In point of fact, the emotions I shared were the reflection of many conversations with others over the years who have found themselves unable to maintain trust in their bishop. I grant that many of these conversations — from both clergy and laity alike — occur on the back end of a difficult experience and that I am only receiving a single side of the conversation without the big picture. That is, after all, the consequence of a system that very often uses confidentiality as the justification for maintaining power through the flow of information. The people sharing with me have been wounded, and the bishop (and the cabinet which represents his our her leadership to us) is a convenient scapegoat for what I know are complex and not easily resolved issues. Maintaining trust in a hierarchical system in which information in compartmentalized and where power sometimes has to trump compassion is an almost impossible task.

And yet my own dealings with bishops have been, by and large, positive. I have felt supported by the bishops under which I’ve served, and although I may have disagreed with a decision or two along the way, I’ve never felt wounded by their actions. In fact, there are bishops that I consider to be friends as much as episcopal leaders — people who have have worked with me in the past before their election, and who I trust for advice in the practice of my ministry. As the former producer of the General Conference (1992 – 2000) I had the joy of spending time in close contact with various bishops as we worked together on worship and working out the procedures of the day. I learned in that role that bishops are human, just like the rest of us, tasked with a difficult job in a system that hasn’t always been clear about their role.

Let’s face it, the UMC has always been of mixed minds in regards to the office of bishop. As I understand our history, John Wesley was pretty angry at Brother Coke and Brother Asbury’s overreach in being named bishop. In reading Wigger’s excellent biography of Asbury I learned that while he was a strong leader, he was regularly challenged by his clergy who understood that his election came as much from their discernment as any sort of special imprint of the Holy Spirit. While the nature of the episcopacy is written into our constitution, the decision to give our leaders no voice or vote at General Conference is one sign that we aren’t fully comfortable with the place of personal power in the church, and that we believe communal discernment is part of who we are as a people.

And yet, I am sympathetic to the argument that we have not accorded our bishops enough power to lead effectively. There are indeed places in our polity in which their role is ambivalent. In being in relationship with a bunch of bishops over the years I can say that for all of their political adeptness (an adeptness that is necessary for election) all of the bishops I have known deeply love the church and want the best for it. They are as much prisoners of the system as any of us, and like all of us they are seeking for ways to be more effective in our common task of proclaiming the reign of God and forming disciples of Jesus Christ.

The concern for me in Bishop Willimon’s commentary and similar sentiments expressed by other bishops is a seeming bout of wishful thinking in which they wave a wand, say “look the Judicial Council says that we’re charged to lead,” and somehow think that all the “effective pastors” will fall into lock step with the bishop’s priorities and agendas. They imply (although I think they are far smarter than this) that somehow the failure of the General Conference in Tampa is a call to trust the Bishops to work things out, for THEY know how to fix what’s broken in the church. I may be mistaken in my analysis, but it feels to me like they think that trust should be given even though trust has not yet been earned.

Is it possible to earn our trust? Absolutely! In fact, I would guess that many if not most of us– both lay and clergy alike–deeply long for a relationship of trust with our bishops. But what it will take is honesty and engagement.

I may not agree with Bishop Willimon on some things, but the one thing he’s got going for him at some levels is that he basically says what he’s thinking — good or bad. Frankly, most of us don’t know what to do with that for we’ve lived through years of “bishop-speak” where it seems like every comment from our leaders is parsed through a political filter to the point where we have little clue as to what the bishop truly believes. What we need are leaders who are honest about the issues we face, and transparent in their decision making.

Likewise, most of us have very little contact with our bishops, if any at all. We need bishops who value the power of knowing their clergy and their churches, bishops who invest the time and energy to being present in their areas more than attending meetings throughout the world. Yes, our bishops are “general overseers” of the entire church, but perhaps at the next General Conference we need to consider not a set-aside bishop (although I understand their argument for that position) but instead policies that free our bishops up to be more engaged in their local areas, focusing on building better relationships with conference clergy and congregations, and fostering trust.

You see, I love our bishops. I want them to succeed. I want to trust them to lead me.

And at a very basic level, I do trust them.

But my trust can only be given when I know that they trust me too. Trust is a relationship of mutuality, and until we understand that, there will always be a culture of suspicion permeating our church.

Photo by Sean MacEntee via Flickr

Loving God,
as the birds chirp outside the window,
and the sun begins to peek through the shade,
I turn my eyes to you.

It’s time for a new day,
not simply the rising of the sun and the procession of the clock hands,
but the rising of the new light in our lives.
We are a people who get stuck in the night,
lost in the darkness, and worried when we can’t find our way.
But then, a sliver of light comes over the horizon,
and we are given a new vision, which leads us back to the right path.

