United Methodist Church – Page 6

taking the first steps to healthy

Posted on June 28, 2010Leave a comment

I might have posted something about this before… but pastors, in general, and in the Iowa Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, in particular, (did I use my commas correctly there?) are pretty unhealthy. There was some outstanding (and not in a good way) statistic a year ago at conference that said that our group for health insurance with Blue Cross Blue Shield has like 2x the rate of cancer and 3x the rate of diabetes as any other group that Wellmark covers. Insanity.

Now, I’m a young woman, relatively healthy, but I admit to myself that I have room for improvement on this front. It would be great if I could look back on this time of my life and say that I was in the best physical and mental and spiritual shape that I could have been.

To try to coax pastors in our conference to be more F.I.T. (remember that challenge from a few posts ago), we are signed up with this program through Virgin Healthmiles. Virgin as in the company… not Mary…

We can get a pedometer and set up an account, and depending on how many miles we walk in a year’s time, we can actually earn money! The thought is that if we are encouraging people to be healthy and rewarding them for their work, they will actually save money in the long run by decreasing health care costs.

So, I got my pedometer in the mail. And I’ve been using it pretty faithfully for a week now – although I forgot to wear it over the weekend. My goal is 10,000 steps a day… and I’ve only hit that goal twice (well, three times if I had worn it yesterday). It is a reminder that I really do need to get out there and exercise, and this morning, I made the extra effort and went for a run.

It had been such a long time and my lungs screamed at me, but I did it. And I’m going to keep doing it. Because the extra cash would be nice to have… and if I keep on track I’ll need it to buy some new clothes… but most of all, because I deserve to be healthy and fit.

So – first step is actually getting off my hiney and getting out there and moving.

Step two is following that up with some healthy eating. I started off today with a fruit smoothie – inspired by Alton Brown. He measures his fruit and juice in oz’s and then dumps it all in… I guess I’m following technique more than anything else. Mine this morning included blueberries (which I bought on super sale and then froze myself), frozen peaches, fresh strawberries (the remainder or which were frozen for the future), blueberry/pomegranate juice, and 1/2 a scoop of whey protein.

Step three is trying to gracefully avoid and limit what I eat at the church. There are homemade cakes and casseroles and snacks everywhere. And you feel bad if you say no, because people are being gracious hosts. But you know what… that’s probably the number one reason pastor’s are so unhealthy. We Methodists have too many good cooks!!!!

BE the church

Posted on June 13, 2010Leave a comment

This morning we find ourselves in the midst of a pretty familiar story.

It is a story of contrasts… the holy man on one hand and the sinful woman on the other.

It is a story of grace… and a man who doesn’t think he needs any and a woman who is begging to be forgiven.

It is a story of paradox… where the tables are turned as the holy man is proven to be not so and the sinful woman is shown to be the one who is in the right.

So let’s break this tale down just a little bit. Jesus has been invited into the home of a Pharisee. And we start to wonder… maybe this is a guy who gets it. Maybe this Simon fellow has his head on straight and not only lets Jesus into his home, but wants to invite him into his heart also. Way to go, Pharisee!

But then, this woman shows up… a woman that Luke makes clear is a sinner. We aren’t quite sure of what has classified her as a sinner. Perhaps it was sleeping with the wrong person. Or perhaps she milked a cow on the Sabbath. We don’t know. But whatever it was – it made her desperate for God’s grace.

And so, she seeks Christ out. It didn’t matter where he was, or how uncomfortable it was going to be for her to enter this holy man’s house. She sought out Jesus and wept and anointed him. She went to where he was and poured out her love upon him.

And by the end of the story, the tables are turned, and we find that this sinful woman is the one who has done right by Jesus. She is the one who receives grace, while the Pharisee receives a tongue lashing for his lack of hospitality.

So what do we take from this story? In our world today, we would be hard pressed to be able to issue a dinner invitation to our Lord and Savior. We might search and seek our whole lives and never encounter Jesus walking and talking among us.

