Old friends in a new venue

Before Emily and I moved to Durham so I could pursue a Doctor of Theology degree at Duke University, I served as an associate pastor back home in the Arkansas Conference.

My appointment was at the First United Methodist Church in Searcy, Arkansas. Our time in Searcy was way too short, but we made lots of great friends and have many wonderful memories from our years there. I saw a couple of days ago that my former church has launched a new website, which you can find here.

I did some work to help launch a new site when I arrived in Searcy at the end of 2003, but this is light years ahead of where we were then. It looks inviting, eye-catching, and user-friendly - which is exactly what a church website should be.

Kudos to FUMC Searcy!

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.

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.

Finally, Mississippi is #1

When I was growing up in small-town Arkansas, we had a saying about our neighbors to the east: "We're 49, they're 50. Thank God for Mississippi!"

Call it a school kid's coping mechanism. Every time some new national poll would come out measuring poverty, or education, or whatever, it always seemed like we Arkansans were back-to-back with our Mississippian brethren - right at the bottom of the heap. Hearing all the jokes about our hillbilly accents or our supposed lack of shoes was bad enough. But to see the stereotypes about our backwardness supported by statistical evidence was enough to give a kid an inferiority complex.

Well, a new poll is out and Mississippi is finally on top. A recent nationwide Gallup poll finds that Mississippi is the "most religious" state in the nation. 85% of Mississippians report that religion is an important part of their daily lives. Arkansas ain't too far behind at 78% (and tied for 5th overall). As the green-shaded graphic at the top of this post shows, the most religious states are found mostly in the South, whereas the least religious ones are in New England and the West Coast.

I seem to remember President Obama making an unfortunate comment during the presidential campaign about the small town poor clinging to their guns and their religion. He was rightly criticized for that remark (though he claimed it was misunderstood). Still, there is at least a broad correlation between poverty and adherence to religion, at least if you consider that the Southern states are amongst the poorest in the nation. And that makes sense: the Christian faith does indeed offer a message of hope to the poor, calling on them to be united with God and one another in the church and offering the promise of an eternal salvation that puts present suffering in perspective.

But let's flip the question on its head. Why are the wealthy so unreligious? Toward the end of his life, John Wesley wrote a sermon called, "Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity," where he bemoaned the failure of Methodists in that day to adhere to the faith of their predecessors. Wesley believed that the growing affluence of Methodists was a direct cause of their weakening faith. And perhaps most disturbingly, he does not seem to offer a convincing remedy to the problem in the text of the sermon.

Besides just looking at broad brushstroke correlations between per capita income and levels of religiosity in various states, we might also look at the example of our own church. Is it possible that the lukewarm discipleship so prevalent in the United Methodist Church is a direct result of the church's great wealth? And is there a remedy for that problem?

But hey, just so you don't misunderstand me - I'm as proud as I can be about my Arkansas roots. When I go home for a visit, I'm happy as a pig in slop. I root for the Razorbacks like a maniac on Saturdays in the fall, and I speak that lingering hillbilly accent with pride.

I'm also proud at the character of my fellow Arkansans. Though they're often poorer than their neighbors in other states, they are a resilient and hospitable people who typically exhibit a deep faith in God. Don't believe me? Just read the polls!

Hey, Arkansas: Just Say No

Say no to the lottery amendment today, that is!

This is my one piece of direct political advocacy for the election today, largely because for Christians I think this is a completely unambiguous issue.

Lt. Gov. Bill Halter has been pushing for this amendment as a way to fund education. Halter has been trying to dupe Arkansans in the same way that lotteries do: telling them that it is possible to get rich quickly and painlessly, solving all your problems. For Halter, the issue is state-funded education. For lotteries, the issue is life in general.

But lotteries are a bad, bad idea. Here are some reasons why:

1) Lotteries are equivalent to a regressive tax on the poor, who buy them in inordinate quantities relative to the wealthy. I see this everyday in gas stations in North Carolina, and it is depressing.

2) Lotteries hold out a false sense of hope and teach a poor work ethic. It is a terrible lesson for the children of our society, and it teaches the foolishness that you can 'get something for nothing.'

3) Lotteries crack the door open for other types of legalized gambling. And with expanded legalized gambling comes organized drime, drug trafficking, alcoholism, and other social problems.

4) The United Methodist Church holds a sensible anti-gambling position. 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 unneccessary 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."

Ultimately, lotteries are ways for cowardly politicians to try to solve difficult problems that they don't want to solve through either a)tax increases or b)budget cuts. So their answer is to introduce a societal practice that has been shown to have ill effects on many different levels while often not solving the very problems they were designed to solve in the first place. Politicians like Halter need to be rewarded for their poor leadership by being voted out of office at the next opportunity. But first, their bad ideas have to be voted down.

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

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.