Bob Kaylor

A Day of Discovery

I've done a lot of church visits during my years in the Beeson doctoral program at Asbury. We've visited megachurches, hipster churches, downtown churches, wealthy churches, impoverished churches, and churches without buildings. Nowhere, however, have I seen what I saw today.

We headed over to Nairobi Chapel this morning for a visit with the staff. They are the church that meets in tents and their offices are housed in a really dingy old building surrounded by mud along the Karen Road. What we found their today, however, is what I think is a major key to the revitalization of the church.

The Nairobi Chapel team described in detail their vision for what God wants to do with their church and they have a methodical process to get them there. From the moment someone attends until they become a ministry leader, the church marks their progress along the way with clarity, evaluation and encouragement. It's a really powerful version of what I think Wesley was trying to do with the early Methodists--a discipleship process that is unapologetic about high commitment, spiritual disciplines, and engagement in transforming society. I've never seen this articulated as well as I did here and I am anxious to explore it further.

Most impressive, however, was the way in which the staff articulated the vision of the church. There was no cult of personality around the senior pastor, though he is clearly the vision architect here. There was also none of the bombastic self-aggrandizement you often see from American churches who believe they have cornered the market on how to do church. The Nairobi Chapel staff humbly told us that they have had many failures and experiments on the way and that they struggle in some areas, but they are crystal clear about what they are trying to achieve. I was impressed with their quiet passion for the work. Spend a few hours with these folks and you'll never need to go to another church growth conference again.

No space for more details here tonight, but will certainly give an overview soon. Needless to say, I was very fired up today and even the jet lag couldn't keep me down.

Into Africa

Greetings from Kenya! A quick update from the Asbury Seminary Beeson group here in Nairobi. I arrived with the group on Saturday night and was bussed to our guest house at the Africa International University outside of Nairobi. Sunday morning we attended a two hour long service at Nairobi Chapel--a church housed in large tents. It was a spirited service with great music and we enjoyed meeting so many of the people. The music was outstanding and a mix of contemporary music, Caribbean, and Swahili styles. We spent the rest of the day having lunch and exploring a bit.

Today (Monday) was a shopping day for souvenirs. I picked up some nice African art pieces made by local artisans at a ministry for women who have been affected by HIV. Really inspired there today.

Tonight we're having a bit of African flavor at a restaurant aptly named "The Carnivore." It features exotic meats like giraffe, antelope, ostrich and crocodile. I will probably stick with the beef, thank you very much. Tomorrow we begin a series of meetings with local churches that will surely prove interesting.

See the pictures here for a visual imprint of where we are. The roads aren't very scenic and reflect some of the conditions here, but we have been blessed by the people and look forward to learning more.

We returned today and heard about at explosion at one of the hotels downtown in Nairobi. We are nowhere near there and are quite safe, but please pray for those who are affected. Terrorism is a stark reality here that the Kenyan government is dealing with aggressively. There is security everywhere we are. More on that later.

Happy Memorial Day and I will check in tomorrow.

The Slothful Servant

Yesterday was our church garage sale. Several of the churches I’ve served over the years do one of these annually. When you do one of these every year, you begin to notice a few trends—trends like seeing the same stuff show up year after year. In seven years of doing yard sales in Park City, for example, we had the same poker table show up in sale every year. Now, you can ruminate about a Methodist church selling a poker table, or about the table’s apparently bad mojo, if you’re into that. But the bottom line was that it never really “stuck” in someone’s home.

Another thing we used to see over and over again was exercise equipment—exercise bikes, treadmills, etc. Most of it was lightly used—mostly as a clothes hanger and not for exercise! Bev Carlson donated one to this year’s sale and I asked her whether she and Ken had used and she said, yes, almost every day for 17 years! That has to be some kind of record. Most of that stuff, however, is in yard sales because it never got used.

Oh, sure, it was no doubt bought with good intentions—if I spend the money on this, then I’ll use it every day, I’ll finally get in shape, I’ll look like the guy or the girl in the infomercial. They went at it hard every day for a week, maybe a month, and then, well, it became kind of a hassle. I don’t have time for that today, I’ll do it tomorrow. Oops, pulled a muscle opening a can of Diet Coke so can’t do it today. There’s just too much to do the next day, so it sits. And then, once the laundry gets hung on it, well, that once noble piece of equipment that was going to be a vital part of a healthy lifestyle becomes a yard sale item which someone else will buy and continue the cycle.

I think that the exercise bike is really a kind of metaphor for the deadly sin we’re talking about today—the sin of sloth. We like to think of sloth as simple laziness and the word translated in the King James is “sluggard.” Think of a slug that moves slowly and leaves a trail of slime behind it—someone who’s not expending any energy whatsoever and who appears to have no usefulness at all. That’s the kind of image we get from this passage in Proverbs, where the writer tells the sluggard to go out and watch the ants, if he’ll get off his lazy butt and go do it. The ants don’t have anybody telling them what to do and yet they’re always busy hunting for food, gathering up food, preparing for winter. The sluggard (lazybones in the NRSV), however, is only focused on resting today—“a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest”—I’ll do it tomorrow. But the sluggard comes to ruin and poverty because tomorrow never arrives. In an agrarian culture like ancient Israel, the failure to work the fields meant that you were probably going to starve. Sloth had deadly consequences.

