Church and movement

NOTE: Even more than usual, this post is highly speculative. It shares a vision for the United Methodist Church’s structure that is likely flawed in many ways and is certainly not likely to be acted upon. It is offered, though, as one idea that might spark wiser and smarter people to come up with better ideas.

It used to be a common saying that the United Methodist Church is in a similar situation today as the Church of England was when the Methodist movement got going.

I don’t know if it is true or not, but it does give rise to a thought.

The United Methodist Church should be a church with a Methodist movement within it.

The UMC needs to be both a church and a movement, not either one or the other.

As a church, it needs all the institutional framework that goes with a church. It needs local churches that offer worship and Christian education and serve as a platform for mission and ministry. It needs these local churches to remain viable and vital, so they can continue their mission into the future.

In many ways, this UMC is part of that generic mainline or old-line Protestant church that may have different accents in different places but is essentially the same whether it talks most often about John Wesley or John Knox or Martin Luther.

This church preaches, teaches, and equips. It hatches, matches, and dispatches the people who come into its fellowship. And it looks different in different places. It has to be contextual. The local churches have to have enough autonomy to be the body of Christ where they are.

In this church, the episcopal office and its supporting staff exist to serve the community of local churches. They exist to provide teaching and unity. One primary way they do this is by calling, forming, ordaining, and deploying the clergy orders, who themselves exist to serve the local churches in the annual conference.

In this model of church, the Call to Action process is necessary, but is best conceived not as a set of knives held to the throat of churches and pastors. It is best understood and offered to the local churches a gift to help them achieve their mission.

(Yes, I know this is all terribly naive, but stick with me.)

Within this dispersed, autonomous, connected collection of local churches, the other primary role of the conference and district are to provide for the one thing that most local churches cannot — Methodism.

The kind of intensive and intentional Wesleyan discipleship that early Methodism embodies is beyond the desires of most Christians. It is beyond the competencies of most local churches. The clergy and other leaders of local congregations have plenty to do if they want to sustain an excellent local church.

In my vision, then, the district and conference would exist in part to deploy, for lack of a better word, “circuit riders,” whose purpose would to recruit, support, and cultivate Methodist discipleship groups in various locations. They would recruit first and foremost from among the congregations of the United Methodist Church, but would open the ranks of the local society to other Christians. In most places, the Methodist society would be composed of members from multiple local churches.

The functions of the society would be narrowly drawn around Wesleyan small group meetings and periodic gatherings — inspired by the love feast and quarterly meetings of old — meant to foster and deepen discipleship.

In all of this, the members of the society would be encouraged to remain involved in the life of their home church, which would remain the primary place for preaching and the only place for the administration of the sacraments.

The primary virtue of having these circuit riders would be as a service for the mission of the church that most of our churches cannot provide on their own. A church like Resurrection has the resources and the sheer number of bodies to created autonomous discipleship systems within its “church” superstructure. Most of our local churches do not have those kinds of resources and never will. The staff of your typical 200-member and smaller UMC is doing well to provide good worship, care of members, Christian education and formation, and mission. Indeed, doing these tasks is a major accomplishment at most small and middle-sized churches.

If we want to retain Methodism, we need the larger connection to help out and stop expecting local churches to do something that does not fall within their primary skill set.

This idea of a church and movement might be crazy and unworkable. It makes sense to me at least as a concept. There are a hundred reasons — practical and organizational — why it would not work. But it is a vision that speaks to many of the things that I wrestle with. If they made me United Methodist pope, I would certainly try to get some smart people together to help me move in this general direction.