Threads from Henry's Web

Category: United Methodist Church

  • Orbiting the Hairball

    United Methodist district superintendent (Grand Rapids District) Laurie Haller takes a cue from a book on surviving in a corporate environment to make some suggestions for United Methodist leadership in her post Orbiting the UMC Hairball 4-12-10.

    Amongst other things she notes:

    The whispered truth is that The United Methodist Church suppresses creativity and genius in favor of the status quo. We want to tame entrepreneurs because we don’t know what to make of them. When they do wildly successful ministry, we remain suspicious of anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into the “image” of a United Methodist. Even when such leaders bear luscious fruit, we’re still threatened because the fruit looks more like oranges than typical West Michigan United Methodist apples.

    I’d call it a focus on making United Methodists rather than Christians. I recall a meeting at which my wife was discussing materials. The book in front of her was produced by Baptists. A dedicated Methodist in the room was afraid that we shouldn’t put this in front of the members, saying, “This is a Methodist church, and as long as we have that cross and flame on the sign in front we should present Methodist curriculum.” Amongst the complaints about the book? It had too much Jesus. (No, I haven’t figured out precisely what that means!)

    Surely our Methodist congregations are secure enough in their faith that it won’t be threatened by a bit of Baptist curriculum!

    Rev. Haller suggests that we learn to orbit the UMC hairball rather than getting sucked into its growing gravity. She has a number of suggestions for how to do so. I think these suggestions are generally good, though rather incomplete.

    Somewhere in there we’re going to have to recover our passion for the gospel itself or any method we use will go nowhere. I’m not suspecting that Rev. Haller would deny that, but it’s something I like to emphasize. If we can once get people listening to the Holy Spirit, God can move things along. (Not to mention it’s God who will get them listening in the first place!)

  • Quote of the Day

    From the Wesley Report:

    Mainline Protestant Christianity has become known for leaving people in slavery, because somewhere along the way, our strategy changed from leading people out of Egypt to planting churches along the Nile. And that’s why mainline denominations continue to lose members. People don’t need churches to help them stay in slavery– they can do that by themselves!

    Don’t get it? Go read the whole thing.

  • How About Planting a Church?

    That’s what Allan Bevere suggests as the ordination process, based on his experience in Cuba.

    I find the idea attractive, at least for certain types of ministry. There might be other ways to test various gifts. It does relate to a problem I’ve noted amongst United Methodist ministers, many of whom come out of seminary with a decent theological education, but much less practical knowledge than they need.

    Note that I’m not a pastor, so I hardly can speak here as an expert from that perspective. But from the perspective of a theologically educated person in the pews, I think I have some basis for comment. Unfortunately, I think that my main comment goes back to my post from Monday. The first thing we need to do is rethink the pastor’s job description. Right now what we expect of pastors is insane.

  • What Would a Successful UMC Look Like?

    Ex-UMC, now megachurch pastor Craig Groeschel offers six suggestions for the United Methodist Church, packaged in six brief blog posts. I think that there is much worth considering in his suggestions, though I don’t think they are generally all that new.

    There’s something that bothers me in the whole discussion, however. In practically every debate about reviving the Methodist church with which I’m acquainted, it seems that we assume that we know what the church should be, what “success” would look like, and then we discuss from there. There are two problems with this approach. First, we may be wrong about what success would look like. Second, we may be discussing without agreeing on the success we seek.

    It is assumed that the pastor of a megachurch obviously has something of value to tell the rest of us because he is so obviously successful. Now I have nothing whatsoever negative to say about Pastor Groeschel’s church. That’s not my point. My point, rather, is to question whether we can identify what needs to change without understanding precisely what we are trying to accomplish.

    On this, I think that Groeschel’s 6th point is actually one we should discuss first, because the message we offer is, I believe, somewhat more important than the structures through which we offer it. But I will nonetheless address that issue last as well, since that is the order in which the suggestions were presented. As I write I will try to lay out the basis on which my own critique is made, wrapping up with the 6th point.

    Groeschel’s first point is well-taken. Why is it well-taken? Because an emphasis on branding one’s denomination is much less important than the power of the gospel in one’s churches. We would hardly need to explain on Television just how welcoming we are if we were, in fact, welcoming people all over the place. United Methodist Churches are ubiquitous. Our problem is not a lack of name recognition. Our problem is more based on what happens after people come into church. No matter what you advertise on TV, if the witness of your church interior is negative, the campaign will tend to fail. Spending $20,000,000 on the denomination’s image doesn’t seem right to me.

    At the same time, I wonder about the millions spent on some of our larger church structures. If I were to look for a New Testament church, a church following Jesus, I think I’d tend to look more in the direction of the home church or even a very small church that doesn’t spend money on a separate building. There are many ways to spend money poorly!

    Groeschel’s second point is a critique of the itinerant system. Here I think we need to think very carefully about what the real problem is and just how to remedy it. I don’t believe that organizational structures are the main problem in our church’s ministry. That may seem astounding to some people, especially those who have heard me criticize those same structures. But that isn’t the root.

