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 failing to emphasize 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.

Itineracy under the magnifying glass

This is an important post.

My friend and Arkansas Conference colleague Eric Van Meter continues his series of columns in the United Methodist Reporter this week. You can access his first, second, and third articles in the Reporter's archive.

In his current installment, Eric looks at the issue of itineracy. He centers on the problem that itineracy creates in the church being able to fulfill its mission, which is (according to Paragraph 120 in the Book of Discipline) to make disciples of Jesus Christ. Eric writes, "Itineracy - in practice, if not in theory - fosters [a] culture of shared-and-shirked responsibility. Superintendents, pastors and local congregations all share the responsibility for the formation of Christian disciples. Most of these folks are decent, committed people who love the Lord and want to serve faithfully.

"But they're distracted, constantly preoccupied with the short-term commitments our practice of itineracy encourages."

Bingo. He is right-on there. Because the UMC has evolved into a large denomination with congregations ranging in size from a handful up to thousands, the itinerant system has taken on the character of a corporate ladder. When you get a church, you need to balance the budget, avoid scandal, keep attendance steady, and come across to your people as reasonably competent. Do all that, and you can be guaranteed a move in a few years' time to a bigger church with a more impressive salary and greater prestige. All the incentive for taking risks for the gospel are effectively eliminated.

Eric says that pastors accomplish their tasks as well as they do in spite of, and not because of, the increasing transience of the American experience. And I think he's hitting on something really crucial. Think of it this way: in the true days of the circuit riders back in the 1800s, it was the communities that were permanent and the pastors that were not. You might get a new Methodist preacher every year or two, but you could be sure that the same people you knew in your little town would grow up, grow old, and die there.

Now our cultural situation is such that people move around constantly. Take me, for example: I'm 32 years old, and since I was 18 I have lived in Paragould, AR, Conway, AR, Nashville, TN, Jackson, TN, Searcy, AR, and now Durham, NC. That's 6 different towns in 14 years! I may be a little over the norm because I've moved so many times for school and ministry, but my experience is by no means uncommon for today's young adults. And in fact, it's not even young adults, since job opportunities, divorces, and other factors lead even older adults to move much more frequently than they did in the past.

All that leads to a suggestion that Eric makes well: namely, the suggestion that pastors and congregations need to covenant together for long-term ministries that will allow for the full flowering of gospel ministry. If communities are more transient, the cultural reality calls for pastors to be less so. And that means bishops and district superintendents realizing the situation and taking on the discipline of really listening to their pastors and churches instead of forcing pastors for the sake of the appointment process.

This is a timely and prophetic column. I only hope the rest of the church is reading it.

When is a blog dead?

When I first started reading blogs a lot a few years ago, one of the blogs I visited most regularly was Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank. I appreciated its mission of trying to transcend the typical liberal/conservative divide in the church, and doing so within a broadly orthodox framework. But the Think Tank has been sputtering for a long time now. There have only been 7 posts since the beginning of the year, and the last one was on March 12th.

That leads me to a question: When is a blog dead?

With the Think Tank in particular, the question for me is when to remove it from the "I like these blogs" category on my right hand sidebar. I will read dozens of blogs over the course of a month, but I put those few ones there in my sidebar to say to readers, "Hey, these are some good blogs you should check out." Some of them are written by friends, while others are Methobloggers who tend to have exceptionally good content. And some, like the Christianity Today and Christian Century blogs, connect what we do with the broader Christian conversation. The Think Tank was in this latter category, which makes its demise all the more disappointing.

Sometimes the death of a blog is announced, as it was in the case of Shane Raynor's Wesley Blog. With the Think Tank, it seems to have died slowly from lack of time or interest on the part of the contributors. Regardless, I'll be taking it off my list of favorites. Can't recommend a blog that isn't really functional.

On a positive note, I've added some other blogs that I have found particularly interesting or useful:

-- Young Clergy Blog - the relatively new blog that is run by young clergy in the North Alabama Conference and addresses issues particularly relevant to young UM clergy.

