Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Christian Ministry

  • In Which I Make Two Intemperate Remarks

    I was talking to a friend the other day. Our main topic was church and the way it was done. In the course of our conversation I discussed what I feel is the 1 Corinthians 14 church, you know, the one Paul was trying to correct. (I discuss what I think about it in my post The Problem with 1 Corinthians 14 Worship.) I was also discussing handling of incorrect statements in church, whether these are off-the-wall interpretations of Bible passages, or people claiming to speak a prophetic word that is truly not from God.

    In summary, I believe the Corinthian church was active and alive, and everyone came in with a message. There would be multiple messages given to the group, and there would be discussion. I believe the New Testament model would be for people to speak and then for others to affirm or correct as necessary. I acknowledge the problems, and in our conversation I mentioned how many friends of mine who are pastors are not too happy with my view. They’d prefer to check the message before anyone hears it, so none are led astray, and they’d also prefer not to have to affirm or correct any statement in a public setting.

    I acknowledge that I am not a pastor and thus may be less sensitive to these problems. I also know that telling someone they are actually wrong in a public place is very much against our cultural norms. We really prefer to keep the face of things happy and affirming, and take care of any questions out of sight. But I don’t think a church modeled after the ideal presented in 1 Corinthians 14 (and elsewhere in the NT) can function in that way.

    In our discussion, this brought forth my first intemperate statement. After we’d discussed these points, and both agreed about the difficulty of accomplishing this, I said: “It had better be possible. If not, my life work thus far has been in vain.”

    It was out of my mouth before it passed through my brain. But it has stuck with me, and I haven’t found much reason to back off of it. To me, the church, if it is to be the body of Christ, must have input coming from everyone, and must have everyone involved. We are all baptized into the same Spirit (read all of 1 Corinthians 12-14 to get this picture), and we all have gifts. These gifts are to come together. That, to me, is church. If church doesn’t work, I have truly been wasting my time.

    I would note that I don’t mean spreading people’s private issues and problems in public, where they can be kept private. I don’t mean gossip and tale bearing. I mean every member involved in the theological thinking and practical visioning of the church body on a regular and constant basis.

    What do you think? How intemperate was I?

    Then there was the second intemperate statement, which needs more qualification on further thought. My friend asked me which seminary I would recommend a young person go to in preparation for Methodist ministry. My intemperate answer? “I wouldn’t.”

    Yet there are things I like about various seminaries. My problem here is that I don’t like the professional education approach to preparation for pastoring. In fact, I don’t like it much for anything at all. I think our educational system is well-designed to prepare people to live in the 19th century. it’s not completely incapable of preparing people for the 20th century, but it’s not fully equipped for that task. Unfortunately, none of us have the option to live in either of those centuries.

    I may really stun my friends in educational institutions, but I think the traditional university is a surviving fossil. It’s going to go away over time, or at least become a very minor factor. The reason is that technology and information is developing too fast for one to dedicate a certain percentage of one’s life to going to school, then assume education is complete, except for an occasional refresher in some continuing education program.

    We’re going to need to find a way to work and further our education simultaneously. We’re also going to want to benefit from scholars from around the world in any educational program, not just those who happen to be in the local area. This is a long subject, and I’m sure people will be very annoyed as things progress. There is already a great deal of prejudice against distance learning. Some of this comes from growing pains. Some of it is completely unjustified. Note to critics: You need to do more than point to problems with distance/online learning. You need to realize the imperfections of resident learning as well.

    So again, how intemperate was I?

     

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  • The Wrong Reason for Church Growth – Quote of the Day

    From Allan Bevere:

    And one more thing– as long as the church wants to grow only in order to pay the bills; if we see new people not as persons made in the image of God who need God’s transforming grace as much as the rest of us; if we only see them as instruments by which to meet the general budget, then we will have really lost what it means to be the church in the world.

    This comes from a post titled The Church Has an Edifice Complex. You should read the whole thing.

    I’d link this to the numerous times I’m aware of in which a church has forced some ministry off church property because the people served weren’t those who attended church. These include a Wednesday night program for community youth whose parents weren’t church members and a young adult class whose members weren’t attending the church service.

    Is church attendance desirable? Yes. But if you do ministry only to those who are already doing so, where’s the outreach?

     

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  • What is Cutting Edge?

    From Pensapedia.com / Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike License v. 2.5

    The description of the ICON service at my home church, First United Methodist Church in Pensacola, FL, states that the service is:

    • Cutting Edge
    • Tradition Rich
    • Art Embracing
    • Christ Centered

    This worship service just celebrated its second anniversary, and I was happy today to see that the sanctuary was largely filled. It has been both amazing and gratifying to me to watch the success of this particular worship service as it has been the entry point to church fellowship for a large number of people, especially young couples. I must confess that I often feel a bit old attending.

    Today associate minister at First UMC, Geoffrey Lentz, preached on cutting edge. He noted the things that make people think the service is cutting edge–large, high-definition screens, state of the art sound, and the embrace of social media. But he said that wasn’t what makes it really cutting edge. The one genuinely new thing under the sun, with due apologies to Qoheleth, is Jesus Christ. He told us that the most cutting edge thing we could possibly do is to follow Jesus Christ.

    Now I like many of the elements of worship in ICON. I think many of those elements, and the way they are blended, has helped make the service successful. But if you had asked me before this service why I think First UMC is growing, I would tell you it is because the pastors are preaching the gospel and making every effort to put it in practice. If you attend First UMC, you’re going to hear a gospel message.

    I don’t say this to belittle any other accomplishments. I just don’t think those are the key things. Large, high-definition screens showing well-produced videos can help bring people into the room. Well-done contemporary music can catch their attention. But if the message behind those things is not Jesus Christ and him crucified, there will be nothing to keep people in church. And if you don’t get there, you also don’t get them into ministry, and I would say that if one doesn’t get into ministry (or more directly stated mission), then one hasn’t really brought that person to Christ.

