The Inside Out Life

Does dreaming for the future mean disposing of our history?

2012-02-03T08:48:00.005-05:00

The General Board of Discipleship has put out a fascinating video in which its leaders dream of what the United Methodist Church could look like in eighty years (hat tip John Meunier). A couple of things strike me in this video.

First, and let me get this out of the way, there are no young adults invited to dream about the future of the church. As someone who has another forty years of ministry ahead of me--assuming there is still a church in forty years, of course--I would be interested to see a version of this video full of young adults in ministry. I would imagine that there would be great agreement on the points about the needs of discipleship and small groups. The model of doing church that has emerged from the latter half of the twentieth century is simply not working anymore. Inviting people to come to the church for an hour (or, for those truly committed, two or three) a week is not church so much as it is performance. I am not exactly sure how we got here, but I suspect we've taken the idea of mass and Protestantized it. Mass, of course, happens each day, but in our thoroughly Protestant identities, we decided once a week was enough to transform a life. It is not. The next decades will be devoted, I am quite sure, to figuring out what "enough" looks like.

Second, I am struck by the fact that just about everything said in the GBOD video is about structure rather than theology. To hear most folks talk about the future of the church, they talk about doctrine and theology. Are we going to change this doctrinal understanding, or are we going to get back to our theological roots? These are the questions I most often hear. But what the GBOD folks are saying is something different--and fundamentally Wesleyan. So the question is not, "are we going to get back to our theological roots?" The question is, "are we going to get back to our structural roots?" There are questions of theology bound up in structure, of course, and this is where Wesleyan theology truly comes into play. Questions such as "How is it with your soul?" only work in situations of intentional discipleship, and situations of intententional discipleship come most fruitfully from Wesleyan networks. This is not to say that there is not Wesleyan theology. It is just to say that we have somehow lost the importance of structure, believing that it is subordinate to theology, as if you can separate the two. But what Wesley clearly believed--and you can see this in his classes and conferences--was that theology and structure are intimately intertwined. Structure defines, after all, how it is that we live out our faith. And isn't lived faith the bedrock of Methodism?

(As an aside, I think that this argument about structure and theology is the big knock against the Call to Action report. The consulting firms who have evaluated our structures have ignored our theology. Just as it is wrong for those who bemoan the state of United Methodist theology to forget our historic network, it is wrong for those who bemoan our historic network to ignore the theological implications of structural change.)

Finally, I am struck by the focus of upcoming structural changes upon the unit of the local church, as if the local church were the basic unit of United Methodism. It is not. But should these reforms pass--and I suspect they will--it will become the basic unit. Taylor Burton-Edwards notes in the video that the local church is, at a very fundamental level, not designed to do the kinds of things we are asking of it. In fact, he says, though congregations "do the kinds of things congregations can do," it was "other forms of Christian community" that worked "much more intently" on discipleship. I want to quote every word he said in the video; make sure you watch it.

Methodism, as understood by John Wesley, has at its root the concept of "network." You would think that in this day of information sharing and incredible technological advances that are connecting us in ways of which we've never dreamed, that the UMC would be embracing this kind of network. It is uniquely shaped for our times.

Instead, we have a growing focus on the local church as basic structure. If we were talking about a "network of local churches as the basic structure," I would not feel so uneasy. But then again, we already have a network of local churches as the basic structure. It is called the annual conference.

I have recently written about some fears being alleviated by just this notion of local churches working in network with one another. But this morning, I read something that gives me deep pause. So should you feel as if I am misinterpreting the aims of the call to action report with regard to the focus on the local church at the expense of our historic network, allow me to quote this morning's blog post from Mary Brooke Casad, the head of the Connectional Table:

On the long flight to Manila, I sat by a Filipino couple who were returning
home. They are Seventh Day Adventists. As I shared about my work with the UMC,
they nodded their heads and said that the challenges we are seeking to address
are the same for their denomination. They asked why my husband did not come with
me, and when I shared that he was a pastor and was busy in ministry at his
church, they smiled. "The local church! That's what it's all about!"

It is indeed what it's all about as we focus on "redirecting the flow of attention,
energy and resources to an intense concentration on fostering and sustaining an
increase in the number of vital congregations effective in making disciples of
Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world."

Perhaps I am overreacting. I have been known to overreact. But if we are making statements, in the United Methodist Church of all places, that "it is all about the local church," then perhaps it is already too late. I fear we are on the precipice of losing our structure: the most fundamental thing Wesley gave to us, and the best tool we have for making disciples in this uncharted new century.

Thinking differently about Call to Action

2012-01-10T07:38:00.002-05:00

As someone who thinks a lot about systemic things--and with General Conference rapidly approaching--I have been thinking a lot, over the last year, about the Call to Action report and its ramifications for the local church. I've written about it several times, and always from a critical perspective. I'm a millennial, for sure, so I am good at deconstructing and criticizing. In school, I could write a paper in my sleep.

As delegation after delegation endorses the proposal, it looks quite likely that at least the structural and general agency changes will be passed, and we will move away from General Agencies as we currently understand them. With consolidation comes lack of staff, and one of my main critiques of this whole business has come from my history as a staff person at a jurisdictional agency. The role I played at that agency (UMVIM, SEJ), I have said, could not adequately be performed by a pastor with local church responsibilities. I say this as a pastor with local church responsibilities who is asked, more and more, to perform duties which used to be performed by dedicated staff people. It can be exhausting. So eliminating staff, as I have said, runs the risk of even further taxing the very pastors who are already overtaxed.

I still don't feel entirely comfortable with such a momentous systemic shift. We sometimes make huge shifts in church systems and pretend they will not affect the mission and nature of the church, when in reality the mission and nature of the church flow directly from how we arrange ourselves. The mission is the "what" and the systems are the "how." It does not matter how often you invoke the Holy Spirit: you cannot make pancakes by vacuuming the carpet. The "what" (pancakes) flows directly from the "how" (gathering ingredients, mixing, cooking). When you change the "how," your "what" looks different.

So I think we're jumping onto a train whose direction we're not totally sure of, but my concerns were alleviated a bit this morning upon reading Ken Carter's most recent blog post about the CTA report. He proposes this:

[W]hat if the adaptive challenge, inspired by the Call to Action, is that nothing happens at the district, annual conference or general church level that is not in partnership with some local church or small network of local churches? There are evidences of strong partnerships already (note the Ginghamsburg Church's mission work in the Sudan with UMCOR), but the idea would be that this becomes normative, and a key measure in how funds are allocated (and perhaps matched).

At first, my thought was: isn't this just more "creeping congregationalism," more relying on the local church (and its pastor) at the expense of, you know, keeping me from sleeping? But then he describes the benefits:

local churches would become more connectional; in an age of scarce resources, crucial and life-giving work would be sustained; the distances between boards and agencies and local churches would be lessened; and smaller boards and agencies could draw upon the gifts and talents of the laity who remain in their local contexts

Rather than creeping congregationalism, then, we would be forced to work together, in local church partnerships. This is not creeping congregationalism--it is creeping connectionalism! Perhaps the bureaucracy is not so much keeping us connected as it is keeping us from relying upon one another.

We need to be careful, of course. When we change something so fundamental in the UMC's structure, there will be unintended consequences. But what if the main consequence was that local churches, admitting finite resources (and seeking to protect the pastor's time and energy), went in together. I have already seen smaller churches get together for mission trips; this is the same idea, introduced systemically into the life of the local church. Rather than relying upon agencies (and even the conference!), we would need to rely upon on another.

The possibility remains that churches--especially larger ones (and I serve in one of these churches, mind you)--will go off and do their own thing. But what an opportunity we have to share with one another!

Now, this business of eliminating guaranteed appointment, that is something else altogether. I'll post my thoughts on that issue in the coming days.

The Story of God

2011-12-21T07:39:00.000-05:00

I have heard it said that the church is always one generation away from extinction. I would simply add that I am far less concerned about the church simply ceasing to exist because of some sort of lack of interest in eternal matters than I am about the church dying because God’s people decide that the story is over. The ending is not ours to write, and when we insert an ending just because it makes more sense that way, we are not doing justice to God’s story, to the story that in some ways began with an angel but in other ways began much earlier and has in its inception traces of the breath of God.

It is easier to end the story, of course. It is much easier to declare that everything has been finished. It keeps us from having to take part in keeping the story alive. We say that the story is finished, that we will receive our reward, and we use whatever ending we have created to prove our points and win our arguments. It is much easier to end the story early. It keeps us from having to fully participate in it.

The Book of Acts is full of people who knew that the story was bigger than their own lives. Peter sold everything he owned to lead a group of earnest but thoroughly human Disciples on an unpredictable adventure. Ananias went to look after a murderer, against his better judgment. Even certain death could not make Paul retreat within himself. There is no earthly logic that demands this sort of commitment; the law of self-preservation forbids it. And yet . . .

The story of God was bigger than this entire cast of characters. It continues to be bigger. There is no ending to this story, at least not yet, because the story continues. So go ahead and add your piece to this grand story. Claim your spot and continue the story. God is depending upon it.

Hope sounds like breathing

2011-12-07T07:56:00.004-05:00

"Love" may be the greatest of all the words I know, but I think "hope" may be the biggest.

Hope is an overused word these days, of course. "I hope it will not rain on Saturday." We put the word on political posters: not because we are certain of what it means, but because we are not certain, because with such a big word stamped on a poster for all to see, everyone can pour into "hope" whatever it is they are looking for. Any smaller word would evoke something specific, and so we put in the biggest word we have and let people interpret it how they want. Our biggest word turns into a word that means so many things, it might as well mean nothing.

But that is just the cynic in me talking, and I am reminded that it is the very thing about which I am talking that is the answer to my cynicism. I hang on to hope, tight-fisted, in an earnest attempt to move beyond, to see beyond, to wrestle with the fact that though the world seems to stop at the horizon, there is always something just over the ridge.

I say that hope is the biggest word I know because of its power, but also because I am not quite sure what it means.

Oh, I know its definition. I can define hope. I can even put it in a sentence! But I am not exactly sure what all hope means, because every time I try to contain it, hope shows me that it is quite bigger than I imagined, larger than my preconceived notions. Hope is not one thing, after all. It is not simply wanting, nor is it simply looking forward to. Hope is bigger than these ideas, more complex than want and more nuanced than desire. And yet, want and expectation and desire are all bound up in "hope."

I wish I knew a clearer way to say this, but this, to me, is the promise of hope. Like all of the great words, the only definition that is adequate is the one which has no basis in language, the one that cannot be spoken as easily as it can be lived, as it can be made manifest in the son of God.

In his book the Irresistable Revolution, Shane Claiborne quotes Indian activist Arundhati Roy.

"Another world is not only possible," she says, "she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

What is hope? I cannot tell you what hope is. But I can tell you what hope sounds like. It sounds like breathing.

Advent

2011-11-27T06:48:00.002-05:00

Advent begins today, as we prepare for Christmas and the great gift on which we rest our hopes.

In this season, I want to offer an . . . alternative Advent song. You know, just so that you've got something to sing along with O Come O Come Emmanuel.

In which the Kindom of God breaks through

2011-11-08T08:17:00.004-05:00

I don't do a lot of writing on this blog about what is happening at the church I serve, Johns Creek UMC in suburban Atlanta. I try to use the blog to explore bigger ecclesial and theological issues, but all ecclesiology and theology is done in context, so I thought I would share some news about what is happening at JCUMC. Last Sunday, November 6, the church broke ground on a new sanctuary. The clergy and congregation are VERY excited. This event was a long time coming.

In conjunction with the groundbreaking, the church was blessed to work with Mission Guatemala in opening a feeding center in the community of Pacaman. Thanks to this feeding center, 60+ previously malnourished kids will get a nutritious meal every day. Take a look at this great article from the Mission Guatemala website.

The Ministry of Possibility

2011-10-27T07:27:00.004-04:00

I am becoming increasingly convicted that the Church's primary mode of doing ministry is out of step for the times. I'm not talking about the United Methodist Church. I'm talking about the Church.

Now, before you give up on what will surely be some church-structure or worship-war diatribe, let me say that I like the structure of the church. I like traditional worship. I like the witness we offer.

But our primary mode of doing ministry may just not fit anymore, in a culture that no longer accepts filters. There was a time, I am told, in which the minister's job was to filter information. The minister was, in essence, the designated reader, and all the training that the minister had went into what she or (primarily) he had to say on Sunday morning. The minister served as the filter, such that the minister went to the Bible and brought out whatever the Bible had to say for that particular group of people on that particular day.

And this mode of ministry--and of preaching--is fine, but it seems to me that the modern mind functions differently in the day of information overload. Annie Dillard calls it "the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash," such that it "cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness." What I fear we are doing as ministers is trying to filter--to dam--in a world that is not used to damming. Everything we present, then, because it has been filtered, is sold as very important.

It is no surprise that we sell this stuff as very important. After all, it is very important. It is the most important thing there is.

But the "stuff" (the Bible, Christian religion, the path of discipleship) is not what we are selling, exactly. You cannot give a sermon on the whole Bible. You cannot sing the entire hymnbook in one service.

Instead, what we are selling each week is filtered and concentrated and very important, and minds that have lost their willingness to have someone filter their information behave one of two ways.

1. They look back at the stack of things already piled on top of their backpacks, figure out how high to hurl this one, and throw it on top, and then they carry it around with them until next week when they hurl something new on top of that. Or

2. They become overwhelmed, and they topple, crushed under the weight of all the very important things we have given them.

There are times I wonder if we are simply filling people's already-overfilled backpacks instead of offering them an encounter with the living God.

This is not to say that programs are not important. Programs are simply vehicles through which we offer the love of God to one another, structures through which we mirror grace. But at some point, in our offerings of specific opportunities, are we missing the opportunity to simply be the church? In our filtering and distilling and boiling down, are we offering people a sickeningly-sweet syrup instead of the wine that fills the cup of salvation?

Dillard says that the answer to this dilemma--the way to deal with the muddy river of the mind--is to allow it "to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights."

What if church were about offering possibilities? In a world that seems static--in which I feel frustrated and incapable as much as I feel anything else--what if what the church had to offer was the possibility of God's grace, of God's transformation? What if we raised the sights and showed that, truly, nothing is impossible with God?

There is a danger, of course, in raising the sights. We can so spiritualize the Gospel that it begins to mean nothing other than accepting or rejecting and then waiting to die. There are churches who have fallen into this trap, turning the Bible into something wholly spiritual and ethereal and neglecting the bloody, dirty consequences of a life spent following God. This is scary business. We dare not touch the Ark. We would rather leave God in the sky.

But danger is no reason to shy away from that which God is offering! Neither is danger a reason to boil something down until its sharpness of taste is gone.

Of course, in preaching, it is much easier to see a piece of scripture as something to be simmered down to its essence. I am starting to think that the church's job is not so much to simmer the scripture down to its essence but to find the spot in the heart of God where that scripture is seeded, and offer that seed of possibility. Planting that seed means that the results are out of our control, but then again, they never really were in our control.

This is the model of the church I am thinking about these days: a church that raises the sights, that looks beyond simple application.

I am thinking about a church that sees as its mission offering the possibility of an encounter with the living God.

I am thinking about a church that offers things, yes, but also a church that understands, at its core, that the very important things we have to offer pale in comparison to the Very Important Thing that lies at the source of all we do. If we recognize that Source, if we shine a light on its holy possibilities, we might just end up with disciples AND a transformed world.

(Image by Flikr user Herkie, Creative Commons license)

Two E.O. Wilson quotes I am chewing on this morning . . .

2011-10-26T06:37:00.002-04:00

. . . both with implications, I think, for the church.

"Group selection brings about virtue, and — this is an oversimplification, but— individual selection, which is competing with it, creates sin. That, in a nutshell, is an explanation of the human condition. Our quarrelsomeness, our intense concentration on groups and on rivalries, down to the last junior-soccer-league game, the whole thing falls into place, in my opinion. Theories of kin selection didn’t do the job at all, but now I think we are close to making sense out of what human beings do and why they can’t settle down."

and

"Within groups, the selfish are more likely to succeed, but in competition between groups, groups of altruists are more likely to succeed. In addition, it is clear that groups of humans proselytize other groups and accept them as allies, and that that tendency is much favored by group selection."

(link)

Be who you are.

2011-10-18T13:00:00.000-04:00

I am a provisional member of the North Georgia Conference. For those folks who aren't in the United Methodist world, that means that I have miles to go before I sleep in terms of making it to ordination. This is a provisional time, a time of learning and growing and determining fruit for ministry. As it is, I am actually appreciative of this time. I am allowed to test and learn and discuss in an environment that is especially conducive to growth (that is, surrounded by folks in the same boat, at the same point in their ministries).

I am serious. This time is good. I hope you can get enough of a sense of my temperament in this blog to know that I have no problem pointing out when I have a problem with something. And perhaps this time is too long (we have a three-year process in North Georgia, whereas many other conferences have gone to a two-year system), but I really do find it to be useful. Test, try, do, pray, discuss: all in a safe environment.

That said, I have thought long and hard about whether even blogging during this time of provisional membership is worth it. The more public writing I do, the more there is with which to indict me, I suppose the thinking goes. I have been advised to keep my head down, to know my place, to keep my mouth shut.

And while I understand the importance of, well, not outgrowing my britches, I also know that "keep your head down" is probably great advice for war but terrible advice for ministry.

