Friday Miscellanies

Here are a few notes that might interest you. Consider it suggestions for weekend reading! I wanted to highlight a few articles that touch on important issues in faith and discipleship -

Steve Rankin, the university chaplain at Southern Methodist University, has a great article in the United Methodist Reporter looking at the doctrine of Christian perfection, character formation, and contemporary higher education. As Steve rightly points out, higher education that aims only at increasing the knowledge of students and does not nurture formation in moral virtues is both impoverished and un-Wesleyan.

Two articles on leadership have caught my eye recently. One is this interview with Stanley Hauerwas which is available from Faith & Leadership. Hauerwas comments on whether "leadership" can be understood as a theological category, and he also makes some interesting insights into the role of leadership in institutions and the role of institutions in leadership.

The other article on leadership comes from Covenant Discipleship Connection, where Steve Manskar connects Wesleyan leadership with the deep Wesleyan understanding of faith in Jesus Christ and the ongoing process of sanctification. Steve wants to invite folks into an ongoing conversation about the character of Wesleyan leadership, and he has started a new blog to facilitate that.

Finally, after a writing sabbatical of several months, I'm back in the pages of the United Methodist Reporter. My new column - available at this link - starts a series on the means of grace in Christian practice. This is the subject of my academic research at Duke Divinity School. So I'm excited about presenting some material related to it in my regular column. I believe - as John Wesley did - that our growth in holiness of heart & life is impossible apart from disciplined participation in the means of grace. And I'll be explaining that conviction column by column over the coming weeks.

Worth reading, part IV

My last two posts featured periodicals in the Wesleyan & Methodist tradition that fall by and large on the scholarly or academic side. Today I want to highlight a more popular-level publication. The United Methodist Reporter, in my opinion, is the best news source available for current events and commentary related to the life of the United Methodist Church.

Okay, okay, first a disclosure. I am a columnist for the Reporter, where my articles appear bi-weekly. I did take a sabbatical from writing over much of the fall, but my columns will return to the pages of the Reporter later this month. Then again, the only reason I write for the Reporter is because I think it's a great publication!

The Reporter is both a traditional newspaper and an online news site. The newspaper is used by many annual conferences as its printed source of conference news. UMR Communications - the parent company - partners with annual conferences to tailor their own editions. So for instance, you might see the Memphis Conference Reporter if you live in that annual conference, featuring local news combined with stories related to the larger Methodist connection.

What this basically offers the Church is a journalistic organization dedicated to covering and reporting on the United Methodist connection, but one that is also independent and thus able to maintain the objectivity that comes along with being its own entity.

Along with news reporting, you'll find a great deal of special features in the pages of the Reporter. Each issue usually highlights a cutting edge ministry or important initiative going on somewhere in the Church. In the opinion section, I write an op/ed column, alongside other regular columnists like Don Haynes and Bishop Woodie White. You'll also see a lot of special contributors writing commentaries on various topics. And there are regular features on film, Christian music, and hymnody.

If your annual conference uses the Reporter and you'd like to subscribe, go through your conference office. If you want to subscribe to the national edition (this is the type of subscription I have, for instance), then go to this link.

As with my previous posts, I would urge you to think about a print subscription to support the ministry periodicals like the Reporter are carrying on. Even if you prefer to read stories online (which you can through the UM Portal, the Reporter's online presence), getting the print edition is a way to further the work of an important ministry that helps keep the connection, connected!

News from the UM Reporter

Robin Russell, my editor at the United Methodist Reporter, was in Durham this week for a conference of Christian publishers hosted by Leadership Education at Duke Divinity (LEADD). It gave Robin and me the chance to sit down for lunch and have a conversation - a rare treat, considering she lives in Dallas, Texas, and I live here in Bull City.

There are changes afoot at the Reporter these days. After four years of impressive leadership as Chief Executive Officer, Sarah Wilke left UMR Communications earlier this year to become the world publisher and editor for the Upper Room Ministries in Nashville. That left a gap in leadership that has just been filled with the selection of a new CEO. His name is Robert Mathews, and he comes to UMR after having held executive positions at a number of corporations in publishing and print media. Sarah left big shoes to fill, but it looks as if UMR is getting a great person to do just that in the addition of Bob Mathews.

Robin herself generated news this past week when she was named the "Communicator of the Year" by the United Methodist Association of Communicators (UMAC). The award was, as Robin told me, a complete surprise to her. It was a well-deserved one, though, as I can attest from having worked with Robin for the past several years.

Readers of the Reporter see Robin's excellence in journalism through the stories she pens and by the overall products that both the United Methodist Reporter and the UMPortal website represent. I see a side that many others do not, in the patient and careful editing she does of the Reporter's content that appears under my own name. That kind of editing is not just the result of a sharp journalistic mind; it also requires a relationship between editor and writer, where advice, understanding, and a keen insight into the heart of an article's message are all a part of the editor's approach to her writer's work. I have been fortunate - nay, blessed - that Robin possesses those qualities in abundance. And so her recent award is recognition of both the obvious and more hidden talents she has that go into being a great communicator in journalism.

