You need to read this article

My colleague at the United Methodist Reporter, the Rev. Don Haynes, has written an extremely important column.

His latest in the Reporter, entitled, "Call for GC special session is reality check," offers a lucid and articulate view on the issues likely to face a specially-called session of the General Conference in the coming months.

One of Don's paragraphs that particularly struck me goes as follows: "Whether we have a special session of General Conference or not, this is the time for a painful reality check. We can no longer copy the corporate culture of the 20th century; connectionalism can no longer mean an obsolete, hierarchical flow chart."

In casting a critical eye at the United Methodist Church's present organization, Don suggests needed changes in everything from guaranteed appointments to the mission of the publishing house, and from the size & role of the general boards and agencies to the prevailing anxiety over the pension fund.

But he's also not making cheap shots. Don's commentary is realistic, and it is respectful to the institutional arrangements that served the Church so well in the last century. He's just not willing to let inertia dictate the Church's future course.

Don writes quite self-consciously as a member of the Church's older generation. But he offers a fresh critique that provides a ray of sunlight into our current discussions on the Church's top-heavy bureaucracy on every level from local church to annual conference to general board.

I'm not anti-institutional, and you shouldn't be either. The Church is an institution, and it is a Christ-created institution. We need the Church to be a strong institution in order to give us a community where faith can be formed and discipleship can be developed.

And that's why Don's article is so important. He's asking the right questions - questions that can help us move strongly into the future. Go read the article. You'll be glad you did.

Privileging People over Process

A few days ago I posted about how the church can often be its own worst enemy when it comes to the ordination process.

Posts about ordination candidacy tend to generate a lot of response - both in terms of e-mails and reader comments. I've always seen that as an indication of the level of frustration people often experience in the process itself. Having received a call from God to enter ministry, it can be exasperating to navigate a bureaucratic maze that seems designed to frustrate more than facilitate.

As I wrote about in my last column, there is a momentum in the UMC at large to reform the structure of the ordination process. That's good news! Significant changes were made at the 2008 General Conference, and I expect there to be more in 2012.

But we need more than just structural reform. We need a reform of personal attitudes as well. I take up this subject in my current column, where I talk about the importance of personal concern and attention on the part of candidacy mentors, DCOMs, and BOMs. You could add to that list, of course, with seminary professors, pastors, district superintendents, and bishops.

I firmly believe that any complicated process is made easier with the right attitudes on the part of the people in authority. The church as a whole should be constantly aware of the vulnerable and often uncertain position that ordination candidates find themselves in. They need the love, care, and wisdom that mentor figures can provide. And with that, I think a lot of the deep frustration that they often experience can be avoided.

The trend in our culture is, on the whole, toward greater bureaucracy. As that happens, we tend to think processes can take over in systems where people used to be the integral parts. That may work for shopping online and self-check outs at the grocery store, but I don't think it will ever work in the body of Christ.

We are members, one of the other! And as we try to respond faithfully to the Holy Spirit's work in raising up shepherds, we need to make sure that we're personally involved to help, assist, and encourage.

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.

Heading into the Weekend

I've been swamped this week, but I wanted to post on this beautiful Friday evening to share a couple of things:

First, I've got a recent column in the United Methodist Reporter that looks at the importance of doing work to preserve and extend the Wesleyan tradition of our church. I mentioned this in passing in a post last week, but I wanted to highlight it here. The column reflects on my recent trip to the Wesleyan Theological Society's annual meeting back in March, when I got to interact with fellow United Methodists as well as folks from the Church of the Nazarene, Free Methodist Church, Church of God, and Wesleyan Church. The WTS is made up of people who are committed to the common Wesleyan foundation of all our churches, and they do historical and theological work aimed at preserving and developing the Wesleyan tradition. If you are a student or pastor with an interest in Wesleyan theology or Methodist history, I would recommend joining the WTS and planning on attending its annual spring meeting. It is wonderfully invigorating.