But we do see the poor. We do see the homeless. We do see the hungry. We do see the sick. And in the back of my mind somewhere I remember that Jesus said – whatever you have done for the least of these… my brothers and sisters… you have done for me. (Matthew 25)

So let’s think about this gospel lesson from Luke again. Let’s imagine for just a second that we are talking about the Christ we meet in the eyes of the poor, in the groaning of the hungry, in the tears of the sick.

On the one hand, we have a holy man, a Pharisee who invites the poor, the hungry, the sick. over for dinner one night. The poor come in and sit down to eat. There is no welcome, there is no real hospitality, simply an invitation… the food has been provided, help yourself. It’s charity, plain and simple.

On the other hand, we have a sinner who goes out of her way to seek out the poor, the hungry, the sick. She sheds upon them her tears, she pours upon them lavish blessings, she soothes them with her offering. She gets down on her knees to take care of them. That is love, plain and simple. That is the beginning of a relationship.

Who are we as the church? Are we the holy ones who hole up inside of our buildings and invite the poor, the hungry the sick to come to us?

Or are we the ones who admit our sinful and broken natures – who know that we need Christ as much as the world needs Christ – and go out and share the grace we have been given?

As Mary and I experienced Annual Conference this year – there was one very simple message that we wanted to bring home to all of you:

Don’t just go to church, BE the church.

The message came at us from a thousand different directions. Preachers and presenters, lay delegates and pastors got up and spoke at microphones to the crowd and everywhere we heard the calling to not just go to church, but to BE the church.

It’s a subtle difference really. But it is the difference between the holy one who invites Jesus to come in and the sinful one who seeks Jesus out in the world. It is the transformation from a Sunday ritual to feed our souls into a daily living out of our faith beyond the four walls of the church.

A DAILY living out of our faith beyond the walls of this building.

I don’t know about all of you… but sometimes that daily living part is hard. Even as a pastor, even as someone called to this ministry, there are times when living out my faith is difficult! We slip into being content with our Sunday morning rituals and our Tuesday bible study and we give to the local food bank and think that is enough – that is all that is asked of us.

But we have a higher calling beyond our own personal salvation. Now, don’t get me wrong, our own personal salvation is important…. But once we believe – there is more that God wants us to do with our lives.

Recently, the United Methodist Church has been thinking about being church. For about a year now, the “Rethink Church” campaign has been going on to help us to ask the question… what if church was a verb? What if our faith was something we lived instead of thought? What if the love we experienced from God was shared with others?

At Annual Conference, we had the opportunity to see a music video put together by young people of the United Methodist Church who have found energy and passion around this idea of being church. And I want to share it with you this morning!

In that video, Mike Slaughter, pastor of Ginghamsburg UMC, says that the real focus of Jesus is not getting more people into the church, but getting the people who are already in the church into the world. Love one another as I have loved you… that is the command that Jesus gives us.

It is what we heard in our gospel reading from Luke this morning… Jesus asks who has loved Jesus more – the one who obeyed all the rules, but forgot hospitality or the one who was found to be in the wrong and yet bowed down before him in service.

As Jesus loved us, and died for us, the only appropriate response is to love with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength.

And it’s the same word that we hear from the first letter of Peter. Peter writes to a number of communities in order to encourage them in their daily living.

He doesn’t tell them to show up on Sunday mornings for worship, but to let the suffering and sacrifice of Christ be the example for their lives.

Peter doesn’t ask us to simply believe and accept that Christ died for us… he tells us to make the suffering of Christ the model for our lives. Or rather, to not run away from love when it is difficult… to love our neighbors like Christ loved them… even if it gets us into trouble.

Love each other as if your life depended on it. Love makes up for practically anything. Be quick to give a meal to the hungry, a bed to the homeless – cheerfully! Be generous with the different things God gave you, passing them around so all get in on it: if words, let them be God’s words; if help, let it be God’s hearty help.

When Peter writes these things– he is not talking about a special set of rules we live under in the church… he is talking about how we should live our entire lives. In all things, everywhere that we go, at work, at the playground, at the city hall meetings, in the hospital where we volunteer… be a good steward of the manifold grace of God. Be generous with the grace and the love that God has given to you.

