An evening at the Mad Pizza Co.

I made the trek back to Arkansas earlier this month to attend the annual session of the Arkansas Annual Conference. I try to do that every year, as a way to renew friendships and participate directly in the life of the church back home. And of course, this year there was added interest because of the debate over the proposed amendments to the United Methodist Church's Constitution.

But while I enjoyed all the happenings in the convention center where annual conference was held, perhaps the most significant part of the week for occurred one evening at the Mad Pizza Co. in Rogers, Ark. I tell the story in my recent United Methodist Reporter column.

For the past five years, the young adult clergy & lay delegates have gathered for a supper together at some point during annual conference. We've tried different approaches to how to structure the evening - sometimes a round table discussion over a specific topic, and sometimes a more free-flowing invitation to gather in groups and talk about whatever comes up. But we always make sure to break bread together and open in prayer.

The evening at the Mad Pizza Co. was especially enjoyable, as our annual group has grown to more than 50 people. Conversations were on a bunch of different issues, naturally. But from where I was sitting it seemed like everybody took advantage of the chance to engage each other on matters of real importance: the nature of annual conference, the ordination process, the structure of the church, and how to carry out a faithful gospel ministry.

In fact, the evening ended with the last group of people gathered in a circle and three of the young adult elders - all of them church planters - sharing their experiences of growing churches from the ground up.

It was exactly what conference is supposed to be about. That gathering offers a perfect example of what we mean when we say our church is a connection.

If your annual conference doesn't have a group like this every year, start one. You'll be glad you did. And so will the rest of the young adults you're serving with.

Meeting Bishop Eben Nhiwatiwa

Here in the United States, we often hear stories about the vibrant growth of the United Methodist Church in Africa. There is a desire on the part of many Methodists here to look to Africa for signs of the powerful work that the Holy Spirit is doing in the church. But for many of us, "the church in Africa" exists only in news stories and missionaries' blogs. [I've been to Africa twice - to South Africa in 2000 and to Egypt in 2006 - but neither trip was to be in ministry with UMC congregations.] As interested as many American Methodists are with what is going on in the African church, I think most congregations here find it easier, in terms of the time and expense necessary for establishing foreign ministry connections, to commit to mission and ministry partnerships with the church in Latin America.

The United Methodist Church in Africa took on real flesh and blood for me earlier this week when my wife, Emily, and I were honored to meet Bishop Eben Nhiwatiwa from Zimbabwe. Bishop Nhiwatiwa is in North Carolina this summer, both to visit his daughter and to have a sabbatical retreat. He spent some time here on Duke Divinity School's campus, utilizing the library for study and meeting with various scholars on Duke's faculty.

Bishop Nhiwatiwa is the episcopal leader over both the East Zimbabwe Annual Conference and the West Zimbabwe Annual Conference, a part of the UMC that is growing by 10% per year. He was first elected bishop in 2004, before being re-elected last year (meaning, in the way the Central Conference episcopacy is organized, he is now considered a bishop for life).

Over lunch last week, we were able to engage Bishop Nhiwatiwa on topics as diverse as the current UMC constitutional amendments under consideration, Africa University, the economic situation in Zimbabwe, and the joy of getting to spend some restful time in study and reflection amidst a hectic episcopal ministry.

I got to be with Bishiop Nhiwatiwa again at the end of the week, when he visited the closing session of the Summer Wesley Seminar held here on Duke's campus. After a round table discussion where the scholars and graduate students engaged a number of topics related to theology, doctrine, and the current state of the church, Prof. Richard Heitzenrater turned to Bishop Nhiwatiwa to ask him for his own reflections on our discussion and how it relates to his experience of ministry in Zimbabwe.

Bishop Nhiwatiwa began by saying, "Wesley is alive in Africa. There is a hunger to know him."

He said he did not realize the truth of this statement until 2004, after he was elected bishop. Some of his preachers told him at that time about having a worship service outside a storefront in a particular village, and they told him that they felt they were carrying the gospel to people just as John Wesley did when he took to field preaching in order to reach needy hearers.

As he continued mentioning particularly Wesleyan characteristics of the church in Africa, Bishop Nhiwatiwa went on to add this: "Class meetings match up well with African society, because in Africa, life revolves around community. You cannot separate Africans into individuals and expect something good to happen. So the class meetings work well [as a practice of Christian formation.]"