It's not that I want to start a revolution or anything. I am not intending to strike up the band and parade into the conference office wearing a sandwich board declaring something-or-other. I am not advocating an Occupy Methodism movement. But I wonder where this "keep your head down" advice comes from, and what its effects are.

Is that really the point of the provisional process? To keep my mouth shut and my head down? Of course it is not, at least as it is intended. But there seems to be such a fear of the Board of Ordained Ministry that folks decide to spend three years toiling in quiet, keeping silent about any problems--especially as they are unique to young or new clergy. I just want to get through the Board, we say. I just want to pass.

Because provisional members are so consumed with simply passing--that is, not simply consumed with bearing fruit in ministry or serving God faithfully--we are perhaps doing in ministry what we are doing in public education: teaching to the test. I know of one seminary that regularly hands out answers to the Board of Ordained Ministry questions and then asks students--as the final paper in several classes--to rephrase the answers in their own words.

If the point of the provisional process is to help provisional members demonstrate fruit in ministry--but what we are actually doing is teaching provisional members to keep their heads down--how can we possibly be surprised when the church loses its former relevance? We are learning to shut up rather than to speak out!

This may be a good strategy for making it through the Board, but it is a terrible strategy for building up the Church. The problem is that for new ministers--and especially those of us who are young--these first years in ministry are very formational. I suspect I'll carry the things I've learned here at Johns Creek UMC with me throughout my ministry. I bet I will catch myself saying things like, "Well, at Johns Creek, we . . ."

This is a formational time, and if I am taught to keep quiet during this time, I may well carry that lesson with me, and rather than speaking truth, I may just keep my mouth shut to avoid rocking the boat.

So, here is my plan. I will think and pray before I speak, but not because the Board is coming up. I will think before I speak because words matter and are important.

I will sometimes censor myself, but not because the Board is coming up. I will censor myself, because I am called to be a part of the church, and part of what it means to be the church is to recognize that the wisdom of the whole is greater than the wisdom of the individual. This does not mean I will keep quiet. It simply means that I will be respectful of the fact that I am but a small part of the church.

I will listen to others and do my best to grow, to allow the Holy Spirit to work within me and teach me the ways of God. I will think and talk about ministry in terms of how God is working in my current appointment, and how God is working in the UMC (and the Church) as a whole. I will take what I am experiencing in my first years of ministry and seek to place it in a greater context.

And I will keep communicating, keep praying, keep blogging, because this is now I process and learn and grow and respond to God's call. I will do all that I can to be who I am.

The 2am Mystic

2011-10-10T09:26:00.005-04:00

I fear that I am a failed mystic.

I have been listening to the Howard Thurman audio collection, and while I find myself quibbling with some of Thurman's theology, I delight in hearing the spoken words of a man who has loaded up his things and taken the perilous journey to the center of the heart--and who has returned, alive, to report back on how the journey to his own heart ended with the shocking discovery that within his heart was a long hallway with doors, including a door that leads directly to my heart.

On days when I feel as if I have eight million details of ministry with which to wrestle, Thurman calls me back into myself, so that I may discover that God has been there all along. This is not a selfish quest for God-in-self, but a profoundly humble one, such that I am called to recognize that I have caked layers of nonsense upon my heart in order to shield myself from the frightful glory of God's presence. It is as if I do not want anyone to see my face aglow, as if I would be embarrassed by such a clear statement of God, and so I do whatever I can to contain that which is within me.

Each time I try to pack up my things and go on that journey, I find myself taking some frivolous detour, and it is not long before I end up right where I started.

And this is why I find Thurman so profoundly helpful. Just as a missionary comes to the church to share with the congregation what God is doing in the Dominican Republic, or Russia, or Uganda, Thurman tells me what is happening in my own heart, at the level that connects all people to one another, and all people with God, during the moment in which God says, "You are all my children." In all of this, I am reminded that in Christ, God shared human flesh and being.

I want to go to that place, to that point of myself that is so basic that it is nothing but being, for I suspect that it is at this level that God most powerfully speaks to us. I also suspect that it is at this level that one can most clearly see the Imago Dei, the image of God. I want to go there, to spend some time in being, to share in that being with God and with the great cloud of witnesses.

Then the phone rings, or the email comes through, or I remember something in the middle of the night that I have neglected, and I find myself on a detour back to where I started. Being will have to wait for another day.

But sometimes, something slowly bubbles up from deep within me, and I remember whose I am and how I am connected to God.

I woke up this past weekend at 2 or 3 in the morning remembering an email I forgot to return. It was nothing important, but then again, it rarely is important when I wake suddenly in the middle of the night, remembering something or other. But at 2am, even the most trivial thing seems life-and-career threatening, and so I worried about it, for a time, until I noticed what Gordon Atkinson calls "the mysterious sound of footsteps crunching in the snow," the "body language of the soul."

It was, of course, the sound of my own heart, my temple pulsing against the fabric on my pillowcase, but it surprised me, that morning at 2am, as if I had forgotten I had a heart at all, as if I'd been thinking of myself as a heartless container full of "What's next?" rather than a child of God.

It will surprise you that way, the heart, for even in times that seem devoid of spirit, that seem to be all details and no Great Being: even in those times, the heart is at work. What is more, it is sometimes in retrospect that I can see the Great Being actually within those details, guiding and connecting and moving towards wholeness.

Perhaps retrospect is my greatest lens, as I reflect on those moments that seem so mundane as to be nearly Godless, or at least, not worth God's time. Perhaps I am only fit to see God in those details, because I am not yet ready to fully face God, to have God set my face aglow.

I do not know the reason.

I do know that despite my seemingly constant preoccupation with the crisis of the moment, God keeps working. In the midst of everything else--everything else--it sometimes takes the beating of my own heart to remind me that the spirit of God is at hand.

United Methodist Theology

2011-10-09T07:30:00.000-04:00

I would draw your attention to an extremely well-written and thorough critique of the presence of Beth Moore studies in United Methodist churches. Jeremy Smith seems to have hit a nerve, judging by the reaction to his post. I know I resonated with much of what he has written on the subject.

I am less concerned about the substance of his critique of Beth Moore's theology (though it is well-taken) than I am about what I consider to be the underlying problem: there is just not much accessible theology coming from United Methodist theologians.

Think about it, those of you well-versed in this stuff. How much curriculum is out there by actual United Methodists? Who is putting this stuff out? If I told you not to include authors named "Adam," how long would your list be?

I was asked, during my Board of Ordained Ministry interview for provisional status, which theologians occupied the honored space on my bookshelf. I had no trouble with this question; I have many such spiritual guides. Then, I got this question: which United Methodist theologians were important to me?

I had to think on this one. I do have United Methodist theologians who are in my spiritual corner. I've read Willimon, of course, and Randy Maddox, and Scott Jones, and Ted Runyon. I have a great respect for Tex Sample. And I've read the standard United Methodist seminary curriculum. Thomas Frank. Russ Richey. Albert Outler. Ted Campbell. Lovell Weems. But what strikes me as holding this list together is that rather than being United Methodist theologians, most of these men (and they are all men) are actually experts in United Methodism. They are experts in some subfield of United Methodism. Tom Frank is, if you can call him this, a polity-ician.

Where is the general theology? Who are the great United Methodist theologians, leading us into the 21st century?

Perhaps the problem is not so much that there are no capable United Methodists interested in doing theology. I know plenty of intelligent United Methodist folks who are doing theology in the pulpit and in the pew. They just are leaving the theology in the sanctuary, which is a great place for theology but which can also be a prison if that theology is not allowed outside the stained glass windows.

"But people don't care about theology," you might say. I've heard this argument again and again. People just want the pastor to show up when they are in the hospital, or to call when an aunt dies, or to know the names of their children. People don't care about theology.

While I am sympathetic to this argument, you need only walk into a Christian bookstore to see this argument decimated.

You will not walk in a Christian bookstore and find it full of nerdy intellectuals. Walk into a Christian bookstore, and you will find it full of hungry people.

So the problem is less about not having enough capable United Methodists, nor about the death of intellectualism. The problem is that we are not feeding people, and that problem is WAY bigger than the others.

I suppose this shift in focus mirrors the general public in some ways. There seems to be, these days, a disdain of anything one might call "intellectual." And the very notions of questioning God, of testing hypotheses and using imagination to help expand our understanding: these notions are frequently described as "unorthodox," "pagan," and "divorced from Biblical truth." It is as if the Bible gives a very clear, direct, systematic, soup-to-nuts description of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and anything humans might do to better understand this Holy Being is against the very notion of what it means to be faithful.

In some ways, of course, all theology is folly. But this does not mean that it is not important work! The Bible, while sufficient, is not a simple primer on God. It is a collection of narratives in which God is made known, and we are called to play a part in that narrative! We do not simply understand God and move on with our lives. We take what we have received in the Bible and become a part of God's story. We have a role to play.

We can choose to stubbornly refuse to engage God in this way. We can choose to view God as something to be understood rather than Someone to be engaged. But when we--and I'm talking to the church leaders here--when we model such a simplistic understanding of the scripture, and when we choose a path that sounds nice but does not go about the fundamental work of feeding people from the fallow fields of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, then we ought not be surprised when people devour the tepid "theology" of the grocery store check out lanes--and of a growing part of our Christian bookstores (even Cokesbury is now selling Beth Moore). And, since we have helped them find nothing else to eat, once they have devoured these books, so processed, so full of empty calories, we ought not be surprised when the church lacks the energy to get up and do much of anything.

The Church--UMC and otherwise--is at a critical point. This is where we are. We can offer food, or we can let "Christian" businesses profit off of our laziness. In some ways, whatever happens, we will get what we deserve.

A Prayer for World Communion Sunday

2011-10-02T09:15:00.003-04:00

God our neighbor and our Redeemer,
You stand above us, calling us to you,
and you stand among us, calling us to one another
in your name.
Show us, once again,
that within each person
is the Imago Dei,
the Image of God,
and that you call all people
your children.
As we come to your table today,
let this occasion of World Communion Sunday
be a reminder unto us
that the church is not ours
but yours,
that the earth is not ours
but yours,
that the table is not ours
but yours,
and that the invitation to come
is not dependent on how we understand another's worth or status or place,
but that the invitation belongs to you,
and you extend it to all people.
Help us to be nourished by this meal
so that we may work to ensure
that not one of your children goes hungry ever again.
For though we may quibble about matters of theology large and small,
we know that in your kingdom,
all deserve food, and peace, and love,
for all of us carry an image of you.
We pray these things in the name of the one who called the disciples to this table,
and who calls us still.
Amen.

I now interrupt your regularly scheduled life to bring you this mission trip

2011-09-22T16:25:00.001-04:00

I have been in Frakes, KY all week at Henderson Settlement, a United Methodist agency of the Red Bird missionary conference. It has been such a blessing to be in such a beautiful place, working with folks who clearly need help. I have some reflecting to do, but I look forward to telling the story here soon. In the meantime, forgive the lack of a post this week. I have been busy!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Anything goes? Really?

2011-09-15T16:01:00.003-04:00

Maybe I'm just naive, but I keep hearing the same allegation spoken again and again, and it sounds something like this: the United Methodist Church is in decline because we are preaching "anything goes."

Let me bracket the issue of the United Methodist Church being in decline. I'm not going to argue that one. We've got to do better on getting folks in our doors, we've got to do better at baptism, we've got to do better at evangelism. This is all good. I'd like to have a church to serve in twenty years, after all.

But "anything goes?" Really? Have you ever actually heard a United Methodist pastor preach "anything goes?" Do we have a cadre of spiritually blase ministers out there, preaching "Whatever" and "Do what you want" and "What you think and believe and do don't matter?"

"Dearly beloved, we gather here for some reason or another, not that it matters, to join these two in holy marriage, which doesn't even really mean much. I'm just here for the honorarium."

"In the beginning was the Word, which you can interpret however you want. I choose to think that the Word was not so much a Word as a symbol, like the artist formerly known as Prince."

"Do unto others whatever you feel like, really."

"Keep these commandments, when you can."

Are these sermons being preached? Of course not. Find one such sermon, send it to me, and I'll eat my words. They simply do not exist. You would be hard-pressed to find one mininster who has preached one sermon that boils down to "anything goes."

This does not mean we do not have some deep-seated theological differences, not that that is a bad thing. We disagree on many issues, but ours is a big tent denomination, for better or worse. The United Methodist witness is born out of these disagreements, tempered against different opinions and dulled a bit, perhaps, in community. We move slowly, but we are a Church. We're carrying two thousand years worth of luggage. Slow movement is warranted.

To say that "anything goes" is to deny the strongly-held beliefs held by those with whom we disagree. I may hear a sermon with which I disagree, but I'll bet I will hear a passionate defense of the point, using scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.

Deep-seated theological differences are not the same thing as "anything goes," and I am starting to believe more and more that blaming "anything goes" is a convenient way to keep from looking at our actual house, figuring out what is actually going on, and addressing our actual issues.

But maybe I am wrong. Find me one "anything goes" sermon and I'll recant. I just don't think they exist.

God and everybody

2011-09-08T08:17:00.003-04:00

I am co-facilitating a Disciple 1 class with my wife on Wednesday nights, and it is always such a delight to watch people engage the Bible in a new way. I do not know how much the class gets from my facilitating, but I always get so much from their learning.

Last night, as we studied the flood narrative in Genesis, I asked them a question straight out of the leader's guide: what does this passage tell us about the relationship between God and us? I think it is a clear enough question, even if the answer takes some investigating. And it is a fair question. The Bible tells us all kinds of things about how we relate to God.

One of the members of the class asked me this question: "Is this about the relationship between God and me? Or God and everybody?"

I had to think for a minute, and I think I gave some garbled reply about trying to see if there were different answers to the different questions, or some such nonsense. But the question stuck with me, and at the end of class, I came back to the issue. Disciple, after all, is an exercise in communal Bible study.

For that matter, so is the church. We come to the church and participate in it because none of us has a corner on Truth. This communal endeavor--the work of tempering the "me" against the "us"--is the best argument I have against the spiritual-but-not-religious crowd. Of course you have your own truth. So do I. To simply embrace my own truth is to to simply embrace myself. I'm all for self-care and self-regard, but it is not such a far leap from embracing my own truth to worshipping myself.

It is in community that my beliefs are tested, or confirmed, or sharpened, or blunted. It is in community that I can be reminded that I am not so important, or that my experience of God is not the only experience of God.

In fact, community is WAY harder than having my own truth. It is not easy being told that I am wrong; it is even harder facing the fact that I may actually, in fact, BE wrong. I get frustrated with worship songs that are all about me, all about my experience. I am not surprised those songs are popular; it is much easier to have it just be, as the song says, me and God.

But the tempering process of community is important. This process ensures that the church is one, that we are in relationship with others and in relationship with God.

It is maddening, this business of being the church, but it is a holy madness. After all, what a miserable life it would be, just me and my truth.

(image (c) David Hayward, nakedpastor.com)

How God Acts

2011-09-01T06:38:00.009-04:00

Shane Claiborne, who is usually one of my spiritual guides, posted a cute story the other day in which a child asked him whether God sent Hurricane Irene. The gist is this: No, Virginia, God does not cause hurricanes.

And while the basic sentiment is important--God does not cause disasters--there is more to be said. God does not cause disasters, but what does God do? We often talk about God's action in terms of what God does not do, but speaking about what God is not only takes you so far. I am very sensitive to the notion that God stands above language, and thus ascribing qualities to God is dangerous business; in some ways, the more we describe God in human terms, the more we get away from who God actually is.

I also believe that we must be very, very careful about talking about what God does, because it is not such a far leap to start assuming that God is in control of everything, or to ascribing characteristics to God that are more about our understanding of the world than of God's understanding of the world. As the writer Anne Lamott says, you can be sure you've created God in your own image when God starts hating all the same people that you do.

So a spirit of humility is called for in all of this, but a spirit of humility is called for in most things. Such concerns should not keep us from speaking about how God acts

I do not care to pen a lengthy excursus on the myriad ways in which God works in the world. There are far more ways that God works than I am able to list, and besides, any such list is by its definition inadequate to describe God.

What I do want to do, though, is affirm the historically Christian notion that God works through people. As Claiborne says, it is God who saves the world, not humans, but to stop there is to do a great disservice to God's call to faithfulness, not to mention Wesley's call to acts of mercy.

So let me bracket the issue of God's saving act and simply assume that God's action in the world is understood. God is at work in the world. God is interested in saving the world. This is well and good.

But to stop the conversation after this, to say only "God does not send hurricanes" is to miss an essential part of the equation: that is, the end result. It is good to say that God does not send hurricanes, but hurricanes exist, so what should we do about it? How do humans react in the face of something like a hurricane? Ignore this part of the equation, and you'll find yourself only looking up--not out, but only up--and it will not be long before you trip on your shoelaces.

I have a hard time understanding why, in the doing of theology, we are only concerned with that which comes "down" from God? Why is a simple "no" sufficient to end the conversation about God sending hurricanes? Why are we only concerned about what God does?

I must admit that when I hear these kinds of answers, I cannot help but feel that we focus on what God does so that we do not have to worry about what we are doing.

We worry about whether God creates hurricanes so that we can get away with living as we always have, pretending that there is nothing to be done about problems here and now.