Such a concept might seem a little foreign to us, however. After all, we’re no longer an agrarian society. The hardest work that most of us have to do to get food is to pull out our wallets. Yes, we have to work to earn a living, but that’s not a problem for most of us. We are Americans, after all—the products of a deeply ingrained Puritan Protestant work ethic that drives us to be industrious and productive. According to a Forbes magazine survey of the hardest working countries, we work an average of 1797 hours a year, which puts us 9^th on the list behind countries like Mexico, Greece, Poland, and the Czech Republic. South Korea is the hardest working country in the world with an average workload of 2,357 hours per year.

Even at ninth, however, we’re still a hardworking people. Sloth would not seem to be an American value. Indeed, much of our political rhetoric reveals that we’re pretty down on sloth, believing that it’s the reason for poverty. We’re very clear about our distaste for those who will not work, often quoting Paul in 2 Thessalonians 3:10 when he says, “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.”

But we have to remember that all poverty is not the result of idleness, and neither is all sloth the result of simply doing nothing. Indeed, people in the ancient world believed that there’s another kind of sloth that may be even more insidious than pure idleness. In both Greek and Latin, the word for that kind of sloth is acedia.

 The fourth century monks called it the “noonday demon” after that feeling you get in the middle of the day when you just don’t feel like doing anything but sleeping. To put it simply, acedia is really the failure to care—a sleepy, listless, lethargic, apathetic approach to the things that really matter. That’s why it’s associated with the sloth—who hangs in the trees and does seemingly nothing all day long and moves so slowly that it can eat the algae grows on it.

Writer Regina Barreca wrote an article for the Chicago Tribune in 1996 that describes this slothful acedia in simple terms:  "Sloth is insidious. It whispers that you might as well do it tomorrow, that nobody will know if you cut comers here and there to save yourself some trouble, that the world will be the same in a hundred years no matter what you do, so why do anything? Sloth says, "Don’t strain yourself," "What’s the big hurry?" and "Just give me five more minutes." 

Sloth hits the snooze alarm, hits the remote control and hits the road when the going gets tough ... Sloth cheats on exams, drinks straight from the milk carton and leaves exactly two sheets on the toilet roll so that it will have to be replaced by the next poor soul who finds out too late that the remaining paper is nothing more than a mirage. Sloth does slightly less than the right thing. It doesn’t bother returning something to the lost-and found, but pockets it instead; it doesn’t tell the clerk he has undercharged. Sloth has never written a thank-you note, sent a birthday card on time or entertained angels. All this simply asks too much effort."

Acedia is failure to care, failure to do the right thing, and when we are grabbed by the sin of acedia we stop paying attention to the people around us. I have a theory, for example, that the problem in many marriages is simple acedia—we fail to the do the right thing, we stop paying attention, we don’t do the little things that really matter. That old song, “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers Anymore” was written from the perspective of a victim of acedia.

Indeed, if you want a visual example of acedia, think of a dying houseplant. How many of those do you have at your house? I can never keep them because I don’t take care of the little things—watering, food, light. Fail to care for a plant and it dies. Fail to care for a relationship and it dies, too.

That includes our relationship with God as well. Much of the biblical material about sloth is about failing to invest in our relationship with God and failing to care about what God cares about. In Matthew 25, for example, Jesus tells three parables about how acedia can keep people from entering God’s coming kingdom, one of which has to do with a master giving each of his servants money to invest while he is on a journey. Two of the industrious servants manage to double the master’s money through their shrewd investments and diligent work. The third servant simply buried his portion, unable or unwilling to do the work and to take the risk of investing the master’s resources. When the master returns, he is in big trouble and gets shut out of the house.

Jesus then goes on to say that the criteria for entrance into his kingdom isn’t about one’s theology or one’s system of belief but, rather, did you care about the hungry, the thirsty, the sick and the naked? If you did, you cared for Jesus and you are welcome in the kingdom. If you were guilty of acedia, and you failed to care for the least of God’s children, then you’re doomed.  

Friends, I really believe that the biggest problem that the church of Christ faces in our day is a kind of spiritual acedia. We’ve become so focused on defending the tenets of our faith that we forgot that faith is always tied to works. The Reformation reminded us of Ephesians 2:8,9 that tells us that we are saved through faith and not through works, but the Reformers forgot to read verse 10 which says that we were created for good works. Indeed it says that good works are to be our life style. Writing to the church at Ephesus, Paul wants them to know that their faith isn’t just a holy head trip—it’s 24-7 vocation that must be worked at constantly, paying attention and caring about what, and who, God cares about.

You know, as Joe and I have been saying through this series, each of these deadly sins is also personal for us pastors as well. Indeed, pastors may be some of the most egregious perpetrators of acedia on our congregations. It’s not that we’re not busy—indeed, we are probably over-busy. It’s just that in our busyness we sometimes miss the things that matter and we fail to care where we should. I was reminded this week that I missed a very important event in the life of one of our kids who was having surgery a few months back. I was too busy being busy and I failed to care for someone and her family who were facing a very difficult time in their lives. I have been wrestling with that all week, and I am very sorry for that sin of omission. I can only say that I’m sorry to others of you who have felt that way and have been disappointed that I passed by without stopping to care. I ask your forgiveness.

