EPISCOPAL ADDRESS Arkansas Annual Conference
07-02-2010EPISCOPAL ADDRESS Arkansas Annual Conference
June 7, 2010
I want to share with you a grainy, gritty image of the past. The Times, They Are A’ Changing – Bob Dylan singing.
As a child of the 60’s I listened to the nasal twang, the harmonica and guitar of Bob Dylan, and I’ve always liked this song. It fit the spirit of the age, and unlike many of the songs and ballads and words of protest and prophesy out of the 60’s, it is still relevant. We are in rapidly changing times. The old verities shift. It is a different world. To say it is a new and dangerous world is to state the obvious.
As we focus on the theme of “Imagine Ministry,” there is a metaphor/Biblical Text that serves as a background for the Episcopal Address today. You know it well. It is the story of Moses leading the children of Israel into the desert across the Red Sea and into the Wilderness of Sinai. They were in the wilderness for a long, long time. On more than one occasion they would murmur and complain that Moses led them into the wilderness to die. They would prefer slavery in Egypt to the unknown and uncomfortable world of the wilderness. They would prefer the “fleshpots” of Egypt and the bread of Egyptian ovens to the uncertainty of manna from an unknown source.
Like the old story of the lion who escaped from the local zoo, only to be found pacing back and forth in front of a five foot fence, a fence it could have easily jumped. So, also the children of Israel. The lion was programmed into its patterns of behavior from the past. To pass through the wilderness, the Israelites would have to change their perspective and way of thinking and acting. It would call for more than a corporate change – it would require deep personal transformation.
We share the wilderness experience of the Children of Israel. The Church, the United Methodist Church and our Church in Arkansas are in a land we know not, a culture that is rapidly changing, a world for which we in the church were not prepared to engage, nor for which most of us were trained. Our patterns of behavior no longer resonate.
This wilderness experience is a time of great change. While the Gospel truths to which we strongly hold are the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, the way in which we communicate the Gospel, the ways in which we live out the gospel, the manner of personalizing our own gospel experience must change or it will fall on deaf ears. The ways in which we “do” church, “are” church -- the ways in which we articulate the Gospel must learn from our new and strange environment. Like God’s challenge to Moses and the Israelites to choose life or death, we will either choose life giving deep change or we will experience slow death. Someone has said that for the kind of deep change we envision, we need the “courage to walk naked into a land of uncertainty.” Where we find ourselves in this story is not so much about the way out of the wilderness, but about how we pay attention to the landscape of the wilderness and how we are reformed and renewed by what we encounter.
In late 2008 and early 2009, discussion began to pop up across the annual conference about our future and how to face it. All the discussions, though varied in both depth and detail, acknowledged that we need to experience a transformation in the way we do church in Arkansas. We can no longer do as we have done in the past if we are to reverse the decline of vitality and the loss of energy and passion in our church. Our purpose, “To make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world,” will become a laudable, but laughable tag line if we do not experience deep change in the life of our conference.
The Imagine Ministry Team was formed, but not to fix all our problems or tell us how to do solutions. Rather we have secured an insightful consultant. (You will hear from Gil Rendle later today.) We have been intent on gathering information, raising questions and creating the context for conversation that recognizes that God is doing a new thing in our midst, something dramatic is happening – as it did at Sinai; and we now need to decide how we will respond. As we move forward, the change of which I speak is not about rearranging the office chairs in the conference office or reducing the shared ministry giving.
On our journey I suspect the conference will deal with structural and financial issues, but the real issue before us is not structure, and it is certainly not money. The issues are much more profound and fundamental. It is how we will view and deal with the wilderness/world in which we live and through which we are moving. It is how we confront our fears and hopes and opportunities. It is about our attitudes, our understanding of who we are – clergy and laity. Will we be bound by the past or use it as a spring board into the future. Will we pace back and forth in front of a fence or will we jump over it into a new life. It is about personal and corporate deep change that is both risky and transforming.
