Thank you to our Bishops

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.

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

Naming the Lie

          As I write this I am perched in the gallery at the General Conference of the United Methodist Church, where I have come to serve as a Reserve Delegate.    It is the last day of the Conference.    The days have been etched with the acid of acrimony as delegates have fought over a host of concerns.   Human Sexuality,  Climate Change, Health Care,  all of them very real and of serious import, and almost all of them are argued from “Progressive”  or “Conservative” perspectives.     As the Church tries to express itself, every petition and argument, whether it is theological, social or financial, is sliced with the blade of ideology between left and right.   The tension is high.   So high, in fact, that schism is a very real possibility.

            In the midst of the power maneuvers and political manipulation – and there is plenty of it from all corners – there is a pervasive and defining lie that hangs in the air like smog.   It is a lie that is so prevalent and all encompassing that most people are not even aware of it.     It’s a lie too, that infects our secular culture as well.

            And the lie is this.

            The binary labels of left or right, liberal or conservative are in themselves a fundamental lie.    To draw a line through the Body of Christ, or through our secular culture and to force people into one column or the other is fundamentally an act of violence.    These are artificial designations, and I would submit that they are designed to separate and alienate.     Divide the people into two oppositional, adversarial groups and get them arguing and fighting and they will never unite to create real change.  Divide and conquer, right?   Moreover, if we train people to  adopt a narrow world-view and tell them they should only relate to people with whom they agree, we have then created an easily controlled population, haven’t we?    This brings to mind an experience I had as a Pastor when I brought a book for an adult study class.  The class rejected the book because they didn’t agree with public positions the author had taken.   Mind you, they had never read the book, but they refused to even expose themselves to an idea that might be different from their ideological perspective.

            Think about this in terms of real life experience.    No one is completely liberal or completely conservative.    We are all far more complex than that.   Indeed, it’s a bit insulting to think that we could be so narrowly labeled and filed away.   The truth is that each person is a marvelously complicated jumble of feelings, emotions and experiences.    Our very Createdness defies any attempt to dump us into one of two camps so we can curse, judge and throw stones at one another.    Indeed, we believe that God Created us each as unique individuals, knowing us even before we entered our Mother’s womb (Jeremiah 1:5).    More than that, our human nature is to be dynamic and changing.  No one stays the same.   The things we thought and believed when were twenty years old are rarely the things we think and believe at age sixty.  

            For those of us in Christian community, reality is based, not upon stands, positions, or artificial categories,  but on relationships.   We are called together not because of ideological agreement but because of our common commitment to God’s love in Christ Jesus.   For us, the relationships we build in faith are deeper than the wounds we cause one another.   They are broader than the disagreements that we will inevitably have, and they are stronger than the pull of secular culture which always tries to define us and pull us down to it’s level (Romans 12:2 “The Message,” Eugene Peterson).     In Christian community we belong to one another to such an extent that we are described in Romans 12 as all part of one body in Christ, and all unique, all with different functions and roles to play.    More than that, we follow a Savior who takes down the “dividing walls of hostility, (Ephesians 2:14)” creating a new community of peace and harmony.

            Yet here in Portland, the United Methodist Church is infected with the virus of secular culture, using the power of “this world (Ephesians 6:12)” and jamming people into categories rather than relationships.    Arguing, positioning and posturing, not according to the beautiful relational power of The Gospel, but along the lines of ideology and the lust for control.

            It’s my firm conviction that if our Church does not name and renounce this lie of ideological categorization, we are doomed to be completely swallowed up by the culture around us.    So the call comes for each of us to lay down our closely held ideological positions.    We are not liberal or conservative, left or right, we are One in Christ Jesus.    Do not be taken in by a pre-set list of positions and policies.  Instead, sit with people who have a different point of view.   Build relationships with people who see the world through a different lens.    Root your relationships, your life, your work with Christ at the Center, not your ideology.

            If we can actually do this, we might have a shot at being Church rather than an outpost of a secular political party.  If we can do this we might find a way of claiming God’s firey, Pentecostal love as a global people.   If we can do this, we might be able to heal the hurt we’ve caused and bring life where there is only strife.   If we can do this we might be able to begin the transformation of the world we yearn for so powerfully in our mission statement as a denomination.

            And in all of it let us remember that it is God, and not we who do the judging.  Our job in Jesus Christ, is to love extravagantly and leave the judging to God.