Second, the crush of work this week has kept me from responding to some of the insightful comments to my blog post last week on possibilities for church reform. I devoted a couple of hours this afternoon to just such a response, which you can see by scrolling to the bottom of the comments on that post. I only mention that because my response includes a reflection on the proposed constitutional amendments to the Book of Discipline that will be taken up for consideration by annual conferences this summer. The reflection is written in conversation with Bruce Robbins' book, A World Parish?, which I believe is key to understanding what the amendments are aiming toward. An essay I am working on right now will include my views on the amendments in fuller form, and I plan on making that essay available on this blog when it is finished.

As we prepare to move into Holy Week, I hope everyone is blessed with the same beautiful weather that we are promised here in Durham this weekend.

It's not what you say...

... it's how you say it. Or, so the old saying goes.

I've thought about that saying a lot over the past few days, after re-reading my last two blog posts and carrying on a conversation about them with a few folks over telephone and e-mail.

Electronic communication media - whether e-mail, blogging, or otherwise - is a flawed blessing. It connects us in ways we never before imagined, and it allows for a rapid exchange of ideas and points of view. But it is also tone deaf, which can lead to problems that I'm sure any reader of this blog has experienced firsthand in his or her own life. I once read a columnist who called e-mail a "multiplier of misunderstandings" because of the way a poorly worded message can ignite an office-wide controversy that the message's author never intended. You could say the same thing about blogging, because of its inherently opinionated character and inability to communicate nuances in tone of voice.

Which leads me to the point of this post. My last two posts (here and here) were fired-up views on some of the problems the United Methodist Church faces at present together with suggestions for positive change. My intent in both posts was to be positive, but I didn't want to let my desire for constructive suggestion obscure a deeply-held view that the church has got some serious structural problems that need to be addressed soon. So I didn't hold back, assuming that anyone reading this blog knows how seriously I take the calling of discipleship on all our lives and the importance of the church as the body of Christ where we learn the depths of saving faith. I admit that I think strong language is sometimes needed to overcome the inertia that we all experience in the church of just going about our business and assuming everything will turn out alright. Clearly, things are not alright and it is going to take intentional and probably sacrificial commitment to bring about the kind of reforms that can equip us for faithful service in the years ahead.

But what I was not intending to do was run the church into the ground or suggest that God is not still working through us. As I mentioned in a response to one of the comments last week, I was baptized, married, and ordained in the UMC. Amongst Protestant churches, I think we have the most solid core doctrine and can make one of the best cases that there is still a need for Protestantism to exist at all. I'm very hopeful about what a reformed and reinvigorated UMC could mean around the world, and I hope to be a part of that renewal through my own ministry in the years ahead.

So I say all that just so you won't get the wrong idea about my occasional 'soapbox' moments. I had a difficult blogging experience about a year ago with an issue related to my alma mater that almost caused me to reconsider blogging entirely. I ended up deciding that I could still do it effectively, so long as I made sure to take the time to communicate well and always err on the side of charity. That can be done even in impassioned ways, so long as your audience isn't taking you the wrong way.

On another note, I should mention that I saw a great example just yesterday at my church of a way that the UMC is still engaged in powerfully Wesleyan ministries. In our district's "Mission Saturation Weekend," every local church in the area received a speaker who presented on different ways the church is in mission. We happened to get Rev. Mark Hicks, who is the executive director of Disciple Bible Outreach Ministries here in North Carolina. His ministry is centered around bringing the gospel into people's lives through the popular Disciple Bible Study series, and it has a wonderfully Wesleyan twist: one of its primary efforts is in prison ministry. Mark's organization trains individuals and local churches to go into prisons all over the state and establish a ministry presence through offering bible study classes. As Mark described his work to us, he cited both Scripture and John Wesley in abundance! He clearly believes that the church is crucial to helping prison be a place of rehabilitation rather than retribution.