In the context of some question-and-answer time, the bishop also mentioned two more notable facets of the UMC in Zimbabwe that tend to attract converts: first, he calls it a "teaching church," meaning that it tells you its origins and how it developed. It wants its adherents to understand the gospel by understanding the story of the church and how it came to focus on the ministries that it practices. And second, he said that the UMC in his homeland encourages an "experiential religion." It doesn't keep religion "out there" but instead insists that "religion is something that involves us."

These two opportuntities to visit with Bishop Nhiwatiwa and hear his thoughts on ministry and the church were priceless. For anyone who is interested, there are a number of good articles available online that focus on Bishop Nhiwatiwa's ministry and the church in Zimbabwe. Here are a few:

-- A great interview by Hendrik Pieterse with Bishop Nhiwatiwa, in which the bishop answers questions about both the blessings and challenges facing the church in Zimbabwe.

-- A story about the renewal of the covenant agreement between the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference and the Zimbabwe Episcopal Area at the 2008 General Conference.

-- A 2006 story focusing on the church in Zimbabwe as a place that has tremendous spiritual resources and steady growth, but which also faces tremendous challenges in terms of material resources.

A Voice for the Church

One of the strange things about being a columnist for the United Methodist Reporter is how little interaction I usually have with the staff and my fellow columnists. The Reporter is published by UMR Communications in Dallas, TX. I live in Durham, NC, and most of my interaction with the folks down in Dallas is via e-mail. That was why I mentioned how nice it was to get to see some of the Reporter staff at annual conference a few days ago in my last blog post.

So it was doubly nice last night when I got to have supper with the Rev. Don Haynes, who writes the Reporter's regular "Wesleyan Wisdom" column. Don is one of those Methodist preachers who retired years ago but has yet to stop working. He periodically serves as an interim pastor for churches who have gone through a mid-year move or retirement. And he also serves as the Director of United Methodist Studies at Hood Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (but which counts more than 50% of its student body as United Methodist).

Don lives in Salisbury, NC, but he is in Durham this month to participate in the annual Summer Wesley Seminar, which is hosted by Duke Divinity School and draws scholars from all over the connection to do research in Wesleyan theology and Methodist history. He is working on the manuscript of a book on John Wesley and early Methodism that would be geared at a pastor and lay reading audience.

If you haven't read Don's column before, you should check it out. This recent one on 'Rethink Church' argues that the UMC's current efforts to think creatively about what it means to be the church must include a commitment to evangelism. As he mentioned to me last night, doing good works without doing them in the name of Jesus makes us nothing more than a humanitarian agency. And of course, doing them in the name of Jesus also means a whole host of other things that Don points to in his column - growing in communion with God, growing in mission to our neighbors, and growing in our connection within the body of Christ.

Don's writing is creative and lucid. He focuses a lot on the basic tenets of Wesleyan theology. So his column can be a great way to learn more about the background of Methodist doctrine. I'm grateful he is sharing his gifts with the church!

Annual Conference Reflections

I have been in Rogers, Arkansas, since Sunday night at the Arkansas Annual Conference. Since moving to Durham, NC, I have always looked forward to returning home each summer to reunite with colleagues and friends in ministry. This year has been especially nice, since I had several friends who were either ordained or commissioned into ministry.

Since Annual Conference ends today, I wanted to offer some thoughts on what I thought were real highlights from the past three days. These are basically in reverse order starting with this morning and working backward.

- We completed voting on the constitutional amendments today, which I thought went mostly pretty well. The Rev. Rodney Steele, our lead clergy delegate to General Conference, explained the amendments to the annual conference. There were some real contentious issues, and I thought delegates tried hard to be respectful and courteous in their remarks. My sense from the floor discussion and the conversations in the halls makes me think that both the Worldwide Church amendments and Amendment 1 (on church membership) are going to fail.

The confused discussion on the Worldwide Church amendments proved to me that their defeat is a good thing. No one was clear on what the amendments, once adopted, would lead to in terms of church structure. And the possibility that we could see increased bureaucracy through a new layer of conferencing was distasteful to people from all over the spectrum. We need to reconcile the differences between the way the American church is treated in the Book of Discipline with the way the church in the rest of the world is treated, but this proposal is not the way to go. These amendments will most probably fail. And when they do, I hope the church as a whole is able to go about the discernment over our ecclesiastical structure in a more coherent way (and frankly, using a proposal that seeks to streamline our hierarchical structure and reduce the complexity of our bureaucracy rather than do the opposite).

