The problem, as I’ve said before, is that simply repeating a mantra of “vital congregations” over and over again is not casting a vision, for it fails to provide a connection to how congregational vitality is connected to discipleship – our primary calling and mission. Willow Creek is considered to be vital by the numbers, but Bill Hybels himself has suggested that they may have failed in significant ways in leading persons to become faithful disciples of Jesus Christ who are engaged in transforming the world. Congregational vitality is vitally important – but the descriptors of vitality have been fewer. Certainly, the one description of church vitality as the “…dynamic forward leaning state of engagement that connects to God, each other, and the world in profound ways…” is a significant descriptor. And yet, as all would admit, it’s hard to measure dynamism or engagement outside of some metrics related to certain practices. That is, I suppose, what the vital congregations metrics are an attempt to do – to identify practices which are connected to engagement and connections to one another and the world. Unfortunately they miss out on God and say nothing about whether the congregation is dynamic and/or forward leaning.

There is another problem for me, which is how are United Methodists specifically called by God to make disciples of Jesus Christ. In all of the Call to Action material and in all of the Vital Congregations literature there is no mention of how United Methodists are uniquely called to proclaim the Kingdom of God and make disciples. Frankly, based off of what I’ve read there seems to be little interest in suggesting that the people called Methodists are in any way different from the other expressions of Christian faith in the world. There is an acknowledgement of structural issues (our so called connectionalism) but not much to suggest that United Methodists are called to be in the kingdom at this time and place for a specific purpose. Frankly, the non-denominational guys do a better job of creating “vital congregations” as we are defining them, so why don’t we go ahead a simply shut down the apparatus and give in to what my friends like Tony Jones call the death of denominationalism. It doesn’t seem to me that there has been much vision casting to suggest that maybe we Methodists indeed have a place in the world today.

This past fall a group of United Methodist leaders gathered together to think about the future of what it means to call ourselves United Methodists, and to think about our mission in the world. Many of us had experienced a document written by Alan Hirsch, Ed Stetzer, and others in the “missional church” conversation – a so-called “missional manifesto.” We thought it was an interesting document, outlining some of the values that group saw as foundational for being missional, however we recognized that it failed to capture the unique character of what it means to be part of the Methodist/Arminian theological tradition, and we believed that our church would benefit from a similar vision. We pulled together a small group of persons to draft our own Methodist Missional Manifesto as a means of providing a theological framework which would then guide our own understanding of what it means to be involved in promoting congregations of vital faith.

This is a document in process, and we fully understand its limitations. There are all sorts of ways it could be perfected, but my goal in sharing today is to open up a space for conversation about what it means to call ourselves Methodist, and how having a “missional manifesto” might open up the Call to Action conversation to new possibilities and alternative ways of thinking about church vitality.

So here is our offering to the church. We hope it will be helpful as we think about who we are as the United Methodist Church.

Dear ________,

During the past week to 10 days I’ve offered some of my thoughts on some of the things that I think are important for a District Superintendent from my perspective as a pastor. Who knows if there are helpful, or have any connection to reality in any way, but I tend to be an idealist and so I hold up an idealist’s vision of the job. While my last thought may be the final one in chronological order, it may be the most important of all.

6. Root yourself deeply in the love and grace of God, and model the life of discipleship to those in your care.

One of the great servants of the United Methodist Church that I am proud to have called both a mentor and friend is the late Bishop David Lawson, who served both the Illinois and Wisconsin Annual Conferences. Bishop Lawson and I worked closely together on several General Conferences, and he was a man of gentle spirit, great wit, and immense wisdom. One week while we were in school together Bishop Lawson came to be with us, and I was able to come have him meet a group for lunch over at our favorite pizza place. He was asked to share the most important thing we could learn in seminary, and he paused for a moment before saying: “You need to know how to pray deeply.”

“I had been successful in my ministry,” he went on. “I had been the pastor of several large congregations, and like most of us I developed a bag of tricks that I would pull out to be successful. Certainly I prayed in my ministry, but if I were honest I have to say that my success was more due to the bag of tricks than my faithfulness in prayer.”