Maybe we’re trained that way, however. When I was at General Conference, for example, I saw just how busy the United Methodist Church is around the world—busy doing some very good things but, also, doing a lot of busy work that doesn’t really matter. Our acedia allowed us to spend nearly two weeks and $9 million on a conference that ultimately produced no significant changes to our denomination’s focus and mission. We’re busy counting heads, busy generating program, busy raising money, busy, busy, busy—but we’re so busy that we have failed to care for the things that really matter—the things that Christ wants us, as his church to care about.

But while the church and its pastors are busy, so, apparently are the congregants. In fact, I saw a survey this week that was conducted by Lifeway research that gave the top ten reasons people stop going to church. Number one reason? Simply got too busy! We’re too busy to focus on what really matters. We’re too busy to even pay attention to God’s commandment to have a Sabbath day.

There’s an old saying that says what begins as an excuse, soon becomes a habit and then ends as a cage. Acedia is all about making excuses that become habits and then trap us in a never-ending cycle of failure to give a rip about what really matters.

In many ways, the 21^st century can be very much like that first century church in Ephesus that Paul planted. Paul, in fact, seems to have spent more time with the Ephesian church than any of the others he established around the Mediterranean world. First Church Ephesus became a Christian success story as a result—by all the metrics a growing and vital church. Tradition tells us that sometime after Paul left Ephesus, the apostle John, the beloved disciple of Jesus, was appointed there as pastor, bringing along with him Mary the mother of Jesus.

A few years later, however, John was exiled to the remote Greek island of Patmos by the emperor Domitian because of his preaching at Ephesus. While on Patmos, John learned that his former church, which had been thriving, was now slipping into a kind of spiritual acedia.

The book of Revelation, which John wrote while on Patmos, includes letters to seven churches in Asia Minor, one of which is Ephesus—indeed, they are the first church John addresses because they are close to his heart. Writing through the words of Jesus, he begins by saying,

REVELATION 2:2

“I know your works, you toil, and your patient endurance. I know that you cannot tolerate evildoers…I also know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for the sake of my (Christ’s) name, and that you have not grown weary.” In other words, I know, church, that you are busy doing a lot of good things, that you are working diligently at being the church, but…”

John writes under the guidance of Jesus, “I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.” That’s what acedia is at its most basic level—we forget and abandon the love we had at first—whether it’s love for Jesus, love for our spouse or children, love for the world, love for those who are in need. We have a deficit of caring about the little things, a busyness that produces nothing of lasting value. When we abandon our first love, we abandon the ability to care and we are deep in the sin of acedia.

So, how do we beat this sin? What do we need in order to get off the spiritual couch and no longer be pew potatoes? How do we remember and engage our first love?

Well, speaking for Jesus, John offers three things that will beat back acedia and sloth. The first is:

Remember from what you have fallen. Remember what is like before. Remember what it was like when you first came to Christ—the excitement and wonder of those early days when you couldn’t wait to know more, you were sensitive to every move of the Spirit. You were alive with joy at realizing what Christ had done for you! Most churches, and many of the people in them, suffer from a collective memory loss about the power of God in Christ. When we were young and excited, we couldn’t wait to go forward.

When I was ordained, we ended the service by singing, “Here I am, Lord! Is it I, Lord? I have heard you calling in the night. I will go Lord, where you lead me.” Yes! But then, 20 years into it, sometimes the hymn sounds more like, “And Are We Yet Alive?” The key to being the church of Jesus is remembering who we are and where we’ve come from.

You know, I think that’s true for any relationship. You want to change your marriage? Remember where you came from! Remember what it was like to fall in love, to have that spark. Remember that there is a reason you’re together. If you’re struggling with a career, remember what it was like to dream about what you wanted to be when you grew up. Wherever in your life acedia is keeping you from caring, remember what it is you cared about in the beginning!

The second thing that replaces acedia, John says, is repentance. Repentance is essentially turning 180 degrees away from the life of sin and acedia to life in Christ. We have to decide that we want to change—to put ourselves before God and those we’ve wronged, to ask for forgiveness and, then, to begin walking a very different way of life. Repentance is a reminder that we can change, that the life we have isn’t the life we are stuck with. We can choose to get out of the rut of acedia and back on to the path of discipleship.

What do you need to repent from today? What has been keeping you from living the abundant life Christ offers? To whom do you need to confess and ask forgiveness?

And the last thing we can do to beat acedia, says John, is to “do the works you did at first.” To put it in 21^st century terms, that means “going back to basics”--to go back to the beginning and start over with the basic habits and practices that made you a vital disciple of Jesus.

What are those habits and practices? Well, we Methodists have traditionally been very good at this in our history. John Wesley had three simple rules for Methodists to follow: Do no harm, Do all the good you can and attend to the public and private ordinances of God—the basic daily habits of Christian discipleship. We vow to uphold those basics when we join a United Methodist Church: prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness. We will have our confirmands come up here in a little while and say, at the beginning of their walk with Christ, that they will commit themselves to these practices—to daily prayer and Bible study, to weekly worship, to giving sacrificially of their resources, to serving others, and sharing their faith. And every time we ask new members to affirm these vows, we ask the whole congregation to do so again. If we’re going to beat acedia and sloth in the church, both here at Tri-Lakes and around the world, we have to be willing to repent of the fact that we haven’t paid very much attention to these basic things and start doing those works we did at first.

I am convinced that no program, no initiative, no Episcopal proclamation, no conference, no system will make the United Methodist Church as a denomination or Tri-Lakes as a local church be more vital. Only a return to the practices that made us a discipleship movement will do so. We need to recapture the power of holy habits and, when we do, we will begin to see all the areas of our life—our relationships, our work, everything—begin to be shaped like Christ. What are you prepared to do?

