"Restoring Methodism" ...

... That's the title of a book written in 2006 by Jim and Molly Scott. Actually, the full title is Restoring Methodism: 10 Decisions for United Methodist Churches in America. The book is an attempt to help Methodist churches grapple with the realities of the denomination's situation at present and start to think about a way forward that would allow for the renewal of the church as a whole.

The Scotts are clergy members of the Arkansas Annual Conference who have had a long and diverse career in ministry. Since moving back to the state and settling in Eureka Springs, they have devoted themselves to study and writing, as well as in the training of pastors and congregations, on how the United Methodist Church might better embody the doctrine, discipline, and spirit that drove the movement back in Wesley's day.

I read the Scotts' book recently for their interest in the class meeting and its role (in the past and, potentially, in the present) as a central feature of Methodism. I think one of the best parts of their project in Restoring Methodism is in the way they clearly distinguished the renewal of the church-as-institution and the renewal of the church-as-Holy-Spirit-led-movement. All their interest is in the latter.

For instance, they write, "The purpose [of the church's restoration] is not to save an institution but rather to use all the gifts and graces given to us to fulfill our love and obedience in the Kingdom of God. It is the salvation of people that is at stake here. It is people experiencing the justifying grace of Jesus Christ that forgives and frees us from sin. It continues with the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in us" (p.30).

Likewise, the Scotts are not interested in latching on to John Wesley as some mythic, founder-figure who defines the church simply because of a compelling life story. Rather, they write, "It is not that Wesley himself changes us; it is that he continually points away from himself to the Trinity - God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost; to basic Christianity; to the early Church. Wesley is not the answer, but he takes us to the answers" (p.xiii).

Those statements are a pretty good summary of why I study Wesley and early Methodism. The answers they provide are not contained within themselves; they rather come from where they point us. They demonstrate a form of disciplined holy living that can still help us respond to the Spirit's call in our own day.

[If you'd like to check out more about the ministry of Jim and Molly Scott, you can visit their Christian Connexion website.]

Arkansas lottery: a bad bet

The people of my home state of Arkansas will go to the ballot box later this year to vote on whether or not to institute a statewide lottery. Currently, every state that touches Arkansas has either a statewide lottery or casino gambling or both. Though Arkansas does have gambling at its horse track and dog track (in Hot Springs and West Memphis, respectively), it has so far resisted the temptation to expand gambling into a statewide business.

I've always been proud of that.

But those who would profit from gambling force Arkansans to say 'no' again and again, because they are so determined to foist widespread gambling upon the state. As a current North Carolina resident, I am ineligible to vote against the lottery this time around. But that can't stop me from advocating against it. I stand behind people here in the gas station and grocery store all the time here in North Carolina who are spending large amounts of money on lottery tickets. They are almost uniformly poor, and they are putting their hope for a better tomorrow in the little scratch-off cards and Powerball tickets that make them even poorer, $1 at a time.

As I have sent e-mails to friends and family back home to encourage them to vote against the lottery, several have asked me to provide more information. To that end, I am dedicating this post to the anti-lottery cause.

Check out this website of the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. It will give you a lot of good information about the proposed lottery measure, including a downloadable newsletter, "Gambling on our Future: Why a State-Sponsored Lottery is Still a Bad Bet for Education & Families in Arkansas," detailing the negative societal effects that the lottery will have (and debunking the overly-optimistic projections about state revenue from the lottery proponents).

The AACF offers these reasons why we should say 'no' to the lottery:

-- Lotteries function as regressive taxes that disproportionately hurt the economic security of low-income families.

-- If the state had a lottery, it would only get to keep 30 percent of the revenue from ticket sales. The rest would go toward prizes, advertising, and administration.

-- Lotteries are unstable sources of tax revenue that can decline from year to year. Overall, any positive effect on state budgets tend to fade over time.

-- Lotteries and other forms of gambling often lead to negative social and economic consequences for children and theri families - costs which often must be borne by the state.