If the focus is on how God acts--and this is an important question, do not get me wrong--but if the entire focus is on how God acts, then there is no room to evaluate how we act, to think about the ways in which God works through us. After all, God working through us does not take the pressure off. It is not as if God, when needing to use me for some divine purpose, pushes a button, turns off my brain and puts me on autopilot, until the purpose is finished. I have initiative, and a brain, and emotions of my own, and until I am receptive to God's calling for my life--until I make a conscious decision to live as if God's purpose of Love might just be made manifest in me--I am not fully participating in God's plan for the world.

For as much as we talk about free will--for as much as we talk about the ways in which we are responsible for ourselves--we neglect the part about how free will requires something of us beyond simply agreeing to "accept" Christ. Even the language of acceptance means more than simply saying the words. Accepting Christ means accepting our great role in creation, accepting that God's love works through us when we serve, accepting that there is work to be done.

The answer to "Does God send hurricanes?" is much more than "No." The answer is even much more than "God came to save the world," though this part is vital.

The answer to "Does God send hurricanes?" is this: "God came to save the world, and while God does not send hurricanes, God does send us. Let us go."

On imagination and theology

2011-08-28T05:00:00.000-04:00

A conversation with our youth pastor today has me thinking about how we deal with theology in the church. We seem to think of theology as a science, or as legal testimony, as I suppose there is something to that kind of understanding. We want to understand God, and so we describe God as we see God, and we report on our experience of God. But there is a difference between religious testimony--which tells a story--and legal testimony--which must stand up to strict scruitny and requires precise speech.

But theology is not science. Theology is art. Theology is a way of speaking, and it does do some reporting, and some interpreting, but it is unlike any other form of speech in that it proves nothing. In fact, the more specific theology gets, the further away from God we find ourselves.

Theology is painting, not photograph. And yet we get so bent out of shape when we talk about God that we do not even let ourselves imagine. Before long, God is some concrete being we've carved and put on display. We argue back and forth--and get downright angry--over descriptions that are, in the final analysis, not worth arguing about because they do not actually amount to much. We latch on to an understanding of God that fits with our experience, and we assume that everyone has the same experience--even if we do not assume so explicitly, the assumption is inherant in our passionate defenses--and if we hear an argument that does not match with our own understanding, it is as if we are chewing on aluminum foil. You feel a shock deep within you, and nothing else matters. It becomes time to fight.

But imagination is the cornerstone of good theology! The God who imagined the world is the God who calls us to love with all our mind. When did we get the idea that to imaginatively engage the Divine is a bad idea?

The work of rest

2011-08-26T10:17:00.003-04:00

In recent months, I have taken to gardening. Let me simply note that this is a remarkable development. I was born with no green thumb. I did not grow up in a gardening family. My grandmother always kept a garden, but she did not subject her grandchildren to the laborious work of tilling the soil, planting seeds, watering religiously, pulling weeds, or the other work involved in keeping up a garden. I was not offered this tradition as some are given a family heirloom. There is no sociological reason I have taken to gardening.

But I am beginning to wonder if there is a biological reason, because I am finding that gardening offers me more comfort than nearly anything else I do. There is just something about starting seeds: something about ensuring they have the right soil and the right temperature and the right amount of water, planting them and watching the plants as they grow, produce, and ultimately die. When I began this project, I thought that perhaps my interest in gardening was a control issue. In the life of ministry, there is much out of my control. I suppose my job is to--forgive me--lay seeds and hope they will one day sprout. I thought that my gardening interest was then about control, because so much of ministry is beyond my control.

Then the plants started to grow, or rather, some of them started to grow, and I learned that while I could control some elements of growth, most were beyond my control. I could not control the rain, though I could water the plants accordingly. I could not control disease or bugs, though I could keep an eye out for them. I could not control how much fruit each plant put out, though I could plant them in such a way that they were given the best chance to produce.

I am realizing, as I write this, that I have become a plant parent.

What is most striking to me about the work of gardening, though, is that it is indeed work. It is much easier to go to the store and buy tomatoes and carrots than it is to begin them from seed, water them and care for them and hope that they produce. I am constantly checking on the next season's seedlings, looking at the weather forecast, puttering around the garden, picking fruit, pulling bugs off of plants, pulling weeds, thinking about what to plant next.

There are times I get too busy to work in the garden. Last week I had a meeting every single night, and I was out of town all weekend at the church's annual men's retreat. Sometimes, there is just no time to work in the garden. And when I come back from those times, as I did Thursday afternoon, it is quite clear I have neglected my responsibilities. Weeds are everywhere, vines are growing out of the raised beds and into the gravel, fruit begins to rot on the vine. Want to know how busy I have been at the church? Just come walk through my garden. If it is so overgrown that there is no room to walk, you can bet I've been neglecting my holy duty to rest.

It takes work to rest. This sounds strange, of course, but it is true. It takes work to slow down, to admit that I am tired, to find activities that nourish my soul. And even the rest itself is work, because it takes work to allow myself a few moments of not thinking about all the things I need to be doing at the church. It takes work to rest, and if I neglect that work, the garden becomes overgrown, unworkable, and it bears fruit that has rotten by the time I get to it.

So, if you will excuse me, I have some vines to wrangle.

The Rev. Twitter

2011-08-23T22:13:00.004-04:00

As the school year gets underway, and as things pick up at the church, I am finding out something quite interesting about myself. It happened this time last year, too, and so this is not just about starting a new position. What I am learning is this: when things get hectic at the church, I have trouble making myself read.

Perhaps this sounds strange. Let me say that this is not a physiological response. I can read (and obviously, write) and I do: the newspaper, the news, the blogs I follow. But when church life gets so crazy that I am forced to do one thing, and then another, and then another, and then look up and its time to go home . . . well, it does something to my brain. I start to think in thirty second increments, rather than in longer thoughts. I can give you three sentences on any topic you like, but don't ask me for sustained thoughts. I just don't know that I can offer them to you at present.

This constant changing-of-the-subject may be a survival mechanism for large church ministry, but it absolutely wrecks my reading life. I cannot read for more than a few minutes before I lose focus, feeling as if I need to move on to the next thing, as if I am missing doing something very important. I get so wound up during the day that when it is time to come home and settle in with a book, I lose focus.

It is as if I am turning into Twitter. I can give you 140 characters, but that's about it.

This mindset, of course, is not only unsustainable: it is ridiculous. People are not three sentences long; at best I can scratch the surface of thousands of people, like an evangelist who promises life-saving medicine in exchange for professions of faith. "Yes," is, of course, the answer to that question, and then you go on your way as if nothing happened other than receiving the medicine.

I can give you three sentences, but it is much harder for me, when this mindset hits, to go any deeper than that. When I am constantly on the go, thinking in short bursts, one after another, I am not much good to everybody and even less good to any one person.

Now, this is not to say I don't find the ministry life-giving. On the contrary, nearly every day in minstry confirms my calling.I am doing what I am supposed to be doing. I am genuinely happy, in a way that I did not know I could be. But I am having trouble making myself settle down, relax, and read. At best, I can plop in front of the television, and good grief, I'd rather be working.

What strategies do you use to "turn off?" I am happy to take time for self-care, but if I am not "turned off" during those times, what good are they?

Some fascinating reads

2011-08-19T07:05:00.002-04:00

I am off to Glisson this afternoon for the church's annual men's retreat. I leave you with some summer reading:

John Meuneir stands Tillich next to Wesley and draws some conclusions. I don't always agree with Meuneir, but he is nothing if not thorough.

James Howell bemoans clergy evaluation time and wonders if there might just be another way.

Keith Anderson does some incisive thinking about what social media is (and can be) for the church.

And, finally, here is a Facebook exchange I find absolutely fascinating. It is incredibly rare these days to see ANY kind of dialog between conservatives and liberals in the church. I know this can be a false dichotomy sometimes, but even then, we refused to talk to one another about real theological differences. I don't know that the tone of this discussion is terribly helpful, but I do find it fascinating.

Integrity

2011-08-17T06:33:00.003-04:00

The longer I am in ministry--and, in the grand scheme, it has been about five minutes--the more I am certain that in the American church, the greatest threat the church faces is a general lack of integrity.

Now, you should know that I erased the previous sentence five or six times before I felt as if I got it right: before I was willing to finally commit to the language of "a lack of integrity." I am very cautious about speaking in such bold language, especially because everybody these days has an elevator speech about what the biggest threat to the church is. Perhaps the church is most threatened by relativism, or a lack of scriptural literacy, or by money, or by politics. I have heard it all. So I approach this matter with fear and trembling, knowing that everybody knows what the biggest threat facing the church is, and it's always something different.

I've thought long and hard about this. I am convinced a lack of integrity is the biggest threat to the American church. Now, before you dismiss this conversation as some high-minded hoopla about a "lack of character" or a "lack of respect," I'd better define the term involved, because when I talk about lack of integrity I am thinking of more than one definition of the word.

The first definition of integrity, of course, involves sticking to your principles, even in difficult times. This is very important, of course, and I see so many folks who just give up on their principles when times get though. There is a difference between having integrity, though, and in being obstinate. Having integrity does not mean you are not allowed to change. It just means that you cannot forfeit what you believe when it becomes easy to do so. Change is difficult, while betraying integrity is always the easier path. Integrity is about being true to who you are.

But there is another definition of integrity that matters for the church, and that is this: the state of being whole: as in the integrity of the ship, the bridge, the union. Whenever I hear conversations about integrity, I never hear about this dimension of integrity, but we forget about this dimension of integrity at our own peril. We are called to have a holistic worldview, a holistic theology, and we are called to reconcile that which we see against that which we believe.

The problem with encountering things that do not match up with what you believe, of course, is that you are faced with a dilemma. You have three options: 1. ignore that which you see, 2. change that which you believe, or 3. compartmentalize, such that you make exceptions for that which you see but are unwilling to question that which you believe. While I have seen many who have fallen victim to number 1, it is number 3 that I think offers the biggest challenge to the church.

I see this issue most often as it relates to mission and the church’s involvement in the world. I believe that a church's engagement in mission—done well—can be the magic bullet as it relates to solving problems of giving, involvement, and ecclesiology. When we are involved in mission, taking time to reflect on our experiences and talk about that which we are seeing, we cannot walk away unchanged. But what a simple mission trip cannot do is make people have integrity, such that even if they are changed—even if they do see poverty as they have never seen it before (that is to say, even if they have smelled poverty as they have never before), even if they talk about fixing the need, doing continued work, that change does not spread towards other areas of their life.

We compartmentalize. We allow the Spirit of God into one small portion of our lives, and I suppose this makes sense. If we were to, you know, actually allow the Spirit of God to fill our whole beings, then we lose control of who we are. If I just let God into my earlobe, I can deal with that. My earlobe does not drive my body. If it gets too inflamed I can just cut it off, and it will be painful, but it is survivable. But if I allow God into my entire life, into my body and my home and even my savings account, then I am in danger of losing control.

We compartmentalize, because it is easier. The only problem with compartmentalizing is that it is not sustainable. You either lose that part of you which has been changed, or you split right in two (just ask these two folks).

To have integrity, then, is not only speak in such a way that people can believe you. Having integrity means being who you are in all areas of your life. Accept ambiguity—I do not mean to suggest that everything must be cut and dry—but do not lock your God in a cell. Do not allow yourself to be changed only a little bit. You might as well not bother.

If you do allow yourself to be changed--if you do recognize, for instance, that what you see in one country may actually have implications for your own—you may just find yourself in the presence of God. There are worse things.

Or, you can just miss that opportunity. That is also an option, if it is what you prefer.

Church work

2011-08-15T21:58:00.003-04:00

I spent today in an all-day staff meeting.

Wait. You need to read that sentence in a sinister voice, imaging haunting music in the background. Let me try again.

I spent today in an all-day staff meeting.

It was our annual knock-down, drag-out plow-through-the-next-year-and-a-half staff meeting, and so my Monday was spent around a conference room table, planning and talking. Maybe I've oversold it with this business about the haunting music. It was an all-day meeting, but I have had worse all-day meetings. I mean, the day wasn't all cupcakes and unicorns, but it was not torture, either.

It was work, is what it was. It was not terrible work, but it was work: the kind of work that leaves you cross-eyed and stiff, but the kind of work that is necessary for ministry to get done. You have to do the work--the office work, the paperwork, the guesswork, and the teamwork--or else nothing gets done. You can't just go play all day, every day. You have to do the work.

And it's funny, because one thing we ministers like to talk about is that professional pastoral ministry, being a pastor, is actually not a profession at all. You do not go to work, be a pastor, and then come home. If you are a pastor, YOU ARE A PASTOR. You don't easily change professions when you are a pastor, because being a pastor is who you are. It is a calling, of course: something to set against a profession, not in and of itsemf a profession.

I feel fine about this kind of highmindedness until the 14th and 29th of the month, at which time I look expectantly towards the next day's paycheck.

It is a twice-monthly ritual that reminds me that for everything else it is--and it is a lot of things, for sure--being a pastor involves actual work, actual toil. It is (mostly) not physical work, though there are connections to those who work with their hands. As a farmer plows the fields, I plow through emails. As a carpenter builds, sands, and finishes a table, I craft the occasional sermon. As a doctor, as a cook, as a baker, as a fieldhand . . .

In ministry, we spend lots of time talking about what it means to "be" something: be righteous, be faithful, be careful, be incarnational. I suspect all of this "be" talk has its root in the setting of ministry against other forms of work. We live in a society, you are aware, that often values work more than family, time at the office against time at rest. In a time when 12-hour days are the norm, there is something to be said for a prophetic "be."

But even if ministry is not a profession, per se, there is a "doing" of ministry that is very important. Perhaps in our reticence to be a part of the hyper-working culture, we have focused so much on the "be" that we lose the "do." I do not imagine this has always been the case. You know, of course, which word preceeds "work ethic." I will leave the general theology of work to the esteemed theologian Kyle Tau, but I do know a little something about "good" works.

The church has always, in one form or another, valued good work. Before the Protestant Reformation, the Church--having read the book of James, I would imagine--valued good work as a part of the salvation story. Once the Reformation took hold, the Protestant Church--having read the letters of Paul, I would imagine--saw a shift in the understanding of work, such that good work moved from something necessary for salvation to something that results from salvation. It a classic over-reach (the church always seems to over-reach), we've lost this work because we worry it takes away from the gift of grace, as if, you know, actually responding to grace does grace an injustice.

I am actually not all that interested in the conversation about "good work(s)," at least not for the sake of this discussion. Let's take it as a given that in response to God's grace, we are called to what John Wesley called "acts of mercy."

I am concerned with the work of ministry, which I suppose I hope is good work, but when I am signing expense forms and filing emails and spending Monday around a meeting table, it can be hard to see. It is hard for me to see filling out a check request for as an act of mercy.

But it is, right? The work if ministry is good work, and it is necessary! You can't just "be" a minister. You have to "do" ministry. And of course the works flow from the being. You "do" because you "are." If all you do is "be" then you are no minister at all! You are a guru, perhaps, a sage, and there is a role for the sage in society.

There is just no more room for the sage in the Church.

There are already plenty of sages in the pulpit, and it is killing the church.

This is not to absolve the "doing" minister of taking time to "be." Even those uf os who "do" must have sufficient "sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time" (as the writer Grace Paley calls it) in order that we might connect with God, rest our brains, and become open to new ideas.

Ministry requires doing and being, it requires of us that we take stock of who we are and then respond accordingly: not because we are worried that grace is insufficient, but because we take seriously the gift of grace. Hard work does not undermine grace; hard work gives testament to grace's power.

I am fortunate to serve in a place that takes work seriously (as evidenced by the day-long staff meeting!), but I knowthat there are some ministers who simply preach good sermons and then feel as if their work is done. Talk is cheap, of course. Even well-crafted talk is cheap. Please understand that this is coming from someone who sees preaching as a foundational part of his call. But preaching is an insufficient response to grace. I am reminded of the various Facebook campaigns which encourage users to copy and paste a short advocacy statement as their Facebook status. While I often appreciate the sentiment, I am left to wonder what good it does. If you merely speak something, and then do not live it out--if you talk about the problems of the world but do not do something concrete to help God's people--then why speak it at all?

For if the actuality of my life show what my priorities are, what does it say about how I understand God and the world if I do nothing, preferring to simply be?

The Art of Ministry

2011-08-13T12:43:00.001-04:00

The New York Post recently ran a fascinating report about the New York Public Library's phone-a-librarian service. Apparently, there are librarians on call twenty-four hours a day to field all manner of questions from all manner of people. As an associate pastor whose on-call day is Thursday, I am given hope for humanity knowing that just as one may call upon a pastor or a physician in case of an emergency, one may call upon a librarian at three in the morning in case of a dispute about the rules of croquet.

One librarian interviewed in the report spoke about an instance in which the producers of the television series Mad Men called to ask about whether a taxi in 1964 would have had a lit "Off Duty" sign on its roof. The show is set in the 1960’s, and its producers are famously fanatical about staying true to period details. They call the librarians a lot.

Mad Men, of course, is a critically acclaimed, lucrative program, and as such, the producers could have gotten by with whatever old-looking taxi the prop department had on hand. The studio could have saved a little money instead of creating an entirely new prop, and only one or two people out of the millions who watch that show would have noticed. Maybe nobody would notice: I have seen the episode in question and the particulars of Don Draper’s taxi certainly had no bearing on the plot of the show. But because they take their work seriously, the producers of Mad Men go to great lengths to ensure that the taxi cabs on the show are just as they were in 1964. They go to these lengths because they see their show as art.

