A Week in the Life

It’s been yet another busy week. We’ve started Servant Walk, our Sunday morning video curriculum, again after a couple weeks off of filming for Christmas and New Year. If you’re really interested in looking at some of the early attempts at video teaching by yours truly, hop over to YouTube and check out what we’ve done.

Next week, I’ll get back to teaching my two large group bible studies. We’ll finish up with the women’s study of Romans, and the men will be beginning studying Acts of the Apostles. Since our director of missions just took a new position as the director of mission for the Alabama West-Florida conference, I’ve been getting more of the assistance calls in the missions area, sometimes as many as three or four a day. We’ll have our first mission council meeting of the new year on Tuesday.

I’m also beginning preparations for my D.Min. project which begins the first week of Lent (a virtual classroom for the Servant Walk curriculum), getting ready to develop the parents class for confirmation in my spare time, and leading a Service of Death and Resurrection (Funeral) on Monday.

Since I don’t have anything else going on, I’ve also switched to a Mac! I was given a 1.67 GHz PowerBook G4 awhile back, and I finally upgraded the RAM to 2GB and a friend installed Leopard on it. It’s pretty darn fast now, and I’m loving it. I look forward to using Keynote instead of Powerpoint and see how that goes.

So, that’s what’s going on in my world! Anything going on in yours?

A New Year, and Few Resolutions

Today has been a good day. I had the day off of work and took time to do some things that needed doing.

Even though we’ve tried in the past, today was the day we really took off Emma’s training wheels for good. She took to it immediately and rode up and down the street in front of our house. I loved sitting on the tailgate of my pickup with Caleb, drinking coffee, and watching her as she alternated between pedaling and crashing.

We put up all the Christmas stuff today and completely cleaned out our garage. As a pastor, so much of our work moves at glacial speed, so it’s nice to do this kind of work from time to time and actually start and finish something in the same day!

We also followed in my family tradition and ate beans and cornbread for New Year’s Day. As long as you eat something that swells when it cooks, rice, beans, etc., you’ll prosper in the year ahead. At least that’s the logic behind that tradition. So, I’m looking forward to a prosperous year!

I’m not one to make a ton of New Year’s resolutions, but I think I’ll make a few for this year. I plan to read through the Bible this year using YouVersion on my iPhone. As of this moment, I’m planning on doing my daily readings in the TNIV version.

Second, I plan to work on my skills as a leader. Seth Godin has been really inspiring me lately, and his post today really challenged me to step up to a different level in that arena. He writes,

The place where expectations are lowest: leadership. Everyone expects you to get in line and follow, not lead. The opportunity this year is bigger than ever: to lead change, to create a movement in a direction you want to go. While the rest of your world huddles and holds back, here’s a golden chance to use cheap media, available attention and great talent to make something that matters.

This hopefully links to my third resolution, which is to finish my D.Min. project. My project involves developing an alternative entry point for Christian Formation, specifically creating an online classroom for a curriculum series I’ve been working on in my new position. It is definitely integrated with the cheap media side of Seth’s challenge, since I’m using free resources like wetpaint.com and youtube to develop it.

I think that’s all I’m going to write. It seems that there resolutions are ever-expanding, and I could think of fifteen more things that I’d love to focus on in the New Year. I guess fifteen focus areas would probably not be focus at all, would it?!

May you all be blessed in your planning and blessed in this New Year!!

Finding the Jesus You Thought You Had Lost

This is one of the transcripts from the teaching videos I’m doing each Sunday. This one is based on Luke 2:41-52 and owes a lot to N.T. Wright’s interpretation in his “Luke for Everyone” commentary.

Growing up, I lived on a small country back-road. If you ever drove down it, you might even think it was a back-road off of a back-road. In many ways, my life was something like that of an earlier time. On one side of our property you had my great Aunt and Uncle, the Fitzgeralds, across the street were the Sisks, and on the other side you had the old Reich place. Behind our house there was a little branch called Jackson Creek, and just across our pasture were the Potato Hills. There were so many times when I’d leave the house in the morning and tell my mom goodbye. She would just wave and say, “Make sure you’re home before dark!” We knew everyone up and down that little back-road, so she wasn’t worried. Besides, if I got in trouble, she would know before I got back home!