-- Researchers have found that Georgia's "Hope Scholarship" lottery, often cited as a model for lotteries in other states, is disproportionately funded by low-income households, while higher-income, more-educated households disproportionately benefit from the scholarships.

-- A lottery would do little to improve access to higher education among the lowest-income citizens and would prey upon those who stand to lose the most from state-sponsored gambling.

-- If increasing access to higher education is indeed important to Arkansas' future economic success, then the state should commit to finding a stable, reliable and fair source of funding for it.

I would also strongly encourage you to read this remarkable op-ed article by Edward Ugel that appeared in the New York Times last year. Mr. Ugel is a former insider in the lottery business, and he comments on the Illinois state government's quixotic attempts to make the lottery really pay for the state's citizens. In the process, he offers a depressing window into the adverse impact that lotteries have, ironically, on lottery winners. Commenting that "nobody is immune to lottery fever," Mr. Ugel writes, "I got out of the lottery industry because it and I had had enough of each other. It's a legitimate business, but it is an unseemly one - no one who spends any real time in it comes out smelling like a rose, myself included."

I ask this to all Arkansans: Is this the kind of corrosive societal influence to which you really want to expose your children?

Finally, if you want the Church's teaching on gambling, including lotteries intended to fund public education, here it is from Paragraph 163G of The United Methodist Book of Discipline:

"Gambling is a menace to society, deadly to the best interests of moral, social, economic, and spiritual life and destructive of good government. As an act of faith and concern, Christians should abstain from gambling and should strive to minister to those victimized by the practice. Where gambling has become addictive, the Church will encourage such individuals to receive therapeutic assistance so that the individual's energies may be redirected into positive and constructive ends. The Church should promote standards and personal lifestyles that would make unneccesary and undesirable the resort to commercial gambling - including public lotteries - as a recreation, as an escape, or as a means of producing public revenue or funds for support of charities or government."

If you are a resident of the state of Arkansas, please vote 'no' to the lottery measure and encourage others to do the same.

Should we go on mission?

A few weeks ago, I wrote this column in the United Methodist Reporter about my recent mission experience in Peru. I had wanted to put down in words my views on the importance of short-term missions for sometime, and the column gave me the chance to start to do that. There's a whole lot more than I couldn't fit in a 700 word article, but it was at least a start.

A couple of days ago over breakfast here at the Duke Youth Academy, I got into a conversation with fellow DYA staffer Lanecia Rouse over whether short-term missions to foreign countries can be justified. We had heard Dr. Amy Laura Hall give a plenary lecture to the DYA students earlier in the week, where she suggested that we would be better off focusing our efforts on being in ministry with our local communities. Lanecia is a youth minister at a large church in Nashville, TN, and she was reflecting on whether she should be taking her kids on foreign missions.

I admit it is a complex issue. There is a not-so-good history of mission work from Europe and the United States that saw peoples in the Developing World as inferior and pursued missions in a highly condescending manner. That missional legacy is a black mark on the church, and we should be ashamed for the attitudes of our ancestors. Some think that this negative legacy represents a conclusive case against foreign missions in the present (and that all missional activity between the Global North and the Global South will inevitably take on colonial overtones).

The other potential argument against foreign missions has to do with costs and the allocation of resources. This recent article in the Washington Post chronicles blunders commonly made by American missionary groups, from poor use of resources, to engaging in construction projects that are unnecessary or wrong-headed, to cultural ignorance of host communities. By this line of thinking, short-term groups do more harm than good when they go to engage in ministries that are best undertaken by churches already present in local cultures.

These are tough challenges that anyone who wants to go on a short-term mission trip needs to face. I think the key to understanding the importance of such missional ventures is in forming long-term, sustained relationships between sister churches that are constantly renewed through short-term trips. I have tried to go about my relationship with the Methodist Church of Peru in just this way.