    I have seen many different structures that have cases in which they work, and others in which they fail. There are elder-led congregations that have dried up and know nothing but tradition (usually defined as something like a generation) and simply drift along as an ark for the comfortable. I have seen United Methodist congregations where the laity had the kind of leadership one would expect in a congregation led by elders chosen by the Holy Spirit. I have seen other United Methodist congregations that, despite all the rules provided authority to lay leadership, were led by a dictator-pastor.

    Churches that choose their own pastor often simply perpetuate the errors already existing in the church and have no means of correcting course. There is limited accountability quite often. It’s very hard to keep such a church from drifting off under the right circumstances.

    Having itinerant pastors corrects for this sort of inbreeding, but at the same time introduces its own set of problems. I watched one church go from more than 20 prayer groups meeting during the course of any particular week down to single digits because the pastor changed. Both the outgoing and incoming pastors were men of prayer, but their leadership style was different. One would turn up at multiple prayer groups, some as early as 5 AM, while the other thought prayer groups could function without him. I’m not calling either man wrong, but in the change, the church members didn’t know how to keep things going themselves, and that was a tragedy.

    I would also say that in my few years in the United Methodist Church (I first joined a United Methodist congregation in 1994), there have been many cases when it’s hard to believe that the bishop and cabinet had a firm grasp of the needs of all the local congregations. But that must be taken not with a grain of salt, but with a whole saltshaker. How much of a grasp did I have of the needs of those congregations? Which leads back to a congregation choosing a pastor for itself. How effective is the search procedure? How good of a fit results? How many pastors miss their calling because they never heard of the church where they could serve? I have known cases where I thought the bishop was crazy when I heard of an appointment, but the result was good.

    I say all of that because I don’t think the process is the most important thing. I believe the most important thing for church organization is our theology of the church and of church leadership. We need pastors and laypeople who understand what servant-leadership is. (While I may disagree with some points of church structure, I heartily recommend The Jesus Paradigm by Dr. David Alan Black, which my company publishes. After all, I’ve just said that those structural differences are less important than the theology of leadership.)

    If we have the right view of leadership, no matter how a pastor gets in place, and no matter where he or she is recruited from, that leadership will emphasize equipping the saints for ministry (Ephesians 4:11-12), not taking over the organization.

    And while we’re at it, let’s ditch the incredibly stupid concept of the pastor’s job. If we wrote down the real job description, what the congregation actually expects the pastor to accomplish, and then tried to recruit someone to fill that position, only fools would apply. Our expectations set up pastors to fail. One equation that I believe is wrong is that pastor equals preacher. My wife and I were discussing last week two ordained ministers we know who really don’t need to be preaching. They are good at teaching in a small group setting. They have good ideas. They are able to equip. Their problem is that their speaking in a sermon setting is, to put it kindly, soporific.

    Other pastors are great preachers but wouldn’t get a job managing a hot dog stand. Yet others are good at visitation, ministering to the sick, counseling, or encouraging. Now you can justly question whether all of these people should be titled as pastors, but I think the main problem is that we expect one man to carry too many gifts. Why should the congregation expect the pastor to preach 48 weeks out of the year, as I recall one congregation’s covenant with their pastor? The jobs can be divided up between the lay people with a few better trained people given specialized jobs equipping the others.

    The third point is the ordination process. I’d relate this back to my comments on point #2. If we were preparing pastors for a reasonable job description, then we might be able to prepare them more reasonably.

    The problem I have here is that I think many of our existing pastors are under, rather than over prepared in their scriptural understanding. I think some of this results from the quantity of different topics we expect a minister to cover in seminary so as to be preacher, teacher, counselor, business manager, conciliator, prayer warrior, comforter, and social mainstay of the community.

    In order to solve this, however, I think we need to change the superficial level of study at the local church level. More and more in the world at large, education is coming to where people are as we realize that there is so much to learn and one can’t always dedicate years and years just to learning it. The seminary will need to break free of its walls and start to do more education of people in the churches. It is my personal belief that a young person should be able to prepare for ministry almost entirely in the local church, though I would strongly recommend that part of that preparation happen at churches other than his or her home church, and would suggest some time spend in an academic environment, though much less than we do now.

    Again we have to ask ourselves just what the purpose of a pastor is. I would suggest that the primary role of the pastor is to equip the saints for the work of serving, and that this service, as a whole, provides the witness of the church congregation in the community.

    Point 4 is about apportionments, a favorite United Methodist target. Can one discuss reforming the church without taking on apportionments? I have even said before that if I ever left the United Methodist Church, you can be certain that the way apportionments are spent would be part of the reason.

    Yet here I think we need to refer back to the first point. The main issue is not a sort of profit-loss statement for larger churches. Why become larger when you’re going to be hit with higher apportionments? Is that not appropriate? Is that not, in fact, a mission? I know that there are many smaller churches that are smaller because they are stuck in the mud and doing nothing, and that doesn’t seem like a mission field, but that is only one small part of what the apportionments do. Further, many of these small churches are sparks of light in their communities around the nations. In my view, they often show us precisely what a successful United Methodist Church should look like.

