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.

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.

Amendment 1 (without the baggage)

Annual conferences of the United Methodist Church from all over the world will be voting on the 32 proposed amendments to the church's Constitution in the coming weeks.

The amendments have already generated a great deal of discussion. News articles and blog posts have appeared in print and online. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the whole thing has been the YouTube appeals from figures both prominent and obscure in the church.

I personally approach these kinds of moments at annual conference with fear and trembling. The parliamentary procedure that we use does not allow for the kind of holy conferencing needed to discuss matters of importance to the church. And yet, we do not seem capable of finding another way. That means that we will be forced to decided whether, and to what extent, we should amend the Constitution of the church based off of a flawed system and an impoverished discussion.

As I have reflected on the various amendments, I've come to have deep reservations about many of them. And my reservations are often for reasons that do not seem to show up in the discussions going on elsewhere. So over the past few weeks I've been organizing my thoughts. Below you'll find a link to a commentary on Amendment 1, the amendment that would change the "membership article" in the Book of Discipline:

"Amendment 1 (without the baggage)"

If you care about the coherence of how we understand ourselves as a church, please read this short essay. And feel free to pass it along to others.

I'll also follow this post up with another one in a few days, when I will share a commentary on the "Worldwide Church" amendments that make up 23 of the 32 total amendments.

The trouble with 'Christian America'

Jon Meacham wrote a cover story in Newsweek a couple of weeks ago that was titled, "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." A title like that is meant to be a little sensational. And Newsweek probably got just what it wanted when Meacham's piece sent Christians all over the country in a tizzy.

The article itself, though, really wasn't sensational at all. Meacham is a liberal Episcopalian, and he was mostly just relishing the decline of the so-called Religious Right - a catch-all term for the politicized evangelicalism that came to prominence under Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in the 1980s. Meacham is also the editor-in-chief at Newsweek, and under his leadership over the past couple of years the magazine has drifted left noticeably. A part of that comes out in a particularly left-leaning religious view, which shows up in reporting of all types but is best seen on a regular basis through Lisa Miller's BeliefWatch column. So in that sense, Meacham's article was just standard Newsweek fare.

But Meacham did cite statistics that are troubling beyond his connection of them with the decline of a politically muscular Christianity. A recent survey shows that the number of professing Christians as a percentage of the U.S. population has decline from 86% in 1990 to 76% today. Any position piece is strengthened by hard numbers, and those were Meacham's. (For a different take on them, go to Michael Gerson's recent column in the Washington Post.)

So is 'Christian America' really dying? Is it not just the Religious Right that is fading away, but is the generally Christian character of our society fading as well?

With a little fear and trembling, I take this subject up in my current column in the United Methodist Reporter. My editor at the Reporter was gracious to give me more space than usual, and with the complexity of this topic I used every bit of it. I won't repeat my whole argument here but instead invite you to check out the column on the Reporter's site.

The gist of it is this: There never was such a thing as 'Christian America.' And the Christians in America shouldn't worry about that.

There cannot be such a 'Christian America,' in fact, because citizenship and discipleship can never be synonymous terms. Christians owe an allegiance to Jesus Christ above the allegiance to the nation. And that means that a Christian's primary frame of social reference is not society at large but rather the church.

If we, as Christians, are really worried about declining numbers of the faithful in this land, we should practice a more robust form of discipleship. Ultimately, it is not by baptizing secular institutions or passing 'Christian' laws that we practice fidelity to God. It is rather by preaching the word of God, celebrating the sacraments, forming disciples of Jesus Christ, and witnessing to the love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit through our works of piety and mercy in the world.

It is good when Christians exert an influence on the society in which they live. Their participation in the larger world can lead to greater civility in social life and more compassion in the legislation and execution of laws. But the telos of the practice of Christian faith is not to make the world Christian. That makes no Scriptural sense. It is instead to spread the gospel and build up the church. And yes, there is a real difference.

So we shouldn't worry about trying to Christianize America. We should just be concerned with Christianizing the church.

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.

Church: Community or Institution?

The church's future depends on our ability to hold two key ecclesial concepts together: community and institution.

I make the case for this claim in a new article - which you can find here - where I look at the reality of the church as both a community of Jesus' followers and an institution complete with church hierarchy, bureaucracy, and connectional structure.