Ministry is an art, too, or at least it is supposed to be. We pastors like to talk about the “art of ministry” as if it were a craft to be set beside painting and composing, as if the sanctuary were a museum built to house genuine (if transitory) works of art.

The problem is not so much that we do not view ministry as art. The problem, it seems to me, is that as ministers, we do not take the art of ministry as seriously as the producers of Mad Men take the art of television.

I am in my second year of pastoral ministry. As I look out over the years of ministry ahead of me, I find myself spending a lot of time asking “what if” questions. This is a time of great change for the Church, after all-- Phyllis Tickle calls this time a great “rummage sale”--and I am finding that the Church I expected to enter is not the one to which I have been given. Much is in flux, and while uncertainty can be scary, it is the ability to freely ask the “what if” questions that I find most liberating about my first year in ministry.

What if we served the church in such a way that we truly saw ministry as art: as messy, difficult, life-wrenching art? How could we ever even dream of ripping off a sermon, or of getting bogged down in minutiae, or of stretching some warmed-over church growth strategy to fit a situation completely unlike the megachurch from whence it came?

What if we took the art of ministry seriously, remembering that the composition is not a self-portrait but a representation of that most Ultimate subject?

Comparing the ministry to a television show is, of course, unfair. When there is a problem off set, the cameraman can simply shut off the camera, while the minister must put down her sermon and speed to the hospital, doing her best to avoid red lights, small animals, and the police. But the distractions are not so much an excuse to turn in sloppy work as they are yet another opportunity to practice the art of ministry, to bear witness, to create in the hope that God is pleased.

Ministry is art, after all, and not just for the professional minister. One is in ministry because one wants to honor God, and within that honoring lies the artist's hope: that every breath in the making of art is art itself, that striving for excellence is not about furthering one's career or looking like a martyr, but about being an artist, about living art, about doing as much justice to the love of God as can be done by human hands. As a painter paints a scene, knowing that there are within that painting differences between the actual scene and its representation on canvas, so too the minister goes about her business, practicing that which we appropriately call the art of ministry, knowing that she can neither do full justice to the love of God nor replicate it exactly. What she can do, however, is use what she has. She can strive to live and practice ministry in such a way that the God to whom she bears witness can be seen in the art of her life. She can live in such a way that the Imago Dei that infests her being spills out onto those she loves and cares for and serves.

Perhaps it is this spilling that is the aim of all art. Perhaps art aims to make us all spill out, and to examine the resulting puddles for signs of that which makes us human and, I would add, signs of that Who makes us human.

I stand at the beginning of my ministry, working within an institution already left for dead by so many for so long, yet I cannot help but be hopeful, for I know that the God who created humanity in God’s own image is creating still. I may have no skill at painting, nor composing, nor sculpting, but I am in ministry, and I know that this same God expects me create anyway, to be an artist in a world—and in a Church--in desperate need of art.

Some quick thoughts on Call to Action

2011-08-12T10:08:00.003-04:00

The Connectional Table has voted to endorse the recommendations of the Call to Action report, a series of proposals designed to restructure the United Methodist Church, reverse declining trends in the US, and help focus the UMC into an outcome-based denomination (I think these are fair and accurate descriptions of the report).

You can see a PDF of their recommendations here, and a blog post from the head of the Connectional Table summarizing their actions here.

I will say, as these conversations have played out, I have been far less appalled than I thought I would be. As I have written before, I have been concerned that the language of crisis would give cover to those who want to make huge changes to the way the United Methodist Church functions, such that what Jeremy Smith has called "creeping congregationalism" were allowed to take place. I have little tolerance for the language of crisis, because it seems that whenever we talk about "crisis," we figure that we should make changes and evaluate later, rather than moving slowly and deliberately.

Sure, there are issues that need to be addressed. I don't think you can deny that, but there are always issues that need to be addressed. The General Conference meets every four years for a reason; the world changes, the church changes, perhaps even God changes. We need to be able to change the way we understand the church, so we meet every four years to do so.

So when I read the relatively measured steps of the Connectional Table's recommendations, I breathe a sigh of relief. I do have some issues with this analysis, though, and I do have concerns that I hope will be addressed in the actual legislation before General Conference.

1. As the General Conference looks at weakening the language of "guaranteed appointment," or eliminating the language altogether, how can the annual conference implement structure that holistically evaluate clergy effectiveness (that is, protecting clergy from, God forbid, a Bishop with ulterior motives) without creating another Methodist logistical nightmare? There are, of course, already in the Book of Discipline guidelines for dealing with ineffective clergy, but my understanding is that the guidelines are so difficult to implement and complicated that they are almost never used. Put another way, as someone new to ministry, I want to be encouraged to be effective, and I want to be dealt with if I am showing ineffectiveness, but I don't want to be kicked out of the ministry for ideological or political reasons.

2. How can the General Conference realign the General Agencies, necessarily reducing staff, without putting too much of the work of these Agencies on the local church and its pastor? As someone who has worked for a jurisdictional agency, as well as someone who serves the local church in addition to some conference responsibilities, I am particularly sensitive to the workload associated with carrying out the mission of the larger Church. Local churches, pastors, and laity ought to have a role in promoting the mission of the Church, but there are benefits to a connectional system. The UMC needs full-time staff devoted to these matters. Pastors simply do not have time to carry out their duties in the local church and spend a large segment of their time driving denominational (or conference-wide) goals.

3. As the denomination looks to evaluate how we allocate apportionments, what happens NEXT General Conference once we have spent the $60 million proposed to help restructure the church? I have seen the church, time and again, simply eliminate these resources when it comes time to put together another budget, rather than reallocate them to the mission of the UMC. Also, as we look to income-based apportionment giving, will we bring in far less money than the current system? What does that do to our mission?

4. Finally, as has been admitted by the head of the Connectional Table, where is the theological basis for any of these recommendations? To quote Mary Brook Casad's own analysis of the Table's actions:

I've heard the challenge of showing the theological underpinnings to these recommendations. I would like to thank each person who is making the effort to raise these important questions. While the Connectional Table, in collaboration with the Council of Bishops, has set the process in motion, it will take all of us in faithful conversation to discern where the Spirit of God is leading us.

I commend the transparency of the Connectional Table in all of this, but I note that what you will not find in that analysis is any kind of answer about why the language of the Call to Action report--and the work of the Connectional Table--includes nothing theological, nothing scriptural, nothing noting that the Church is any different than a big business looking to maximize its earnings. Again, I don't mean to shoot down these recommendations, nor the good work of the Connectional Table, but when you say something like "I've heard the challenge of showing the theological underpinnings to these recommendations" and then don't actually show the theological underpinnings, I begin to wonder if there are, in fact, theological underpinnings.

This is an interesting time for the UMC, and an interesting time to be a young minister. I would hope these questions help to clarify the implications of such sweeping changes.

(In the original post, I neglected to link to today's post from the aforementioned--and quite reasonable--Jeremy Smith. Obviously it was his thoughts that got me thinking today. Go read them.)

Wordle for 7.31

2011-07-31T06:27:00.000-04:00

Viva la Guatemala!

2011-07-07T08:03:00.002-04:00

Just a heads up: I leave Saturday with a group of twelve other bold folks from Johns Creek UMC to head to Panajachel, Guatemala to visit Rev. Tom Heaton and his incredible ministry, Mission Guatemala. This is the first trip I've led in over a year, and as someone who worked for the short-term mission agency of the UMC, I'm not ushttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifed http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifto being stateside for so long!

While I am away, you can be a part of our adventure by following along on our team blog: http://jcumcmission.blogspot.com. I hope you'll be in prayer for us as we go.

One more plug: if you are interested in this sort of thing and are part of the North Georgia Conference, Stacey and I are leading a team to Uganda in early March of 2012 through the conference's Bridges initiative. We'd love to have you go with us. If you want to know more, drop me a line.

On social media

2011-07-06T22:21:00.006-04:00

There has been quite a stink lately about the Kentucky Conference's social media policy, and while I do not care to dive too deep into the crevasse of Board of Ordained Ministry policy, I do think it is WAY past time for those of us who are pastors to figure out how to use social media.

I have taken the tack, so far, of wait-and-see. I have never been one to post intensely personal things on Facebook (or on this blog, for that matter), but I also have kept my Facebook privacy settings pretty strict. I don't limit what folks can see once I friend them, but I also have made it so that I can't be searched for. This strategy has worked, so far, in my capacity as part of a multi-staff congregation; people are not that interested in the online life of an associate pastor. Besides, I really don't care to rock the boat too much as an associate. I want to be myself, of course, but I honestly also don't want to do anything to distract from the senior pastor's vision for the church.

I don't have anything online I am ashamed of, short of the haircut displayed in several high school photos in which I have been tagged. I do not have photos of myself doing kegstands with bikini models or whatever. I'm pretty boring. You'd be hard-pressed to point to a place on Facebook where I've violated the social principles (though, I should note, this is not a challenge!).

Still, there's the issue of integrity. I want to be who I am, and I want who I am in real life to match up with who I am online. I think those members of my generation--especially in the clergy, though not exclusively so--are sort of at a crossroads with this social media business.

Those who are older than me did not grow up with the internet. They did not get into Facebook when it was The Facebook (and only open to colleges and universities). Many of them entered (and continue to enter!) the world of social media with a wary eye and a general feeling of inevitability. There does not seem to be a problem, with some of these folks, about how to handle social media, but then again social media is not so much "social" for many of these folks as it is, well, an assigned parking place on the internet.

Those who are younger than me have grown up with a Facebook page to which their parents had access. They instinctively know how to operate online, or at least they are good at hiding those things which they do not want their parents to see. I suspect that as they come into the professional world--and as those who are called enter the ministry--they will face many of the questions my generation is now facing. For now, though, they seem to operate online quite well, devoid of much professional responsibility.

But those of us in the middle--I'd say four or five good years worth of Facebook users--entered the social media world thinking it was one thing and are now being told it is something else entirely. The problem is not so much the changing nature of social media. The nature of technology is that it changes.

The problem is that those changes mean I have to reconfigure how I am socially oriented, and if this sounds like an exaggeration, let me just say that I grew up with the internet, quite literally. My first AOL handle was DRush11, reflective of my age at the time. Those of us who are now young professionals, especially young adults navigating the clergy universe, have been taught to be social online in a certain way. Now that my role has changed, now that I am living into my calling, I have to fundamentally reorient my social self. This is difficult, and I suspect this is also why so many United Methodist young adults are reacting so viscerally to new policies on social media.

So cut us a little slack. We are figuring this stuff out--and from a much different place than those who are writing the policies. As people of integrity (and most of us are!) we recognize the issues. We just need a little time to make the adjustments.

As for me, I'm still deciding on how to use Facebook. If we're talking integrity, hiding behind privacy controls does not seem to me to be much better than lying about who I am on Facebook.

The prison of the short-term

2011-07-05T08:35:00.003-04:00

We are held prisoner by the short-term nature of decision-making. Health care costs are skyrocketing because, in the moment of crisis, please, doctor, do whatever you can to stabilize great-great grandma. I do not mean to deny empathy to those at the end of their lives, but at what point to we tack on an extra two months to someone's life at the expense of providing basic healthcare to the uninsured? Surely there is a way to ensure basic health care for all people, rather than viewing health through the lens of crisis: somebody get the crash cart, do whatever you can, keep trying.

And, in war, we spend three hundred thousand dollars to produce one Humvee, when that money could provide a hot meal for over a million children, perhaps negating the need for the armored vehicle in the first place, with the added benefit of, you know, feeding a million children. In the heat of the moment we allow military spending and healthcare innovation to be its own end, but standing at the precipice of the future, surveying the whole world and God's call to faithfulness, these things cannot be their own end. Perhaps they are a means to an end, but they cannot be their own end.

All of this makes me wonder how God views history. I think I know, but it must be interesting to watch us scurry about.

On a new project

2011-03-08T21:46:00.002-05:00

I'm working on a new project this Lent that I am excited to announce here shortly. It has been a season of health issues for us, but thankfully we're coming out of that, and it is time for something new. I look forward to letting you into the know!

In the meantime, blessings on your Lent, my friends!

On a brief absence

2011-02-20T07:26:00.002-05:00

Just checking in after a rough month. I've been so busy I have had little time to write, and when I have time, I have felt little inclination. I have thought, several times, I should write something on the blog . . . but not once have I come up with anything to write about. I just haven't had the heart.

But we've moving past some health issues and the busy January season, so I hope to check in here more often. My apologies for the gap. Peace.

A small thought for the morning

2011-01-17T11:05:00.005-05:00

I just cannot get past the notion that the fact that Martin Luther King was a clergyperson was integral to his mission and historical persona. There is power in that robe, in the calling and the ordination, and we forget just what drove Dr. King at our own risk. King was a Christian pastor, who preached and lived out of Christian scriptures. His message of reconciliation and justice was a deeply Biblical one.

Incidentally, I am pretty sure he read the same Bible as the rest of us.

Lest this read as some call to repentance for the Christian church, let me simply say that it is.

Dr. King on Avoiding Tension

2011-01-17T11:00:00.001-05:00

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail

On what the church is, part 2

2011-01-11T14:39:00.004-05:00

In part 1 of this thrilling series, I talked about how the church lives out its call as the body of Christ. In this post, I want to talk about what the church needs to do in order to change--and how it must evaluate whether change is worth it. In my next (and I suspect final) post on this issue, I'll talk about the fundamental issue of what the body of Christ is in the first place, and how our human structures and bureaucracies can bear witness to this scriptural understanding of the church.

I should introduce this notion two ways. First, the reason I am thinking about this particular issue is that I recently read Adam Hamilton's Leading Beyond the Walls. I will say that this kind of "Look what I did" book usually does not appeal to me, but I just really enjoyed this book, and reading Hamilton's discussions of why he does what he does was really eye-opening to me as I think about what the church is and could be, even if I did not always agree with his rationale and actions.

Second, I must admit my general unease at the talk about fundamentally changing what the church does and how it operates. I am one who immediately turns off when someone talks about having a "relevant" church with a "relevant" pastor and "relevant" ministries. We have spent so much time bending church structures and functions in the name of relevancy that the minute the church launches these ministries, they are no longer relevant. In the name of reaching out to people outside of church culture, we have created a whole new church culture. If you have seen churches in which Hawaiian shirts are common, or with rock concert-like lighting, or with holographic presentations of the preacher, or with awesome video, etc.--then you know what I am talking about.

I also serve a very traditional church, and I'm happy for that. If I were creating the perfect church for me (congregation of one), we'd have high liturgy, traditional hymnody, exquisite vestments, smells and bells, the whole nine yards. I am at a church that values traditional, high-church liturgy, and I find myself more uplifted by worship--even while leading it--than I expected, or than some pastors I know. Johns Creek UMC does worship awfully well. I am a traditionalist at heart.

And yet I find myself wrestling with tradition as I come to terms with what it means for the church to be the body of Christ, because while I am a traditionalist, I fully recognize that some of the church's traditions have less to do with being the body of Christ than they do with preserving whatever it is the church has become.

This is not to say we should get rid of tradition. I value tradition as part of the Wesleyan quadrilateral, and I believe it has much to teach us about who God is and how God works. I likewise believe that church tradition need not always have Biblical foundation for it to be a valuable, viable, faithful witness to Christ. We discount two thousand years of Christian tradition at our own peril. Those pastors who want to start entirely fresh, who want to forget who has gone before, are the picture of hubris, believing that their vision for the church is greater than all others.

I do not believe we should get rid of tradition. But, as Phyllis Tickle has said, about every five hundred years or so, we go through another period of enlightenment when we look at who we are and reevaluate how the church functions as the body of Christ, because it is very well likely the case that we have some fine tuning to do.

So we have some sorting to do. Tickle calls it a "rummage sale," which is cute, I suppose, but does not do justice to just how difficult it is to figure out what to hold onto and what to toss. Thankfully, this responsibility does not fall on one individual, church, or denomination; the process of reinvention takes place over many years. But we as church leaders of all stripes must wrestle with this issue, of what to keep and what to get rid of.

In some ways, we've already begun. Many churches, for instance, have tossed that traditional hymnody in favor of "contemporary" music. There is much to celebrate in this shift towards finding a way to meet people where they are, and I have no beef with electric guitars in worship. But the theology! The theology in much of what I have heard described as contemporary music is just awful, just terrible, totally devoid of any thoughtful, reasoned reflection on how Christ works in the world, or how we are to respond to Christ's love. It is all about me: me, me, me.

I don't mean to harp on contemporary music. Much of it is good, and there is some good theology within it (and some good music!). I use contemporary music as an example of the implications of tossing out a vital part of the church's witness, without much thought about the implications. Throw out traditional hymnody, even with good intentions, and a great theological witness is lost.

Is it worth losing that witness? I'd say no; obviously, many folks would disagree with me. But we can't pretend that nothing is lost. As we strive to figure out how to faithfully be the body of Christ, we have to be careful. We are, if you will excuse the pneumatological pun, playing with fire, after all. There are consequences to our changes.

But as long as we pay attention to the consequences, and recognize they are there, change is important, as we do what we can to be the most faithful body of Christ we can be. As we--the church--have learned more about how God works in the world, and especially of how Christ fits into our lives, we have two thousand years worth of witnesses to whom we can listen. As we have listen, and as we pick up insights, we also pick up some baggage: the gum on the bottom of the shoe. The problem is not that the gum is on the shoe; the problem is that we think the gum is part of the shoe, and so we hang onto it.