    I would suggest that rather than the idea of apportionments as such (and the system could stand reform, I suspect), the real problem is what happens to the money. Is it being used for missions or to promote structures? That, to me, is the real question, and it goes back to my most basic question: What does success look like?

    Part 5 I actually like pretty much as is. I think the multi-site church is a good compromise between destroying the small community church and the staffing and expense problems of totally separate congregations. Certain facilities and certain staff positions could be shared, and many activities could be coordinated. Of course, much of this could be done if local churches in a region simply decided to talk to one another and work together. Nonetheless, officially encouraging such activity or creating some sort of structure to make it easier to organize would be helpful. Then more money could be spent on the work of the gospel.

    Finally, we get to a key point, Groeschel’s #6. I must make a personal note here. If the United Methodist Church split as Groeschel suggests, I wouldn’t like either portion. That makes it hard for me to comment on the split without personal bias.

    At the same time, I think this point goes to the core of the problem. What is it that we are proclaiming in our churches? Whether or not we are preaching a genuine gospel message is, I believe, much more important than any number of structural changes we might make. By “proclaiming a genuine gospel message” I do not mean to separate the explicitly spoken message from the activities that go with it. Proclaiming good news to the poor and outcasts is important.

    In the United Methodist Church as a whole I don’t think we know where we are going with the message. We try to be all things to all people, and end up being not much to not many. I suspect that both liberals and evangelicals in the denomination would have a solution–their set of beliefs and emphases. But the problem I see on both sides is the tendency to go from defining nothing, the effect of our current conflicts, to defining everything.

    I do not distinguish here between what evangelicals desire to do and what liberals prefer. I don’t have statistics on how welcoming each group is of the other, but I do know of enough cases of both evangelicals made unwelcome by liberals and liberals made unwelcome by evangelicals that I know I would find either group’s exclusive possession of the lines of authority unacceptable.

    An organization needs to have some sense of distinctives in order to function as an organization. In this case, I would hope that those distinctives would be the defining elements of the gospel, both in doctrine and in practice. Note that I am not discussing who will be saved or lost, but rather who will be part of a particular organization.

    I think we have gone to the point in the United Methodist Church where we no longer have enough essentials to be coherent. While we think this makes us open and accepting, it actually makes us incoherent, confused, and confusing. There are, perhaps, some folks who should belong to a different organization.

    I discussed this previously in my post Unity, Diversity, and Confusion. Let me reproduce the illustration I used in that post:

    Church member attitudes toward doctrine and diversity
    Click the image for a larger view

    I think Pastor Groeschel has pointed us in some important directions, but unless we can clarify our message and what makes us a church, a congregation of saints following Jesus, I don’t think the structural changes will help. It’s a cliche, but rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic comes to mind. What we need to do is identify and plug the whole. Unlike the Titanic, I believe we still have the opportunity to do so.

    What would it look like? It would look like disciples of Jesus joining together to accomplish his mission. I have a long way to go in describing that, but I think it would involve less money spent on ourselves and more on others. It would involve fewer facilities and more people going out. It would involve more people equipped for and involved in ministry and fewer stars.

    (HT: John Meunier)

  • Of Apportionments and Stewardship

    Bishop Willimon has a post about pastoral leadership and stewardship, with the particular aspect of stewardship being apportionments. I like the framing that goes on in our church, as apportionments are called “fair-share giving.” I know that sounds better, but I still call them apportionments.

    I think the general finding is unexceptional. Pastoral leadership has a large impact on how a church responds to apportionments. My question is just what it says about an organization that the pastors have that much of an impact. Apparently the members in the pews are often not all that dedicated to apportionments. One major reason could be that very few United Methodist members really understand how apportionments are assigned (though that knowledge might make the less happy), or how they are spent.

    I have yet to attend a United Methodist church that pays all of its apportionments. At the same time, the way in which the denomination spends the money that is sent up the line tends to make me want to go find an independent church. Unfortunately, I am also well aware of the potential problems of independent churches. For some reason, all churches and denominations consist of people, and thus all forms of organization have problems.

    My own answer is that as long as I’m a member of a United Methodist congregation I must support the payment of apportionments and continue my stewardship, including giving to the local church as the Lord leads. But if there comes a time when I choose to become a member of a church of another denomination, the use of money at the conference and denominational level will doubtless have something to do with it.

    What disturbs me here is to hear stewardship discussed specifically in the form of apportionments, and secondly to see how much Methodist churches change with pastoral assignments. The leadership pattern displayed in Bishop Willimon’s post is something I have observed (much less scientifically, of course) in other areas. I have also seen leadership changes do great damage to a church. I know of a church where the pastor went from pro-charismatic to not-so-much pro-charismatic, and then back to charismatic. With each change the church shed members and while it continues to struggle along, it is not thriving, and many pastors are not very anxious to be sent there.

    I wish I knew how to solve this, other than better pastor placement, and I must be honest when I say that I would do much, much, much worse than the bishop and cabinet in our conference. (Amongst a multitude of other things, this explains why I am neither bishop nor even pastor.) But I do believe this is something that should be of concern. It fits the “shepherd and sheep” model, but doesn’t sound much like the “body of Christ.”