He continued: “Then I was appointed as a district superintendent. All of the sudden my relations with my friends changed for colleague to supervisor. I wasn’t engaged in planning worship or preaching as wasn’t being forced to be in the scriptures they way I had to be when I was preparing a sermon each week. I felt isolated and alone, and I experienced a dark night of the soul. It got so bad that I wasn’t sure what to do, so I traveled down to the monastery at Saint Meinrad, threw myself before one of the monks, and asked them to teach me to pray.”

Bishop Lawson went on to share that he experienced transformation during his time there, and that what he learned about prayer would transform his ministry and give him the strength and wisdom to be sustained in his time on the cabinet, and later as a bishop.

You may not want to hear it, but the fact is that you set the spiritual tone for your district. Your example will be examined by the pastors you serve (and yes, you serve them . . . they simply report to you) and will set the stage for ministry throughout the region. You will absolutely have to be rooted in your faith, fully embraced and believing in the radical love and grace of God, if you are to avoid burnout and avoid the cynicism that can come when one is called to supervise a disparate group of creative people like a bunch of pastors.

One of the dangers and I think downfalls of our United Methodist system is that far too much of our language and practice is about administration rather than about discipleship, and that is certainly true at the district level. Certainly you will have the opportunity to share devotionally with your district leaders, but in all honesty they need more than that. They need someone rooted in faith who is concerned about their own level of discipleship, and who offers love and grace in helping them to be fed and nourished in faith. Yet far too often I’ve seen gatherings where the D.S. offers a perfunctory devotional moment, perhaps even some form of worship, but where a good 75% of the meeting is about administrative tasks. What could we be as a church if we were spending our leaders time less on administrative, institutional functioning, and more on ensuring vibrancy and vitality in prayer?

That is, in point of fact, one of the things that worries my about the Vital Congregations initiative. We couch everything in terms of “making disciples,” and we suggest, without much biblical or theological warrant, average worship attendance, professions of faith, and number of small groups is somehow connected to disciple making. These metrics are indeed important, but they continue to measure the breadth of ministry, not the depth of folks connection to God. No less than Bill Hybels at Willow Creek (generally seen to be an example of church vitality) has suggested that they may have missed the boat and created something that is broad, but not especially deep. We Methodists, with our obsession over methodical record keeping and administrative and structural solutions to the problems of the church can easily find us enamored with administrative functions and church programs rather than the condition of the soul, and the presence of God in our folks lives.

You have an opportunity to model for our leaders the life of faith lived out connectionally, with the assumption that God is indeed in our midst. You are the bringer of hope to both pastors and local congregations who haven’t heard a word of hope in a long time. You have a responsibility to not simply bring order to the district, but to bring love and grace as well. In a very real sense, you (as a representative of the larger United Methodist Church) have the ability to truly help folks to appreciate Christian conferencing as a means of grace. More than that, however, YOU are a means of God’s grace! The only way you can be that for your district is to be rooted deeply in the love and grace of God.

It’s not always an easy task to be the bearer of God’s grace to the church. There will continue to be those who write off any attempts to be engaged in prayer and discernment together as some sort of heavy handed manipulation. There will be folks who think that the business of the church is something other than searching the scriptures and growing in the grace and love of Christ. Even within the cabinet, practices of faith can become perfunctory, with your colleagues and even the bishop going through the motions rather than experiencing the presence of God. I urge you to maintain a winsome, and perhaps even naïve belief in God’s presence in all. It is the proclamation of that presence that will transform the church, and I believe transform the world.

Please know that you will indeed be in my prayers, and if any of the folks who are serving in your district are reading this, I sincerely hope they will be praying for you too. The D.S. is an easy target for our frustrations, but what they all need is not wrath but love, not anger but prayer.

Never forget that our God is bigger than the institution of the United Methodist Church, and that the God of scripture always seems to use the least likely ones to bear his presence in the world. Watch for signs of God’s grace where ever you go, and I am convinced that you will go far in leading God’s people to new and exciting places.