I would be curious to hear your thoughts about the pros and cons of the short-term approach to missions. Should they be avoided? Or can they be justified? What are some of the important arguments on each side?

Learning to die

Eric Van Meter concludes his remarkable series of 'imaginatve therapy sessions' in the current issue of the UM Reporter. His articles have all been based on the idea that he has a dysfunctional relationship with his church - the UMC. The same spiritual fire and theological depth that drew him to find his pastoral home as a United Methodist minister is sometimes hard to see in the regular machinary of the church's bureaucracy. Systems, processes, and the inertia of old habits get ingrained into a denomination's culture in such a way that they are hard to root out.

Out of step with the gospel? Who cares. This is the way we've always done things.

In this last installment, Eric's therapy sessions conclude with the realization that Jesus' call on him (and on the church) is a call to die. We can soft pedal the idea of death as a "death to the world" or a "death to the old self" but the reality of the gospel's call is that we are buried with Christ through our baptism, so that we might have the hope of being raised with him through resurrection (Romans 6). And this means pursuing God's call on our lives with reckless abandon, including a faithfulness unto real, actual death if that is what is required of us.

All of this means that we can't try to save the United Methodist Church.

As Eric rightly points out, trying to "restore the church" is a wrong-headed mission. It's not the institution of the UMC that Jesus wants to preserve. The UMC can be a faithful ecclesial community insofar as it is reflective of the church Jesus does want to preserve. But the right response to Jesus' call is not in trying to prop up a structure that has only dubious claims to faithfulness in the first place. It is rather to live the kind of lives befitting of Jesus' disciples, in the community he has established.

That may kill us. And it certainly may kill the United Methodist Church. But it won't kill the Church, which has been built upon a rock and will endure until Christ comes in final victory and we feast at his heavenly banquet.

I'm a Wesleyan, by the way. And it's worth pointing out that Wesley would never want us to focus on him in some kind of fetishizing way, nor would he want us to try to restore the UMC-as-institution to some former glory when we were The Largest Church in America (the memory of which haunts our every move). He would rather want us to practice what he called "primitive Christianity", which is a form of disciplined, faithful living that embodies the gospel and witnesses to the watching world.

More than meets the eye...

... That's a saying usually associated with the Transformers, but I think this summer it fits better with a kindler, gentler robot. That's right. I'm talking about WALL-E, the new Pixar film from Disney about a trash compacting robot who falls in love, saves humanity from a barcalounging and binge eating fate, helps point the way to a sustainable future for the earth, and gets the girl in the end. The robot girl, that is.

This has been a summer of exciting movies. We've seen new incarnations of old franchises (Rambo, Indiana Jones, Batman). We've seen crime-fighting and misunderstood superheroes (Iron Man, Incredible Hulk). And we've seen the continuation of ongoing sagas (Prince Caspian). But for my money, none of them can hold a candle to WALL-E. This film manages to provide robust entertainment for the kids while offering grown-ups a compelling commentary on our increasingly poor stewardship of the earth and of our own selves.

One commentary I read on WALL-E notes the irony of the Walt Disney company offering a critique of consumerism. That's a point well-made. But the rank hypocrisy of the market should not keep us from taking note of those times when the market is willing to critique its own modus operandi. In my current column in the United Methodist Reporter, I look at the messages WALL-E offers in the areas of environmental degradation, conspicuous consumption, and techonological addiction. These all fall under the umbrella of stewardship, which is as biblical an idea as you can get.

I'd be curious to hear if anyone has discussed WALL-E in a Sunday school or small group setting. It could be a good teaching tool.

Bishops gettin' elected

The official website of the United Methodist Church is tracking the ongoing episcopal elections at the Jurisdictional Conference sessions that are meeting around the country. If you'd like to check out your own jurisdiction, go to the "Episcopal Elections 2008" website.

I am a member of the South Central Jurisdiction, which has not yet elected a bishop (they're only on the third ballot). If you are a fellow SCJ'er, you can follow our elections here.

