For those of you who are following this, several bloggers at General Conference are reporting the newly elected Judicial Council members. I don’t know much about these folks, so I’ll list them without comment (Update: A friend sent me this link which provides a little more information on these folks):
On the way back into General Conference after lunch one day, a lady approached me and asked, “Would you like to receive a blessing?” I was a little taken aback, but I said, “Sure!” She reached up and made the sign of a cross on my head and spoke a short word of blessing. I walked on in the Conference Center.
Strangely enough, I got a message from my buddy Robert today saying, “Check out this picture; I think it’s you!” Sure enough, that’s me getting anointed at General Conference.
After getting back from GC, I’ve been doing some thinking about what I saw and experienced there. Fortunately, I was too busy today catching fish with my kids to write any long-winded posts.
I’ve made plans, and I’m going down early Thursday morning to visit General Conference. I’m staying one night and leaving on Friday, so I’m not expecting to get much more than a taste of all that will happen there.
However, once I return, I’m planning to share my thoughts on General Conference, United Methodism, etc. on Sunday morning during my sermon. This isn’t something I do regularly, but I feel like the laity often only hear from the people with enough money to send out brochures and newsletters. So I’d like to examine what a wide range of people are saying and offer my prayerful thoughts on all that is taking place.
In the meantime, I’ve been reading up on some of the important issues facing our denomination. This reading makes me wonder something. If you were asked, “What are the four most important issues facing our denomination,” what would you say?
One of the things I really enjoy about ministry is seeing people who’ve had very little experience with the Church become a part of the life of the faith community. In the congregations I serve, this happens most often with little kids.
Before my first service at 9:30 this morning, I came in to find 14 little boys and girls waiting for worship to start. At least five of these kids were first time visitors, brought by their friends and neighbors. It’s interesting how these little kids start coming, even without their parents, and start extending invitations to anyone who will listen.
Some of the more senior members of our community have insisted on the kids calling me Pastor or at the very least, Pastor Matt. As I entered, one of the little girls met me with a big smile and a hug before introducing me to her new friends, none of them more than five or six years old. I smiled and asked the new friend’s name. After doing this, I went off to talk to some of the adults who had gathered before worship for coffee. As I was leaving, I overheard the littlest one giggle and the older girl say, “See…I told you ‘Pasture’ is really nice.”
No wonder Jesus wanted his followers to let the little children come to him!
Just finished up the in-class portion of my latest D.Min. class, The Next Church: Ministry in the New World. It was a pretty interesting class, as we talked about our “notion of Church” and some of the creative new models of Church that are being expressed in response to the cultural shifts we see in our world.
As part of the class, we spoke via speaker-phone with two “practitioners” who are doing some neat things with their congregations: Tim Lucas of Liquid Church in Morristown, NJ and Rick Diamond of Journey IFC in Austin, TX. Both of these guys are leading really interesting and dynamic faith communities, and I would encourage you to check them out. You can be assured I’ll be borrowing ideas from both of these places in the near future!
Guy M. Williams has some excellent thoughts on appointing pastors missionally over at Gen-X Missional Wesleyan. He really hits on one of the challenges we face as a denomination with an abundance of small rural and small town congregations. Many of the clergy we have aren’t from these congregations. In turn we find,
indigenous leadership of congregations is arguably not happening when “city folk” are sent to smaller-to-medium towns, and vice-versa.
Guy helpfully qualifies that with a tip of the hat to folks who those who realize that being a “native” isn’t necessary to finding a way to be indigenous,
…it is important to acknowledge up front that sometimes persons discover affinities for places that are unlike that in which they grew up. That said, affinity for place is closely related to being “indigenous” in my view.
He makes two important suggestions. First, he argues that we should examine the culture of call in small town and rural congregations,
One element of this would include solving the riddle concerning the relative lack of persons in rural and smaller town areas responding to a call to ordained ministry. Is a “culture of the call” lacking in these places? Is there something about our denomination’s organizational culture that works against this?
He then argues that instead of sending people with an affinity for certain places away from their preferred setting we should look for creative ways for them to live out a missional calling in the places they care most deeply about,
A second element of this would involve a commitment to creative thinking about opportunities for ministry that we are not seizing because we are sending persons with a metro/suburb affinity away. What if they were invested in the place of greatest affinity? We are a shrinking denomination, so surely there are opportunities we would do well to seize in the metro/suburb context?
He then heads off three potential objections:
These are terrific questions, and I believe they have to be seriously considered by anyone who has a heart for the United Methodist Church. Even though I really agree with Guy’s thoughts on the importance of indigenous missional leadership and “place,” I have a thought or two I’d like to add. While rural/small town ministry calls for a different set of gifts and graces than suburban/urban ministry, there are still certain intangibles that are essential no matter where you serve. For example, whatever the context, relationships are a central part of pastoral ministry. If someone has trouble developing and maintaining relationships in rural areas or small towns, it probably won’t make a tremendous difference if you put them in a their preferred socio-economic setting.
That reminds me of the story of the man who goes into town and says, “What are the people like here?” The townsfolk reply, “What were they like where you were before?” “Oh they were mean, nasty, and irritable…” “Well, that’s pretty much how they are here.” Later, another person came into the same town asking the same questions, yet her response was, “Oh the people back home were gracious, interesting, and pretty good folks,” to which the same townsfolk replied, “That’s pretty much what you’ll find here.” The small town I grew up in loved that story and told it often.
