A Peculiar Prophet

Storm Recovery Thank You from the Willimons

2012-02-08T14:16:00.000-08:00

Click here to watch a video from Bishop Willimon and his wife.

Our Spanish Speaking Churches in the Aftermath of HB56

2012-02-07T11:25:00.000-08:00

The fastest growing ethnic groupin United Methodism are Spanish-speaking Methodists. North Alabama Methodistshave invested huge resources in establishing nearly a dozen new congregationsin the past few years. These new churches have become spiritual dynamos of ourconference, leading our conference in baptisms and professions of faith – untilHB56, our state’s notorious immigration law.

Though almost all of ourfledgling United Methodist Christians were documented, in just two months wesaw our congregations decimated and all of our prayerful work destroyed. Notonly did nearly all Spanish-speaking Methodists have an undocumented person intheir home or nearby but also the law -- designed (in the words of one of itsauthors) to tell undocumented people to get out of Alabama -- created a climateof fear.

In a discussion between me andSen. Scott Beason on the ultra-conservative “Laura Ingraham Show,” even Ms.Ingraham called this law a heinous attack upon the free exercise of religion,and an “embarrassment,” and chided Beason. (Fortunately, District JudgeBlackburn struck down the part of the law that caused so many in the churchimmediate concern.)

The Reverend Dr. Thomas Muhomba(himself a thoroughly documented immigrant to our country, along with six otherleading North Alabama pastors), who heads our ethnic ministries, has given us afrightening report of the effects of HB56. Rev. Bart Tau tells us that on thefirst of September, there was a mass exodus of children out of schools in hisarea. While many of the children were citizens, their parents were not. Onefamily, whose daughter is an honor student at a Methodist college in Florida,cannot come home because she is undocumented and fears traveling in Alabama.Bart says that many parents have left Alabama fearing deportation that wouldrequire them to abandon their children, making them wards of the state.

Rev. Tau says, “Our churches needto remind our Hispanic brothers and sisters of our Lord’s love and care forthem as His children in this very scary time. For those that decide they mustleave, we can help them to deal with the details of a move and transition. Wecan pick them up and bring them to church, so they don’t have to drive and riskarrest. We can help them afford legal counsel when they need it, and we canhelp them by taking care of their kids if they are detained. A simple Power ofAttorney can give a legal resident or citizen the ability to manage the affairsof a person who is separated from their family and their possessions. We needto show our love and support by standing beside our Latino families in a verytangible way.”

At Riverchase, an establishedcongregation that has led the way in birthing and partnering with an Hispaniccongregation, Rev. Fernando Del Castillo (who despite our expensive legalefforts was deported a few years ago, my first experience with difficultimmigration laws) states that HB56 fostered anxiety, fear, and panic among hispeople . “Four of our families have already moved to different states, leavingbehind businesses, jobs, houses, and dreams.”

In Huntsville at Iglesia de laCommunidad, Rev. Roblero Macedonio’s church reports that his congregation lostten families who had to move to other states. Macedonio says that though hiscongregation has all but disappeared, he vows to “continue preaching the wordand growing more disciples for the transformation of the world.”

By the way, nearly everyone I spoke to asked us to pray for the law enforcementofficials who have been forced by our government to attempt to enforce the law.They are hopeful that the lawmakers will listen to the pleas of the businessgroups, school leaders, and police and sheriffs who have pled for revisions inthe law.

And that’s just what we pray for too. Our Governor and legislators haveadmitted that the law needs change and they have promised that they would makechanges in the law this legislative season that begins this week. We fullyunderstand that when the law was devised, not all of them could know thenefarious implications of the law upon our businesses and schools.

I hope that by pointing to the effect of this law upon our churches, the lawmakers willconsider the well-being of all of our people, particularly those who areattempting to practice the Christian faith in Alabama.

Will Willimon

Highest Rate of Connectional Giving in Two Decades

2012-02-06T11:24:00.000-08:00

I am happy to report to the NorthAlabama Conference that we received 82.86%of the 2011 Conference budget through connectional giving this past year. Thisis our highest collection rate over the last 19 years (from 1993 – 2011)!Personally I am thrilled that my last year as bishop I got to witness thiswonderful result. This rate of giving is particularly noteworthy consideringour huge response to the Easter week storms of 2011. (By my conservativeestimate, our churches gave about two million dollars in relief for victims ofthe storms, which makes our nearly 83% participation remarkable.)

Congratulations to the Southeast District forthe highest collection rate of 89.54%.The Northwest District finished with 89.39% and the Northeast District finishedwith 88.07%. (These were three of the most storm-devastated districts.) Thevast majority our congregations participate fully in Connectional Giving, atestimony to their pastoral leadership and our attempts to contain Conferencecosts, particularly administrative costs.

Connectional giving accounts foronly about 11% of a congregation’s income. If fewer than twenty of our largerchurches that failed to participate in mission giving had participated, wewould have received nearly a million dollars more. Any church that does notparticipate in connectional giving at 100% invariably shows a deficit in itsspiritual life and clerical leadership. We will continue to work with thesepastors and churches in the coming year, reminding them of the mandate underwhich we work – a vital church participates in Christ’s mission in the world.

A pastor’s leadership is the keyto connectional giving, so as I mention our faithful congregations, I want tonote their faithful pastors. Peter Hawker and Minnie Stovall are leading adramatic turnaround at Anniston First, putting them at 100% for the first timein years.

Some of our churches that wereheavily damaged by the storms like Canaan (Ted Bryson), Lakeview (JohnPurifoy), Hackleburg (George Gravitte) were, despite their loss, fullparticipants in connectional giving!

There are many pastors andchurches who deserve to be recognized but I’ll highlight a few of the many thatmade remarkable progress over previous years’ giving: Wesley Memorial (SherryHarris), Edgemont (Chris Montgomery), Morgan (Eddie Bolen), Christ (PaulLawler), St. James (James Fields), Camp Branch (Frankie Jones), Hoover First(Rachael Gonia), Cullman First (Mitchell Williams), and Spring Hill (ClauzellWilliams).

Obviously, there were many morewho deserve accolades for this great year in connectional giving. Alabama,according to surveys, has some of the most generous givers in the nation. Wehave been determined to improve our Conference’s rate of participation inconnectional giving and, with the hard work of our pastors and churches, wehave!

William H. Willimon

We Believe in Social Righteousness

2012-02-06T11:21:00.000-08:00

John Wesley preached “practicalChristianity.” Few United Methodist practices illustrate our practicalChristianity more vividly than our Social Principles(which have their roots inthe “social creed” of our church which dates from the early Twentieth Century).The Discipline definesthese principles as ourmost recent official summary of stated convictions that seek to apply the Christianvision of righteousness to social, economic, and political issues.The God whom United Methodists worship combines love with justice, is not onlygracious but also demanding, not only died for you and me but for the wholeworld. There is for us no personal gospel that fails to express itself in relevant social concerns;we proclaim no social gospel that does not include personal transformation ofsinners.

The Social Principles are athoughtful effort on the part of a succession of General Conferences to speakto the pressing human issues in the contemporary world from a Wesleyan biblicaland theological foundation. They are intended to be instructive, to teachcontemporary United Methodists the best thought and practice on selectedsubjects, and they are also meant to be persuasive, urging the church on tohigher righteousness. The Social Principles call all members of The UnitedMethodist Church to a prayerful, studied examination of our life together andour personal lives in the light of the gospel.

Our struggles for humandignity and social reform have been a response to God’s demand for love, mercy,and justice in the light of the Kingdom. We proclaim no personal gospel thatfails to express itself in relevant social concerns; we proclaim no social gospelthat does not include the personal transformation of sinners.

The Social Principles begin byaddressing issues in “The Natural World” – ecological concerns, energyresources, technology and space exploration, next “The Nurturing Community,”beginning with the family, moving to marriage (we’re in favor of it), divorce(we’re against it but recognize that it sometimes is a “regrettable alternativein the midst of brokenness”). There is a discussion of homosexuality (anargument that has consumed much time and attention in recent meetings of theGeneral Conference), as well as a long paragraph on abortion (I suspect thatthis paragraph is trying to please everybody by saying next to nothing). Thereare also extensive discussions on “The Economic Community,” “The PoliticalCommunity” (the person who said that the church ought to “stick to saving soulsand stay out of politics” wasn’t a United Methodist!), and the “WorldCommunity.” We have churchly opinions on just about everything.

Frankly, some of these sectionsshow the challenge of asserting the primacy of Scripture and at the same timeattempting to speak on many topics for which Scripture has no apparent concern.The theological underpinnings of our social teachings are not always clear.Even though these principles are our collective wisdom on social, public,political matters, the Discipline’s scant attention to personal, individualsin, when compared with this extensive and detailed treatment of social sin isodd. Wesley certainly held the personal and the social together. But we live ina curious age in which, if we think of sin at all, we focus more on the sins ofCongress or the corporate board room than sins committed by individuals in abedroom. Sometimes it’s safer to love a whole neighborhood than to love ourindividual neighbors. It’s always sad when we United Methodists show ourconformity to the world rather than God’s calls to help transform the world. Inthe great Wesleyan tradition, there is no clear demarcating between thepersonal and the corporate, the social and the individual. The light of Christpenetrates every somber corner of our lives, personal and corporate, and we areunder obligation, as followers of Christ, to let that light shine.

Religion that is pure andundefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for the orphans and widowsin their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. (James 1:27)

Today United Methodists have over80 hospitals, 64 extensive child care networks, and 214 retirement communitiesand nursing homes for the elderly. We have over a hundred colleges anduniversities in the United States and about the same number elsewhere. UnitedMethodist agencies like UMCOR are first on the scene of disaster and calamitywith emergency aid and relief. I don’t see how our Conference would have madeit after the terrible spring storms last year without the millions of dollarsof aid through our fellow UM’s and UMCOR.

All of this is the institutionalresult of our Wesleyan theological commitments to faith and good works. (JohnWesley not only dispensed theology but also claims to have dispensed medicineto over 500 persons in London each week.) The term “organized religion” is notto us an insult. We believe that love is less than fully incarnational when itfails to organize and institutionalize.

In Mark’s gospel Jesus isconfronted by a rich young man who asks a theological question (Mk. 10:17-22)about the inheritance of “eternal life.” Jesus responds to the man’s questionby urging him to obey “the commandments.” When the young man says that he hasobeyed all the commandments, Jesus adds yet another, telling him to “go, sellwhat you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”Maybe it would take a Wesleyan to notice, but did you note that Jesus respondsto a rather theoretical, theological question with ethics? Jesus somehowconnects “eternal life” with obedience – “go…sell…give to the poor”?

Itis our conviction that the good news of the Kingdom must judge, redeem, andreform the sinful social structures of our time.

Adapted from William H. Willimon, UnitedMethodist Beliefs: An Introduction, Westminster/John Knox Press,2006.

We Believe in Discipleship in Action

2012-01-26T08:41:00.000-08:00

This week, I return to theseries of messages focusing on some of our distinctive Wesleyan beliefsfrom my book on that subject.

No motif in the Wesleyantradition has been more consistent than the link between Christian doctrine andChristian living. Methodists have always been strictly enjoined to maintain theunity of faith and good works, through the means of grace… The coherence offaith with ministries of love forms the discipline of Wesleyan spirituality andChristian discipleship…. Discipline was not church law; it was a way ofdiscipleship. (The United Methodist Book of Discipline)

Any truly Wesleyan vision of theChristian life includes direct, personal, sacrificial encounter with sufferingpersons – simply collecting money for someone else to work with the poor is notenough. Also, John Wesley stressed a need for understanding of the root causesof poverty. He avoided the typical moral explanations for poverty that were invogue in his day (and our day too). Wesley also didn’t mind urging governmentalofficials to do their part in response to human need. Why does the UnitedMethodist General Board of Church and Society lobby Congress? Not simply from adesire for a better functioning society but rather from our theological visionof God whose presence and love among us is always “good news to the poor” andour passionate desire to walk with this God.

Here is the summation of one ofWesley’s diatribes against wealth:

Heathen custom is nothing to us.We follow no men any farther than they are followers of Christ. Hear ye him.Yea, today, while it is called today, hear and obey his voice. At this hour andfrom this hour do his will; fulfill his word in this and in all things. Ientreat you, in the name of the Lord Jesus, act up to the dignity of yourcalling. No more sloth! Whatsoever your hand findeth to do, do it with yourmight. No more waste! Cut off every expense which fashion, caprice, or fleshand blood demand. No more covetousness! But employ whatever God has entrustedyou with in doing good, all possible good, in every possible kind and degree,to the household of faith, to all men. [1]

Wesley’s 1739 decision to go outand preach in the fields to the masses and engage in the innovative practice of“field preaching” in the open air was his dramatic attempt to take the gospelto England’s new urban poor, just as he had worked among the poor at Oxford fora decade before. He defined the gospel as “good news to the poor” (Luke 4).Right up to the very end of his life, John Wesley worked to set right what waswrong with the world, supporting the Strangers’ Friend Society to helpnewcomers to England’s great cities. He worked to end the scourge of slavery,as in his famous last letter to William Wilberforce in 1791. Just four yearsbefore his death he welcomed Sarah Mallet as a preacher; the first officiallysanctioned female preacher of Methodism. He gave away all that he made from hisbooks and writings, dying a pauper. Six poor men bore Wesley’s body to itsgrave.

-- Adapted from William H. Willimon, UnitedMethodist Beliefs: An Introduction, Westminster/John Knox Press,2006.

[1] Works, 2:279.

Disturber of the Peace

2012-01-16T20:54:00.001-08:00

Our Lord Jesus preached peace, but “not as the world gives.” Peaceful Jesus was from the first a disturber of the status quo. Alas, too often Jesus’ followers have been on the side of peace at any cost, peace as the world gives in opposition to Jesus.

A remarkable moment in church history occurred right here in Alabama in the ministry of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

As you know, Dr. King was discovered here in Alabama while he was a Baptist pastor in Montgomery where the church called him to the ministry of Disturber of the Peace, the “peace” wrought by people like George Wallace and Bull Connor.

I’ve got a copy of, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which Martin Luther King, Jr. justifies why he has organized marches and sit-ins that “disturbed the peace.”

Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation . . . Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.

King explains that while he opposes violent tension, he believes there is “a type of constructive, nonviolent tension… the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of King’s protests was “to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”[1] The liberal recipients of King’s letter (one of whom was our bishop) hoped that Birmingham would desegregate without a fight. King eloquently told them they were wrong.[2]

The peace that King disturbed was no peace, but instead Birmingham’s police state, constructed by powerful people in order to oppress and terrorize black citizens. No transformation without disruption.

In my experience, churches always hope that it is possible to be faithful to the mandates of Jesus Christ without the pain of disruption and dislocation. We pastors tend to be reconcilers and peacemakers who are uncomfortable with disruptions.

This day let’s remember that Jesus Christ was unable to work our redemption without a disruption of the status quo that eventually led to his crucifixion in a vain attempt to silence him.

Let’s remember, as we go about our attempts to be faithful to Jesus, that few good works meet no resistance, and few transformations occur without disruption. As I’ve studied pastors who transform congregations I’ve noted that these pastors expect there to be resistance and this disruption and they learn to creatively use this dislocation as leverage in their leadership of change.

It’s good to be reminded, by recalling our history, that change is never painless, particularly if we are changing something that is sinful. One of the great blessings of being in the North Alabama Conference is that a few of our elders engaged in social activism and various forms of civil disobedience back in the Sixties and they are still around to tell us about it. Whenever I encounter institutional resistance, whether it be in our church at large or in an individual congregation, I recall the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. when he was told to ease up on Alabama. In his sermon, “Our God is Marching On,” King vowed, “No, we will not allow Alabama to return to normal.”

Of course for us Christians, the most striking example of disruption, dislocation, and painful challenge to our status quo is Jesus Christ. Since Jesus appeared among us, we’ve never been able to “return to normal.” And one of the ways Jesus continues to disrupt us in order to save us is through faithful disrupters like one-time-Alabama- pastor, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Will Willimon

2012-01-09T14:14:00.001-08:00

For the next few weeks I’ll befocusing on some of our distinctive Wesleyan beliefs from my book on thatsubject.

We Believe that Faith Is Known by Its Fruits

The communal forms of faithin the Wesleyan tradition not only promote personal growth, they also equip andmobilize us for mission and service to the world. (The UnitedMethodist Book of Discipline)

Fully a fourth of John Wesley’s Sermons focus on the Sermon on the Mount.Wesley took with great seriousness the Sermon on the Mount as a practical guideto how to live the Christian life. That’s curious because most of us todaythink of Jesus’ exhortations in the Sermon on the Mount – turning the othercheek, not remarrying after divorce, enemy love -- to be utterly impossibleideals. Wesley gave thanks that Jesus so simply, directly gave us practicalguidance for everyday discipleship. He said that the Beatitudes were a pictureof God drawn by God’s own hand.[1] These commands are not meant to forever frustrate us by theirimpossibility, said Wesley, but are meant to be actually practiced with thehelp of God. When faced with some seemingly impossible demand of Christ – suchas forgiveness of our enemies -- we are to change the church and ourselves,rather than attempt to scale down the command.

In our church’s recent debate onthe U.S. interventions in Iraq and elsewhere, I was impressed how infrequentlyanyone referred to Jesus. And when someone mentioned Jesus, most disputantsseem to agree that Jesus is irrelevant to a contemporary conflict like the “Waron Terror.” We had made Jesus’ command to enemy love into an impossible ideal.This is distressingly “unmethodist.”

We Wesleyans once assumed thatJesus himself combined personal righteousness with social holiness, that hisethic is not to be relegated to the personal and the subjective, the ideal andthe unrealistic, but is meant to go public and be put into practice. Jesus cameto teach us about the “real world” and we are called to follow him there out ofthe fake world where the poor are oppressed, and the strong lord over the weak,and well, you get the point. Our United Methodist Social Principles are anattempt to render the real world in the light of the love of Christ.

Early Methodists contended thatthe urge to holiness in thought and life can be perverted when holiness is notlinked to love. Love is not sentimental syrup that we pour over everything tomake our problems easier to swallow. Love is the complex, multifaceted forcethat drives us to engage in the world’s needs in the name of Christ. Love isthe divine gift that enables true moral transformation. How sad whencontemporary United Methodists attempt to scale down the dominical demand for loveto the secular political possibility of justice. It is also sad to seecontemporary United Methodists choosing up sides on the political left or theright and slugging it out in political squabbles that Wesley would surelydismiss as debates about mere “opinions.” Too many of us are confident thatbeing on the “right side” of some social or political issue is more importantthan being there in love.

It is a constant challenge for usto think and to live on the basis of our theological convictions. Wesley caredas much for our being and our believing as for our doing. Christians are meantto serve the needs of others, in love. The notion of “Christian perfection” canbe an ugly thing if not always answerable to love. And the practice ofpolitically engaged social Christianity degenerates into just another worldlypower play when it is loveless. Jesus didn’t call us simply to improve ourneighbors but to love them as he has loved us.

Note that we use that word discipline when wetalk of social ethics. United Methodists use “discipline” as both a verb and anoun. Discipline in the sense of a Bookof Discipline is constitutive of church governance. For us,discipleship and discipline go together. In a sermon “The Late Work of God inNorth America,” Wesley said that the great limitation of the evangelisticministry of George Whitefield was lack of discipline:

[I]t was a true saying, which wascommon in the ancient church, ‘The soul and the body make a man, and the spiritand discipline make a Christian.’ But those who were more or less affected byMr. Whitefield’s preaching had no discipline at all. They had no shadow ofdiscipline; nothing of the kind. They were formed into no societies. They hadno Christian connection with each other, nor were ever taught to watch overeach others’ souls. So that if any fell into lukewarmness, or even into sin, hehad none to lift him up….

Holiness and discipline gotogether:

Prepare yourminds for action; discipline yourselves; set all your hope on the grace thatJesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed. Like obedient children, do notbe conformed to the desires that you formerly had ignorance. Instead, as he whocalled you is holy, be holy yourselves, in all your conduct; for it is written,“You shall be holy, for I am holy.” (1 Peter 1:13-25)

The Social Principles, along withour General Rules, are testimony to the continuing role of disciplined holiness– personal and social holiness – in the United Methodist way of beingChristian. Our church attempts to be more than simply an expression of thereligious yearnings of its members. In these principles, guides and rules, thechurch seeks to conform us, to change us, and discipline us to the nature ofChrist. As Wesley summarized the message that he expected his traveling preachersto proclaim: “Christ dying for us” and “Christ reigning in us."[2]

-- Adapted from William H. Willimon, UnitedMethodist Beliefs: An Introduction, Westminster/John Knox Press,2006.

[1] Sermon 23,“Sermon on the Mount III, “ §IV, Works, 1:533. Wesley described the Sermon onthe Mount as “the noblest compendium of religion which is to be found even inthe oracles of God,” in Journal(17 Oct. 1771), Works, 22:293.
[2] Letter to Charles Wesley 1928Dec. 1774), Letters(Telford), 6:134.

We Believe in Faith and Good Works

2012-01-05T08:45:00.000-08:00

For the next few weeks I’ll befocusing on some of our distinctive Wesleyan beliefs from my book on thatsubject.