Faithful ministry goes on through the UMC each and everyday, and people like Mark Hicks are testament to that. When I cast a critically constructive eye on the church, it is always with the belief that our potential is enormous and that we could always be preaching and practicing the gospel in greater ways than we are. But that should never obscure the things we are doing, and I'll keep that in mind in the future.

And by the way, Mark Hicks is one of the editors in the new book, I Was In Prison: United Methodist Perspectives on Prison Ministry. It's at the top of my summer reading list.

My vision for church reform

Okay, so this is a pretty long post. But if you were interested in what I wrote last week, you might be interested in this too.

My last blog post looked at the viability of the United Methodist Church's future as a denomination. That future is by no means certain. With declining numbers in the American church, an anemic sense of evangelism and mission, a lack of commitment to Wesleyan doctrine, and a movement afoot to split the church into regions based on national and regional boundaries, the church is at a crossroads. In addition to that, the stiflingly bureaucratic forms of church government we have adopted are seriously inhibiting our attempts to carry out our primary mission, which is to proclaim and practice the gospel so that we make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

There were several questions directed to me in the comments section of that last blog post, so let me address them first:

1. One respondent asked why we would spend time and energy trying to repair a broken institution when we could be spending that time making disciples one-on-one. That is a great question, and it points to the driving issue I was trying to get at in my recent article in Faith & Leadership. Jesus has called us into his church. That means that the church is, first and foremost, the community of Jesus' disciples. But over time, the community gains an inescapably "institution aspect" to it. And that ain't a bad thing. Because we believe that the church witnesses to the gospel throughout history, we believe there is a continuity to the Christian community from the time of the apostles to the present. That continuity is evident in the church's historic doctrine, the church's ministry (including the ministry of both clergy and laity), and the church's mission. If you don't accept the church-as-institution, you very quickly begin to suffer from a form of historical amnesia that ungrounds you from the Christian tradition. That's bad for basic Christian theology and can lead to a shallow biblicism. It is also a peculiar temptation for Americans, who tend to see everything in "newer is better" terms and want to discard anything that appears not to work well.

2. Another respondent asked how viable I think the UMC is over the long term, and to what degree I am committed to stay in it. The first part of this question is, in a sense, THE question for Methodists. Clearly, the growth of the church in Africa and the Philippines (and in parts of Europe) shows that the Holy Spirit is working through our church. But the church in the U.S. is a different issue, where we seem to be tearing ourselves apart over differences in moral doctrine and seem to have lost the will to evangelize in a robust way. I can't answer the viability question with any certainty, although I'll make some suggestions later in this post. As far as the issue of my own commitment is concerned, I was baptized, confirmed, and ordained in the UMC. I took vows that commit me to a ministry of Word, Sacrament, Order, and Service in its midst. I believe our church has the resources within its tradition to be a powerful witness for Jesus Christ in the world. So I ain't going anywhere.

3. Yet another respondent asked about my views on the proposed constitutional amendments that would initiate a process of structural reform in the UMC as a whole. If you aren't aware of these proposed amendments, you need to read up on them. As a starter, see this post from Wesley Report. This is a complicated issue, and I am working on an essay that addresses it right now. I'll let you know when I'm finished. Until then, I would only say that I think the restructuring is a very bad idea. The issue most often raised to support it is that the General Conference is too "Americentric" (meaning too focused on the concerns of the U.S. church). But all that is needed to remedy that is discipline and patience. The discipline would come in the form of limiting the number of General Conference petitions submitted that focus on peculiarly American concerns and structuring the agenda more equitably. And the patience would come in simply waiting a few years as the size of the church outside the U.S. grows. Since delegations to the General Conference are proportionally-based, the dominance of the U.S. delegation will eventually even out. And that will happen sooner than you think. Restructuring of the church is overkill. And it would open the door to the separation of the church into national or regional constituencies, thus reinforcing the nationalism that has led to innumerable problems over the past few hundred years.