Go in grace. God is with you.

Jay

Dear ______,

You know it’s pretty arrogant of me, a simple country pastor, suggesting that I know anything about what is required of a District Superintendent. I understand that you will have to take these suggestions with a grain of salt, for the reality is different than the mental picture. And yet, the more I think about it, the more I believe that much of what I am suggesting is fairly obvious (so obvious in fact that you are probably hitting your forehead and shouting “Doh!” that I would even think to suggest these things). But for some reason, it hasn’t always seemed so obvious to my colleagues in ministry.

My next suggestion is one of those obvious bits of knowledge that often seems to be missing:

5. Understand that dealing with conflict in effective and creative ways IS INDEED your job.

One of the things that seems pretty clear to me from afar is that the D.S. is often having to flit from place to place to put out fires. This can be frustrating for the time it takes to deal with these often petty grievances can hinder one’s ability to proactively cast a vision for a district, and to engage in the more fulfilling aspects of ministry.  In many cases, the D.S.’s ends up functioning as a referee of sorts between pastor and congregation, attempting to find a common ground between two forces that seem opposed to one another.

So here’s the deal. You have to do it. You can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that conflict doesn’t exist. You will be forced at times to have the wisdom of Solomon in navigating the waters of disagreement, and any attempts you make to avoid conflict will only lead wounds to grow deeper, and pretty much ensure that the ability to find creative and productive solutions will become impossible.

You would be well advised to find a workshop on conflict resolution . . . the Quakers offer some excellent training. It would probably be good to dust off your copy of Friedman’s Generation to Generation and become familiar again with the language of family systems, for most of the conflict you will face in the church is generally influenced by the congregation’s “family” system. It probably wouldn’t hurt to identify a consultant or two (a mediator, a psychologist, or even a pastor with training) that could be a resource in helping facilitate processes to help groups address conflict.

But in the end, ultimately dealing with conflict in an effective way means that you have to show up, listen intently so that folks feel that their grievance has been heard, and then provide a path to reconciliation, or a path to deal with the conflict through separation.  You can’t phone it in. You have to show up.

I have all sorts of horror stories of times when D.S.’s didn’t show up, leaving behind scars that remain, but I don’t think I can share them without revealing too much of the identity of the folks and/or congregations involved. Take is from me, the personal touch is always the best.

I’ve had a sense which may be false that cabinet’s in general reward pastors who keep everything in the family system calm and do what THEY can to avoid conflict. I hope that you won’t fall into the trap of seeing pastors who experience conflict in their congregations as “problems.” Often times they are simply challenging the status quo, or speaking prophetically about issues of discipleship that folks simply don’t want to hear. They need to know that you’ve got their back when they face a storm for preaching their convictions.

Likewise, SPRC’s need to know that you are with them when they are dealing with abusive clergy. You and I both know that there are colleagues of ours who are far from effective in their ministry, and who seem to bounce from place to place every couple of years. There will be times when the appropriate means of addressing a conflict is reprimanding a pastor, and don’t flinch from the responsibility, just as you shouldn’t flinch from the possibility of speaking the truth in love to a congregation when they are being unreasonable.

Conflict is ever before us, and you in particular in your role, however we have to come to understand that conflict isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and can often be a means of growth. It isn’t something to be feared. It’s also not something we seek after. It simply is, and your best bet will be to deal with it.

Dear _______,

I’ve spent some time on building relationships, which is a key component of your new job. In a sense, my next suggestion is an extension of that work, for it better helps you to navigate the specific contexts of ministry settings and avoid making sweeping generalizations about pastors and their congregations.