-- John Meunier - a UM pastor in Indiana who posts on an interesting and diverse range of church-related topics.

-- Andy Rowell - a fellow Th.D colleague of mine here at Duke. Andy comes from an evangelical background and has served both as a pastor and a professor. His blog, Church Leadership Conversations, includes thoughts, reflections, and advice for church leaders or church leaders-in-training.

GC preview for Gen X'ers

Ladies and Gentlemen, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church is just one week away! (audible groans ... nervous chuckles ... looks of fear).

I thought I'd pass along a few things you might find interesting as the quadrennial event approaches. Let me say first of all that my outlook on GC has swung back and forth from great optimism to near despair as I have read various related stories over the past few months. But starting today, I am switching to official 'optimism' mode for the duration. The bishops, the GC planners, and apparently everybody else wants us to think of this year's GC as embodying "A Future with Hope", so that's what I'm gonna do. There. I said it.

Moving right along...

-- Duke Divinity student Arthur Jones, scion of Bishop Scott Jones, is a lay delegate from his annual conference and yesterday moderated a discussion here at Duke about issues before the GC. It was a good and informative event, and we were able to here from three North Carolina Annual Conference delegates in addition to Arthur. He also prepared us by drawing up this
ABCs of GC information sheet to familiarize us with various aspects of the GC. He said I could post it, so feel free to download it and use it (giving Arthur proper credit, of course).

-- Circuit Rider, the official clergy magazine of the UMC, devoted its most recent issue to the global nature of General Conference. It included this interesting piece called By the Numbers
that looks at the demographics of both global church membership and delegation size. Note the growth of the church in Africa over the last decade. It is also significant to me that the church in the Southeastern Jurisdiction of the U.S. posted a small gain in membership, whereas the church everywhere else showed a decline.

-- There are a lot of issues Gen X'ers and Millennials should care about at GC. But since I couldn't write on all of them, I picked the proposed changes to the candidacy process and the proposed changes to the 'guaranteed appointment' system to focus on in my most recent United Methodist Reporter column. You can access it here. On the guaranteed appointment issue, Erika Gara has a related post with a lively conversation arguing the pro's and con's here.

-- On a somewhat related topic, a few weeks ago I wrote a column on Lovett Weems and Ann Michel's new book, The Crisis of Younger Clergy, where I suggested that "it takes a village" to raise a pastor. Gary Pelusa-Verdend saw that column and forwarded me this article he wrote for the Circuit Rider a few years ago where he addressed the same issue of the kind of community that is needed to support and sustain individuals who are being called to ministry. I recommend it.

-- Jenny Smith, who is a student at United Theological Seminary, is preparing to film a documentary on young clergy in the UMC. She talks about the idea on her blog. Jenny is planning on starting the filming at General Conference next week, and she is inviting all young clergy there to participate. Check out the website she has begun here, which includes an invitation to join a related Facebook group. Jenny, if you read this blog and can offer further details, feel free to do so!

Touche, mon pasteur

This is one of the most fascinating blog posts I've read in awhile, even if I am one of the butts of the joke. I knew nothing of Jeremy Smith's relatively new blog until John the Methodist pointed me to it, but you can bet I'll be checking it out in the future.

I thought about comparing the mission statements of the various UM seminaries when I wrote that last post about Claremont. Well Jeremy actually did it, and in a much funnier way than I ever could have pulled off. Asbury Theological Seminary as the mushiest, least-holy seminary of the bunch? Who knew?

What's your mission?

A friend alerted me to changes that have been made recently to the mission statement of Claremont School of Theology in Claremont, CA. Claremont is a seminary of the United Methodist Church, which means that it is one of the 13 official UM seminaries responsible for training UM clergy.

