A story you need to know about

I've learned a remarkable story in the last few days by reading blog posts by Amy Forbus and some of the stories from the Dallas Morning News to which she has pointed me.

The story is about the Rev. Kathleen Baskin-Ball, a 50-year old Methodist pastor in Dallas who is dying of cancer. As Amy notes in this blog post, five years ago Kathleen gave birth to a child at the age of 45. Then, two years ago, a trip to the emergency room to see about some abdomina pain resulted in a cancer diagnosis. Tumors were found in her liver and chest cavity.

By all accounts (including this story in the Dallas Morning News), Kathleen is a charismatic pastor with many gifts - from powerful preaching, to growing churches, to demonstrating the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ through her own person. I am told that the consensus by many in the North Texas Conference is that she would have been elected bishop this year if she had been physically healthy enough.

But though Kathleen has battled the cancer with courage (almost never missing preaching and worship in the process), she has now entered hospice care. Amy went to visit her at home in Dallas, which she tells about in this post in the United Methodist Reporter's blog. In addition to Amy's testimony, this article in the DMN tells about the crowds of people who have gathered at Kathleen's house to say farewell, sing, pray, and even have their babies baptized by her. (If you want a sense of her impact on the lives of others, spend a few minutes scrolling through the comments at the end of the DMN news story.)

When I read such stories about fellow pastors, I am awed and humbled. I consider it a real honor to serve in the same order of elders as Kathleen Baskin-Ball, and I hope some day, in some way, to live up to the example she sets for the rest of us. It is an inspiration to serve in a church with a pastor whose life is so filled with the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.

Kathleen will pass through the veil soon, but that is only a step on the path that will lead to the resurrection of her body, cancer-free, and perfected in glory. I won't be able to meet Kathleen in person on this side of the eschaton, but when Christ returns to make all things new, I will seek her out and embrace her with the love of the Holy Spirit.

May God grant her peace in these days. Pray for her, her husband Bill, and her son Skyler, and her congregation.

Sex on Campus

It was with more than a little fear and trembling that I wrote this column - "Sex on Campus" - in the United Methodist Reporter this week. No one has ever accused me of being a saint, and I was about as far from sainthood as you could get during my own college years. But time and maturity cause one to reflect, not only one's own past but also on the way that environments play such a key role in helping people to live in healthy ways. I'd be curious to hear readers' thoughts on this column in particular.

I believe there is very little that is healthy about the recreational pursuits of college students these days. The levels of substance abuse and casual sex, the inattention to engagement with the larger world, and the neglect of virtue formation all have real consequences for later life. Bad habits ingrained during the formative years tend to stick around and only become worse.

By the way, I wasn't picking on Duke in particular in the blog post. I only use it as an example of the permissiveness of campus culture because it is the campus I happen to walk around on everyday. And despite all the Duke lacrosse controversy over the past year-and-a-half, I don't think Duke is any worse than most places.

Amy Forbus had this to say on the Reporter's own blog about the issue of campus culture. Her comments about the "Shirttails Serenade" tradition at our own alma mater, Hendrix College, is right on: "Back then I saw it as innocent fun. Now it seems far less innocent." You could say that about a lot of the troubling behavior that happens on campuses. We have lost the sense that virtue formation is something that is intimately connected with an educated person.

Meaning of Church Membership

There are a number of posts up on several blogs I read having to do with the meaning of membership in the church. I'm not sure if this is all coincidental, or whether there is rather some story or event I have missed. At any rate, I have also just finished a column on the meaning of church membership for the United Methodist Reporter. I'll link to that when it comes out.

In the mean time, here is a summary of several posts that are worth checking out:

On his Accountable Discipleship blog, Steve Manskar posts about the way we often treat church membership as membership in a civic club (and how at odds that is with an understanding of the church as the body of Christ).

Amy Forbus posted on the Methoblog on the way that an 'open door' membership attitude allows for easy exiting as well as easy joining.

Also on the Methoblog, Jay Voorhees has posted on membership as it relates to the deep longing for family, as well as the vows of membership as similar to marriage vows (I agree with him strongly on this count).

(Both Amy's and Jay's posts are drawn from still other blogs, to which they link, and those are worth a look as well.)

Matthew Johnson has an excellent post on pastoral responsibility in helping determine readiness for church membership, something that most pastors are probably to intimidated (and too eager for new members) to do.

And Gavin Richardson quotes himself on the nature of the church: "At its best the church is a family, at its worst the church is a family."

My own column, which I'm tentatively calling, "Cheating on your church," focuses on the implied seriousness of our vows of church membership as well as the poverty of contemporary church life today. It is that deep poverty that keeps people from understanding the meaning of membership in Christ's body. The church's failure to truly be the community of Jesus' friends leads to a situation where people treat church as any other consumer choice. And that causes them to make terrible choices both for the church and for their own discipleship. As I argue in the article, leaving your church for reasons of personal preference is nothing more than a form of ecclesial adultery.

Blogging about ordination

In the past week, there have been several blog posts about the issue of the candidacy and the ordination process in the UMC. If you are interested in what has been said elsewhere, check out:

-- This Methoblog post that I wrote on Friday, basically summarizing what I said a couple of days earlier on Gen-X Rising.

-- This impassioned and poignant post from Gavin Richardson (who, by the way, may be the hardest working blogger in show business). Gavin offers a few good examples of how bad candidacy can really be. It wasn't nearly this bad in my own experience, but I have certainly heard stories of the kind Gavin shares.

-- This post on the United Methodist Reporter's new blog, written by Amy Forbus. Amy mentions on the Reporter post that Rebekah Miles' op-ed piece is going to come out in the Aug. 31st edition of the Reporter. Keep an eye out for that. The Reporter's general website address is here.

I will link to Dr. Miles' Reporter article when it appears. In the mean time, you might be interested in seeing this report on clergy age trends, compiled by the Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary: youngumclergy.pdf. It is filled with fascinating and shocking statistics, most of which are related to the aging of United Methodist clergy. For instance, did you know that in 1985, over 15% of clergy were under the age of 35?

Want to take a guess what it is now? Try 4.69%.

Correlation does not prove causation, as psychologists like to tell us. And I have no doubt that there are many reasons why younger folks are not answering God's call to ordained ministry in nearly as high numbers as they once did. But I also do not doubt that the length and complexity of our candidacy process does not help.

Testimony in text

Sharing our faith is important. That's the only way the gospel is really spread, in fact. And oftentimes, a personal faith testimony is worth 100 regular sermons, because it connects people with real stories of faith.

So I was glad to see that Amy Forbus, a friend and fellow Methoblogger, recently shared her testimony about "Why I am a United Methodist" in the United Methodist Reporter. You can read her story here.

Amy is a good example of how ministry is not just limited to clergy serving in local churches. Her work with UMR Communications is an important aspect of our connectional church. I'm glad she's a Gen-X'er out there, showing the world that our generation thinks the United Methodist Church is a vital place to be a part of the body of Christ.

Oh, and you can read her blog here. Dogblogger power, activate!