4. Do your homework and learn all you can about your churches AND their surrounding communities.

In the face of all the demands that will be placed on you, finding time to do research will be difficult, if not impossible, but do it anyway. Ultimately this will help you avoid the pitfall of failing to understand the struggles of a particular minister and or his/her congregation. More important, knowing your churches and their neighborhoods allows you to make decisions about district emphases and ministerial deployments from a missional perspective rather than an institutional one. It’s far too easy to fall into the trap of seeing congregations as cogs in the denominational wheel rather than unique, organic communities with their own gifts and idiosyncrasies.  Churches (and pastors too) become pawns in the difficult chess game that is the itinerant system, and I’ve seem issues of salary and church size play far too large a role in making decisions than missional concerns.

One of my D.S.’s began his tenure by scheduling an hour long meeting with every pastor in the district simply to have the pastor give them a tour of the facilities and to tell them about the church. This is certainly a good starting point, and if you ask the right questions you can learn much from the pastor. While the metrics of Vital Congregations are helpful, there are so many other questions that I would want to ask to gain a better sense of the congregation. That would include budget struggles, facility issues, the way the congregation deals with conflict, and the self-perception of the congregation. I would also want to know if the pastor has a reasonable grasp on the demographics of the community in which the church is located.

I mention the last point because I continue to be shocked by the number of my colleagues that have very little grasp on the community around them. Due to relationships in the church, they have a narrow sense of who is who in the neighborhood, but many have no concept whether the community is growing or not, whether the community is experiencing change, what the ethnic/racial breakdown of the community is, or any of a number of factors that would help them better reach out. They often have anecdotal generalizations of a community, but those are often disconnected from the reality on the ground.

Take my last appointment. As you know, the community that I served was one of the most ethnically diverse in our city. Everyone tended to point to the rapid growth of the Hispanic community, which was indeed growing by leaps and bounds. However what was often overlooked was a large and growing African American middle class population. Several predominantly black mega-churches were planting satellites in the area with great success, but the United Methodist Church was so fixated on the tales of Hispanic growth, they totally missed the need for a United Methodist presence in the black community and missed out on several opportunities to develop ministry in that area. While this was my parish and I tried to address the concerns as I could (being the fat, un-dynamic white guy that I am), this was a place where the D.S. and Bishop should be aware of growth trends in their district and working with the local clergy to address those trends, including initiating new ministries to meet community needs.

Or take my current appointment at a church that has gone from 1000 members in the 50’s and 60’s to a worshipping congregation of about a hundred. One might attribute the decline to the drop in mainline influence or a congregation that had lost its sense of mission (both of which may be true) but it helps to know that this church was built as part of a company town by a large chemical company which during the 50’s and 60’s had over 5,000 employees a mile from the church. With the decline of that business came a decline of the overall community, including the church. Thus we have a smaller base to draw on and in fact are comparable with other area congregations as we have to re-tool to a new community reality.

Of course, there is more to know than demographics. It probably is important to know who the matriarchs and patriarchs are in each church (people who have power regardless of any official office or title). It’s probably good to keep up with the history of previous appointments, which has an unbelievable impact on current success in ministry (says the pastor who served in one congregation in which a bad pastoral appointment led to a huge split in the church with over half of the congregation leaving, and who serves in another which had four single year appointments in a row prior to the appointment of my predecessor). What you are needing is to get a better sense of what makes a church tick, and what issues in the community may effect their ministry in the world.

I recognize that maintaining records on this data is a logistical nightmare. I could envision a notebook with a profile of every congregation including some of the data above, but with 80+ churches, that could be unwieldy. I think what I would try to do know is to create folders in Evernote, a great internet based note taking/filing program and keep all the data in the cloud so that I could access from my IPad or phone. All I know is that you will have to develop some means of keeping up with a plethora of information that helps you to know your churches and their communities.

