Reframe it with Resurrection

“Kids are leaving!”

“Change or die!”

“The church is doooomed!”

It has become quite trendy in the church to make sweeping pronouncements such as these. Consultants, coaches, superintendents, bloggers, experts of various levels of expertise, and so on - all seem to be chipping in these days about how awful the situation is, and getting worse every moment.

If you have read my blog for any length of time, you’ve probably read something I have written on this topic. I find myself a bit outside of the mainstream when it comes to questions of the church’s imminent demise. I’m not inclined to hand-wringing and navel-gazing. Instead, I find myself inclined toward resurrection.

It is from that perspective that I read the piece that made its way around the interwebs last week. It was called “Why Millenials areLeaving the Church,” written by Rachel Held Evans.

I almost always like reading what Rachel Held Evans has to say. She writes a lot, and I haven’t read everything she’s written, but what I have read I like. But I will admit that I definitely cringed when I saw the title to her recent post on CNN.com. “Why Millennials are Leaving the Church” is a title that sets the stage for another hand-wringing, navel-gazing lament.

At first, I was upset with the generalization that an entire generation of people has a rather uniform critique of religion that the church was struggling to hear and understand. Been there, heard that. At first, it was just more of the navel-gazing same. But then I realized that this was clearly not just another “Change or Die” piece written by a church insider.

“We long for Jesus,” she said. “Like every generation before ours and every generation after, we long for Jesus.”

Evans’ short (and easy to read - I hope you do) piece is a call for substance, for meaning, for theology. It is a call to rid ourselves of obsession over superficial style and moralistic sermonizing and reclaim the depth, the complexity, the challenge of truly following Jesus.

Yes! Yes, please, and more of it.

Now … Can we please not frame that in “I-told-you-so” language? Can we please not write hand-wringing headlines for pieces with such life-affirming truth? Could we please re-do the prelude to this service so that it doesn’t set such a negative tone for the proclamation of the Good News?

The church does not need to change because we are dying.

Rather, the church is changing because God is at work in the world.

The choice that faces church leadership is not whether to change or not. The choice that faces church leadership is how exactly we will cooperate with the vast and transformative changes that clearly are taking place. These changes, I believe, are no less than a great resurrection movement of the Holy Spirit.

Much of that movement seems to be taking place outside of the outdated structures of the church. It’s happening over in the garden while the disciples are sitting in a locked room, wringing our hands and worrying. However, many, many churches are responding to that new movement in exciting and creative ways, and that’s where I believe church leaders need to place our focus.

No need to wring hands, no need to lament, no need to get all worried! God is doing a powerful, wonderful, brand new thing. A healthy doctrine of resurrection will convince you of that.

Come on, church. Let’s go out to the garden with Mary and see what God’s up to these days.

The Phenomenal Future is Here Today

Three episodes in the last two days that refuse to support the myth that the United Methodist Church is doomed to age slowly, wither up, and die:

1) On Sunday, we sent a youth mission team and their adult chaperones to Memphis, Tennessee for the week. It was a smallish team, and that fact itself will cause some people to say, “See, told ya,” as if merely counting heads is enough to forecast the downfall of the church. Rather, I want to describe the spirit of the group.

The entire trip is being led by volunteer leadership; the Youth Director is not even on this trip. And the group is tweeting updates and pictures @campbellyouth so that we can keep tabs on everything they’re doing. The group is excited, motivated, dedicated, and having a great experience.

It’s really hard for me to participate in denominational gloom and doom when something wonderful like this is happening.

2) I baptized a seventeen year old girl on Sunday. Her family was surrounding her, along with some other high school friends. She started coming to worship here a few months ago because one of her friends invited her. And she comes by herself; her family stays home on Sundays, although she tells me she’s “working on them.”

One teenager, reaching out to another and inviting them to come to church, and a few months later, a baptism. And from here … who knows? She is a disciple of Jesus Christ, and is worshiping every week, studying the Bible with a small group of friends at school, and volunteering her service through participating in multiple groups in the community. She is changing the world, for God’s sake!

I just can’t seem to wring my hands to much about “irrelevance” when I see things like this going on.

3) At the memorial service for his grandmother, a teenager in our congregation shared a poignant remembrance. It was sad and funny and a fitting tribute to a beautiful woman whose love and joy and care for her family was inspiring to all who knew her. He allowed me to read it on his behalf as a part of the service.

And he closed his remarks with these sentences:

“It’s hard losing someone as great as my Grandma. She fought a long and hard battle with cancer. And trust me she did not give up. She is a fighter.

And I know now that she is in a much better and more comfortable place with our Lord and savior Jesus Christ, whom she loves and trusts. And I couldn’t ask God any more than to treat my Grandma as well as she treated me.”

This kid, who is as quiet and reserved as they come, had expressed the grief of the people gathered in the room in such an eloquent, powerful way, that the sanctuary was completely transformed. Each and every person there was unified by a common experience of “YES” and the Holy Spirit was profuse within and around all of us.