My kids will grow up in a different world. Even if we lived in that same place, I think I’d be a little more cautious about letting my kids run wild. There’s no way we’re going to let our kids leave the house and not know where they are all day long!

Today’s scripture passage takes place in a world much more like the world I was raised in. Luke tells us that Jesus’ family lived in a tiny village called Nazareth. Everything we know about Nazareth from sources outside the bible and archeologists suggest that it couldn’t have been more than about 500 people. Undoubtedly Mary and Joseph would have had extended families and friends throughout the village. It’s no surprise, then, that they could set off with a large group of travelers making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover without keeping a close eye on Jesus.

Yet after a day’s travel, when they looked around to see if Jesus was there, he was nowhere to be found. Jerusalem was a bustling city of around 70,000 people in pretty tight quarters. It was one thing to let a twelve year old boy run free in Nazareth, but the city was full of dark alleys, strange people, soldiers, and traders. You can almost feel Mary and Joseph’s anxiety and urgency when they run back to Jerusalem to search for their son.

I get paranoid if I lose sight of my kids when we’re out shopping even if they’re in the same store that I’m in. But can you imagine realizing you’d left your child in the big city, when you assumed he was traveling back with your family and friends?

So they rushed back to Jerusalem…and notice something interesting…they didn’t find him in the first place they searched. We read that after three days they found him in the temple. Three long days this couple from Nazareth searched Jerusalem: walking the back alleys, asking merchants, calling out his name as they searched. And finally, they found him in the temple sitting among the teachers. Rabbis didn’t stand at the front of the class when they taught. They sat and their students gathered around. It’s important to notice that twelve-year-old Jesus is sitting among the teachers, listening, asking questions, and amazing everyone with his grasp of the faith. Actually, the Greek word used here is existanto, and you could translate the passage literally, he was shocking them with his understanding and answers.

Mary and Joseph were blown away (explagesan), and Mary reacts as any good mother by saying, “You had us scared half to death, how could you do this to us? Your father and I have been searching for you like crazy!!!” But Jesus reminds us of something extremely important with his response when he says, “Why were you searching?? Didn’t you realize I’d be here in my Father’s house?”

This passage is filled with meaning, and to be honest the only way we can wrap our minds and hearts around it is to treasure it in our hearts in the same way Luke tells us Mary did.

I can relate to this story all too well on several different levels. There have been times in my life when I’ve went my own way, assuming Jesus was with me, taking Jesus for granted, and all of a sudden I look around and he’s not where I expected him to be. Again and again, the times that I have decided to strike out on my own and do it my way, I’ve struggled. Like Mary and Joseph, I’ve at least had enough awareness to search for Jesus. But also like them, I’ve often spent three days looking for him where he can’t be found. And Jesus will say to us, “Didn’t you know where to find me? I’m here going about my Father’s business.”

As Christians from the Methodist Tradition we have a strong belief that God has given us a map of where he can be found. We call this map the “means of grace.” These are the means where God promises to meet us: in worship together as the Church, in prayer, in studying Scripture, baptism, Holy Communion, authentic Christian community, visiting the sick, caring for the poor, giving. Are you looking for Jesus? Believe it or not, you can still find him in his Father’s house. I want to invite and challenge you to return to the tried and true places where God has promised to meet his people. Don’t waste your time looking anywhere else, and you’ll find the Jesus you thought you’d lost.

Clear-Paned Missiology

At one of the congregations I serve, there are huge windows lining each side of the sanctuary. Without fail, every time we have guests come and speak from across the conference, they mention these windows. You see, they aren’t stained-glass. They are simply huge panes of clear glass, and they are indeed beautiful.

Out the north windows you can see the high school across the street, a small rental house, and a large wooded hill beyond. To the south, you can see the parsonage, several homes, and oftentimes people walking on the side street.

Apparently, in the past these windows were something like stained glass. They were thick, yellow, and had giant draperies hanging around them. However, when they were replaced the church bought the huge clear panes. Stained glass would have been nice, but it simply was too expensive. Little did they know, they were making a theological statement.