This fall, we will be launching a whole church emphasis on developing and sticking to these holy habits. We’ll be going back to basics. In the meantime, where can going back to basics help you in your marriage, your work, your relationship with your children, your life? What do you need to start doing again in order to start fresh?

Remember from where you have fallen. Remember what it was like.

Repent.

Do the works you did at first.

Our faith is very much like a yard sale exercise bike. It doesn’t do us any good unless we’re willing to get on it and work at it every day. Like the old Nike commercial put it so aptly, “Just do it!” That’s as good a cure for sloth as any!

But if we fail to do it, if we fail to reclaim our passion for the work of Christ, then we might as well look like this…

 

 

A Gluttonous Grace

It’s good to be back with you all after nearly two weeks away at the United Methodist General Conference in Tampa. I wish I could tell you that I had plenty of opportunities to enjoy the Florida sun, maybe get to the beach, come home with a little tan—but actually the whole time was spent almost exclusively indoors in a huge convention center, sitting in the newsroom where I was writing blog articles and Tweets or sitting in the main plenary sessions in the huge hall (where the Republican convention will be in a few months).

Note the emphasis there on sitting. Whenever I go to something like this, there’s a perfect storm of things that conspire to expand one’s waistline. I don’t know about you, but one of the things I notice when I travel is that restaurants don’t generally have a ton of healthy choices on the menu. Even if they did, you have to eat so fast in order to get back to work that you hork down the food. It kind of reminds me of being on the rifle range in basic training where we ate standing up at long tables and slide our food while we ate. When you got to the end of the table, you were done.

So, it’s been easy for me to think about today’s Deadly Sin of gluttony after feeling a little more expanded over the last few days. Indeed, when you look out over a sea of pudgy United Methodists you can see that there’s a collective need to push back from the potluck. If we’re representative of the whole country, then it’s evident that the CDC’s statistic that 35.7% of American adults are obese isn’t that far off.

Of course, you knew that already. Everyone is telling us that our national obesity problem is hurting us, resulting in everything from heart disease to diabetes and host of other health issues. Our United Methodist health insurance rates are insanely high mostly because pastors don’t tend to care for themselves real well. Many of us and many of our neighbors are losing the battle of the bulge.

But if that were all that gluttony was about we could make this a really short sermon—the kind of sermon you hear on all those late night infomercials. The cure for obesity is pretty simple—eat less, exercise more. Take everything in moderation. Monitor your weight and your diet. Get out and walk. Don’t go to long conferences without taking your work out clothes and actually putting them on and using them (I am pleased to report that I did so). Gluttony would seem to be the deadly sin whose solution is the most obvious.

What’s interesting about this deadly sin, however, is that it’s the only one of the seven that Jesus himself was accused of. We read that today. When John the Baptizer was dunking people in the Jordan, people thought he had a demon because he didn’t eat bread and wine. His diet was locusts and honey.

 Now, on one of my trips to Israel, I learned that “locusts” here probably doesn’t refer to bugs but to the pod-like fruit of the carob tree which grows wild in the region. Carob is highly nutritious and the pods they come in look like locusts, thus they were commonly referred to as locusts trees. That puts things in a different light, doesn’t it? But, still, it’s not exactly a five course meal. People thought John was a little crazy because of his weird habits.

But they thought Jesus was even worse—not crazy, not having a demon (though he was accused of that elsewhere), but something perhaps even worse. In first century Israel, to be accused of being a glutton and a drunkard meant something more than the fact that you had bad habits. The company that Jesus kept made him guilty by association, even if he never overindulged himself.

Here’s where context helps us. In the Torah, the law of Israel, gluttony and drunkenness (the two are often paired together) were connected to disobedience of one’s parents—a violation of the fifth commandment to honor your father and mother. In Deuteronomy 21:18-21, for example, it says this:

“If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother, who does not heed them when they discipline him, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the gate of that place. They shall say to the elders of his town, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death. So you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel will hear, and be afraid.”

I know what you’re thinking—what was college like in ancient Israel, where getting stoned had a very different connotation? But seriously, this was major stuff and was certainly in the back of the mind of those who saw Jesus hanging out with tax collectors and prostitutes and a wide range of other rebellious folks who had somehow gotten on the wrong side of life. To his critics, Jesus looked very much like a rebellious son who had broken the law and deserved to die.

See, in the biblical context, gluttony wasn’t just thought of as overindulging, it was actually just a symptom of an even bigger sin—a sin we might call “waywardness.” When we’re not satisfied with our lives, we search for things to fill the emptiness within and we’ll even leave behind those who love us in order to get what we think will satisfy us. It doesn’t matter what we try to fill the emptiness with—food, drink, money, sex, material goods, you name it—because the truth is that no matter how much we consume, we will never be satisfied. The more we consume, the emptier we feel.

Most of us carry with us the signs of that waywardness. We can see it in each other, but we rarely see it in ourselves.

Being a General Conference for the last two weeks, one of the things that became very clear to me is that the United Methodist Church is nearly irreparably divided, and the way we deal with differences is by voting. Every single decision that the delegates made was a based on a yes-no vote. Every vote meant that there were going to be winners and losers. With the stakes that high, people on both sides of the tables approached the debate in a way that pointed out the flaws, the brokenness, the hunger, the sins of the other. It was nasty and manipulative in a way that makes me never want to go back again.