Through four regional meetings involving over 1600 clergy and laity the Imagine Ministry Team has invited all the local churches of our conference into a conversation and a time of discernment and discussion. We have shared data, some of which is very stark and not very pleasant. The first step into the future is to look at the hard facts of the present and the past. The second step is to let go of the past in order to embrace a positive future. To that end, we have commissioned a staff and structure assessment to analyze what we are doing now. Local churches have been invited into the conversation around three critical questions the results of which you will return today. In a few minutes Susan Ledbetter will invite you into a conversation about the central values and strengths of our conference in an annual conference-wide discernment process.
It is interesting that as we have moved through this year, as we have held the regional meetings, as we have had local churches doing their homework, we have heard the voices of both hope and fear, of cynicism and expectation. Others have simply refused to join the conversation. Groups have coalesced, conversations have transpired. Some say, “Go for it.” While others say, “Cut the budget and go back to business as usual. It is exactly what you would expect to hear in the wilderness. In essence, there are folks who are saying, “Let us go back to Egypt, at least we will die in comfort.” While others say, “Let us take the risk, ask the hard questions about who we are and who we can yet become, let us go up and take the promised land. We are able!”
What really excites me in all this, are the signs of hope. Churches have written to me with excitement about the conversations in their administrative councils. Individuals have spoken of hope restored. One young pastor wrote: I really thought the Imagine Ministry meeting would be one more silly waste of money and an institutional “hoop” to have to go attend and jump through. I thought it was ridiculous that you required us to be there; but, I stand corrected. I just wanted to say that I thought the presentation was very well done. I was thoroughly intrigued by it….I am very impressed by the conversation that you have started….It seems there is an inherent skepticism in my mind for authority unless that particular authority is proven to be worth respecting. I suppose my generation has just seen such a break down in “authorities” in our lifetime and in history that we are scared to blindly put our trust in someone or something…I smiled when I left the meeting last Sunday.” I am excited not so much by the kind words, but by the underlying hope that we can, and indeed, must cross all the artificial boundaries that separate us if we are to navigate the wilderness.
And new forms of ministry are beginning to bloom. For example, we are just beginning to utilize a new style of ministry in special situations - Transitional Intentional Interim Ministry. Mt. View Church had been served long and well for 18 years by Rev. Steve Johnson. The church was not in crisis. He was to be appointed to First United Methodist Church, Hope, Arkansas at the first of the year. It would be an opportunity for the cabinet to facilitate a transitional intentional ministry that would bring a pastor, Dr. Ed Matthews, with specialized training to a church for a designated period of time as the congregation made the challenging transition from an 18 year pastorate to a new pastor. It would be an opportunity to work through the grief and to re-examine who and what the church was all about. Listen for a few moments as Missy Irvin speaks of their experience.
The wilderness is not a stable place. It is filled with all kinds of questions, some already asked, others yet to be articulated. But if we are to cope with it and continue the journey through it, deep change will be required of us.
What excites me is that there is a very real and palpable movement toward the realization that deep change is possible. For me, and this is very personal, I think this involves finding our value before God and in the Kingdom of God as related not to size of congregation or building, or salary, or conference position, but in the satisfaction that we are part of a team that is bringing people to Christ. It is not about my status, it is about our effectiveness. It is about leaving the comfortable fleshpots of Egypt and our self-absorbed attitudes behind. Frankly, some will resist. Others will wait for someone to tell them what to do, then complain they don’t want to do it. There will be the cynics and nay-sayers. There will be those who are in deep denial about the need for any change. But we are realizing that there is no silver bullet that will immediately fix all our problems, whatever the problems are. There is a dawning realization that we need to forget about what we know and discover what we need.
There is an awakening that the most important issue before us is not the cost of the pension program and our health insurance, but whether or not we will once again become a movement through which the breath of the Holy Spirit will blow.
We are beginning to understand that we can reinvent ourselves, and transform our church and rise to the future God is offering.
The Arkansas Annual Conference has advantages. We have a high percentage of full member clergy under the age of 35. We are the envy of conferences all across the church because of the “Connected In Christ” process. We are blessed with an effective training process for new church development pastors. But most importantly, we have clergy and laity that refuse to be part of a dying church.
The hard work is just beginning. But this is our time. We were born for this hour, for this day, for this week, for this year. God has given into our hands the gift of a precious opportunity. The choice is ours. God said, “I place before you life and death.” We can stay as we are and slowly die. We can embrace the risk of deep change and live.
Choose life.
