Wisconsin talks about covenant

Here is the account of the handling of the clergy covenant proposed by a group within the Wisconsin annual conference.

“Rev. Steve Scott presented the Clergy Covenant report at Sunday morning’s Plenary session. The team was formed at the 2012 Annnual Conference session to address procedures for clergy in order to help resolve issues that harm the clergy covenant within the Wisconsin United Methodist Church. “This is all very personal,” Scott said. “We are the church together. What we have discovered is that we can either continue to debate over differences in theology or we can focus, as this team is charged to do, on living together in better ways.” Bishop Jung affirmed the document as “a tool to be used for future conversation, not as a document up for debate or approval.”

The report was presented to the clergy session according to this report. The presentation to the clergy session dropped a controversial recommendation regarding sexuality. The Q&A on the clergy covenant web site gives some indication of the discussion around that provision. Before the conference, the web site had said the covenant would be voted on by the clergy session. I cannot find sign of that now.

The Wisconsin conference website has a link to a video of the plenary session at which the covenant was discussed. The covenant discussion begins at about 1 hour and 8 minutes into the session. Here is a report of the clergy session presentation. Here is a report of the plenary session presentation. These appear to be advanced texts and not transcripts of the actual presentations.

In my brief watching of the video from the plenary session, I believe I heard the presenter says that the recommendation about sexuality (recommendation 6 in the report linked in the first paragraph of this post) was not presented to the conference because doing so was the only way to ensure that everyone in the clergy covenant group returned to the group again when they started to meet again. I may be misinterpreting it, but it sounds like some conversation went on between the time the group published its report and the time the presentations were made at annual conference session.

The chaplain in the army has a collar on his neck …

Mitchell Lewis is writing about being an Army chaplain. He gives an insider’s look for those of us whose only knowledge is watching MASH.

Leo McGarry on being a pastor

Something Chad Holtz wrote a few days ago got me thinking of this West Wing scene.

Like Holtz, the 17th century British priest Richard Baxter believed that one problem facing many clergy was that they had never actually experienced salvation themselves. To use Leo McGarry’s terms, they’d never been down in that hole and found their way out.

Here’s how Baxter put it:

Alas! it is the common danger and calamity of the Church, to have unregenerate and inexperienced pastors, and to have so many men become preachers before they are Christians; who are sanctified by dedication to the altar as the priests of God, before they are sanctified by hearty dedication as the disciples of Christ; and so to worship an unknown God, and to preach an unknown Christ, to pray through an unknown Holy Spirit, to recommend a state of holiness and communion with God, and a glory and a happiness which are all unknown, and like to be unknown to them forever. He is like to be but a heartless preacher, that hath not the Christ and grace that he preacheth, in his heart.

These words of Baxter get, I think, at what the United Methodist Church means — or used to mean — when it asked after the gifts and graces of candidates for ordination. We wanted to know if candidates knew Christ as savior and had evidence of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in their lives.

If I press this line too far, I suspect someone will raise the specter of Donatism to accuse me. And yet I find Leo McGarry quite persuasive on this point. The best person to help another person out of a hole is one whose been down there before and knows the way out.

Do we know the way out?

The goals of a top pastor

Mark Beeson is senior pastor of one of the most vital congregations of United Methodists in Indiana. His church — by all outward appearances — does incredible ministry and is busy spawning offspring congregations.

A recent post on his blog gave me a little insight into the mindset of a senior pastor who overseas the growth of such a church. Beeson wrote about his personal goals:

1. I want to do something with my life that actually makes a difference. I long for the assurance that I’ve had a noticeable impact and made a contribution.
2. I intend to serve God’s purposes until I can do no more and when my time on earth is done, I want God to find me in the middle of some worthwhile task – continuing the work of Christ’s followers before me.
3. I’m determined to look for the next right thing to do, each-and-every-day of my life. When Jesus brings me home I’ll be glad to know I served God’s purposes to the end. Even if I don’t finish every little project I’m working on, I want to be like Paul, “the doulos (slave) of Christ,” doing what God wants me to do and finishing well.

Beeson’s first point reminds me of Steve Jobs’ statement that his goal was to leave a ding in the universe.

The world was his parish

From a letter by John Wesley to “Mr. John Smith”

[W]herever I see one or a thousand men running into hell, be it in England, Ireland, or France, yes, in Europe, Asia, Africa, or America, I will stop them if I can: As a Minister of Christ, I will beseech them, in His name, to turn back, and be reconciled to God. Were I to do otherwise, were I to let any soul drop into the pit, whom I might have saved from everlasting burnings, I am not satisfied God would accept my plea, “Lord, he was not of my parish.”

Who is the pastor?

I find myself torn between two or three ideas about what it means to be a pastor.

John Wesley — the saver of souls and spreader of Scriptural holiness as a thing that spreads from person to person.

Adam Hamilton — the architect of a congregation as a system and organization.