So, are you wondering why we are even here this morning? Why do we have worship at all – if God wants us to be out in the world loving others?

Because it is here in this fellowship of believers that we find the strength to go out there and to serve. It is here in this community of faith that we are fed the bread of life and the cup of salvation. It is here in the presence of God that we confess the failings of the past week and are able to let them go so we can love and serve anew.

A pastor of mine once described worship as a cup of cold water during a marathon. We stop and renew ourselves and we give thanks to the one who has provided. But then we go back out there and keep running. We keep serving. We keep loving. Thanks be to God! Amen.

The F.I.T. Challenge

Posted on June 10, 2010Leave a comment

For over a year now, Bishop Trimble has been talking about the F.I.T. Challenge. And I think tonight, for the first time, I really understood how genius this very simple, simple concept is.

F.I.T. stands for Focus, Invest, and Tell. It is the overarching framework for ministry in Iowa. I don’t have the brochure and all the details with me, but basically, we can’t do everything so we need to focus in on what is important, get people to invest their time and talents into it, and then above all, tell the stories of Jesus and transformed lives.

It also very nicely fits into a conference focus on health and wellness – especially for our clergy. At conference this year, two men got up and shared their stories about how they were inspired by the F.I.T. challenge to lose weight and one lost 75 lbs in a year and the other lost 150! Now that was some focus, investment into their health, and then some wonderful witnessing!

Tonight, at a mission team meeting, we were all over the place trying to figure out what our next projects should be. One person on the team brought up how nice it would be to FOCUS on one project and really make it come alive as a congregation. I think in the end, we decided that focusing on smaller projects, but one per month might be a more suitable option for where our church is right now… although I think in a year or two, also having one big project that we can continually support would be wonderful.

Anywho… One of the other suggestions this new team member had was that we should have a mission celebration and TELL the stories of what we have done so far this year.

Our conference has this thing called Rainbow Covenant. Churches are encouraged to give in mission – first by paying their apportionments, and then by supporting general categories of mission. To be a 2nd mile giver, we are asked to give to all seven categories of mission (each represented by a color of the rainbow). But do you think that we had taken the time to really explain this to the church? Do you think that anyone beyond our mission team knew what we were doing with all of these different projects? No. Not really.

Bishop Trimble’s F.I.T. challenge teaches us that while having a focus is important, we also have to get people to invest in what we are doing. And I think the number one way that we do that is by telling the story. We have to show what a difference this ministry can make and then, we have to celebrate the ways we have been giving in mission.

In some ways we have done this already. Our most successful mission projects have been the ones where we had a hands on connection. We raised nearly $1500 for the Personal Energy Transportation (PET) Project… mostly because we actually brought in a PET and let people see it and rode it around during worship and had this huge connection with what the money would be used for. We told the story. And people were instantly invested.

So, out of our conversation tonight, we are going to create a yearly mission celebration Sunday where we lift up what we have been doing as a congregation. And we are going to create a bulletin board that demonstrates our progress with the rainbow covenant and we are going to fill in the rainbow of colors with our mission giving money, with pictures and with stories of the projects we have worked on so far.

I told a friend tonight that I feel like it was both a “lightbulb” moment and an “I can’t believe I’m so dumb as to not think of this before” moment. While I had heard over and over and over again about the F.I.T. challenge, I don’t think I thought to apply it to our church ministry. But how simple is it to use in our mission team. To lift up the focus projects, to help people invest, and to tell the stories of success and transformation. And what if we did that with worship? Focusing on God, investing our time and energy into helping people connect in new ways and helping them invest their time and energy, and telling the stories of Jesus? or with our PPR? Or education team?

It’s so simple. It’s genius, really.

it causes me to tremble…

Posted on June 6, 2010Leave a comment

Day two of our annual conference has completed. We have voted on exactly 7 items of legislation. And we have celebrated and praised and prayed and remembered and sung and danced and ate and hugged and sat and walked and listened.