On Amendment 1, we really had two debates. One was the debate that centered specifically on the issue of homosexuality (which I argued was not the way we should think about the amendment). The other was the issue of pastoral authority as the shepherd of the (local congregational) flock. The amendment, poorly worded and poorly conceived, will almost certainly fail.

[UPDATE: The Arkansas Conference voting results have been posted on the conference website, which you can find here. Thanks to Matthew Johnson for pointing this out.]

- This morning the Rev. Ronnie Miller-Yow preached the morning service, and the annual conference session was electrified. Ronnie was ordained just last night, and his message to the conference was a real highlight of the week. He spoke of what it means to be a transformative church, challenging the conference to welcome Jesus into their churches, to preach the good news, to do works of ministry in Jesus' name, and to be willing to think creatively in how we reach the suffering and the lost.

- Last night's Ordination Service was (as it always is) an occasion for celebration and hope. We commissioned or ordained 33 elders and deacons. And I have no doubt that they will go forth to do great ministry in Jesus' name.

- The Rev. Will Choate, who is planting Argenta UMC in North Little Rock, gave an address yesterday that touched on the importance of changing the way we think in how we are reaching people and going about our mission & evangelism. Will is one of the outstanding young adult clergy in the annual conference, and he provided a crucially important generational perspective to the delegates (and one that appeared to be much appreciated by young and old alike).

- On Monday evening, we had our annual gathering of Gen-X and Millennial clergy & lay delegates at the Mad Pizza Co. About 50 people came for food and conversation, and all had a great time. The Rev. Eric Van Meter began organizing this event 5 years ago, and it has grown from just a handful to a whole crowd. I would highly recommend this type of event for every annual conference. It helps to remind the young adult leaders in the conference that there are a lot of us out there and that we can support one another through reaching out and forming relationships.

- UMR Communications has been here this week, which is the parent company of the United Methodist Reporter where my bi-weekly column appears. I had the opportunity to visit with my friend Amy Forbus, the Digital Community Builder at UMR, and I got to meet the Rev. Andy James, who heads up Digital Print Sales. Sarah Wilke, the CEO, was also here and it was enjoyable to visit with her. Sarah has recently been named as the new world editor and publisher at the Upper Room, and she will no doubt bring the same high level leadership to the Upper Room that she has to UMR over the past several years.

- Dr. Jim Heidinger was the keynote speaker at the annual Confessing Movement breakfast, which took place on Monday morning. Jim is retiring this summer from his leadership of Good News, and he gave an optimistic and encouraging address on his view of the future of the UMC. Jim heads an organization that often gets unfairly pigeonholed by some, and I can tell you - from both his address and a personal conversation I was able to have with him afterward - that he is a warm and gentle pastor with a deep love for the church and a strong desire to see us embody our Wesleyan heritage in spreading the gospel and forming disciples for Jesus Christ.

It'll be tough not to see most of the folks here for another year, but the days of reunion are always a high point of my year. We can all (me included) tend toward cynicism when it comes to thinking about the way the UMC is structured. But annual conference is still very much a means of grace, and it needs to be named as such. I am grateful for the fellowship it represents, and I think it often serves as a powerful arena for equipping the saints for ministry and celebrating the victory we have in Christ Jesus.

What to do about our 'graying church'

Woody Allen once said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying."

Ah, if only. But since Woody's desire doesn't seem to be a possibility for any of us, we have to make plans for what is going to happen to the people and the communities we love after we pass on. In the church, that means making sure that there are younger generations of people who will carry on the torch of the gospel and help to make disciples for Jesus Christ. But for many Protestant denominations in this culture, church members seem to be dying at a much faster rate than they are being replaced.

My own church is in this predicament. So I ask myself, "How can the United Methodist Church attract more younger members? How can we keep from being a 'graying church?'"

I've got some ideas on that, as I'm sure you do. But whatever solutions any of us thinks would work, we could all agree that having a toolkit with useful information about the church's demographic makeup - and trends - would be a big help.

As they have in the past, Lovett Weems and his staff at the Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., have come through for the UMC. They have just released a new report that looks at the church's aging in the United States as compared to the overall population, which you can access here.

The methods in the report are creative and unorthodox, and they deliver results that I think are probably pretty accurate. The church is aging everywhere, though there are wide differences between regions of the country. And there are interesting differences in aging rates between annual conferences within the same jurisdiction as well. As you might imagine, the church is aging slowest in the South (i.e., in the Southeastern and South Central Jurisdictions), which is also the region where some annual conferences report modest growth at times. It's aging most quickly in the West, Midwest, and Northeast regions of the country.