Dear _______,

I’ve spent some time talking about the relational side of your new job, and the more I think about it the more convinced that it all comes down to relationships. In a very real way, you are pastoring “a church” with 80+ members (your pastors) and their extended families (their congregations). Just as pastoral work involves the marriage of leadership and care, your new task requires you to walk that fine line between being in front of the district so that folks will be moving forward, but not so far out in front (separated from the congregation) that you have no personal connection to those you lead. Thus, much of the advice I offer is common sense for most pastors, but for some reason it sometimes seems forgotten when folks move into the district office. This leads to my third suggestion, which should seem obvious, but for some reason often seems elusive to some:

3. Always tell the truth, even when it’s hard.

Several years ago I was transitioning from one appointment to a new place. At the time both Kay and I were on housing allowances and we were living in a house that we had purchased a few years before. When I met with the D.S. and the SPRC in the new location, I learned that they had a parsonage, and when I asked if we might stay in our own home I quickly learned that some political turmoil related to the parsonage a few years earlier made that a bad idea, and that if I was to have a viable ministry we would need to live in the parsonage. That was a difficult blow for us, but part of what we live under, so we decided to drive out to the neighborhood to see the parsonage. It was a wonderful house (probably the nicest house we will ever live in) but we discovered that it was not only several miles from the church I would be serving (with heavy traffic in between) but out at the county line requiring a very long commute for Kay into the downtown church that she served. It was going to be a hardship, and before we committed we decided to talk to the D.S.

During the entire meeting he attempted a sales job on us. “Oh the parsonage isn’t that far out,” he told us. “You can zoom on this or that road and be downtown in no time.” And yes, he told us, the church HAD been through some conflict, but it had huge potential and was a plum appointment. “Everything will be great,” he told us.

Now Kay and I have been around church politics long enough to know a sales job, and frankly we were disappointed because what we needed was the truth, not a sales pitch. We needed the D.S. to say: “Yes, I know this is difficult and an inconvenience, but we believe Jay has the skills to move this congregation forward and we believe that it’s what we need to do. I’m sorry for the hardship, but in this case it’s necessary.” What we needed was an honest assessment and recognition of the situation, not some sort of attempt to make things sound better than they really were. And honestly, if he had told us the truth, our commitment to the church is strong enough that we would have said okay and still done what we did – make the best of a difficult circumstance.

I’m not sure what the drug is that they give D.S.’s when they enter that role, but I continue to be surprised at friends who fall into the “conflict avoidance” mode when they become D.S.’s, and who end up being less than honest about their dealings. I understand that there are issues of confidentiality and knowledge of topics that the cabinet has which are not ready for broad publication, but rather than providing fuzzy answers when asked, it’s always better to simply say “I can’t talk about that yet . . . or at all.”

Part of the issue, I imagine, is that you are thrust suddenly into a different type of relationship with folks who have been your friends and colleagues. For years (in many cases) you have been one among the masses gathered together grumbling about the leadership above, only to find yourself now as that authority figure what everyone is suspicious of. We all want to be liked, and truth telling can be hard when it puts us in conflict with our friends, so we find ourselves drawn to obfuscation, or trying to put a positive spin on every decision rather than fully admitting that there are times when we simply have to do difficult things.

I think that truth telling applies in both your relationships with pastors AND congregations. One of the struggles that our connection has faced has been the unwillingness of leaders to hold a mirror up to a congregation and help them face the realities around them. There are times when they need to be told that while life was great in the 1950’s, it’s time for them to become relevant to the new dynamics of their communities or face extinction. There are also times when you may have to admit that the person you are appointing to their church may not be everything they want and need, but that it’s who is available and that you both need to give him or her a fighting chance to succeed. What would it mean to a congregation to know that their task is to not be wowed by their new pastor, but rather that they were being asked by the denomination to raise up this man or woman so that they could become an effective leader?

Now I confess (as evidenced by this blog) that I am one who errs on the side of transparency. I believe in being open and honest about our dealings . . . maybe to a fault. But in our postmodern world, openness and transparency are values that are increasingly more important, especially with younger generations who are unwilling to blindly follow those in authority without some sense of where they are being led. Truth-telling builds relational trust that leads to growth and transformation.

So tell the truth . . .

And to paraphrase the Gospel of Thumper, “…if you can’t tell the truth, then don’t say nothing at all.”