Some brief highlights for me so far:

“Hi, I’m Fred.” Our “priest” for the conference introduced himself and welcomed us into a spirit of worshipful work and I truly have felt this particular time of conference has felt different because of it.
advocating for young adults at our legislative section and dreaming up possibilities for community college ministries
Rev. Doug Ruffle’s challenges to be a sign, a foretaste, and an instrument of the Kingdom of God…
crazy fast and delicious dinner at A Dong
even though clergy session was inhumanely long – it had a wonderful spirit to it as we gathered to worship (thanks clergy band!) and celebrate the ministry we share… and have good conversation about itinerancy
ordination!!!!!! being surrounded by family and church members and friends, the weight of all of those hands upon me, the feeling of the bible underneath my fingers, singing with joy
the reminders throughout the day of the gift of the scriptures: Bishop Kulah talking about Jesus expounding the scriptures; Barbara Lundblad’s take on radical love enfleshed in John’s gospel (love that bends down, that reaches beyond, that puts people before rules, that is here in this moment, that renews itself as soon as you think it has ended); Bishop Job sharing what a day, a year, a decade’s worth of living in the word can do for our lives; a friend’s amazing rendition of a song from the musical Philemon during prayer;
the Rethink Rock video
the voices of young adults who stood to speak out of love for what they care about on the floor.
sharing deeply with one another truths about things that have hurt us… so that we might give them over to God.
our conference artist’s work… and the poetic description of what God is sharing with us through it. The idea of being baptised into the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ being symbolized by a font filled with shards of glass… of chairs of hospitality inviting us to take our seat… the challenge that being radically hospitible brings… of the chair on the cross being an invocation – asking for God to enter our lives.

the Church

Posted on January 15, 2010Leave a comment

Describe the nature and mission of the Church. What are its primary tasks today?

If the sacraments call us into the world, the church is the “us” that is called. In my previous paperwork, I talked about the church being the place where we come to know and begin to embody the Kingdom of God – but as I have grown in my understanding of the church, I realize more than ever that the church is not a place, but a people. It is the community in which we first participate in the means of grace and the Body of Christ that sends us forth in mission to the world.

I would heartily agree with our denominational vision that we are called to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world – but how we define “church” dramatically changes how we understand that mission. If the church is a people, then our task is not necessarily to get someone to join a particular congregation, but to invite them into the journey of faith – a journey that may never take them inside the four walls of a traditional congregational building. They may worship God with other believers in a house church, or study the bible in an intentional community of faith that meets at the local bar, or be a part of a new monastic community.

As I have been in conversation with emergent and missional theologies, I have begun to drawn a distinction between the church and the congregation, the church being the fullness of the body of Christ – not limited to a building, or a congregation or even a denomination. That is not to say that the congregation and denomination are unimportant. They are the institutional partners that provide structure and support for the work of the church in the world. But I think what is key is that the mission of the church lies outside of the bounds of any particular congregation or denomination. As I have taught this in my own congregation, we remember that the church is to embody the Kingdom of God in all that we do. We are the church when we are at work, when we are at play, and we are the church to each and every single person that we meet. We carry with us the faith, hope, and love that have sustained us in our journey and we invite others to be travelers on that journey with us.

Photo by: Jascha Hoste

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

Call & Response: ie: post ordination paper sermon & bishop’s letter

Posted on January 10, 20101 Comment

Call and Response.

In the African-American church tradition – call and response is what happens when the people hear something the preacher says and can’t contain themselves… they have to respond. It’s the chorus of Hallelujahs and Amens and Tell Me More Sister’s that the congregation brings out to help the preacher along in telling the gospel story. And when you are a part of it – when you feel the energy, when you realize that each and every single person in that room is waiting to respond – it’s pretty powerful.

Now – we are a white, Iowan congregation. 51 weeks out of 52 there probably won’t be an “amen” uttered in response to anything I have to say. It’s just not who we are! =) BUT. But… we do have a call…. And, we are called to have a response.

We were first reminded of that call today from the book of Isaiah – the Lord who created us, who formed us says: DO NOT BE AFRAID, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are MINE.

Do not be afraid, God says. Do not be afraid to respond – I have called you. And so when you are called to pass through waters – I am there with you. Called through rivers? – They won’t overwhelm you. Called Into ministry in Marengo, Iowa? I have your back.