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Commentary
WESLEYAN WISDOM: Finding our way into a new UMC future Donald W. Haynes, Feb 17, 2010
Donald Haynes
By Donald W. Haynes UMR Columnist
The challenge of United Methodism today is to make a paradigm shift and redefine some of the attitudes and structures entrenched in our 20th-century ethos. We have arrived at a “perfect storm” of the reality about the relationship between the local church and the larger connection.
John Wenrich is a denominational consultant in the Evangelical Covenant Church, who leads local church seminars called “Veritas,” the Latin word for “truth.” His philosophy is one that we United Methodists might find helpful—“There is no vitality without reality.”
His seminar fleshes out the statement: “Blessed are the churches who admit reality, and confront it with honesty, hope, and faith.” As we sometimes say in seminary courses on biblical exegesis, “That will preach!”
What is the reality among our own connection? We are finally admitting that numbers are important, a reality factor long denied in seminary faculties, General Board staffs and the Council of Bishops.
Counting heads
We repeated these denials as truisms in so many important settings: “We do not play the numbers game” or “Authentic ministry must not be quantified.” Somehow in that denial we forgot to admit that every “number” is a child of God and a member of some pastor’s flock.
Certainly the dropout and transfer of some persistently “nattering nabobs of negativism” makes for congregational peace. Yet we should remember the philological origin of that alliteration: former Vice President Spiro Agnew, who refused to admit the importance of political dissent and civil disobedience in the 1960s.
We would be better served if we heeded the advice of the late Joe Harding, who helped develop the “Vision 2000” local church renewal effort. Joe loved to gig people by asking those who wanted to “purge the rolls and get rid of the deadwood” to consider instead, “Why did the deadwood die?”
This is a piece of “humble pie” we all need to eat. In every jurisdiction, conference and local church where membership decline has weakened the church, we must ask, “Where have all our children gone?”
Likewise we must ask why our appeal after the mid-20th century became more and more limited to white suburbia. When Gibson Winter of Garrett Biblical Institute wrote The Suburban Captivity of the Churches in the 1950s, his thesis got no traction.
If we had really “walked the walk,” would clergy pensions have become the highest fiscal priority of the late-20th century? In making appointments, did we stop factoring numerical growth into the equation of clergy effectiveness?
Bottom line: There is no vitality without reality. We must once again evangelize all socio-economic, racial and ethnic strata or we are destined for the slippery slope from “mainline to sideline to offline.”
Secondly, how long can a church remain viable when its membership base develops a wider and wider spread between the age of those on the church roll and the age of those living in that zip code? Medical science has been the best friend of United Methodism for over half a century, camouflaging the reality that the strongest component of service and giving in many congregations has been those over 65 years of age.
Church demographics
Look at your church next Sunday. If present trends continue, who will be singing in the choir, sitting in the congregation and keeping the church solvent?
Quaker Elton Trueblood once wrote that every church must define its base and its field. Then it must recognize that if the base can no longer support and supply the field, the field will die a slow death. In other words, if a church is having more funerals than professions of faith, it is being weighed in the balances and found wanting as a missional outpost of the Kingdom.
That is not to say that we older adults are not important, but we want spiritual progeny! We do not want the last of us who goes to the rest home to have to turn out the lights!
Bottom line: There is no vitality without reality. We must evangelize younger people or grow weaker with every death.
Thirdly, we have developed a knee-jerk reaction to the emerging church insistence that the denominational sign on the lawn is not necessarily a draw to your church. Most megachurches of all heritages are playing down their denominational identity. Often it’s only mentioned in parentheses!
This development has probably hurt no church as much as it has United Methodism. As United Methodist Bishop Bevel Jones used to say of many situations, “Our strength has become our weakness.” We cherish our “catholic spirit” and encourage our youth to see the validity and value in other religious traditions. Yet we have lost more than we have gained, as our children married persons of other denominations or moved from small towns to urban areas.
We also developed in the entire 20th century what William Abraham of SMU’s Perkins School of Theology calls “doctrinal amnesia.” On campuses, in boardrooms and around bridge tables, United Methodists were embarrassed when asked what we believe about any number of doctrinal issues.
The merger of the Methodists and Evangelical United Brethren in 1968 proved to be doctrinally disastrous for the EUBs. The EUB Confession of Faith was hammered out after World War II; the Methodist Articles of Religion came from Elizabethan England, with some deletions by John Wesley.
There is a cultural aphorism that applies here: If you don’t know where you are going, you will not know if or when you get there.
Serious disconnect
Fourthly, even e-mails I receive in response to this column show there is a serious disconnect between laity and pastors, and between local churches and the connectional church.
In horse-and-buggy days, the linchpin of connectionalism was the Quarterly Conference. Four times a year, the Presiding Elder came to the charge, preach and interpret the connectional ministries of the church. By the early 1950s, the Quarterly Conference became the Charge Conference and was held semi-annually.
A decade later, the spring conference was abandoned, leaving only an annual Charge Conference in the fall. With the 21st century, some bishops allowed the superintendents to abandon their annual visit to each charge and to hold “cloister conferences.”
Now only a handful of laity attend, and the dialogue between the District Superintendent and the local laity is often confined to confrontational issues. The only recognized connectional group often is defined as the Staff-Parish Relations Committee and they have to see the D.S. on her or his turf—the District Office.
Along this journey we have lost valuable personal rapport—and the conversations and sermons that build trust. Now we see “apportionments” defined as a “franchise tax.” How sad.
Bottom line: There is no vitality without reality. District Superintendents should do what corporate district managers do—ride with their sales people, accompany them on calls; know what they are reading; learn their priorities between time spent in the office and time spend “burning shoe leather.”
Pruning overhead
Our honesty must reflect the same reality of passengers on a plane that has lost some of its engines—we must jettison some sacred cows that are too costly to maintain. We cannot afford the general, jurisdictional or annual conference overhead that we could when we were younger, more generous in stewardship and more familial in connectional relationships.
The last page of Russell Richey’s important volume, Methodist Connectionalism, lists some factors that can lead to new vitality. The key word is trust. I’m paraphrasing them as challenges for us all:
trusting enough in the gospel to embrace a new future; trusting our ministry enough to give up “salary-ladder” appointment careers; trusting our bishops and trusting them to lead us; trusting connectional leadership when we disagree with them; trusting ourselves to experiment, to dare, to start afresh, to create anew; trusting our Methodism heritage in a world of pluralism and divisiveness; moving beyond suspicion, not to naiveté, or caucusing or exiting, but trust.
Jesus once said of Simon Peter’s great affirmation of faith in him as Son of the living God, “On this rock I will build my Church.” Each of these itemizations of trust are merely broken reeds unless they are rooted and grounded in our faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and the Lord of the Church.
You and I must ask ourselves, “Have I faith? Have I fruits?” Our answers will determine the answer to the larger issue, “Have we a future featuring a vitality founded on veritas?
Dr. Haynes is an instructor in United Methodist studies at Hood Theological Seminary. dhaynes11@triad.rr.com.
Donald Haynes