SR

The Parable of the Two Dogs

          

            One day, two puppies were basking in the sun in the back yard sleeping fitfully and enjoying the sweet smells of summer and the warm embracing air.   While they were dozing, their Master placed a beautiful stuffed animal on the ground between them.    Soon, the puppies awoke and noticed the stuffed animal.    Assuming it to be a toy meant for him, one of the dogs grabbed it in his mouth and began to prance around the yard with it hanging from his mouth.  

            The other dog saw this and wanted the stuffed animal for his own.   He raced up to the other puppy and grabbed the half of the stuffed animal that was hanging from the other dog’s mouth.   

            Suddenly it was tug of war.    Each dog dug in their heels, clamped their jaws down on their piece of the stuffed animal and pulled.   They yanked and jerked and shook and tugged.    It sounded like they were fighting, but the truth is that they were enjoying this game, and as they pulled and pulled, one could see wagging tales and hear the growling guffaws.  

            What they didn’t notice in their glee and gusto, though, was that the fabric of the stuffed animal was beginning to tear.    The joints where arms and legs were stitched together were giving way, and with each shuddering tug it tore a little more.  Soon the stuffing started to fall out on the ground, unnoticed by the players of the game.    As the dogs danced about vying to get the animal for themselves, they waltzed and two-stepped all over the stuffing, trampling and soiling it under their feet.    The commotion grew, the dogs kept, pulling, the fabric kept tearing, and stuffing kept falling to the ground. 

            Suddenly both dogs noticed at once that there wasn’t much left to  the thing that they had tried so hard to get.    They looked at each other, and as much as a dog can do this, they shrugged, released the soggy, grimy, formless, limp  fabric and let it fall to the ground.  Silently they both gazed at it for a moment.   Then they turned around, trotted away and returned to their place in the sun where they laid down and soon fell sound asleep.

           

                                                                        

Exactly Who Is In Charge Here

A General Conference Reflection by Schuyler Rhodes

  “Consider your own call brothers and sisters; not many of you were (are ) wise by human standards, not many were (are) powerful, not many were (are)  of noble birth. Bod chose (chooses) what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose (chooses) what is weak in the world to shame the strong;   “God chose  (chooses) what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing the things that are so that no one might boast in the presence of God. “    1^st Corinthians 1:26-29 NRSV (parenthesis are inserted by me).

            I am packing to go to Portland to the General Conference of the United Methodist Church and my heart is not what I’d call “strangely warmed.”    A friend asked me how I was feeling about it all, and I responded without thinking that I was experiencing a “malignant apathy”  about it all.   The words just slipped out and betrayed a growing anxiety I was feeling.   Actually, it’s not true.   I feel neither malignancy nor apathy, but I do feel the tension rising.  I do feel people readying for struggle.   I do feel the shuffle and static of people and their causes, both just and unjust, and it gives me pause.

            It gives me pause to think about our story, about us.   And as I cast my thoughts across the landscape of our Judeo-Christian journey it strikes me that God has an interesting particularity about who gets chosen to lead the people to justice and new life.

            I note that God did not choose Pharaoh to liberate the Hebrew people.  Wait.  He couldn’t choose Pharaoh because it was he who had enslaved them and he was reaping quite a profit from all that free labor.   No.   God chose this Moses character who was wanted for murder and was hiding out in the hinterlands.  What was God thinking?

            God chose a  country bumpkin shepherd with a harp to be King of Israel.   No royal lineage or pedigree here.    And when God chose to come among us, God didn’t come as Herod.   He came as the son of a carpenter, a relative nobody.

            It seems to me that when change is in the air, as it most always is, change doesn’t come from the top down, from Pharaoh or Herod.   It comes from the bottom up.   Change wells up from below and flows like a spring to the surface of our institutional reality,  and sooner or later those at the top acknowledge it…..because their feet are getting wet.

            I wonder, as we gather  in rainy Portland to consider weighty matters, if we will pause to listen to  those who  seem to have no status, those who are on the margins, those who don’t have the right pedigree or credential.   I wonder if we will pause to look around for the unlikely ones God has chosen to lead and to articulate new vision.   And I wonder if we will  realize that the vision and leadership for the future probably will not come from  the institutional church or those who vie for power within it.    No.  It will come from those who have been shoved away, those who are named as sinful and unfit.  It will come from a fugitive, wanted for high crimes and misdemeanors.   It will come from some rube playing a harp or ukulele.   It will come  from a carpenter.   It will come from a place where we are not looking.