We need a new day in our church,
for sure in the broader communion of which I am a part,
but specifically in the community that meets across the street from where I sit.
We are active and doing many great things,
but we need  you to shine the light on what comes from you,
and what is simply inertia
or a work of our own pride.

I need a new day in my life,
a day when I realize and remember
that my worth doesn’t come in my competence and length of the work day,
but rather in your love and grace.

Change me. Change us. Change the world.

It’s a new day.

May we live into it fully.

Amen.

Our gift to the individual seeker and to a jaded and degraded society is the fullness of Gods grace and holiness. Without the fullness of this way of salvation we degenerate into political interest groups obsessed with issues; without a posture of grace we do not have the resources to discuss with civility, to discern our positions with humility, to see our neighbor or our enemy with dignity, or to be patient in the long journey toward the beloved community. Without the fullness of grace, our actions, no matter how well intentioned, do not glorify God. Every local church would benefit from a serious engagement with the meaning of grace in our everyday, ordinary lives.

via bear witness to the love of God in this world.

This morning the net was abuzz with commentary about your UMR article on “Church by Committee.”  Frankly there was little in the article that surprised me for I’ve known you long enough to know of your disdain for the system that we are both part of. I have heard you speak pretty disparagingly about our shared denomination both “within the family,” and depressingly enough to me, with folks outside the United Methodist fold, offering them permission to dis’ our communion without a great deal of justification for why you choose to remain a part of the people called United Methodist. There was nothing in your commentary that I haven’t heard before.

You are a Bishop in our church, and I respect the position that you hold as a church leader. While I have known you since before you were elected to that office, I trust the discernment of the Southeast Jurisdiction representatives who believed that you possessed the gifts to hold the office of Bishop, and I respect your opinions (even agreeing with some of them).

And yet, with all due respect, as I read through your post, I found so many points of disagreement that I’m not sure really where to begin.

Actually, I DO know where to begin — with your conclusion that the discernment of the Body of Christ as reflected in the General Conference is inadequate, and that we should simply allow the Bishop’s to work things out.

And you wonder why there is a trust issue in the UMC?

You are right — the General Conference didn’t fully trust the Council of Bishops, and that’s because the church as a whole isn’t fully sure that the Council of Bishops can be trusted. Don’t put the burden of this solely at the feet of the 1000 delegates of General Conference, for they simply represented a much larger mistrust of a Council that they aren’t really sure can be trusted.

You offer some great examples of why that is the case. Take your commentary on the Call to Action process initiated by the Council of Bishops. You suggest that the GC2012 disregarded four years of work “…guided by some of the church’s best management minds…” And yet, when those of us in the hinterlands reviewed the work, we found a plan that was guided in part by a systemic survivor, and which contained conclusions that were not completely supported by the research. Apparently our best church management minds weren’t so great after all, for they failed to invite participation from any of our experts in church polity to see if what they were proposing would likely pass constitutional muster (it didn’t) and they clearly failed to recognize the changing nature of our church in their failure to invite participation from leaders outside the U.S. If the Bishops want to take credit for the CTA/IOT plan (which it sounds like you want to do) you fell short in many ways in trying to get something that the General Conference could embrace and adopt.

But the lack of trust has been present for far longer than that. The fact is that clergy and congregations don’t fully trust the bishops because we’ve experienced bishops at their worst. We’ve seen appointments made for political reasons rather than missional ones. We’ve seen pastors removed for speaking prophetically because folks with money convinced the bishop to remove him rather than the bishop standing up for the gospel. We’ve seen bishops engaged again and again in shutting down creative and exciting ministries that have great kingdom potential, but fall outside of the norms of what a church is supposed to look like under our current system. Congregations have experienced bishops failing to take the time to understand their issues and making appointments that are doomed to fail from the beginning, and clergy have experienced episcopal leaders seem to have little compassion for the struggles they face in serving “clergy killer” congregations.

Most of all we have seen a Council of Bishops who have spent their careers as the consummate systemic insiders. For all of the rhetoric of creative leadership, many (if not most of you) have spent years serving on the very committees and boards that have failed to embrace change. The current boards and agencies, which have been largely groups that rubber stamped staff initiatives and General Secretary priorities, have not been held accountable even though it is Council of Bishop members who are, by and large, the presidents of those governing boards. The bishop, more often than not, are a body who are invested in the same political process that got them elected in the first place, a network of relationships that seems unable to truly embrace change.

And we’re supposed to trust you now?

Trust, as I understand it, rarely comes through authority imposed from above, but rather through the experience of one over time. Yes, we respect the office and place ourselves under your authority . . . but trust can only be given when it’s earned, and in far too many cases the expectation of blind obedience to power has ruled the day at the expense of building trust.