We see God’s grace and humanactivity working together in the relationship of faith and good works. God’sgrace calls forth human response and discipline. (UnitedMethodist Book of Discipline)

As Wesley encountered resistanceto his revival, he issued an “Earnest Appeal” to his critics, attempting toexplain Methodism:

This is the religion we long tosee established in the world, a religion of love and joy and peace, having itsseat in the heart, in the inmost soul, but ever showing itself by its fruits,continually springing forth, not only in all innocence…but likewise in everykind of beneficence, in spreading virtue and happiness all around it.[1]

Note that Wesley refuses tocommend his revival exclusively on the basis of an experience that it engendersin its adherents. Nor does he take pride in the birth of a new institution orin his movement’s conformity to the orthodox faith. He urges measurement ofMethodism “by its fruits,” by the “beneficence” it produces in the spread of“virtue and happiness all around it.” Faith in Jesus engenders good works forJesus. United Methodists join Wesley in joyfully linking the mercy of God withthe holiness of God, what we believe with what we do, who we are, with how weact, praying that our doing will be a public testimony to the fidelity of ourbelieving, and “to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land.”

Wesley’s orientation towardthe practical is evident in his focus upon the “scripture way of salvation.” Heconsidered doctrinal matters primarily in terms of their significance forChristian discipleship.

In Wesley’s “Address to theClergy,” in which he outlined his expectations for the performance of histraveling preachers, he stressed (of course) grace – they should show responseto God’s work in their lives, gifts – they must show both God-given talents andacquired skills for ministry, and fruit – visible, measurable evidence of God’sblessing upon their ministry.[2] In countless ways, Jesus did more than ask us to “think this” or“feel this” but also to “do this.” Faith is meant to be fruitful.

Whenever Wesley cited thedeleterious results of teaching the doctrine of predestination, his main fearwas that predestination fostered dreaded “quietism” and hindered thetransformative work of God in the individual soul.[3] Wesley sneered that if peoplereally believed in predestination, then “The elect shall be saved, do what theywill: The reprobate shall be damned, do what they can.[4] The Christian life, initiated and sustainedby grace, is known by its holy fruits.

The Discipline reminds us that Methodismdid not arise in response to a specific dispute, but rather to support peopleto experience the justifying and sanctifying grace of God and encourage peopleto grow in the knowledge and love of God through the personal and corporatedisciplines of the Christian life.

Note that knowing precedes doing,experience of God leads to the service of God, and ethics arise out ofdoctrine. On the other hand, our knowledge of God is enriched and deepened inour service of God, our attempts to put the faith into practice encourage us tointellectually explore our faith. We do no good work in the world that is notsubsequent to, responsive to the work that a creative God is already doing.It’s God’s world and God intends to have it back and one way God uses to getback the world is ordinary United Methodists through whom God does someextraordinary work.

-- Adapted from William H.Willimon, United MethodistBeliefs: An Introduction, Westminster/John Knox Press, 2006.

[1] EarnestAppeal, para. 4.
[2] Address to the Clergy (1756), inWorks (Jackson) 10:480-500.
[3] Sermon 110, “Free Grace,” §10-18, (see §11),Works, 3:547-50.
[4]Works (Jackson), 14:190-8.

A Christmas Parable

2012-01-05T08:44:00.000-08:00

A Christmas story, can’t rememberwhere I heard it, but I tell it to you as you begin your own celebration ofChristmastide.

There was a time when all theangels where gathered about the heavenly throne for a discussion. Things werein a mess down on earth. (What else is new?) The Creator had become concernedabout the state of the Creation – wars, fighting, famine, bloodshed all over.

“I’ve tried everything,” Godcomplained. “I have spoken to them some of the most beautiful words they couldever hope to hear. Think of the glorious Psalms, the hymns, the poetic passagesof Isaiah. They love to read about peace and goodwill, but they don’t like to liveit!”

God continued, “Then I sent themthe prophets. They love Isaiah, the promises of release from their sufferings,freedom from their exile. But do they follow the precepts of the prophets aboutjustice and righteousness rolling down like waters? Never!”

There was widespread discussionof the sad state of affairs on earth. Many of the angels – Gabriel, Michael,and others had been on earth on many an occasion. They had seen for themselvesthe sources of God’s lament and shared God’s concern.

“I think the only thing left isfor one of you, a member of the heavenly court, to go down to earth. Live withthem, not just for a moment, but every day. Get to know them, become one ofthem, live with them, let them get to know you. Only then will heaven’s intentbe truly communicated to them. Only then will they take notice of the great gapbetween the way they have been living and the way they were created. Only thenwill we be able to reveal to them who I created them to be.”

The angels stood in awkwardsilence. They had been to earth before, to deliver messages from God or toeffect some momentary intervention in human affairs. They weren’t about tovolunteer for long term duty in such a murderous, difficult place.

The silence lasted for aneternity. Finally, God broke the silence. Quietly, determinedly, but withoutresignation and no bitterness, God said, “Then I will go.”

This is a parable of Incarnation.

Will Willimon

Gifts at Christmas

2011-12-19T13:18:00.000-08:00

Christmas is a time of giving.One of the great gifts of the North Alabama Conference is Urban Ministry. Thisyear we celebrated the 35th Anniversary of this vital ministry to the community(West Birmingham) that has the lowest median income in the entire state with apoverty rate of over 40%. Urban Ministry serves more than 7000 each yearthrough the Community Kitchen, Food Pantry, Homelessness Prevention andEmergency Services programs. Then there’s the Urban Kids after-school andsummer learning program, the Joe Rush Center for Urban Mission (which offersexterior house painting), and West End Community Gardens (17,000 volunteerhours were given by people this year!).

Since 2010, Urban Ministry hasoffered Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Rehousing, a new program under thecare of social worker Jeff Bowman. Jeff administered approximately $90,000 thisyear to assist families at risk of homelessness with rent, utilities, andhousing, helping more than 250 individuals avoid homelessness and achievelong-term housing stability.

Visit www.urban-ministry.organd you will see all the good that is being done in the name of Christ and ourchurch.

As you can imagine, this has beenone of the toughest years ever in finding funds for Urban Ministry. Our newdirector, Rev. Melissa Patrick, has been cultivating Urban Ministry's friendsand supporters in a wonderful way. Most of the people served by Urban Ministrydidn’t need to be hit by the spring storms to be in dire straits; they wereliving on the edge of desperation long before the storms without anyone to helpexcept Urban Ministry.

This Christmas please join Patsyand me in sending a gift to Urban Ministry. You can be sure that your gift willbe used wisely and widely by an accountable, proven ministry, one of the bestcreations of our Conference and one of the best ways to show our activecompassion for our sisters and brothers at this sacred time of the year.

Will Willimon

UrbanMinistry, Inc., 1229 Cotton Ave., S.W., Birmingham, AL 35211.
Call (205) 781-0517

Union Chapel UMC- What My Eyes Have Seen

2011-12-14T08:33:00.000-08:00

Pastor Christopher Herbert is leading some dramatic changes at Union Chapel UMC. Most of our small membership churches are in serious decline – but not all! A key to the small congregation having a viable future, from my studies of our small congregations, is the pastor’s leadership toward growth. There is nothing amiss in a congregation being small – there is everything wrong with the idea that churches have no part to play in the growth of the Kingdom of God. After seeing some of the great growth at Union Chapel, I asked Christopher to comment on what is happening there and he gave testimony to a church where “the light shines.”

Will Willimon

How can I describe a whole church that is serious about God’s mission? How can I describe these things that my eyes have seen?

How do I describe the church wrapping its arms around an unwed couple with a child and saying, “you are our family now”? Their wedding was a few weeks ago and now while the father is working to provide, the mother doesn’t miss church and serves others because of the love that they were shown.

How do I describe the many families that have decided to, in love, teach others that “playing church” must not be in the cards. How do I describe other people in the community and beyond telling me that they hear of the great things happening at Union Chapel (this doesn’t happen unless our folks go out and spread the good news of Jesus and His church that seeks to honor Him).

How do I describe a place where older people have decided to pour out blessings on the next generation? How do I describe younger people being respectful of older people, and listening intently to their wisdom? How do I describe the launch of a prayer shawl ministry and a majority of those attending those meetings are from other churches, backgrounds, or denominations? These are just a few things that my eyes have seen and any words I have right now seem inadequate in describing what is happening.

My eyes have seen God’s people do indescribable things before and it’s always beautiful. I realize that I’ve been blessed in the past and I’m so blessed today. It is always a blessing to be in ministry with people who just want to hear God say, “WELL DONE”.

All Glory is God’s Glory as we grow.

The light shines!

Until the nets are full,
Chris
Matt.19:26

The Power of Connection

2011-12-05T13:03:00.000-08:00

“The North Alabama Conference is a model of how to respond to a natural disaster and how to keep responding over the long haul.” That’s what a fellow bishop said to me the other day.

I agree. I couldn’t be more proud of our sustained, active response to the spring storms. We have been hosts to hundreds of UM work teams every week since the storms. We have purchased and equipped staging areas and housing for these volunteers, and we continue to handle hundreds of cases. I asked Nancy Cole, who has been responsible for designing an excellent system of response.

Will Willimon

As Coordinator of Disaster Recovery for the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church, I could write any number of stories of survival and heroism during the April 27 tornado outbreak in Alabama. It has been an amazing time of strength and courage on the part of the people of Alabama. As a United Methodist Clergy who has a unique perspective on this tragedy, it has been the power of our United Methodist Connectional system that has been so impressive to me.

The first Sunday after the storm, Bishop Willimon asked to preach in a church whose pastor was impacted by the storm. Forest Lake United Methodist in Tuscaloosa had 37 members who had lost their homes and/ or businesses. The pastor was in the hospital very ill as a direct result of the storm. Bishop Willimon preached and I served as liturgist this first Sunday after the storm. Our presence was one of the first examples of our Connectional system at work. Also present in that service was Tom Hazelwood, UMCOR's Assistant General Secretary for disaster response in the United States. He addressed the congregation about the various ways UMCOR would be in partnership with us throughout our response and recovery phases. Our District Superintendent was also present that day. The Bishop and District Superintendents were available to all of our churches who had been impacted by the storm and are still very supportive of the recovery efforts.

Further power of our Connectional System became evident as UMCOR trained Early Response Teams began to pour in our state from all over our country. Early on in the disaster, I served as the Southwest District Coordinator of Disaster Response. This District includes Tuscaloosa. We had over seventy UMCOR trained teams from all over the country come to Tuscaloosa during that time. We had many other teams throughout our state as well. I could never say enough about the professionalism, the expertise displayed, and the genuine heart for ministry that was exhibited by the teams of Methodist people who wanted to be the hands and feet of Christ to us.

I have been so proud of the way our Conference has responded to the tragedy, beginning with our Bishop, his Cabinet, and Conference staff. Early on, a Disaster Response Center was set up at our Conference Center with volunteers pouring in from throughout the area to answer the 1-800 phone lines and direct incoming teams to areas that needed help.

Now, with the help of recovery teams throughout the Methodist Connectional System which include UMVIM trained teams, we have organized for the long haul. We could not have come this far in our recovery without the help of the UMCOR staff and consultants. Every one of them has helped us in some way. I am so grateful for our United Methodist Connectional System and how it has been the power that has fueled the Methodist response to recovery in Alabama.

*Rev. Nancy Cole is serving as Conference Disaster Recovery Coordinator and Natural Church Development Coordinator.

P.S. Rev. Clay Farrington and Nacole Hillman are leading a remarkable revitalization of our Conference Youth Ministry. Are the youth at your church participating in some of the great upcoming events? Click here to learn how your youth can be engaged. - WHW

Word Made Flesh

2011-11-29T13:46:00.001-08:00

It’s a story so strange we could not have dreamed it up by ourselves, this story of how God was incarnate in Jesus the Christ. An embarrassing pregnancy, a poor peasant couple forced to become undocumented immigrants in Egypt soon after the birth of their baby, King Herod’s slaughter of the Jewish boy babies in a vain attempt to put an end to this new “King,” From the beginning the story of Jesus is the strangest story of all. A Messiah who avoids the powerful and the prestigious and goes to the poor and dispossessed? A Savior who is rejected by many of those whom he sought to save? A King who reigns from a bloody cross? Can this one with us be God?

And yet Christians believe that this story, for all its strangeness, is true. Here we have a truthful account of how our God read us back into the story of God. This is a truthful depiction not only of who God really is but also of how we who were lost got found, redeemed, restored, and saved by a God who refused to let our rejection and rebellion (our notorious “God problem”) be the final word in the story.

Jesus the Christ (“Christ” means “Messiah,” “The Anointed One”) was a human being, a man who was born in a human family, attended parties (he was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard by his critics), moved constantly around the area of Galilee, ran afoul of the governmental and religious authorities, taught through short, pithy stories (“parables”), did a number of surprising and utterly inexplicable “signs and wonders,” and eventually was tortured to death in a horribly cruel form of capital punishment which the Romans used against troublesome Jews and rebellious trouble makers. A few days later Jesus’ astonished followers proclaimed to the world that Jesus had been raised from the dead and had returned to them, commissioning them to continue his work. (This aspect of the story has always been somewhat of a reach for those who prefer their gods to be aloof, ethereal, and at some distance from the grubby particularities of this world.)

While these are roughly the historical facts of Jesus from Nazareth, as is so often the case, the raw facts don’t tell the whole story. From the first many knew that Jesus was not only a perceptive, challenging teacher (“rabbi,” teacher, was a favorite designation for Jesus) but was also uniquely God present (“Emmanuel,” means “God with us”). In a very short time Paul (whose letters are the earliest writings in the New Testament) could acclaim crucified and resurrected Jesus as the long awaited Messiah, the Christ, the one who was the full revelation of God. Jesus was not only a loving and wise teacher; Jesus was God Almighty doing something decisive about the problems between us creatures and the Creator.

This is the story we Christians name as “Incarnation.” It is a strange, inexplicable story that we happen to believe is true, the story that explains everything, the key to what’s going on between us and God. It is the story that we encounter each year at Advent, that season of reflection and penitence before Christmas.

It’s Advent. The church gives us the grace of four Sundays to get ourselves prepared for the jolt of once again being encountered by the Word made flesh, God with us.

Happy Advent.
William Willimon

When “Mine” Becomes “Thine”

2011-11-21T11:25:00.000-08:00

S.T. Kimbrough, a great treasure of our Conference, is the foremost living scholar on the hymns of Charles Wesley. S. T. called my attention to Wesley’s hymn, “Happy the Multitude,” in which Wesley says that we Christians should banish “mine” from our vocabulary. On this week of Thanksgiving, pray with me this prayer, Wesley’s poetic response to Acts 4:32, “The multitude of them that believed, were of one heart, and one soul; neither said any of them, that aught of the things which he possessed, was his own, but they had all things in common. Neither was there any among them that lacked.”

It’s good to be reminded that our faith was born in the miracle of religious conversion that led to economic transformation as those who had previously been taught that their possessions were “mine” became born again to see that all we have is God’s (“thine”).

One of the most miraculous transformations that God works in the heart of the Christian is, in a culture of consumption and material aggrandizement, is the transformation from seeing the world as essentially “mine” to “thine.”

1. Happy the multitude
(But far above our sphere)
Redeemed by Jesus’ blood
From all we covet here!
To him, and to each other joined,
They all were of one heart and mind.

3. Their goods were free to all,
Appropriated to none,
While none presumed to call
What he possessed his own;
The difference base of thine and mine
Was lost in charity Divine.

4. No overplus, no need,
No rich or poor were there,
Content with daily bread
Where all enjoyed their share;
With every common blessing blessed
They nothing had, yet all possessed.

S.T. Kimbrough, The Unpublished Poetry of Charles Wesley (Nashville: Kingswood, 1992), 2:295–96.

Happy Thanksgiving.
William Willimon

Transformational Ministry

2011-11-17T11:52:00.000-08:00

The Reverend Mary Bendall has been leading a remarkable ministry at Tuscaloosa First. She and Ken Dunivant are working a remarkable transfromation of this historic, beloved congregation, leading it into the future. Having visited "The Bridge" on a number of ocassions, having met with the worship leaders of this dynamic, contemporary service, I asked Mary to relate what she has been doing, how she has been leading, and the things that worked. Here is Mary's response.
Will Willimon

Approach to Pastoral Ministry: My job is not to personally do every task of ministry. But rather to develop people who in turn create a really great community of faith. I believe there is a significant difference in those two approaches. It was tough at first to realize and accept that I am not the one anymore who gets to teach every class, or set the table or arrange the bread and juice, or make the bulletin board, or offer every prayer, or light every candle. I try as much as possible to be clear on what my responsibility is as the pastor, and what is the responsibility of the people of the church. I think that as pastors we can inadvertently hold the church back when we operate with the mindset that we have to have our hands in everything. I’ve learned that a church becomes a place where people want to be only when pastors spend time developing people, and then releasing the ministry to them. I think people don’t join churches, or attend them, because of the band/choir or the preacher. When we clergy are having down-feeling days we are tempted to believe that we are doing something so great that people are coming to see us. Dangerous, misguided thought. Actually, I feel like people join churches, or get up early on the weekends to attend a church, because of two things: the people of the church were warm and seemed real (or at least not as horrible and hypocritical as the last time they tried church) and, secondly, they walk out of worship having encountered the Holy even if just for a fleeting moment. A moment in worship with the God who changes lives. That’s worth coming back for.

Strengths-Based Ministry Emphasis: I believe that serving and leading from our God-given strengths is a pretty good way to do things. Five years ago we began lifting up and naming strengths and why knowing your strengths matters. I began to actively help church members identify and develop their talents and strengths. Just having the conversation helps people to connect the dots that a life of faith is about doing also, not just being. In other words, as great as it is to come to worship on Sunday mornings, what matters most is what you do with yourself and who you are becoming because of your faith. When my language shifted to that I began to see a difference in our church. This September we begin our 15th round of Ministry by Strengths classes. At the end of the six-week class I have individual strengths conversations with each person in the class about what they sense from God about their next steps in life and ministry and serving. Beyond taking the Ministry by Strengths class we expect people to find a place to serve and to continue to grow. I intentionally have conversations with church members about their strengths and how they are using them. And because of that, they in turn have those same conversations with one another, and that is really where you see some good fruit. Church members having conversations with other church members about calling and fruit and life and strengths and God. That is good stuff. Having had close to 300 people in our church take the class, we have been able to start to shape the culture around the idea that God call us to serve in the area of our greatest natural strength. We used to have one designated day where people could sign up for a ministry. That worked well for several years. We discovered that we really had a need for a mechanism that would help someone new get involved right away. We created ServeLINK – our catalog of serving opportunities. It contains descriptions of almost all of our ministry/outreach/mission/serving opportunities. It is on our website (www.fumct.org) and people can simply register whenever they would like to. Printed copies of ServeLINK are also available throughout the church, along with brochures about the major areas of the church. All new members are given a “new member packet” which contains the brochures and a copy of ServeLINK. This helped us expand our recruiting by giving the congregation the opportunity to sign up 24/7. We also created GroupLINK which is where they can sign up for classes and small groups.

Worship Design: The area of worship design is one of the most important things that we do. Sunday morning is our greatest opportunity to connect with people. (For all intents and purposes, it is my “game day” – yes, I’ve lived in Tuscaloosa too long ;)) But we really only have one shot to get it right, to create an environment where people can connect with God and each other. Sunday morning is very important. As Robert Schnase observes in his Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, one hour of passionate worship affects all other hours of the week. I have found that the best way to make Sunday morning rich and meaningful is to empower teams of church members to design and implement it. Pastoral duties are mine, but everything else is done by the people of the church. I lead the Bridge design team which is comprised of the leaders of each of the Bridge ministry teams. We have met just about every Tuesday night for the past six and a half years. It is the reason the Bridge works. It is labor intensive and demanding. It requires advance planning and teaching church members how to design worship. It is not always the quickest way to plan worship, but we have seen time and time again it is a really, really good way to do it. At our weekly sessions, we work together to design, imagine, dream, create, implement and then evaluate each and every Sunday. Watching people move from attending a worship service to becoming the leader of a team that implements the service, and watching them discover their strengths, build upon those strengths, and then put their own blood, sweat and tears into making the Bridge work is a beautiful thing.

Measuring Results: I count and measure and name everything. I have learned in my D. Min. program the value of measuring. It was once said at a class that “you measure the things you can so that you can experience the things that cannot be measured.” Counting is huge. You can ask our team, sometimes they wonder about my constant reminders to get accurate numbers on things. I count vertically and horizontally. I track our worship attendance of course and look for trends. But, I also count horizontally – I track what is happening to people the longer they are part of this place. In my mind, high vertical numbers with low horizontal numbers is a problem, so I work to set up opportunities and processes for people to come in to the church and then move horizontally, so to speak, into deeper involvement and serving and ministry. And then into leadership roles. Every number is a person, a story, a life. To me, that is worth keeping up with. It’s a beautiful thing to watch. It’s a privilege, truly.

Rev. Mary Bendall
Tuscaloosa First UMC

Turn Around

2011-11-10T13:19:00.000-08:00

After serving well as a member of the Bishop’s Cabinet, Lori Carden was appointed to our beloved but troubled congregation in Columbiana. Lori is leading a dramatic rebirth there. I asked her to share some of her leadership insights with the rest of us. One thing that makes this narrative remarkable is that I ordained Lori! Only a couple of years ago!

