United Methodist Church – Page 8

I’m back!

Posted on March 28, 2009Leave a comment

It’s been a little while since I posted last.

I am mostly recovered now and my digestive tract has decided to work again =) I lost about 10 lbs in the process (eating nothing but popsicles and jello for a few days will do that to you) and now I’m trying to establish healthy eating habits and a light exercise routine to help me regain some strength and keep that little bit of extra weight off.

I do have to admit that I’m fairly disappointed with how I used my recouperation time. I had a stack of books I wanted to read and a few knitting projects and none of that was even begun. Part of the reason is because I felt so crappy for a few days there – but I also let the mind-numbing lure of television and video games take over. Which simply means that I need to find time to really put those books and those projects into my schedule of sabbath.

There have been a number of things of interest that have popped up since I started thinking with a pastor’s brain again on Monday. I’m really excited about the UMC’s new marketing vision: Rethink Church and 10 Thousand Doors… I hope to post more in the next week about this, but suffice it to say that I think that it is right on target with where my congregation is! While I was gone, our finance committee did a congregational resource assessment and from that thought about what are the gifts that we have to offer our community and what our mission priorities might look like. They were both mission related and had everything to do with being with people in need and responding to identified needs in our community. “Don’t Go to Church, BE the Church” has been the theme of our mission outreach and this new marketing effort really picks up on that same message. I also LOVE the way that our “brand promise” of Open Hearts. Open Minds. Open Doors has become a verb: “together we can open hearts, open minds, and open doors.”

I’m also trying to figure out which conferences to go to this year and will post more on that later.

celebrations and transitions

Posted on February 19, 2009Leave a comment

This Sunday is when we celebrate the Transfiguration and after five weeks of exploration on the Lord’s Prayer – I am more than ready for something new in worship.

I have been thinking a lot about what the Transfiguration symbolizes for the life of the church. Besides simply being a remembrance of the event witnessed by the disciples, besides being an affirmation that the law and the prophets were fully behind the ministry of the Son of God, the Transfiguration comes at an important juncture in Mark and in important juncture in the church year.

In Mark, Jesus is setting his face towards Jerusalem. Life as it was for the disciples would never be the same. And in many ways, we too are setting our faces towards Jerusalem as we enter the season of Lent.

But I think that the Transfiguration also serves as a transition point in which we need to remember where we have been and let that be seen in the light of God’s glory, but then set it behind us and move forward. The disciples got the glory part, but they wanted to enshrine the moment, build tabernacles, and stay in that moment. We need to take a moment to sit in the glory of what we have accomplished, but then let it go and realize that our journey has only just begun.

So that idea of celebrating a moment and then moving on is really in the back of my mind.

In our congregation, we have a lot to celebrate. We just had a hugely successful dinner to raise money for our youth ministry. We gave money to many valuable missions in the last year. We increased our involvement in worship and other activities. And the thing that amazed me, we paid our apportionments 100% for the first time in years.

But we can’t say – oh, well, we accomplished that, look how great we were, and be done. We have to keep working. We have to keep seeing what changes need to be made. We have to keep following the guidance of the spirit. And that means coming down off of the mountain top, rolling up our sleeves, and getting to work.

papers and work and delegating

Posted on December 3, 2008Leave a comment

I am exhausted this morning. And I really need an assistant at the church. If by July I’m still feeling these stresses, I’m going to insist that we hire someone part time. Because I have so little time to do the things that I really need to do.

For example. I got up at 6:30 this morning to finish typing newsletter articles. 1) yes, other people should be helping to write articles… that will be addressed starting in January, 2) once I get the articles typed, I have to arrange them on the page and then I head to the office to print out all the copies.

Part of this is my fault. I love doing graphic related things (not that kind of graphic!) And I’m the one with patience for the copy machine that jams every three copies. And in some ways, its easier to simply write up the quick announcements and articles myself instead of tracking down 10 people to each write their little piece. So I have done it myself.

My point is – all of those tasks above can and should be done by someone else. My contribution should be my montly column, coordinating with others re: the calendar and that’s that.

I’m getting better about delegating. sort of. I have someone in mind to take over the newsletter if I can convince her to do it. And I’m meeting with someone next week about helping me to coordinate visitation to our homebound and nursing home residents and new visitors. I figure, if I have someone telling me who needs seen on any given week, it will be easier for me to follow through!

I’ve also been trying to make some long term plans for ministry for next year. But again, I think I’m taking too big of a chunk of the work for myself – at least planning wise.

We are trying keep our committee meetings to 6 per year (some meet too often with little to do, and others only meet once or twice a year – this is an attempt at compromise). So I got to brainstorming and realized that six meetings neatly helps our mission team to focus on one color of our Rainbow Covenant each month – if, that is, our Special Sundays are handled by the worship team. So I brainstormed what would be logical colors to focus on based on the mission activities we do in various times of the year. And I called our mission chair into my office and wanted, really, to say: here is an example of how we can arrange our year. She breathed a sigh of relief – I’m so glad that you did that, because I thought you wanted me to! (doh!)

If I can give the team the outline – and they are the ones who implement it… is that still okay?

welcoming the sojourner

Posted on October 17, 20082 Comments

I’m attending a conference right now in Illinois about immigration and the church. And I have been incredibly moved by so many of the personal stories, the images and videos of raids and border crossings, the statistics, the songs from across the world, and the witness of people of faith. It has been not only informational but inspirational. (wow, that sounds so cliche).