The Turmoil in Tampa was not the problem, although it was certainly a reflection of the problem. Our problems are far deeper, seen in the failure to truly talk about Christ’s call to be engaged in forming disciples and focusing again (as we’ve done since the very beginning of the Methodist Episcopal Church) on how we structure ourselves. We fail to have a common understanding of the task before us, and in the decline that comes from that failure, the fingers start pointing in all directions as we search for someone to blame. In the blame game, trust is eroded even further, and we ALL miss out on the opportunity God gives us.

Yes, we have a broken system, and it is in our best interest to unpack that brokenness to discern if there is any means of fixing it. But as important will be our efforts to attempt to rebuild trust — between lay and clergy, conservative and liberal, U.S. and Central Conferences, and between the Council of Bishops and pretty much everyone else. Without addressing the issue of trust, our ability to function as a communion is indeed doomed to fail.

I pray that as you soon watch from afar in the ultimate insider/outsider role as a retired bishop, you might work to discern a means by which the breach of trust can be fixed. That would be, in my honest opinion, the greatest legacy you could leave the United Methodist Church.

Thanks again for your commentary. May God bless you in your new endeavor.

Sincerely,

Jay

I just hope that enough of you young UMC clergy have the temerity to stand up and walk out of that system. Trust me, what you’re putting up with is not worth the health insurance — you’re getting the raw end of that deal.

I’ve known Tony for some ten years now, and he has repeatedly suggested I should bail too. I appreciate his perspective, but this morning, in the light of all the other emotions swirling through our church right now, I found myself less appreciative at an outsider suggesting we should simply give up. Thus, I wrote him an  e-mail this morning, which (with his permission) I share with you:

Dear Tony,

I’ve tried several times to think about how I could come up with an appropriate response to this morning’s post, but haven’t figured out a way to say what I really want to say without using profanities. [Author's note -- In point of fact, I did use profanity in my e-mail to Tony, a sign of my brokenness, but since this is generally a PG rated blog, I am editing myself to sound better than I really am.]

Yes, we are a very broken institution, composed of very broken people. One might even say that we are completely dead. And yet, I continue to hold on to the belief that God takes dead and broken things and transforms them into new and living things. Be careful about proclaiming the death of the UMC, for the possibility of new life arising from the ashes is always a possibility.

Should I bolt? Probably. Do I want to bolt? Very much at times.

And yet, I continue to hold on to and offer the grace that I believe that God offers us — a grace that never gives up. As a Methodist, I am an Arminian, not a Calvinist, believing that God’s grace is unlimited and while resistible, always present even when we can’t see, hear, or taste it.

Yes, our institution is a mess and may indeed be irredeemable.

But that was the same things some folks said about me at points in my life.

Take care, and know that I love ya even when you dis on my people.

jay

Thanks, Jay. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

 :-)

This is especially important for me for I am appointed to serve a village named “Old Hickory,” the nickname of President Andrew Jackson, whose mansion known as “The Hermitage” is just a few miles down the road. As I sit in Tampa, arrangements are being made be people I know and love to honor Jackson with a special memorial in our village’s Veteran’s Park. As a pastor we believes that God has called me to engage in the community, I will be expected to attend this celebration, and the pastor in me wants to honor the energy and passion of my members . . . people who are like I was until tonight . . . unaware of the horror perpetuated on the Trail of Tears, a horror ordered by the one for whom our town and church is named.

As Tinker said repeatedly, repentance isn’t easy. Repentance calls us to cast aside our myths of moral superiority, and honestly confront the ways that we have fallen short in our relationships with others. It forces us to take our heroes off their pedestals and recognize that they were broken men who often did horrible things in the name of God. The lie of manifest destiny – the false theology perpetuated by the church – provided the cover to avoid Christ’s call of love, and to engage in acts of hate.

Where Tinker – a man with a gentle spirit and whose eyes looked through our hearts like a disappointed grandfather – recognized and affirmed that we can’t repent on our own. It takes all of us standing together to try and restore the harmony and balance of God’s creation.

The fact is that I can’t confront the legacy of the community I serve without help. It’s going to take everyone who believes that God is calling us to transformation to stand together. I need your help. I need Tinker’s help. I can’t do it on my own.

The good news is that Tinker reminded us that the Greek word metanoia really means “Y’all repent!.” I understand what “y’all” means, and it means that I am not alone. Yes repentance is hard, but y’all are standing with me.

“Be not afraid,” the scriptures say, “for I am with you.”

May we be joined together with God and with one another as we work to repent of what we have done.