  • Preaching until you Mean It

    Shane Raynor is again stirring things up with a post on a Toolkit for Radical Methodists. He has proposed the idea of preaching faith until you have it, rather than waiting for faith.

    Since I recently posted some about doubt, I was interested in his phrase “wearing [your] doubt as a straitjacket.” I wonder if one could distinguish acknowledging doubt as opposed to wearing it as a straitjacket. Might it be possible for there to be healthy doubts, doubts that lead you onward as opposed to unhealthy doubts that keep you from taking action?

    This is one I’m still thinking about.

  • Seventh-day Adventist Education and Evolution

    I recently wrote with appreciation about my Seventh-day Adventist education in Biblical studies over on my Participatory Bible Study blog. Today a friend sent me an e-mail directing me to a post on Inside Higher Ed, discussing a problem with the teaching of evolution at La Sierra University, a Seventh-day Adventist school. I didn’t attend La Sierra myself, but do have some family connections there.

    In the story we see a fairly common complaint, a biology (or other science) professor teaching evolution in a Christian classroom where the school constituency does not support it. In some cases, we find a very divided constituency. In a Seventh-day Adventist school, such teaching is directly contrary to the church’s statement of belief.

    From Adventist.org:

    In its statement of fundamental beliefs the Seventh-day Adventist Church affirms a divine creation as described in the biblical narrative of Genesis 1.

    – God is Creator of all things, and has revealed in Scripture the authentic account of His creative activity. In six days the Lord made “the heaven and the earth” and all living things upon the earth, and rested on the seventh day of that first week. Thus He established the Sabbath as a perpetual memorial of His completed creative work. The first man and woman were made in the image of God as the crowning work of Creation, given dominion over the world, and charged with responsibility to care for it. When the world was finished it was “very good,” declaring the glory of God.–Gen 1; 2; Ex 20:8-11; Ps 19:1-6; 33:6, 9; 104; Heb 11:3

    In this case, a student asked to present a paper that included his creationist beliefs, and was permitted to do so provided he first showed a full understanding of the mainstream science involved. In the end, the professor decided that the paper did not fulfill that requirement. From an e-mail quoted in the Inside Higher Ed story:

    “The paper you sent me is unacceptable in its present form,” Gary Bradley, a professor of biology, wrote to Cerna May 12. “You said you would address the geological issues presented in class, demonstrating that you understand the data and the mainstream interpretations. Only then would you attach a paragraph taking issue with that interpretation. You have not done this. You have demonstrated only superficial knowledge with what was presented in class and even that was done with clear apologetic skepticism.”

    This is the sort of story that provokes mixed emotions for me. First and foremost, I am an advocate of free speech. It is a topic on which I come very close to extremes, especially for someone who calls himself a moderate, even a “passionate moderate.” But freedom of speech doesn’t require other private persons to provide one with a platform for that speech. As a publisher, I am very well aware of this. There are many things I think should be legal that I will not publish myself.

    Education is similar, in my view. A teacher must obviously set some bounds on what is allowed in the classroom, and a student must work within those bounds to fulfill an assignment. While I would certainly commend any teacher for making those bounds as broad as possible, consistent with accomplishing the educational goals, I don’t think a teacher is obligated to allow free speech full reign in a classroom—certainly not by law, and I don’t think even ethically.

    But here we take a step further. A church establishes a school, such as La Sierra University, and presumably expects it to serve the educational needs of its constituency. What happens if it does not do so? I remember in my days as a student at Andrews University, seeing an ad offering research grants for people who would do research to demonstrate that the earth was created about 6,000 years ago. Could those be considered scientific grants? Would the money be paid if the research proved that the earth was, in fact, 4.5 billion years old? These grants were not offered by the university, but they do demonstrate the feelings of the constituency.

    Is it acceptable for a church-related educational institution to control what is taught in its classrooms? I believe this should be the case for the most part, with exceptions for accountability which I discuss below. I may disagree. I may choose not to go to that school or send my children there, but a church institution has additional accountability to the folks who created and maintain it.

    I want to make clear here that I believe that the best protection for freedom of speech in education is through competition from multiple educational institutions pursuing their own policies and goals. Accreditation provides some accountability, but I would personally prefer that accreditation dealt with the minimum requirements, and not with the details of what else might be taught. (Note that La Sierra is a fully accredited school, and I would be very surprised if they did not meet, and continue to meet and exceed standards.)

    At the same time I am in sympathy with the professor in this case. Your freedom of belief and freedom of speech does not give you the right to a particular grade from a particular professor. If the assignment involves understanding the way mainstream science understands the fossil record, for example, you should demonstrate such understanding. Briefly, my ideal is that a professor requires understanding but not belief, and does not penalize one for belief. (That ideal should require a great deal of definition and support, don’t you think? Well, it must wait for another post.)

    Also, just to cover the bases, I am an advocate of mainstream science, and that alone, being taught in public school classrooms, both because I think we have little enough time to cover the basics in a high school education these days, and because I am tremendously unhappy with government employees, teachers in this case, getting into material that is largely religiously driven, much less actually teaching religion. (I apply the same standard to public school Bible classes. I don’t like them.)