There is baggage we can leave behind, certainly, and there are changes that need to be made. The question I am wrestling with today is this: how can the church wrestle with its fundamental mission of being the body of Christ, reinventing itself without losing much of what gives it its power? How can we be disciples who are faithful to God's continuing call without tossing out the baby with the bathwater?

Let me close with a final example that I think illustrates my inner conflict.

I have always felt that preaching was a central part of my calling as a pastor. I love to preach, have a gift for it, am energized by the whole sermon process. I enjoy reading about preaching, thinking about how stories impact our identity as humans and Christians, and wrestling with the Biblical text in a way that leads to faithful exegesis. I love to preach, and I am a good preacher.

But something Adam Hamilton talks about in his book has me rethinking the whole preaching act--maybe not in my current context, but in the context of my entire ministry. Adam Hamilton talks about his process of selecting sermon materials, and about his delivery style, and he argues that the state of Biblical and theological illiteracy being what it is, any pastor worth her salt should preach thematically and in a teaching style. Most folks don't know the language of the Bible, or the themes, and so rather than telling stories that either bring about an experience of Christ in the sermon, or which point to some moral truth, Adam Hamilton talks about teaching during his sermons in a way that helps people learn.

My struggle is this: my style works for me. It is natural, I have good response to it, and it fits the model, I think, of mainline preaching. I work hard at crafting sermons, and because this is a gift for me, I usually feel good about what I craft. Part of the reason I use a storytelling style is that these are the kinds of sermons that most appeal to me as a listener. I could listen to Fred Craddock preach all day, and feel the whole time that part of what he has done with his stories is call upon Christ to be present in the room with us. I love this kind of preaching.

But what if another style is more effective? What if a teaching style--which I do not find as natural--is what people need? What if teaching sermons lead to more change within people, more making disciples and more transforming the world? Then wouldn't I be crazy to continue preaching the way that I currently preach?

And yet, if I change the way I preach, something will be lost. Is it worth it?

On what the church is, part 1

2011-01-07T22:39:00.003-05:00

I almost titled this post, "On what the church is, and could be," but I'll go ahead and give away the punchline: the church is the body of Christ. It should work to be the body of Christ, whatever that looks like, and it should seek to be nothing else.

Of course, it is not quite so easy. There are two specific issues the church has got to deal with, if it is to truly be the body of Christ. The first issue is that the church needs to figure out what that means--being the body of Christ. The second issue is that the church need to figure out how to live in the world as the body of Christ without losing its essential character.

In this post, I'm going to be dealing with the second issue--that of how the church can live in the world as the body of Christ, and nothing else. In a few days, I'll take up the bigger issue--just what being the body of Christ means for the church--but in this first installment let's explore how the church lives out its call.

I have been thinking a lot about vision statements lately, and my provisional ministry group is supposed to talk next month about visioning: how a church does it, what the process looks like, etc. I am thinking about visioning in light of two different arguments I've been hearing about the process of visioning for a church.

The first argument goes something like this: the vision is everything. If it does not fit in the vision, it is not done. The church's vision, for reaching the lost or transforming the world or whatever it is, informs all that the church does. The pastor--and leaders of the church--must take great time to discern God's vision for the church, and painstakingly ensure that the vision is implemented. You can find the vision on the church's website, you will find it on signs in the church, you may even read it as a congregation. The vision is everything, and if the congregation is not moving towards that vision, then the church is being unfaithful to its calling.

The second argument is that a church having a vision fundamentally warps that which God has called us to be. A body does not have a vision--it simply is. Once you add a vision to a church family, it ceases to be a family and begins to be a purpose group.

I must admit that if I had to choose one stark reality or the other, I am on the side of vision. I find that writing things down is helpful--this practice helps us all get on the same page and keeps us from scheming. So much harm is done in the church because of folks scheming to bend things their way, and a stated vision helps focus us. If there is one thing I know about churchpeople, it is that we are not a very focused bunch.

I am also sympathetic, however, to the idea that the church is not only a group of people who do; it is a group of people who are. It is true: once we steer people towards a goal, and push them to work towards it, we necessarily lose some of the emphasis of being and begin to focus on doing.

I was reminded, in an interview I read from Bishop Willimon (hat tip), that Jesus's message to us is "follow me." As much as I worry about what happens when the church becomes a group of doers, Jesus's message is a "do" message just as much as it is a "be" message. Yes, Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart, but I also want to follow Christ, which may be something else entirely.

Following Christ means that the church is called to live in the world with a message of redemption, but also with an agenda of action.

And this call to action, of course, has profound implications for the first question above--about what it means to be the body of Christ. There is a certain model for church (and, I'd say, a certain model for mainline church in the United States), and I have a deep and abiding love for it. But if God is doing a new thing, how can the church reevaluate and retool in light of its, well, vision of being the Body of Christ?

I look forward to exploring that issue next. I have some thoughts that are surprising me.

On wedded bliss

2011-01-06T08:31:00.001-05:00

We got married on Epiphany, four years ago. What a day--and what a great four years.

On music

2011-01-02T06:04:00.003-05:00

"Albert Blackwell's The Sacred in Music makes a compelling case for the "sacramentality" of music itself. Tracing two distinctive Christian sacramental traditions, he draws on both the central theological claim of the Incarnation and the contemplative tradition linking music to silence. Music is sacramental in that it contains the mystery of the inexpressible depth of reality, yet makes it audible and palpable to human sense. Both of these dimensions, he claims, mirror the very idea of the self-incarnation of the invisible God in the physical world of time and space, perceived by human senses. Thus music in its depth dimension bears the sacred mystery of God, who is transcendent spirit, made flesh."

Don Saliers' Music and Theology, Abingdon 2007, p16

On time

2011-01-01T00:39:00.001-05:00

"Another year has passed," as they say, and it is only natural to think about time: what it is, how we live with it, how it affects our lives.

I think it is fair to say that 2010 was the first year I realized that I was getting older, in any substantive sense. Oh, we all notice getting older as children, but we tend to see this getting older retrospectively, in terms of where we have been and how we have grown. Each year is a year to grow into something more, when we are children, but this realization that our shoes do not fit anymore and that next year we'll be learning multiplication is a far different realization than understanding that we are growing older, because growing older is quite different than moving up a year in school.

I realized I was getting older in 2010, in my 27th year, as I have laughed at Stacey's comments about my hair turning gray, and as I have watched my forehead grow, and as laugh lines appear around my eyes. I do not mean to sound overly grand; I am only twenty-seven, after all. But even as a young adult I can begin to see how aging affects life, for this is the first time in my life when I have really experienced aging. I have also seen dear friends and family members wrestle with the aging process. Some have refused to believe aging exists, which I suppose is understandable. Others have embraced aging as a sad, if inevitable, fact of life. Still others rejoice in aging, even as it throws the mind and the joints for a loop.

Maybe I am just thinking especially lately about my ankle, which has been smarting for the last few weeks, or my back, which seems to stiffen every now and again. But I have this sense that I am getting older: not in terms of growth, though there is of course some spiritual and emotional and mental growth--but in terms of age, in terms of finitude, in terms of living in time.

And I think this is what I mean when I say that 2010 was the first year I realized I was getting older. Perhaps a better way to say it is that 2010 was the first year in which I understood time to be something that went before me and goes after me, rather than some infinite expanse full of possibility.

Coming to this realization is part of being an adult. At some point, you must choose for yourself which path you will take. The choices you have are not entirely your own; I am not so naive as to believe that I am master of my own destiny. There are others (and an Other) involved in this process. But at some point, paths emerge, and you choose. This is in some ways a liberating choice, because it enables you to put on clothes you were born to wear, and they feel good. They feel awfully good.

Still, there is implied in this choice unchosen roads, and while I do not mean to suggest that all choices are permanent, it is the case that an unchosen road necessarily ceases to be a viable option, and it dies: sometimes a quiet death, fading into the ether, and sometimes a violent one, thrashing until the very end.

Once those choices die, there is grief. Grief is only natural, and I have to believe that God honors that grief as the natural extension of a life lived passionately and deliberately. I could have chosen road A, but I did not, and now it is gone, forever. Grieving is natural.

I do not mean to suggest that I spent 2010 drowning in grief. Though it was a difficult year for us in many ways, there were many life-giving moments and people, and I leave 2010 behind feeling more full than when it started. But I do not want to ignore what happens when we choose a path. This is not to say the path will not change--there are always forks in the path, down which we can travel, for whatever reason--but a choice implies other roads not taken. A choice without alternatives is not a choice, after all.

I suppose I am thinking especially about time because in addition to the lines around my eyes--I noticed them in the mirror tonight, as a matter of fact--2010 was the year I began in full-time ministry, the first time I put on the robe in an official capacity, the first time I had to tell people at parties that I am a minister. This is a strange business, the clergy, and I find myself loving what I do and who I am and what God has called me to more each day, even as I find myself rolling my eyes and wondering what on earth I have gotten myself into.

As I experience this passing of time, I am also beginning to understand what it means to "live into" something. I have heard the phrase over and over--in seminary, it was a buzzword akin only to "in the tension"--but I am beginning to really get what living into something means, especially as it relates to living into the life I have been given.

I am not someone who believes God has planned out my entire life in advance; besides wondering about the theological and scriptural basis for such an argument, it just does not sound like much fun. So living into my life is less about finding out God's plan and more about discovering what it means to live, as a person, in time, with God, and with the people who share my journey.

Maybe this all sounds a little "out there." I am ok with that. Living into my life requires me to understand that having made peace with God as it relates to my calling, I am also called to make peace with time, and with the roads I did not choose.

I am called to understand that what goes before me goes after me, too. Time is not merely something to catch: some limitless goal which, having been caught, calls me forward again. Time goes before me, too, and will go on long after I am gone. Time, being God's medium, is the canvas in which I live--in which we all live--and just as it goes before me and goes after me, it goes before everybody else and after everybody else, too.

Even as I make choices that necessarily narrow my life's focus, it is not as if there is a life waiting at the end of each road which must die; though there is grief in this life decision-making process, there is no finite time that dies with each choice. God's time is such that rather than losing each prospective person at the end of each path, I am gaining the person I continue to become, the life I continue to live into.

This is a liberating thought to me: that time is God's medium, that time is not only the number of days until my next birthday, but rather it is forever, in both directions, and that while God does not have my entire life planned out for me, God promises to go along with me as I stumble along the way. And not only does God promise to go along with me, but God promises that fellow travelers will share the journey. With these folks' help, no heartache is unbearable, and no joy worth keeping under wraps. Come to think of it, that's not a bad hope for the kingdom. You know, as Wesley said, "Heaven opened in the soul."

At the beginning of 2011, as I stumble, this is enough for me: that God is with us, and that you stumble alongside me.

I hope it is enough for you. Here's to a good year.

Merry Christmas, folks

2010-12-25T09:50:00.000-05:00

Blessings to you this Christmas--and on earth, peace to all whom God favors.

I preached our 11pm service yesterday--the church was packed all day, and the midnight service was no exception. Preaching Christmas Eve is tough. You can't really tell stories, which is how I usually preach, so I felt like every priest you have ever seen in a movie: you know, "Now, let us all remember the joys of Christmas," etc.

As folks walked out at the end of the service, instead of "Good sermon," which is what I usually get, I got lots of, "Well, you got us to midnight," which is either a compliment or damning with faint praise.

Here's something I've posted before, but which I think about fresh every Christmas. Merry Christmas, folks. It is a joy being in conversation with you.

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On what the Bible is, and is not

2010-12-21T15:27:00.001-05:00

I am an AJ Jacobs fan. I have not read The Year of Living Biblically--I have been waiting to be gifted it, ahem--but I did read The Know It All, and found it to be both fascinating and hilarious, which are two words you will not find in this particular review. I like AJ Jacobs because he takes his subjects seriously, in that he treats them fairly and engages them fully, but not so seriously that he cannot see how ridiculous it is for him to stone an elderly adulterer in a park with a pebble.

Here is his TED talk about the Bible, and while I do not agree with everything he says (obviously, as he is agnostic), I do agree with the basic framework he uses to talk about how we should understand the Bible: that is to say, seriously, but not literally.

On illness and rest

2010-12-20T10:29:00.000-05:00

I have, on many occasions, been known to bemoan those pastors who go and go and go and refuse to rest until they get sick. Having spent the last week two shades from miserable, I may have lost my cred on this issue.

To my credit, I think my nephew got me sick. We babysat last Friday for him and his sister, and coughing on me turned into something of a game. But I was so tired--and am so tired--that it is really no surprise that I ended up sick, no surprise that I had to quarantine myself for a couple of days just to rest enough to spend some time in the office. You go and go and go, and your immune system loses juice, and before you know it you have to get sick just so you can get some rest. It is pitiful.

And now, a week after first getting sick, I'm still tired, still worn out by noon. At this point I am just trying to get to Christmas. Thankfully, things are slow this week--I just need a Christmas eve sermon, and I am good. After Christmas, we'll sleep for a week, which is what I need.

It has been adjustment, to say the least, as I figure out the particular patterns of being a pastor. This is not to say that I feel overworked--truly, I am pretty good about cutting things off and saying it is time to go home. But I continue to be surprised that even as I am careful about taking care of myself, I still get worn down sometimes. In short, you cannot remove the stress from pastoral work; you can only manage it.

Maybe that sounds painfully obvious, but it has been a revelation to me. As someone who is good at dealing with stress--really!--I still get stressed, still occasionally lose sleep, still get worn down and sick and tired. Self-care is about more than just avoiding stress. It is about recognizing stress, getting appropriate rest, and not being consumed entirely by the rigors of the job.

So here’s to a restful Christmas and an inspired new year. Don’t look for me at midnight on the 31st; I will probably be asleep.

On radio silence

2010-12-18T10:41:00.000-05:00

My apologies for not blogging this last week and a half. I am on the tail end of a nasty cold, and I have barely been able to think straight enough to dress myself, let alone make some sort of sustained argument.

Thankfully I am on the mend. I'll be back very soon.

Peace.

On Trust

2010-12-07T09:03:00.000-05:00

It is clear to me that just about nobody trusts the church anymore. A study flagged by Michael Jinkins shows that, in a survey which asked "Whom do you typically trust to provide accurate information about important issues in society?", religious authorities ranked dead last. Last!

Part of me is thankful for this lack of trust; it seems that those "religious authorities" who have the most public forums are the most bombastic and opportunistic among us. If the issue is, who do you trust to incessantly talk about issues of abortion, gay marriage, and Koran burning?, then I'm glad people are getting their information elsewhere. These are important issues, each in its own way, but there are other issues in the life of faith. Religious leaders who incessantly harp on these issues ought not be trusted, in my opinion; the Gospel is bigger than gay marriage, after all.

And while I am often glad that church iconoclasts are ignored, not everybody in the church is bombastic and self-serving. Maybe this is a revelation to you, but there are some goodhearted folks in the church who have some important things to say! If nobody is listening to the church (for whatever reason), and I represent the church (which I do), then nobody is listening to me. I do not believe I am the most insightful representative of the church, but I occasionally have some valid things to say, and so do most clergy I know. Otherwise, why would we waste the breath?

I have entered a field few people trust. Nothing I have done, to this point, has led to that mistrust, but I must deal with it nonetheless. I am starting in a hole, and while I suppose I knew this in some ways, it is interesting to see how this lack of trust plays out. In many ways, I am a great test case--I do not have the history with a congregation that an older minister might have, so the trust I do solicit exists solely because of my office.

I am not looking for folks to take what I have to say at face value, all the time. But when the church is viewed with a skeptical eye all the time, and when the sermon begins with a congregation predisposed not to believe what is being said, then we're in trouble.

The challenge is that we have to create a culture of trust in the church: not so that everything the church says is taken at face value, but so that the church regains spiritual authority. Those clergy who take their call seriously—and who care about the call more than they care about the spotlight—have work to do.

So the question I face is this: how do I relate to an institution (and as a steward of that institution) if nobody believes what I have to say? It is as Kierkegaard says: “There is no lack of information in a Christian land; something else is lacking, and this is something which the one cannot directly communicate to the other.”

How do we communicate that which cannot be directly communicated, and in a way that helps people trust? What is the way through?

(PS This is my first post that is referenced on Methoblog. I'm grateful to those faithful bloggers who run the shop over there, both for listing this blog and for being a window to the greater Methodist conversation. You have my thanks.)

On Social Justice and the Gospel

2010-12-04T08:29:00.000-05:00

I have spent much of the weekend reading about how the church is dealing/should deal/cannot deal/must embrace/must run from issues of social justice. Everybody's got something to say about social justice, especially after the whole Glenn Beck tempest, and the arguments seem to fall this way:

Progressives embrace social justice at the expense of speaking of salvation and eternal life.

Conservatives embrace salvation and eternal life at the expense of speaking of social justice.

Or, you can make the formulation a little more crudely, but I think this is a fair description of the traditional arguments:

Evangelicals or Conservatives care only about salvation of souls and the world hereafter. Liberals or Progressives only care about issues here and now, such as social justice.

So, the argument goes, each group cares about one or the other. And even those good folks who are trying to make some sense of God's call to social justice in the midst of this crazy political environment basically counter this argument by saying, "This is not a fair description," or:

Evangelicals/Conservatives care as much about life in this world as Liberals/Progressives care about eternal life. But very often, obstacles such as varying perspectives, differing emphases and vocabulary, and disagreements regarding strategies to solve issues such as social justice come into play.