So imagine my surprise when I read the mission statement and saw that there is no reference to God, Jesus Christ, or the United Methodist Church itself:

"An ecumenical and interfaith institution, Claremont School of Theology seeks to instill students with the ethical integrity, religious intelligence, and intercultural understanding necessary to become effective in thought and action as spiritual leaders in the increasingly diverse, multi-faith world of the 21st century."

The context of the new mission statement is given in a bit more detail in this news release by the seminary and this blog post by seminary president Dr. Jerry Campbell.

Now maybe I'm overreacting. But it seems to me that a United Methodist seminary ought to at least be able to identify itself as rooted in the monotheistic tradition (let alone the Christian faith itself). I asked a couple of friends about this, both of whom have lived on the West Coast. They said that the cultural context of Southern California, as perhaps the most religiously diverse area in the country, means that the context for thinking about the mission of a seminary is very different than in other places. They said something else that was striking to me as well: That oftentimes the church's mission out there is largely understood as learning how to speak peacefully to other religions.

My question: How can you talk to other religions if you don't know who you are?

Here today, gone tomorrow...

Memory, that is.

David Brooks has a humorous column in the New York Times that suggests digital media is robbing us of our memory. He says that the 21st century will become known as the "Bad Memory Century," as we realize that our reliance on technology is coming at the expense of reliance on the original computer - our brains.

"As it becomes clear that a constant stream of blog posts and e-mails decimates the capacity for recall," Brooks writes, "people will be confronted with the modern Sophie's choice - your Blackberry or your mind."

It's a funny take on a phenomenon common to a lot of us. Take cell phones as a good example. Before you got your first cell phone, how many friends' phone numbers did you have committed to memory? A dozen? Even 20 or 30?

And how about now? (I can hardly even remember my own phone number, let alone anyone else's. I fear that little digital address book in my pocket has stolen a part of my gray matter!)

It's the Wikipediazation of knowledge. Why commit something to memory, when everything you'd ever want to know is a couple of mouse clicks away?

Does this scare anyone else as much as it does me?

Let's talk about sex

Shannon Vowell has a remarkable article in the United Methodist Reporter this week where she calls the church to reappraise its teaching (or lack thereof) on sex and sexuality to its youth. She writes, "The bottom line on teenage sexual practice as far as our church is concerned is this: We've failed them by copping out on Scriptural teaching about sex, both institutionally and individually." She says that our desire to be relevant has led us to become relativistic, both in moral teaching and in fundamental doctrines such as the truth of salvation through Christ and the nature of God as Trinity.

She goes on to observe that "about sex, we stand silent - or simply echo a muted version of the ethos of culture: Anything goes, because we are too civilized and sophisticated to need God's boundaries."

Now, anyone who grew up in a United Methodist Church where the silence on sex was deafening can relate to what Shannon is saying. I grew up in a church like that, and while no one in the church - pastors included - would have thought they were doing anything wrong, neither did they consider that the church is the absolute best place for children and youth to learn about their sexuality.

In a seminar I'm currently taking on ethics in the early church, we spent a couple of weeks reading the church fathers on marriage and sex. Granted, the early church had some views on sexuality that we would rightly question. But what was significant to me is that these guys were preaching on sex and seeking to engage their congregations in the issue of how sex should be rightly understood. A colleague of mine in the class said that she had led a "good sex" retreat for her youth while a pastor in Arizona, which was oriented around helping adolescents understand sexuality in healthy and holy ways. But my colleague's courageous ministry aside, I think Shannon Vowell's view is the more common one in the church: Sexuality is considered so taboo that most churches won't engage their children on it at all.

Watching what this leads to in campus culture is as depressing as it is frightening. How many of us went to colleges or universities where, without any real formation around issues of sexuality in our faith communities, we were thrown into a culture where Bacchanalian revelry was the rule rather than the exception? And with no formation, what resources do such kids have to fall back on?

