United Methodeviations

Winding Down & Wrapping Up May 5, 2012

Okay, friends, what have we learned?  First, General Conference is hard.  It is emotionally, physically and spiritually taxing.  It demands a Herculean amount of concentration and effort, sifting and sorting and making sense of thousands (literally) of pages of very tiny print of churchy legalese.  And it is not perfect.  We passed a plan, then it was ruled unconstitutional.  Is it the end of the church?  No, no matter what the doom-and-gloomers might want you to believe.  We are left with the flawed church we have had for years.  Now we need to get creative and work together to make it better.  We need to stop worrying quite so much about our hierarchy and power and think instead about our potential and authority.

Our theme this year at General Conference is our mission — yet we have not given any measurable time to thinking, dreaming, talking, planning or scheming about what this really means to us.  What would it be like if we came to consensus that disciple-making is a worthwhile past time?  We could spend two weeks together crafting strategy to transform the world.  Wouldn’t that be cool?  Instead of lamenting that we have so many small membership churches, what if we optimized our potential and made stellar small membership churches a badge of honor.  What if we took time in Christian conference to talk about scriptural authority in a global context?  What if our time was about building bridges instead of walls?

Many are disappointed by our aborted quadrennial gathering and the lack of decisions made.  But could it be that we failed in our decision-making because we are deciding on too many wrong, less important things?  This is a mandate to get our act together.  Our planning needs to shift from form to function, process to performance.  We cannot let things rest as they are.  The time for renewal and redemption is now.  Let’s all commit to work together to bring something great out of our chaos.

Back to the Future May 4, 2012

I have endeared myself once again to the powers that be.  When asked about my impression of the Plan UMC, I described it as “a resurrection of the General Council on Ministries with its delusions of grandeur fulfilled,” and some took offense.  Well, sorry about that, but what we adopted is not going to position us for growth into the future — it is positioning us to do the kind of ministry and micro-managed regulation we did in the late 20th century.  However, if we use this structure wisely, it can actually produce some solid results.  The choice of system is critically important, but we haven’t maximized the potential of any of our structures or systems for years.  The key is simple: the new General Council on Strategy and Oversight (GCSO) must realize that it is designed to create an unsustainable tension.  Strategy is the boat, ready to sail.  Oversight is the dock, anchoring the boat in place.  In the very early days, one of the two functions must take precedence.  If we have the wisdom to give strategy precedence, we should be fine.  If our focus is on oversight, we won’t go anywhere.  The great challenge is this: we love oversight, but we have to hire outside consultants to do strategy for us.  We may just micro-manage our General church out of existence with the very best of intentions.

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Green Light Plan UMC May 3, 2012

Anyone in any kind of planning process knows that a normal and natural progression is from “what we want” to “what we need” to “what we absolutely can’t live without” to “what we can live with.”  We arrived today at the final exit — and what we can live with is not so different from what we already have in many ways.  It certainly isn’t streamlined or simplified.  It will be most interesting to see how power, authority and influence are shifted.  I will go on record as saying I don’t think we will save any money in this structural change.  If anything, it will cost more than what we already spend — and it won’t result in savings down the line, either.  As a voting body, we moved first to reduce the number of people, then to add more bodies back into the downsized structure so that it really isn’t a whole lot smaller at all.  We must be very careful not to spend more to accomplish less.

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Dollar General (Conference) May 1, 2012

I love my church, and there are very few things it does that both anger and hurt me.  In specific terms, I hate it when my own church hates — when it goes out of its way to judge and revile and hold God’s children in contempt.  We affirm their goodness then tell them we don’t want them.  This is awful.  But in the broad and general sense, nothing angers me more than cheapening our Christian faith, watering it down to make it more palatable and easy to do.  I sat through a beautiful worship service at General Conference on Monday night (April 30) then had the whole thing ruined by an infomercial for our “Vital Congregations” emphasis.  Each of our conferences committed “goal cards” that redefined “Christian discipleship” as attending church, being in a small group, or giving money to the church.  (Some did commit to mission projects/work, but not too many).  So, what we have now communicated to the world is that discipleship is not about sacrifice, or supreme commitment, or risk, or even death (forget all that icky cross stuff…), but about going to church when we feel like it.  We have taken the Biblical teachings attributed to Jesus, and made them simple and easy and cheap. And ALL of our bishops stepped up to witness to this new, disciple-lite definition.

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Specific Conference April 30, 2012

What would it take to move us from the “general” to the “specific?”  We have been told by our bishops that this General Conference is not about preserving the institution — but if not, what is it about?  We are here, primarily, to plow through literally hundreds of legislative petitions to change our Book of Discipline and other key non-disciplinary articles of polity and doctrine.  We are talking about credentialing, orders, structure, complaint processes, insurance, pensions, who to allow into leadership and who to get out of leadership.  We are setting numeric goals for numbers of pastors and number of churches and numbers of dollars.  Are we talking about prayer?  Are we talking about fasting?  Are we talking about a more rigorous and intentional study of scripture?  No, we don’t have time to talk about content and context, just structure and polity.  We do talk about “discipleship,” but the definition by which we mean it still isn’t clear.  We keep being promised celebrations, but many of them are infomercials instead.  There is much to celebrate at General Conference, and I do not offer anything but praise for the excellent work we do, but these celebrations of our faithful witness are such a small percentage of our time and energy here.

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