Just based on the statistical data, there is nothing to suggest that predictions about a precipitous decline in church membership over the next few decades is off the mark at all. So the question then becomes, "What do we do about it?"

I offer my own views on this report in my new column in the UM Reporter. Feel free to check it out and share your own views. I appreciate the section of the Lewis Center report that makes suggestions about starting new churches and growing existing congregations. But ultimately I think those suggestions are fairly useless until they are informed by prior theological work.

The church will not grow again until we proclaim a gospel that reflects the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. If we are willing to proclaim that gospel and embody it in our common life, I suspect the Holy Spirit will bless us with fruits. If we do not, then Jesus will do what he says he will do to the church at Laodicea. I for one believe that the proclamation of the true gospel was the very reason God raised up people called Methodists in the beginning. And God can use us still, if we are willing.

So the real question for us is not really how we get younger, not-so-gray heads in our pews. It is rather how we can once again preach and practice the gospel once entrusted to us to save souls, reform the church, and spread scriptural holiness across the land.

Why etiquette ain't just quaint

Cotillion.

Growing up in cozy Paragould, Arkansas, it's a word I had never heard until my junior or senior year in high school. But as I got to know people from great metropolises like Jonesboro and Little Rock, I learned about cotillion from boys and girls my age whose parents had enrolled them in lessons given by the Amy Vanderbilts of their towns. They covered everything from how to dance, to how to eat from the proper plate (and with the proper utensil), to how to engage in polite conversation with elders and members of the opposite sex.

Paragould's got a lot. But it ain't got cotillion.

That's not to say I didn't learn manners. My mom was strict about that, particularly when it came to social interaction and conversation: we answered the telephone a certain way, always said "sir" and "ma'am" to adults, and never interrupted someone who was speaking. I heard the admonition, "Remember who you are," on a regular basis when I was headed out the door during my teenage years, which was shorthand for, "Remember that you are a Thompson and act appropriately."

In short, mom taught my three siblings and me etiquette. It wasn't cotillion-fancy, but mom took her Southern upbringing - with its complex standards of graciousness and hospitality - seriously. And she expected her kids to do so as well.

The funny thing is, that very word "etiquette" seems so quaint now. It's a word that really does evoke a figure like Amy Vanderbilt or Emily Post. Etiquette is best left wherever you put the white gloves and patent leather shoes once the debutante ball is over, right?

Maybe not. Few people would argue that there is a certain coarseness to society that didn't exist a few years ago. A lot of that is driven by media, as television, radio, and cinema broadcast images and words and stories that would have been taboo once upon a time. And if etiquette can restrain vulgarity while encouraging charitable interactions between people, then its standards have real value.

But I wonder not so much about the top-down effects of media entertainment (which are easy to see) as I do about the harder-to-see effects of how we communicate. [A quick disclaimer: I'm a big fan of those forms of communication that have evolved in my lifetime. You're reading a blog post that I wrote, after all.] Think about all the e-mails, text messages, tweets, Facebook wall posts, and other impersonal and digitized messages that you have sent to your family and friends in the past month. Now think about how differently you composed phrases, sentences, and paragraph-length concepts.

NE1 SWIM? OMG. It's a real problem. Even with emoticons.

I first experienced this with e-mail, when I would occasionally have my emotional intent or tone of voice misread by the recipient of my message. You've probably experienced this too. And the blogosphere is probably the worst of all, where people hide behind relative anonymity in order to lambast one another. Face-to-face conversations are just different than talking on the phone, which in turn is very different than texting. And you can say the same thing about letter writing - real, paper-based, gotta-use-a-stamp letter writing - which is worlds away from e-mailing and twittering.

In my new Reporter column, I try to look at what happens to etiquette when our communication moves from the patience-requiring arenas of personal conversation and letter writing to the quick-and-easy formats of e-mailing, text messaging, and tweeting. My concern is that, when we start to live most of our lives in virtual worlds where we don't have to be present to real flesh-and-blood people, we start to forget how we're supposed to treat one another. And for Christians who believe that loving our neighbor is a divine command, that's a significant issue. How do you know how to treat another person with compassion - let along come to know that person in a deep way - when the language you speak most of the day is in impersonal sentence fragments, stream-of-consciousness digital blurts, and impoverished abbreviations?

So is any standard of etiquette in our interactions simply in terminal decline? And does that make it harder to learn how to love one another? Y/N?