It is not as if there aren't brave individuals out there. Take Justin Noia, an undergraduate here at Duke who wrote this column last year on valuing sex and sexuality as a fundamental and inseparable component of love - something you would not want to trade in cheaply. Of course, Noia's column received angry letters to the editor (such as this one and this one) that insisted that his views were boring, Victorian, and misogynistic.

There is also a growing trend amongst Ivy League schools for abstinence organizations (or "chastity clubs"), such as the one described in this NY Times Magazine article on Janie Fredell and Harvard's True Love Revolution organization. It is a fascinating story, and one must appreciate the heroism of young adults who embrace chastity as a virtue in a culture that is often hostile to such a practice.

But we might ask, "How do we turn chastity from a virtue of the heroic minority to a viable or even preferred option for Christian college students?" I think the answer to that question has a lot to do with what Shannon is talking about in her article: it has to start at church.

Do you have any experiences of ministries on sex and sexuality in your own church context? Do you have any resources that you would recommend?

Miscellanies

A few days ago, I posted about Lovett Weems and Ann Michel's new book, The Crisis of Younger Clergy. In addition to the related UMR column I wrote, I also did a book review on it for the Reporter which has now been posted online.

You also might be interested in this interview with Bishop Will Willimon, who leads the church's North Alabama Conference. The interview mostly covers Bishop Willimon's blogging and connections to both clergy and laity through the blogosphere and e-mail. But ironically, the article never gives the actual address to the bishop's blog! If you'd like to check it out, it is called A Peculiar Prophet and can be found here. Bishop Willimon has also recently gotten a Young Clergy Blog started, which I assume is maintained by the clergy of his annual conference. I don't know much about it though, so if anyone else knows more feel free to fill in the details.

Hauerwas on Hauerwas

Last month, I posted on an ongoing lecture series here at Duke where professors are invited to speak on various aspects of what constitutes "Duke theology". This afternoon it was Stanley Hauerwas' turn, and he did not disappoint.

Dr. Hauerwas is currently on sabbatical, and one project he is working on during that time is a planned memoir. He read for about 35-40 minutes from the manuscript of that memoir, and then fielded questions. The entire session ended up being about 1 hr 25 mins. If you'd like to have a listen, here's the audiofile: Hauerwas on Hauerwas.mp3.

If you are not familiar with Hauerwas either as a person or through his work, this lecture is a great introduction. If you are familiar with him, the lecture is still really good because he reads stories about his religious upbringing and about significant mentors in his life.

Oh, and if you're not familiar with his generally salty language, be forewarned. There are a few four-letter words thrown in here and there. Naturally.

The greatest talent I never had

Is there one talent out there that you'd like to have but don't?

One thing you wish you could do really well but never had the time or ability to learn?

For me, that talent would be knowing languages well - how to speak, understand, write, and read them. I have at different times studied French, Spanish, and Latin, and I made one abortive attempt to learn Greek. And the thing is, I love these languages. Every one of them! But I am not proficient, let alone fluent, in any of them.

A big part of me wants to blame my backwoods Arkansas upbringing on this lack. "If only I had grown up in a city," I sometimes think, "I would know how to order coffee in Quechua and could appreciate soccer in a dozen European tongues!" But I know this isn't fair to my background, for a couple of different reasons. For one, I could have started learning Spanish at the age of 12 and chose not to. And I could have started learning Greek at 22 and dropped out. Plus, my more sophisticated city-dwelling friends don't seem to be walking around chatting on their cellphones in Swahili. So I think part of it is a personal failure, while the other is simply the product of growing up in a larger American culture that doesn't value foreign language study much (although I hope that is changing).

I finally realized that most real talent (except perhaps for true child prodigies) comes only after years and years of practice. And now, relatively late in my education, I am trying to gain some proficiency in languages for the purpose of both study and ministry. But it's hard. And if I had formed the habits of such study earlier in life, I would reap greater benefits now.

How about you? Any talents you wish you had but don't? Any interesting stories of opportunities squandered or opportunities redeemed?

Oh, and I also wish I could play the banjo.