    But in this case, I’m more interested in the best way for a church group to educate its own young people. Growing up SDA I was thoroughly indoctrinated with young earth creationism. If you look back at the SDA statement of belief, I was required to memorize every single one of the scriptures–yes, whole chapters–as part of the process of making sure I understood just how God created the world. Most of this education was in what were called “self-supporting institutions” in those days, the “self-supporting” denoting that they were not financially supported by the denomination.

    I learned only science that was consistent with this view. Since I dodged biology and took chemistry once I was in the regular Adventist educational system, I continued to avoid biology, geology, and related topics. To the extent that I challenged this view, it was from a biblical perspective, as I looked at the text of the early genealogies and became convinced that the earth was much more than 6,000 years old, and that this view was scripturally sound. But I was thinking maybe 100,000 or so years. Thus I left school with an MA degree without any understanding of evolution.

    Again, I do not say this as an assault on Adventist education. There are plenty of other groups who struggle with the same material, and they often have similar problems. Had I attended a mainstream SDA secondary school, I would likely have encountered a bit more of evolutionary theory. As it turned out, I simply started reading material on evolution, especially in astronomy and geology, on my own. Now people will often think I was somehow brainwashed, but what struck me most in my reading was the number of cases in which my indoctrination had misstated what science intended to teach. (Hold that thought a minute.)

    I recall teaching a class in Genesis, covering the prehistory (1-11) shortly after joining my first United Methodist congregation. I had no idea what the range of beliefs in the pews actually were. As it turned out, there were two ladies, one who sat at my right as we gathered around the table, and the other at my left. The lady at my right was a theistic evolutionist, thoroughly convinced that anything else was nonsense. The lady at my left was a young earth creationist, thoroughly convinced that evolution was at least the first step on the road to hell. Both were Methodists in good standing and leaders in the church. So I learned that changing denominations hadn’t changed some of the basic issues. Yes, there was no similar Methodist statement to the SDA statement, but all the viewpoints were there, and they were contentious.

    So where is this leading me? I think we have a serious educational weakness in the church in general. I heard it in SDA circles–let’s just teach “the truth,” let’s use only SDA literature. Now I hear it in Methodist churches–we have the cross and flame on the sign, we need to use Methodist literature in all our classes. But it wasn’t possible to do a solid indoctrination when I was growing up and it has only become more difficult as information science progresses. Isolation from all other ideas isn’t possible.

    It’s not that all Methodist literature is bad. Neither is all SDA literature. In fact, I like a great deal of both. Considering I grew up and was educated SDA and then became Methodist, I have quite a bit of both on my shelves. But we have a wonderful opportunity through Sunday School (or Sabbath School for any SDA readers!) and small groups, and I don’t believe we use it very well. We have an opportunity to really study subjects in depth, to discuss them with people holding various viewpoints and learn to truly understand opposing viewpoints. But so frequently we just rehash the list of major doctrines or major social issues without getting serious.

    When should children and young people learn to understand a topic like evolution? I’d suggest it happen at the earliest opportunity. If you don’t accept the theory of evolution, you also have the time to give your reasons. Shielding them from the information, or from having to express an understanding of it, will not help you.

    This little ramble was triggered over the subject of evolution, but I would add to this hermeneutics in the broadest sense. While I was required to memorize hundreds of verses of scripture, very little time was spent on how one would understand those scriptures. I had no idea how someone could come up with a different view of the scriptures than I had, because I had no idea how we had come up with our view, which in turn became my view. That is an approach that is bound to fail in the long run.

    A choice made in ignorance cannot be very good, even if the choice is technically correct.

  • Reflections on Church and The Jesus Paradigm

    As a publisher I have the joy of spending a great deal of time with a book as it goes through the process of publication. I don’t expect you to read my thoughts on The Jesus Paradigm as anything like a review, but there are some special things about this book and the way it has influenced me as I worked on it.

    I like to think of my business as a ministry, which is “churchese” for “service.” It is my intent to serve both the church and the community with materials that challenge and educate. Now don’t get me wrong here. For a small publisher, signing an author who has written nearly as many books as the company has published is a sound business decision. I didn’t decide to sacrifice myself in service and publish this book contrary to my better judgment. It’s a good book; it’s a book that is likely to sell quite well; it’s also a book that is kingdom building.

    Now as I frequently must, let me warn you that I’m going to be writing quite a few words. I’ve been thinking about the concept “church” for a long time and struggling with many things. This is also largely addressed to a Christian audience, so it may well bore others. Read on at your own risk!

    What happened with this book was that a number of things I’ve been thinking about, things that have challenged me over the years, came into sharper focus while I was editing and preparing it for the printer.

    I traditionally point out about now that I disagree with some things in a book I’ve published, and that this is a good thing rather than a bad thing. That’s part of developing brand identity since in a company founded by one person, it’s easy to confuse the person with the company.

    But in this case I think anyone who looks at the header of this blog and reads a few essays, and then does the same thing on Dave Black Online will be in no danger of confusing the two of us.

