Five-Finger Reflections, part 1

I'm grateful for the overwhelming support that the Kansas East, Kansas West, and Nebraska Annual Conferences gave in moving forward with plans to create one new annual conference. It was also clear from the comments received that we have a lot of work to do. I was on a mission trip during the latest Transition Team meeting so I don't know all the ground that was covered there, but I want to share here a couple of my own personal reflections after the "five-finger vote". These are my observations, not the opinion of the transition team as a whole.

1. In his excellent book Journey in the Wilderness Gil Rendle says, "As in all difficult moments, the starting point of change is finally to name the tension or conflict between expressed values and actual behavior." I think this is the crux of the problem we face. We state that we value the mission of the church, but in reality we value the institution of the church. We know what we should value, but our actual practices don't back this up. For example, who would not support risk taking for the sake of the mission? But how often have clergy second-guessed an appointment of another pastor as one that doesn't fit in the system or privately criticized a pastor when the church struggles after the appointment (a natural pattern if the pastor is really trying to change things)? How many times have laity challenged a significant change in direction from their church rather than embracing the risk?

Many of the comments that came back to us ask for answers to questions like where will annual conference be held? Where will the episcopal office be? How will pensions and health insurance be affected? What committees will go away? These are all critical questions that we need to answer for the sake of the institution. Beginning in August I'll be part of a smaller group that will begin to seek how to find answers to some of these questions. They do need to be answered. I want answers to them also. But they are almost irrevelant to the mission of the church. Our annual meeting accounts for 4 out of every 365 days. As currently formulated, we hear reports from instiutional committees and take votes on institutuinal matters. The most important missional component of Annual Conference is worship, which is also the lightest attended part of Conference. In a world with more efficient travel and technology, the location of the conference office and bishop's residence will have very little affect on the bishop's performance. Pensions and health insurance are important to our clergy now, but with the exception of the burden of the cost of health insurance to the local churches the changes we make now will hardly be remembered 20 years from now.

Again, these are important questions that need to be answered - we are an instiution, after all. But the instiution needs to help us fulfill the mission. Our focus needs to continue to be raising questions that move our mission forward. Questions like "how can we make sure that the right pastor is appointed to the right church? How can the bishop and cabinet best support our local churches? How can we raise up our laity as spiritual leaders inside and outside the church? How can smaller churches make a bigger impact in their communities? How can a new generation of United Methodists build and improve on the heritage that we leave behind?" These are the questions that will lead us towards renewal. They are much harder to answer than the technical questions, but when we look back 50 or 100 years from now our answers to these questions will matter much more.

2. Several people said that we are moving too fast. I expected that. But many others said we are moving too slow. They say that we need bold, radical change now and the transition team is holding back too much. This also speaks to the tension that we face. Very few people believe that we don't need to change. A large majority seem to believe that we need significant change. But how much change is needed how soon is where the debate lies. My own bias: knowing that all of us tend to push against change more than we should I'm in favor of the most change that we can make.

One other comment was very common - "You make some good points and I agree we need to change, but how will becoming one conference result in the change we need?" I'll address this next week in part 2.

OBL is dead. God is Great.

That was a post I saw last night after the death of Osama bin Laden.

My first thought after reading it was, "well, God was already good. bin Laden doesn't have any control over that."

My second thought was that translated into Arabic, that would read "Allah Akbar," the same phrase that the 9/11 hijackers said as their planes were crashing into the world trade towers. (It's not only a Muslim phrase, by the way. Arab speaking Chrisitans call God Allah also.)

The world is probably a safer place today than it was 24 hours ago, but I don't think it is a better place. Bin Laden deserved to die, but as long as we equate death with success we will still fall short of God's hopes for humanity.

In-between Two New Years

All of you know that New Year's Day is January 1st. Many of you know that the Christian calendar begins with the first Sunday of Advent, which this year was November 28. So from November 28 until January 1st we are in-between new years. It makes me think that while we know Jesus wasn't actually born on December 25 that there is not a more appropriate time of the year to celebrate the birth of the Messiah.

The Apostle Paul teaches us that the coming of Jesus marks the birth of a new age. We live between the now and the not-yet. We live in the midst of the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God. We see glimpses of a new age, a new community, a new kingdom, while we cope with the realities of the hardship and disappointment that come in this world. It makes sense that the Christian calendar and the standard Gregorian calendar don't line up. Jesus' birth gives us hope that, in Augustine's words, the City of Man will give way to the City of God.

May these final days of 2010 bring us closer to the end of the "now" while the first days of the new Christian year bring us closer to the "not yet." May we live as though a new year, a new age, has already begun!

Kindergarten and the Spirit

August 17th is a day I will always remember. At 12:40 Tracy and I drove Sophia to her first day of Kindergarten. We took a picture at home, walking down the hall of the school, next to a directional sign pointing the way for the “KinderDAWGS” to go, and two more when she was in her classroom. We watched from a distance outside the room while she started to look at her new classmates and listened to her new teacher, Mrs. Smith. Then with a couple of goodbye waves, another minute of watching, and a final wave, we left our daughter and went home.

Going to kindergarten isn’t really that remarkable of a feat. Almost every five or six year old does it. But even knowing that in and of itself this is not an extraordinary accomplishment I still felt like an incredibly proud parent for my daughter to now be in kindergarten. Thinking about it some more, I think the pride comes not so much from seeing her there in the classroom but in seeing her grow from birth until this day. That day was the culmination of five years of growth, change, development, and learning. Tracy and I were not rigorous about having a growth plan for Sophia in the first five years of her life to prepare her for kindergarten, but we were intentional about reading to her when she wanted to be read to and showing her how to do math in everyday situations. We tried to help her know the sound that each letter makes. In short, we wanted her to be ready to take the next step in her development by sending her off to kindergarten. After all, our intellect is always growing isn’t it? Our knowledge is always increasing.