Will Willimon

Dear Bishop,

Upon reading your request I thought to myself, “He wants to know what is working? Well heck, working is what is working.” I humbly submit that I don’t have grand initiatives to carry us forward for years to come. My ministry has been more fundamental than that. I am simply working!

I set personal goals for myself. I make a minimum of nine contacts each week. I send three personal emails or cards, I make three phone calls and I make a minimum of three personal visits each week. In the book “Making a Good Move” by Michael J. Coyner this is part of what is known as “paying the rent”. If I stay focused in accomplishing this each week, then by the end of the year, allowing for two weeks vacation, I will have made a minimum of 450 contacts with my flock per year.

I spend time in prayer for my people. Don’t just blow this off as some pious statement. Seriously, I spend an hour each week with the directory in hand, looking at the photos, thinking of the people, asking God to bless them and to give pastoral discernment as to how to love them and lead them.

I took time to listen to as many people as possible. This was difficult because much of what I heard was repetitive. The opinions were strong and divided. It was very very hard for me not to offer rebuttals, take a side, and offer promises or to jump into a fix-it mode. Pastors need to use their ears not just their mouths. We have to check our defensiveness at the door. I possess a strong personality, so this took much prayer. After I had listened to them, I found most of them to be happy to listen to me.

I held a “state of the church dinner” and spoke to all of them at once. I called for complete transparency in all activities and works of the church. I spoke plainly and deliberately. I told them I was not there to worry about “hurting feelings” or who “might get mad and leave” but to lead us in Christ’s mission. I named the elephants. This takes a tedious balance of courage and humility. I spoke and watched as eyebrows raised and heads nodded in affirmation. They then knew that I was not afraid of much and was there to care for the good of God’s church first and foremost. The people here welcomed such candor and it seemed to bring us closer. I will hold these dinners twice per year.

I expect much and we do much. We must never underestimate God’s people. Let’s face it; our churches are filled with brilliant people and specialists of every kind. Pastors don’t know it all. It is our job to offer direction for people to engage their gifts. However, pastors have a large role to play in helping churches own and shape their identity.For example, I was told that this church pretty well shuts down for the summer, giving people “a break” and that it always has. I asked what I thought was a good question, “What are we breaking from?” I was told that the leaders were tired. My response was that we need fresh leaders and servants. I met with people and declared that we were not doing any less for the summer than any other time of the year. We kept our Wed. night children’s program going. All teams and councils met as usual.

I raised the bar. Now, worship attendance did drop again for summer this year as I had been warned, but people now know that the church doesn’t stop. I have great expectations and hopes for next summer’s attendance and involvement to be even better. It takes time to change the norms of a church but it can be done. Dare to declare and direct people! Pastoring is not for wimps!! At the end of the day this church enjoyed doing more for Christ and community. The people must never be underestimated. Just challenge them to be the great gifted people that they are

I began to teach an “Adult confirmation” class that teaches people what it means to be a Christian who is part of the UMC. Long time members and new members of all ages, our oldest is 87 our youngest 24, meet together for several sessions learning about our heritage, our theology, and our mission.

Staffing adjustments and changes were necessary. Not easy work but vital work. Just do it! Though we now have a great team for which I am most grateful, I know that it is never concrete. People come and go. Life happens. It is so sad when churches fail to recognize this fact of life and fearfully fail to address staffing matters.

As I prepared to answer your request I met with four of our key leaders and asked, “What is working with my leadership and what is not?” All noted the following;

1. My leadership is gutsy, honest and speaks truth. The State of the Church dinner was a hit!

2. I am present with presence. I teach, I visit, I preach, I counsel, I have office hours. I play with kids in VBS. (I had six people thank me for coming to VBS. Can you believe that?)

3. I equip by modeling. Then I trust people to do it better than I did it.

4. I lead. As one guy put it, “We know who the leader is without a doubt.” I also praise people when they earn praise.

5. I speak the name of Jesus and of the power of the Holy Spirit. I do a great deal of sermon preparation and preach directly from the text. Not topics with textual passages thrown in, but text with relevant correlations thrown in. There is a difference! So many people have thanked me for “preaching from the Bible”.

As far as any constructive criticism that was offered, each one said, “Just please, don’t give up and don’t stop and take care of yourself.” I asked them to hold me to account on taking my day or two off each week. I need that accountability.

I am serving a church that has been taught that as long as the district apportionments and pastor’s compensations were paid that they were doing enough. I will not take a raise in pay until annual conference apportionments are paid in full. (Even though I need the money to pay off my seminary debts) I am working to educate the people on the good that connectional giving affords. They don’t need a heavy hand on this matter but a healed and fresh perspective.

Pastors have been given the task of holding up and onto our identity before God’s people. As I tell my children, “Remember who you are whose you are”.

This is one of our basic yet most essential tasks as pastors.

Loving the Challenge,
Lori

Ancient Theory for New Math

2011-11-02T06:50:00.000-07:00

Paula Calhoun is leading an amazing congregational relocation, a virtual new church start at Stepping Stone UMC. A beginning to Paula's ministry has been her work in Scouting. I got to help the Boy Scouts of America celebrate their one hundredth anniversary. (I was a scout during their fiftieth.) Paula shows how scouting can be a means of evangelizing a new generation.

- Will Willimon

Albert Einstein said: “If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.” I’m neither a physicist nor a mathematician—far from it! But I believe a theory can be used or practiced in order to change the facts.

I’ll give an example. I’m hesitant to use the ‘e’ word, but I’ll say it: evangelism often raises the anxiety level in Christian disciples. We believe in the concept and especially the theology; it’s the practice that sometimes provokes our pause. But to quote Einstein again: “God always takes the simplest way.” Looking back on God’s story, relationship multiplies or increases, including people and blessings. Or, to put it another way: relationship equals evangelism. It’s an ancient theory from a God who scores high in math! (See God with Abram and Sarai, aka Abraham and Sarah[i], or more recently: Jesus and a Woman of Samaria[ii], The Holy Spirit and the Apostle Peter at Pentecost[iii]).

Please hear me—I’m not there, yet. But I’m beginning to see multiplication in a more simple way and I believe facts can be changed by relationship—with God, with self and all others. One means of relationship can be exercised through scouts: Cub, Boy, and Girl Scouts in all their age groups.

I’m sure most of you are way ahead of me on this; so please join the conversation. After all, I grew up in a rural area of Alabama where scouting was not offered. I don’t know why. My parents drove me into town for piano lessons. My sisters took dance lessons. But we didn’t know to ask, “Why doesn’t someone—why doesn’t our church—start a scout troop?”

My entry into scouting came as an adult through the local church. I wouldn’t call the introduction a positive encounter. Standing in a dank fellowship hall smelling of mold and brittle crayons, I listened to stories of the large scout troop that once met there. I could still hear the faint echo of their feet and voices. But it was their feet that brought on the trouble and another “r” word—ruin.

The church council chair loved a pretty tile floor and every week, rain or shine, the fellowship hall floor got tracked up in some way: smudges in the wax finish, sandy grey mud from the parking lot or a few blobs of pizza sauce from the monthly Pack meeting (scouts and leaders practice clean-up, but it’s not a perfect process). And so, the church powers charged with carrying out the Gospel moved a new and not-good-news policy into being: “There will be no scout troop in this church.”

Standing there listening and looking at the spotless, now cracked tile floor in an empty space that leaked life far too long: I wondered if scouts and the ‘new rule’ started the decay and decline. Or—did the decay and decline prompt the thoughts and conversation that grew to fever pitch over a floor that could be mopped!

Thankfully, I came across another church and another and another that celebrate the scouts hosted by local churches. Does it sometimes get messy? Well, do our homes get messy if people live and grow there? Of course! But what a relief to experience life! Movement. Voices. Touch. Smiles. Laughter. And good work. Work that teaches and shapes, supports and guides.

Maybe we’ve hit on a revised theory: S = R = G = G x G. I confessed I’m not good at math! Let me put it another way: ‘Scouts equal Relationships that equal Gospel that equals Grace that multiplies Growth.’

It’s true we never begin with the end at heart, as in: let’s start and support scout troops so that we can grow our church. You can probably think of a good term for that kind of motivation. However—practicing relationship through scouting often prompts us to grow in a variety of ways, including new people, new disciples.

How do we work or practice the theory in order to change the facts? We start with simple gifts and servant ministry. If scouts meet at your local church, contact the leader and ask how you can help; go to one of their meetings or share a fireside event at their next camp-out (your presence is a wonderful gift!). If you enjoy serving in the kitchen, bake cupcakes or cookies for their next meeting. Prepare or help pay for their next pizza party…and if the floor doesn’t shine, grab a mop and make Jesus smile!

If your church already shows hospitality to scouts, here’s a salute to your generous grace! Not involved yet? Invite or begin a new troop in order to practice an ancient, but simple theory: relationship multiplies people and blessings. Act quickly to help change the facts. I look forward to seeing you September 2012 at The Methodist Encampment (more info coming soon)!

Paula Calhoun

God and A Church on the Move

2011-10-24T14:32:00.000-07:00

I had the privilege (Just six years ago.) of receiving Sherry Harris into our Conference after her great seminary run at Vanderbilt. She had a great ministry at Vestavia, UMC, then in June was appointed to our dynamic Wesley Memorial in Decatur. I’ve watched Sherry utilize the Transition Teams approach to her First Ninety Days, a program of pastoral beginnings that has been pioneered in the Northwest District. In less than three months, Sherry has been able to give dynamic leadership to Wesley Memorial, in great part because of her careful, energetic strategies as a new pastor. I asked her to give a brief narrative of her work. - Will Willimon

As I reflect on the First 90 Days of my new appointment at Wesley Memorial UMC in Decatur, Alabama, I realize the connecting theme is movement. Thanks to the leadership of Superintendent Mike Stonbraker, the Northwest District has a process to allow both the receiving church and new minister to “hit the ground running” and get moving! Wesley’s transition team was invaluable as we met together to share the vision and the needs of the church before our first Sunday together. Like many of our churches, Wesley Memorial found its neighborhood changing demographically while 85% of the membership moved into different areas of the city. The choice was clear: Should Wesley Memorial relocate the church closer to its current membership or find fresh ways to be the church in a changing neighborhood? After months of prayer and discernment, the congregation decided to stay put and move out into their community in brand new ways. It was a faithful and bold decision.

The scriptural record reveals to us a God of movement who always reaches out to humanity in transforming love. God’s church must do the same, so Wesley Memorial decided to go back to the basics together. Wesley 101, a sermon series and bible study (adults, youth and children) based on The Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations: Radical hospitality, passionate worship, intentional faith development, risk taking mission and service and extravagant generosity, energized an entire congregation.

The results have been amazing. Fueled by extravagant generosity giving is on the increase for both the budget and special projects. After realizing our campus signage was confusing to first time guests, all of Wesley’s buildings now have large and user friendly signs. Radical hospitality continued with an update of the church’s nursery and parent pagers to provide even better child care. Members of the congregation decided to take a risk and volunteered to serve in Scout Reach, a program to bring the benefits of scouting to boys in deprived neighborhoods who ride the school bus to Wesley Memorial every Monday afternoon. The church community garden provided fresh produce to church members and those in need and there are plans to widen its impact even more in the next year. Three new Sunday school classess are in the works and over a dozen new people have committed their membership to the community of faith at 1211 Westmeade Street SW. Worship continues to grow in passion and in numbers.

As the minister of a church on the move, I am humbled by the energy and momentum I witness each and every day. But the power behind Wesley’s movement into the community is best described by a new member of the church. When asked why he wanted to join Wesley Memorial, he replied, “My wife and I believe the Spirit is on the move here and we want to be a part of that movement.” I thank God each day that I am allowed to serve a church willing to take risks and move forward in the Name and Spirit of Jesus Christ. I look forward to seeing where God will lead the church named Wesley Memorial UMC in the months and years to follow.

Sherry Harris

Unnatural Gratitude

2011-10-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

Christians are made, not born," said Tertullian. No Christian virtues are innate. Nothing about following Jesus comes naturally. Therefore, so much that the church does for us is formational, educational, and transformational.

Take the virtue of gratitude. Don’t let anybody tell you that gratitude is innate. Why else would parents need to instruct their child, "Say thanks to the nice lady for the candy – or you will be punished?"

A primary task of the church is to take otherwise normal, innate, American tendencies and to re-form them in the light of Jesus.

What comes naturally in our culture are words like "mine," and "I earned it and deserve it."

Thus I found to be one of the most moving worship moments in Duke Chapel was when, as people come forward at Communion, we taught communicants to hold out empty hands for the blessed bread. What’s natural is tight–fisted gripping of what we think is ours. What’s Christian is open-handed generosity.

It’s natural for us to grip what we’ve got rather than to give. Americans and American churches are keeping a larger percentage of their income than in previous decades. About a fourth of our congregations find it impossible to part with about 13% of their intake for the benevolent, mission, and administrative work of the church. It is completely natural for people to say, "Let’s keep most of our money here in our church, why pay our share of Connectional Giving?"

This is unsurprising in a culture that has a too expansive view of what’s "mine." What is remarkable and can only be attributed to the activity of the Holy Spirit is that three-fourths of our congregations expend more than a fourth of their income on those outside their church. Amid all the legitimate needs they have within their congregation, they know that the purpose of the church and its ministry is beyond the bounds of the congregation.

Thus, one of the requirements listed for a District Superintendent in North Alabama is to tithe. Clergy lead congregational giving through their own giving. Actually a tithe is a job requirement for every follower of Jesus!

The church teaches us in various ways that most of what we have came to us, not through our hard work, but as a gift of God, grace. We have what we have in trust. We are assigned responsibility for others beyond our immediate family. None of us is a self-made person. We’re all connected in a web of Christ-given responsibility.

These are strikingly unnatural truths that only a loving church can teach. Thus on Sunday at your church, the offering may well be the most demanding (and revealing!) act of worship.

Will Willimon

Every week you can see the spiritual health of your church by logging into the North Alabama Conference Dashboard. There you will see the most reliable indicators of spiritual vitality, not only your church’s participation in Connectional Giving but also professions of faith, baptism, attendance, and service to those in need.

The Passing of a Preacher

2011-10-06T13:36:00.000-07:00

When you enter the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham - one of Alabama's great institutions - you are welcomed by Fred Shuttlesworth. You will be welcomed to this shrine of the Civil Rights Movement by a preacher. Fred bragged that his head was harder than the batons of the Birmingham police. For decades this straight talking, hard headed preacher not only preached but enacted the justice of Jesus Christ. In so doing, Fred was a model for all later generations of preachers in Alabama.

Fred was not known as widely as some Civil Rights activists, mainly because he never stopped being a pastor who daily cared for an active congregation. He was a preacher first, a political activist second, basing his challenges upon his pastoral convictions. We knew him as a man who changed our state for the better by standing up, speaking up, and acting up for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Reading some of the spurrious biblical interpretation that appears on our Conference website in our current discussions about our state's Immigration Law, interpretation that picks out a couple of Bible verses (often from Romans 13) and uses it to justify all sorts of nontheological subserviance to the state, I give thanks that we live in Alabama. That is, we live in a place where, in a time when horribly unjust laws had been duly passed by our government, a few hard headed, straight talking preachers stood up for the higher law of God. What a blessing to serve God in a place where God raised up a faithful witness named Fred.

Will Willimon

ILLEGALS ALL!

2011-10-06T10:05:00.000-07:00

We’ve had a lively debate around our Conference related to the Alabama Immigration Law. My objections to the law are based upon biblical convictions and are shared by many of our leaders, particularly those who have an evangelical passion to reach the world in the name of Jesus. One of these leaders is John Bailey, who leads missions at our Asbury UMC in Madison. I thought John had a thoughtful meditation on the theme of our “illegal” status before God, a status that has been rectified by the cross of Jesus.

Will Willimon

The recent debates over Alabama’s immigration law have revealed divisions among Christians. Many people who profess Jesus as Lord and Savior have taken up ranks on both sides of the issue. It is always disconcerting to see how, once again, the followers of Jesus are divided over an issue that touches the core of what Jesus calls us to be. I often wonder if we are fully aware of what it really means to be a Christian. I have a dear friend who likes to ask this question about everything we face as Christ followers. His question is this, “what does the Good News of Jesus Christ have to say to us in this issue?” Looking at all things through the lens of the Gospel gives us the perspective we need to have as Christians in whatever we face. It is worth asking what the Gospel has to tell us as we consider the debate over Alabama’s immigration law.

It will be good for us to remember that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not about making good people better, strong people stronger or nice people nicer. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not a self improvement program. The Gospel is about Jesus coming to live among us to set the captive free, make the weak strong, raise the dead to life and to proclaim the lawbreaker innocent. (See Isaiah 61:1-2 and Luke 4:18-19) The Gospel tells us that we were all enemies of God, far removed from God’s love and mercy. God, in the person of Jesus Christ came that we may move from enemy to child and even friend of God. What is more, Jesus sends His followers into the world in the same way He was sent. (See John 17:18) This is a foundational truth that I am afraid that many who profess the name of Jesus have either forgotten or have never fully understood. This foundation is critical, because if the foundation is not right, everything that is built upon it will be wrong.

One of the arguments being put forth by those who advocate for Alabama’s immigration law is that the people the law is focused on are illegal. This fact is not up for debate, these people are indeed here illegally. What the Christian must ask, then, is how he or she will view these lawbreakers? Do we look at them as ones who are impacting our way of life and should be excluded? Or, do we look at them in the same way that God views us, as lawbreakers who will be treated with mercy, compassion and Grace? I submit that your understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ may impact how you view these lawbreakers in our midst. If you understand the Gospel to be about making good people better, you may view the illegal with scorn and contempt and be pleased to see them sent home. If you understand the Gospel to be about God reaching out to a lost, rebellious and lawbreaking people with overwhelming mercy and compassion, you may grieve to learn that fellow lawbreakers are being treated poorly at the hands of those who profess Christ. I encourage all who profess the name of Jesus as Savior and Lord, to seriously consider your understanding and experience of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and look at this law through the Gospel lens.

John Bailey

John is a certified evangelist and provisional Deacon in the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church. He is appointed to serve as Director of Missions at Asbury UMC in Madison.

Dream Sabbath

2011-09-26T13:05:00.000-07:00

While leading the rebuilding of our beloved Woodlawn Church in Birmingham, The Reverend Matt Lacey has also led a revitalization of our Conference mission work, a vibrant tradition of the North Alabama Conference. I have marveled at all of the ways Matt, a true missionary among us, has led us. Grateful for Matt’s work in immigration ministry, I asked him to be our representative in the work of Dream Sabbath. Here is how your congregation can be part of this ministry this October.

Imagine the future of children in the United States being taken away, often through no decision of their own. Being stripped all their hard work, education, friends, and dreams, often through a decision that someone else made when they were too young to understand. This is the story of many children in this country who are undocumented.

The United Methodist Church is part of the Interfaith Immigration Coalition, a group of more than thirty national organizations representing Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, and Islamic faith communities. The Coalition is sponsoring Dream Sabbath, an opportunity for people of faith around the country to express support for the thousands of young people who were brought to this country as infants or children and who, though not documented residents, have nevertheless worked hard to succeed in school and to be good citizens of their communities.

The Dream Act is a proposed federal law that would make it possible for these young people to earn legal status if they complete high school or get a GED and then enroll in college or university or serve in our Armed Forces. You may have seen some of these young people, known as the Dreamers, when they held peaceful vigil outside the federal courthouse here in Birmingham and attended the August 24 hearing on the bishops’ challenge to Alabama’s new immigration law, HB 56. They are an impressive group of teenagers who are taking a risk by speaking out publicly and telling their stories, stories that sound very much like those of any teenager raised to believe in “the American Dream.”

However your congregation may feel about Alabama’s new law or about our immigration laws generally, Dream Sabbath is an opportunity for us to share in prayer and worship what it means to respond to these young people through our faith.

Dream Sabbath events can take place anytime, but I’m asking you to schedule a time between now and October 16 for your congregation to participate in this interfaith initiative. It may be through a themed worship service or an element of worship – a sermon, a story, a prayer, a litany, a meditation, a bulletin insert.

The Interfaith Immigration Coalition has prepared a number of materials you can use in planning your service. You can find them on the Coalition website, http://www.interfaithimmigration.org If you would like to have one of our local Dreamers come to your service to share their own stories, let me know.

PLEASE help us support the Dreamers by doing three things:

1. Plan an opportunity between now and October 16 to lift up in worship your concern for these young people;

2. Invite your state and federal legislators to be a part of your worship service

and

3. Go to the Coalition website and register your congregation’s participation in celebrating Dream Sabbath, or send an e-mail to Anne Wheeler at annepwheeler@gmail.com or post your participation at www.facebook.com/missionsnal so we can share word of your service with others.

Will Willimon

A Tool for Learning About and Building Your Church's Story

2011-09-20T13:59:00.001-07:00

Ben Padgett is working with me and the Cabinet to improve our ability to motivate and equip our pastors and congregations. One of the things Ben has done is to develop the leadership potential of the North Alabama Conference Dashboard. I asked Ben to share his thoughts in this message. - Will Willimon

North Alabama Conference Dashboard
A Tool for Learning About and Building the Church Story

The North Alabama Conference Dashboard is a great new tool that our Conference has given us for leading the congregation in ministry. The Dashboard is a great way for pastors to tell the story of their church. As eyes fall upon the Dashboard numbers, a story comes to mind. The congregation knows the story and the Dashboard can prompt people to verbalize the story. If the Dashboard is left on a computer monitor and filled in only through obligation then the result may well be a report card with little or no positive application. However, the following is a step-by-step means of moving from report card to tool for knowing and using the story of a particular church.