What was missing in all of the wrangling and arguing was a sense of self-awareness—that before we can speak of the sin of the other, we have to be willing to admit that we, too, are empty. We want to tell others what they need to believe, what they need to do, but we don’t remember that we’re just as empty and wayward and clueless as they are.

I have known a lot of people who came to a point in their lives when they realized their emptiness. Anyone who has been in a 12-step group gets this—that the first step toward healing is to realize that you have a problem, that you’re empty and whatever it is that you’re addicted to isn’t going to fill you up. I sat in Tampa thinking that we need a church-wide twelve-step group because we’re addicted to an awful lot of unholy stuff.

You know, in some ways, I think that what Jesus was doing with these sinners around the table was really a kind of early 12-step group. Jesus hung out with wayward people—people who had left everything behind to try and fill the emptiness. Jesus joined their parties. He was at the cafes and back alley dives where the wayward hid from the world and medicated their emptiness with all the wrong things. His critics thought he was just like them—the kind of person that Proverbs 23:20 warned about when it said, “Do not be among winebibbers or among the gluttonous eaters of meat; for the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty and drowsiness will clothe them with rags.”

Jesus was guilty by his association with all of these empty gluttons and winebibbers. What his critics didn’t get, however, was that Jesus’ presence at the party wasn’t about the gluttons and winebibbers rubbing off on him, but rather the other way around. For Jesus, parties were not about indulging, but about filling the empty with his presence. Rather than condemning those at the table for their empty waywardness, Jesus offered these sons and daughters a way home.

Later in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus deals with this accusation again—that he is a wayward son who eats with sinners and in response he tells a story about…a wayward son. A young man takes his inheritance early, basically acting as though his father is dead, and heads off to try and fill his emptiness and desire with food, money, sex and anything he could get his hands on. But gluttons aren’t generally known for being frugal—so the money ran out, to the point that the only way the young man could eat was to nibble on the pods that the pigs rejected. The gnawing emptiness becomes a raging hunger—physically and spiritually.

The young man realizes that his only option, the way to survive, is to turn around and go home. That plan is fraught with difficulty, particularly because he knows the law in Deuteronomy—the wayward son deserves nothing by a hail of stones.

But in a shocking twist, as the wayward son comes up the driveway, empty and broken, the father doesn’t pick up a stone—instead, he runs to meet his son. In first century parlance that was even more shocking—men, especially patriarchs, avoided running as something undignified. The father embarrasses himself with his running and his grace. He meets the boy and throws his arms around him, kisses him. The boy, who has nothing, asks forgiveness. The father responds with—a feast. The empty one is filled.

Someone has said that there a three things people want to hear most:

The first one is, I love you. We just don’t hear that enough. The church just doesn’t say that enough to the world. Who was the last person you said that to? Who was the last person you heard that from? Our gluttony of things is largely a result of being starved of real love. Jesus’ presence at the table was first and foremost an act of love for the people everyone else sees as unlovable. It is an embarrassing, wildly reckless love with which the father loves his wayward children.

The second thing that people most want to hear: You are forgiven. This is huge. Our emptiness is also a result of believing that we are worthless—that what we’ve done and who we are will never be good, will never measure up. When we’re stuck in that kind of thinking, we don’t believe God can forgive us. As result, we can’t forgive ourselves, let alone forgive anyone else. We talk a lot about sin, but very little about forgiveness.

Can I tell you today that you are forgiven? No matter what you’ve done, no matter who you are—you are forgiven. And you are welcome to come home. 

And third, Dinner’s ready. When you hear that, you know that you have a place at the table. You don’t have to gorge yourself in secrecy and silence, you don’t have to scrounge around for something to satisfy your emptiness. No—you are welcome at the table.

It’s no coincidence that when Jesus wanted to give his disciples an ongoing remembrance of who he was and what he did, he gave them a meal—a meal for sinners, a meal in which the grace and love of God is broken and poured out through his own broken body and his own shed blood. We come to this table empty—our sin makes us so. But even though we receive only  small piece of bread and taste of the cup, it is enough to fill us inside with the fullness of Christ. He ate with sinners and changed them, and he is still doing so today.

I love you.

You are forgiven.

Dinner’s ready. 

 

Thursday Afternoon Wrap-up

United Methodist News Service has written a fairly comprehensive article about what took place on the floor of General Conference this morning concerning the debate and vote on a compromise amendment regarding our denomination's disagreement on issues surrounding human sexuality. You can read it here. The Rocky Mountain delegation had lunch together to discuss the outcome of the vote. 

General Conference also voted to change the clergy pension plan from a defined benefit only plan to a plan that combines both a defined benefit and a defined clergy contribution plan. 

The afternoon was taken up with a variety of other petitions dealing with clergy and lay representation at annual conferences, mandatory retirement age for bishops, and other funding issues. 

There are still a large number of petitions to be addressed before the Conference ends tomorrow evening. 

 

 

 

Wednesday (May 2) at Annual Conference

It's been an eventful day so far at General Conference, with several actions that have significant implications for the way our denomination is structured and the United Methodist Church's influence in the world. Here are some of the highlights and links to detailed articles. 