In my experience, Gen Xers tend to gravitate toward the notion of the church as a community. We are skeptical of the 'big institution' approach of our forebears in the Builder Generation, but we're also turned off by the 'save the world' idealism of the Baby Boomers. So we tend to retreat into the local, focusing on our own immediate communities and their surrounding environment.

Don't get me wrong: I think the localism of the Xers is one of their best qualities. It means that we are asking tough questions about the character of the church. As a disciplined community of Jesus' followers, the church must not be a place where cheap grace is preached and practiced. I don't think it's any coincidence that Xers in general tend to be turned off by the "Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors" marketing campaign of the larger church. It's not that we don't have open hearts; it's just that we don't want the gospel watered down to some nebulous slogan just for the purpose of trying to make ourselves seem more likable.

On the other hand, the same local focus that helps Xers to think seriously about matters of personal and communal discipleship can sometimes hinder them when it comes to thinking about their responsibility to the institutional church. We tend to neglect the larger church because we don't see what good it does for us and our communities. (Shane Claiborne, who I posted about positively last week, is an interesting example of this trend. Shane grew up in the UMC, but the radical discipleship he practices now is essentially in a free church evangelical context. When he came to speak at Duke a few weeks ago, he made several contradictory statements that made me want to ask him about his understanding of ecclesial authority. Alas, I didn't get the chance.)

But it's important for Xers to remember that the church is bigger than the local congregation. Just as we are individual members of the one body, so too are our congregations individual members of the body of Christ. We live in an age skeptical of big institutions or not, it is true. But in my mind, that gives us all the more reason to reform our own institution so that it better reflects the church God would have it be.

The article, by the way, was published by Faith & Leadership, a new venture of Leadership Education program at Duke Divinity School. It is a kind of cross between an online magazine, a blog, and an all-purpose resource center for church leadership. The site went online a couple of weeks ago, and they've already featured some really insightful articles and commentaries.

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this issue of community vs. institution, particularly if you have time to read the article. I consider it to be crucial to our leadership of the church over the next few decades.

God's best work...

Is the authority of the clergy in crisis?

Are pastors as respected in society as they once were?

During the fall semester, I served as a graduate assistant for a course in American church history taught by Prof. Grant Wacker here at Duke. One of our main course texts was Brooks Holifield's God's Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America. Holifield takes up these questions, in part by suggesting that the clergy of every era in American history have always viewed their power and authority as on the wane.

Holifield goes back to the earliest European clergy who came to this continent - first Catholic missionary priests and then Puritan congregationalist ministers in New England and Anglican priests in Virginia. In the colonial era, it is true that clergy held all sorts of authority that seems strange to us today. They acted as judges, drafted legislation, served as de facto physicians, and were the most widely-read authors. When institutions of higher education like Harvard, Yale, and the College of William and Mary were founded, clergy served as both presidents and professors for generations.

As American society developed and became more complex, the clergy gradually lost their dominance in all these areas. Holifield points out that as the professions developed and as the high education level of the clergy was matched by people pursuing other careers, it became less necessary to have clergy serve so many functions in society. (And interestingly, the clergy in some populist traditions like Methodists and Baptists in the early 19th century actually eschewed education.)

But here's the catch - and this is what I write about in my new Reporter column - Holifield argues that all these arenas of authority outside of the church have always been only peripheral to the clergy's true authority. And that authority is the ministry of the church: preaching the word of God, celebrating the sacraments, engaging in the ministry of pastoral care, and leading & equipping the people of God for ministry in the world.

I find Holifield's thesis compelling, and here's why: All too often, we are tempted to think that God has abandoned the church in order to do his work in more exciting venues. Whether it is politics, non-profit work, or social advocacy, the tendency is to think there has always got to be some exciting new area that aspiring clergy should gravitate toward. And in that milieu, the church becomes a 'fall back' option for those who can't do something 'sexier.'

But the reality is just the opposite. God's best work really is done through the church. We only know what words like justice, compassion, reconciliation, and love mean because we learn them through the grammar of the faith. And it is a grammar that is taught by the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. "By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us" (1 John 3:16, NKJV). The church is the steward of God's mysteries, and it is the community of God's own people. It is the very vehicle of God's salvation in the world!

