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?

It simply works….

Pros: High quality picture, Great value, Easy to use, Easy to set up, Compact, Built in Wi-Fi, Video selection

Best Uses: Bedroom, Primary TV

Describe Yourself: Technophile, Netflix fan

I first picked up a Roku to get some content to my daughter’s bedroom in lieu of paying for another cable outlet. It worked so well that I found myself longing for one in the den on the HDTV for Netflix, and more importantly Amazon Instant Streaming. The only thing that would make our experience better would be for real-time network streaming so that we could go ahead an cut off the cable entirely.

Our unit is compact, and works well, but part of that is due to being in the same room as the wireless router. There are occasional server issues with the Roku store, but generally everything works as advertised, and it is very much worth the price in our eyes.

(legalese)

(c) 2003 by Jay Voorhees

Singer needed badly, along with a fiddle, guitar, and mandolin break!!! But since I wrote it, I might as well share it.

The Baby Was Born

In previous settings I have had access to video projection equipment and have used visuals to great effect, but the church I now serve hasn’t progressed to that yet (we’re working on it). We don’t have a drama contingent, and so the challenge becomes sharing a familiar story in a way that connects with the kids.

This year I have enlisted the help of a creative layperson who will join me sitting in the front of the church in easy chairs telling the Christmas story, interspersed with carols and special music. It is, in fact, lessons and carols, but wit the lessons written in kid friendly language and told as stories, not presented as “scripture readings.” We will be inviting the kids to sit up front on the floor around us and inviting questions and comments along the way.

One of the things I struggle with is that most of the carols that our kids know (in a traditional, organ hymn based church) are pretty . . . traditional. For many of them, that isn’t a problem. However some are musically a bit more challenging and in some cases don’t really jibe musically with the air of celebration that we are looking for in the service.

I find that especially true with the hymn “My Soul Gives Glory To My God,” (words by Miriam Therese Winter). Lyrically it is a wonderful adaptation of the Magnificat, which I want to include as part of Mary’s story. However musically (and yes this is a matter of personal taste) it’s in a minor key and while pretty, doesn’t seem to capture the audacity and energy that would be coming from a teenager singing about God’s blessing upon her and her beliefs about who this child will be.

So leave it to me to take a perfectly beautiful song and mess with it to make it more contemporary….

This is a bad, first draft recording on the computer with one harmony track added for fun. It ain’t going to win any awards, but I think it will work for our intentions on Saturday night.

SongofMary