• Delegates voted in favor of adopting the compromise "Plan UMC" with some amendments that tweaked the plan. You can read an article about the plan and its impact here. The plan was also referred to General Council on Finance and Administration for a look at the plan's financial impact and to the Judicial Council for a ruling on the constitutionality of the changes. Assuming those go through, the framers hope that the changes will consolidate the work of the General Agencies and increase accountability. 
• The afternoon began with a look at resolutions having to do with opposition to Israeli settlements in Palestinian land. The petitions called for a resolution of opposition and financial divestment in companies that supply Israel with equipment and the means to build illegal settlements in the occupied territories. The debate was passionate on both sides, both from those who support divestment and those who oppose it. The General Conference voted for the resolution of opposition, but voted against divestiture. 
• Voted to refer the alteration of the Social Principles to reflect the worldwide nature of the church to the new General Council on Strategy and Oversight. 
• Voted to change the title of Lay Speaker to Lay Servant. 

The delegation enjoyed a wonderful social time at dinner at a local restaurant. The evening ended with worship. 

Minding the Sheep

I've been here at General Conference for a full week along with delegates and observers from around the world and while much work was done in legislative committees over the past week, this week the real work begins as legislation is brought to the plenary. Yesterday I had the chance to take some time off and spent the morning worshipping at Hyde Park UMC here in Tampa. Bishop Will Willimon from North Alabama Conference, in his inimitable blunt and frank style, preached a strong message on John 10:11-18, the famous passage that reveals Jesus as the Good Shepherd and we as his dumb sheep.

That's an interesting and apt metaphor for what's going on here in the plenary. Ironically, the voting delegates on the main floor of the plenary are separated from the rest of us by a fabric fence that runs the whole way around them--a thousand Christian of different colors and dispositions all penned in like sheep. On the stage and presiding over the proceedings is the Council of Bishops whose symbol of office is a shepherd's crook. The shepherds in this case preside over the sheep, but it's the sheep who do the voting and deciding via electronic keypads. Indeed, half of the delegates in the sheep pen are pastors, which is another word for shepherd. The shepherds are also sheep, so...well, you get the idea. 

Many of these shepherds/sheep have their own ideas of whether the flock should go left or right (let the reader understand). Indeed, some will want to stray no matter what the shepherds say. Some of the sheep here are biters and some are the docile type whose brand is their victimhood. The sheep form sub-flocks and talk about how all the other sheep are idiots. The bleating and biting has already begun and, by all accounts, it promises to get worse as the week goes on. 

Bishop Willimon reminded us yesterday that there are two important realities in the Gospels that the sheep need to hear today--two truths that will both guide and critique the work within the General Conference pen. The first is Jesus' definition of who's really in charge: "I am the Good Shepherd." All other shepherds pale by comparison. Whatever we do here, if it fails to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, the Good Shepherd, the real leader, we are destined for disaster. A lot of the sheep here think they know what Jesus is up to and want to herd the flock in his stead but, as the Bishop put it, the first step in being able to really follow Jesus is for each of us to state an important reality: "I am not the Good Shepherd." Only Jesus can lead us, and the way he does so is by laying his life down for the sheep. Any shepherd that isn't willing to lay down his life for the sheep isn't a shepherd at all, but a hired hand (John 10:11-13). Any would-be sub-shepherds will need to have the same mind as Jesus, who sacrificed himself and his own interests for the good of the flock, from the temptations of the wilderness all the way to the cross. That's an attitude missing in many of these debates. 

The second reality has to do with the Good Shepherd's assessment of his beloved sheep, which he offers at the moment he lays down his life for them: "They don't know what they're doing" (Luke 23:34). Maybe we ought to admit that in the midst of all this wrangling and politicking that, in the end, we don't know what we're doing. We don't know what the future of the United Methodist Church will be. We don't know if any the proposed reforms, if passed, will make any difference in the end. Despite all appearances to the contrary, we really don't know what we're doing. We like to think that Jesus' word from the cross only applies to those who nailed him there out of hatred and self-interest, but we're guilty of hatred and self-interest, too. Maybe if we admitted that we don't really know what we're doing, we'd do a lot less legislating and lot more listening to the Good Shepherd in worship and prayer. 

I once gave a children's message where I was making the same essential point that the bishop was making--that sheep are pretty dumb when it comes right down to it. One of the children stood up and said forcefully, "Sheep are not dumb!" Her grandpa had them on his farm and she was convinced that they were smart. Subsequent studies have revealed that, indeed, sheep aren't that much dumber than any of the other barnyard animals. But barnyard animals need to be constantly cared for, fed, and protected. They can't generally survive in the wild on their own. Intelligence is always a relative term, whether you're talking about sheep or people. No matter how smart you are, you're still a sheep and you need a good shepherd. 

I remember watching a pre-General Conference briefing several months ago when, after 45 minutes of rolling out proposals for structure and process, one of our bishops finally said, "And where does Jesus fit into all of this?" That's the dumb question that defines the problem. The sheep want to try and bring Jesus into the pen. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, wants to lead them to an altogether new pasture. 

My prayer this week is that we'll spend more time asking the Shepherd than debating with the sheep--that maybe the ethics of the sheep pen will be replaced by the ethos of the Good Shepherd. 

Let the sheep say, "Amen." 