Keep the church’s Dashboard numbers up to date by reporting every week.

Choose three to five persons from the congregation who will meet with the pastor at least once a week.

Three criteria for choosing these persons:

· They are interested in the purpose of their church.

· They will speak out.

· They know the story of their church.

The meeting:

· Begin with prayer. Request the Holy Spirit be present and guide those present.

· Provide each participant a print out of the latest Dashboard for the church. [NOTE: The Dashboard was created as an online tools and is best viewed on a computer in order to have full access to all the graphs.]

Describe each section of the Dashboard. If you are uncertain about how to do this you can make a copy of the instructions from the Conference web site and the group can learn together.

The pastor becomes the student.

The group is asked to look at the numbers and graphs and tell the pastor what story the numbers tell about their church.

The pastor, or a member of the group, jots notes as they discuss the story.

Each participant may see a different story represented by the numbers and it is important that all the stories be heard. There is no reason to attempt agreement; mutuality will develop as the story develops.

The pastor may share with the group that the story of the church is actually a collection of stories of the church. There are as many stories as there are members because there are that many perspectives.

The pastor’s leading is limited to convening the group and letting it be known that she wants to know the story of the church.

· Avoid interpreting the numbers for the members; let the group interpret the numbers for you.

· Avoid leading the conversation. Allow the group to do the talking.

· The pastor is seeking to be led rather than to lead.

· The pastor’s leadership is keeping the focus on the Dashboard story rather than the content of the story.

The movement of the process may be fast or slow but it is the same for either:

Does the story of the numbers describe that the church is being the church God desires them to be in their community?

· If “Yes” how shall we celebrate in the church and in the community?

· If “No” what needs to change?

This leads to actions to be considered by the elected leadership of the church and pastor. Remember, this group may share and suggest but only appropriate elected committees, councils, Boards, and Conferences can officially make changes.

· What needs to change?

· Who will be responsible for the changes?

· When and How will the church start the changes?

Develop means of keeping the membership involved and informed of the progress of the process.

Keep the numbers conversations going with the Dashboard each week.

Weekly attendance tells a story.

· This story is immediate and will become a portion of a trend.

· Talk about positive and negative change in the numbers.

Trend numbers may tell a very different story.

Changes are discussed in terms of:

· What happened at this point?

· How did the church respond?

· Have we recovered?

· How will we recover at this point?

· How will we keep this trend going?

· How can we grow this trend?

Keep the conversation going.

Pastor and group must meet and talk about the story.

· Pastor must use this as forming his or her vision.

· Church may use this in forming its vision.

This all falls under the United Methodist Church vision of “making disciples for the transformation of the world.”

Ben Padgett

Welcome Others as Christ Has Welcomed You

2011-09-12T11:33:00.000-07:00

Most mainline protestant churches are in decline, the churches of North Alabama are no exception. But not all. I’ve made it my business to visit our growing congregations in order to learn more about why they are thriving.

I asked a pastor of a congregation that had spectacular growth among young adults what was her most significant act of leadership that encouraged growth.

"I fired the ushers,” she replied. “Those older men were stiff and cold. All they knew how to do is to hand people a bulletin, thus making a horrible first impression on visitors. I fired them, searched for people whom God had given the gift of hospitality, and the rest has been easy.”

I’ve learned that hospitality may be the key factor in a faithfully growing church. One could argue this theologically. Paul tells us that we ought to welcome others in the same way that Christ has welcomed us. A major reason for the crucifixion of Jesus was his practice of radical hospitality, open-handed, table-time conviviality.

“We want church to begin in our parking lot,” declared one of our dynamic pastors. “We’re vetting and training teams of friendly Greeters who meet visitors in the parking lot, welcome them, hand them off to the Hosts who stay close to them in the service, then invite them to lunch afterwards."

The most notable change in church architecture in the past fifty years is the enlargement and the open atmosphere of the narthex, the hallway into a church’s worship space. A hundred years ago our churches received people in a dark, cramped entrance hall. Today churches build spacious, open, light, comfortable “Welcome Centers” as a sign that they desire and expect people who are not seasoned members.

Indeed, I have learned that the main difference between a congregation in decline and one with a future is the difference between practicing the faith for the exclusive benefit of “insiders” (the members of that congregation) or passionate concern for the “outsiders” (those who have yet to hear and to respond to the gospel).

Jesus Christ died for the whole wide world, not just for those inside the church. Therefore, a theological test for the fidelity of a church is hospitality. In our contesting of the Alabama Legislature’s ill conceived immigration law, and I’m rediscovering the radical nature of the seemingly benign Christian notion of hospitality. Our churches really resent any intrusion into their attempts to be obedient to Christ’s mandate to welcome others as we have been welcomed. An evangelical definition of a Christian: Christians are people who know how to welcome people even as Christ has welcomed us.

If your congregation has lost the art of Christian hospitality, let us know. We have learned so much about best practices that our churches have tested and found fruitful in countless congregations.

A major task of ministry in our time and place is to turn our churches inside-out, making them more hospitable and therefore more faithful.

Will Willimon

Remembering 9/11

2011-09-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

This week a number of our churches are having various services commemorating 9/11. That day changed many of our lives. I will never forget the Sunday after the tragedy. A few months later I published a book of sermons by campus pastors, The Sunday after Tuesday: Campus Pulpits Respond to 9/11 (Abingdon). Many of us pastors found that making sense out of this senseless tragedy was one of our greatest challenges in ministry.

Our own S.T. Kimbrough, master theologian, historian, poet and missionary, shared with me a hymn that he wrote to think about and to pray after 9/11. I share it with you as an offering from one of our Conference's most distinguished pastors.

The hymn is below. I have also linked a PDF file of it so you may have a printable version.

Will Willimon

Ministry Matters

2011-08-17T08:41:00.000-07:00

Ministry Matters is still in beta, but it contains many helpful resources for pastors and churches including the following articles and videos from Bishop Willimon: click here.

Responding for the Long Haul

2011-08-04T13:07:00.000-07:00

I couldn’t be more proud of the way that the churches of our Conference not only responded to the Eastertide storms in our state but have, throughout the summer, kept responding. It is one thing to respond in the heat of a crisis; it is another thing to keep on responding for the long haul. Nancy Cole and Emily Nelms are leading us in wonderful ways.

One of the most exciting events I have witnessed in my entire time of ministry has been Camp Noah. In two of our towns, more than more than fifty volunteers sat with children wrapped in homemade quilts listening to each child’s perspective of the April 27 storms. The Mountain Lakes District and Southwest District hosted Camp Noah for nearly 100 children in an effort to help them grieve their losses of homes, pets, and family members and recover.

By following the Biblical story of Noah and the Ark from disaster to redemption, the children identify their own loss by using arts and crafts to share their story. Children in both camps became more expressive in their art and play as the week progressed. Children’s art activities displayed their storm stories, their safe place and their wall of remembrance.

In the Mountain Lakes District, Camp Noah was held at Robertson Chapel UMC in Rainsville. Forty-three children and twenty-five volunteers participated from the surrounding areas of Piedmont, Henagar, Sylvania and Geraldine. The Site Coordinator was Aimee Kilgo from New Oregon UMC, and Rev. Christopher Cone served as their Noah for the week.

The Southwest District’s Camp Noah was held at St. Mark UMC in Northport. Fifty children participated, while thirty volunteers assisted. The Site Coordinator was Susan Clements, a member of St. Mark UMC, and the site’s Noah was Nathan Kenny, the intern for the Southwest District. Children attending were from the West End, Forest Lake, Alberta and Holt neighborhoods of Tuscaloosa, Cottondale and Coaling. Childcare was provided before and after Camp Noah.

“As Methodists we always seek ways to show God’s love and share God’s grace with others. Through Camp Noah, members of the United Methodist Churches of the Southwest District reminded children that God is with them, even in the midst of a storm. Our volunteers touched the lives of children and their families, and I know that God will continue to use this ministry to bless many others in His name,” said Dr. Bill Brunson, Superintendent of the Southwest District.

Nancy and Emily are now coordinating volunteers from nearly two hundred churches from all over the nation who will continue to come to Alabama and work with us in the recovery. The Southwest District recently opened Camp Coker, a permanent housing and staging area for volunteers.

As I say, the response to this disaster, by our churches, has been one of the most inspiring moments in my ministry. In responding to the needs of others, we have felt God responding to us, giving us creative, faithful ways to reach out in the name of Christ. Thanks be to God!

Will Willimon

Wayne Flynt as the Bishop's Lecturer

2011-07-26T12:03:00.000-07:00

To better acquaint ourselves with our assignment in Alabama, Patsy and I spent a couple of months reading histories of our new state. “Read Wayne Flynt,” knowledgeable people advised, “he is Alabama’s greatest contemporary historian.” We devoured Wayne’s Alabama: The History of a Deep South State, and his Alabama in the Twentieth Century both published by the University of Alabama Press, In a couple of weeks this distinguished Auburn University professor had given us a real feel for where Alabama had come from and where Alabama ought to go. So many of the present trials and tribulations of our state, particularly our current governmental and educational challenges, are rooted in our past. Wayne is a truly public intellectual, battling for a new and more just constitution for our state and for a state government more concerned about the economic plight of our people. He is a courageous interpreter of our state to itself, a dedicated Baptist Christian with our Lord’s own compassion for the poor. He represents the very best of our state and the very best of our faith. Wish Wayne were a Wesleyan, he certainly thinks and writes like one!

One of the joys Patsy and I have had is the establishment of an endowment for the Bishop’s Lectureship at our Huntingdon College. Huntingdon has used our lectureship to bring to its campus nationally renowned lectures, most of whom embody both great scholarship and the Christian faith. I am thrilled that this year’s lecturer on September 20 is Dr. Wayne Flynt. He will be meeting with students and faculty throughout the day, part of President Cam West’s commitment to form Huntingdon students for Christian service to our state. We are thrilled that our lectureship will help bring Dr. Flynt to Huntingdon. I encourage all of our people, particularly our clergy, to be present for his 7:30 p.m. lecture on the timely Christian topic, “The Lord is the Maker of Them All: Black, White, and Poor in America."

Huntingdon has made remarkable progress in the past few years under the inspired leadership of President West, a United Methodist pastor, scholar, and college administrator. But forgive me for thinking that Huntingdon’s greatest achievement is the college’s unreserved commitment to its role as a church-related college. In recent decades we have watched so many of our colleges slip quietly away from the church. Huntingdon is the happy exception, showing how the church and the college can be mutually beneficial. Wayne Flynt’s presence at Huntingdon and his lecture provide a wonderful occasion for us to celebrate our ministry in higher education.

Will Willimon

The Possibilities of Church Turnaround

2011-07-20T10:37:00.000-07:00

“Anniston First UMC is responsive and working toward change. God is blessing!”

The words above begin a remarkable report of celebration and hope I received recently from the senior pastor at Anniston First, Rev. Peter Hawker. This was the second “90 Day Plan” I had been given since Pete’s appointment in January 2011. In both reports were descriptions of plans and goals being used to reclaim the church’s purpose and to create vision. In the second report it was obvious that momentum was being built and early buy-in from congregation and staff was taking place. Most exciting was the turnaround spirit of a church in decline to a church working hard to reclaim its purpose. The report included specific metrics of fruitfulness to the mission and purpose of the church. As one excited member recently said, “we have not seen this in years!” After receiving this six month report I placed some of these benchmarks in a comparative manner from the three previous years:

	New Members	Professions of Faith	Baptisms	Average Attendance
First 6 Months of 2011	36	13	7	368
Previous 36 Months	34	14	21	333

In order to appreciate the early turnaround going on at Anniston First UMC it is helpful to remember the city of Anniston experienced major changes over the past several years. Most significant was the decommissioning of Ft. McClellan in 1999 and the major loss of human and economic resources within the city. The base closing affected the entire area including businesses, schools and churches. Anniston First was significantly impacted and forced to rethink its purpose in relationship to the changing community circumstances. Over the past few months the pastoral staff and leadership of the church have chosen to focus on turnaround while resisting the temptation to remain in a “maintenance mode” and decline. Their early success has been invigorating.

So what is the difference now versus that of previous years? First, is the leadership of courage and wisdom being offered by the two pastors, Pete Hawker and Minnie Stovall. It is no accident that the spirit of the church has been lifted due to recent growth. Now, growing forward is becoming contagious. It’s worth noting these early successes were born on faithful intentionality via consultation, candid communications, leadership buy-in and measured accountability to the goals outlined for the church’s turnaround. Especially important has been a continued promotion of the non-negotiable reason for being the church, “to make disciples and grow the church for Christ’s kingdom!” The expectations being built around “kingdom growth” and faithfulness to the vision is also producing secondary benefits of church health and vitality.

Here is where many of our churches lose focus and waste energy. Instead of “great commission” focus there is a scattered approach to ministry where everything is judged of equal value and penultimate ministry is treated as primary. Vision becomes fuzzy and goals become short-term reactions to seasonal needs. Unfortunately, there are many churches across our Conference quite busy but not very successful making new disciples. I am convinced that any church serious about turnaround must elevate discipleship making as primary and build vision around Jesus’ great commission.

Though early, Anniston First UMC is a good example of a church being intentional to pivot from decline to hope. If you want to know more about the turnaround ministry and vision of Anniston First, I recommend contacting the pastoral staff, Rev. Peter Hawker or Rev. Minnie Stovall. Their passion for purposeful ministry is infectious.

Bob Alford
Cheaha District Superintendent

First 90 Days Pastor's Report

2011-07-12T13:28:00.000-07:00

One of our most productive innovations in the way we appoint pastors has been our First 90 Days program. Every full time pastor who moves is asked to devise a First 90 Days plan, stating the goals and activity during the first 90 days. The District Superintendent and pastor work with the lay leadership to follow the plan and to be sure that every pastor gets off to a good start. We have not had a single pastor, who followed the First 90 Days plan, to have difficulty in making the transition into a new congregation. Daniel Pope is one of the pastors whom I asked to report regularly on his First 90 Days. I wanted to share Daniel’s excellent work with you. - Will Willimon

My First 90 Days plan actually began about 30 days prior to moving to Crossville. With the belief that much can be communicated and gained through the transitional time of the 30 days leading up to the move and the 30 days immediately following the move, I got the transition underway early. First I met with the PPRC to listen to their hopes and concerns and to allow them to see my heart and begin to catch my spirit. One of my leaders is a teacher at the local high school, so he introduced me around to the administration, support staff, teachers, and coaches. Then I had a series of individual meetings with key leaders and their spouses (admin. Board chair, finance committee chair, choir director, and youth minister). I requested data on the church (i.e. budget, calendar, charge conference reports, pictorial directory, homebound list, etc.) All of this happened before June 1st.

In the week prior to moving day, I made a personal contact by phone with each family listed in the pictorial directory to express my excitement about and thankfulness for the opportunity to be their pastor. As well, I sent a “listening” survey letter to each family in the pictorial directory asking: 1) What do you love about your church?; and, 2) What are your dreams for your church? This effort to make personal contact and to listen to the people seemed to be well received and appreciated.

The people of Crossville First offered to come and move me here from Oneonta. I accepted as I perceived that this gave them a “share” in me. They graciously helped me move in and get settled, and we had a “meet and greet” reception in the fellowship hall that evening. I even made an in-home visit to a prospect that evening with one of my congregants. On June 16th, the day after moving day, I was able to visit 20 homes in my neighborhood to introduce myself.

We had a great first Sunday together, a combined worship service with sermon titled “Something Worth Living For.” I invited everyone to the parsonage that night for fellowship, conversation, and vision casting (we did that each of the 1st two Sundays - June 19th and 26th). God’s vision is a family systems approach where every age group has activities with biblical foundations each Sunday and Wednesday. The people of Crossville have really stepped up to the challenge with new Sunday schools for children formed and a children’s choir ministry to begin on Aug. 17th, the launch for Wednesday night ministries for the new school year.

I began meeting weekly with the youth minister for guidance and support. The PPR met June 27th. We discussed the role of the PPR, how we will work best together, had both the spiritual diagnosis conversation and the expectations conversation, and completed a 6 month review of the youth minister. Administrative Board met on June 29th, and I had the expectations conversation again with the leadership. This included being 100% in our tithe to the District. We caught up our May tithe shortfall immediately afterward.

On July 1st, I invited my neighborhood to a block party at the parsonage. I visited 67 homes to hand out invitations. I rented an inflatable slip-n-slide, the church brought homemade ice cream, and we cooked hot dogs. We had about 60 people attend (30 church members and 30 neighbors). It was fun, and I got to meet many of my neighbors. We had about 6 first time guests the next morning in worship.I’ve made about 25 in-home visits, numerous calls, and sent many cards thus far. I’ve visited about 12 local businesses meeting people in their places of work. We are having a “Christmas in July” celebration on July 31st. As well, we are planning some outreach events. I really have to give God all the glory and give the people of Crossville First credit for their enthusiastic support. We expect to see His glory through and among us in the present and future!

Daniel Pope
Crossville First UMC

"The Bishop's Dashboard" - The Christian Century Article

2011-07-11T09:57:00.000-07:00

William Willimon’s experiment in accountability

May 31, 2011 by Jason Byassee

"My job now is to coordinate disaster relief," William Willimon said, reflecting on the storms in Alabama that destroyed 20 United Methodist churches, rendered 20 more unusable for months to come and killed more than 200 Alabamians. "We're trying to learn from our experience with Katrina to be more organized. People really need the church in a moment like this."

For Willimon, the bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church, disaster relief is an unexpected addition to an already unconventional career.

When Willimon became a bishop in 2004, people who knew him and his work were curious. Why would the dean of Duke University Chapel want to leave a high-profile position to oversee congregations in Alabama? The joke in the world of theological scholarship is that one must "publish or parish"—and here was Willimon, among the most prolific theological writers of his generation ("never an unpublished thought"), voluntarily choosing to occupy himself with hundreds of parishes.

The tenor of Willimon's own theological writings raised an even more significant question: Could an inveterate gadfly, the author of Resident Aliens and other forceful critiques of mainline Protestantism, oversee a unit of the mainline church without doing damage to himself or others?

With Willimon set to retire as bishop in 2012 (he plans to return to teaching at Duke Divinity School), it is appropriate to consider how the Willimon experiment in the episcopacy has turned out. As one might expect, it has not been business as usual.

Willimon has used his authority to "decimate the career ladder," as one pastor told me. In the process he has alienated many pastors in the North Alabama Conference. He has promoted younger clergy deemed to be more talented over those with more seniority. He has streamlined some meetings and eliminated others. "I got annual conference down to two days," he boasts (it had previously lasted four and a half days). And he has made accountability a hallmark term.

Accountability, in this case, mainly means that every congregation's weekly numbers for giving, attendance, hours of service, and professions of faith are posted online for all the world—and the rest of the conference—to see. They appear on a page on the conference website called the North Alabama Dashboard. These statistics become one source of input for decisions on pastoral appointments. What looks to some like a call for public accountability looks to others like an act of public shaming. For critics, the Dashboard seems to treat the dynamics of church life like so many hamburgers sold.

Willimon's main desire seems to be to see energy in ministry. "He wants us to be out there, doing something," one young pastor told me. "It's almost like he doesn't care what."

I met with a group of pastors that Willimon called the Brat Pack, made up of some of the younger pastors whom he had promoted above the usual rung on the career ladder. Having Willimon's support didn't stop them from criticizing him. One accused him of failing to promote women sufficiently (only one member of his cabinet is female). One accused him of unnecessarily alienating older clergy, perhaps even practicing ageism. Others voiced a common criticism: he travels and speaks a lot outside the conference. "He's never here," they say. Willimon's travel schedule makes him an easy target—but he protests that he preaches in his conference's churches 35 Sundays a year.

Though Mike Holly, a pastor to students at Birmingham's Canterbury UMC, defended Willimon's initiatives, saying that "no institution will fix itself." He noted that Willimon came to Birmingham with a limited amount of time (Methodist bishops usually cannot serve another four-year term after they turn 65) and only one unchecked power: to move pastors to new churches. Why not use that power to put talented, energetic people in places where they and their churches can thrive?

Defending the Dashboard, these pastors said that a good pastor always pays attention to the numbers. "This goes all the way straight back to Wesley," said Wade Griffith, a pastor at Liberty Crossings UMC in Birmingham. Methodists in the 18th century scrupulously counted attenders, members, professions of faith, accounts of sanctification and financial gifts. Willimon is practicing what academics might call "traditioned innovation." The online Dashboard may be new, but it comes straight out of Methodist custom. One of the district superintendents who works under Willimon said, "Haven't you ever seen the pinup numbers on the plywood boards in front of little churches? Churches have always counted." With the Dashboard, "pastors can't lie to their buddies."

Surprisingly, the Dashboard can even build community. When pastors can see which of their peers are succeeding, they can (or should) call them up and ask them how they're doing it. "Using 'I don't know how' as an excuse is out the window," Griffith said.

Willimon said that the numbers on the Dashboard have been illuminating to him. "The first month we used it, the pastors showing the best growth were people I didn't know. I had to call them up: 'Hey, this is your bishop, what are you doing up there in Dismal Swamp?'"