Finally, if we begin to scratch the surface about the reason things are the way they are, we’ll have to get into serious questions about qualifications and training for ministry. All processes are selective whether we like it or not. The current process for encouraging the call to ministry and the ensuing training is selective as well, and for a variety of reason it seems to primarily be producing people from larger population centers (Yes, I know there are anecdotal counter-examples). If we want to encourage people from more diverse socio-economic backgrounds to think about pastoral ministry, we should do some serious thinking about what it would mean for them to spend 10 years of their life preparing to respond to the call to pastoral ministry. Are there ways we can use technology to train and prepare more indigenous leaders?
Thanks Guy for an interesting post.
General Conference 2008 begins April 23rd in Fort Worth, TX. I’m thinking about going for a couple of days, but I’m not sure when would be best. Are you going? If so, when? Why did you pick those dates? Thanks for sharing!
My daughter just came in the kitchen to get some chocolate milk for her and “bubby,” so I filled up their sippy-cups and said, “OK, but when you take it to Caleb I want you to say, ‘One for me, and one for my homies!'” She did it, and I laughed. I wasn’t in the living room to see my wife roll her eyes.
The blogging-experts out there seem to have a low opinion of folks who simply link to other people’s good stuff without a lot of commentary, and I sometimes think I do that too much. Yet, nearly every time I run into someone who frequents my blog they comment on me pointing them to things they wouldn’t otherwise stumble across (I use Google Reader, an RSS reader, so it really doesn’t take much time to come across a lot of great things).
So, I’ve come to realize that this is part of what I do through this blog. Anyway, that’s a long way of introducing this really good article by Tony Jones on the “Hauerwasian Mafia.” Trust me, I’ve had a similar journey to him after a good dose of Hauerwas during seminary. I especially loved this small vingette from his larger piece,
Having been persuaded by this thinking while in seminary, my assistant at the church didn’t understand when I went catatonic after checking my voice mail. I had only been on the job as a pastor for a couple months, and I received the offending phone message from the most unlikely source: the mom who was putting on the Cub Scout banquet. That’s right, from the seemingly innocuous mouth of a Den Mother came the Siren’s Call of collaboration with the militaristic state: she wanted me to say the opening prayer at the annual banquet.
In catatonia, I searched my soul. What would I be doing there, if I did accept? Surely, I would be granting the imprimatur of the Deity on the purely secular proceedings that would follow. I had been told in no uncertain terms by the HM that accepting invitations just like these and lending the gloss of religiosity to secular occasions is exactly what has led to the impotency of the American church. The HM angel on my shoulder told me to call the Den Mom back and respectfully decline on the grounds that God wasn’t for sale (or, in this case, for rent along with the church’s Great Hall).
But how could I turn down the Den Mom and several dozen little boys in kerchiefs? Maybe it would be great outreach opportunity, said the devil on my other shoulder. Maybe it would be a sign of hospitality and grace that would entice one of the little Cubs and his family to visit the church for worship. Maybe I’d have a good conversation over dinner with a spiritual “seeker.”
Like Tony, my pragmatic side has nearly always won out over my Hauerwasian bent. So go ahead, get over to Tony’s blog and check out his thoughts.
Yesterday, I bought Joseph R. Myers‘ book, Organic Community: Creating a Place Where People Naturally Connect. In the first chapter, “Synchronized Life: Moving from Master Plan to Organic Order,” Myers discusses the differences between programattic models of prescribing community and organic ways of developing environments in which community emerges. In describing the point of community, he suggests that the end goal is,
…a search for wholeness, not for totalitarian order.
Overall, he seeks to argue that it is important to move from a master plan (eg. the master plan of a city) understanding of building community to an understanding of organic order or an environmental model of allowing community to build and grow naturally.
In the second chapter, he begins to break down the way organizations deal with patterns using a master plan (programmer model) versus organic order (environmentalist model). He argues that the master plan has a bias for a prescriptive approach, whereas the organic order way of thinking favors a descriptive approach.
The prescriptive way of looking at patterns tries to import successful models from other communities wholesale into new settings.
We get into trouble when we think someone else’s model will work exactly as described with our participants, in our communities, in our environments.
On the other hand, descriptive ways of being attempt to pay careful attention to specific local communities.
Perhaps the most helpful comments in this chapter comes in his four “descriptive patterns of belonging. These come from Myers’ study of Edward Hall’s theory of proxemics which proposes four spatial references: public, social personal, and intimate.
Myers writes,
The four spaces describe an organic order, descriptive pattern for helping people with their search for community. We do not experience belonging in only one or two of these spaces. All four contribute to our health and connectedness. We need connections in all four.
In contrast to some models, the goal is not to prescribe these as essential steps. For example, Myers suggests that small groups might not necessarily be the best place for intimate space, and other groupings might best serve the same role as small groups. In other words, this is by no means a “one-size-fits-all” model that can be imported into any situation. Instead, by creating environments with an awareness of these levels of connection, we can provide opportunities for health and growth. I resonate with this language, and I think he’s hit on some very strong ideas about building community in the context in which we live.
However, I do have a few questions about Myers thoughts on this. First, as good Wesleyans, we have a strong heritage of prescriptive groupings. How would we reconcile Myers’ more descriptive environmentalist model with Wesley’s prescriptive progressive model of discipleship (Kevin, are you out there)? Second, how would we encourage people to do things that aren’t necessarily “natural” (eg. love their enemies, serve the poor, etc.) in order to grow spiritually? I like Myers ideas, but I think we’ll have to wrestle more with how we can encourage discipleship through a fully organic model.
You’ll want to read Adam Hamilton’s thoughts on abortion from his latest book, Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White: Thoughts on Religion, Morality, and Politics.
mattjudkins.com 