The Way of the Gauntlet

One of the more interesting aspects of General Conference involves the act of just getting into the Tampa Convention Center. Outside are a myriad of folks dressed variously in t-shirts and with scarves that represent a variety of causes. There are the pro-Life folks with orange "Do No Harm" shirts, those wearing rainbow stoles advocating for full inclusion of LGBT people, the conservative folks with their papers. Everyone wants to put something in your hand--a flier, a handout, a sticker, a button. It kind of makes you feel like a rock star running through paparazzi for the moment you walk through the gauntlet because everybody wants your attention. Of course, rock stars would have people to carry around all the junk they get handed. 

Most conversations here at General Conference have an angle. Everyone's got a cause and, in many ways, it's a bit of a microcosm of the wider political divide in the country. It's not a little ironic, for example, that the Democratic convention will be here later this summer where there will undoubtedly be even more people handing out stuff and protesting across the street (here, there's a tent set up across the street by a group that advocates for LGBT inclusion). Then, I would imagine, that space will be taken up by some conservative caucus group. 

We are constantly hearing the voice of the extremes here--the religious equivalent of Fox News or MSNBC. I'm reminded of Rabbi Edwin Friedman's famous dictum about family and organizational systems when he says that (and I'm paraphrasing) a lack of clear vision and differentiated leadership always gives strength to the extremists. Without a clear and cohesive vision, countries, denominations and families will all be driven by those with the loudest voices and the most anxious approach to life. 

The way things are done here at General Conference (like the US Government system after which our polity is modeled) always means that someone is going to win and someone is going to lose. The rhetoric is peppered with a lot of we-they statements, images of battle, and the woundedness of those who lose. Every issue has winners and losers and while we vow to stay together afterward you always know the fight will be rejoined again at the next committee meeting, conference, or caucus. 

Not posing a solution here, but I wonder if there's a better way to do all of this. Robert's Rules of Order make meetings orderly, but do they enable real dialogue? Speeches for and against aren't the same as having a cup of coffee together. The Conference has attempted to have "holy conversations" around some of these issues, but all the delegates complained that the time for them was too short--have to get back to the meeting and the legislation, after all. We apparently always need a referee to help us decide things, so we're left to communicating ideas through fliers and t-shirts and scarves that mark us as belonging to one side or another. Walking the gauntlet becomes a substitute for walking the long road together. 

This week has been all about legislative committees but, beginning Monday, we'll be dealing with a lot of major issues on the plenary floor where there will certainly be more at stake, more emotion, more passion, more of a desire to win. The sentiment around here is that it's going to be pretty intense but hopeful that it won't be ugly. The gauntlet line will get longer, no doubt, and the protests more vigorous. 

Before I headed out from the hotel this morning I was watching the Today show, which would be interviewing Rodney King on this day before the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots sparked by his King's brutal beating by police officers and by their subsequent acquittal. I was reminded of King's word to the city as the riots raged: "Can't we all just get along?" 

That's a fair question whether you're in the midst of a riot or a religious meeting. We are called to be peacemakers and not political hacks. 

At Tri-Lakes UMC, we have talked a lot about the fact that while our culture wants to fall somewhere along a continuum between conservative and liberal, Jesus is really nowhere on that grid. He's calling us to a completely different way of being.

It's a way of following instead of fighting. It's the way of grace instead of the way of the gauntlet. 

 

 

A Serious Language Barrier

I spent most of this afternoon sitting in on the Faith and Order legislative committee at General Conference. This is the committee that is considering all the petitions relating to theology and doctrine, along with several petitions about homosexuality and its compatibility with Scripture and Christian tradition. You can see all the petitions here:  Download 1.Faith and Order

Say what you will about these petitions. I certainly have my opinions about them and it was probably a good thing that I was a silent observer! What struck me most about the debate of the subcommittee dealing with homosexuality and ordination, however, wasn't so much the content as the dialogue itself. Imagine, if you will, a squared up series of tables where about 30 or so delegates are sitting. About two thirds of the group are American Methodists, while a third are from other countries--mostly United Methodists from Africa. Every time someone speaks, two or three translators--who are also sitting at or around the table--need to translate it into French for the Africans, or from French to English for the Americans. People speak in short bursts of sentences, wait for translation, and then move on. It's a painstaking process to just get the words out and heard. 

But that's not the most difficult part of the process. What really became evident to me as I listened today was the fact that even if we're using the same language, we use words quite differently. Take the word "inclusion," for example. One African delegate wanted to clarify what that word meant to everyone else around the table. The translation made it frustrating for him and everyone else but it was an honest question. Several American delegates got up and tried to explain it, but each gave a different definition based on their particular perspective. For some, inclusion means that everyone is welcome in as they are and celebrated while, for others, inclusion is just the first step in a larger process where we are accepted as we are but we're not called to stay that way. For some, inclusion means participation while, for others, it must lead to transformation. The African delegate kept trying to get his question clarified but the committee chair eventually ruled his question as "inflammatory" and stopped him cold. I wonder how his translator handled that...

This seems to me to be a microcosm of the underlying problem of much of the dialogue here (not all of it, mind you, but much of it). We United Methodists have a serious language barrier. One delegate talks about the "quadrilateral" as the way we interpret Scripture (on a level with tradition, reason, and experience) and another delegate holds up Wesley's dictum that the Scripture is primary with the other three acting as lenses. One delegate talks about inclusion with the mantra "all means all," while another reminds us that inclusion isn't valuable unless it leads to transformation. We are seriously divided on issues like the authority of Scripture, the meaning of Jesus, the reality of resurrection, the nature of sin, and a whole host of other issues and terms we define quite differently. Even the people who don't need translators to hear one another can't really seem to understand each other. And sometimes, when we try to define the terms, others are quick to rule our definition as out of order. 