    What I think I need to emphasize instead is just how much I agree with in this book, and the tremendous value I find even in the things about which I have reservations (ecclesiology) or differences in emphasis (hermeneutics-maybe).

    In my personal testimony I note how I left church after my seminary training (MA, not MDiv) because I then regarded Christianity as a total “one-way street” surrender. I note that at the time:

    Some Christians argued with me that such a total surrender as I described was not required, but I could not see a partial surrender to God at the time, and I still can’t do so.

    Despite believing that, I have struggled with how to put that into practice, particularly in church life. The extent to which “church” doesn’t work, or perhaps doesn’t appear to be what it seems the Bible points to, has continued to bother me.

    Let me list some of the threads of thinking that have bothered me.

    (1) Again as I note in my testimony, I felt God’s call to ministry as I was registering for the second year of a pre-law program. I switched to Biblical languages. Unfortunately I found that while many people would talk about a lack of Biblical knowledge in the pews, the church had no place for a teacher who was not also ready to pastor a church. I observed that pastors got overloaded and rarely had a chance to actually teach.

    (2) If you look at most pastors and then write up a job description as you might for a business, you will see a job that nobody can actually perform. Our pastors cannot lead, teach, and equip, because they are so busy doing, and not necessarily doing the things that truly go with their calling.

    (3) I grew up with missionary parents who were truly dedicated to their work. By this I mean being willing to go out to serve God at risk of life and limb and at times depending on God for their next meal. I spent four years in southern Mexico, and then three in Guyana (South America) and while we were in the United States, they worked in underserved areas.

    In this process I experienced a number of things:

    • I experienced mission trips as loading up mules and backpacks and hiking to a village, or in Guyana getting in a boat and heading up river. This gave me a different view of “discomfort” than I have encountered in various short term missions in which I have been involved.
    • I experienced worship and teaching in circumstances that varied from outdoors under trees to small, simple churches that were no more than walls and a roof. I have felt the presence of God in places most Americans would regard as unusable.
    • I learned that “mission” was not necessarily something you did in somebody else’s country

    (4) By contrast, I have sat in American churches that would be inconceivably luxurious while people debated the color of the carpet for hours. Somehow I just couldn’t get into it. We’re replacing chandeliers that don’t look just right; Christians somewhere else are trying to do the minimum necessary to keep out the rain.

    (4) I have wondered just how we could create a church that would carry out the work of the gospel as its primary mission. I don’t like evaluating ministry purely on a numbers basis, but I believe that you can often calculate what real priorities are by looking at where the money goes and secondarily by looking at how time is used. By this measure the priority of American churches in general is neither social service nor gospel preaching but rather self-maintenance.

    Enter The Jesus Paradigm. In a sense it is almost fitting that the author, Dave Black, contracted Malaria while in Ethiopia and the book was released while he was in the hospital. As I have noted recently in writing about 2 Corinthians, the person can be inextricably linked with the written message. Paul didn’t want to boast, but he had to, while at the same time defending himself from the charge of weakness by claiming that he was weak.

    In some of the reviews and in comments brought to me personally there have been questions about a number of things that are either lacking in the book or that people question. I’m not going to try to defend this book by saying that every word is absolutely correct and will stand the test of time. I’m not trying to make Dave Black into a prophet or incorporate his book into the canon of scripture.

    These questions relate to ecclesiology and the lack of extended practical directions, both of which I will address, and the political commentary, which I will not.

    One major question has been the lack of detailed practical advice on how to put the message of this book into practice. I don’t like to criticize reviewers as a publisher, but I think that criticism misses the point.

    The way you put this into practice is by prayerful, constant surrender to Jesus. Read John 6:28-29. The problem is that we want a checklist, a program, or at least a detailed guide. The fact is that we have one–scripture brought to the moment by the power of the Holy Spirit.

    I recall from my experience here in Pensacola with the Brownsville Revival. Now please lay aside your issues with what was being done in that revival. I’m not pointing to Brownsville as an example. Pastors and church leaders would come from far away and they would want whatever it as they perceived that Brownsville had. So they would go back home and try to apply what they had seen at Brownsville.

    They would use the same music, not just the same style but the same songs. They would organize their services in the same way. They would try to style their preaching after the revival preacher Steve Hill. Then they would wonder why it didn’t work.

    It didn’t work because kingdom service is not a program, nor is it a checklist, nor is it an organizational manual. It’s a surrender.

    If you don’t know how to do this, dig into Acts and the Epistles, though only after you’ve thoroughly dug into the gospels. Spend your time in prayer and study and in listening to what God has to say to you. You will find ways to put the Jesus paradigm into action.

    Another issue is with ecclesiology. How can this material be applied to a different structure of church than just Baptist? Here we may certainly have many disagreements as to details. These are good to discuss with the proper spirit.

    I can look at this from my Seventh-day Adventist background and now as a United Methodist, and I think that the most critical thing here s the way church leadership thinks of themselves and behaves. I believe a Methodist church pastor could spread the Jesus paradigm through the committees of teams of his church structure just as boards of elders can do so in other church structures.

