Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Discipleship

  • Dashboards, Discernment, and Responsible Leadership

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    Yes, that’s a big collection of topics, but I think they’re connected. John Meunier links to an excellent post by Dan Dick, which you should read before you read this one. The topic here is the conference dashboards in United Methodist annual conferences, such as this one for the North Alabama Conference.

    I do have substantial problems with the church dashboard, including a great deal of the way in which the statistics are presented. I also am concerned about numerical measures of success in the church. It’s quite possible to build up numbers and be missing the mission and ministry of the church, and the proclamation of the gospel message. Some people will leave a church that is aiming for full commitment and discipleship. At the same time, as Dan Dick pointed out, some people’s professed disdain for such numbers is the result of laziness. But all of this has been thoroughly discussed amongst the Methodist blogs.

    It seems to me, however, that the use of these numbers on conference dashboards is just a symptom of a certain retreat from personal responsibility. I don’t mean by this that our United Methodist bishops are off trying to avoid hard decisions. Rather, we are systematically trying to codify and quantify so much of human behavior and organizational policy that not only can avoid taking personal responsibility; they must.

    For example, in my district, the district superintendent has 53 churches for which he is responsible, and the conference as a whole has more that 600 pastors, for which our bishop is responsible. Each year, pastoral appointments are made by the bishop, with the advice of the cabinet and many people in the churches, for those 600 churches. I think the temptation is going to be very strong to put some kind of simplified set of numbers on performance. The more details you have to consider, the harder it is to make a choice.

    What I wonder is how often a bishop could get by with ignoring the numbers because, let’s say, one pastor is making better disciples, even if his numbers (for some reason) didn’t look as good. Could the popular pastor with the watered-down message be overlooked in favor of the pastor with the harder message of sacrifice and service? I recognize here that the pastor with the good numbers may be an effective disciple maker. I know some pastors in that category. The pastor with the bad numbers may be either lazy, or much more likely simply too beat up by parishioners, the system, and the unrealistic expectations we have for pastors that he is, in fact, performing badly.

    But can the leadership determine this with accuracy in all (or nearly all) cases? Would they be willing to send the less popular pastor to a larger church?

    It seems to me that collecting statistics is valuable, though I think someone well qualified in analyzing data should rework the conference display. I sense a few cases of deceptive use of numbers. Most importantly, the numbers are not related to the nature of the existing church body and the community in which it is located. All of that requires personal knowledge such as cannot be collected remotely.

    But what if such information was collected and available? Would our leadership be willing to act against popular pressure? I see this as a common problem in leadership, at least in the United States today. We have a problem making a decision and standing up for it. Of course, in employment situations, the decisive leader may well have to present statistics as evidence in court in order to justify a decision.

    That’s one reason for “zero tolerance” policies in so many cases. “Zero tolerance” means that people in leadership don’t have to make responsible, nuanced decisions. But “zero tolerance” is just the extreme case of avoiding responsibility. Putting it all on a set of numbers is another one. It’s a trend I don’t like, even though I recognize it as a response to the other extreme–a complete lack of accountability. (I have tremendous respect for Bishop Willimon, for example, whose dashboard I linked as an example. Yet I’m still not happy with it.)

    I ramble because I don’t know a solution, other than to say we need leaders to take responsibility, and we need to make sure we know who is responsible for what, so they can be accountable. I also think we need to bring leadership closer to the local church so that each person in leadership is responsible for a reasonable number of people and churches. That would allow individuals to seek out all those nuances that back up the numbers.

    I don’t know the solution, and since I am neither a pastor nor a church administrator, and have avoided most church committees, I am probably the wrong person to propose one. What I do believe is that, though structural changes can help, the answer doesn’t lie in precisely how the church is organized. There are congregational style churches that are just as dysfunctional as any Methodist church whose bishop sent the “wrong” pastor.

    What we do need is a change of our personal culture, from that of an organization that must maintain itself to one of gospel driven discipleship.

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  • A Christian Case for Limited Government?

    Allan R. Bevere is making a Christian case for limited government. Scot McKnight has linked to it. Some of the discussion is heated. Fun!