With the Dashboard, Willimon "busted the closed shop," Griffith said. When appointments are made, both pastors and parishioners ask to see the numbers.

"The numbers take the appointment system out of the backroom," said Brandon Harris, pastor of Avondale UMC in Birmingham. "We all want to talk about performance."

But performance of what? As readers of Resident Aliens know, Willimon has eloquently argued that churches must above all be faithful to the demands of the gospel. A church that stands up for nonviolence or racial justice may post some poor numbers. Doesn't an emphasis on numbers serve to trim the wings of prophetic pastors—the very kind of pastor Willimon has encouraged in his writings and the kind of pastor that he was?

Several members of the Brat Pack noted this tension and said it is one that Willimon hasn't resolved. Like early Methodists, he wants to see evangelical energy and church growth. He wants clergy who don't live off the achievements of the past but who rally missional energy for God's future. Yet at the same time, said Wade Langer, who was assigned to plant a new church in Tuscaloosa, he encourages courageous action. "He's always saying, 'Don't be afraid to piss people off.'"

Several expressed confidence that Willimon would support the decisions they make as pastors. Griffith said Willimon's approach "has given me even more courage to lead my congregation when it comes to making difficult or unpopular decisions."

And these young pastors do show courage. One spoke at length about the ministry at his church, and only later did I discover his congregation carries a debt of more than $7 million. Another told of an innovative ministry to gay and lesbian families, another of a Theology on Tap program (which might be a tame idea elsewhere, but not in the Deep South).

I heard about a pastor whom Willimon sent to a rural church, where she was disappointed that few people turned out for church. The next week she went across the railroad tracks and got a crowd of folks from the tar paper shacks to come to church. She baptized six one Easter but also lost six of her most devoted members. Her Dashboard numbers didn't show any growth, because people left the church as the "wrong" kind of people entered it. Willimon may want growth, but not just in the way many church growth consultants suggest. Willimon likes the Dashboard, but he knows that it is only one potential indicator of faithfulness.

The pastors all had stories of Willimon reaching out to them personally. He telephones people out of the blue and, though he's on the road a lot, uses technology to stay in touch. "He's 21st-century accessible," one pastor said, amazed at how quickly he responds to e-mail and downloads new apps.

A key player in Willimon's episcopacy has been Bill Hamer, a former executive at Liberty Mutual insurance company. It's not uncommon these days for denominational administrators to hire executive coaches. Hamer, who had taught management and been an administrator in higher education, met Willimon when the two served on a board together. Hamer was pleasantly surprised that the church would ask him to do something that draws on his business skills. And Willimon appreciated an adviser who's not surprised by impious behavior from clergy.

Hamer advised Willimon on personnel matters and devised the Dashboard system. He told me that the way to read the Dashboard is to look for the odd numbers—like the percentage of people served per member, or the ratio of membership to attendance (which will reveal churches that have large but inaccurate membership rolls).

Part of Hamer's job was to interpret Willimon's manic energy to others ("Wait and see which of the ten things he mentioned today he'll mention again tomorrow. Then do those"). Hamer said his most important task was to get Willimon to focus not on the 25 things on his mind at any given moment, but the five things the church can actually accomplish.

Hamer was eventually let go after the conference cabinet and others concluded that he had too much power. Willimon remains unconvinced on that point, but he bowed to the cabinet's wishes.

About Willimon, Hamer said: "He's a big believer in conflict. He can't help being an agitator. He can't sit still because Jesus doesn't."

I saw this style in action. I heard Willimon casually tell the pastor of a large church that he might assign the talented young leader of the church's contemporary service to a different position. "That conversation would affect 3,000 people," the pastor told me, shaking his head over how a momentous move was brought up so breezily. I was with Willimon when he bumped into a young African-American pastor in his conference. "Do you like working with white people?" Willimon bluntly asked. It seems Willimon doesn't want anyone to feel settled in a job.

A pastor who has seen the pugilist side of Willimon is Reggie Holder, director of a series of ministries for the poor at Highlands UMC, a neo-Gothic church in Birmingham's trendy Five Points South neighborhood. The church's ministries feed more than 100 homeless people daily and provide them with access to washers, dryers and post office boxes. The church has hired the homeless to run these ministries. One Highlands member, who lamented that her once-beautiful church looked like a city bus stop, stirred up some local merchants to oppose the church's ministries to the homeless. A front-page story in theBirmingham News detailed these complaints and quoted business owners who said that nothing was wrong with their area other than what was caused by Highlands.

Willimon weighed into the controversy with energy. He wrote an op-ed piece in the Birmingham News that said: "I love it when the United Methodist Church makes front-page news not for losing members or fighting over some social issue, but for being the church and doing what Jesus commanded us to do." He named the clergy leading the local ministries and thanked them personally. And rather than seeing any shame in the church hosting homeless people, he pointed to the shame of a state in which 23 percent of the children live in poverty. When other church executives might have been on the phone asking the church to stop stirring the waters, Willimon asked Highlands to churn them all the more. "I felt empowered," Holder said.

Yet Holder also mentions the time when Willimon publicly called out Highlands UMC for failing to pay its apportionments, the fees collected from congregations by the conference. "Here we'd been working to get back to paying them and he calls us out," Holder said.

Another pastor who has felt the bishop's support for his ministry is Mike Skelton. His church plant, Inner change, is aimed at reaching unchurched and de churched people, especially those familiar with tattoos, piercings and drug use. He organized a Christian rave, a nightclub-like dance party. Neighbors complained about the noise and the city eventually shut the service down—but not before Willimon himself attended a rave. Recalling that event, Willimon describes a kid who asked him, "Are you a narc?" To which he responded, "Kid, here's a dollar. I want hubcaps on my car when I get back."

He's a keen supporter of Skelton's ministry, which includes a ministry to strippers and one that makes space for those with car mechanic skills to serve those in need. "If Methodism loses the lower middle class, we're sunk," Willimon said.

Ron Schulz, a district superintendent in the North Alabama Conference, de scribes Willimon's vision this way: "He's standing on tiptoe, saying, 'This is what God wants.' Then he asks us to go and figure out how to get there." In a hier archical system like United Methodism, pastors are used to being told what to do and being rewarded for doing it. Willimon tells pastors what he wants but lets them figure out how to deliver it.

Willimon's approach seems to be paying off. The conference saw an increase in professions of faith last year to 4,000 from an average of 3,500, even though it suffered a net loss (with 7,500 deaths). Other UMC conferences are copying Willimon's approach, which he insists is not his; he cites Janice Huie, a bishop in Houston, as the forerunner in emphasizing results. The denomination's recent document "Call to Action!" called for more clergy accountability and wider publication of what works—themes central to Willimon's work in Alabama. Huie's Texas Conference reports on numbers monthly rather than weekly and asks about only four things: worship attendance, professions of faith, personal involvement in mission, and apportionment giving.

"This is a recovery of Wesley's and Francis Asbury's understanding of evidence of fruitfulness," Huie told me. "Metrics are an indicator, but not the only indicator, of vitality." Huie said she and Willimon are among several bishops pushing a similar agenda.

Being around Willimon one hears an endless stream of stories, and many of his stories are about the struggles of being a pastor. For example, he tells of a pastor who was presented with a list of ten criticisms of his leadership style. When the pastor asked if his two decades of service meant nothing, a woman in the parish responded: "That's the sort of question someone asks right before they retire." Another story he tells is about a pastor who poured forth his personal difficulties in a sermon. An elderly layperson suggested afterward that if the man lacked the stamina for the work, perhaps he should find another job.

One lesson of these stories is clear: ministry may be tough, but people deserve more than to hear pastors kvetch about it. In fact, a key to understanding Willimon is to realize how much he values hard work. As theologically committed as he is to Karl Barth and to the primacy of grace over works, he disdains those who presume that good things will fall into their lap without working hard.

Willimon also relishes stories that are outlandish—like the one about a pastor, a Vietnam veteran, who found out that a parishioner was abusing his wife. When the man came up for communion, he heard: "The body of Christ, broken for you. If you ever lay a hand on her again, I'll kill you."

He likes to tell about the time he preached at Innerchange Church. A video played beforehand in which an African-American man described how pastor Mike told him his destiny was better than being a drug user and then introduced him to Jesus. A woman appeared in the video to recount how she'd been beaten up by her boyfriend, went to buy milk for her baby and was met by an Innerchange member, who invited her to church—where she got her life back together. Willimon said, "I was crying too hard to preach. I told them they had to sing another hymn."

Though rooted in real life, the stories are undoubtedly blown up a bit. I heard different versions of them retold by pastors and found myself doing historical criticism on them. But they have a teaching purpose: the point is to expand pastors' imaginations.

I followed up on the story about the woman ministering to people on the wrong side of the tracks. When I reached pastor Hilda Walker on the phone, she said the bishop's story is true in the main and added, "He always speaks well of us." Some details were off--but the truth is actually more impressive than the story Willimon told.

The church Walker serves had been set to close in 2000. As part of her ministry in a women's prison she found inmates eager to worship. One had murdered her baby, another had needle tracks on her arm and asked, "Can I come [to church] looking like this, wearing rags?" All of the inmates wanted to come to church when they got out. Walker and her minister husband fixed up a trailer home to be a shelter for them. "We're reaching people no one else reaches," she said.

Walker complained that Willimon hasn't funded her ministry as much as he's praised it. She and her husband pay apportionments from their pocket and she makes no salary. Walker is expected to increase the size of the church enough for it to be self-supporting.

Willimon's theology has always had an enemy, whether mainline Protestant malaise, the university, liberalism or boring churches. Now his enemy is churches' lack of accountability. What seems constant in all this is his effort to point to a God we can't explain, control or follow very well. For Willimon, God is always at work in surprising ways and is calling us to new endeavors. And those who respond need to hustle to catch up.

Reprinted by permission from the June 14, 2011, issue of the Christian Century. www.christiancentury.org

By The Numbers

2011-07-06T14:42:00.000-07:00

Our Conference has pioneered the use of metrics in ministry in our Conference Dashboard. Our Dashboard shows the spiritual health of churches each week showing the most reliable indicators of spiritual vitality, not only of a church’s participation in Connectional Giving, but also professions of faith, baptism, attendance, and service to those in need. Others in the United Methodist Church are taking note and starting to follow our lead. I thought you would find the following article from The United Methodist Reporter interesting. - Will Willimon

By the numbers: United Methodists debate use of church ‘dashboards’

By Mary Jacobs
Staff Writer
The United Methodist Reporter

At a meeting of the board of trustees at Emory University a few years ago, trustees pored over the college’s “dashboard”—a detailed view of 30 different numerical measures of the university’s vitality.

For Bishop William H. Willimon (North Alabama), a member of the board, it was an epiphany: Why not track vitality in the same way in the United Methodist Church?

By 2009, North Alabama had implemented an online Conference Dashboard. Every Monday, churches log in their numbers for attendance, baptisms, giving and other measures. Pastors—and anyone else—can see how their numbers stack up against other churches.

Now, Bishop Willimon logs in every Tuesday to see which churches reported the greatest increases—and which had the biggest drops. Dials and charts on the dashboard give a quick glimpse of how the numbers are trending.

Bishop Willimon’s experiment may soon become standard practice at annual conferences across the U.S. Similar “dashboards” cropped up around the same time at a handful other annual conferences—including Florida and Illinois Great Rivers—and now the General Council on Finance and Administration (GCFA) is rolling out VitalSigns, a tool modeled after the North Alabama dashboard—and encouraging every annual conference to adopt it.

Detractors say that dashboards are a mistake—a worldly tool that will turn pastors’ focus from ministry to “making the numbers.”

But advocates assert that dashboards offer a desperately-needed tool, in the face of steep declines in the denomination’s membership, to create accountability for pastors, mobilize laity and boost congregational vitality.

“We’re hoping to begin to change the culture that says ‘Numbers aren’t important,’” said Bishop John Schol (Baltimore-Washington), who’s working on the VitalSigns rollout. “Numbers are about souls.”

Always counting

Take a look at the North Alabama Conference Dashboard, and you’ll see that it names names and publishes the numbers—good, bad and ugly—for all to see. For the week of May 22, for example, Canterbury UMC in Birmingham reported two baptisms, topping the list for year-to-date baptisms at 39, while First UMC in Huntsville topped the list of “churches with biggest loss in worship” with 228 in attendance.

Keeping track of these numbers is nothing new for Methodists. John Wesley tracked membership numbers assiduously and cited numerical growth as an indicator of spiritual vitality. Many church members will recall the old wooden register boards that were once posted at the front of church sanctuaries, with movable numbers that tallied attendance and giving from week to week.

And most of the data posted on the dashboards has been tracked in the past—but generally ended up buried, and largely unheeded, in conference journals.

Before the dashboard, “We had three full-time people who did nothing but compile the numbers in the conference,” Bishop Willimon said. “But by the time we got them, they were 1-2 years out of date. It was very hard to make decisions based on those dated numbers.”

What’s changed, with the implementation of dashboards, is that now the numbers are published widely and in “real time.”

“One of my beefs with the general church is that we’ve had this fairly disturbing data for years, but you’d be hard pressed to think of any major change we’ve made in response to the numbers,” Bishop Willimon said. “Now I can honestly say that these numbers have become part of how we work.”

Bishop Willimon says he mostly focuses on the positive numbers—writing or calling pastors of churches with significant upticks, some of whom he might not otherwise know about. But he also moved a pastor, after just one year, in an appointment where attendance dropped 20 percent in the pastor’s first seven months.

Pushback

Not surprisingly, the dashboards are generating pushback from pastors and seminarians.

The idea of dashboards “is both exhilarating and terrifying,” said Jason Byassee, a research fellow at Duke Divinity School who’s beginning a pastoral appointment in the Western North Carolina Conference. “It’s creating anxiety, a worry that the dashboards are designed to shame people they think are lazy pastors.”

As the Detroit Conference begins implementing GCFA’s VitalSigns dashboard, the Rev. Jerry DeVine, director of Connectional Ministries, said that some pastors have complained about the addition of yet another administrative task.

Some worry that dashboards will make ministry “all about the numbers.”

In his experience as a former district superintendent, Dr. DeVine said, “When there were positive numbers, the clergy in my district would love telling me about them. When they were not so good, they’d say, ‘I’m not a numbers person.’”

Others wonder whether numbers can really measure what matters most.

“What will numbers tell us of holiness of heart and mind? Of the pastor's seriousness and ability?” asks Austin Rivera, a Duke Divinity School student and ordination candidate in the Kansas East Conference.

“Lately I’ve been preaching a lot about friendship with the poor,” writes the Rev. Tom Arthur, pastor of Sycamore Creek UMC in Lansing, Mich., in a recent blog post on dashboards. “How do you measure that?”

The right measures?

The first time someone showed the North Alabama dashboard to Amy Laura Hall, she burst into tears. The associate professor of Christian ethics at Duke Divinity School has been a sharp critic ever since.

She calls dashboards a “union busting” tactic—targeting clergy and their guaranteed appointments, and compares them to the metrics enacted in public schools by the No Child Left Behind Act that, she says, similarly target teachers with tenure.

“Pastors won’t be able to preach what their congregations need to hear without thinking about the numbers,” she said.

Bishop Willimon isn’t buying that argument.

“That’s an old-fashioned Methodist alibi—‘We’re dying because we’re so prophetic and truthful,’” he said. “The words you’re looking for there are actually ‘boring’ and ‘old.’”

“The question is what can the numbers really tell us?” Dr. Byassee said. “It’s easy to get people in the building. Put up a sign that says ‘Free Beer’ and they will come. Attendance figures don’t tell us to what degree the church is loving Jesus.”

Dr. Byassee, who authored a book, The Gifts of the Small Church, hopes that dashboards won’t tilt emphasis toward larger churches.

“Jesus had nice things to say about wherever two or three are gathered,” he said. “He attends to his closest followers rather than the crowds. And he leaves behind the hundred to go get one.”

Despite his concerns, Dr. Byassee agrees that ignoring numbers completely is naïve too. No church would lose track of its bank account balance, he noted—that’s ‘baseline stewardship.’

“More data doesn’t make more wisdom,” he said. “But it is harder to get wisdom without data.”

Advocates note, too, that laypeople are less likely than clergy to dislike the dashboard concept.

“Lay members are accustomed to accountability in their work,” said Bishop Timothy Whitaker (Florida). “They’re not threatened by it. They know they perform better when there’s a system of accountability.”

Metric madness?

Dr. Hall also claims that dashboards use the same kind of metrics that businesses use to sell products, and in doing so, “routinize ministry in ways that are antithetical to Christian teaching,” she said. “Metrics distort the way we are called to see one another in Jesus Christ.”

She also accused church leaders of using dashboards as a “pathetic and mean” way to bring much-needed money and new people.

“This is public shaming of pastors who don’t bring in new members,” she said. Luke Wetzel, a Duke Divinity student and ministry candidate in the Kansas East Conference, says trust, not accountability, is the real driver behind the dashboards.

“Our clergy don’t trust each other, and our churches don’t trust the conference,” he said. “I fear that the fruits of dashboards are competition and coercion.”

The Rev. Robert “Bob” Phillips, directing pastor of First UMC in Peoria, Ill., doesn’t see it that way, even though his church showed up poorly in one metric—the highest net loss of membership in the conference—for one week in May.

Membership in his church is down, in part, because the church is working to remove outdated names from its rolls—and his bishop and DS know that, he said. And FUMC Peoria also turned up near the top of another list, as one of the highest payers of apportionment dollars in the conference.

“The key here is the level of trust that pastors have in their bishop, and the integrity of how the bishop and the cabinet interact and affirm pastors once they’re appointed,” he said. “With trust, the dashboard is a genuinely helpful metric to measure where we’re headed and where we need to go. Without trust, a dashboard could become a game of ‘gotcha.’”

Equipping clergy

Dr. DeVine says that the Detroit Conference embraced the dashboard concept as part of another program, the Vital Church Initiative, that trains pastors and lay leaders on building church vitality.

“We also felt we can’t ask pastors to raise the bar if we’re not there to equip them to do that,” he said. “If we are asking them to start measuring themselves, we are ready and willing to support and equip them through training that goes beyond what they learned in seminary.”

Dr. DeVine compares dashboards to the pedometers that some people wear to track their daily physical activity and to motivate themselves to move more.

The dashboard “is an invitation to a wellness program,” he said. “It’s not intended to be punitive or oppressive.”

Like pedometers, he admits, dashboards won’t solve problems—only provide a tracking measure.

But they do encourage church leaders to focus on areas that need attention, says the Rev. Jeff Stiggins, executive director of the Center for Congregational Excellence in the Florida Conference.

While comparisons among churches and pastors are inevitable, Dr. Stiggins says, the dashboards’ main purpose is to allow congregations to focus on their own progress.

He said he’s seen “story after story” of congregations that turned their focus on ministry to people outside of the church, spurred by the metrics they report. Before the conference instituted its dashboard, no statistics were collected that related to that type of outreach, allowing churches that had become “self-absorbed” to go unchallenged.

“If you ask the right question long enough, it becomes the way people pay attention,” Dr. Stiggins said. “Otherwise, it’s like playing basketball without keeping score.”

