Leadership from the Ground Up

Jay Voorhees, pastor and Methoblogger, has a great commentary in the current United Methodist Reporter. He looks at styles of pastoral leadership, and he emphasizes the necessity of both empowering laity for ministry and modeling leadership by being willing to take on grunt work. Read his article here.

I think Jay makes some great observations in this piece. The pressure of ministry often causes pastors to want to focus on the things they are absolutely expected to do: preach, lead worship, visit the sick, lead committees, etc. But the top-down approach to ministry can cause a pastor to get detached from the basis of ministry, which is about relationships. Jay uses the example of mopping up after a church event. Let your church members see you being willing to do that, and it can make all sorts of impressions that a dozen great sermons won't.

I've read a critique lately of the UMC's decision to abandon the age-old metaphor of "representative ministry" in favor of the "servant-leader" metaphor. While I understand the worries, I think Jay's article shows why servant-leadership is such a powerful model. Ultimately, the church is a community of Jesus' friends. It is not heavenly filling station for getting your spiritual gas tank topped off each week. It is not some magical place where sacraments mediate grace that you can't get anywhere else. It is, instead, a place where grace is available precisely because of the community that is present. And the pastor should recognize that his place is within the community rather than above it.

New and Improved Methoblog

While I was in Rome, Jay Voorhees & Co. launched the new and improved version of the Methoblog. It's really sharp. Check it out here.

The Methoblog has been online for a year or so, and it was originally intended to build on the important work that Shane Raynor (through his now defunct Wesley Blog) and John the Methodist (through the ever-popular Weekly Roundup, now managed by Allan Bevere) did in popularizing the Methoblogosphere.

The topics covered on the Methoblog are widely diverse and a broad range of topics related to church & faith. Of course, issues pertinent to United Methodists tend to get the most play.

Meaning of Church Membership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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