4. Finally, a question was asked about how to go about extricating ourselves from a bureaucratic approach to ministry and recommitting ourselves to the missional task of making disciples for Jesus Christ. That's what I want to take up in the remainder of this post, so consider what follows my humble attempt at addressing this most crucial issue.

First, there are quick changes we could make to the way we go about some our vital tasks that would make a huge difference. I'll mention two. One is to reshape the agenda of our annual conference sessions so that they are almost entirely centered on worship and equipping. Have all your awards and recognitions done at the bishop's office in the weeks leading up to conference. Film them and put them on a DVD, which you then distribute to the conference delegates. Also make the commitment not to spend time debating and voting on resolutions, which are among the most counterproductive activities that an annual conference does (with an exception made for the year before General Conference, of course, when the annual conferences have the ability to submit petitions). Then take all the new time you've got to worship (perhaps getting a 2 or 3 sermon series from your bishop casting a vision for the conference's ministry) and equip clergy and laity for ministry (through substantive workshops on doctrine, mission, evangelism, etc.). This may sound simplistic, but don't underestimate the potential that annual conference culture change represents. Remember that there was actually a time when Methodists looked forward to annual conference as a time when the Holy Spirit renewed the church.

And as another easy change we can reclaim the ordination process as a personal experience rather than a bureaucratic nightmare. This can start immediately by a new attitude from clergy mentors, who often see themselves as cogs in the wheel rather than real contributors to spiritual formation. If mentors will commit to get involved in the lives of their candidates and stay involved, it can have an immediate humanizing effect on the process. (I'm not blowing hot air here. I have done that with a candidate of my own, and I think it made a difference.) Beyond that, annual conferences can do whatever possible (given the Book of Discipline regulations) to further humanize the ordination process by de-emphasizing the bureaucratic elements of it and accenting the human contact. Getting the candidates and the probationary clergy together with the Board of Ordained Ministry registrar (apart from the annual retreat) to go over processes and troubleshoot questions in a supportive setting would be a start. All of these things take time commitments from the clergy involved, but all of them are do-able without official action by a governing body. Again, it may sound simplistic, but don't underestimate the difference young clergy can make when they are optimistic rather than cynical about the church and their place in it.

Second, we need to think carefully about what we want our annual conference ministry staffs and our general boards and agencies to do for us. And I want to be careful here, because I think the folks who make up these staffs are committed disciples who pour out their hearts for the church. But in general, I think the more we can reduce the size of the church bureaucracy, the better off we'l be. Take the issue of top-down programming, for instance. Because these staffs are expected to generate programming, and local church pastors and laity are expected to attend, it gives us the erroneous notion that "connectionalism" consists primarily of us all doing our duty by attending programmatic events that are often ineffective or inapplicable to our settings in ministry. Moreoever, the programming I have been most impressed with has never come from 'on high,' but has rather been the vision of a pastor or a church who have shared it with the rest of us. If the time and energy spent on conference and general church-level staffs doing programming was handed over to congregations, then it just might happen that congregations in geographical proximity to one another would reach out and join together in true connectionalism for common ministry and mission. But so long as your attention is focused on the next mandatory thing coming down the pike from your district superintendent or bishop, or from the conference ministry staff, then you will never think to look laterally for how you can cooperate with sister congregations near you.

I also believe we need to seriously re-think the role of general boards and agencies in setting the agenda at General Conference. I don't know this for a fact (and I would appreciate someone who does enlightening me), but my understanding is that the proportion of General Conference legislation that originates with general board and agency staffs is quite large [UPDATE: In the comments section of this post, Steve Manskar from the General Board of Discipleship offers some corrective comments on this point. I thank him, and welcome anyone else shedding further light on the extent to which general church structures 'set the agenda' at the General Conference]. I don't mean this harshly, but that amounts to the entire church's agenda being driven by bureaucrats who may not even be in touch with what is going on in the church 'on the ground.' And the result is that the church becomes committed through the legislation that passes to certain courses of action, which require lots of money and which are (not surprisingly) often carried out by the same general boards and agencies that originated the legislation in the first place. It is also no wonder that church bureaucrats would tend toward the belief that the church's problems could be legislated away. That's the mindset of someone who works in a bureaucracy, whereas I would argue that the church's problems are best solved through the Holy Spirit's work in local congregations. Like annual conference sessions, the General Conference could actually be something that people look forward to with something other than fear and dread. But change has to start somewhere.