The apparent issue, then, is that both groups care about both spheres of concern, just in different ways and with different "emphases." This, I think, is the standard way of finding middle ground. Conservatives do too care about social justice! Liberals do too care about eternal life!

While I am thankful for those who are trying to find that middle ground--it seems harder and harder every passing day--the way through this issue is less about granting that the other side does care and more about realizing that at the end of the day, the church ought not draw bright lines between concerns of eternal life and concerns of social justice, between heavenly concerns and earthly concerns, between saving souls and saving lives. If we are to understand religion as a holistic enterprise, with no part separate from the others, drawing such a distinction just does not make any sense.

Just as we celebrate the diversity of witnesses in the Bible, we are called to live as one people, under one God. And to divide our concerns into the here-and-now vs. the yet-to-come is to needlessly cut God in half, to miss the fullness of God's revealed self for the sake of making the life of faith easier, making the challenge of God less challenging.

The issue is this: since when did we remove the service of others, in the name of social justice, from our understanding of what it means to follow and worship God? As we throw around arguments about how social justice fits into the Gospel, it is increasingly apparent to me that all the Christians must have gotten together and decided that--while they may disagree with the importance of social justice--at least working for justice and worshiping God are two very different things. They must have had a conference and decided this. Now, why they decided this, I do not know. I was evidently not invited to this gathering.

I jest, but the sentiment is quite serious: presupposed in the arguments about liberal vs. conservative churches, social justice vs. salvation, program churches vs. worship centers is the notion that justice and service are quite different than worship and concerns of eternal life.

My concern is that when we separate salvation and social concerns, we do neither justice. And implied in this separation--implied in any separation!--is that you can have one without the other: like you can have peanut butter and jelly, or you can have just peanut butter or just jelly.

I am fairly certain that if you asked the early Christians how they understood the need for salvation and the need for social justice, they would not even understand the question. Acts is clear: bound up in the Christian community was the notion of the common purse, of taking care of physical needs, of looking after those who needed looking after.

This is a nuanced point, I realize, and the church does not always do nuance so well! But it is a vital point for the church, especially the United Methodist Church, which uses John Wesley's language of "works of piety" and "works of mercy" to separate what I suppose you can call concerns of salvation and concerns of social justice. Even Wesley, it seems, separated these two spheres!

But even as he separated these two areas of spiritual concern, he did note that they were areas of spiritual concern! And rather than being guiding principles, "works of piety" and "works of mercy" were subtitles for what he called "Means of Grace," or:

outward signs, words, or actions, ordained of God, and appointed for this end, to be the ordinary channels whereby he might convey to men, preventing, justifying, or sanctifying grace.

God works within works of mercy just like God works within acts of piety, and I have to believe that you can't master one without the other.

In our quest to have "authentic worship," to talk about Christ's redeeming power over sin, we have forgotten, I think, that the Imago Dei--the image of God--is not just in me, but in everyone I meet. When I meet someone for the first time, I am seeing a picture of God as much as I am seeing anything else.

If you want to get scriptural about it--and I do--you need only look at Jesus's command to look after one another, for in that service you will serve God.

You simply cannot separate salvation and social justice. Christ was as concerned about the saving of the human race on earth as he was the saving of humans from sin. In fact, the way that Christ most powerfully said that we serve him is by serving others.

With such a clear scriptural command, I just don't understand why we are still making this distinction. There is no such. When the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews said that "faith without works is dead," he was not saying that faith and works were two co-equal parts of what it means to be a Christian. He was saying that social justice is a fundamental part of following Christ, and you can no more separate social justice from faith than you can pull your heart from your body.

Faith without works is dead. Not difficult, not wrong-headed, not painful. Dead.

I think it's pretty clear, right?

On the Rebel Jesus

2010-11-30T08:29:00.001-05:00

This song continues to be a gift to me. I hope it is to you. Blessings this season.

(lyrics)

On What Could Be

2010-11-29T14:44:00.001-05:00

(Forgive me for posting a sermon text. I try to post something longer each week, in addition to a couple of smaller pieces. But charge conference is tonight and I am tied up in meetings all week. Here is a sermon for the first Sunday in Advent, preached yesterday. I heard the DS say today, at a district meeting, that we ought to be more positive about our economic circumstances. Having slogged through this particular sermon yesterday, the point is well taken.)

Text: Isaiah 2:1-5
Title: What Could Be

I was here two years ago and it is a real pleasure to be back, especially on this first Sunday of Advent. Advent is sort of a strange season—we are waiting for something that has already come, expecting a child that was born two thousand years ago. Advent is a distinctively different kind of season—it is a church season, which means that like a lot of other things in the church, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but we do it anyway.

But I love the Advent season. There is something about waiting for Christmas that reminds me of waiting for the birth of a child, that sense of anticipation, those preparations, and Advent helps make Christmas mean more to me than ripping open presents and eating half a honey banked ham and passing out on the couch. You need that sense of expectation, I think, to make the day worth it, and in some ways we need it now more than ever. I don’t have to tell you. These are uneasy days, and the days have been uneasy for some time. When I preached here last, things had just turned south, and we were in it, but I think we all figured that this time, like most periods of down times, this time it would quickly pass. We would batten down the hatches and weather the storm, and then we’d go on like we always had.

But this time has been different, of course. It is hard to have hope when all around you seems to be falling away, and you wonder whether your next step is going to fall on solid ground or on a trap door where you find yourself in a hole with a tiger. These are uneasy days.

So, I don’t know about you, but I have been especially looking forward to Advent this year, because even if things are tough, at least I get the small piece of chocolate every day when I open the little door in my Advent calendar. When times are tough, you hold on to any little piece of happiness, any little piece of hope you can get your hands on, but lately I almost feel as if I don’t want to have hope. Now, I know that is a strange thing to say, but I almost really do feel like I don’t want to have hope, because I worry that I will just end up disappointed. Every time I feel like the world is getting ready to come out of this nonsense, we dive back in, and there’s always something to keep you disappointed, if that is what you are looking for. There’s always a new piece of economic news to disappoint you, or more awful sales figures at work, or another exhausted, hopeless look at the end of the day from your spouse. There just does not seem to be much to hope for—we are in so deep that you almost want to give up. And the worst part—the worst part—is that we seem to have lost control of the situation. So much of this is out of our control—I will venture to guess that there are no Wall Street bankers or members of Congress in the room—so much is out of our control that you wonder if we will ever feel like we’re walking on solid ground.

So let the record show that times are rough, but before you give up on me let me tell you that the kind of period we find ourselves in today is quite similar to the situation that the Israelites found themselves in, in this chapter of the Book of Isaiah. Their fate seemed to shift with the wind. One day, Egypt dominated them, and the next it was Assyria, or Babylon, or someplace else, but it didn’t really matter who it was. It felt like nobody was in charge, and because things changed so quickly, there really wasn’t anybody in charge, at least for long. It felt like nobody was in charge, least of all God, and when you start to feel like even God is not in charge, it is easy to lose sight of God’s vision for the world, because there are always, it seems, more pressing concerns, more immediate problems.

I say that you start to lose sight of God’s vision for the world, because in a lot of ways, that’s what hope is: hanging on to God’s vision for the world, trusting that God is still God. That’s what hope is, I think: believing that God is still God.

The Israelites had lost sight of God, and started to trust only in themselves, and this happens more than you might think. A nation loses its way, and of course you start to blame God, because if God is in charge and things are bad, then the natural extension is that God made things bad. Or you lose a job or a loved one, and if God is in charge, and you lost something, it must have been God who took it from you, and who wants to trust a God who does something like that? Oh, nobody really believes that, you might think, but how many times have you heard someone at a funeral say, “I guess God must have wanted another angel?”

These kinds of formulations work just fine, if you assume that God really does control everything, really does everything independent of human actions—if we are just pawns in some divine game of chess between God and the devil. It sounds ridiculous, but until something truly awful happens, it is of course much easier to think this way: to think that you are successful because God wanted you to be successful, blessed financially because God wanted you to be blessed, that all you are and all you have are who you are and what you have because God wanted it to be that way. And while I do not deny that God works in our lives, it is only a short skip and a jump from this kind of understanding of God to creating God in our own image instead of the other way around. It is just a short hop to a belief system where everything we do is justified just because it happened, and God would not have let it happen if God did not want it to happen that way.

Do you hear what I am saying? We self-justify and then stamp God’s name on it, like a knock-off pair of sunglasses or a purse with a designer label sewn into it, because self-justifying and attributing our actions to God’s will is easier than asking hard questions about what God’s true vision is for the world, and how we as God’s people fit into that vision.

I know these are hard questions. They are so hard we don’t even really ask them, in the church or otherwise. Oh, you hear all the time about God’s vision for your life. You can’t turn on the television without seeing some TV preacher with beautiful teeth telling you about God’s vision for your life. If you listen to those preachers, God’s vision for your life is for you to have gobs of money and nice cars and seventeen homes.

Even if you reject this sort of thinking that says that if you are faithful, you will be wealthy, you probably have asked yourself about what God’s vision is for your life. I think it is a perfectly reasonable question. Finding God’s vision for your life is important, I think, but it is not terribly hard to do, because it is easy to see your own role in finding God’s vision for your life. If you are like me, you have no problem thinking about yourself. I am something of an expert at thinking about myself. I pretty much do it all the time.

Asking questions about God’s vision for your life is perfectly reasonable I think, which makes it all the more surprising to learn that the prophet Isaiah could not care less about God’s vision for your life. Israel was full of people who asked about God’s vision for their lives, but what they did not do was ask about God’s vision for the world. Isaiah is talking about God’s vision for the world, and your place in it.

God’s vision for the world is really something quite different from God’s vision for your life, because thinking about God’s vision for the world require going outside of yourself: thinking about what God’s vision is—not just for you, not just for this time, but for the entire world, for the entirety of time. God’s vision for the world is bigger than any lifetime, bigger than any one person or one nation. But just because God’s vision is bigger than any one person does not mean that we as God’s people have no role in God’s vision. The world is not a cosmic chess game in which the pieces have no control over their own movements. God does not demand that we move three spaces forward and two over, and then it is the devil’s turn. That is now how this all works. The world is an active, moving place in which God is at work, yes, but the primary way that God works is through God’s people, so God’s vision for the world is less about things happening to us than it is about us making things happen.

And in the midst of all of this the prophet Isaiah gives us a pretty clear picture of God’s vision for the world: and oh, what a vision it is. Instruments of war bent into instruments of food production. Peace among all nations. Food for everyone. The study of war falls away and gives way to the worship of God. These words have so inspired the world that they are engraved on the United Nations building, and displayed outside the World Court, and celebrated on countless other monuments to peace, all over the world. With such beautiful language, and so many people claiming to take it seriously, you’d think we’d be closer to a world full of peace. I guess the reason is that these words, like so many others in the Bible, are chalked up to impossible idealism and ignored as beautiful but outdated relics of an earlier time.

It is idealistic, for sure. But it is also God’s vision. If you decide that life is too hard for God’s vision, too hard to work towards this ultimate goal of beating swords into plowshares and bending spears into pruning hooks, I suppose that is fine, but don’t try to fool yourself by pretending that you are putting your trust in God, or that you are seeking God’s vision. God’s vision is that there is war no more, and maybe that’s a politically incorrect thing to say, but it is in the Bible, so I feel pretty comfortable saying it. You can’t properly have hope, you can’t properly put your trust fully in God our Creator, without working to bring about that vision.

Look, I know we are not there yet. I may be an idealist but I am no fool. We are not there yet. I do not believe will get there before Christmas. But even though the work is hard, and heartbreaking, and just because I may not see the ultimate results of my hard work, God calls us to the work anyway. Just as we wait in Advent for that which has been and is not yet, we wait and work towards God’s original intention for the world—that which was in mind when God said, “Let there be light:” that all may live in peace with one another, that there is enough for everyone, and that we may study war no more.

So I invite you to ask yourself two questions this Advent. First, what is God’s vision for the world? This is the easy question, because the answers are in the book, and it is an open book test, after all. What is God’s vision for the world? It is here, in Isaiah, and it is all throughout the rest of the book, too, so you should not have too hard a time answering. Here’s a hint: it may just involve all the peoples of the world shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, and that national shall not lift up sword against nation, and neither shall they learn no more. This may just be God’s vision for the world. Isaiah seemed to think so.

The second question is much more difficult, but it is just as important: what am I doing to bring about God’s vision for the world? Not so much what is God’s vision for my life, but what am I doing to bring about God’s vision for the world?
Figure out how to answer those two questions, and I suspect that life will feel less out of control, because you will find yourself working towards God’s plan. It is hard, because God’s vision requires something of all of us, but I believe that if you take God seriously, you will find yourself among a great communion of saints, many who have gone before and many who are with us now, who are assisting God in bringing about a world without hunger and without war. I do not know what your part in this effort looks like. That is between you and God. But I suspect that God has a role for you, no matter who you are, no matter how old, how skilled, how skeptical that this vision will work.

This is difficult work, but God promises that it is indeed possible. And I know no better symbol of God’s promise that this vision is possible than a child, born in a barn, who would grow up to show us a new way. May we take him seriously this season, may we follow his example: now, and always.

On the Trinity

2010-11-22T14:59:00.000-05:00

We Christians neglect our Trinitarian heritage. While I am not certain as to why we do not dwell more on the three-fold nature of God, I suspect that one reason for our (small-u) unitarianism is that trying to make sense of the Trinity will give you a mild case of vertigo.

It is much easier to think of God as one-in-one. I also have a theory that people don’t like thinking about God as three-in-one because it makes us feel too much like polytheists.

I happen to like this notion of Trinity, though—and that is a good thing, considering that I have pledged to uphold this doctrine. I like the idea that God is fundamentally relational—that just as God relates to God’s self, God relates to us. There are relationships within the trinity: Creator and Christ, Christ and Sprit, Creator and Spirit. On days when I feel isolated, I take comfort in this relational understanding of God.

There is another reason, though, that I find the Trinity to be a particularly powerful notion. Let me back up a bit and explain.

I think a lot about cohesiveness. I firmly believe, for instance, that one’s beliefs should stand up in all aspects of one’s life. That is not to say that I don’t believe in shades of gray. I do, but I also believe in integrity: that notion that you do what is right, even if the consequences are nasty.

You just cannot go through life split in so many directions. Divide your loyalties, and you’ll split right in two: just ask Ananias and Sapphira. And much of modern psychology is built upon the principles of wholeness and cohesion. You can’t live a proper life when your beliefs are stacked up against one another. It is just not healthy.

So I think a lot about cohesiveness, especially as it relates to the Christian life, and that is why I am thinking about the Trinity today, about three persons of God who represent vital parts of what it means to live in Christ. I think of the Trinity both in its historic formulation of Father-Son-Spirit, and in its theological formulation of Creator-Redeemer-Sustainer.

First, the Creator. Without the creator, there is nothing, as there is no One to create. Creation, of course, was not a one-time event. We are constantly created and recreated in the image of God. Were God not constantly creating and recreating, there is no need for redemption or sustaining; there would be nothing to redeem or sustain.

Second, the Redeemer. Without the redeemer, God the Creator and God the Sustainer would be creating and sustaining such a horrid bunch of self-loathing and self-destructive people that I wonder if the whole exercise would even be worth it. This is not to say that there is no goodness within humanity; Wesley taught that sin “is a malignant disease, not an obliteration of the image of God.” The fact of sin, and the fact of broken relationship, means that there must be a force, greater than ourselves, which takes that which was created and saves it, restores it to community and frees it from the bondage of selfish obsession. Without the Redeemer, we are but a wandering pack of self-reliant nomads, unable to settle down because we are unable to see our place in the great matrix of human life. In the connection that exists between humans, and between humans and the Divine, God the Redeemer shows us a better way.

Third, the Sustainer. Without the sustainer, God the Creator and God the Redeemer would create and redeem humanity, but that moment of redemption would be the last moment humanity would properly reflect the Imago Dei. As M. Scott Peck began The Road Less Traveled, “Life is difficult,” and a difficult life without a sustaining God is a hopeless place. Without hope, the Imago Dei breaks down, because God is One who continually calls us to greater things. God’s promise to be with us, even to the end of the age, means that God’s presence in the human life does not end with redemption. God sustains us, calls us to greater love and care, and lives with us. This last point cannot be oversold: God lives with us, actually.

These kinds of thought experiments are helpful only to a certain degree, of course. God is all three of these things, so to imagine God as only one or two of these things is difficult, if not impossible. But thinking theologically helps me see a fuller picture of God, and to work towards unity in my own beliefs and understandings. I cannot help, for instance, see a link between the way I’ve described the Trinity and the United Methodist understanding of Grace as coming before us, justifying us, and sanctifying us.