  • Boldness to be Fools

    Sometimes even when I’m way to busy to be blogging, at least on my personal blog, I just see so many things that point the same direction that I just have to write. This post didn’t start with this quote, but it says something I like to read:

    If our denomination has lost the boldness to be fools, then we do not need new initiatives or new advertising campaigns. We need to recapture our lost zeal.

    That’s from John Meunier, a United Methodist local church pastor and blogger.

    This follows on some discussion of radical discipleship over on GenXRising, who says:

    If we, as Christians, are really worried about declining numbers of the faithful in this land, we should practice a more robust form of discipleship.

    Ouch! You mean we have to mean what we say? Say it ain’t so!

    This all relates closely to a book I’m publishing, The Jesus Paradigm by Dr. David Alan Black, a professor of Greek and New Testament at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Indeed, it does appear that there are things on which Methodists and Baptists can agree. [Cue the shock and amazement.]

    To go back to the question, however, here’s what I wrote on my company’s blog right after contracting to publish Dave Black’s book, my third of three points:

    Finally, this book hit the spot because I’m frustrated with the professional church. Practically every pastor I know is frustrated as well. They are wondering why church members don’t get to work, why they don’t serve one another, why they don’t share their faith, and why they fill pews (occasionally, even!) rather than getting involved.

    I like to call myself a passionate moderate–just look at the blog header. I’ve discussed before what I mean by combining those two terms. I never mean that we don’t need to really be who we are called to be. That’s going to take some willingness to get radical on at least one point–faithfulness to what we know is right.

  • Quote of the Day 1-19-09

    From Only Wonder Understands:

    This week, in working on a sermon on transforming discipleship (drawing on some materials by Trevor Hudson) I was reminded that Jesus always values people over efficiency and effectiveness.

    One might also remember that what is efficient will depend on what one’s goal is. And yes, I think it’s a good one for Martin Luther King day.

  • Legislating Morality

    Have you ever heard a conversation like this?

    “You can’t legislate morality,” says one person.

    “Oh yes you can! We do it all the time. Murder is immoral and we legislate against it.”

    Interesting, no? For me, this gets combined with separation of church and state. I’m an advocate of separation. People will frequently ask me why I don’t want politicians to take their faith into their actions in government, and how I would be able to separate those actions if I was a politician.

    Well, I can’t separate them, and I have no plans of doing so. Who I am is driven by the fact that I’m a Christian, trying to live out a life here as a follower of Jesus. If I stood for election to some office, I would remain a Christian, and Christianity would be a part of my political choices. I would hope that I would also be able to express those choices in a way that would be comprehensible to people of other faiths and of no faith at all. I would certainly regard it as my duty to try, and if I found that I was advocating legislation that was good only for Christians, to stop doing so.

    Separation of church and state is sometimes read as separation of church and statesman. But the constitution says nothing about the faith of an officeholder, except to specify that there can’t be a religious test, which suggests that “separation of church and statesman” was not the intent. (I realize that “separation of church and state” as a phrase, does not occur in the constitution, but I regard this as irrelevant. As with many other legal principles, it is a name for a principle contained there, which is convenient shorthand for the words that actually are there.)

    I advocate separation because of two things. First, I believe that getting the power of government is inevitably corrupting to the church. When we try to accomplish the goals of the gospel through legislation, we often forget the power of God and the value of grace. Secondly, I believe that the government is too easily led to serve only the majority, and that aligning with a particular faith or religious tradition exacerbates that problem.

    None of this, however, prevents or should prevent people from taking their moral principles, however derived, into the public forum, arguing for them, and producing laws that they believe are suitable to good moral principles. And thus I get back to legislating morality.

    “You can’t legislate morality” is used in two ways in my experience. First, it is used to suggest that you can’t make laws requiring people to be moral. This is most commonly used against laws regarding sexual morality. In this first sense, the statement is clearly false, as we can legislate moral actions in many spheres. Laws about sexual morality may be hard to enforce, but they certain can be legislated.