Rush of Relief

2011-07-05T14:39:00.000-07:00

It was two months ago today that tornadoes left paths of destruction throughout our Annual Conference. This week I want to share with you a news story that was recently in The United Methodist Reporter describing how our new campus minister at the University of Alabama Wesley Foundation Rev. Creighton Alexander was able to mobilize student volunteers from Wesley Foundations at colleges and universities around the U.S. to come serve in Tuscaloosa in the early days following storms. Our United Methodist connectional system is still at work responding to these storms and will be for the long haul! - Will Willimon

Rush of relief: Student volunteers aid in Alabama response
By Mary Jacobs
Staff Writer
The United Methodist Reporter
If there’s a “silver lining” in the terrible storms that struck the Southeast on April 27, it’s the story of how the United Methodist connectional system quickly mobilized churches and volunteers to provide disaster relief.
One powerful example comes from the Wesley Foundation at the University of Alabama. Heeding an invitation issued by “Bama Wesley” just days after the storm, dozens of student volunteers from Wesley Foundations at colleges and universities around the U.S. have already traveled to Alabama to help with cleanup and relief.
Although it’s located in Tuscaloosa—one of the areas hardest hit by the swath of tornadoes—the Wesley Foundation’s building escaped major damage. So the Rev. Creighton Alexander, the foundation’s director, put out a call via Facebook and email inviting students at other Wesley Foundations to come, help with the relief and cleanup work in Tuscaloosa and stay at the Wesley facility. (The Foundation was without power for days, but he was able to get the word out by way of his cellphone.)
Students answered the call. Mr. Alexander says the Foundation has already hosted eight groups, and he expected a total of at least 20 groups will visit over the summer. Students are coming in from the campus ministries at the University of Oklahoma, Purdue University, Mercer University in Macon, Ga., LaGrange College, Winthrop University, Texas Tech, Ole Miss and others.
Andrew Ferdon, 21, a civil engineering major at Purdue University, joined a group if 17 young people, 14 of them students from Purdue’s Wesley Foundation, that traveled to Tuscaloosa in early May.
“When we heard about the storms, we decided we’d like to go to help, but most of the agencies we called needed trained individuals,” he said. “But Creighton said he’d love to have us.”
Mr. Ferdon said there was a week between final exams and the time when most students would start summer school or summer jobs. They gathered chain saws and other tools and headed to Alabama.
The Purdue students brought more than just willing hands and strong backs. Churches in the Lafayette, Ind., area—Asbury UMC, First UMC-West Lafayette and Trinity UMC—donated $3,000 to cover expenses and to help with relief work.
“I feel like I’ve been blessed in my life,” Mr. Ferdon said. “That blessing gives me a challenge to help others, and this was just an opportunity to help.”
Connections in place
For the past few years, Mr. Alexander has participated in Refresh, an annual gathering of United Methodist campus ministers sponsored by the Foundation for Evangelism. Connections made at those gatherings, he said, made it easy for him to extend an invitation to other Wesley Foundations to come to Tuscaloosa.
Many adult United Methodist volunteers are pouring into Tuscaloosa; many of them staying at FUMC Tuscaloosa. The Wesley Foundation was not only able to utilize student volunteers—most of whom did not have prior emergency response training—but also provided those students with a faith-inspiring experience.
“I know it’s a little weird to say this, but we’re having a blast,” Mr. Alexander said. “The students are doing a great job of taking care of people, and they’re having fun doing it.”
Volunteers are sleeping in a makeshift dorm, on cots, sleeping bags and inflatable mattresses. They eat their meals at FUMC Tuscaloosa, and worship together on Tuesday evenings.
Gabriela Law, 21, a biochemistry and molecular biology major at Mercer University in Macon, Ga., traveled to Tuscaloosa in mid-May along with eight other Mercer students.
“At first, it was overwhelming,” she said. “I had no idea that there was this kind of destruction.”
Still, she left Tuscaloosa uplifted. “The way the community is coming together is really impressive,” she said. “To see God bringing people together through a horrible situation is amazing, and it’s something you want to be a part of.”
Wesley hosts the students in its facility, and the Southwest District of the North Alabama conference puts them to work on projects around the area. Some students helped staff a supply distribution center at nearby Hargrove Memorial United Methodist Church; others have spent their days clearing away trees.
Mr. Ferdon says he’s mastered the chain saw in Tuscaloosa, noting the area seemed to have a lot of trees—and most of them were felled wherever the tornadoes ripped through.
Zac Head, a sophomore at the University of Alabama, lives in Tuscaloosa. His home escaped major damage. After the storm, he and a friend carried sandwiches, chips and bottles of water to people in the areas most affected.
He says the influx of fellow Wesley Foundation students was encouraging, and for those Alabama students, like him, who were not displaced, the opportunity to help has proved to be healing as well.
“The best word for the situation here, in the first few days, was chaos,” he said. “But as long as we’re helping others, I know that God will help me through this situation.”
Plenty left to do
There’s room for more groups of students, Mr. Alexander said, who’d like to come to Tuscaloosa later this summer. (To inquire, email him at creightonalexander@gmail.com.) He says volunteers can expect to do hard, physical work—they’re still focused on removing trees and sorting debris—and promises there will be plenty of work to do throughout the summer.
“The Southwest District is doing an incredible job of coordinating volunteers,” he said. “No one is going to be idle.”
The work is hard, but the fellowship among students has been memorable.
“We connected with kids from several different schools,” Mr. Ferdon said. “It was cool meeting kids from other parts of the country who have the same willingness to do God’s work.”
“This generation, they really want to help,” Mr. Alexander said. “Their compassion and passion to help is inspiring.”
How to help
Those who can’t come but would like to pitch in for resources to help the students in their relief work may donate at www.bamawesley.org.

Our Finest Hour

2011-06-24T09:14:00.000-07:00

We are responding to the affects of the storm over the long haul. Mike Stonbraker, Superintendent of the Northwest District offered these thoughts about our work after the storm. I wanted to share them with you. - Will Willimon

In my weekly emails to the Northwest District pastors preempting Easter, I encouraged them to prepare their church families for the most meaningful Easter season the church had ever encountered, especially during Holy Week. I challenged them to take their people through the daily recorded scripture that was offered to them focusing on the final days of Jesus’ earthly life. I pushed for them to examine the temple (their church) for the money changers and con artist that spoil the holiness of the Father’s House. Upset a few tables and whip a few if you must! From courtyard teachings to final betrayal, mock trials to crucifixion, I shared with them to ready the canvas of the mind’s eye for the sunrise burst of Easter Morning.

So, just over three weeks ago our churches were celebrating the resurrection story of Jesus. My last email in the Easter series begged the pastors to invite their congregations to journey deep into the opened tomb and examine for themselves that it was truly empty. Pray for Jesus to meet with them and call them by name. My final sentence in that email stated something to fact that preaching a sermon about a resurrection encounter with Jesus is one of the easiest things for us pastor’s to do. But once the church has met the resurrected King, that’s when the real work begins. It’s not so much the Easter Sunday morning that counts…but more like the Monday ministry that follows…that’s where the real work begins. If I could ever find someone that can writes good books, I would love to tell them, listen, Willimon’s “Thank God It’s Friday”, or even Capalo’s “It’s Friday But Sunday’s Coming!” is just the beginning, write one that’s entitled “Thank God It’s Sunday, but Monday’s Coming.” To meet Jesus in worship is the easy stuff, taking Jesus home and into the streets is where the difficulty begins.

The command to Mary from Jesus in Matthews Gospel was, “go and tell the boys I’ll catch up with them in Galilee.” I think that was the Master’s way of saying to Mary, “you have seen the Resurrected Lord, now Mary, the real work begins.”

On Easter Sunday little did any of us know what work really lay ahead of us. How many times have you met Jesus in the past 19 days? My youngest son Matthew is a football coach at Smith’s Station High School. I have heard him say to his boys on many occasions, “The way you respond to winning will show your knowledge, the way you react to loss and adversity will show your character.” This Cabinet, the leadership of the North Alabama Conference along with her churches has shown their character. We have risen to the call. Jesus has met us at every turn. But the real work still lies ahead. If you will pardon my recall, I want to semi-quote a phrase and add a few words that have been part of me for many years. On June 18, 1940, while preparing Britain for war, in his speech to the House of Commons, Winston Churchill said, “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bare ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth (the North Alabama Conference) last for another thousand years, her people will say, this was their finest hour.”

Mike Stonbraker

An Open Letter

2011-06-13T11:02:00.000-07:00

As Patsy and I have traveled about the Conference to witness the work of our churches in storm recovery many pastors have told us of their frustration that Spanish-speaking friends in the hard hit areas have been reluctant to take help from the church because they were afraid of possible reprisals from the state.

We thought this sad and hoped their fears were unfounded.

Then our state passed the meanest immigrant legislation bill in the nation.

The bill is an embarrassment to our state and does not represent the spirit of hospitality of our churches.

While I'm confident that the bill will be overturned I am proud that a number of our Methodists - those committed to evangelism and mission - are speaking up in the name of Christ to oppose this ill conceived bill that does nothing to help our state and does great harm to our sisters and brothers.

Many of our clergy plan to sign the following letter that will be sent to the governor, legislators and local newspapers. For clergy to add their signature to the letter, please email Rev. RG Lyons at rglyons@gmail.com with your name and church affiliation. We also invite all United Methodists to attend an ecumenical prayer vigil on June 25 at 6:30PM at Linn Park in downtown Birmingham. At the vigil we will pray for those affected by this new law as well as voice our opposition. In the coming months, we will also call for open dialogue concerning this law, our faith, and it's implications. For information on these opportunities, please check the conference website soon.

Will Willimon

An Open Letter to Governor Robert Bentley, Senator Scott Beason, and Representative Micky Hammon:

Forty-eight years ago, while sitting in a Birmingham jail cell, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote that, just as Christians have a moral duty to obey just laws, they also have a moral duty to disobey unjust ones. We are a group of United Methodist ministers from all across the state of Alabama who believe that HB 56 is an unjust law. Both proponents and opponents of the bill have described HB 56 as the “toughest immigration law in the country.” Among other measures to halt illegal immigration, it gives police the ability to stop anyone they have a “reasonable suspicion” may be here illegally. It requires schools to verify the immigration or citizenship status of students. It denies bail to anyone arrested for being here illegally. And, it makes it a crime for a citizen to associate with someone who is here illegally, whether that be inviting them to one’s home or church or giving them a ride in a car.

We know that many who support this law are well-meaning individuals who are seeking to find the state's best interest at heart: they are people who are worried about employment in this fragile economy and some feel that the state is strained to pay for services like health care, police and fire protection, and education for those who may be here illegally.

These are all valid concerns. We believe, however, that many elements of this law are not in the state’s best interest. Teachers and principals are already stretched thin and have suffered tremendous budget cuts. Requiring them to also verify the immigration status of students will, in all likelihood, cost rather than save money and can only distract them from their most important task: preparing our children to succeed. Prohibiting bond to people who are here illegally means that more and more people will be kept in jails that are already overcrowded and understaffed. Finally, this law will most certainly be challenged in court and could cost the state millions of dollars at a time when nearly every state board and agency must accept budget cuts in this economy.

As Christian ministers, however, we not only believe that this law is not in the state’s best interest, but we also believe it contradicts the essential tenets of the Christian faith. Scripture is filled with examples of God’s people wandering as “aliens and strangers.” In the Old Testament, God reminds the people, “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt (Exodus 22:21).” Jesus told parables about people like the Good Samaritan – someone who was not considered a true Jewish citizen – stopping to help a battered and beaten man while the leaders of the people passed him by. And the apostle Paul taught us that in Christ there is “no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, but all are one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).”

We believe that God’s call for the United Methodist church is to be a church for ALL people, to be in ministry to ALL people. HB 56 would define many of our churches and many people in our churches as lawbreakers. United Methodist across the state welcome all people, regardless of immigration or citizenship status, to our churches, activities, and programs. Many of our fastest growing churches are Spanish-speaking, and we do not check people’s immigration status at the door. In response to Jesus’ admonition in the parable of the Last Judgment to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked and welcome the stranger, many churches have ministries to care for those who are poor by providing them with food, shelter, and transportation. Again, we do not check people’s immigration status before inviting them into our church vans and cars. We United Methodist clergy will continue to be in ministry to all people and we call on all United Methodists to do the same.

In Christ’s Peace,
__________________

Don’t Be Afraid

2011-06-06T14:33:00.000-07:00

This is my sermon for the Service of Ordination at this year's Annual Conference at Asbury UMC in Madison. We had a grand, informative, inspiring Conference. This sermon was my charge to our newest clergy.

5 The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. 6 He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. 7 Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.” 8 So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9 Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. 10 Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
6 Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. 18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
-- Matthew 28:5-10, 16-20

We’re still in Easter, still in shock that crucified, dead Jesus has been raised. The women go to the tomb early on Easter while it was still dark. Where were the men disciples you ask? Don’t. Their’s is not a pretty story. Let’s just note that the first witnesses of resurrection, the first preachers of Easter, are women.

(Take that, you denominations that mistakenly teach that women shouldn’t preach!)

At the tomb, the women are met by an angel. And the angel says, “Don’t be afraid.” Don’t be afraid. I’ve got some fearful news to tell you women. Brace yourselves for some terrifying information. Here I go with the frightening news: he is not here. He is risen. He is going on before you.

Question: why would the Easter angel say to the women, “Don’t be afraid”? He gives them the most unimaginatively joyful news and follows by saying, “Don’t be afraid?”

I think it’s because right after the angel says to the women, “He is risen!” the angel says, “Go preach!” Go and publicly proclaim: God wins! Jesus is raised!

Later, when the women meet the risen Christ, he also says to them, “Don’t be afraid.”

You would think he would have said, “Rejoice! I’m raised from the dead!”

But the first thing the risen Jesus says to them is, “Don’t be afraid.” And the next thing he says is, “Go preach! Tell those cowardly male disciples (hunkered down behind lock doors) I have been raised!”

Some kind of connection is being made here, not simply between “He is raised” – “Don’t be afraid” but rather between, “Don’t be afraid” – “Go preach!”

If you have difficulty understanding the link between fear and vocation, between terror and the call “Go preach!” then ask any ordinand here tonight. He or she will explain it to you.
I meet with all our ordinands before I lay hands on their heads. In those encounters with soon-to-be deacons and elders I’ve heard:

“I’m afraid that God may have gotten me mixed up with somebody by the same name from another county.”

“I’m really scared that I don’t have the training I need to oversee a congregation.”

Or, “Sometimes I fear that seminary didn’t really train me to lead anybody anywhere.”

In Christian leadership, fear comes with the territory. Scripture says that it is a “fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God.” Presumably, it isn’t fearful to acquiesce into the arms of a dead god, a god whom we use to get what we want. But it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God who uses us to get what God wants.

Well, the male disciples do as the women proclaim. They go to Galilee and, just as he promised, the risen Christ appears. Matthew says that when they saw Christ, “they worshipped him; but some doubted.” Anytime the church gathers to worship Jesus, along with prayer and praise, there’s also doubt. But here it’s not just any old doubt.

What did they doubt? The risen Christ stood right in front of them, had been with them for weeks, say some of the gospels. Surely they didn’t doubt that he was resurrected. What did they doubt?

The answer is in the specific words Jesus speaks: “All authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

His resurrection is authorization by God Almighty that Jesus Christ has complete divine authority. But authority to do what?

That is answered by his next words: “Go, therefore,…make disciples, baptizing and teaching all that I have commanded.” Jesus’ authority is the authority to commission, to send these fearful, doubting disciples into the world to make disciples.

I think that’s why “some doubted.” They didn’t doubt that he was resurrected. They doubted Jesus’ authority, or at least his good judgment, in commissioning a rag-tag group of losers like them to, “Go…make disciples….baptizing…teaching….”

Lori, Mark, Alex, Joy, Wade and all the rest, I bet (if Methodists were permitted to bet) that you know exactly why “some doubted.”

How can it be that a crucified, resurrected Lord would summon fearful, doubting people like us to do his courageous, revolutionary work?

Tonight, in this service, that’s what the church tries to say to you:

Don’t be afraid. God knows what God is doing when God calls you for ministry.

Don’t doubt. Jesus believes that you will be faithful to his call, even more than you may believe in you.

In your ministry after this night, believe that. Believe not only that dead Jesus was raised, but that resurrected Christ immediately began calling women and men like you to help him save the world.

After thirty-nine years of ordained ministry the only claim I have for authority, the only hope I have that my pitiful ministry counts is this: I’ve been summoned by a Savior who confounds the wisdom of the world by calling fools like us to grow his Kingdom.

Upon my arrival here, when I laid out my plans for what I wanted to do, a wise, old, experienced pastor asked, “What gives you the right to tell us what to do? D you think that these changes will make a difference? We’ve been declining for a decade and I don’t think you are good enough to turn things around.”

And in the face of his justifiable incredulity at my episcopacy all I could say was, “I believe, despite my fears and doubts, I’ve been called. I believe that this was God’s idea before it was mine. I’m not the smartest or most experienced bishop you could get, but I’m the only one God sent. So there.”

Don’t be afraid! Believe in Jesus’ vocation more than you believe in your human limitation!

I recall the woefully frightened young pastor who was sent, for his first appointment, to a congregation universally acknowledged to be the meanest in the South Carolina Conference. That poor young preacher nearly had a breakdown when the bishop appointed him there.

First Sunday summoning forth his courage, he went out to the church and somehow managed to tremble and shake through his first sermon, terrified to look up from his notes at some of the mean looking Methodists.

Finally he stood at the door, bidding farewell to the stone-faced, cold handed members as they exited. The lay leader of the church paternally put his arm around him and said, “Son. We know what you have heard. We ain’t going to hurt you.”

The terrified young preacher went limp with relief.

“We ain’t going to harm you,” reassured the lay leader. “But we aim to kill that fool bishop that sent you.”

True story.

Newest sisters and brothers in our Conference, my charge to you tonight: “Don’t be afraid. There is no daunting task that Christ sets before you that he will not also give you what you need faithfully to fulfill his summons. Don’t doubt. Jesus has this uncanny gift for calling the right people to do his work.”

Tonight your church rejoices that once again, the risen Christ sends us just the people we need to give our church a future, to enable us Methodists to be faithful. Don’t be afraid.

- William H. WIllimon

Healthy Congregations

2011-06-01T07:38:00.000-07:00

It’s a typical Sunday morning for me and Patsy. We drive past fallow fall fields, trustworthy GPS coaxing us down the rural roadway. Just over an hour outside of Birmingham we descend a low hill, the trees part, and we see a little white frame church, a building that is type cast as everyone’s idea of a church. An hour before the service only a few pickup trucks have gathered in the church’s gravel lot. Spotting an aging Ford Taurus parked in the shade, I comment knowledgeably, “At least the pastor is here.”

“Though this county has lost a third of its population, it now has the third highest influx of Spanish speaking people. That building was built after the fire – in the Forties – they still call it ‘the new church,’” I say, showing off my reading. It is my custom to ask for a summary of the demographic context and the congregational history when I make a Sunday visit. While my sermon preparation is helped by knowledge of the congregation’s past, the truth is that most of our congregations have more history behind them than future before them.

The majority of our congregations, like the one where I’m the visiting preacher today, are located where they were planted a century ago. In every case, the community that gave them birth has relocated. Though the people around the congregation have changed, the congregation has remained fixed on the same land where it was established and, in many cases, fixed in the same rhythms of congregational life that worked for them decades ago, but no longer work today.

That’s one of the things people love about a church – it doesn’t move. It blooms where planted and, long after it has ceased to be fruitful, stays planted. We build our churches to look at least two hundred years older than they actually are. Inside, we bolt down the pews and make the furniture heavy and substantial. That the world around the church is chaotic and instable is a further justification for the church to be fixed and final.

One of my younger churches worships in the “contemporary worship” idiom. The pastor complained to me of boredom: “We are singing the same songs, using the same pattern of worship that we’ve been stuck with for the past twenty years. Worst of all, we call it ‘contemporary’!”

“Why not change?” I asked naively.

“This is a highly mobile suburban neighborhood,” he explained. “Only a couple of my members have been here longer than I. The last thing my people want is for church to force even more change. Contemporary has become our hallowed, immutable tradition.”

In a time when many feel overwhelmed by change – the government’s economic attack on the middle class, high unemployment among our young adults, shifting political alliances, soaring debt to pay for the biggest military in the world, the demise of once sound institutions, changing social mores, the information explosion – the church is tapped to play the role of island of stability amid a sea of change.

What is incomprehensible is that we call this stability-protecting, past-perpetuating institution “the Body of Christ.” All the gospels present Jesus as a ceaseless peripatetic. Never once did he say, “Settle down with me.” No, with vagabond Jesus it was always, “Follow me!”

Consider the first days of Christ’s resurrected life. Not content just to be raised from the dead, the risen Christ is in motion, returning to the rag-tag group of Galilean losers who had failed him. (Matthew 28:16-20)

And what does Jesus say? “You have had a rough time. Settle down in Galilee among these good country folk with whom you are most comfortable. Buy real estate, build a church, get a good mortgage, and enjoy being a spiritual club”? No. The risen Christ commands, “Get out of here! Make me disciples, baptizing and teaching everything I’ve commanded! And don’t limit yourselves to Judea. Go to everybody. I’ll stick with you until the end of time -- just to be sure you obey me.”

How like the rover Jesus to disallow his people rest. Refusing to permit them to hunker down with their own kind, he sent those who had so disappointed him forth on the most perilous of missions. They were, in Jesus’ name, to take back the world that belonged to God. There is no way to be with Jesus, to love Jesus, without obeying Jesus, venturing with Jesus. “Go! Make disciples!”

The theme of this year’s Annual Conference is “Healthy Congregations.” We are going to reflect on our Conference priority of building healthy churches. One way to tell if a person is in good health is if that person is out and about, if that person is able to be a person in motion.

One way to tell if a congregation is healthy is that it is on the move, trying to keep up with the machinations of the risen Christ. Thanks be to God the majority of our churches, thought they may have been planted where they are a century ago, show a wonderful willingness to be in motion with the risen Christ.

William Willimon

The Joy of Ministry

2011-05-23T13:45:00.000-07:00

A highlight of worship at Annual Conference will be our services of Ordination and Commissioning. In these services our church recognizes God’s gift to us of a new generation of United Methodist pastoral leaders.

Ministry, in any of its forms, is always God’s idea before it is ours. While we pastors may come to enjoy our clerical vocation, we do it first of all not because it causes us bliss but rather because it is the job to which God has called us. God loves to summon people to painful, impossible tasks. Service to Christ and his church begins in Christ’s call. That’s why reflection upon ministry in any of its forms begins with baptism – the laying on of hands is a baptismal gesture that only later, and regrettably, became almost exclusively associated with ordination. All Christians are “ordained” through baptism to share in Christ’s ministry in the world. A few of the baptized are designated by the church to equip and to mobilize their fellow Christians to share Christ’s ministry – these are called clergy.

All Christian leadership begins in God’s determination to have a people in motion helping God retake God’s world. For those of us in ordained leadership in our church, sometimes the great challenge is to believe in us half as much as God in Christ believes in us; though laity can be forgiven for watching us pastors in action and thinking lots of things before thinking, “gift of God.”

My former boss at Duke, Nan Keohane, defines leadership as “providing solutions to common problems or offering ideas about how to accomplish collective purposes, and mobilizing the energies of others to follow those courses of action.”[1] This is as good a global definition of leadership as I know -- except for one missing element -- God. A faithful pastor allows God the Father to define our common problems, asking Jesus Christ for the grace to find solutions that are compatible with the Christian view of reality, and then assists the Holy Spirit in mobilizing the energies of fellow disciples to do the work. All Christian leadership is under obligation to keep our leadership theological rather than a-theistic (attempting to lead as if God were not).