Deeper Still

2010-11-19T16:48:00.000-05:00

In the tears you gave to me
I found a river to an ocean
A concrete sky and a stone cold sea
That came to where the emptiness cracked open

And all my fears came crashing through
And met the fire of my sorrow
But I found my strength in forgiving you
I never even dreamed how far my heart could go

To give my life beyond each death
From this deeper well of trust
To know that when there's nothing left
You will always have what you gave to love

In this life, the love you give becomes the only lasting treasure
And what you lose will be what you win
A well that echoes down too deep to measure

A silver coin rings down that well
You could never spend too much, a diamond echoes deeper still
And you'll always have what you gave to love,
You will always have what you gave to love

David Wilcox, "Deeper Still"

Merton on Grace

2010-11-17T08:27:00.000-05:00

What is "grace?" It is God's own life, shared with us. God's life is Love. Deus caritas est. By grace we are able to share in the infinitely selfless love of [God] Who is such pure actuality that [God] needs nothing and therefore cannot conceivably exploit anything for selfish ends. Indeed, outside of [God] there is nothing, and whatever exists exists by [God's] free gift of its being, so that one of the notions that is absolutely contradictory to the perfection of God is selfishness. It is metaphysically impossible for God to be selfish, because the existence of everything that is depends on [God's] gift, depends upon [God's] unselfishness.
When a ray of light strikes a crystal, it gives a new quality to the crystal And when God's infinitely disinterested love plays upon a human soul, the same kind of thing takes place. And that is the life called sanctifying grace.
The soul of [human], left to its own natural level, is a potentially lucid crystal left in darkness. It is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside and above itself. But when the light shines in it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and seems to lose its nature in the splendor of a higher nature, the nature of the light that is in it.
So the natural goodness of [human], [the human] capacity for love which must always be in some sense selfish if it remains in the natural order, becomes transfigured and transformed when the Love of God shines in it.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

On what the UMC does right

2010-11-15T07:57:00.000-05:00

There has been a good deal of talk lately at the denominational level of the United Methodist Church about what is wrong with the UMC. We've been issued the Call to Action report, which among other things, comes from a place of "crisis," a word that is used in the report some fifteen times. Crisis, crisis, crisis. We have to move now, or the whole blasted thing might just fall in on itself.

You get the picture. Everybody wants to get a word in about what is wrong with the United Methodist Church. There has been a report, and before you know it, it's a voting year in Annual Conference, and then General Conference. Before you know it, the election cycle in the UMC is just as long as in American politics, which is to say it never ends. And the rhetoric is negative, just awfully negative, and it's no wonder we all think we're in dire straits. We've been using the word "crisis" so much that we are starting to believe it!

I do not deny that there are issues the UMC needs to deal with. As a young clergyperson, I certainly am sympathetic to the church's need to reach young people, both to grow the committed laity and to grow the clergy. Having worked for a jurisdictional agency for three years before my current appointment, I am also familiar with concerns surrounding church structure. There is some fine tuning to be done.

But God forbid we talk about what is right with the church. I'm not one to pretend that life is all rainbows and cupcakes, but I think there is probably a legitimate case to be made for looking at what the church is doing right, and using that as a starting place, rather than looking at what the church is doing wrong, and beginning there.

Actually, in some ways, that was the stated modus operandi of the Call to Action report, inasmuch as the group was seeking to measure "vitality" of churches. But even as the group is looking at markers of vitality, the reports reads as if the vitality markers are just something against which to measure the rest of the church.

And in all the conversation about church reform, and about General Conference, and about "reaching the lost" and "being relevant" and whatever else the buzzword is this week, we focus on what we are doing wrong--or, perhaps to be more specific, what we are not doing well enough.

I'm all for these conversations, because you can't really be properly self-reflective without thinking about what you could be doing better. But as put together a comprehensive plan for survival, I can't help but think that this look under the hood of the UMC is not so much a look at the UMC as it is a coveting of what other denominations and faith traditions are doing well.

We have been in this place before. The last part of the 20th century saw the UMC co-opting other traditions' church-growth models, and we are now coming to see that while those models may have worked for us for a time, they have not left us in such a great place as a denomination. Even nondenominational churches are beginning to see that having beat the church growth drum for so long, they are worse for the wear.

These models often have pulled at the connection, exposing places where the thread is ripped and holes have formed. I have heard the words "creeping congregationalism" used to describe the path we are on, specifically as we look to the Call to Action report. I would not take it that far, but I think the basic sentiment is fair. As churches go off on their own, and neglect the connection, the connection gets weaker.

Perhaps weakening the connection is fine with some folks. Too much bureaucracy, too much heavy-handedness, too much control over the life of the local church: I've heard all these arguments, just within the last week. But, I mean, my God, we're United Methodist. Let's be United Methodist. This is not to say that the Spirit is not moving in other denominations, in other traditions, and it is not to say that great things aren't being done outside the UMC.

If there is one thing I've learned about ministry--really, it's been drilled into my head by those concerned with clergy self-care--it is that God does not expect us to be all things to all people. So why are we trying to do that with the denomination? The UMC obviously wants to reach as many folks as it can, as, you know, I'm pretty on board with the whole business of making disciples for the transformation of the world. The message is good. But why are we looking at all these things we COULD be instead of looking at what we ARE?

This is why I am thinking about the connection today. The church to which I am appointed, Johns Creek UMC in metro Atlanta, held an event yesterday with Stop Hunger Now, an anti-hunger organization. 50,000 meals got packaged, and ten other churches in the Atlanta-Roswell District participated. Ten! All we had to do was make an announcement at the district set-up meeting, put an ad in the district newsletter, and talk to ministers who are already my friends. And we had ten churches come participate, sending money and volunteers--we almost had too much of both!

Connectionalism, of course, is such a low priority in other organizations and denominations that it is not an actual word; my spell check does not recognize it, and I can't find it in the dictionary. But when we tend to the connection--because it does need tending--it is life giving. Eleven churches in total yesterday packaged meals for 50,000 kids.

The hard news is that we need each other. The good news is that we already have each other, if we will tend to those relationships. A marriage does not work, after all, unless both parties put in work to keep the relationship strong. A connection of churches (which we are!) does not work unless we put an effort into working together. In that working together, I am pretty sure that we will find that those connections are what is--quite literally--holding us together as a denomination.

I think that is a fine place to start.

Or, you know, we can serve the same warmed-over report, year after year, and talk about what a crisis we are in.

Look, I get it. The church has got to change--and it is hard to change the church, because the church is a fundamentally conservative institution. We are conserving tradition and practice. But if we are always in crisis, what is the point of existing at all? So many things get served to me during the day under the banner of "this is a crisis and must be dealt with immediately" that I am starting to believe that unless life and limb is under immediate attack, calling something a crisis does it more harm than good.

But there are good things happening in the UMC. Great things, even. And it tends to be that the best things that are happening in the United Methodist Church happen when churches work together, celebrate that connection as more than just lip service, and understand that we are all in this boat together.

Of course, plenty of more experienced folks have weighed in, and the Bishops seem to like the report. We will see what comes of it. Maybe I'm just naive.

But, you know, out of the mouth of babes . . .

On the spirit of mind

2010-11-10T08:07:00.000-05:00

I seek the renewal of the spirit of my mind.

There is a spirit of mind without which it is impossible to discern truth. It is this set of mind that makes possible the experience of truth and distinguishes it from the experience of error. It is this spirit that recognizes or senses the false, the dishonest, the bogus thing. It is this attitude that determines the use to which facts are put.

The spirit of mind works in our behavior, in what we do, in what we say, whether our acts are strictly moral in character, or whether they have to do with the manner in which we deal with each other or the traffic of the market place or aught else. This spirit of mind is the factor upon which the integrity of performance rests.

Constantly, I must seek the renewal of the spirit of my mind, lest I become insensitive, dulled, unresponsive to the creative movement of the spirit of God with which life is instinct. True, the spirit of my mind is a gift from God but it must be ever held before Him for testing, for squaring.

Here in the quietness I seek the renewal of the spirit of my mind that I may be a living, vital instrument in His hands, this day!

I seek the renewal of the spirit of my mind.

Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart

On art

2010-11-09T07:59:00.001-05:00

We had the chance, last weekend, to see the Atlanta production of Ovo, one of the more recent Cirque du Soleil shows. I think we saw one of the first productions of the show in Atlanta, but you wouldn't know it from the performances and professionalism of the cast. I was so impressed with the incredible physical abilities of the cast that it actually, at first, almost made the show hard to watch. You worry about whether someone is going to fall, because what that person is doing looks so physically impossible that you just KNOW they are showing off for the crowd and they are going to fall.

And then they don't, and you move on to the next anxiety-ridden performance.

Only, there is something so beautiful about a Cirque performance that it was not long before I got over those anxieties and soon found myself so wrapped up in the show that I was not even really focusing on one performer. There is so much happening on stage--so much color, so much movement--that it can be hard to focus. But it was not long before I could feel my view broaden, quite literally, and I started to take in the entire show, from my seat in the fifth or sixth row.

And it was art. The show was art. It was not a collection of feats of strength, or a colorful group of people, or some kind of freak show. It was art, in the sense that art is that which bypasses your brain entirely and knocks on the door to your heart. This is not to say that art cannot be cerebral--it certainly can--but even cerebral art knocks on the door to your heart, only to climb the brain stem back into your head, like a trapeze artist climbing a rope ladder.

It was art. And I do not know if I actually felt as if I was above myself, but that is how I remember it, because that is what art does. It pulls me out of myself, which is good, because it can be stifling in here.

I joke, but what it definitely did make me think is that I need more art in my life. If I am going to try to move beyond drowning in a sea of details, then I need art to throw me a life raft. After all, we are speaking to that which is at the human core, and to that which is at the heart of God, and to that which is both at the human core and at the heart of God.

There are no finite words that can adequately describe either the human core or the heart of God, because at the very center of being there is that which is beyond words, what Schleiermacher described as "absolute dependence," an ineffable understanding that we are in unity with God and the world. Schleiermacher was talking about religious experience, which is as much art as it is anything else, if you ask me.

It can be hard to feel that absolute dependence when I'm filling out expense reports and coordinating volunteers and making phone calls. But these are merely brush strokes in the great canvas, the place where the core of human existence intersects with the heart of God.

* * *

There is a painting I love. It is called "Les raboteurs de parquet," or "The Floor Scrapers."

It was painted by Gustave Caillebotte, who is best known for a different painting, if he is known as a painter at all. Mostly, he was a collector and patron of the arts. The Floor Scrapers is not a particularly well-known painting, though it does hang in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.

And yet, something about that painting speaks to my heart. I don't know what it is--it is certainly a strange painting to have speak to my heart, but it does. I will always remember coming up upon the painting at the Orsay, and how I felt just starting at it, the movement depicted, the ordinariness of it against the shine of the sun on the varnished floor. When we went to Paris for a week after we graduated from seminary, I made a beeline straight for this painting and just stared, allowed my heart to remember what it felt like to find it for the first time.

I have a poster of The Floor Scrapers that I look at from time to time, and--though it is not the same thing as seeing the original--the poster reminds me of what it feels like to stand in front of a canvas so large you have to wonder how it fit through the door, and to just stare, until the details fall away and the brushstrokes meld and I suddenly find myself standing at the edge of the infinite silence.

That's what art is, I think. And ministry, without art, is dead.

On grief.

2010-11-02T15:55:00.001-04:00

If prayer is the attempt to understand God, then grieving is the deepest form of prayer, rising from the body and soul and mind, asking God and really and truly wanting to know, no matter what the answer: Whoa re you? Why did you create a world with pain? Why is life this way? What are you? Because you are not what I thought you were.
Grieving, at its deepest level, is to acknowledge that creation can be cruel and that people suffer. To look at this truth, to allow yourself to feel it, you are forced to consider the nature of this world and this existence. You ask how this can be and who set this up and why this happens. To grieve is to ask God the hardest questions. To grieve is to ask who God really is. It’s to change your perspective on all other human beings and their relationships to one another and to you and your place in this world. To grieve is to start over, to be re-created.

Kerry Egan in Fumbling: A Pilgrimage Tale of Love, Grief, and Spiritual Renewal on the Camino de Santiago.

I'm a minister.

2010-10-31T22:30:00.000-04:00

My wife, Stacey, and I have a game we like to play at parties. We will get into a conversation with someone we don't know, as normal, and we will wait until the conversation begins to run its course. Once we're ready to get out of the conversation, we direct the line of discussion towards work, and the person we're talking to will inevitably ask us what we do.

"We're ministers," we say, and then we see how long it takes the conversation to completely shut down. On average, it is less than a minute.

Oh, the person will stammer, say something about how they usually go to church, and if it is Saturday night, and they've already talked about their plans to stay out late and sleep in the next morning, they'll say something like, "Well, I usually go on Sunday evening" which, of course, is neither true nor a particularly good lie. I would prefer something along the lines of, "Well, I would go to church, but I think it is stupid." Or "Why on earth would you want to be a minister?" Or "Church? Like the chicken place?"

Inevitably, the person with whom we're talking says, "Oh, that's cool," and the conversation just ends. Nobody knows how to engage after that. And there's no turning back from that kind of roadblock. You can't talk about last week's Mad Men when you've thrown that kind of news on somebody. A minister? At a party? . . . I think I will go talk to someone else.

When I first started telling people what I do, I was really surprised by the response I got. I mean, this is my reality. Ministry is normal to me because it is the life I live. My wife lives it, too, so it is not unusual for us to talk about theological minutiae at the dinner table, or about who is driving us crazy this week, or about our hopes for the future in ministry. Ministry is what I do, and a minister is who I am (in the strongest sense of "am"). I do not look in the mirror and think anything other than "I need a haircut."

But for others, particularly those who are not active in the church, meeting a minister must be like meeting a martian. Meeting a young minister must be like meeting a giant martian, and meeting a young minister at a party must be like, well, you understand.

I suppose part of the surprise is because of my age. I am twenty-seven, and while historically ministers started out much younger than me, the average clergyperson these days is pushing ninety.

I kid, I kid. But you get the picture. Not only are there fewer young clergy, but my generation does not seem to get church. Especially because many of my friends are single and without children, they do not see a need for church. That is fine, I suppose. I mean, I am a fan of church, at least when it is done well. But I understand the apprehension. There have been days when church did not sound so great to me, either.

I understand the hesitation with church, but I wonder if even more than the shock at my profession in general, and my age in particular, it seems shocking to people that they would go to a party and end up talking to a minister. Ministers just do not go to parties, you understand.

Actually, this is probably fair. You tend not to see many ministers at parties. I suppose we are busy with church potlucks and Bible studies and such.

I worry that clergy are an insular bunch. Actually, I know they are an insular bunch, and I worry about what that does both to clergy and to everybody else.

Some of my closest friends are clergy, and for good reason. We share struggles, we understand unique pressures, and we have similar interests. Plus, those of us who are young United Methodist clergy will be colleagues for the next 30 to 40 years. We might as well get along.

Being friends with clergy, though, is not enough. There are plenty of great, non-clergy (and non-church!) folk who make perfectly good friends, I am here to tell you. Miss out on those folks, and you are missing out on some good people.

Now, I am not someone who thinks it is all that great when pastors go hang out in bars "to meet the regular people." That is a little overdone, and I am a little tired of hearing the same old "well, Jesus hung out with sinners" line. When you've labeled them sinners like that, you've already created enough of a barrier that jumping over it is probably out of the question.

I do think, though, that pastors should be intentional--there's that word again--about not limiting themselves to church life. Not only is it not productive to hang out with church people all the time, in terms of my own faith development, but I am pretty sure it is not healthy to conflate my professional life with each and every one of my personal relationships.

That does not mean I am not always a minister. I am. Mine is not a 9-5 calling, and I am Rev. Rushing when I am in the shower and when I am on vacation and when I am at a party, just as much as I am Rev. Rushing when I am wearing a robe or visiting the hospital. But always being a minister does not mean I am only allowed to hang out with people who feel the need for church. Most people, you ought not be shocked to learn, do not feel the need for church. I am missing out on a lot of fine folks if I limit my friends to church people. And I am not doing myself justice if all I do is church-related.

So I will keep going to parties, and I am not going to choose all my friends with a church-attendance litmus test in my back pocket. I hope my clergy friends do the same. It is good, I think, to be in an environment when I am just another somebody in the room. It reminds me that while the call of God is good, it does not make me so special. I need to hear that sometimes.

Plus, if more clergy would bridge those divides, and these kinds of relationships were more commonplace, it would make conversations at parties a little less awkward. So there's that.

On the Pastor's 24 project

2010-10-27T08:08:00.000-04:00

My old friend Thomas has some tough words for the Pastor's 24 project. Read them here. He sees the project as the result of some of our worst impulses as clergy, pastors "worrying if our congregations think we are spending enough time 'doing' ministry." He goes on:

We should be about the business of being in ministry with other and with God as the guide. So we create lists in order to prove what he have done. We want concrete measurements of numbers and figures. Instead, we should be planting seeds and fertilizing growth. Those have intangible results from day to day, but over time, it bears much fruit.

I don't think you can argue too much with the notion that pastors--and, well, people in general--often seek validation for their actions at the expense of actually doing what is right. Moving past validation, I think, is part of what separates great clergy from marginal clergy. Figure that one out, and the rest is cream cheese.

But the Pastor's 24 project, as I understand it, looks nothing like the project Thomas is describing. Thomas says that "the main reason given here" is to "show that pastors do more than Sunday things." To summarize his argument--I think I am being fair here--Thomas is saying that the whole enterprise is about seeking validation. United Methodist ministry, he says, should be its own validation. We are sent, and in that sending, we are inherently "given value in that placement."

Thomas seems to see the project as our--and let's make it personal, since I am participating--my need to show the congregation that I do, in fact, work all day. As he said, I think that myth has been debunked. I have no worries about whether the congregation things I work enough. Nor do I have concerns about my value as a pastor. I am humbled with the charge I have been given, and I find worth in both the work and in my relationship with God and people. I do not need validation from the Twitterverse.