May God bless the voting in each jurisdiction as we choose the shepherds who will lead us forward.

UPDATE: It's Saturday morning, and Jurisdictional Conference sessions are wrapping up around the country. That means the church has a whole slew of new bishops. In the South Central Jurisdiction, we have elected W. Earl Blesdsoe, John Michael Lowry, and James (Jim) E. Dorff. Beka Miles, one of our Jurisdictional delegates, has been sending regular updates back to the annual conference. She said that the election of the third candidate (which ended up being Rev. Dorff) was a real roller coaster. He was eventually elected on the 23rd ballot overall. The Arkansas Conference's own endorsed candidate, Rodney Steele, did very well in the early balloting. He eventually fell behind Rev. Dorff and Rev. Cheryl Jefferson Bell, as it became a two-horse race. It would be been great to see Rodney elected, as I know he'd be a good bishop. Still, I have high hopes that our three new members of the episcopacy will lead us forward in faithful and courageous ways.

Duke Youth Academy

The Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation here at the Divinity School began on Sunday. I am the Ministry Coordinator for Community Practices at DYA this year, so I have the privilege of spending this week and next with about 60 very talented high school students who are here to participate in two weeks of intentional Christian living.

The DYA website describes the community in this way: "Duke Youth Academy ... is an intensive encounter with Christian life. Days are patterned by worship through word and sacrament, reflection on scripture, study, service, play; practices ancient and modern that nourish the life of faith." But such descriptions don't do justice to the richness of what goes on here. This is the best formational program I have seen in terms of helping teenagers grapple with serious theological questions while also showing them an almost monastic way of going about the Christian life.

A typical day begins with a communal breakfast, followed by morning prayer. Students then hear a plenary lecture by a member of the Duke Divinity School faculty, and they follow that up with a workshop on worship planning. Following lunch, students have a mandatory rest period where they spend sabbath-time in their rooms. Afternoons consist of different activities: On some days, students will go out into the community for service and work projects. Other afternoons, they attend art workshops and prayer practice workshops where they get to engage in hands-on learning and practice around art-as-theology and different prayer traditions. Following supper, the whole community worships together and then students split up into "Mentor Groups" where they get to engage in conversation with a theologically-trained mentor.

We are only halfway through the first week, and I am amazed by this program. The faculty director is Dr. Fred Edie, who also teaches at Duke. His theological vision for youth ministry (which you can read about in his new book, Book, Bath, Table, and Time) drives the structure and program of DYA. The rest of the staff, led by Assistant Director (and current Duke student) Katherine Smith, is a talented and committed group of Christians who pour everything they have into forming young disciples of Jesus Christ.

DYA will certainly be keeping me busy for the next few days. And by the way, if you know a kid who will be a rising junior or senior in high school next year and would benefit from DYA, point them our way! All the necessary information is available on the DYA website, where you can also read reflections on daily life at the Academy from this year and past years as well.

[Note: I'm reviewing Dr. Edie's book for the United Methodist Reporter. When that appears online, I'll provide a link to it.]

How rich are you?

Not long ago I was turned onto this fascinating website, called the Global Rich List. It allows you to include your personal income and then tells you where you rank in terms of global wealth.

What was interesting to me was how different standards of wealth in the United States seem when you put them up against the wealth of the rest of the world. For instance, according to U.S. government standards, the poverty threshold for 2006 was $10,400 for a single person (or $21,200 for a family of four). But according to the Global Rich List, living right at the poverty line in the U.S. would still make you the 793,757,388th richest person on earth. Keep in mind that there are well over 6 billion people on earth, so being in the top 800 million is pretty good. Put in simpler terms, it would mean that you are still in the top 13.22% wealthiest people in the world.

It's tougher to figure these numbers in family terms; the Global Rich List is really meant to give the stats on an individual. But even if I take my family income and divide it in half to get a rough idea of my personal earning power in a given year (I live in a family of two), it still puts me in the top 10% of the world's wealthiest people.