    But the bottom line, in my view, has to be more revolutionary, but again I think it applies to all different structures. The issue is this: Where do our resources go? Do they serve our desires or do they serve others? As I have looked at the church budgets of the churches I have attended over the last few years, the vast majority of the budget goes to buildings and staff salaries, and the staff is largely charged with maintaining the members that are already there.

    As long as we’re spending the majority of our money on maintenance, we’re not going to be reaching people as we should either in social services or in proclamation of the Christian message.

    This is why I’m so delighted to have the opportunity to publish The Jesus Paradigm, and yes, to have the opportunity to market it as well. It will challenge us to apply this “downward path of Jesus” (also a phrase from the book) to our circumstances wherever we are. It will direct us to Jesus himself and the early church to find ways of doing that.

    I don’t think this will necessarily be simple, but I think it’s time for us to be praying, thinking, and listening for the Holy Spirit in regard to how we can accomplish it. Otherwise, our churches are just an extremely expensive and annoying form of social club.

  • All Tangled Up in Solutions

    Imagine being on a ministry committee with the responsibility for examining the plan for Jesus and his congregation (the disciples) going to Jerusalem that final week. What would you consider? What would you recommend?

    From my observations of the various decision making bodies in churches, I suspect there would have been a few people who would bring up good, practical business and political plans. After all, many claimants to the title of “Messiah” or “King of Judea” had come to bad ends. One should surely learn from their mistakes.

    The best management advice would have suggested not going to Jerusalem at all, or perhaps doing so incognito. Of course, without 20/20 hindsight, we know that the best possible business and political advice would have been completely wrong.

    Yet the pattern of decision making, and of evaluating decisions that would have avoided holy week is precisely the way in which we make and evaluate decisions in most of our churches.

    [Warning: I’m about to ramble!]

    I’ve been thinking about this recently because of the discussion amongst some Methodist blogs about measuring ministry. I started following this a bit when John Meunier wrote a post titled Check Day Every Week. In it, he tells us of Bishop Willimon’s (North Alabama Conference) new dashboard on the conference web site which informs all concerned–or not–of how each church in the conference is doing based on various measures.

    Now I have great respect for Bishop Willimon in many areas, but his dashboard profoundly troubles me. I wonder, for example, just what such a dashboard would have shown about the climax of Jesus’ ministry. That may be an unfair question, but it did occur to me.

    But then I read this post, It’s All in the Numbers, following a link from John Meunier again, and again I was profoundly troubled.

    Now again there is much to be admired here. There are many ways in which this church is truly living out the gospel in their community. Yet there are no professions of faith as of the time of the post, and just one baptism coming up.

    Now as I discuss this, please don’t mistake me for some sort of expert on church growth or pastoral ministry. (Actually, on re-reading, I see no chance that you would!) I studied Biblical languages in school. No church administration, no pastoral counseling, no ecclesiology. There are those who think that if you read Greek you can pretty much handle anything, but that’s not the case. On the other hand, I’ve been watching churches work–or not–since I can remember.

    What troubles me about Bishop Willimon’s dashboard is the question of just what “success” is in a Christian context and how it should be measured. I’ve been studying 2 Corinthians over the last couple of weeks and I’m profoundly impressed by Paul’s simple, yet incredibly challenging words: “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.” — 2 Cor. 11:30 (NRSV)

    So if I were a pastor or a congregational leader, should I want to show a dashboard that displays how many people I have brought to Christ, or how many I have baptized? How would “boasting of the things that show my weakness” work on a dashboard?

    Even further, looked at from a business standpoint I would have to ask just who takes responsibility for those stats. Do we account for the different locations and callings of all those churches?

    At the same time, I have to ask whether a church that is not growing, producing new spiritual life, is really doing the work of ministry. It’s surely not an indefinitely sustainable pattern. And there is, after all, the gospel commission. Evangelism may not be popular today, but it is a command. If we aren’t making disciples, just what are we up to?

    In a sense, we see an apparent conflict here between making disciples and being disciples. Of course, this conflict may be, and probably is, largely artificial. It’s likely that many of the churches who are bringing in new members, and thus making new disciples, are also being disciples. Those churches who are doing the work of ministry–being disciples–may be doing the work of witness, but are just plowing hard ground.

    It seems to me that what we look at is a set of methods or programs that we expect to help pastors solve these sorts of problems. There must be some method that one can use that will bring in more souls, make more disciples, produce a better church congregation and thus improve our witness.

    I know how desperate pastors are for these kinds of things, because sometimes they will even ask me. And you know, I really know nothing whatsoever about church growth programs. But right now, I’m thinking it’s worse when they ask the experts on church growth, because then they get a method or a program, and they try to apply it in their own church. Very often, it doesn’t work.

    In my own area–Biblical studies–I see this with the desire to find a program that will get one’s congregation studying the Bible. Church libraries and storerooms are overflowing with discarded material that was supposed to make the congregation more Biblically literate and build their enthusiasm for Bible study.

    I’m often asked what “program” I follow. Well, I have written some materials, but those materials will only work with one additional ingredient. For me, the only formula to generate more active and effective Bible study in your church is to be excited about study yourself, and let that infect others. (Hint: It’s part of discipling!)

