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