WESLEYAN WISDOM: Coming of age: When will UMC regain its passion?
Donald W. Haynes, Apr 14, 2010
 Donald W. Haynes |
By Donald W. Haynes
UMR Columnist
Source
John Wesley feared that Methodism would become a dead sect. That has not happened.
However, he also said that our major mission was to save souls. That requires a relational evangelism that reaches God’s children whose lives have become morally, ethically, emotionally or economically dysfunctional. It was the major market of early Methodism, but long ago we made an intentional shift from “conversion” to “gradualism” among churched families. We have lost confidence in the potential of amazing grace to change lives.
A pivotal point in my education and ministry came in 1989 when I attended a meeting of the United Methodist Association of Communicators in Omaha, Neb. The keynoter was Russell Chandler, a “religion specialist” for the Los Angeles Times. It was 11 years before “Y2K,” and he had just written Racing Toward 2001: The Forces Shaping America’s Religious Future.
The Cold War was ending and the press and politicians saw the new peace as a panacea. Wiser minds did not concur. “Seventeen prominent futurists agree that a global economic collapse is possible and some debts will have to be written off in order to keep some nations from going broke,” Mr. Chandler said then. “We will see a debt blow-out that could trigger a worldwide depression. But the larger question is not whether America has the ability to be a leader, but whether she has the will to lead, if she is again stirred by what Henry Luce called ‘the blood of purpose and enterprise and high resolve.’”
The same question can be asked today of United Methodism.
How can a conference or a district justify renting commercial offices or owning strategically located property when we have tax-exempt local church space left vacant? How can we sustain the network of old-paradigm real estate holdings—camps, campuses, assemblies and local churches—past the time when local United Methodists are willing to support them? How can we justify our whining about lower salaries and benefits when we have been rationalizing or ignoring lower membership and attendance for decades? How can we ignore the bankruptcies, home losses, unemployment and closure of manufacturing plants, shopping malls and mom-and-pop businesses?
Mr. Chandler presented some damning statistics two decades ago and concluded: “If the mainline does not shift with the times, it will be moved to the sidelines and maybe offline.” He predicted that we would see splinter and breakaway groups, and mission agencies outside denominations. Have we not seen all of this come to pass? How many wake-up calls do we need?
Rx for recovery
Mr. Chandler also predicted faith would be “re-mythologized” by Eastern religions, Pentecostalism and religious entrepreneurs. He foresaw that media would ignore mainline church leaders, and instead caricature Christians or give massive coverage to clergy who had been historically sidelined. We ignored the warning, assuming it would never happen to us. But when did we last see a United Methodist bishop on a prime-time talk show?
Still, if you have read this column through the years, you know that I insist God is not finished with United Methodism! We may be humbled but not humiliated, chastened but not crippled. Since hearing Mr. Chandler 21 years ago, I have used his prescription for recovery as a program leader, district superintendent and a pastor:
Listen to the remarkable experiences of people, and give them the support they need to understand, mature and channel their energies.
Teach people how to develop their faith, integrating it into their daily lives. Replace biblical literalism and criticism with biblical literacy.
Encourage small-group fellowships. We herald the age of the megachurch, but its Achilles’ heel is the revolving door where so many people come and go without learning each other’s names or the circumstances that brought them to worship that morning.
Inspire people; don’t bore them and don’t just entertain them. No one should leave a place where the Gospel has been proclaimed without some sense of a “God moment,” a challenge to come home to the Lover of all souls.
Target special groups and persons for support, recovery, and/or a renewed faith pilgrimage.
Søren Kierkegaard was a brilliant philosopher in Denmark, but he also was a popular preacher and was often invited to leave the university campus and go to a village church. One of his sermons began in this fashion:
Once upon a time there was a village called Ducktown. The entire population was made up of barnyard ducks. They built little duck houses and slept in feather beds of duck down, and gobbled up duck food and quacked in duck talk. On Sundays the females put on little hats and sashes, the males put on little neckties and the duck families waddled down to Duck Church, quacking all the way.
One week they called a new duck preacher, and were very excited to hear his first sermon. He told them that God had endowed all ducks with three great gifts—webbed feet for swimming, beaks for gobbling food and wings for flying.
However, they had lost the talent to use their wings. If they looked into the sky, the preacher said, they could see flocks of wild ducks flying in perfect “V” formations. But they were content to eat, quack and waddle around Ducktown, and couldn’t even swim much.
“I am here to tell you that you can fly,” he said. “Your wings can still lift your bodies into the air and you can soar like the wild ducks. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to leave the church this morning and take a short flight over the village?”
He was so persuasive that suddenly there was a loud “Quaaack” from the back of the church, and one of the young adult ducks was in the air, circling over the congregation. Some of the other ducks were so excited that they joined in the fun, and soon you could hardly see for all the flying feathers. Their lives would be changed forever. They would no longer be confined to the ground; now they could claim their God-given endowment as masters of the skies.
Then it happened. One loud duck waddled down to the front and quacked out a protest: “Stop this nonsense! We are domesticated, not wild. We are civilized ducks. We have houses with beds, yards with gates, a village with streets and a church with walls. Flying is what our ancestors did, but we don’t fly.”
One by one the ducks flew back down to their perches, feeling a bit foolish for what they had done and holding up their heads with quiet dignity. The chastised new preacher pronounced the benediction and they all waddled home, never to fly again.
There is a lot of truth in that fiction. We are constantly tempted to ignore the nudging of the Holy Spirit to “press on the upward way.” We are tempted to live beneath our potential, to sell out to the present age or what Paul called his “lower self.” We live out our days muddling and waddling. But we can fly. Yes, we can!
Have young generations of church leaders assumed that whatever we do in each parish, the ladder of career advancement will always be there? Have general boards, conference staff and lay leaders been like the decision makers on the Titanic, ignoring all the icebergs? Have we really thought United Methodism was immune from the decline suffered by the Presbyterians, Episcopalians and the United Church of Christ? Did we not see some corollary in our own loss of membership and influence in the public square? Have we been satisfied to waddle?
We must have the nerve to drastically re-think, to dramatically cut overhead at every level—from the general church to local congregations.
How long do we have?
Dr. Haynes is a retired member of the Western North Carolina Conference, an adjunct professor at Hood Theological Seminary and current interim pastor of Kallam Grove Christian Church.