When Rowan Williams was made Archbishop of Canterbury the press asked if he had doubts about accepting the new post. Williams replied, “You’d be a maniac not to have doubts…..it’s a job that inevitably carries huge expectations and projections,… you live through other people’s fantasies in a way, and to try and keep some degree of honesty, clarity and simplicity in the middle of that is going to be hard work – so that frightened me a lot.”[2] Fear and trembling come with the summons to ministry of leadership of the church, fear of God’s demands, apprehension of the church’s fantasies and expectations, dread of your own limits.

Considering our present obsession with leadership, it’s odd that the New Testament has so little to say about the subject. For instance in one of the few places where scripture bothers with bishops, the First Letter to Timothy says:

Now a bishop must be worthy of reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, sensible, dignified, hospitable, an apt teacher, no drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and no lover of money. (1 Timothy 2:2-3)

Well, at least I am the husband of one wife.

While I take comfort that First Timothy has modest ethical expectations for bishops, these days, it isn’t easy being bishop. The Bishop of Rome continues to twist in the wind due to almost daily revelations of sex abuse by priests under his care. The Archbishop of the Church of England isn’t doing so hot either – he’s just been forced to make another public apology. Both I and the Pope could learn from Williams’ skilled self-flagellation before the media. My heart goes out to the Archbishop. Though I’m far from the depth of his intellect, like Rowan I came to the episcopacy from academia and, like him, have difficulty being comprehended. I am also an anti-establishmentarian now forced to prop up and to defend the establishment. And like the good Archbishop I can’t find a way fully to please either conservatives or liberals.

But being a specifically Christian leader has never meant first of all to be easily understood, popular and well liked, or pleasing to peoples’ expectations. It means first of all to serve God, to work to move forward God’s purposes, and earnestly to try to do what God wants before serving what we want.

It’s a vocation full of peril, failure, and frustration to be sure. But I’m happy to report, after four decades of my own attempt at ministry, and from what I’ve observed (particularly in the past four weeks in Alabama) that it is a profession full of great joy. It is a joyful thing to feel that ones life is being used by God for godly endeavor.

I spent some time a few weeks ago, attempting to help a young woman discern if God might be calling her into the United Methodist ordained leadership. That morning I had spent some time at one of our disaster relief centers, working with Methodists attempting to help people after the storm. I had seen some of our pastors leading some remarkable work in some very difficult situations.

I said to the young person exploring vocation, “I don’t know at this point whether or not God is calling you into ordained leadership. But you need to pray that God will call you into the pastoral ministry. It’s a great way to go!”

William H. Willimon

Reading Job in a Whirlwind

2011-05-16T14:53:00.000-07:00

In the Hebrew scriptures “whirlwind” designates a variety of destructive, violent winds. Tornadoes are rare in the Holy Land. Perhaps it was a tornado that swept up Elijah (2 Kings 2:11). To my mind the most notorious whirlwind in scripture is the violent “great wind” that swept across the desert and destroyed Job’s house, killing all of Job’s children. (Job 1:19) This destructive wind is the catalyst for Job’s moving poetic lament and his protest against the injustice of the pain and tragedy that have taken all of his goods and his beloved family as well.

In the past weeks we in Alabama have had cause to renew our friendship with Job. We have witnessed, and many personally suffered, the havoc and calamity of a series of great and mighty whirlwinds. Standing with Pastor Ryan Rosser in the ruins of our Long Memorial Church in Cordova, I saw how an ill wind destroys. We were to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Long Memorial next year. Now this historic, beautiful church with its exquisite windows and noble belfry is in ruin.

The next day, while thanking a team of United Methodists from Adam Hamilton’s Church of the Resurrection in Kansas for their work in one of the impoverished, devastated areas of Tuscaloosa, a veteran chain saw operator showed me the peril of cutting into a huge tree that the tornado had crashed into the top of a house.

“The tornado, in just a few seconds, takes these big trees and twists them, twisting the wood like a coiled spring,” he explained. “Put a chain saw to it, release the tension, and the tree can literally explode, sending the chain saw back in your face.”

The awesome, awful power of the biblical whirlwind, seen in contemporary Pleasant Grove with hundreds of ruined homes is terrible to behold. In the past weeks, in the fevered activity at dozens of our church disaster relief centers, I have seen innocent lives twisted by a great, evil wind.

And yet, not until my most recent reading of Job did I notice: the terrible whirlwind that destroys Job’s life and blows him into misery in the end becomes the very voice of God. After thirty-six chapters of Job’s lament and his friends’ false consolations, God at last speaks. And how does God speak?

“Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind….” (Job 38:1) God speaks to Job from the whirlwind. The horrible, destructive, death-dealing wind becomes a means of divine-human communication. Not that Job likes hearing what God says to him “out of the whirlwind,” and not that God’s words to Job are completely comprehensible or undo the tragedy Job has suffered. Still, God speaks. Job has pled for God to come and speak. At last God does – “out of the whirlwind.”

In these past three weeks I have witnessed this phenomenon. Pastor John Gates, as we surveyed the remarkable response of Pleasant Grove UMC, said, “I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, ‘I feel so privileged to be able to serve during this time.’” John says that on Sunday, in their devastated community, in their badly damaged church, they had the largest crowd they had seen in years with regular Pleasant Grove communicants joining their voices in praise and prayer with Methodists from all over the country who had come to help us in our need. John preached a three way sermon with two visiting preachers, one a Methodist from Pennsylvania and another a Church of God pastor from Texas whose teams had spent the week working out of Pleasant Grove.

Too many pastors and laypeople to mention have told me, “This has been the greatest experience of ministry. Our church is closer to God and more engaged in the true mission of Christ than ever because of the storm.”

How amazing that a redemptive God can transform the worst of ill winds into a revealing, divine breath. What grace that a God can take a death-dealing wind and, in church, use it to speak to us.

Will Willimon

Invite someone in your community to join us in relief work this week at one of our dozens of disaster relief centers.

Also, we have started a Disaster Response account for all our efforts in responding to the storms here in North Alabama. Direct gifts to this fund can be sent to our Conference Treasurer’s Office at 898 Arkadelphia Road, Birmingham, AL 35204. Make your checks payable to “North Alabama Conference” and mark “North Alabama Disaster Response” in the memo line.

Prayer of Hope

2011-05-11T14:59:00.000-07:00

I am offering the following prayer of hope after the storms of April 27, 2011.

Lord Jesus Christ,
You are our Savior who saves us amid the storm.
You are our Comforter who comes to us in our pain.
You are in life, in death, in life beyond death our only hope.
We pray this day for all those who suffer in body or soul, particularly our sisters and brothers among us in Alabama who have suffered pain and loss because of the storms that ravaged our state. We ask your comforting presence among those who struggle in the destruction and the loss. We pray for your guidance for those who feel overwhelmed and over burdened by the aftermath of the storms.
We give you thanks for all those who have given money and time to help the victims rebuild their homes and their lives. Thank you for motivating so many to reach out to us in our time of need.
Lord, you have never left us alone in our need. Time and again you come to us amid the storm. Thus we have hope, hope not in ourselves or our own devices but rather hope based upon your faithfulness and upon our experience of your steadfast love.
Amen.

This prayer is now among the notes of thoughts and prayers from many from United Methodists around the world who posted comments throughout the Conference website that they are praying for North Alabama following the spring storms. These comments from United Methodists in North Alabama, youth and children in Slidell, LA; Rev. Adam Hamilton of Church of the Resurrection in Kansas; pastors in Texas, South Carolina and Oklahoma and others – have been collected on the North Alabama Conference Disaster Response Prayers page.

To read all the prayers visit the Disaster Response Prayers page.

To add your own prayer, while viewing the prayer page, click the submit prayer link in the left menu.

The Limits of Explanation

2011-05-09T11:38:00.001-07:00

Last year Professor Bart Ehrmann of the University of North Carolina cranked out yet another book, God’s Problem. Dr. Ehrmann breathlessly announces that he has discovered that God has a big problem – suffering. Ehrmann dismisses various futile attempts on the part of God to explain why there is suffering, pain, and disaster in the world – the Book of Job, Ecclesiastes, and Jesus. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Ehrmann reaches the conclusion that God comes up short in regard to a plausible explanation for suffering. Dr. Ehrmann says that, even though he personally does not believe in God, he can’t figure out why so many otherwise intelligent people persist in the notion that God is good – look at all the suffering that God can’t explain.

Now, I’m all for explanations, have attempted some of them myself. I have spent much of my life trying to figure out answers to some of life’s toughest questions, write books on what I’ve discovered, and convey explanations to my students and my parishioners.

In the past two weeks I’ve learned again that terrible, destructive, undeserved tragedies are, on the whole, inexplicable.

Pine Grove UMC (pastor, Don Burgess) was built over a hundred years ago, with stone that was pulled up the hill by mule teams. Now, those huge stones have been cast all over the hillside and Pine Grove Church has been leveled to its foundations. That same day I stood among the volunteers working at Pleasant Grove Church (pastor, John Gates) and saw nearly equal destruction of one of our beloved churches.

No one around me at those locations of terrible destruction asked, “Why me? Why God?” Most of them were too busy, drenched in sweat, and dust from the rubble to pause to engage in philosophical speculation. Their most persistent question was, “How can we do more to support and work for the victims?”

And that seems very Christian to me. Jesus was not a great philosopher who came with a set of noble precepts and brilliant ideals. Jesus never said, “Think about me.” Rather it was always, “Follow me!”

Jesus was among us as a victim of horrible injustice. He offered us few explications of suffering and injustice; he offered himself as fellow sufferer. As Hebrews says, Jesus not only came to us but suffered with us. He offered us not reasoned explanations but rather empathetic, life-giving presence with us. He gave us not a great way to think about tragedy but a way of acting in and through tragedy.

Professor Ehrmann, believe it or not, that’s as close as Christians come to a true explanation for suffering. God in Jesus Christ does have a real problem – this God cannot desert us, cannot not keep coming back to us or refuse to stand with us.

We Wesleyan Christians have never been known for our great speculative theologians. We have been known for our warm hearts and active hands. John Wesley considered that any theology that can’t be put into practice wasn’t worth thinking. Thank goodness our churches didn’t wait to ponder the eternal implications of the horrible storms that swept through our state and destroyed so many of our churches, homes, and families. We went right to work. We were first on the scene and we reassured our devastated communities like Fultondale, Forrest Lake, Tuscaloosa, Phil Campbell, and Cullman (and others listed on our website) that we will remain with them throughout the long, arduous process of rebuilding.

And that, my fellow Wesleyans, is better even than learned explanations.

Will Willimon

The Body of Christ in Motion

2011-05-03T13:33:00.000-07:00

I wish that all of you could have been with me for the last couple of days. Yes, the devastation in places like Tuscaloosa, Fultondale, Sand Mountain, Cullman, and Phil Campbell is terrible to behold.

And yet….the response of our people in the United Methodist Church is an even greater wonder. I began the weekend bragging that United Methodists were feeding five thousand people a day, but quickly revised the number to ten thousand. In Tuscaloosa our churches like Forrest Lake and Southside were badly damaged – and had staging areas and dining tents set up in their front yards. At Phil Campbell you could hardly see our horribly damaged church for the dozens of workers, tents, and disaster response trailers the Northwest District had assembled out front. We have shown that we can respond quickly and effectively to meet the immediate needs of the victims and the volunteers. Our churches are housing many hundreds of utilities workers and those who have lost their homes.

Tom Hazelwood of UMCOR spent the weekend with us, helping us to organize for the longer term. The North Alabama Conference is leading this recovery for the long run. The Reverend Matt Lacey will continue to train and to equip our responders. Linda Holland, our new Connectional Ministries Director, is mobilizing our Connectional Ministries to give all their focus over the next couple of months to the recovery. The Reverend Tom Duley will coordinate and place all volunteers coming into North Alabama from elsewhere.

Today I’m also appointing the Reverend Bob Alford as the Director of our Disaster Recovery effort. Throughout the Conference I’ve heard that we need an experienced, senior person to serve as the overall coordinator and director of our efforts, one person who knows exactly what we’re up to and where the help is needed. If you need information on our staging areas, places of need, and how your church can plug into our far flung efforts, beginning May 4 we will have a dedicated number to call. The number will be posted on the conference website (www.northalabamaumc.org). Director of Communication Danette Clifton will also continue to keep information constantly updated on our website. If you have questions and need answers, go first to our website, then call the 800 number.

Many of you know that I have long been a critic of some of Methodism’s overly articulated organizational structure. We’ve got so many rules, so many layers of bureaucracy. This past week, I’ve rediscovered the beauty of our name – Methodists. We have a methodical approach to discipleship. We believe if there’s good worth doing in Jesus’ name, it’s worth rightly organizing ourselves to do it well. I give thanks that the North Alabama UMC didn’t wait until a disaster struck to get ready for a disaster and that, with our connection in good working order, we were ready to respond when the time came for us to step up and testify to our faith through our deeds of mercy and love.

Will Willimon

Even Amid the Devestation; Christ is Risen!

2011-04-29T07:19:00.000-07:00

The Second Week of Eastertide will long be remembered by us as the time of terribly deadly storms that ravaged Alabama. We have lost over a dozen of our churches, a number of parsonages, the homes of many of our people, and worst of all, the lives of many sisters and brothers. We are heartbroken.

In times like these God gives us the opportunity to rediscover the redemptive work of God in Jesus Christ. By God's grace, we believe we shall look back on the next few weeks as a time when -- even admid our tragedy -- we experienced the presence and power of the Risen Christ. Our loss is huge, but we may find that the gifts of God are greater even than our loss. Still, Light shines.

Over the past harrowing forty-eight hours, I've been proud of our churches and our pastors as they move into prayer and into action -- Matt Lacey's teams have shown the wisdom of hours of training and preparation for such a time as this. The North Alabama Conference has had all too much exposure to natural disaster. We have developed one of the most extensive and well prepared network of staging areas, disaster response teams, equipment facilities and trained people who are able to respond in force. Through UMCOR and our connectional giving, we have not waited until disaster struck. We are connected, organized, and in action in Christ's name. Over the last forty-eight hours, the Cabinet and I have been engaged with our churches and pastors who were hit. Methodists from all over the country have been sending messages of concern and will receive funds to help us. I've heard from pastors in North Carolina, Maryland., Indiana, and Washington who will be receiving offerings for us on Sunday. Even in the storm, our connection is testifying to our faith in God's ability to redeem even this. We are not alone!

We shall build back our devestated churches. We shall stick with our ravaged communities. We shall offer funds and hands-on-work for those in need. We gave over half a milliion dollars to help with Katrina relief and days and days of work. We shall do even more now that disaster has come our way.

And we shall claim all Wesleyan good work as visible proof.that, even in the storm, even amid the loss, "Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed!"

I'll be in our hard hit Southwest District this weekend, and will preach at our Forrest Lake Church (even without electricity and badly damaged, Forrest Lake has taken in those who need shelter). We shall pray, shall receive a special offering for the victims, and we shall testify to our faith in a God who keeps coming back to bless us, to raise us up, and to be with us.

Will Willimon

Easter: God Comes To Us

2011-04-25T10:21:00.000-07:00

The Resurrection is not only an event in the past; it has present implications. Easter is a sign of what God is up to in the world. The same resurrected Jesus who came back to his defeated disciples continues to come to us. This meditation is selected from my book, “Why Jesus?”(Abingdon, 2010). Happy Easter.

On Easter evening, when the disciples gathered behind the locked doors and the risen Christ came and stood among them, two of the twelve were absent. Thomas was somewhere else. Judas wasn’t there either and we know why: he was mourning his own betrayal of Jesus into the hands of the authorities. Judas believed in the power of the authorities, or the power of money, or the power of revolution or something else he deemed more loveable than Jesus. (In my experience, this is the way it is with some disbelief. It’s not so much that we don’t believe; it’s that we deeply believe that something or someone else is much more of a “god” than Jesus.)

Thomas also disbelieved. But his disbelief had a more willful tint than Judas’ disbelief. Thomas told the other disciples, when he heard that Christ had appeared to them, “If I can’t touch the holes in his hands and jab my fist through the wound in his side, I will not believe that the apparition that you saw was really Jesus.”

The next thing you know the risen Christ reappears, telling Thomas, “Go ahead. Jab your hand in my side. Stop your unbelief and believe.”

How do we know that the one who is raised from the dead is Jesus? Jesus, God crucified, has nail prints in his hands, a gaping wound in his side.

John doesn’t say that Thomas took Jesus up on his offer. I like to think that he didn’t. Just having Jesus compassionately reach out to his disbelief, just hearing Jesus say, “You need proof? I’ll give you proof,” was all Thomas needed to exclaim, “My Lord! My God!”

The Resurrection is a sign that Jesus is determined to give back the whole world to God, including you. He will stoop at nothing, even a cross, even allowing you to make a crude poke in his side, to get to you. So, if you’re having trouble believing in Jesus as the Son of God, don’t worry. It will come. He isn’t done with you or with the world yet. The King is determined to have sway over your life. The divine Lover will stoop to anything to get what he wants. Keep looking over your shoulder. He wants you.

William H. Willimon

P.S. Our Conference Lay Ministry Team has coordinated daily devotionals written by lay people from across the Conference to help us prepare for Annual Conference 2011. The devotions are on our Conference website as part of the Lay Ministry Blog. They will run from today, April 25, thru June 8. Go to www.northalabamaumc.org/ac11devo to see the devotionals each day.

God's Peculiar Love

2011-04-18T14:56:00.000-07:00

The night before his death on a cross, Jesus cries out in Gethsemane, in prayer, “I don’t want to die,” he, who was one with the Father, shows the peculiar nature of God’s love: God’s love is not sentimental or sweet; it is costly love that is free to love completely, even unto death. Jesus in Gethsemane also embodies God’s freedom: God is free to walk away from the horrors of humanity or to love even down to the dregs of suffering and death. In love, God chooses to love all the way to the end.

Still, from what we know of Jesus, it’s hard to imagine him doing anything less than drinking the cup of suffering down to the bottom and being obedient to the Father for, in so doing Jesus is being true to his deepest self. The God whom Jesus reveals in Gethsemane is not being less-than-godly in this anguish in the Garden but is rather disclosing true divinity – suffering, sacrificial love, all the way to the end. And the God who loves humanity enough to die with and for humanity reveals what true humanity really is – obedient, trusting love. Here is a God who is truly known only in Gethsemane as the cross looms before him. So when, after the Garden, the next day as Jesus breathes his last and the soldier says, “Truly, this man was the Son of God!”[i] we hear a statement that can only be made at the foot of the cross after a night like that – Jesus is fully human and fully God, God truly human, humanity truly caught up into the divine heart, Mount Calvary become Mount Zion, the veil in the temple ripped in two.

A wonder as great as his resurrection was his death on the cross. The miracles he performed were wonderful but they were temporary fixes, holding death at bay for just awhile. Jesus did more than love the world through an occasional good deed here and there – a random act of kindness to somebody’s mother-in-law, the restoration of sight to one blind man. On the cross he accomplished something cosmic, decisive, something that went right to the heart of the matter.

By the way. Where were Jesus’ disciples during all this sweat, tears, and anguish in the garden? Once again, true to form, they are sleeping like babes, thereby aggravating Jesus to no end. It isn’t like he asked them to die for him; all he asked was that they watch and stay half awake one hour for him while he prayed.[ii]

Repeatedly Jesus predicted his death but his disciples found it impossible to believe.[iii] Perhaps having seen so much good and so much God in Jesus, it was inconceivable to them that the world would eventually turn on the God who had so graciously, in Jesus, turned to us. Perhaps it was that they just couldn’t conceive of anyone named “God” acting in such a way as to get crucified.

So when soldiers come to arrest Jesus, his lead disciple, Peter, swings into action, takes matters in hand, draws a sword (Jesus had earlier expressly commanded his people not to take extra baggage while walking with him[iv]) and nicks a piece of an ear of the High Priest’s servants. Jesus rebukes Peter telling him to put away the sword, not because Peter is such a lousy swordsman but because this isn’t at all the way God’s reign comes.

“Do you think,” Jesus asks, “that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me twelve legions of angels?”[v]

But that would be the way of Caesar, not Jesus. Rome promised their allies and subject peoples peace, security, good highways and the best legal system in the world. But at a price: high taxes, an oppressive bureaucracy, a far flung military, a few worship services to honor the Emperor, and much crucifixion of Jews.

Jesus went to the cross between vacillating but dangerous Pilate and the colluding religious authorities. Rome had an economic and military stranglehold upon the whole known world; Jesus commanded his followers never to take up the sword. Jesus’ sovereignty was different from Rome,[vi] as is dramatized by the Romans mockery of Jesus just before crucifying him, putting a royal robe upon him and shouting, “Hail king!”[vii] Rome solidified power with the whip, nails, and a cross; Jesus accomplished what he wanted to do through nonviolent, suffering love.

To the mob crying, “Crucify him!” Pilate said, “Behold the man,” not knowing his double entendre. Pilate is no real man in his dithering appeasement of the crowd. This bedraggled, whipped rabbi before whom Pilate smirks is the real man, the model for true humanity. Yet Pilate is not alone in infamy. Pilate tells the chief priests that he is inclined to release Jesus, for this little rabbi is no real threat to the Empire.