Far too many churches have a stained-glass missiology to go with their opulent stained glass windows. Rather than constantly looking out at the world beyond, people can only contemplate what’s on the inside. Today, in my sermon, I described the beatuy of those windows and the striking image they present of who we are called to be as a church. We gather together, worship faithfully, and listen to God’s call, ever mindful of the world outside the walls.

If we only care about what goes on inside, we’re like a sports team that only practices and never plays the game. We’re created to get in the game. We’re called to be formed in the faith and move to the other side of the glass, where we can live out the adventure of following God’s ongoing mission in the world.

Megachurch Musings

Since I’ll soon be beginning an appointment at a much larger congregation, I have found myself reading more about the unique opportunities and challenges within megachurches. Scott Thumma & Warren Bird have released a new study which you can find here (h/t Todd Rhodes @ MondayMorningInsight).

Todd summarizes several changes that have taken place over the last three years including:

Growth without adding seats
More satellite campuses and off-site worship
More intentional training for ministers and ministerial candidates
Growing emphasis on small groups
More interest in social justice and outreach

He also shares a few things that have remained roughly the same:

Contemporary worship styles
Strong outreach and programming
Continued growth
Continued strong finances

I’m curious what will change in the next three years in these influential congregations. Primarily, I can foresee the current financial situation in our country may start to have an impact on these congregations.

Holy Serendipity!

I love the word serendipity and the concept of unexpectedly stumbling across something even though you weren’t really trying to find it. Back when I worked in a research lab, I always said, “If we don’t leave our work benches messy, we don’t leave room for serendipity. After all, we wouldn’t have penicillin if Alexander Fleming was more conscientious!” Supposedly Fleming had a notoriously messy lab, and left some bacterial cultures out only to find the growth of the bacteria was inhibited by…you guessed it…Penicillium mold! Others were skeptical of my logic.

I think this concept can apply to the Church too, even though we usually call it by more theologically sound words. Preparing for Sunday, I was in a hurry to finish the worship service. So, I just went through the hymnal and picked out several songs we haven’t sung in awhile. None of them fit the message especially well, but hey at least they weren’t repeats! We ended up singing, among other songs, “To God Be the Glory,” and “My Tribute.” No big deal, right?!

Lo and behold, holy serendipity! During our announcements and prayer requests at my first church service, a woman told the story of her daughter’s involvment in a car wreck that ended up as a huge pileup. She and her family escaped unharmed. The mother said her song all week had been, “To God be the Glory,” and she had planned on requesting it during the service. Not only did that song proclaim God’s glory, but “My Tribute” also sings praise to the glory of God. She couldn’t believe those were the songs for the day! How cool is that?!

All’s Well that Ends Well

I don’t know much about Shakespeare, but I do know he once wrote a play with this as the title. Further, I’m really not sure what the play was about, but it popped in my mind as I was thinking about the next month and a half of my life as I prepare to change appointments.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what it means to “leave well.” As an itinerant pastor, I have a great responsibility to do my best to finish in such a way that it sets the congregation and the next pastor up for success. I haven’t been through this process before, and it has been a real challenge to discern what steps to take along the way.

Several good friends have shared advice with me, and I appreciate their counsel. This morning, I did some searching for resources online and came across a blog post from the Greater Richmond Area Christian Educators. The post is called, “Leaving Well (If you’re going to go, go!)” The formatting at their blog is a little wonky, so I’ll repost the major portion of it as I go.

Don’t plan for the congregation’s future. When it’s time for you to leave a congregation shorten your vision. Concentrate on leaving well and give the congregation’s future to the congregation—it’s no longer your responsibility. To be blunt, once you decide to leave your congregation’s future is none of your business.

To be honest, this one is a little bit hard since we are required to be working on the strategic plan for our conference. I’ve struggled to find a balance of promoting the strategic plan with the realization that I’m leaving.