[BTW: Some people do not realize that the United Methodist Reporter, and its parent company UMR Communications, are not organizations within the United Methodist Church. The company explains its relationship to the UMC on its website:

"UMR Communications, home of the United Methodist Reporter, is related by covenant to seven United Methodist Annual Conferences: Central Texas, New Mexico, North Texas, Texas, Northwest Texas, Rio Grande (a Spanish-language conference) and Southwest Texas. This covenantal relationship, similar to that of church-founded hospitals and homes, acknowledges the previous ownership of the organization by these annual conferences and its United Methodist heritage. UMR Communications is not funded directly by the United Methodist Church or by any other denomination it serves. It is financially independent, and derives its income from fees paid by clients for its services, along with grants and bequests from donors."

The same page also relates UMR's mission: The mission of UMR Communications is to enable the Christian community to make disciples for Christ by providing communication services and resources."

Though I write a bi-weekly column for the UM Reporter, I am not an employee of UMR Communications. That said, I write for the Reporter because I believe strongly in its mission as an independent source of news and commentary for issues related to the life and ministry of the United Methodist Church. If you would like to subscribe to the newspaper, see this link.]

A Voice for the Church

One of the strange things about being a columnist for the United Methodist Reporter is how little interaction I usually have with the staff and my fellow columnists. The Reporter is published by UMR Communications in Dallas, TX. I live in Durham, NC, and most of my interaction with the folks down in Dallas is via e-mail. That was why I mentioned how nice it was to get to see some of the Reporter staff at annual conference a few days ago in my last blog post.

So it was doubly nice last night when I got to have supper with the Rev. Don Haynes, who writes the Reporter's regular "Wesleyan Wisdom" column. Don is one of those Methodist preachers who retired years ago but has yet to stop working. He periodically serves as an interim pastor for churches who have gone through a mid-year move or retirement. And he also serves as the Director of United Methodist Studies at Hood Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (but which counts more than 50% of its student body as United Methodist).

Don lives in Salisbury, NC, but he is in Durham this month to participate in the annual Summer Wesley Seminar, which is hosted by Duke Divinity School and draws scholars from all over the connection to do research in Wesleyan theology and Methodist history. He is working on the manuscript of a book on John Wesley and early Methodism that would be geared at a pastor and lay reading audience.

If you haven't read Don's column before, you should check it out. This recent one on 'Rethink Church' argues that the UMC's current efforts to think creatively about what it means to be the church must include a commitment to evangelism. As he mentioned to me last night, doing good works without doing them in the name of Jesus makes us nothing more than a humanitarian agency. And of course, doing them in the name of Jesus also means a whole host of other things that Don points to in his column - growing in communion with God, growing in mission to our neighbors, and growing in our connection within the body of Christ.

Don's writing is creative and lucid. He focuses a lot on the basic tenets of Wesleyan theology. So his column can be a great way to learn more about the background of Methodist doctrine. I'm grateful he is sharing his gifts with the church!

A story you need to know about

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the beginning

Okay, so I've been a little obsessed with this project of archiving the entire corpus of my work with the United Methodist Reporter. But it has been fun, allowing me to go over old columns and book reviews that I wrote years ago and re-reading them so I could write little annotations when I add them to the blog's archive.

I couldn't locate my very first two columns on the Reporter's website, so I inquired with the good folks at UMR Communications and - voila! - they got both of them up in a jiffy. My second column was called, "Single with cheese: Are we listening?", and it looked at the nature of singles ministry in the church today. Most of the concepts of singles ministry that I have encountered are fairly outdated (and in fact, the term itself seems old-fashioned). So I wrote the column to suggest that we should view singles as they are rather than according to yesterday's labels. That's an important thing to note, and I think it impacts on the way we go about evangelism. (Not everybody lives in a family of four behind a white picket fence, after all).

It was this column that launched my writing for the Reporter - an initial offering entitled, "Get ready, Church: Here come Gen X'ers." As I went back and re-read it four years later, I was surprised at how many themes I mention in this first column that have remained consistent topics for me in the years since. The sense that 'now' is the time for Gen X'ers to step forward and lead, the sense of rootlessness and uncertainty that faces us in the postmodern world, and the challenges that the economy and technology pose, are all present there in the first column. Also present is an indication of my high ecclesiology - that is, my belief that the church, as the body of Christ, is the one place where we can really find a home. I believe that now as strongly as I ever have.

At any rate, those first two columns have been added to the blog archive now, and you can find them by clicking on the 'UM Reporter Columns' tab in the left-hand sidebar, clicking on the drop-down window to choosethe year, and selecting '2005.' We're still dealing with a couple of weird occasional glitches on the archive pages, but most everything is posted now.