Eugene Peterson — resident theologian and contemplative poet.

Of course, there are other ways to conceptualize the pastor. These are just the three that most readily spring to my mind.

These all overlap in some ways, but each one has its own center of gravity. The United Methodist Church is not clear about what it sees as the pastor’s identity. I am still sorting through this.

Take thou authority?

In an age without authority and a church in which leaders have great anxiety about claiming authority, how do we read Hebrews 13:17?

Have confidence in your leaders and submit to their authority, because they keep watch over you as those who must give an account. Do this so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no benefit to you.

The text is an exhortation to the people to follow the leaders of their church community because those leaders will be held to account by God for how they led the people.

This sense of accountability was part of what drove John Wesley to do what he did. He read passages like this and Ezekiel 33 as removing from him the choice of whether to lead and confront the people when their ways strayed from Scripture’s description of a holy and God-pleasing life.

You could say, in a sense, that Wesley was acting out of self-interest. He was taking up his cross mindful that if he failed to do so, he would fall under the grave condemnation reserved for leaders who shirk their duty to God’s people.

Now, some will read this and find it displeasing. What? Should we not do everything we do out of love only and never fear or a sense of duty and obligation? In the perfected heart that would be the case. But we are not perfect. Our flesh still rebels and tempts us to turn aside. It is the very example of love to endure that which is not pleasing to us for the sake of others.

But we live in an age in which “authority” is a dirty word. Our democratic impulses argue against authority. The very spirit of modernity and post-modernity is an assault on the idea of authority. Our exegesis and theology remove the threat from the passages of Scripture that speak of authority and accountability to God.

Does a verse such as Hebrews 13:17 have anything to do with the church today?

Do you visit house to house?

Do you visit house to house? How does that work? How do you do it?

It was from the first a challenge for Methodists and something that they urged on all preachers. Our order of ordination includes questions still about such visitation. The purpose, at first, was not simply to exchange nice words but to teach and instruct. And, yes, people did not take to it then either. Richard Baxter — who was urged as a model for Methodist preachers — wrote at length about how to deal with the fact that people in the parish do not want the preacher to come around quizzing them on the faith.

In the minutes of the early Methodist conferences, the issue is joined this way:

For what avails public preaching alone, though we could preach like angels? We must, yea, every travelling Preacher must, instruct them from house to house. Till this is done, and that in good earnest, the Methodists will be little better than other people. Our religion is not deep, universal uniform; but superficial, partial, uneven. It will be so, till we spend half as much time in this visiting, as we now d in talking uselessly.

What do we have to offer?

I have been wrestling recently with the meaning of being a pastor. Some of my recent posts reflect some of the questions and tensions. Often in times like these, I pull out well-worn books on my shelf: Will Willimon, Eugene Peterson, Henri Nouwen.

Here is one passage from Nouwen’s In the Name of Jesus:

I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. … The great message that we have to carry, as ministers of God’s Word and followers of Jesus, is that God loves us not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God has created and redeemed us in love and has chosen us to proclaim that love as the true source of all human life.

This is Nouwen’s deep conviction. I want to ask if he is correct, but I fear this is part of my recent struggle — the search for certain answers to uncertain questions. So, I will respond without attempting to pretend I know enough to judge him.

I hear in the call to “irrelevance” a different voice than the ones that animate my denomination. And so, I fear that listening to Henri Nouwen will make me an unfit United Methodist.

I see he ends with the “source of all human life,” and so I wonder if he is unconcerned with eternal questions. Is the pastor concerned finally with this life only? Or is eternity assumed by Nouwen and so unstated? Any true human life will extend beyond the grave, he might say. I do not know.

He says we offer our own vulnerable self. But is that true? I recall the painting on the seminary wall of Methodist preachers climbing into a ship with the words “Offer them Christ.” In addition to proclaiming Christ, do we not also offer Christ? And is this not something more important than our vulnerable selves?

Nouwen may have part of an answer to my questions:

The Christian leader of the future is the one who truly knows the heart of God as it has become flesh, “a heart of flesh,” in Jesus. Knowing God’s heart means consistently, radically, and very concretely to announce and reveal that God is love and only love, and that every time fear, isolation, or despair begins to invade the human soul, this is not something that comes from God. This sounds very simple and maybe even trite, but very few people know that they are loved without any condition or limits.

Would John Wesley let Nouwen preach to a Methodist society? Or is such a question pointless given the change in time and place between the men? Would the Board of Ordained Ministry approve Nouwen’s candidacy? Would he lead people to Christ?

I am full of questions this week and few answers.

Texas UMC: Stay in your first career

If a proposed policy goes into place, I would not qualify to be certified as a candidate for ordination as elder or deacon in Texas.

Why?

Because I’m 45.

Read about it here. (Jeremy does wonderful work for a young buck.)

Someone explain to me now how Generation X is unjustly paranoid about Boomers and Millennials conspiring to step on us?