If you’re going to go, go. You don’t need to burn your bridges, but you need to get clear about what leaving means. Most clergy seem to do well once they get clear. For example, they will communicate with their congregation that when they leave they are no longer the pastor. So they’ll not make pastoral calls, conduct weddings and funerals, or get involved in church business. Clergy who are not able to go tend to become the bane of the new pastor and often do a great disservice to the congregation. It’s amazing how many clergy have trouble leaving their congregations. Sometimes they try to come back as members. But I’ve yet to see a former pastor of a congregation able to successfully return to their former congregation as just a member. It seems hard for them to appreciate that they weren’t just a member before, and never will be.

This one is the most common piece of advice I receive from my friends and colleagues. Several have mentioned the shift from pastor to friend, and the need for a period of disconnect to allow the new pastor to join the new system. I won’t comment on the few examples I’ve seen of people who simply don’t get this, because I can see how this is a difficult process. However, because of those examples I think I’ll be more mindful of how I handle myself in this regard.

As you are leaving the function of your preaching needs to change. That change in function is primarily one of prophetic theological hope. This isn’t the time to try to plant insight into your congregation—if they didn’t get what you’ve been trying to say all those years they’re certainly not going to get it now. They’re listening to you differently. What they want to hear, and need to hear, is the affirmation of hope that they’ll be just fine without you! The second function of preaching at this time is to remind them of their story. Clergy often are the resident storytellers of the narrative history of the congregation. Too often a congregation experiences an episode of corporate amnesia when a pastor leaves. Now is the time to tell, and retell, the story of the congregation as a local people of God. Remind them of how they came to be, who they were, and who they are.

It has been more difficult than normal to preach the past few weeks, and I think this is helpful advice. The lectionary has been helpful in keeping me from the temptation toward “last-chance indoctrination!”

Stay connected. One common emotional response of clergy who are leaving is to emotionally defect in place and begin to disconnect from their congregation. That’s understandable and may be a function of anticipatory grieving. But clergy need to work at staying emotionally connected to significant persons in the congregation—its leaders as well as others worth investing time with. Work on your grieving. Leaving a congregation, under whatever circumstance, involves loss, and loss requires grieving. Own it. Find ways to mourn appropriately (mourning is the outward expression of grieving), but don’t confuse your grieving with that of the congregation.

These have been unanticipated challenges. As I said earlier, this is my first time to go through the leaving process. I grew up in a denomination that would often have months in between pastors, and the first pastor would often leave fairly abruptly. So, I’m experiencing a whole new system and process in that regard. I’m working on this one!

Focus on your own vision and work on your own self. I’ve mentioned that in the early stages of discernment it is difficult to sift the important from the insignificant. In the midst of the fog of discernment I’ve seen clergy get stuck by weighing in, with equal weight, issues like, the children (even when they are grown!), the house, their age, the spouse (his or her job, friends, hobbies, etc.), giving up a short commute, the club, the salary, a perk, their nice office, the computer the church provided, etc. To be sure these are all important—but they are not as important as pursuing your own vision, calling, and goals. Change involves risk and it involves loss. As someone said, you can have anything you want, but you cannot have everything you want. The question becomes, What are you willing to give up in order to pursue your calling, vision, dreams, or desires?

This final aspect may seem to have more to do with people who are discerning whether or not to leave in a more congregationalist setting, but I think it applies to United Methodists too. This paragraph helped me see that this next step in my journey is indeed something of a risk, but it’s also an important part of my attempt to pursue my calling and vision. Change is hard, but it’s worth it to follow God’s call.

Altogether, I have a lot more work to do. However, one of my most important tasks will be leaving well. I think this list has been fairly helpful in thinking about some of the issues. Any other advice or commentary on “leaving well” out there??

Polity is Popular?

I find it fascinating that some of my more active posts in terms of comments come when I make statements or raise questions about committees and/or administrative concerns. Remember the transfer letter post? There are still people who make comments over at the Catching Meddlers site on that one.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this.

I will say this. There are times when my desire to reach folks who are not in the church comes into conflict with my personal comfort within our particular system or way of doing church.

This reminds me of Wesley’s comments on field preaching. He reached a point where his personal preferences came into conflict with his passion for sharing the gospel. In his journal, Wesley wrote,

I could scarcely reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields, of which he set me an example on Sunday; I had been all my life (till very lately) so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church.