    It is possible that some rejection of “legislating morality” results from the fact that it is difficult to legislate moral behavior. Apart from social context, it is no more difficult to enforce a law against adultery than against murder. There will be evidence left in both cases, witnesses in both cases, and a good investigator can probably discover these. There is obviously no great difficulty in implementing a penalty. The real problem with enforcing a law against adultery in modern society would simply be that the behavior is prevalent and widely accepted. It would be hard to enforce because of that. For example, if a police officer comes to my door looking for evidence of murder, I’m likely to be as cooperative as I can because I share a society-wide revulsion of murder and wish the murderer caught. Adultery? Well, not so much.

    I don’t mean to minimize adultery as a sin. Frankly, I think churches do that way too much, to the point that there is very little moral stigma to the occasional adultery in many churches. Pastors can commit adultery and simply get some counseling and get moved in many mainline churches. But the societal view of adultery in general would not allow for an effective civil penalty. So as a practical matter, we could not legislate that particular point of morality, or better moral behvavior. But that’s not because of any inherent difficulty in legislating something moral. Rather, it’s because so many people either don’t see adultery as immoral at all, or regard it as only a minor offense.

    There is a second sense, however, in which “you can’t legislate morality” is quite true–if we mean that it is not possible to pass legislation that will actually make people moral. We can legislate against adultery, or abortion, or any one of a number of other things all we want, and we can enforce that law against a varying percentage of the population, but that law will not make people at heart less adulterous, less inclined to seek an abortion, or less inclined generally to moral behavior.

    That’s the thing about law–it mandates behavior; it can’t mandate character. God’s law runs into the same difficulty. Paul runs through that conflict through Galatians and Romans. I get up in the morning, look at the law, and it tells me, “Henry, you are a person with a considerable number of moral failings.” OK, that’s true, but what do I do about it? The law is pretty unhelpful. I’m already determined to overcome moral failings as much as I can. As I do so, the law is always there to remind me of where the problems lie.

    That’s where the gospel comes in. The gospel is the means of changing hearts and creating moral people. Which brings me full circle to the church/state issue. I think often we, as Christians, act as though we don’t believe the gospel. We don’t believe there is grace (both prevenient and sanctifying for my fellow Wesleyans) that can change people at the core, and keep them moving toward being moral people.

    It seems to me that if we Christians truly believed in the gospel, we would be so caught up in it that we would spend much less time creating laws, and much more time trying to spread Christ’s grace. Of course, when I ask that implacable law in the morning how I’m doing on this one, I can’t say that I’m always the best example. But it’s another good thing to work toward.

    We can’t legislate moral people, just moral behavior. But as Christians, that should not be discouraging, but rather energizing. After all, we have the gospel!

    (Note: Maverick Philosopher has a post on some definitions related to this topic, from a more philosophical point of view; it’s worth reading, HT: evangelical outpost.)

  • Mother Theresa and Crises of Faith

    A friend e-mailed me the link to Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith. Although they use the singular “crisis,” that one crisis was one she lived with for a long time.

    I have to say that I have ample sympathy, not to mention empathy with people with doubts from time to time. I think God leaves us with an abundance of questions. Standing back and thinking in “theologian mode” that seems like an excellent scheme to make us grow spiritually. Living through it seems just simply annoying.

    It does remind me how much I dislike prosperity theology. Besides promising people something that is false–not all, or even most, followers of Jesus will be wealthy–it also encourages people to deny doubts and troubles in order to appear to be “real, faith filled” Christians.

    When our son was in his fight with cancer, from which he ultimately died at age 17, there were those who felt that if we had the right amount of faith, God would heal our son. It’s an interesting feeling to not only struggle with the reality of losing a child, but to also face the implicit accusation that it’s your fault because you don’t pray correctly or with enough faith.

    I suspect the faith that is without any doubts of being shallow. Trust and endurance are separate things. Faith, however, is not so absolute as some would like to make it.

  • Selling Christianity

    Laura has an excellent post on this. She links back to an earlier post I wrote, but that’s not why I’m calling it excellent. She also makes a number of good points, and links to a number of good posts.

    Some Christians make the assumption that if you’re not “in your face” about your faith, you’re not serious about your faith. After all, how can you be quiet when people are going to hell? That’s one reason a number of people complain when I call myself a moderate Christian. How can one be moderate about Christianity? You’ve got to be on fire!