Dear ______,

As I suggested in the previous post, relationship building is a key component of the task ahead of you. It’s with that in mind that I offer my next proposal:

2. Don’t have district meetings. Instead create relational space.

Almost every new D.S. that I have served under in the past 10 years has started out their time with a plan for holding a regular District Minister’s meeting. These meetings usually happened in the morning at a local church, often had some worship component and district announcements, and usually featured a speaker on some ministry related topic. These would go along for three to six months, but rarely did folks really want to attend them, and often times they would end up drifting away into oblivion, with maybe a quarterly meeting because we had to hear from the D.S. occasionally.

I don’t know about you, but I have yet to find a pastor who really looks forward to these mandatory meetings outside of the opportunity to see some friends and share some of the latest United Methodist gossip.

Contrast that with the example of a D.S. that Kay served under while I was in seminary – perhaps the best D.S. I have ever seen. Rather than scheduling a mandatory monthly minister’s meeting, he sponsored a WEEKLY casual breakfast gathering at three different locations in the district (it was a large district and not all could come to one place) on three different days of the week. There was no program, no worship, and the announcements were shared casually. The goal was simply to provide a place where folks could be with the D.S., and as importantly, with one another each week. It wasn’t a meeting – it was a space for building relationships. The D.S. might share something from his agenda, but it wasn’t a presentation from behind a podium, but rather a conversation around the table where folks could freely ask questions and even challenge what was being said. It was at this table where the D.S. shared his dream to be a 100% apportionment district, and then talked with pastors about the reasons why they might struggle to meet that goal. He held this gathering every week, and on those weeks were he was out of town for some reason, the pastors STILL met, because it was a time of fellowship and support, a time where one could bounce ideas off of another, and a time that was much more fun than a dry old meeting.

Yes, I am suggesting that you figure out some way to offer some sort of comparable gathering because I found it so effective. Yes, you WILL be busy, but for this D.S. it became a discipline which demonstrated his desire to support and be in relationship with his pastors, so it was a priority.

The goal is ultimately to value relational space, and to promote it to your pastors. The fact is that most solo pastors (in churches with minimal additional staff) are easily isolated, and desperately need contact with others in ministry to keep them from becoming burnt out. If connection is to mean anything, shouldn’t it be about mutual support among the pastors, and if that is to be modeled doesn’t that have to come from your office?

There’s more to come, so be watching later in the week…

Dear _________,

I celebrate with joy your Bishop’s discernment that you have the gifts to take on the role of supervision for churches and pastors in your area. At the same time, I also offer my condolences for the job you are about to take on seems to be draining, difficult, and filled with the frustration that comes from standing in the middle between the institution of our denomination (expressed in the Bishop) and local congregations and pastors on the front lines of ministry. During my 25+ years of being in the United Methodist fold I have seen D.S’s who were unbelievably effective, and others that could barely function. Those who struggled were not bad people – in fact some of them had been effective pastor’s in local congregations. Where they struggled was in making the transition from one form of ministry to another that doesn’t often have much in the way of personal rewards, but is vitally important to the success of this connectional endeavor that you and I are a part of.

I have never served in the role that you are about to assume, and as such I know that I have an idealistic view of the superintendency that probably is far from reality. I’ve seen many gifted and prophetic pastors move into the role only to become some sort of different person – something I am sure happens because of the nature of the job. And yet, I have been blessed to serve under one or two persons who didn’t drink the Kool-Aid they give D.S.’s at Lake Junaluska and who walk the balance between being the institutional master on the one hand, and the coach and support for ministry in the local church on the other. These are folks who knew that they worked for the Bishop, but didn’t fear him when it came to standing up for their pastors and churches. They weren’t pushovers, in fact the expected a lot of those under their care, but because they took care seriously and worked hard to be ministry partners with those at the local level, they were loved and respected and folks worked harder to meet those expectations. I’ve never forgotten them, and I carry their leadership with me.

So here are a few random thoughts about the task before you, from a friend and a United Methodist pastor who respects what you are about to take on, and will be praying for you in the days ahead:

1) Authority comes through relationship, not title, office, or other credential.