Third, I believe reform has to entail a re-commitment to Wesleyan doctrine. Look, if we do not believe that our Wesleyan heritage offers something unique to the church catholic, then it becomes very difficult to make an argument that we should exist as a separate church at all. I wrote my current UM Reporter column about the importance of grounding ourselves in our doctrine. The trouble in the church now is two-fold. First, those who do invoke Wesley or Wesleyan teaching often betray a lack of serious reading in Wesley (and you can see this particularly in the way terms like 'catholic spirit' and 'social holiness' and 'Wesleyan Quadrilateral' are misused). And second, many don't even bother with our particular doctrine and instead work from a combination of shallow pop theology and the therapeutic junk - which is easier but does nothing to form mature discipleship. Our congregations are starving for solid doctrinal content that could open up their lives to the reality of God's revolutionary work in the world, and we make them settle for hearing about how to be a nice person. It doesn't have to be this way. But it's going to require us to read seriously out of the tradition and stop trying to turn Wesleyan discipleship into a lukewarm mushy bowl of 'open hearts, open minds, open doors' oatmeal.

So that's it. A few practical changes. And a few changes in the way we approach ministry. It's not the total solution. But it would make a difference.

"Denomination" in the dock

We live in a pro-confessional, anti-denominational age. For large mainline denominations like the United Methodist Church, that could mean disaster. Follow with me on this:

Christians (particularly younger ones) are starting to realize that faithful discipleship and good citizenship do not mean the same thing. There was once a time when the phrase, "America is a Christian country" did not sound so nostalgic. Our culture was, broadly speaking, Christian. So you could count on the idea that teachers, politicians, and businessmen would take Christian convictions seriously (even if they did not subscribe to them themselves). But that era has passed. Our culture has become secularized and pluralized to a degree that calling America "a Christian country" strikes one as hopeful but unrealistic.

And Christians are starting to catch on to this reality. They are - perhaps for the first time in American history - beginning to understand that Jesus may have a call on their lives that differs from that of the nation. Even more important, they are realizing that Jesus' call and the nation's call are not just different, but also at points incompatible. So more Christians accept the challenge that self-identifying as "Christian" actually means something. It may put them at odds with their neighbors, their co-workers, and particularly with the broader culture. But this is what it means to be confessional. The New Testament promises us that it will, in some ways, make life more difficult. But it is a life in service to the living God.

Here's the irony: At the same time when Christians are starting to realize the need for a confessional identity, they are becoming increasingly resistant to the idea of a denominational identity. In my own tradition (the United Methodist Church), you see that all the time in new church plants, where the name of the local church will either minimize or wholly conceal the name of the larger denomination (such as: "THE RIVER CHURCH" in huge letters, with "a united methodist congregation" in tiny letters underneath, if it is present at all).

The recent decision by the pastor and staff of GracePoint United Methodist Church to separate from the UMC and launch GracePoint Community Church in Wichita, Kansas, is an excellent example of this trend. This is a complicated situation, to be sure, and it is not one I care to issue judgment about. Frankly, I don't know enough of the details. (To find out more, see Shane Raynor's investigative piece on his blog and the United Methodist News Service's recent press release.) Whatever the events over the last couple of years that resulted in the split, you have to recognize this: the leadership of the church believed it had a vision, and it did not have the patience or the willingness to allow that vision to be lived out within the context of the UMC's ministry.

My interest is not in the details, but rather in the underlying cultural situation that leads to such unfortunate incidents. Why the recent and widespread desire for congregational polity over other forms of church organization, such as the episcopal and connectional polity of the United Methodist Church? As the new GracePoint goes its own way and takes its place among the growing crowd of "community" and "bible" churches, I want to ask, "Why is it that we have come to have such little interest in the identity that a denominational label gives us?"