What is that for us? When do we reach the point, like Wesley, that we “submit to be more vile” in order to share the gospel? Is our polity (and practice) framed by our mission or is it sometimes the other way around?

Update: Here are some interesting practical questions along the same lines from Andrew over at Thoughts of Resurrection. He’s busy thinking about issues with a virtual campus as it relates to the Book of Discipline. This is a great example of how to begin wrestling with polity and mission without denying either.

Smaller Committees and Life-Changing Discipleship

For some strange reason, I have been paying closer attention to some of the United Methodist megachurches. I just ran across this article on Emergent Village by Michael Slaughter. It’s an excerpt from the new edition of his book UnLearning Church.

Two things in this article stood out in my mind. First, some folks might assume big church = many meetings. Apparently this isn’t true at Ginghamsburg,

Older-mindset churches usually require a lot of committees and meetings. Ginghamsburg finds that its people have neither the time nor the patience for multiple committee activities, so we are down to one committee of nine people called the Leadership Board. No more staff-parish, missions, or finance committees. Major businesses operate with one board, but too often tiny churches become immobilized by layers of committees. They spend hours debating about what color carpeting to put in the church narthex, or about the precise wording of the congregation’s statement of beliefs.

Imagine a leadership board of nine people. There are congregations in United Methodism who average fifty people in worship and have 25 people serving on boards and committees. Imagine Ginghamsburg, who averages 4,000 in weekly attendance, with a Leadership Board of nine people. Interesting.

Another thing that stood out is his comment about “listen and learn” meetings,

Fifteen years ago, we would have emphasized getting people to show up for church programs and listen-and-learn meetings. We would have sponsored a seminar and gauged its success by how many attended. Now we measure success by asking “How are people finding life change and purpose through the experience?” People are not looking for church meetings so much as for life meaning.

This is something that really interests me, and it may be something I try to explore more in my D.Min. project and dissertation. Are there alternative ways for people to find life meaning through the local church that we aren’t taking advantage of? I think Web 2.0 and its emphasis on participation, rather than simply receiving information, might be one of those ways. Have any of your churches developed participatory Advent or Lenten studies using some of the newer technology (Twitter, Blogging, etc.)?

I know some of my purist friends will think I’ve lost my mind, and they’re probably right. I simply think we’re going to have to get more creative in our approach to making disciples. It’s too important to ignore. As United Methodists, I believe we have a tradition and commitment to offering in-depth discipleship. I’m not saying we need to “jazz things up” to get people interested. I’m just saying we need to work our tails off to think of creative ways to encourage discipleship via the means people are comfortable with and excited about using.

As always, there will be the argument that this will leave a certain segment of our people behind. That’s the great thing about a world where we can embrace “both/and” thinking. We don’t have to quit doing traditional bible studies, devotionals, and the like. There will be a segment of people who will continue to be powerfully transformed in those environments. We simply need to be mindful of the people that those setups won’t reach or transform. It’s not choosing one or the other. It’s about doing both with excellence.

Where are the Top UMC Church Websites?

I came across a post over at churchrelevance on the top 90 church websites. A quick search shows only one United Methodist Church on this list: Church of the Resurrection. Hey, maybe we can claim our Free Methodist cousins at NorthGate Free Methodist Church! Maybe there are some on there without Methodist in the title that I missed. But even if we have one or two others listed, I still would like to have more!

Of course I don’t know what kind of criteria they used, but I still wish we had a little better representation. Maybe in our push to reach younger people as a denomination, we leaders can look through a few of these sites and see what the good folks at churchrelevance see as a top website. I noticed that many of the sites have an Apple-ish feel, none of these are cookie-cutter sites, most are fairly simple, and most assume that people who have never attended their congregation will be looking for information about visiting for the first time.

I hope they’ve just overlooked some of our best examples as a denomination. Anyone out there want to point us to some great United Methodist Church websites that churchrelevance missed?

Update: Thanks to Kent over at churchrelevance for pointing out Granger. Told you I’d miss one!