There is D.S. I know serving in another conference who I deeply love and respect. However, in some conversations that we have about the future of the church he continues to assert that we live under an episcopal system and that pastors simply need to submit to those in authority above. I understand what he is saying, and in many senses he is right in reminding us that we pastors take vows of voluntary submission to the authority of the church, the Bishop, and his or her appointed minions. As I remind my congregation every year at consultation time, I serve at the pleasure of the Bishop, and while I may disagree with the Bishop and/or even the discernment of the General Conference, as long as I am a pastor in our system, I submit to their discernment.

However, what I think is missing is in his analysis is that authority (the ascribed belief in another as an effective leader) always comes through relationships, not simply because a title says that one is a leader. It requires the hard work of getting to know those who serve under your leadership, giving them your time and attention, so that a trust can be built that leads to great and mighty things. Authority through rank works at some levels in the military, but even in the military there is a difference between a line officer, and someone that the platoon is willing to follow to their deaths. Authority comes when those who serve under and with you recognize that you care for them, that you are looking out for them, that you are interested in what they are interested in, and most important, that you too are willing to sacrifice for their success.

Recently I was reading John Wigger’s very good biography on Francis Asbury, who in many ways could be considered as much of a father of our church as John Wesley. Asbury has often been known as an opinionated and autocratic leader. What Wigger reveals, however, is that in fact Asbury was always engaged in relation building, especially with those who disagreed with his opinions. Asbury was not an especially great preacher, but he was a bridge builder who would travel a hundred miles out of his way, even when he was at his physical limits, to meet with one of his pastors. He was known as a great conversationalist, someone who took interest in others, and as a result his pastors (even when they weren’t happy about it) would follow his lead because he had demonstrated in a tangible way his commitment to the ministry and his pastors. No one . . . NO ONE . . . could EVER question Asbury’s level of commitment, and that motivated others when they were on the edge of giving up.

Ultimately your reputation as a D.S. will be judged not on your efficiency in processing the paperwork (although the authorities above you may suggest that to be so). Your reputation will be built on how well you have related to the folks and churches under your care. No one will remember that you ran a Charge Conference meeting efficiently. They will remember that you cared enough to show up – something that is next to impossible at times when there are 80+ churches in your care – but something that has to happen to the best of your ability.

This focus on relationship leads right in to my next suggestion, which will come in my next post…

Bill taught me many valuable things, but the thing that has stayed with me to this day has nothing to do with Paul or the gospels. Instead Bill taught be a way of life that I carry with me, no matter the topic.

“The most important thing you can learn in my class,” Bill would say, “is not the right answers in the bible, but rather the right questions to ask.” He would remind us that asking the right questions is key to having the full picture of what’s before you, leading to better answers or solutions in the end. Bill would never sit by and idly assume that all the questions had been asked. In writing his opus – a two volume commentary on the book of Hebrews – Bill would spend years asking questions and reading what everyone else had written about those questions. If it meant learning new languages so as to read scholars in other countries, so be it. But when Bill sat down at the computer to write, you could bet that he was familiar with almost everything that had ever been said about the topic.

I’ve been a broken record in my concerns about the United Methodist Call to Action report and process. Understand that I believe absolutely in the need for vital churches. I’m a pastor, serving United Methodist churches and very frankly serving non-vital churches is simply not much fun. I believe that we need to everything that we can move congregations, our annual conferences, and the general church toward vitality. And the Call to Action/Vital Congregations efforts certainly can point us in one direction in moving toward the forward leaning state of engagement that allows folks to connect to God, one another, and the world in profound ways (which is vitality).

The CTA  process started with a valid question: What are the common practices that are found in vital congregations. The team hired consultants to examine and evaluate vital churches and these consultants reported back on 6 commonalities shared among them – the so-called drivers of vitality which are now forming the basis of evaluation for the entire church.  It’s not a bad question, in fact it is a natural starting place. Unfortunately it’s not the only question, and for the adaptive change needed to bring our communion to vitality, more needed to be asked.

