Book of Discipline – Page 3

Sources of Revelation

Posted on January 12, 2010Leave a comment

The United Methodist Church holds that Scripture, tradition, experience, and reason are sources and norms for belief and practice, but that the Bible is primary among them. What is your understanding of this theological position of the church?

In traditional Wesleyan thinking, scripture must be the central source of theology and all of the other three means listed above are secondary. Yet, that can create an interesting dilemma. Do we use scripture to interpret our experiences and to put hedges around our tradition and to limit our reasoning, or are each of the three ways of interpreting and using said scripture. I think that one of the challenges presented by both postmodernity and the emergent movement is that we are in all cases limited by our human finitude. We simply cannot go back and use scripture in a vacuum. We always interpret it through a lens, through a glass dimly. Our historical understandings of events are culturally flavored. And scientific advances have also challenged tried and true scriptural understandings, leaving us to ask whether we read passages in scripture as absolute truth or as humanity’s best understanding of events, at the time, as inspired by God.

I think the best way of defining our norms and practices is to hold all four of these sources as important and yet also realize that even grounded in all four of these, we might not have the full picture. Our practices and our beliefs might still need to grow and change as we grow in our faithfulness towards the God of all creation. One of the gifts that postmodernity brings is the idea of the intersubjective – that which we hold as a community in common. It allows us to discern together what the best practices are for us right now as we attempt to be faithful, and yet also leaves open the possibility that another truth, a better practice, a more precise or expansive norm may exist.

In effect, that is what we do through conferencing. We leave open the possibility that the Holy Spirit still has places to move us. We share our stories and allow ourselves to be formed by others. We read the bible through new eyes when we hear it read at General Conference in the voice of a brother from India or a sister from Africa. We can communally gain a more holistic picture of God than our own subjective experiences and methods of reasoning and traditions and even versions of the scriptures permit.

Photo by: Jon Wisbey

The Other Two… Christ & the Holy Spirit

Posted on January 11, 2010Leave a comment

What changes has the practice of ministry had on your understanding of a) the “lordship of Jesus Christ,” and b) the work of the Holy Spirit?

In my ministry, my understanding of the lordship of Christ has not changed much at all, but I have had the opportunity to preach and teach the Kingdom that Christ brings. Some of the sermons that made me the most nervous throughout these past two years have been those that have dealt with this very topic. And yet, in everything I do, I have tried to stretch our understandings of who Jesus is beyond merely our personal salvation. We have talked about priorities, we have placed Christ’s Kingdom alongside nationalism, we have been reminded that Christ came not with a sword but in a manger, and that we follow a lord who calls us to follow him to the cross. But above all, I am constantly reminded that our lord died so that we might all have life and life abundant.

My understanding of the Holy Spirit, however, has been dramatically deepened. While before I may have theoretically thought of the Spirit as the agent of life and creativity, every Sunday as I stand to preach, I know that the words that come out of my mouth are there only through the Spirit’s prompting. As I held my newborn nephew this fall, I was dazzled by the gift of life. As the youth that traveled with me to Tennessee for a mission trip this past summer stood in front of the congregation to tell their stories, I saw the Holy Spirit lighting a spark in their eyes and changing them forever. As I witnessed a great-grandmother say yes to a call from God and become a lay speaker in our church and then preach with less than a week’s notice – the Holy Spirit was there working. She gives us life and helps us to grow more into Christ’s likeness each and every single day.

The Human Condition

Posted on January 10, 2010Leave a comment

What effect has the practice of ministry had on your understanding of humanity and the need for divine grace?

Over and over again I am reminded about our utter need for grace. In my own life and ministry the work I do would not be effective or positive if it were not for God’s grace. As someone who is beginning this journey of ministry I make more mistakes that I would care to admit, and yet somehow God takes my feeble and human attempts at faithfulness and transforms them mightily. This fall, I was called to the bedside of a congregation member who was actively dying and the family wanted me to say a prayer with him before he passed. In my vanity, I had worn this cute pair of boots, but they were very loud as I stepped into the room. Embarrassed, I tried to take them off so that I wouldn’t disturb the peacefulness and the quiet music in the background. By the time I got my boots off and moved over to the side of the bed and began my prayer, he was taking his last breath. At first, I was angry with myself for having worn the wrong shoes and for taking so long. But the first comment out of his son’s mouth was about how wonderful it was that his father had passed from this world in the midst of prayer.