More blog updates

I've taken a part of the Thanksgiving holiday to finish updating the Archives of Gen-X Rising. Now when you click on the 'UM Reporter Columns' in the left-hand sidebar, you'll find archived columns stretching back through 2005, which covers almost everything I've written in the United Methodist Reporter.

There are a few glitches that I will try to iron out in the coming days. One very strange one is that my archive section doesn't seem to want to post anything from late December in any year from 2005 to 2007. Not sure why that is happening, but it only cuts out about 3 or 4 total columns. Also, the Reporter's website does not appear to have my first two Gen-X Rising columns online, which were entitled, "Get Ready, Church: Here Come Gen Xers" and "Single with cheese: Are we listening?" I'd like to get those up eventually, because they really serve as the introduction to what I've been trying to do with the column since its inception.

Last month, this blog went over 21,000 unique monthly visitors for the first time. Thanks for reading! I hope to continue to provide the kind of content that will make my readers want to come back regularly. The past two-and-a-half years have been a lot of fun, and I appreciate the feedback you all have given me on the site and its content.

In the mean time, enjoy perusing through the archived Reporter columns. My dual focus as a columnist has always been on a) Writing about issues that concern Gen Xers and Milennials in the church, and b) Writing about theology and ministry from the perspective of a Gen X pastor. I hope I have been able to do both consistently.

Peace +
Andrew

Changes Afoot for the United Methodist Reporter

As most of you probably know, this blog got its start as a companion to the column I write for the United Methodist Reporter. But what you might not know is that I was a reader of the Reporter long before I started writing for it. I received the Memphis Conference edition of the Reporter back when I was the associate chaplain at Lambuth University. Even after I moved back to Arkansas, I continued to read the Reporter online.

I think the Reporter is a great periodical that serves an extremely important function for the church, and I don't just say that because I happen to write a column that appears in it every other week. It serves to unite the whole United Methodist connection in a way that no other periodical can (official denominational publications like the Interpreter Magazine, for instance, do not appear often enough to do this). By publishing church- and ministry-related news each and every week, the Reporter keeps us in touch with one another, whether we are in California, North Carolina, or Cameroon.

Because I intentionally write out of a Generation X perspective, I especially appreciate the ways that the Reporter has sought to include younger voices over the past couple of years. Just in the past few issues, there have been columns, opinion pieces, or book reviews by the likes of Wes Magruder, Jason Byassee, Eric Van Meter, and Kevin Baker. Don't underestimate the importance of that in a rapidly aging church that desperately needs to address the issue of its disappearing youth.

The reason I bring all this up is because the online edition of the Reporter is making major changes this week. The old Reporter Interactive site is about to be shut down, and the online version of the newspaper will be rolled into UMR Communications' wider online effort, called the UM Portal. You can go to that site here. As you will see, besides the Reporter itself it includes blogs, letters to the editor, secular news headlines, a search portal, and lots of other stuff. It is also designed to be more user friendly, with more tabs right up front to take you where you want to go.

Some of you reading this live in annual conferences that use local editions of the Reporter as their conference newspaper. If that's the case, you should call your conference office and order a print subscription. If you live in an annual conference that does not use the Reporter, you can order a subscription to the national edition here. At the very list, bookmark the UM Portal site and visit it often. The good folks down in Dallas are doing a great service for the church, and they produce a top-notch publication.

A blogging District Superintendent??

Who says there's nothing new under the sun?

The name of the D.S. is Susan Cox-Johnson, and she is in the Missouri Conference. She's apparently really interested in emergent church conversations. Check out her blog.

A friend at the United Methodist Reporter gave me the heads up on this. The good folks over at the Reporter have added Susan's blog to their featured blogger page at the UM Portal site.

Gen-X Rising Blog Debut

Hello, cyberworld! This is my first official post on this blog, so let me offer a little background...

For the past couple of years, I've been writing a column for The United Methodist Reporter, called "Gen X Rising." It looks at issues concerning the church and the Christian faith from the perspective of a Gen-X'er. Along the way, a couple of people suggested that I should expand my writing into the blogosphere (specifically into that happy corner of cyberspace known as the Methoblog community). I've wanted to do that for sometime, but it took awhile to get going.

I am a United Methodist pastor who has been serving appointments in campus ministry and the local church for the past five years. I left my appointment in June to return to school, and I've really missed the preaching and teaching I did on a weekly basis. So starting the blog just makes sense. I'm not planning on preaching in my posts : ), but I will be sharing my views on issues that I think are important to people of faith in Generation X. Because I'm a Methodist pastor, a lot of this will probably center on the UMC. But I won't limit what I write to Methodist topics.

I'll continue writing my column for the Reporter as well. Here's my most recent column online. If you have any comments or suggestions about the blog or my column, feel free to post a comment or e-mail me (andrew@mandatum.org).

Enjoy the blog!