Conference-related post, and the time just caught up with me.

So all that's to say, I'll just have to do a GC breakdown when I get back!

There has been a WHOLE lot of interesting stuff come out of Ft. Worth over the past couple of days. If you have any thoughts and want to share them in the comments section, please feel free. I did get an e-mail tonight from Carol Bruse of the Texas Conference about the passage of the candidacy petitions. That's exciting news. If anyone at GC wants to comment on that or any other matter, I'll be checking the Internet from time to time in Peru and would love to hear some info!

Otherwise, I will be back from the mission on May 21 and will start posting again regularly - about Peru, GC, and otherwise - at that time. I would also appreciate your prayers for this trip. My experience with Peru over the past few years has shown me the depth and fullness of God's grace at work in this world. The church is a wonderful place to give your life. And friends, we've got all the time in the world for this stuff.

Peace to all +

General Conference cans and can'ts

As we enter into this second week of General Conference, I wanted to share some thoughts on what I think General Conference can and cannot do. I do so in my current UM Reporter column, where I approach the issue as one of form vs. content in ministry.

That is, General Conference has the ability to make changes in the form of the church, which (hopefully) will make the church a place more conducive to the Holy Spirit's work. The example I use here is the proposed alteration to the candidacy process. But even with changes made, it is still up to individuals and congregations to do the real work of ministry. I think that is an important distinction to remember, lest we be tempted to think that GC can be the cure-all for the church's ills.

May God continue to guide the work that is ongoing in Ft. Worth. Above all, the fact of the General Conference is a powerful witness to the faith of the people called Methodists!

GC first couple o' days

J. Richard Peck of the United Methodist News Service has two summaries of the first few days of GC the first one here and the second one here. Here's a highlight of some of the notable happenings:

-- The Episcopal address, given by Bishop Sharon Brown Christopher. Bishop Christopher suggested that membership decline in the U.S. branch of the church is at least partially attributable to infighting that arises out of differing liberal and conservative viewpoints. That is an interesting perspective, though not one I have ever seen backed up by any statistics. Also interesting to me is Bishop Christopher's suggestion that "right relationship" should take precedence over the "fervent pursuit of being right". That's a curious statement, since it suggests that ethics and doctrine are wholly separable for one another. I appreciate the bishops' frequent appeals for unity, but I often fear that their statements lack the depth of substance that would allow real unity within the church to exist.

-- It sounds as if the laity address, given by Lyn Powell of the North Georgia Annual Conference, was heavily focused on evangelism. Peck indicates that she had some challenging words for the laity, particularly in terms of being willing to go out into the world and actively participate in ministry.

-- The 13 general boards and agencies are adopting a fourfold emphasis for the coming quadrennium: 1) Developing principled Christian leaders for the church and the world; 2) Creating new places for new people and renewing existing congregations; 3) Stamping out diseases of poverty by improving health globally; 4) Engaging in ministry with the poor.

-- The "Seven Pathways" developed by the Council of Bishops served as a model for these four areas of focus by the general boards and agencies. These pathways offer a fuller description of what the church is wanting to do in terms of mission, evangelism, and development. I do have one question here: Why do we in the UMC seem to have such a difficult time talking about salvation as a real, spiritual process? If you read Peck's article, note that the four emphases and the seven pathways all talk about making material changes in the lives of people in order to help them out. And this is certainly one aspect of the Wesleyan understanding of outreach and ministry. But Wesley's first call to his preachers was to save souls, and this is not just done through eliminating poverty and disease. Why do we have such a hard time claiming the evangelical portion of our heritage, which holds that souls as well as bodies need salvation? For those of you at GC, are the news reports underemphasizing this, or is it simply not there? I like the language of forming disciples, but it isn't just about getting people to do good works in a local church setting!

-- The UM Task Force on Immigration is supporting a couple of resolutions that would support the church's harboring of immigrants. A press conference was held today, I suppose to anticipate the upcoming resolutions. Regardless of one's position on immigration, I believe the church has a biblical duty to harbor the alien in our midst, and that means protecting the vulnerable when they seek sanctuary with us. I hope the church can act prophetically in this area.

-- Looks like the committees have elected their chairpeople and gotten to work sifting through all the proposed legislation. Godspeed your work!