    I was glad to hear Geoffrey make that point. While I have just argued that the worship service is worship, even though everything we do is to be worship, I also believe that a major test of the success of a worship service is whether or not it gets us engaged in those acts of service–and worship–that are to go on all week.

     

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  • Organizing Small Groups

    Will Rice, Discipleship Pastor at University United Methodist Church in San Antonio, is suggesting retiring the term “small group” because he thinks it is not well enough defined (HT: Dave Black Online). It is hard to know precisely what one is talking about when one says “small group.” He’s right–it is hard.

    He also has some suggestions, such as defining the mission of the small group, making sure you have leaders gifted and trained to accomplish that mission, and evaluating the results according to the mission. I intentionally repeated the term “mission” multiple times there for emphasis. His suggestion is good. I’ve said many times, and I’m pretty sure I’ve said it within the last several posts, that I can tell how a church is doing on its mission by asking a member if they can state that mission.

    I’m also completely in agreement with the idea of finding the right people with the right gifts to put into the right position as facilitator. I’ve even written a book about it, and the title includes the phrase “small group!”

    But there’s another side to this that I’d like to underline briefly, and that’s the church (in my experience Methodist, though I have no reason to believe this is exclusively our problem) that tries to over-organize and over-control small group developments (see my earlier post Putting Up Barriers to Ministry). If a group of people meet and they don’t fit the favored definition of “small group” they are actively discouraged. I even encountered a pastor who objected to prayer groups meeting off-campus without church sanction. It’s quite possible to define, organize, and train our way out of existence. I say this as someone who loves defining, organizing, and especially training.

    I think there are small groups that develop naturally in a church that are detrimental to mission. I would suggest, however, that the solution is not to force all groups under a regimen of control, but rather the preaching of the gospel and teaching discipleship, along with appropriate, Christ-like, church discipline. I don’t mean that Rice’s good suggestions amount to forcing groups under a regimen. I’m referring to what I’ve observed in certain churches. I think one can tell the difference by observing the fruit–if groups of Christians are gathering and doing mission, it’s working.

    Somewhere between (or away from) control and chaos (with apologies to Get Smart) there’s a place where we function as the body of Christ under One Spirit.

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  • Father-Daughter Blogging …

    John Meunier and his daughter are blogging through the book Almost Christian. It looks like it will be worth reading.

  • Wesley’s Rules for Preachers

    Joel gives us John Wesley’s Twelve Rules for Preachers. Which of us can live up to these?

  • Putting up Barriers to Ministry

    I empathize with Alan Knox’s post today, Help or Get Out of the Way. He relates two experiences of church leadership standing in the way because they required people to go through existing church programs. This is not the way to go about Christian ministry. Come to think of it, it’s not even the way to go about secular business.

    How about this as a rule of thumb: If you find yourself telling people that they cannot serve people because of program X, then program X needs to get out of the way. If you can say, “Yes, we can help you with program X, then maybe, just maybe, program X is something useful.

    Let me illustrate. When I first came to a United Methodist congregation, I had been out of the church–any church–for nearly 12 years. I had a strong work background and my education and experience–an MA degree in Biblical and Cognate Languages. It didn’t take long after I joined the church for them to put me to work. I was soon teaching Sunday School classes and various events for the youth. Now I don’t have a problem with a church being careful about who they have teaching. They should, and they did. I talked with various people in leadership about my experience, my beliefs, and what I would be teaching.

    Then the pastor invited me to preach one Sunday. An individual in the church, heavily involved in our United Methodist lay speaking program, was quite irate. I had not gone through the lay speaker training program, and thus shouldn’t be speaking in the church. The pastor ignored him.

    After this event I did go attend the lay speaker training, and while I have any number of problems with the content, I was glad to have the experience. I didn’t really learn new theology, and some of what I did hear was incorrect (John Wesley influenced by the writings of Karl Marx?), but I did get to know other United Methodists and how they worked, and that was helpful.

    My point here is that the program–lay speaking–can be a tremendous help, but when it becomes a means whereby “leaders” control the church members it can be a hindrance. To carry forward that thought, after I had become a Certified Lay Speaker, I was again approached because I was speaking at various places without coordinating with the lay speaker program. This individual thought that now that I was a lay speaker, any time I spoke anywhere I needed permission from the church’s coordinator and needed to report to him after I did, even when those events had nothing to do with the United Methodist Church at all. Again, something potentially helpful was being used as a barrier.

    What I’ve noticed in Methodist churches is a strong tendency to multiply programs. This results in overlapping and redundant people managing the programs, and often in a great deal of discouragement because people with good ideas find that there are nearly dead programs in the way. In one church people were tracked by three different programs with pastoral care looking at church attendance, Sunday School classes tracking one’s presence, and then a lay pastoral care ministry. About this time someone wanted to start a Stephen’s ministry. Each of these things would demand weekend training events (or longer), social events so that everyone could get together, statistics reported to the appropriate leadership or committee, and so forth. And you know what? People would still fall through the cracks while others were exhausted trying to get to all the events that allowed boxes to be checked off.

    Well, this is a longer rant than I intended. Head on over to Alan’s blog and check out the discussion.

    (HT: Dave Black Online)

  • John Meunier Provides a Hauerwas Two-fer

    And a well worthwhile read it is (or they are).

  • Dan Dick on Make-No-Wave Church

    … at Make-No-Wave United Methodist Church. For what it’s worth, I think the young pastor was absolutely right to push. May his tribe increase! (HT: John Meunier)

  • Christianity by Force or Manipulation

    There is very little that offends me more than the idea of manipulating people into Christian events or trying to convert them by force.