I think Thomas is misreading the question behind the project. The question is, "What do you do all day?" The question is not, "Why do you only work one hour a week, you lazy so-and-so?" The difference is in the tone.

There is an aura about ministry. Having not grown up in the church, I can testify to the mystery. Clergy are such public figures--there are perhaps few figures so public, other than politicians--that there is of course some palace intrigue as it relates to what we do during the countless hours we spend in private or doing duties other than presiding in worship. The purpose of the project, as I understand it, is to shed some light on those duties: not for validation's sake, but in order to demystify, and because we clergy often toil alone. As Jeremy says in his announcement of the project, "I wonder what great diversity there might be in a pastor’s daily life." I am excited about today because I get to take a brief look into the ministry lives of those people who are public figures, but who spend most of their time in private.

I would say only one more thing. Saying something "gets it wrong" seems to be pretty common these days: see here and here. But I would hope that those who question the project (and I know that it is not just my good friend Thomas) approach it with the same validated humility with which they call for being in ministry. I want to see the project play out before deeming it a misguided venture.

So I am an eager participant. Follow me at @herevrush, or--better yet--search for the hashtag #pastors24.

Pastor's 24

2010-10-26T16:09:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow is the Pastor's 24 hour Twitter project, during which various clergy across the US (and maybe the world?) are tweeting every single ministry-related thing they do for a twenty-four hour period.

This is a pretty fascinating notion to me for two reasons.

One, you know the classic question: what do you do all day? I thought this question was passe, until I was asked it twice last week. Hopefully it was less about my work performance than wanting to know how people in ministry fill their time!

Two, I think that the aims of the Pastor's 24 project mirror the aims of this blog quite well: that is, to celebrate the details of ministry while keeping an eye on the Big Picture. There is no better way to do that, I don't think, than to lay out the details as they are.

So I am playing. You can find me on twitter at @herevrush. Wednesdays are pretty crazy around here, so it should be an interesting day.

The project starts, I guess, at midnight, during which time I hope to be asleep. Once I'm up and going, I'll be posting every ministry-related thing I do. I am actually really interested to read through my tweets at the end of the day. You plan out a day, and things just come up. I have not had a good way, in the past, of keeping track of those things. I am curious just how much "ad-hoc-ing" I do during the day.

Check out more information about the project at Hacking Christianity.

You can follow along on my twitter page--or, better yet, follow all those who are participating by searching the hashtag #pastors24 on Twitter.

On Birmingham-Southern College . . .

2010-10-25T21:02:00.001-04:00

. . . in which Bishop Willimon BRINGS IT.

On preaching

2010-10-25T14:09:00.000-04:00

Gordon Atkinson, who has been better known as Real Live Preacher, recently gave up RLP and preaching altogether. Here are some thoughts that mirror my own about the preaching task:

I loved preaching. I loved the way it stretched me emotionally, spiritually, biblically, and creatively. I loved the high calling of colliding with the scriptures during the week and sharing the results of that collision with my brothers and sisters on Sunday mornings. It was challenging and meaningful to me. But it was also dangerous.

Check out the whole thing. As someone who is energized by the preaching process--beginning to end--I should say that I don't share his particular concerns about the power of the "dark side" of preaching. I hear the concerns, and I recognize they are valid. But I lose him when he says, "if I'm preaching, I will not be fully engaged with worship." For me, preaching in worship is the most faithful, most worshipful witness I can offer.

That is not to say I don't experience periods of doubt, or of not "feeling it." But then again, is it not the role of the communion of saints to surround me when I find it difficult to worship, holding me up and worshiping alongside me until I am able to "feel it" once again?

On discipline

2010-10-24T22:41:00.000-04:00

Well, I shouldn't just leave it there--with those lyrics and the picture from last weekend. It was lovely, of course. We got to relax, and eat--my goodness, did we eat--and play with my niece and nephew, which I don't get to do enough of. And I got caught up on some reading I have been meaning to do. I've had this book for a few years now, and I just got around to reading it last week. It is chock full of great stuff, by the way.

It is funny. I love to read, and I find great peace and pleasure in it, but I have found myself so busy lately--with the stock ticker in my brain running so fast with things to do and people to call and emails to return--that it is hard for me to do any reading unless I am on vacation and purposefully resting. I can decompress enough in those situations to focus on a book for hours at a time, and I find myself reading faster, not getting lost in the prose, paying attention and engaging the material as I read.

This is the dilemma I have: the more I have to do--the more I need to focus--the less I am able. I realize that it is impossible to do everything well, but I also know that as I said in a sermon a few weeks ago (preaching to myself I suppose) if I am in a thousand different places, I might as well be nowhere. So this conversation is not about being good at everything. I am not sure how to label the issue, but words like "balance" and "discipline" come to mind.

Balance is important because I have to be able to rest enough and work enough so that enough gets done, and I do not burn out. Balance is also important because there are so many demands on my time that I can not possibly give all of them the attention they deserve. Balance means I am intentional about what gets my time, and that I continue to tinker with what I am given so that I am always trying to be the most faithful steward of my time I can be.

Discipline is a word that also comes to mind, and I suppose that as I am United Methodist, it is no surprise that discipline is an important word for me. Besides the fact that the Book of Discipline is our (as one pastor has said) "rules of engagement," Wesley talked about discipline so much that his people were called Methood-ists.

I have been thinking about discipline for the last few months, as it relates to the way in which I function as a minister--and how I function in my relationships. Forgive my half-formed thoughts, as I am still working on this, but I am more and more seeing the need for good discipline in my life.

Take sleep for instance. It has become my custom to stay up reasonably late, either trying to read or getting caught up on a TV show I have not yet seen. Once I finally fall asleep, I stay asleep until I absolutely have to get up. I do like to sleep, so my morning is spent hurriedly getting ready for work.

I am thinking about sleep, because I know there is a more disciplined way to function. About a year ago, as I was trying to finish a writing project (which still remains almost done ), I spent a couple of months getting up early, and that was holy time for me. When no one else is awake, when it is still dark outside and there is nothing to do but drink coffee, pet the dogs, pray and read and write--that is my time. I was productive, and at peace, and this was well and good until I decided, for whatever reason, that it was time to go back to the old sleep pattern. My morning time was spent asleep. This is not a new struggle for me. During Lent a few years ago, I decided to wake up quite early each morning for a time of prayer and meditation. I lasted about three or four weeks before I could not make myself get up each morning. The spirit was willing, I think, but nonetheless . . .

But the issue of disciple is bigger than sleep. I have been thinking, too, about clergy health, and how can I not? We talk about it so often, and I have been known to roll my eyes about yet another discussion about maintaining clergy health. Rest is only part of it. I am convinced that if I do not remain physically healthy, there is absolutely no way I can be a faithful disciple, doing the things that need to be done, let alone a faithful minister of the Gospel. I am in fine health now, and yet I find myself often so tired that it becomes a struggle to even engage a book at the end of the day. If I were in worse health, I know that there is no way I could survive in ministry. Discipline demands that I am intentional about exercising, intentional about what I eat, intentional about resting and dealing with stress and maintaining my relationships.

Come to think of it, maybe "intentionality" is a good word for maintaining sanity in ministry. If I am intentional about how I go about my day, about maintaining balance and discipline, then at least I will not be a passive observer of my own life.

Perhaps this is a bridge to far, but I am also wondering if this kind of radical intentionality is a "required" part of what it means to be a Christian. If we can agree that being a Christian requires a relationship with God, and that having a relationship means that both parties give to it, then I cannot be in right relationship with God if I am just letting things happen to me, surviving minute to minute until the next tsunami hits. That is not relationship; that is letting life happen to you. For me to be in relationship with God, I must be intentional about giving to that relationship, on my own accord, on my own initiative. Otherwise, I am just riding the wave until my days are done. You ought not be surprised when I tell you that riding the wave is not why I got into ministry.

If I am going to be about the business of transforming the world--rather than just hopping along for the ride--then God demands discipline.

This is not to conflate who I am with what I do. I am a deep believer that you should be who you are, recognizing that you are a child of God as you are. But all the same, if I am to be my best self for God--if I am to be the most authentic disciple I can be, with the rest of the mess stripped away--then I must be disciplined.

Satisfied Mind

2010-10-22T19:34:00.001-04:00

How many times have you heard someone say
"If I had his money, I could do things my way?"
Little they know that it's so hard to find
One rich man in ten with a satisfied mind.

Once I was winning in fortune and fame
Everything that I dreamed for to get a start in life's game
Suddenly it happened, I lost every dime
But I'm richer by far with a satisfied mind

Money can't buy back your youth when you're old
Or a friend when you're lonely, or a love that's grown cold
The wealthiest person is a pauper at times
Compared to the man with a satisfied mind

When my life is ended, my time has run out
My trials and my loved ones, I'll leave them no doubt
But one thing's for certain, when it comes my time
I'll leave this old world with a satisfied mind
("Satisfied Mind"-Rhodes & Hayes)

Rest

2010-10-21T07:50:00.000-04:00

One of my traits about which I am most proud is that I know my limits. I tend not to over-extend myself, and I know when it is time for me to rest. When that happens, I pull myself away for a little while, scrape a few things off my plate for the time being, and take some time to recover.

I am a few days past that point. It has been a very busy few weeks, and I have a busy few weeks coming up. I am so happy with how the process of building a mission program at the church is going, but there is more work to be done, and I am just tired.

So it is time to rest. Stacey and I are off this morning to see her dad and step mom for a couple of days. They have rented a lake house in Cordele, GA, and we are off to sit and visit and fish and rest, which are four of my favorite things to do.

It is a welcome rest, believe me. There was a time in my early twenties when being around family was anything but restful, but I am reaching the point where I cherish that time with family, which is good because it seems as if we have a lot of family time coming up. More on this later.

I am just getting used to the rhythms of ministry, of the time to work and the time to rest. It will take me a couple of years to get my sea legs, and then a lifetime to master. In the meantime, I am understanding more and more why we harp on sabbath and clergy health so much. It is possible--even likely--for a minister to work herself, literally, to death. There is so much to be done, and while I have never been one to believe that I--and I alone--hold the key to the world's problems, I nevertheless find myself saying things like, "just one more phone call" or "let me just send this last email" or "I just need to go visit these people one more time," instead of acknowledging my limitations and taking a breather.

A minister I know recently told her husband: "You are not indispensable." This is good advice. And so, not being indispensable, I am off to the lake.

Barth on Integrity

2010-10-20T15:34:00.000-04:00

It is as the persons they are that preachers are called to this task, as these specific people with their own characteristics and histories. It is as the persons they are that they have been selected and called. This is what is meant by originality. Pastors are not to adopt a role. They are not to slip into the clothing of biblical characters. That would be the worst kind of comedy. They are not to be Luthers, churchmen, prophets, visionaries, or the like. They are simply to be themselves, and to expound the text as such. Preaching is the responsible word of a person of our own time. Having heard myself, I am called upon to pass on what I have heard. Even as ministers, it matters that these persons be what they are. They must not put on a character or a robe. They do not have to play a role. It is you who have been commissioned, you, just as you are, not as minister, as pastor or theologian, not under any concealment or cover, but you yourself have simply to discharge this commission.

(via)

On Mentors

2010-10-20T08:29:00.000-04:00

Later this morning, Stacey and I are off to Candler to attend the seminary's Distinguished Alumni Banquet. This year there are three recipients: Gilbert L. Schroerlucke (for service to community), Herschel Sheets (for service to Candler), and Bishop Bob Morgan (for service to church).

As it tends to be, all three of these men are old. I just don't know how else to say it. A lifetime of service is what usually garners such an award, so naturally the people who receive such an award have had long ministries. Bob Morgan is the youngest of the bunch, and he graduated from Candler in 1958. I think he just turned 78.

So while I am not ordinarily one to go out of my way to celebrate old white men--though I do hope to be one some day--Bishop Morgan was a mentor to me, and so I am excited to be present today.

The Bish, as we all called him, retired from sixteen years of active episcopal service to a life of teaching at Birmingham-Southern College (my alma mater), as the Bishop-in-Residence. I was among the group that traveled with Bish and his wife, Martha, to Greece and Italy in 2004 for one of his "Footsteps of Paul" trips. I also worked in BSC's Church Relations office my senior year, and my office was two doors down from his. You would have never known that this sweet man had been the President of the World Council of Bishops of the UMC by the way he took time to speak with me.

I am not someone who can point to a whole host of mentors in my life. I did not grow up in the church, so in ministry, there are only two or three people I can say really took the time to mentor me. And chief among them is Bishop Morgan. I know for a fact he secured my scholarship to Candler--and I needed all the help I could get. And he encouraged me throughout the ministry process, checking in every now and again to make sure I was keeping up with my responsibilities.

All of us who worked with the Bish have a favorite Bishop Morgan story--I have so many--but my favorite involves an exam we had in his Parables of Jesus class. The test was as you would expect: some multiple choice, some short answer, a couple of essays, and a map.

Now, I hate filling in maps. I hate it. I have never been any good at geography. Maybe my spatial reasoning is just not up to snuff. I don't know. But I have never been any good at maps. I avoided taking geography in high school and college because I knew I was no good at it, and I avoided taking classes where I knew I would have to mark up maps.

Or, at least, I'd thought I had successfully avoided taking those classes, because here I sat in Bishop Morgan's Parables class, staring at a map that I could hardly make heads or tails of. We were to mark the major cities in Jesus's life, and draw the boundaries of his ministry, or some such thing. And, for the life of me, I just could not get it right. I put the cities down that I could remember, and tried to place them on the map, and started marking the boundaries as best I could.

Maybe I looked confused. I would not doubt it. But Bishop Morgan got up from the table at the front of the class, walked to the back row, past the 40 or so other students in the classroom, and proceeded to actually give me the answers to the map. In the middle of his exam. I could almost hear the ears of the people sitting around me perk up as he started quietly pointing to places on the map and telling me what to write.

You'd better believe that I remembered the appropriate places from then on. You do not have the professor give you the answers in the middle of the exam and proceed to forget them. So if the point was to learn the map, well, I did. And if it required the Bish to actually give me the answers, so be it.

This is the kind of man Bishop Morgan is: willing to work with nobody college students, mentor them and encourage their gifts, and give them the answers in the middle of the test if necessary.

That kind of life is unnecessary, of course, at least in the eyes of most folks. Here we have a bishop, who does not need to do anything but retire and have a happy life. And yet, seeing the need in the church--and seeing the need in the students with whom he works--he continues to mentor.

I am excited to celebrate him today. I just hope that some of that caring spirit has rubbed off on me.

Losing the Big Picture

2010-10-19T08:16:00.001-04:00

I am new to this ministry thing, so bear with me.

I suppose an introduction is in order. I was commissioned a provisional elder in the United Methodist Church at the annual conference session of the North Georgia Annual Conference in June. That commission, for the uninitiated, means I am a Rev., but I am not done with the ordination process in the UMC. It is a long road, and I have come far, but there are miles to go before I sleep.

I am serving as an associate at a large United Methodist church in north Fulton County, GA, in a suburb of Atlanta called Johns Creek. My wife, who is also a minister (and who was commissioned with me this past June) is also serving as an associate at the same church. It makes dinner conversation interesting, and I do love having a partner in crime.

My portfolio includes several groups, but my main task is mission and outreach, which at Johns Creek UMC means building a mission trip program and getting folks fired up about mission. I do have a little background in this; I worked for three years at United Methodist Volunteers in Mission, the short-term, mission-sending agency of the UMC, and I wrote the manual that is used to train mission team leaders in United Methodist churches in the southeast. So this charge is nothing new.

What is new, though, and what I am finding to be my biggest struggle in ministry, is the fact that my day usually consists of eight thousand very specific tasks, many administrative, and it tends to be that you could probably divide my day up into five and ten minute increments, with a staff meeting or two thrown in for good measure.

There are days when I feel as if I am drowning in details, and details are important. I have seen those ministers who ignore details, who walk, bumbling, into a church and knock over the altar candles and the altar guild--and just about everybody else, to boot--because they ignore the details of ministry. So for as much as I am doing my best to hold on to the big picture, I also want to make sure I do not lose sight of the details--God works within the details, too.

But It is hard to hold on to the big picture when you do something new every five minutes, and in ministry, the big picture is actually the Big Picture, so you can't just ignore it and move on. I suppose that in some ways, the Big Picture is something like the floor: you go along not noticing it until it is gone, and then you've really got nowhere to go.

So this is my attempt to both be reflective about being a millennial in ministry (I am twenty-seven) and to hang on to the Big Picture.

I find myself in the church at an interesting time. The United Methodist Church in the United States is losing members, even as it is growing in Africa. There are those who claim wayward theology as the reason for decline, and while I believe theology is vital to knowing who we are as people of faith, I am not ready to blame this loss of members on the church's theological stances.

The church is graying, as well. The median age of United Methodist Elders stands at 55, the highest in history. Half of elders are between 55 and 72. While the number of young clergy has grown marginally in the last ten years, we remain a very small percentage of the overall United Methodist clergy. And the church's demographics mirror those of the clergy.

It is an interesting time to be a young clergy person, but--if you will pardon the cliche--I am convinced we stand at a crossroad as a church. God is doing something new, and I am excited to see what that looks like.

There are exciting things happening in the church, and I am determined not to so drown in the details that I miss what God is doing. This is my attempt to keep an eye on that Big Picture.