For those who have been ordained into an ecclesiastical communion like the UMC and have no intentions of leaving (like myself) this is a crucial question. Here are two thoughts:

-- First, our culture is becoming increasingly individualistic in general, which means we tend to see large institutions as impersonal, bureaucratic, and lacking relevance for our lives. Whenever anyone makes a statement about "increasing individualism," everyone tends to nod his head and go on. But I think we have to pause and consider this more carefully. In his recent book, X Saves the World, Jeff Gordinier argues that Generation X'ers have witnessed and rejected the institutionalism of the Builders and the anti-institutional idealism of the Boomers. They've instead opted for an individualism that seeks very localized forms of community life. I think there's something to Gordinier's assessment. We're not individualists in the sense that we don't want the community of others, but we are individualists in the sense that we want our community to consist of people whose faces we know and whose lives are a part of our own. In that context, the idea of a denomination is simply too impersonal and lacking in relevance.

-- Second, the mainline denominations are still operating off of the cultural dominance that they enjoyed until the 1960s. Methodists are probably the worst about this. We have this institutional memory of the time when there were more of us than anyone, and we've never gotten over it. Think about the ways this gets played out: the General Conference passes legislation that weighs in on global problems and calls on our government to act in specific ways. The General Board of Church and Society serves as a lobbying force to the U.S. Congress. Groups of bishops relish the opportunity to get audiences with national political leaders. In a desperate move to get people to like us, we launch a multi-year, multi-million dollar advertising campaign to show the culture how harmless we are and that (contrary to what they've heard about Christian discipleship requiring a new way of life) in reality we're just 'open' about everything. This all amounts to a big cultural hangover, and because we are still suffering from it, our moves as a church in recent years have been toward a mushy pluralism in the vain hope that the culture will repent, start listening to us, and come back to church.

I recently wrote an article arguing that young clergy and lay leaders in the church need to learn to embrace both church-as-community and church-as-institution in order for big denominations like ours to have any kind of future. I believe that. But for us to embrace church-as-institution and make that workable over the long term, the church also needs to change. Here are three ways how:

First, we need to accept the fact that nobody gives a damn what we think. I'm serious about that. Neither the president, the Congress, nor the World Wildlife Federation is holding its breath for what any Methodist body is about to say regarding political issues. If we can stop wringing our collective hands over that stuff, and stop spending all the valuable time and money we have when we gather dealing with it, then perhaps we can re-commit ourselves to the work of ministry. And regardless of what you might say, passing a resolution that goes in a book that nobody reads is not ministry, whether it's the journal of your annual conference or the Book of Resolutions. We need to stop trying to speak to the rest of the world and instead get our own house in order.

Second, we need to reduce the bureaucratic complexity of the church as a whole. This will mean difficult decisions about cutting staff and funding at the level of both annual conferences and the general church. It will mean restructuring and redefining their mission. Conference ministry staffs and the staffs of our general boards and agencies do a lot of good things (and those should continue). They are filled by committed servants of the church who are doing their best in a flawed system. But all bureaucracies evolve over time into organisms that generate a lot of stuff in order to justify their own existence. Our own denominational bureaucracy needs to be pared down and given clearly defined 'equipping' functions and nothing more. By simple inertia, we've arrived at a ministry model that sees bureaucratic processes as the way to get things done rather than the Holy Spirit working in congregations. It's like a ship that has been at sea so long its hull is weighted down with barnacles. We've got to pull into port, scrape those suckers off, and allow the ship to function the way it was originally intended.