As a pastor myself, I can tell you that ordained ministry in the church truly is an exciting vocation. Is it hard? Sure, it can be. But when one begins to gain the skills necessary for ministry (courage, patience, gentleness, among others) and allows oneself to be led by the Holy Spirit, fruits can be borne to which nothing else can compare. Fruits that include seeing glimpses of the coming Kingdom of God.

Why would the clergy need any other authority than that?

Unfortunate, self-inflicted confusion

About the orders of ministry, that is.

If you have time, read this United Methodist News Service report along with this blog post. It explains the 2008 General Conference's decision to allow deacons, with their bishops' permission, to preside over the sacraments within the deacon's primary appointment.

Why is this a problem? Well, because historically deacons do not celebrate the sacraments. Whether they are "transitional" deacons meaning they are on their way to becoming elders (as in the UMC prior to 1996 and in many denominations today) or "permanent" deacons (as in both Roman Catholic and United Methodist practice in the present), the ministry of deacons has never been understood to encompass celebrating the sacraments.

Deacons have an important calling. As the Book of Discipline (2000) makes clear in Par.310, the deacon is called to servant ministry in the world, embodying "the interrelationship between worship in the gathered community and service to God in the world." Thus, you'll find deacons who are teachers, social workers, chaplains, youth ministers, music ministers, and activists.

Elders (or presbyters, priests, pastors, etc.) have a different calling. They are called as the shepherds of congregations of the faithful, leading them through teaching, preaching, guiding, and worshiping. And so it is to the elders of the church that the responsibility for celebrating the sacraments falls.

Note: this does not imply a superiority on the part of elders. Elders are not 'better' than deacons, just as the ordained clergy (elders and deacons) are not 'better' than laity. But all these categories have different callings as Christian disciples, callings which are derived from Scripture and the tradition of the church. And importantly for our purposes, they are callings that the UMC has spent a lot of time trying to reason through over the past few years.

It was the 1996 General Conference that separated the orders of ministry, defining the elder and the deacon as two distinct ordinations and phasing out the 'transitional' deacon. The GC made this move because it believed that it was faithfully Scriptural and that it provided for a more coherent account of the orders of ministry. Yet with the 2008 General Conference's decision to authorize bishops to allow deacons to celebrate sacraments in their primary appointments, it has begun to overturn what was developed 12 years prior.

From what I understand, the ostensible reason for the 2008 GC's action was to allow for the sacraments to be celebrated in areas where elders are not readily available. But does this mean that deacons will be serving as the pastoral leaders of congregations? That really makes no sense. If deacons are leading worship because they feel called to do so, then they should begin the process to be ordained as elders. And if there are still truly rural outposts out there without an elder for miles around, then surely our tradition has enough historical knowledge about how to circuit ride that we can get an elder to each local church on a regular basis.

I spoke with a young woman earlier this year who is a seminarian and (I believe) wants to be ordained a deacon. In arguing that deacons should be granted sacramental authority, she said something to the effect, "I have friends who are called to be deacons, but they also feel called to celebrate the sacraments."

The proper response to a statement like this is "No, actually your friends are mistaken. They cannot be called to be both deacons and celebrants. In the church's understanding, if they are called to preside at table, then they are called to the pastoral leadership of congregations. If, on the other hand, they are called to the servant leadership of a deacon, then our understanding of that does not include pastoral leadership."

Sacramental authority is not a commodity, to be claimed by those attracted to the stature it conveys and offered in a consumerist manner when and where one pleases. It is a means of grace, given to us by Christ and provided for our salvation. One of the chief reasons that the presbyteros exist at all is to safeguard the sacred mysteries, ensuring that they are taught faithfully and celebrated rightly. And when we go tinkering with the orders of ministry at each and every General Conference, we do violence to the ecclesial covenant God has given us and introduce unnecessary incoherence into our orders of ministry.

As they have always been, the bishops of the church are the last line of defense for orthodoxy. Let us hope each one of them declines to use the new authority that the General Conference recently offered them.

Our deepest need?

This post is about what I think Christians' greatest need is in the present. I am writing it in connection with my new column in the United Methodist Reporter.

I've been reading a lot the past couple of months about the Great Awakening and the birth of the modern evangelical movement in the 1730s and 40s. When you look at what people like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and John Wesley were focused on, there are differences related to each leader's personality and ministry setting. But there's one thing with which they were all concerned: the New Birth.