IDK. It's really TBD. But IMHO, the good of online community and digital interaction comes with a $.

G2G. BCNU L8R. 'Bye.

[Update on 7/7/09: David Brooks offers an interesting view in his New York Times column on the role of etiquette - meaning a disciplined manner of outward, public behavior - in forming inner virtue. He writes about dignity as that characteristic by which we "navigate the currents of [our] own passions," and he compares the positive examples of both George Washington and Barack Obama with the negative examples of other public figures who have been much in the news of late: South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, late pop star Michael Jackson, and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.]

The Church's first mission

"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

That was H. Richard Niebuhr's comment in The Kingdom of God in America about the view of mainline Protestantism on the coming of the Kingdom of God. He was describing the belief that society's natural progress has pretty much done away with the need to understand sin, Jesus Christ, the atonement, and salvation in the ways they were understood in previous times.

Niebuhr wrote those words in the 1930s, but they pretty accurately describe wide swaths of the Protestant church in America today.

The belief in society's progress, held so firmly by Protestant liberals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was shattered by the devastation of World War I. But curiously enough, mainline Protestant denominations in the United States didn't seem to get the message (Niebuhr and others notwithstanding).

And whereas our Social Gospeling forebears still believed strongly in personal piety, the Protestant liberalism of the mainline church today has lost even the belief that something about salvation necessarily involves personal transformation. The optimism in human progress is still there, though, and our latter-day Protestant liberalism often sees the church itself as a hidebound organization that needs to 'catch up to the times.'

I've always been curious about how we could possibly look back over the last hundred years and see progress. Sure, there's been lots of technological progress - in science, medicine, engineering, etc. We've been to the moon, and we've stamped out smallpox.

But if you look at other measures, you can see how the very same technology that looks like progress in one place looks like regress in another. How about the 20th century's wars? Advances in technology allowed us to kill more people in war than had died in the wars of all other centuries combined. And what about the state of the environment - the plants, the animals, and even the atmosphere? At the rate we're going, we'll be lucky if there are any animals left in a few decades besides us and the ones we either eat or keep as pets. Our great technology is extinguishing animals, ecosystems, and glaciers in equal measure.

So are we really progressing?

The answer is 'no,' at least not in the way that really counts. Everyone is born a heathen, crippled by sin and in need of God's grace. And so God the Father calls all of us to walk the way of salvation shown to us through his Son, Jesus Christ. And the only real progress is the progress of the Holy Spirit in our lives, as we are healed by grace and made holy in heart and life. That is a progress that happens anew with every person, as he or she is gently healed by grace and restored through the ministry of the church and participation in the means of grace.

This is the Scripture Way of Salvation. I make the case in my recent UM Reporter column that proclaiming the reality of salvation through word and action is the very reason the Methodists were called into existence by God in the first place. And it remains our true calling still today.

The problem with us Methodists is not that some want to pursue social justice while others want to focus on spiritual formation. It is that all of us have an impoverished understanding of what salvation means. And we can begin to remedy that by searching deeply into our own tradition for the rich resources that await us there.

Which way to a Worldwide Church?

As I indicated in my last post, I've been writing a commentary that addresses the "Worldwide Church" amendments that annual conferences of the United Methodist Church are debating and voting on this summer. That commentary is finished, and you can download it at the following link:

"Which way to a Worldwide Church?"

I know some annual conferences have already met. But for anyone from an annual conference that has not yet met - like my own Arkansas Conference - I'd ask you to consider the point of view in this commentary. (Heck, you might even want to read it even if your annual conference is already over.) There have been a number of 'pro' and 'con' arguments put forth for the restructure of the church, and I don't think any of them have considered adequately how the change to our church's polity could lead to a form of nationalism that has always been destructive of the Christian Church and destructive of Christian discipleship.

For the record, I am against the Worldwide Church proposal as it has been put forth. We definitely need to do something in the long run about the way the Constitution of the UMC is biased toward the American church, but this proposal is not the way to go.

I welcome conversation on this topic - both critical and constructive - in the 'comments' section of this post. I'm eager to hear others' thoughts, particularly points of view that have not been raised in many of the conventional 'pro' and 'con' arguments over the Worldwide Church amendments.

I also hope that church folk will bear in mind how significantly our ecclesial life can be affected over the course of years by today's changes in how the church is organized and governed. The devolution of our connectionalism may seem the easiest answer to our challenges in the present. But we should be careful not to sow the wind, lest we someday have to reap the whirlwind.