Now I can tell you, as a part of a family where one of the bread winners is a full-time graduate student (that's me), I don't feel wealthy at all. For those of you reading this blog from North America or Western Europe, I imagine you probably don't feel wealthy either. But I bet you also rank pretty high in terms of the world's richest people.

How are we to think about these things? Well, for one, I think it says a lot about how we are conditioned to think about money. We are taught to always think in terms of scarcity instead of abundance; this is a theme that government and the consumer culture drive into our brains all the time. When we constantly receive the message that we don't have enough of this or that (money, consumer products, security, etc.), then we are always going to think we're not well off.

And second, I think it calls us to go back to the Scriptures and read again what God has to say about how we use our wealth, both in the Old and the New Testaments. Wealth is both a real and a relative concept. It's real in the sense that one can either have or have not what it takes to get by, and if one lacks for basic necessities, one is certainly not wealthy. But wealth is also relative, in exactly the sense that the Global Rich List points out. Who are we to buy second homes and boats and expensive clothes, when the vast majority of our brothers and sisters around the world lack for so much?

God, grant me the serenity...

...to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

Ever seen that prayer? Ever prayed it?

That's the shorter version of the "Serenity Prayer," but it is the one that you'll see on everything from coffee mugs to posters to bumper stickers. I had always heard it was written by Reinhold Niebuhr, and apparently Niebuhr thought it was as well. But new research is suggesting that Niebuhr did not, in fact, write it. It's in this NY Times article from today.

It appears Niebuhr may have picked up on and adapted a prayer that was in circulation earlier in the culture. Which means that the actual authorship is a big mystery.

It's interesting that one of the foremost ethicists of the 20th century may have (unwittingly) falsely claimed to have written what has become one of the most famous non-biblical prayers in history.

What to do about such a conundrum?? I suppose we could just pray, "God grant me the serenity..."

Reflections on the ordination process

On the second night of my Annual Conference session this year, the young clergy of the conference had their annual Gen X/Y Clergy Dinner. This is a practice that began a few years ago under the leadership of Eric Van Meter, and it has grown in size each year. In fact, this year the bishop ate supper with us! The dinner gives a great opportunity for Gen-X and Millenial aged clergy to get to know one another, have fellowship, and engage in conversation about issues that are relevant to our lives in ministry.

This year, Eric asked me to lead a conversation about Lovett Weems and Ann Michel's new book, The Crisis of Younger Clergy. (I've written a review of this book, which you can read here.) Their book looks at the declining numbers of young adult elders in the United Methodist Church and attempts to offer some solutions. It is, by the way, a great resource for Boards of Ordained Ministry, District Committees on Ministry, and local churches. They could all benefit by using it to seek out ways the church could better nurture a "culture of call" for its young people.

As the conversation began, we asked each person to speak - sharing information about placement in ministry and about the greatest challenge each has faced in the ordination candidacy process. The results were fascinating. I think it would be best for me to just list the examples we were given of greatest challenges encountered:

- Loneliness/Isolation
- Difficulties in itineracy/family issues
- "Good ol' boy" system
- A feeling of invisibility
- Not recognizing the value of people serving in extension ministries
- Being sensitive to clergy couples
- Mechanics of the process (and let-downs in BOM record keeping)
- Seeing the attrition of others leaving the ministry
- Not taken seriously and the church no responsive to concerns
- BOM politics [editorial note: presumably among members of the BOM itself and how that impacts candidates]
- Being sensitive to the particularities of calling
- Others' expectations of my calling in ministry
- The BOM's difficulty in really nurturing candidates

Following this time of sharing experiences, we asked the young adults present to offer possible ways that the candidacy and ordination process could be improved. Here are their responses:

- Need for great financial support (MEF Funds, support for Exploration and other events focused on calling, etc)
- Need for programs run throughout the conference - "centers of hospitality" - possibly on college campuses. Also, a greater, more personal role for mentors. Conference funds could support these types of initiatives.
- Accountability/Peer Groups amongst probationary/provisional clergy
- Networking & support structures within the Annual Conference [editorial note: the work of Eric Van Meter and others over the past several years has sought to directly meet this need]
- The character of the relationships between young clergy [editorial note: this point was much-discussed, and a lot was shared about what relationships can accomplish that programs cannot]
- A "call event" for high school or college students held locally within the annual conference possibly in the off-year that the Exploration event does not occur

Overall, I thought it was a very productive conversation - at times funny and at times poignant. There were 26 people present for the conversation, and several more than that at the dinner just before. All of them were either currently in the ordination process or recently ordained elders and deacons. For me, the fact that so many were present and engaged in the conversation was a great sign of hope. The point that came up at the end of the evening about the importance of person-to-person relationships was key. The more we nurture those, the less impersonal the ordination process will seem. And that would be an important step in helping young clergy enter their ministries with the right attitude and the right relationships.

No stress? No way!

Ever heard of a No-Stress Sunday?

Those are the events where people are invited to join the church after the worship service has ended.

They can take place in a couple of different ways. Sometimes the people wanting to join walk down to the chancel and meet with the pastor right after the service. Other times, they might go with him back to his office and have a chat there. But the point is the same: It provides people who get nervous or bashful about standing up in front of the congregation the option of professing their faith and answering the "prayers, presence, gifts, and service" question in private.

I think this is one of the worst things the church has come up with ever, and I write about it in my current column in the UM Reporter.

The church has always held that public witness is an essential part of Christian identity. We get that from Jesus himself: "Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven" (Matthew 10:33).

So how in the world did No-Stress Sunday ever come about? I suspect this has to do with the privatization of religion in our culture (or heck, the privatization of just about everything). When we start to assume that one's faith is just about a me-n-Jesus relationship, then joining the church the way you might sign up for the gym or subscribe to a magazine becomes okay.

Well, it ain't okay. And we should put a stop to it in our churches. If someone isn't willing to stand up in front of the body and openly declare his faith in Jesus Christ and a desire to join the congregation, then he probably isn't ready for the kind of discipleship the church will ask of him anyway.

Changes for Gen-X Rising

I had some major problems with Blogger over the past few days, keeping me from posting since last Friday. That's a real bummer, 'cause a post I tried to put up early in the week detailed a major new development in my life: a new appointment as the pastor of Mt. Carmel UMC in Henderson, NC. The post is up now though, and you can view it here.

At least fixing my Blogger issues gave me a chance to start making some changes to the blog. (Well, my web guru Scott Kent is actually making the changes, since I have the technology IQ of a housecat. And a not very bright housecat, at that.) You'll notice them by looking around on the blog, but I'll list them anyway:

-- Subscription Service: The little RSS widget below my picture in the top right-hand corner of the frontpage. I know some of you subscribe to the blog through various different readers, but I wanted to make reading Gen-X Rising super-easy for those who don't. So clicking on the "Subscribe" hotlink will take you to Feedburner, which allows you to customize how you keep up with genxrising.com using the reader of your choice.

-- Inclusion in the Christian Century's CC blogs network: Right under the RSS widget you'll see a CC blogs widget. My blog has been highlighted in the "Related Blogs" section of Theolog, the blog of the Christian Century, for sometime now. Gordon Atkinson, author of the Real Live Preacher blog and the administrator of the Century's CC blogs network, has offered to include me as a part of the network. So clicking on the CC blogs widget will take you to the Century's blog network, and soon my blog will be a part of it.