I wonder if what is true for our intellectual development is the same for our spiritual development? I wonder if we read the Bible with our children sometimes when they want to read. I wonder if we help them learn to pray in everyday situations just like we help them learn math. I wonder if help our children become ready for the next step in their spiritual development, whatever that step might be. I also wonder if we prepare ourselves. Do you know what the next step is for your spiritual life? Are you ready to take it?

Guaranteed Appointments

The United Methodist Commission to Study the Ministry is proposing an end to guaranteed appointments to the 2012 General Conference. If you're not familiar with this, the practice of the United Methodist Church for the last several decades has been to guarantee every ordained elder that they will have a church to serve. In theory, this makes some sense. We have always understood that a person's call to ordained ministry is confirmed by the Church. If it appears that the church made a mistake or that a person's call has changed, then the Church could respond by not giving that pastor an appointment. Having said that, there are a number of issues that I hope are seriously considered before the proposal comes to a vote.

1. In conversations that I've been a part of, the guarantee of appointment for bishops has never come up. Bishops are elders. They do not have a separate ordination. But bishops are consecrated as bishops for life. They are guaranteed to be bishop for life. If guaranteed appointments are removed, then we need to seriously consider going to a term episcopacy so that Bishops also do not have a guaranteed appointment. Just as guaranteed appointments for pastors in local churches could cause complacency, so too could a guaranteed appointment for a bishop.

2. The UMC also guarantees that every United Methodist church will have a pastor. As a friend pointed out to me recently, if we aren't going to promise pastors a church why do we promise churches a pastor? There are churches who have effectively ceased being United Methodist in theology and practice. There are many churches that have abandoned the mission of making Disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Why should we not hold the churches to a higher standard at the same time we hold clergy to a higher standard?

3. One reason that the guaranteed appointment began was as a protection for clergy that churches may not want because of sexism, racism, etc. I suppose the thought is we've moved far enough along now that this protection is no longer necessary. I could be swayed either way on this. I also wonder, though, if there needs to be protection for theology. Clearly the theological diversity within Methodism is a blessing and a curse. I treasure it, but I also understand that it makes conveying who we are and rallying around a common identity much more difficult. Could a particularly conservative bishop choose to appoint a marginally competent conservative pastor at the expense of a slightly more competent liberal pastor (or vice-versa)?

My hunch is that the denomination will move so slowly that the recommendation to eliminate guaranteed appointments won't pass in 2012. It is a topic that deserves deep discussion. I hope these three points will be part of the discussion

Merry X-Mas!

A couple weeks ago I wrote about my dislike of the "Holiday Tree". Since then I've seen lots of people upset with the use of "X-mas" instead of "Christmas." I'm OK with the X. In fact I use the abbreviation all the time. I couldn't stand the abbreviation at all until I went to seminary. In the middle of class one day a proffesor abbreviated "Christian" as "Xian" and suddenly it all made sense to me. So if you don't know the origin of "X-mas", here it is:

The Greek word for Christ is Christos. If you were to write the word out it would look something like "Xpristos" (I don't know how to do Greek letters on an English keyboard, so this just approximate). The Greek r looks like an English p and the Greek "ch" looks like an English x. So X can simply be an abbreviation for Christ. Xian is Christian and Xmas is Christmas. So Merry Xmas and a happy new year!

Initial Thoughts on a Special Session of General Conference

The big news yesterday is that the General Council on Finance and Administration is asking the Council of Bishops for a special session of General Conference. I could be persuaded otherwise, but at the moment this seems like an expensive waste at best and a colossal mistake for the future of the denomination at worst. Fortunately, I don't think a special session is actually likely to be called.

The biggest problem is the timing. The called session would discuss two issues: pension plans in the United States and recommendations from the Call to Action Task Force of the Council of Bishops. The Task Force is scheduled to make their recomendations in the fall of 2010. Unless the timeframe for their work is moved up, that means a special session could take place no earlier than the spring of 2011, roughly 12 months before General Conference is already scheduled to meet. Additionally, meeting that soon after the proposals from the task force are announced would minimize the amount of time for conversation and debate. For some matters a few months is plenty of time, but the scope of this task force is tremendous. There are only two tasks - reconsidering guaranteed appointments for elders and restrucuring the church (including the frequency and size of General Conference and the number, kind, and size of general boards and agencies) - but those are two of the biggest tasks we face as a denomination.

Changing guarateed appointments will generate tremendous debate. Personally, I've gone back and forth a dozen times on whether this would be good or not. The reccomendation to change the church strucuture is even more important. This is the kind of decision that we have to get right. We don't get a second chance. It definitely needs to happen. Anybody who has been to General Conference knows that it is broken. The world has changed so much since the formation of the UMC that all of our strucutres need to be reconsidered and reformed. But it must be done carefully and it must be done correctly. It is not a decision that can be rushed.

My opinion is not as informed about pensions. The Conference I am in is not struggling at all in meeting pension obligations. Perhaps we need a special session just to deal with this. If we do, I hope that the question will be broadened to include pensions of clergy from countries outside the United States. I am sure that many of them would feel fortunate to have the pension funding crisis that some of our conferences have. A partially funded pension is much more than most of them get.