What would some of the other questions be? I know of at least two that I think are missing which would better help us position ourselves for needed adaptation.

While CTA examined practices, they missed a great opportunity during that study to ask if there were common values underlying those practices. Most leadership experts, from Heifetz to Bandy, would suggest that the underlying values of a system (such as a congregation) are the driver of vitality, not the practices. It is the values, and the subsequent mission arising out of those values which gives the practices meaning and leads them to support vitality. I think this lack of examination about the values of vital churches is part of what many critics have instinctively been missing in their concerns that the CTA process seems to minimize the importance of theological concerns. I really don’t know why values weren’t considered, but I have this sneaky suspicion that part of the problem may be that values are unique to a specific community, and as such it was difficult to quantify values. Practices represent a technical response to values which are much more easily quantified, but only make sense in support of an underlying value base.

A second question I would have liked to have seen asked is why congregation are not vital? We are blessed to have a set of data points that help us to understand commonalities in successful, life filled churches, but it we are honest about the United Methodist Church, those congregations represent a minority of the churches in the communion. What would be helpful would be to identify commonalities between non-vital churches to determine if there are values and/or practices that hinder vitality and which need to be addressed. This would be helpful for I have known pastors in congregations who attempted to bring forth the drivers of vitality in to their congregations only to be shot down, with the church continuing in decline. Base in the examples of the vital churches, this would suggest that the pastor’s leadership was lacking, but maybe there are other factors at play which would keep the most dynamic leader from moving a church toward vitality. We simply don’t know what those factors are because we have never asked the question nor done the research necessary to help formulate an answer.

I really don’t know why these questions weren’t asked, but I imagine it came down to time and money. To do the type of research truly needed to bring about the change we are seeking takes resources that we were likely either not willing not able to give. In not asking the questions, we fail to have the data needed to make intelligent decisions about directions for our church.

The good news is that in spite of a flawed process, we have many talented and passionate leaders who instinctively know that CTA is a starting place for much hard work and conversation ahead.

However, regardless of my feelings about the specifics of the general church’s Call to Action, I am not surprised to see a second wave of leadership decisions made using the Call to Action as a justification for difficult decisions while having only the most tenuous connection to the findings of that document. The two most prominent for me arose this week in the statement by the Southeast Jurisdictional College of Bishops calling for the merger of the Tennessee and Memphis Annual Conferences, and a document being shared by some members of the cabinet here in Tennessee outlining a new procedure for congregational accountability which directly and overtly links clergy deployment with the full payment of apportionments.

In both cases, the writers of these document make a case for their proposals based in the justification that somehow they are driven by the Call to Action proposal and will contribute to making vital congregations without ever directly demonstrating or describing how these initiatives will serve the purpose of helping congregations or church leaders. In both cases, the ultimate concerns are in fact financial, not missional, and while at least one of the proposals represents a change in structure that could have missional roots, in the end the concerns are with improving efficiencies without evaluating the impact on ministry. I will be writing more about the specifics of these proposals in a later post.

What concerns me is that it feels like the Call to Action has quickly become the point of justification for pretty much ANY structural change that a Bishop has wanted to implement in the past regardless of whether these changes truly enhance the ability of local congregations to become vital. Yes, I would agree that many structures need to be changed, but those changes should be based in their own justifications, not brought forth in some sort of vague appeal to adaptive challenges and the Call to Action. There are likely good reasons for the merger of the two annual conferences (although they aren’t yet clear to me) but those reasons likely have little to do with our efforts to create vital congregations. Congregational accountability for paying apportionments is needed (and a long time coming in our annual conference) but the concerns there are the effectiveness of our connectional system, not the five drivers of vitality. The Call to Action isn’t some sort of miracle drug that can be pulled out in every situation. And yet, our leaders have made it into a shibboleth to define who is in and who is out, what is right and what is wrong, and whether one is “on board” or not.

When will we as a church be honest about our actions and intentions rather than drawing on some sort of outside justification for what we do?