I spent a lot of time walking around the convention hall today pondering this serious language barrier and wondering if it can ever be breached. It's more like Babel than Pentecost--everyone speaking their own language but no one being able to understand the words. I am doing my best to look for the good things here and there are indeed signs of hope in many places. But like the bishops have been saying throughout the Conference, only a movement of the Holy Spirit is going to enable us to revive this Church. Only a common language will enable us to move forward. Pentecost birthed a church in the beginning. I think we need it again if we're going to continue! 

How About a Call to Discipleship?

We just finished hearing the report of the Call to Action committee, which was presented by Adam Hamilton and others on the floor at General Conference. For those who may be unfamiliar with CTA (as I'll refer to it henceforth), it's a proposal by a task force convened by the Council of Bishops to propose measures to increase the vitality of United Methodist congregations and, as a result, to stop the denomination's precipitous decline. The presentation began with some staggering numbers: 

• Over the last five years, membership in the UMC in the United States has declined 5.3% (424,000 members)
• Worship attendance has declined by 8.7% over the last five years (291,600 less on an average Sunday than five years ago)
• Baptisms and confirmations of children and youth have declined by 21% over the same period. 
• Only 15% of United Methodist congregations in the U.S. are considered to be "highly vital," a designation which is marked by:

1. Effective pastoral leadership
2. Multiple small groups and programs for adults, children, and youth
3. Worship that connects across generations
4. A high percentage of spiritually engaged laity in leadership 

The vast majority of our congregations do not meet these criteria for vitality. 

The upshot of all this, according to the report, is that in 25 years our denomination will no longer have children and youth in our churches, and in 50 years we will no longer exist if the current trends are not reversed. 

The Call to Action task force thus offers the General Conference four proposals for vote in the next few days as a means of re-vitalizing the United Methodist Church (or at least slowing the decline):

1. A ten year focus to create and sustain vital congregations.
2. Allow annual conference to restructure themselves to fit their local contexts.
3. Restructure the denominational agencies to foster flexibility and collaboration.
4. Invest in leadership, including raising up the next generation of clergy (52% of UM clergy are ages 55-72)

The General Conference will be voting on these initiatives, which are more complex than I have outlined here. But here's my two cents...

A lot of the energy in the proposal is around clergy--making clergy more effective, getting more clergy, raising up younger clergy, holding clergy and bishops accountable. As a clergy person, part of me celebrated this. I like being held accountable and I think it's a good idea to raise the bar on standards for the conduct of ministry. But here's the problem--this won't reform the Church anymore than better clergy would have reformed the Anglican Church in Wesley's own day. Methodists never were a clergy movement in the beginning. They were first a discipleship movement. As my friend Steve Manksar of the General Board of Discipleship tweeted during the presentation, "We don't need more clergy, we need faithful disciples of Jesus Christ." 

CTA talks a lot about raising up clergy, but their primary answer for doing so is designating money to send young people to seminary. Again, I liked seminary enough to go twice. But clergy depth is not generated in seminary. If you go to seminary to learn the faith and learn to live it out, that's way too late in most cases! I was blessed to be raised in a church whose primary focus was about shaping me as a disciple of Jesus Christ. While I may now disagree with some of the doctrinal principles I was taught there, I will always be grateful for the expectation that was given to me to grow in faith. It was the church that gave me the tools to do that long before I ever darkened the doors of Asbury Seminary.

Come to think of it, the clergy of the church I grew up in weren't even the primary ones who shaped my faith. It was the non-ordained disciples who did so--Mrs. M who taught us in Sunday School; Brian, my youth leader who showed up at every one of my concerts and took me to his house for dinner when Ididn't know where my next meal was coming from.  There were the elders of the church who taught me the historic doctrines of the church, and the myriad people who prayed me and my sisters through the death of my mother and slipped groceries into the car when no one was looking. 

I didn't know it then, but they were the church. The pastors were awesome but it was the church full of disciples who shaped me and made me who I am today. I have not forgotten. 

When I became a United Methodist, I was intrigued that Wesley had a method for doing what the folks at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Butler, PA did, and then some. The class meeting was the place where the church happened and grew in early Methodism--the place where lay persons, led by lay leaders, stirred one another to Christian perfection by looking each other in the eye and asking, "How is it with your soul?" It was in the class meeting where empty seats welcomed visitors seeking faith. It was in the class meeting that people banded together to be in mission to their neighbors. It was in the class meeting that vitality was measured one disciple at a time. 

I wonder what would have happened if Call to Action had recommended that the way to vitality in our future is to return to the best methodology of our past? What if the report had said, "We are calling on every United Methodist Church to engage in an intentional process of making disciples of Jesus Christ in every age group using the best practices of a movement? What if we developed a system for making disciples--a clergy supported but lay-led system--that was less concerned with counting butts in the pews and more concerned and fully focused on growing a kid, a teenager, an adult into a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ? My guess is that you wouldn't have to go fishing for effective leaders, lay or clergy, at that point. You would only have to launch them into the world! 

The closing image of the report was a video about a church that was closing. It was a kind of "don't let this happen to you" image. There were lots of empty pews throughout. Maybe that's not a bad image if it means that they're empty because everyone is out announcing the kingdom. That's an image of the future I can get behind!