    But regarding your faith as important does not mean you need to embrace ineffective or unethical methods of witnessing. Under unethical I would include any means of witnessing that doesn’t recognize the person to whom you witness as a child of God, endowed with the ability to make his or her own choices. Thus a Christian witness should try to look at God’s children the way God does, and God not only cares about us, but respects our choices.

    Any approach to witnessing that drives people away is ineffective. I recall one teacher saying once that we should make sure that when we are done conversing with someone that it will be easier, not harder, for the next Christian to talk to that person. Sometimes that will mean that I have to shut up completely, because anything I say will make things worse.

    The most important thing to remember, I think, is that God is responsible for conversions. You are not. I am not. God is responsible for heaven and hell. You and I don’t get to make those calls. God is also sovereign, and he doesn’t need our help running the universe. What does that leave us? Well, we simply are called to give witness.

    There’s always the “gospel offends” excuse. Now I do believe that the gospel offends. Grace is unfair. God’s grace is going to let people into heaven that I don’t really like all that much. But much of the actual offense people have against Christians is not due to the gospel. Often it is something precisely the opposite of God’s grace that offends them. When Christians are unforgiving and judgmental, when they arrogate to themselves God’s prerogatives of judgment, when they treat non-Christians with disrespect, those people are offended. Even though Christians have done the offending, the gospel was not at issue.

    There are two elements to a Christian witness. First is a Christian life. Not a perfect life, mind you, but a life aimed at discipleship. Second is the confession. The reason I put the confession second is that a transformed life will draw questions. The confession comes in answer.

  • A Visit to the St. Gregory Palamas Monastery

    Kevin at Everyday Liturgy is beginning some reflections on his visit to St. Gregory Palama monastery. This caught my attention, since my recent discussions of the atonement led to some discussion of the Eastern Orthodox view of the atonement, and thence to some articles on St. Gregory Palamas, and I now have a plan to acquire a copy of a book about him.

    Here’s a taste:

    I went to the monastery partly expecting to see a different world of great and explicit spiritual feats – what I found was a community of simple men, living simply, working out their salvation by simple means. I think I might have been able to deal with the realization of my former misconcieved expectations, for if their world was so incredibly different from my own, I might have been better able to excuse my personal entanglements in wordly concerns. But, since their lives were made up of all the elements as mine, I found myself without excuse and felt somewhat exposed by the light the monastery shone on my life. Since returning, I have been wondering how I can better live the life of the Gospel in my own place, how my desk job can be an obedience, how I can pray more, how I can respect and serve others, keep silence when necessary and speak words of love when possible.

    Check it out!

  • New Philophronos Blogroll Member

    I join with Laura in welcoming Discovering the Heart of God as a new Philophronos Blogroll member. Go check out his blog.

    I’m going to link to a specific post from the Pacesetters Bible School Newsletter to which I’m the primary contributor.

  • On Churches, Drinking, and Weaker Brethren

    Joe Carter has an excellent post looking at the Christian standards on drinking. What does one do with the behavior of Jesus, who did drink? Would Jesus be acceptable as a pastor or elder in our churches or as a faculty member in our seminaries?

    I am a member of a United Methodist congregation, and our standards are a bit softer today, but historically Methodists have been quite strongly against use of alcoholic beverages. I grew up as a Seventh-day Adventist, and in that denomination drinking is strictly forbidden.

    My own choice, and I believe the right choice for me, is not to drink at all, but I do not believe that my personal choice is necessarily the correct choice for everyone. I would certainly not have a problem with church members or church leaders, including pastors and bishops, who used alcoholic beverages in moderation. What precisely “moderation” means may also be difficult to define, but I believe it’s an appropriate exercise.

    Carter concludes:

    These types of questions have important implications that go far beyond the concerns about drinking beer or wine. Where does Christian liberty end and institutional authority over matters of conscience begin? Obviously there are times when we need to delineate such boundaries. But we should be cautious about where we mark those lines — especially when they would put Jesus on the wrong side.

    Good point. I would add that I think we should be comfortable if the way we answer is in accord with the “royal law” (James 2:8). If I drink, I do need to be concerned for those who might stumble because of my action. If I don’t drink (my own choice), I need to make sure that people understand that this is my choice for my walk with the Lord, and not something I hold up as a universal standard.