Before I get too far away or let the thoughts escape me, here are some of the important moments so far for me:

From Rev. Joan Maruskin

“I greet you in the name of the migrant, refugee Christ”
What are three groups that God specifically tells us to care for? The widows, the orphans and the strangers/migrants/foreigners/immigrants
our journey of faith is a communal migration story
in 1849, the state of Pennsylvania had a choice between making german or english the official state language. english won by only one vote.
st. benedict – closing the door to the stranger is closing the door to the sacred
Jesus’ family fled to Egypt after his birth… if they had fled to the US today, Mary, Joseph and Jesus would have all been sent to separate detention facilities to await trials before they would be granted the status of an asylee.

From Diane McClanahan and Barb Dinnen

immigrants who had fled from Central and Southern American countries where they faced political and religious persecution and those around them were “disappeared” came to the U.S. and in the Swift raids in Marshaltown, Iowa – again faced “disappearance.” No clergy, no lawyers, no family was allowed in to see the detainees – and no one knew where they would be taken or what would be done with them.
The story of Arturo – a young boy whose parents were deported after the Postville raids. His dad wanted him to be a vet, but now, the young boy wants to be a lawyer.
Recently, ICE agents raided a church in North Carolina.
From Denny Coon, UM pastor in Iowa: story of a man with two daughters. He makes $5/day in Mexico or he could cross illegally into the U.S. to work for $7/hr at a Wal-Mart in Michigan… what would you do as a parent?

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.

Untitled

Posted on August 1, 20081 Comment

just had meeting re: young adult ministry. that + my time away has me thinking about ministry and my introvert tendencies. Praying for courage!

being true to your beliefs…

Posted on April 30, 20082 Comments

This morning I was approached by a congregation member who wanted to invite me to join him for a gathering of the Methodist Laity Reform Movement. This is a group within our conference that wants to promote a more conservative reading of the social principles but also is looking for more grassroots reform of the whole conference system. There are some things in their agenda and principles I can agree with, but not everything – particularly the views on homosexuality. While I hate to say that is the only issue that would keep me away from it, the fact that half of their “issues” on the website were regarding whether gays and lesbians can be ordained or members or on Supreme Court rulings regarding homosexuality, I have to take a step back.

I have not yet stood up and shared my opinions/beliefs on the subject. I do have a Human Rights Coalition equality sticker in my office and a number of books in my marriage and relationship counseling section – if anyone is interested in looking that would announce where I stand on the issue.

I guess the question I have for other pastors is how do you start to broach the subject? Do you wait until asked specifically, or in the case of this group, should I have said up front that was the reason I wasn’t interested? I did say that there are many reform movements and caucuses in our annual conference and that it wasn’t one I was interested in participating in, but I left it at that.

I want to be true to myself, but I also want to be pastoral and help the congregation wrestle together with this issue. It relates to one of my last posts regarding truth and perception. I have a position on the issues that I can’t impose as fact upon others. I need to listen to them, as much as they need to listen to me. And we all need to open up space for the Holy Spirit to guide us.

And it all has to do with understandings of scripture. Ironically, my mom called me just yesterday. She said that a co-worker knew that I was a pastor and so he came up to her and asked if I had read 1 Timothy 2. She didn’t really know what he was referring to (and didn’t stop to check), but passed along the information to me. One of the reasons that we (or many of us) don’t take verses 11-15 seriously today is because 1) we have been revealed other truths by the Holy Spirit… ie: we have witnessed women’s ability to lead and teach men and 2)we are able to contextualize that passage, look at where and why it was said and we also judge it against other scriptural passages.

So, i guess I’m just waiting to have this conversation and wondering if i should be the one to initiate it.

attractional or missional? programmatic or project driven?

Posted on October 14, 2007Leave a comment

At emergingumc: a gathering we talked a lot about becoming, or reclaiming the idea of a missional church. There are all sorts of really neat diagrams to help visualize what this would me, but basically, in an attractional church, 80% of the church resources and offerings and what happens in the life of the church happens within its four walls. and maybe 20% is spent outside the church with missions or outreach or evangelism. In the missional model, that is reversed… 80% of the church’s time, energy and resources are spent out there in the community and the world and only 20% within the four walls of the church.

I got to thinking about that in relation to Albert Tofflers description of first wave (agricultural), second wave (industrial) and third wave (informational) churches. A first wave church emphasizes the place that they are in. A second wave church emphasizes the programs (usually denominationally based) that it offers. And a third wave church, the coming church in Toffler’s work, emphasizes projects. I think that the attractional model is really based in that modern, 19th and 20th century program church. We have great programs like sunday school and bible studies and choir and this and that and the other, and we want you to come to our church and experience them. While we offer lots of different programs, in some senses it is still a “one-size-fits-all” model of being church. Once you have been a part of the program, you become like the rest of us in the church.

I’m not quite sure if the move to a missional church would entail the “project” driven model that Toffler describes. But it might. He describes this as churches that take on as projects a local health care center, or a homeless ministry – something to meet the needs that they see within the community they are situated. Yet Diana Butler Bass emphasizes that the churches who are really thriving and moving forward right now are “practice” based churches. It is what they do together that matters, not where they do it. Do organic groups fit better under a notion of practice (practicing community, fellowship, open-minded theological discussions) or projects? I think that emphasizing projects can easily slip into a consumer driven mindset… whereas practices might just be the way we need to move forward in the missional church.

We are called to be with the poor. We are called to visit those in prison. We are called to feed the hungry. We are called to break bread with one another. We are called to witness to the love of God in our lives. None of those things speak of a church building. YET – the church building provides the ideal resting place for all of us as we are out in the world doing mission, practicing our faith. We can come together once a week and sing, pray, laugh and eat with one another. And we can find the energy and resources we need to go back out there and do it all again. That is what church is all about – and I hope in my new church I can help them think in terms of mission and being out there instead of what kinds of programs we need to offer the community.