Third, we need to realize that the purpose of our mission is not to make middle and upper-middle class consumers feel better about the shallowness of their lives. That's chaplaincy, and it is what goes on in a lot of our congregations. But Jesus wants to gives all of us a whole new life. Methodists used to know that. Wesley's stated mission to his preachers was to "save souls," and his belief about the reason God had raised up the Methodists was to reform the larger church and spread scriptural holiness over the land. In modern times, we have defined that mission as making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. I can accept either version, but neither does us any good if it never gets put into practice. We've got a gospel to preach, but too often what ends up getting proclaimed in our churches is the gospel-of-how-to-live-a-more-fulfilling-materialist-existence.

I have been wanting to write a post on this subject for a long time, but it was something about the saga of GracePoint that made me finally do it. Part of the justification that people on the blogosphere have given for what happened was that we need to care about the work of the kingdom rather than the success of the denomination. Or put another way, we need to make more disciples rather than more Methodists. There is a way in which that sentiment is profoundly true and there is a way in which it is profoundly tragic.

The way in which it is true is obvious, since our own denominational mission statement is a call to discipleship.

But the way in which it is tragic is this: There was a time when Methodists really believed that the best way of making disciples of Jesus was to nurture that discipleship within the context of the Methodist Church. We believed we had a theology, an understanding of committed practice, and a Spirit-fired missionary drive that made our own church the best place to learn the faith.

It is no longer clear that that is the case, and both the GracePoint example and the reaction to it are testament to that. The future of the United Methodist Church as a viable church communion is dependent on our looking honestly at how we got here and taking the steps necessary to re-commit ourselves to our original raison d'etre.

Where did we go wrong?

I write a lot - some might say too much - about the need for the church to be a place of truly intentional discipleship. Sometimes I catch myself falling into a mindset of "Church: love it or leave it!" And needless to say, that point of view can err on the side of a lack of compassion.

But what is supremely frustrating to me is the wide gulf that seems to separate early Methodism from the Methodism of our own day. In Wesley's day, the Methodists were regarded as dangerous "enthusiasts" who took their religion way too seriously (which begs the question, is it possible to take Jesus too seriously??). In our time, the Methodists are seen as the ultimate mainline Christians - neither hot nor cold, we are as comfortably lukewarm as the Laodiceans of Revelation 3. In between that time and this one, a whole lot of spiritual power has been lost.

The reasons for our spiritual decline are many, but perhaps looming over them all is the way that we Methodists sold our church's soul to the devil in return for cultural respectability. As a professor of mine pointed out recently, there was a time when the best way for politicians to take the national pulse on any given issue was to call the Methodist bishops. Methodism quite literally was American culture. And when you get to a position of that kind of dominance, it is all too easy to just assume that little matters like discipleship, accountability, and sanctification will take care of themselves.

Well, gentle reader, the point I would make to you is that I am not alone in my frustration. I get e-mails from pastors and layfolk from all over the connection who share in the desire to see renewal happen in the church. For instance, one laywoman from Illinois wrote me last week:

"Our dear, old UMC appears to be still stuck on making up programs and strategies and meaningless slogans, which mostly amount to fiddling while Rome burns. Of course we do good in the world, but what a church our size could really accomplish for the Kingdom only God knows. And He wants to lead us to do it. You're right, our member numbers are shocking, and I fear they'll soon be tragic if our church doesn't get seriously into the scriptures, humble ourselves before God, and beg Him to lead us once again..."

From the standpoint of the national church, our main stumbling block seems to be that we still think we are in that position of cultural dominance. I deeply respect our Council of Bishops, but I wish they would spend less time trying to get their photographs taken with famous politicians (and I wish they would ask themselves why such an effort is important). I also wish the church as a whole would ask itself what it thinks it is accomplishing by making a slogan like "Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors" as the church's chief public witness to the world (a slogan which is almost entirely devoid of meaning).

The quote from the reader above is as indicting as it is insightful. And so was the comment that a first year M.Div student at Duke made to me on Wednesday. She said, "You know, the more I learn about John Wesley, the more I realize that we don't do anything he said we should do."

If that doesn't make you want to fall on your knees and beg for forgiveness, I don't know what will.