-- As a sidenote, I would be curious to hear from anyone at GC who can offer some insight into how prominent the transgender issue has been at the conference thus far. A couple of news stories reported the press conference led by Rev. Drew Phoenix, where he claimed that his gender reassignment/sex change surgery represented "steps toward wholeness." I can only assume that this press conference, like others, is designed to influence pending legislation on transsexuality. My understanding of our embodiedness as God's creatures makes me highly skeptical of anyone claiming a greater wholeness by artificially mutilating their bodies, whether through cosmetic surgery or intense hormone therapy. But given the typical nature of the sexuality debates at GC - which have been focused on homosexuality in the past - at least Phoenix's pushing of the transgender issue will allow the church to come to a better degree of understanding of the range of sexuality issues. I only hope some folks do some significant theological work on this after the GC is over. As I said in a recent post, I tend to be skeptical about the amount of substantive theological work that can be done in the context of the conference itself.

Young People's Address at GC

The 2004 General Conference created the Division on Ministries with Young People, within the General Board of Discipleship. Now the 2008 General Conference has heard the first ever Young People's Address, before the whole gathered body. United Methodist News Service reports on today's address in this news story. It sounds like the 6 teenagers and young adults represented a diverse cross-section of the church.

The church yearns for young people, and young people yearn for a place to belong, according to one of those who gave the address. Amen to that. What they said up there is important. The fact that the church invited them to say it and celebrated their presence is even more so.

Do we need a new clergy order?

Tom Arthur, a student at Duke Divinity School, is proposing a new order for clergy, which would be called the Order of St. James. You can see his post about it here. As a way to respond to the rampant materialism of our age, this order would covenant around the practices of simplicity and hospitality. The group Tom is gathering has devoted an entire blog to their ongoing conversations, and they are beginning a process of discernment about intentional practices in which the order will engage.

I think the issue that Tom and this group are pressing is an important one. In more and more interactions that I have with other clergy, the need to covenant around something deeper than just our common ordination vows often comes up. The reasons for this are many: For one thing, the level of accountability both in ministry and in the church as a whole is extremely low. For another, the very issue that this nascent Order of St. James is responding to - materialism - is so pervasive in the culture that it is sometimes hard to even see. When everything around us is devoted to mammon, it makes it difficult to remember how deceptively idolatrous mammon can be.

One other reason an order would be helpful is that it's becoming less and less clear what the mission of the church truly is. Many Christians - and I include Methodists here - don't take salvation very seriously. We've become soft universalists, assuming that our choices have no real bearing on whether or not we are saved eternally. In that milieu, a rededication by the clergy to living and preaching according to the gospel is desperately needed.

When I was in Nashville, some close friends and I entered into a process of discernment over whether to move toward living in an intentional community of some kind. We had lived and studied together in divinity school for a couple of years, and a number of us had been active in an anti-death penalty movement where we experienced a special call from the Holy Spirit. The text we kept coming back to was John 13:34, where Jesus gives a mandatum novum, a new commandment, that the disciples should love one another as they had been loved by Christ himself. Most of us were headed toward ordained ministry, and at some point the conversation came around to whether we should found an Order of the Mandatum, whose members would covenant to live in intentional communities and engage in certain biblical practices.

More recently, I have talked with friends here at Duke about an Ordo Missionis Wesleyani, an Order of the Wesleyan Mission, which would essentially be a preaching order for Methodist clergy. Its members would commit themselves to faithfully preaching the "three grand doctrines" of Scripture that Wesley said were indispensable: Original Sin, Justification by Faith, and the Holiness consequent upon that justification. Though such a doctrinal orientation might at first seem very different from either the Order of St. James or the Order of the Mandatum, it's not. When you understand what Wesley really meant by holiness, it becomes clear that doctrine and practice are twin sides of the same coin.

I will say that I think this stuff is much harder than it might at first appear. The Order of the Mandatum floundered, due largely to competing understandings of how it should be constituted and diverging desires on where to live and what to do. That group read Jean Vanier's Community and Growth together (a book that I highly recommend anyone read who has an interest in either a religious order or an intentional community), and I was struck at Vanier's comment that any group of people who have an idea of what a community will look like before it is actually formed are setting themselves up for failure. As I remember it, Vanier suggests that such an approach shows a lack of faith in the Holy Spirit's ability to shape and form communities according to God's desires. That, I think, was what my Mandatum friends and I did wrong. I would be curious to hear from anyone who is in the Order of St. Luke or who is a part of an annual conference where the Order of Elders and Order of Deacons are taken seriously.

The problem we American individualists have in terms of really entering into an order is that we can't really submit to the ancient monastic vow of obedience. We are too committed to making our own decisions and living our own lives. And yet, it is that very quality of obedience that we most need to learn. If the church is to have a future in this land, it will be through a renewed obedience to God rather than the superficial triage techniques that you see lining the bookshelves of Christian bookstores. "Church growth" is not the church's salvation.

An order for preachers, to guide their lives and help them better pastor the flocks God has given them ... Is it needed? Desperately so. Is it possible? For us? For Methodist elders and deacons? I don't know. But I'd like to find out.