    Similarly, I recall talking to many people during the Brownsville Revival here in Pensacola. People would come and observe Brownsville in action. They thought they wanted something similar in their own churches, anything to bring life to seemingly dead congregations. They would go home and try to implement the things that Brownsville did, and in general, it didn’t work.

    Why? I would suggest it’s because only discipleship begets discipleship, and I see this as a New Testament pattern. There is no program to produce true disciples. There is only the process of letting God take over. That is so hard. I like to hold onto my piece of the territory. Programs allow me to do that. They let me talk about my success, when I know very well that “God gives the increase.”

    As I was thinking about this post, I received a link to a new review (from unlikely christians) of the forthcoming book by David Alan Black, The Jesus Paradigm. (Full discloser: My company is publishing this book.) Now Dr. Black is a professor at a Southern Baptist seminary, and I’m a member of a United Methodist congregation. Between those two points there is a great gulf fixed–or is there?

    We have chosen to measure success in a manner that makes us feel comfortable: giving, attendance, etc. Nevermind that the “wildly successful” 500-member church is in a community where 1% of the population has really believed the gospel. This is success? Black offers another way:

    It is necessary that we view what we do on Sunday as merely the beginning, not the climax, of our work. In other words, we need to change the basis for evaluating the effectiveness of the ministry of our churches. The question is not ‘how many attended on Sunday?’ but ‘What did those who attended on Sunday do during the week to advance Christ’s kingdom?’ This is what it means to be the People of God. It is a people who understand that the mission of the church is to fulfill God’s redemptive mission. (75)

    I’d like to comment here on the best way to disagree with a book, or even a person. A number of folks have pointed out to me how “Southern Baptist” Dr. Black is. But that can easily be an excuse to miss the point. The question is not what your structure is or which program you’re following, unless your structures or your programs are preventing you from truly following Jesus Christ. The challenge remains the same. It’s a good idea to talk about church polity and how it impacts our ministry, but first let’s get to the foundational principles.

    What Dr. Black is saying here is something I know my own pastor would preach. He has even begun adding “and your witness” to the areas in which new members are asked to support their church. I like hearing that. It says that we have a church hear to be a witness and to make disciples. Disciples carry out the ministry of Jesus loving one another as Jesus has first loved them.

    One of the questions I always ask someone when they ask me for suggestions about how to make their church grow spiritually and even in numbers, right after I tell them how deep my ignorance of the subject is, is this: What is the mission of your church?

    I’m amazed at how few people in the various congregations I’ve visited can state a mission for their congregation or even quote the written mission statement. I recall once asking a member what the mission statement of their church was. I was, in fact, looking at it written on a sign on the wall, but the member didn’t know.

    But let’s take a step behind that written mission statement. What is God’s mission for your church? We know it involves making disciples. And before we take the easy road, consider the answers that many of God’s servants through history have received. Their paths have been difficult and dry, often they have seen little measurable success in their own lifetimes, and frequently they wind up in fiery furnaces, facing lions, or hanging on crosses. There’s no program that’s going to handle all of those things!

    There is no substitute for prayerfully seeking God’s will for your church, then following it even when some dashboard doesn’t portray you in the best light.

    God is calling you to accomplish in your community what God can do, not what you can do. So break off all the tangled thread of solutions that were designed for someone else, get back to the basic gospel, and do what you need to do.

    Now that sounded like a conclusion, but I’m going to add one thing. I’m not against all programs and solutions that are suggested by others. I’m not against good business practices in church, with one critical proviso: All programs must be subordinated to the mission to which God has called you. To be honest, until you have the answer to that question, I don’t think you can possibly choose a workable program. After all, I can’t choose between my hammer and my saw until I know whether I want to pound in a nail or saw a board.

    Thanks for sharing in my ignorance and weakness here. Perhaps if we’ll all be weak, we’ll see an outbreak of strength in our churches–God’s strength.

  • New Methodist Blogger – Rev. Geoffrey Lentz

    I’ve been meaning to post this for a few days, but it’s been busy, as you can tell from my low level of blogging. Geoffrey Lentz is the associate pastor of First United Methodist Church of Pensacola, and a former student of mine. In fact, I met Geoffrey in the first class I taught for youth in a United Methodist church when he was just 14 and I had been a Methodist less than a year.

    No, I’m not going to go into all the embarrassing youth stories. Suffice it to say that everyone realized then that Geoffrey was going to be a minister, and that never changed. I now attend his Wednesday Bible study on the Lectionary passages and really enjoy learning from him. He has become quite conversant with church history and especially early church fathers, and makes extensive use of that knowledge in teaching. Since my training and inclination starts from the opposite perspective, i.e. I tend to study the Bible as a piece of ancient near eastern literature, I find his study to be a nice complement to my own.


    Luke Study Guide

    I have long tried to persuade Geoffrey to start blogging, and finally he has. His blog is at GeoffreyLentz.com, and I’d call attention to his thoughtful first post, What is a Preacher to Do?

    He also just wrote a study guide for the Participatory Study Series published by my company, Energion Publications. You can find out more about this excellent new guide to the Gospel According to St. Luke on its catalog page.