-- Expanding the archive on the left-hand sidebar: You may have noticed the two tabs on the left-hand sidebar titled, "UM Reporter Columns" and "CDQ Columns". I added those pages into the blog a few months ago, with the intention of creating an annotated listing of all the column work I've done for both the United Methodist Reporter and the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. I've started that work, and you can access online versions of some of those columns by clicking on one of the two tabs. But what I want to do to expand that part of the blog is to sub-divide the column tabs by year, so that you can go directly to the columns I wrote for a given publication in a given year. To do that, I'm going to have a drop-down tab that will give you options of what year to choose. That development is in the works and should be finished by early next week.

-- Maintaining an ad-free blog: This isn't actually a new development in the blog. It's just the maintenance of a personal policy I have employed since launching genxrising.com almost two years ago. I understand why people add advertising to their blogs, and I have heard that (depending on traffic) it can earn enough money to pay for a lot of the costs of regularly maintaining a blog. But I've always thought there were problems with allowing advertising from outside companies. The two primary ones I see are clutter issues in your sidebars and the danger of ad content that is out of step with the message you are trying to convey in your blog. So I made a decision a long time ago to keep my site wholly devoted to content relevant to what I'm trying to do through genxrising.com. So that means that all you'll ever get is my writing and links to other sites in the general area of the Christian blogosphere.

A new appointment

At church on Sunday, our pastor mentioned that it was Moving Day for pastors in the North Carolina Annual Conference. This is the season for "Moving Days" across the UM connection, and that means it is the season of appointment process uncertainties and the unique reality of being a Methodist preacher. "We work on one-year contracts," you'll often hear Methodist preachers say. And it's true that you never know when that call from the district superintendent is going to come, telling you that it's time to pack up your belongings and move to a new town.

We all actually live in a more transient culture than pretty much any previous generation in American history. People move with a lot more frequency than they used to, whether for work, school, or some other reason. So it's a little curious in some ways that Methodist clergy seem more wary than ever of the appointment system. They look at their fellow clergy in other denominations who can potentially have 20 or 25 year pastorates, and the prospect of moving every 4 or 5 years can seem downright unappealing. But then again, who lives in the same place for 20 or 25 years anymore?

This may be an unpopular stance to take, but I'm willing to speak up for the appointment system. In fact, I think it can teach us something about the nature of ministry that a "call system" cannot. In my Lent column last year, I wrote about the virtue of someone else telling you a Lenten discipline to take on, rather than choosing one yourself. The virtue in question is humility, and it is fundamental to learning the kind of love that Jesus wants to teach us. In a way, I think the appointment system in the UMC, which goes back to John Wesley himself, teaches pastors a similar humility. Accepting the appointive authority of the bishop is akin to saying, "Ok God, I accept that I may not know best how to serve the church. So I will accept the guidance of the Holy Spirit and my bishop in telling me where you need me most."

I don't claim that the appointment system is flawless. Mistakes happen every year, in every annual conference. But in the midst of our grumbling, we should realize that there's a whole lot that does work about it. And we Methodist pastors have the opportunity to learn something about servant leadership - through the very way we accept pastoral appointments - in a way that our fellow clergy in other denominations do not.

Along those same lines, I've also got some news to share. Emily and I were contacted a few weeks ago by Gray Southern, district superintendent of the Durham District in this annual conference. He asked if I would be willing to take an appointment in Henderson, NC, at Mt. Carmel United Methodist Church. It's a beautiful little country church that dates back to the 1850s, and Emily and I are excited about starting there in a few weeks (that's a picture of it in the photo at the top of the post). I'm committed to working at the Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation in July, so our first Sunday at Mt. Carmel will be August 3rd.

I've experienced unexpected calls related to the appointment process before, and this was quite similar. I wasn't seeking out an appointment, and even though it is technically only quarter-time, it is going to take some time away that I could be spending on my doctoral program. But through prayer and conversation, Emily and I came to the conclusion that this is just one more example of the Holy Spirit working in our lives. The church is telling us where it needs us to serve. And I think the proper response is humble obedience to the call of the Spirit and the church.

Besides, now I'll be preaching again every week! Woo-hoo!