At
the 2016 General Conference of the United Methodist Church in Portland, Oregon,
the Bishops of the Church took a powerful and welcome step by calling a time-out
on the Church’s incessant wrangling over a number of issues, the details of
which will not be dwelt upon in this missive.
The Bishops called for, and the Conference agreed to accept the creation
of a Commission which will meet over the next two years to discern, discuss and
pray about the way forward for our world-wide Communion of United Methodists.
I
support the Bishops in this call and am grateful to them for their courage as
they stepped into the fray to call us back to ourselves. My prayers go out to those who will sit on
this Commission. They are prayers that
invite a Spirit of love and grace to flow in the coming conversations. They are prayers for softened hearts and open
minds. They are prayers for healing,
hope, and as Bishop Stanovsky lifted up in her sermon, for the courage to step out of the tomb of conflict and lean into the
Resurrection.
Having
offered thanksgiving to our leaders and prayers for the work ahead, there are
some observations I would like to offer.
It
is my observation that the General Conference of the United Methodist Church is
it’s own culture. It is a thing that exists apart from the
congregations of varying shapes, sizes and dimensions around the globe who bear
the name United Methodist. This is
a group of people who come together every four years to make decisions for the
United Methodist Church, many of whom have been delegates to this body for
decades. They know each other. Some of them love each other. They have experiences of and with one
another, and for many, these experiences are not positive. And like any culture, they develop habits
and ways of being. For this group, a
key habit is to fall into patterns of adversarial wrangling, suspicion and surprising
levels of political intrigue.
It
is a culture fueled by the fact that the Church stubbornly insists on mirroring
secular culture in it’s reliance upon “democratic”
style legislation and Robert’s Rules of Order. In such a rigid, rule dominated, up/down, yes/no system there is little room
for grace and even less for the movement of God’s Spirit. So the primary activity becomes the
management and manipulation of the system in pursuit of victories defined by world-view, ideology, culture, and theology. In the face of this there is a felt yearning for the pursuit of what Wesley
would call the “spreading of Scriptural holiness across the land.”
It
is a culture also driven by the understandable fact that the people who get
elected as delegates are frequently those who are most competent at managing this legislative
and decision making process. Another
way to put this would be to say that the system attracts what the system needs
to maintain itself. Moreover, many people seek to be delegates to General Conference are activists, who care
passionately about the life of the Church from their particular
perspective. And in the grip of our
inflexible process, people are apparently so passionate that they are willing to
sail our ecclesial ship onto the shoals of schism.
So, again, I lift my voice in thanks to our
Bishops who have grabbed the wheel and steered us, if only for a time, away
from those shoals. With the time-out
called by our Episcopal leaders, it might just be possible to extricate our United Methodist community from it’s addiction
to aping secular culture in its structure, politics, and process. With God’s grace, we just might choose to
step onto the path of Holy Conversation and compassion, a way of humility and
hope.
As we
hit the pause button, it might be worth prayerfully considering the possibility that the majority of the United Methodist Church sitting in pews every Sunday may not want a schism. Not only is it
possible they do they not want a schism, it could be that they are apathetic
about what the 864 people who comprise the General Conference are doing.
The
cliché that says, “All politics is local,” also applies to the Church. We are, first and foremost a collection of
local Christian communities who exist in a particular conext. These communities come together for worship
and praise, for a chance to find grounding in an increasingly crazy world, and
for a way to be together in faith and love.
They also seek to share this wonderful Gospel love with a world that
badly, badly needs it.
I
would suggest that it is unlikely that local congregations in the Congo, or
Sweden, or Cuba or Ohio, or Russia, or Alaska or Alabama or California or
anywhere spend a great deal of energy on what the General Conference does or
does not do. They have other things on their plates. And as someone who served local congregations
for nearly thirty years and in my work Superintending I will witness to this as
my own experience.
It
is the ever dynamic power of Christian community struggling to be faithful in the
moment that appropriately occupies our people.
Many of our congregations exist in the middle of horrible warfare and
deprivation. Others exist in the
stress and decay of urban life. Still
others strive to find a way in a spiritually famished culture that identifies
less and less with the voice of the Church.
Local Church ministry is challenging no matter where it happens, and the
work of the General Conference is to focus upon the empowerment of every church
in every context, rather than upon making pronouncements in vain attempts to claim another foot of ideological ground.
The work of the General Conference is to “make straight the highway,” and level the path so that the power of God’s incredible Spirit can flow to the people and the communities, not to the structures and the strictures of a thousand meaningless rules.
The work of the General Conference is to “make straight the highway,” and level the path so that the power of God’s incredible Spirit can flow to the people and the communities, not to the structures and the strictures of a thousand meaningless rules.
Though it may sound like it, this
comes, not as a criticism of General Conference. There is more than enough of that to go
around. No. Instead, I lift my voice to call myself and
each of us who bear the name, “United Methodist” to a new humility. No
matter how passionately I feel about certain things, and I do, the flux and
flow of the Holy is not about what I want.
It is about God, and God’s
calling to us as a people. Can we
surrender the “tyranny of our desires” and be open to God’s Spirit among
us? Can we step away from the
seductive pull of our own opinions and open our minds to the mind of God? Can we
surrender the arrogance that leads us to think we and we alone understand God’s
will and way? Can we embrace the humility that was in
Christ, who didn’t count himself equal with God, but in humility submitted
himself to death, even death on a cross
(my paraphrase of Philippians)?
I do
not know what the future holds. But I
know that we have sinned together in our arrogance. Let us repent and seek forgiveness of God and one another. I cannot imagine how our ministry will
unfold. But I do hear a call to
each one of us to seek God and God’s way, not our own. And I most decidedly do sense the yearning of
the Holy , bidding us to….
“….Lead
a life worthy of the calling to which we have been called, with all humility
and gentleness, with patience, bearing one another in love, making every effort
to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace…(Ephesians 4:1-3)”
And
one more time…..Thank you Bishops. May
God bless and keep you in the days and work ahead.
SR