In "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Edwards warned about the dangers facing "unconverted persons" in the congregation. Whitefield practically willed others to experience the New Birth in his impassioned sermons. And Wesley was convinced that the revival in England was occurring because evangelical ministers were preaching a strong doctrine of justification by faith alone.

I mention this because I think that a strong message about the New Birth was exactly what the church needed at that time. The church had been under assault by Enlightenment rationalism for decades, and the latitudinarian attitude of many in the Church of England hierarchy didn't do much for nurturing a vibrant faith.

And us? My strong view is that the deepest need in the church at present is real community. Everything about our culture teaches us to be individualist consumers. When we go to church, we do it with the mindset of customers. When we engage in discipleship, we often do it as religious consumers looking for a return on our investment. The market mentality of American society pervades everything we do. It is so pervasive, in fact, that we often don't realize it is there.

Without the church, we have no hope. The church is the body of Christ. That means no church, no Jesus. And no Jesus, no salvation. Unless we learn how to overcome the fragmentation that plagues us at present, I fear for our future. I have no plan to offer, no easy solution for overcoming the whole freakin' culture. I do think it has something to do with re-learning what it means to be friends with one another. But that isn't as easy as it sounds.

Too much to live for

In an earlier post, I wrote about my shock over hearing the news of Heath Ledger's death back in January. I have to admit that I have thought a whole lot about that situation in the weeks since. At the risk of sounding like a cliche, it is just so hard to understand how someone who seemingly had so much could be so empty on the inside.

I tried to put together my thoughts on the deaths of both Ledger and fellow Gen-X actor Brad Renfro in my latest Reporter column. I don't think there's any magic answer here. People get bored, they get sick, or they get curious. When they dive too far into very unhealthy lifestyles, tragic consequences can result. I think that's what happened in this case.

The church should be the place where people can go to find out how to adjudicate between competing goods. At its best, I think it is exactly that place. The church is not just a place to worship, or receive the Eucharist, or drop your kids off at daycare. It is a culture, a community of people who are bonded by the common confession in Jesus as Lord. And its message is one of life - a hopeful alternative for those who find themselves ensnared by the ways of death.

Are we the church??

Several days ago I wrote about the ambiguous nature of "membership" in the United Methodist Church. Membership has become an almost meaningless category, I argued, and we would do well to examine how we go about inviting members into the church and holding them accountable for the vows they make.

In response to that post, Casey, a friend and fellow student here at Duke (who is from the Free Methodist tradition, I might add), wrote the following:

"This is, of course, assuming that Methodists are 'the church.' Methodists still need to engage in a robust conversation, both internally and externally with other Christian traditions, about ecclesiology. We have a serious breach with other episcopal traditions over apostolic succession. Are we church or are we still voluntary societies? What's the difference?"

Casey raises some very important points. (They are the very points that brought me to Duke to work on a doctorate, so I guess I think they are important, at least.) We began as a renewal movement within the Church of England. If John Wesley had had his way, the British Methodists would never have separated. Wesley realized that the political reality of the new United States of America made the separation of American Methodists from the Church of England an inevitability, but that shouldn't preclude our having a serious and sustained discussion about who we are in relation to the catholic (universal) church.

Specifically, how do we justify our separation from other Christian churches?

A common (and patently wrong) reason that is given by lots of Protestants is that the unity that Christ desires for the church is spiritual rather than physical. I believe this is a cop-out answer given by people who don't want to think that the very fact of their separation from the larger church might constitute a form of sin. And besides, it is non-biblical. From Acts to Revelation, the NT treats the importance of the unity of the church as embodied (i.e., a physical and spiritual whole).

So how can the Methodists continue to justify their separation? Christ will call us to account for this, I have no doubt. And I don't think he will see "inertia" as a good enough answer.

It is a question of ecclesiology, as Casey points out. And to start, we have to ask questions on at least a couple of different levels:

1) Who are we, as a church? That is, what makes us distinct from other Christian bodies?

2) How do United Methodists justify their separation from other Methodist bodies? How do Methodists in general justify their separation from other Protestant denominations? And how do they justify separation from the Roman Catholic Church?

If you don't think these are crucially important questions, then you are not paying attention. I invite thoughts and comments, as I honestly do not know how to answer these questions.