And the reply of the religious authorities? “If you let Jesus go, you are not really a true friend of Caesar,”[viii] they say, implying that they are Caesar’s friends. They seal their apostasy with the astounding claim, “We have no king but Caesar.” They thus forsake the teaching of the whole Old Testament. How many times did the God of Israel need to say, “I am the one, the only Lord. All the world is mine. I am King”? The cross is a sad reminder to religious leaders of any age about the cost of subservience to the government and the predominate order, the substitution of Jesus’ way for Caesar’s.

In Gethsemane and on Calvary’s hill, Jesus redefined the sovereignty of God. The one we expected to be the royal Victor became the tortured Victim. The one who looked like the failed Victim became the divine victory. As Paul said, Christ “humbled himself…. Therefore God has highly exalted him….that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”[ix] The King who reigns from a cross redefines power for the Caesars of all time, be they democratically elected or not. Early Christian preachers, like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John told the story of Jesus in such a way that subverts the stories of Augustus, Louis XIV, Queen Victoria, and all the imitators of Caesar closer to home. Divine sovereignty redefined on a cross.

William H. Willimon

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[i] Son of God! Mark 15:39.
[ii] while he prayed. Mark 14:32 ff.
[iii] impossible to believe. Matthew 20:18.
[iv] walking with him Luke 10:1 ff.
[v] legions of angels?” Matthew 26:53-54.
[vi] different from Rome. John 18:13-40.
[vii] “Hail king!” John 19.
[viii] friend of Caesar,” John 19:12.
[ix] Christ is Lord.” Philippians 2.

P.S. Our North Alabama Annual Conference will meet June 2-4, 2011, at Asbury UMC in Madison. We are asking all our churches and individuals to be in prayer for this time of Christian Conferencing. We have a prayer sign up on our Conference website – www.northalabamaumc.org/ac11prayer.

Also, beginning the last week of this month, our Lay Ministry Team will provide daily devotionals leading up to Annual Conference. These will be posted on our Conference website beginning April 25.

God On A Cross

2011-04-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

Over the next few weeks, I’m reflecting upon Jesus as God’s salvation. These meditations are selected from my book, “Why Jesus?” (Abingdon, 2010). Lent is the season of the cross. The cross rearranges our definitions of God – God defined not as almighty power but rather as suffering love.

On the night before his crucifixion, Jesus gathered with his disciples in the Upper Room, sharing a meal with them. Jesus called the Passover bread his “body,” and urged his disciples to feed on him for the remission of their sins. He passed around the cup of wine, telling them that the wine was now the sacrificial blood poured out like the blood was dashed upon the altar in the temple.[i] Whereas the temple was where Israel celebrated the Old Covenant, the “Old Testament” between God and Israel;

now this cup, this bread was sign of the New Covenant, the “New Testament” God was ratifying with the whole world.
now, in Jesus, people didn’t need to perform an ancient ritual act, blood sacrifice or engagement in some certified spiritual practice as doled out by the priestly experts at the temple.
now the necessary ladder from heaven to earth and back again, the movable Tent of Meeting, the great high altar on Mount Zion was among us as Jesus.
now the world need not come to the temple. God’s “temple” had, in vagabond lover Jesus Christ, come out to the whole world.
now the appointed means to enable humanity to get to God and God to get to humanity was provided by God – God’s own Son, Jesus. The work that Jesus did on the cross was redemptive, bringing-us-close-to-God work, which he did for all time, for all people.

All that being said, it’s still a shock to see God on a cross. It’s not at all what we expected. Can the problems between us and God be so deep that they can only be set right by God submitting to such human violence? Once again we see that we cannot affirm “God is love” without risk of grave misunderstanding, anymore than we can say, “Jesus is both God and Human” without nuance of what we mean by human and divine. The cross signifies that deep paradox is built into any accurate picture of Jesus because we don’t expect God to go to such lengths to get to us.

The gospels preach this. For instance, the first thirteen chapters of Mark’s gospel show Jesus the powerful Magician, the all-knowing seer, the divine one who casts out demons and commands the wind and wave, “Be still!” Jesus comes across as a human being but with remarkable divine powers. When Jesus heals a paralytic, the religious leaders ask, “Who is this speaking blasphemy? Who is powerful enough to forgive sin except God alone?”[ii]

In chapter 13 the mood shifts and Jesus becomes the human, anguished one who is tormented by thoughts of his imminent arrest. In Mark 14, dining in darkness at the home of Simon the leper (apparently no healthy person would receive Jesus at this late hour), when an unnamed woman shows up and adoringly pours expensive sweet smelling oil on Jesus, his disciples (feigning concern for the less fortunate) protest, “she should have sold this oil and given the money to the poor.” Jesus tells them to show compassion for the poor anytime they want but tonight, “she has anointed my body for burial.”[iii]

The next night Jesus shares a last meal with his disciples.[iv] During the meal, Jesus tells them that when the going gets rough all of them will scatter. Peter self-righteously protests, “Though these eleven cowards desert you, you can count on me.”[v] Before dawn, when challenged by a little serving girl, Peter curses and three times denies even knowing Jesus.[vi] The night ends with Peter (nicknamed “The Rock,” by Jesus) weeping in the darkness like a baby – the first in a long line of Jesus’ best friends who were grave disappointments to their Master.

Jesus then enters the Garden of Gethsemane, sees the prospect of his looming execution, sweats like great drops of blood, and prays to be delivered.[vii] “Oh God, I don’t want to die!” Is this any way for a God to act? It’s as if, in these later chapters of Mark, Jesus the God-Human One is Jesus the All-too Human One wrestling with God. Remember that our story began in a garden, the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve were tested and flunked the exam, disobeying and rebelling against who God created us to be.[viii] Now, in another garden, Jesus is confronted with a fork in the road. Jesus can be obedient to God’s way, at grave risk deliver God’s love letter to humanity or he can act like our primal progenitors and safely go his own way. He can stand up to his adversaries and suffer what they have in store for him, or he can cut and run.

Jesus’ anguish in the garden is a great mystery in which the gospels enable us to peer into the depths of divine love. Of Jesus it can be said, “Truly he is the Son of God,” and yet he is no robot unflinchingly plodding toward his death on a cross. He is truly flesh and blood. He does not play-act in Gethsemane; he wrestles with his destiny, crying in anguished dereliction. He is ready to play his part in the divine drama of redemption and he asks to be delivered from it. He is obedient to his Father’s loving but risky rescue operation for the world and anguished that such painful lengths must be traveled in order to reach the human race. Nobody takes Jesus’ life – in free obedience he gives it. In short, he is in his anguish, as the church believed him to be, truly God and truly human. And in his obedience, in his complete unity with the Father’s loving determination to get back the fallen, murderous human race, he is truly God.

William H. Willimon

[i] altar in the temple. Leviticus 17:11.
[ii] God alone.” Mark 5:21.
[iii] for burial. Mark 14:3-9.
[iv] with his disciples. Mark 14:17-31.
[v] you can count on me. Mark 14:26-31.
[vi] even knowing Jesus. Mark 14:66-72.
[vii] to be delivered from it. Mark 14:32-42.
[viii] us to be. Genesis 1:26-2:25.

God Healing the Division Between Us and God

2011-04-04T11:38:00.000-07:00

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be reflecting upon Jesus as the means of our atonement with God. These meditations are selections from my book, “Why Jesus?” (Abingdon, 2010).

When Jesus finally led his disciples into Jerusalem (on the day the church now calls “Palm Sunday”), many of his followers expected him at last to stand up and act like a Messiah, become King, storm the Roman garrison and set up a grand new “House of David” government. To their surprise, he bypassed City Hall and attacked the temple. Why did Jesus not head for the palace, confront Pilate and do something really useful rather than make such a fuss over a place of worship?

Jesus grabbed a whip and kicking over their tables, spilling their precious coins across the floor, drove the money changers from the temple. When Jesus cleaned out the temple,[i] charging the money changers there with turning the Lord’s house into “a den of thieves,” this seems a severe, unwarranted reaction by Jesus. After all, the money changers were there as a public service, following scripture, helping people to buy the requisite animals for the temple’s sacrificial rituals. How did Jesus expect people to worship at the temple? It’s like expecting a modern preacher to give a sermon without a Powerpoint projector. How are we to be with God without an appropriate ritual vehicle to get to God? Why Jesus?

The story of Israel could be read as a record of our repeated attempts to get to God. The story begins in darkness as progenitor Jacob dreams of a ladder let down from heaven to earth with heavenly messengers taking God’s mail back and forth.[ii] In the Exodus much of the biblical account of the escape from Egyptian slavery is consumed with minute details about a portable tent (“the Tent of Meeting”) that Israel utilized in the desert in order to meet and to be met by God.[iii] Those stories find their culmination in the grand temple in Jerusalem, the center of the world, Mount Zion where God condescends to God’s people and heaven and earth traffic with one another. The temple took almost fifty years to build. Its complex of buildings occupied over thirty acres and was a wonder of the ancient world. Jews everywhere, when they prayed, turned toward the temple, place of divine-human meeting. When pilgrims trudged up toward Jerusalem for festivals, they weren’t just going up to the capital city; they were going to heaven.

Isaiah foretold a day when, not just Jews, but all the nations would stream into the temple singing, “Let’s go up to Jerusalem, to the temple where we can learn the ways of God and walk with God.”[iv] Everybody would gather to worship the true God at the temple, a “house of prayer for all people.” [v]

Jesus seems strangely, severely critical of the temple. When his disciples expressed awe at the temple’s grandeur, Jesus quipped that he could tear the whole thing down and rebuild it in three days (exactly the number of days Jesus’ body was in the tomb.)[vi] In driving the money changers from the temple, in disrupting the temple system, in healing people outside of the temple’s rituals was Jesus thumbing his nose at the temple hierarchy (notorious collaborators with the Romans)?

John’s gospel says that Jesus was setting himself up as the new “temple,” the new means of mediation between God and humanity. Jesus argued with a Samaritan woman at the well.[vii] When she said, “You Jews say we’ve got to go to Jerusalem to worship rightly and we Samaritans say it’s at Mount Gerizim,” Jesus responded that one day soon, “true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.” The woman confessed confusion about what all that “spirit and truth” meant and the right location for worship, saying, “Oh well, when Messiah gets here, he’ll explain it all to us.”

Jesus said, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” Somehow discussions of where best to worship are being shifted from Mount Zion to Jesus. About three decades after this exchange between Jesus and the Samaritan woman the majestic temple lay in ruins. The patience of Emperor Titus ran out with these troublesome Jews. Rome had attempted to pacify the Jews by allowing them to have their temple; now the Romans decided that there was no way to keep Jews quiet without reducing their temple to ashes. Christians came to believe that the temple, the meeting place between God and humanity, was now a man from Nazareth.

Some people think of the cross of Christ as our way to get to be with God in heaven when we die. Surprisingly, the gospels portray the cross first as God’s way to get heaven to earth now. When Jesus breathed his last and died on the cross, Matthew says that the curtain in the temple – the veil that separated heaven from earth at the high altar, sinful people from righteous God -- was mysteriously ripped in two.[viii] Who slashed the curtain? It was as if in one last, dramatic, wrenching act of self-sacrifice, God ripped the veil of separation between earth and heaven. Now Israel need not gather on the Day of Atonement (the day of “at-one-ment” with God), stand before the temple, give over their sins to the priest who pulled back the curtain, entered the temple’s holiest place, and offered their sins to God. The curtain was ripped asunder. Now we could get to God because God had gotten to us. On the cross, Jesus had somehow done something decisive about the distance between us and God.

Will Willimon

[i] out the temple. Mark 11.
[ii] back and forth. Genesis 28:12.
[iii] met by God. Exodus 27:21; 33:7.
[iv] walk with God.” Isaiah 2:2-4.
[v] all people.” Matthew 21:13.
[vi] in the tomb.) Luke 18:33.
[vii] at the well. John 4.
[viii] ripped in two. Luke 23:35.

People of the Cross

2011-03-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

During these weeks of Lent, I’m reflecting upon Jesus as God’s salvation. These meditations are selected from my book, “Why Jesus?” (Abingdon, 2010). Lent is the Christian season of the cross in which we discover a very different definition of God than the one we expected, a God who reaches out to us in suffering, self-sacrificial love.

On the way to Jerusalem (and in a sense, Jesus was always on his way there, i.e. on the way to his death) James and John ask, “Rabbi, do for us whatever we ask.”[i]

“Ask,” said Jesus.

“Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left when you come into your glory.” When you are crowned King, made Messiah, as we know you will surely be, let us sit on your Cabinet, sharing in your glory.

Their request must have discouraged Jesus. Here were those who had witnessed his servant leadership, who had shared in his trials, still thinking about power and glory.

“You don’t know what you are asking,” replied Jesus, “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” He was of course talking about his imminent death.

“We can!” they answered. The folly of Jesus’ dearest friends is almost boundless.

Then Jesus responds, “You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant.”
Surely he spoke with irony. In the end, when he was lifted up high on a cross his disciples were nowhere in sight. On his right and his left were two common criminals.

Hearing about the attempt at one-ups-manship by James and John, the other disciples are indignant. Jesus gives them a lesson in leadership, Jesus style, telling them that they were behaving no better than a bunch of pagans, which must have deeply stung these Jews.

“Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant; whoever wants to be first must be slave of all,” he told them. “For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Jesus died on a cross, not to appease the anger and blood lust of God the Father (as the church has sometimes implied) but rather because of the anger and blood lust that the Father’s love received from a humanity who wanted nothing so much as to be gods unto ourselves. The cross which the world erected to silence another uppity Jew became, in the hands of God, the means whereby God got to us.

Everything about Jesus is cruciform. The cross is not just an unfortunate event on a Friday afternoon at the garbage dump outside Jerusalem; it’s the way the world welcomed lover Jesus from day one. Herod tried to kill him when he was yet a wee one in swaddling.[ii] From his very first sermon at Nazareth the world was attempting to summon up the courage to render its final verdict upon Jesus’ loving reach, “Crucify him!”

Gethsemane and Calvary bring to a head just about anything I’ve told you thus far about Jesus. It was not just that Jesus was born in a stable, had compassion on many hurting people, told some unforgettable stories, and taught noble ideals. Rather the significant thing is that Jesus willingly accepted the destiny toward which his actions drove him, willingly enduring the world’s response to its salvation. Arrested as enemy of Caesar, tortured to death as a criminal, Jesus was more than just one more victim of government injustice. He is not just an example that sometimes good can come from bad. Rather, as Paul puts it, on the cross Jesus was Victor: Jesus “disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them on the cross.”[iii] And he did it for Love: the cross is not what God demands of Jesus for our sin but rather what Jesus got for bringing the love of God so close to sinners like us. This is all validated by God’s raising this crucified victim from the dead, not dramatically rescuing Jesus’ failed messianic project, nor certifying that Jesus had at last paid the divine price for our sin, but rather showing forth to the world who God really is and how God gets what God wants.

What’s amazing is that the providence of God took this cross, this horrible sign of Roman cruelty and the world’s rejection and wove even that into God’s good purposes for humanity. Very early on, the church preached, “Jesus died for our sins.”[iv] That which the world saw as sign of Jesus’ miserable failure, of the government’s need to kick butt in order to keep law and order, of the fickleness of the crowd, or the sinister betrayal of his followers, Jesus’ people came to see as a sign of God finally doing something about the problem of us. “At the right time, Christ died for the ungodly,” said Paul.[v] “Jesus Christ, you crucified, but God raised from the dead,” preached Peter.[vi] Paul says that when he preached among the Corinthians, “I preached nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”[vii] God’s love is infinitely persuasive, patient, and willing to suffer in order to love us. God acts just like Jesus.

And so must we. Jesus promised rewards, but not always the rewards we wanted. When, after the rich man turned away from discipleship and Peter exclaimed, “We’ve left everything and followed you!” Jesus replied that he would receive everything back ten times more – houses, family, friends -- and suffering too. Suffering too? That’s a “reward”?[viii]

As Jesus trudged up Calvary, exhausted from his brutal torture, a man in the crowd of onlookers, Simon of Cyrene, was enlisted to carry Jesus’ cross.[ix] Simon is beloved by many of us; in a sense many of us have been picked out of the crowd of curious onlookers and made cross bearers. Every Christian helps Jesus carry the cross for Jesus chooses not to carry the cross by himself. Jesus never promised his people perpetual good health, freedom from all aches and pains, or bypassing of death. Jesus got little of the “good life,” nor did he promise us that we, by following him, would do so. Rather, he assured us that he would never allow anything worse to happen to us than happened to him. He promised that the world would also nail us to some “cross,” if we followed him. As Martin Luther King said it, paraphrasing Jesus, “the cross we bear always precedes the crown we wear.” In our Jesus-induced times of pain, he gives even us innate cowards the courage to take up our cross and follow.

The writings of Paul show that from a very early date (probably as early as the first blow that was struck against the head of Jesus by the soldiers) the followers of Jesus began to make sense out of the senseless death of Jesus. There was complete agreement that, on the cross, God was taking the horrible act that we perpetrated and utilizing that to do something about the problems between us and God. Paul -- who put some strange limits on women speaking in church, or same-sex relations, or marriage -- had an unlimited, extravagant, sweeping view of Christ’s cruciform rescue operation for weak, ungodly, sinners:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person – though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us…we have been justified by his blood,…saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.[x]

Weak, sinful, ungodly people are the recipients of the determined love of God that is made manifest on the cross, work that we could not do for ourselves.

Will Willimon

[i] we ask. Mark 10:35-45.
[ii] in swaddling. Matthew 2.
[iii] on the cross.” Colossians 2:15.
[iv] our sins. 1 Corinthians 15:3.
[v] the ungodly. Romans 5:6.
[vi] preached Peter. Acts 2:36 ff.
[vii] him crucified. 1 Corinthians 1:23.
[viii] insert
[ix] cross of Jesus. Luke 23:26-32.
[x] saved by his life. Romans 5:6-10.

There Once Was a World by Peter L. Steinke

2011-03-23T21:27:00.000-07:00

Some years ago I co-authored a book, Resident Aliens, which announced the demise of the Christendom era. Since then, many have noted that the church today finds itself in a radically different situation than the past decades in America. What are the implications of this? My friend Peter Steinke wrote a meditation on our life today as journey and exile. As we enter the season of Lent, I thought you might find Peter’s thoughts helpful: -Will Willimon

There once was a world where the church functioned according to what some have called the "attractional" model…. People come to a place, consume the spiritual goods, and serve as patrons to "meet the budget." But a shift has happened. North American culture has taken new turns.

Christendom refers to a period of time when the Christian faith profoundly informed the culture. And, in turn, the culture carried the traditions, symbols, and rituals of the Christian faith. Another often-used term—post-Christian era—… In a "post-Christian" world, the church cannot expect favorable treatment or higher visibility.

One could say that a gathering storm—a confluence of factors—has assailed the church and its dominant perch on the societal ladder. None of this has to do with the church's internal functioning. The sea change is external or contextual. There once was a world that was eager to be hospitable to Christian churches and supported "blue laws," soccerless Sundays, eating fish rather than meat on Friday, public prayer in schools and at nodal events, deferring to clergy by way of discounts, weekly religion sections in urban newspapers, and greeting others with "Merry Christmas." Now, suddenly, with steep changes happening in our society, congregations have to ask themselves whether they are responding to a world that no longer exists.

The loss of members, influence, and a sense of mission—the church's misfortune of the moment—resembles the experience of Israel's exile. The lesson of the present dislocation is clear, if still not learned. The era of Christendom is gone. No longer is culture subsidizing and supporting churches.

Today's rapidly changing world is pressing the church to respond to a shift of paradigms—but not for the first time. In previous shifts, the church has both responded slowly and responded imaginatively. …Faced with a strange new world, the church is challenged to be true to its purpose and attuned to its context. I believe the paradigm shift of rapid change constitutes a rich opportunity for the church. God has set the door open to the future. But the new day is as perplexing as it is promising. …these dislocations could be part of God's new creation. It may be God working through the unknown that contributes to the destabilization of the world. God is no stranger to Eden's deportation, Babel's scattering, the exodus, the exile, and crucifixion. God can be surprising, mysterious, taking history into unexpected turns.

The challenge of change for a congregation on a steady downward slope is precisely to redefine and redirect its mission. …Congregations may hanker for a technique that will bring about results they want to achieve; they want to replicate what has been discovered by someone else: "Give me a copy of the wonderful plans." Seeing what those plans have done for others, they want the same result—but without going through the process that got the others to that point. The shortcut of imitation certainly bypasses a lot of pain. How churches hunger for precisely this situation.

Meaningful, lasting outcomes are the result of the journey …Transition time is life's curriculum. Being on the path opens new insight; being on the path, not the steps one takes, is the very condition necessary for learning.

The Bible is replete with stories of transition and exile. …Jesus spends forty days in the wilderness—alone, hungry numb—and the devil tempts him three times. The process of thinking, testing, and exploring contains the lessons… Only by going out, being there, and seeing from a fresh angle will the process lead to learning. Discovering how to respond to shifts and changes is the learning. Self-confidence is a byproduct. But growth is in the struggle, the push, and the journey.

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There Once Was a World by Peter L. Steinke

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