My understanding of humanity has also been tried and tested in my congregational work. We welcomed a gentleman back into our congregation after he had been in some trouble. Overall, our congregation was very gracious and welcoming! After some time had passed, even connected with our community, he found himself in trouble once again. I think for the first time, I really saw the destructive powers of sin in someone’s life – sin that not only imprisoned his spirit, but also led once again to the imprisonment of his body. And yet through it all, we have continued to be in relationship with him. I was amazed by his power to seek and ask God’s forgiveness and the fact that he kept praying for us in the midst of his struggles.

I have also worked a lot with families in need in our area. As I work with them, I am reminded about how little power so many people have to change their lives. Sin (our own and that of others) digs us into deep holes and creates patterns that we cannot even imagine being different. It isolates us from the help we need and from relationships of love, kindness and mercy. Only by the grace of God can we as a church continue to have the patience to minister to these families and maintain the relationships… and only by the grace of God can their hearts and minds be transformed. But I am also reminded that as a part of this relationship there must be honesty and accountability – there must be confession and a desire for repentance in order for God’s grace to transform our lives.

Photo by: Mateusz Stachowski

Goodbye Ordination Papers!!!

Posted on January 9, 2010Leave a comment

The past few weeks, really two months, I have been working here and there and everywhere on my ordination papers. And they are finally finished and in the mail system. And it feels like a huge load off of my life.

As I thought about all the work that went into them, all the ways that I have grown and changed in the past three years, I realized that if all of that work is not only for the five people who will read it for my BoOM interview. It is who I am, and how I go about ministry. So I might as well share.

In the next days/weeks, I will be posting some of my answers to the many questions out of the Book of Discipline that we have to answer. Feel free to comment back, challenge me, agree with me, and keep wrestling. Enjoy!

conversations around ministry

Posted on October 1, 20082 Comments

First, I’m so glad that the other young adult clergy in my conference are so outspoken with me. (thanks Allison!)

Second, we had some conversations with our district leadership and two of our Leadership Development Ministers (conference positions that help us all to think about various aspects of ministry) about one of Lovett Weems 10 Provacative Questions – particularly

Can the church change to reach more people, younger people, and more diverse
people?

There were a variety of area clergy and lay people there and in many ways we broke the question down into many different parts.

1) what church are we talking about?

Certainly we on the bigger level were talking about the institution which is extremely hard to change. But if we think about the local congregational level, change can be difficult too. What happens when the church is seen as the body of Christ? THEN I think, we start to realize that not only do we need younger people and more diverse people and we must change to include them, but that we need them because we are not complete without them. It is like walking around without an arm, or without a head.

2) are we thinking about growth? success in numbers? fruitfulness?

While we think that our church has been in numerical decline since the 1960’s, we have actually been in decline as a percentage of the population in the US since the 1880’s. But what we talked a lot about is that # of butts in the pew does not equal disciples of Jesus Christ. The point that another young leader and I tried to push was that disciples of Jesus Christ does not also equal butts in a pew. All of us agreed, disciples were the goal and so in many ways, we need a whole different metric for even thinking about the question of how we measure “success” on that front.

3) what kind of change are we talking about?

here is the hard part. Each and every church is different and will have to look different as we reach out to the varied populations that we live in. All of us will have to take seriously our context and who is around us: low-income? hispanic? upper middle class blacks? a whole city of 20-30 somethings? One pastor made very clear that we cannot all be a like, and perhaps we simply have to name that and claim that and live authentically the kind of church that we are called to be. Which is absolutely true. But we also wrestled with the fact that it is hard to do that with a structure and a discipline that makes conformity to the rule more desireable than fruitfulness.

An example: needing to have three year rotating terms for the Board of Trustees. I am never going to get young people to serve on that committee. They don’t want to committ for that amount of time! Short term projects are more desireable. But the whole structure would have to be changed to give the kind of flexibility and grace that is needed (see Lovett Weems question: Can we move from a structure of control to a structure of grace?) We also need to rethink the entire structure of the conference – in today’s modern technological and informational world, do we need district finance and district church and society and district this and that? no. their function has been replaced by the conference website.

I guess the piece about this conversation coming immediately after General Conference is that there is some talk about this need for change and flexibility. The structures that we have engrained in our Book of Discipline may have made sense for United Methodism in the United States in the 1960’s. But they don’t make sense for us today, and they REALLY don’t make sense for the United Methodist Church in Nigeria! I have great hopes that the church structure itself will have the room to change as we begin to either a) create regional disciplines or b) simply chop down the Discipline to the things that truly matter – the funadamentals of our church and provide a structure of grace for the church to be what it needs to be in ANY given community.