For some reason, it’s kind of tricky for me to be all worried about ineffective agency structures this afternoon.

I know, I know … a few anecdotes do not negate all the statistics and “big picture” trends and whatnot. I get it; I’m not naïve.

But I also believe with all my heart that renewal in the church will happen in the form of the anecdotes that I have mentioned above, not in grand denominational reconfigurations and programs and conferences and meetings and plans and schemes and all those things we seem to be trying to do.

One person at a time. Slowly. Oh so slowly. Yet inevitably. Inexhaustibly. With the certainty of hope.

I love the church. I love the United Methodist Church. I love Campbell United Methodist Church. And I refuse to participate in myth-making when it comes to the future. I can’t, because I have witnessed that “future” present in the here-and-now, and it is phenomenal!

A United Methodist "Buffet Effect"?

So what would it be like if “the Buffet effect” swept through the church?

Wouldn’t the clergy equivalent of Betty White be a hoot in the pulpit every week?

Who is the Paul McCartney of pastors, still innovating as he approaches age 70?

The United Methodist Church, like so much of culture, has become youth-obsessed. In our panic to save the denomination, we have objectified young people as a “target demographic” that, if sufficiently engaged, will swoop into our churches and save us from oblivion.

I understand all the stats - our congregations are decades older than the communities around them; we’re just a couple generations away from extinction; the structures, styles, and systems we utilize are archaic - I understand the reasons for the panic. I respect the work that Lovett Weems and others have done about the age trends in our denomination.

But we have overcompensated, I think. We have negated much of what is good about being Methodist, while doing very little that actually means anything to younger people. In fact, the church’s sudden discovery of young people and subsequent obsession with them is kind of freaking people out.

Kenda Creasy Dean says it better than anyone: “To treat adolescents as a separate species instead of as less experienced members of our own was one of the twentieth century’s largest category errors. Teenagers, obviously, are people too, and youth ministry is as much about being the church as it is about working with adolescents.” (Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church - p. 24)

And a sorry side effect of treating young people as separate from “us” is the perception that older people just don’t matter any more. Ministry is “about being the church” for youth, young adults, middling adults, and the really old ones, as well. And if there’s a place to point in order to explain the decline of the church it is at our ineptitude at “being the church” - period.

As Diana Butler Bass puts it, “Between business-as-usual church, internal stresses, external scandals, and rank hypocrisy, finally compounded by economic crisis, American Christianity is in a mess.” (Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening - p. 83)

The point is, of course the situation is driving young people away. That’s because it is driving everyone away.

You want to get young people to come back to church? Be a better church.

Which brings me back to my initial thought - Where are our pastoral Warren Buffets, Betty Whites, and Paul McCartneys? What are they doing? Are we relegating them to museum display identities that we smile at and applaud, but don’t really listen to?

Or are we engaging the wisdom, passion, and experience of such as these to provide vision, purpose, and integrity so that we can be as good a church as we possibly can?

Obviously, there is a lot of room for mulling over these questions. I am still in mid-mull myself. But I read two articles almost back to back this morning that started this mull, and I encourage you to give them a read also.

This one was a business piece in Newsweek. (Where the term "Buffet Effect" came from.)

This one was a column on the UMPortal.

I’m eager to read your mulling ... let's mull together!

More On Saving the Church

"The truth is I feel tremendous pressure to save the United Methodist Church."

So says Rev. Eric Van Meter, director of the Wesley Foundation at Arkansas State in a column for the UM Reporter. And so say we all. It is a pressure from within, driven by our love for the church and our deep desire for the church to flourish. It is a pressure that he says many young adults feel, and I count myself as one of those many. So I really resonate with what Eric is saying, and commend his column to you to read in full.

I have written before about the ministry of young adults; I have led a couple of workshops; it is one of my favorite topics. Among other things, my underlying feeling is that young adults are being objectified by the church as "savior" figures, rather than being valued intrinsically.

It seems sometimes as if young adults are valued as long as they can be useful in reanimating the dying denomination, and by "reanimating the dying denomination" I mean acting like younger versions of the people currently populating the pews. But not if they're just being themselves.

The problem, as Eric sees it, is when the church does things that "give church insiders something to rally around, [but have] little impact on most folks who populate Sunday morning worship or Wednesday night council meetings." And a lot of that complicated (and expensive) navel gazing has exactly the opposite effect that was intended. Let me explain.

Trendy programs and slick websites sometimes give the impression of trying too hard, especially when the true life experience of the church just doesn't jive with what is being presented. Or as Shane Raynor puts it (as only Shane can), "Let's face it...some of our churches stink. Why should we spend money advertising them?"

I might not want to say it exactly that way, but I fully agree with the sentiment. When a young adult (or any adult, just about) looks for a church, they go online. Based on what they find there, they'll attend a worship service or two or three. But if they do not experience a connection, something that resonates with what they have seen in the ad, they'll head somewhere else in a hurry.

As I see it, the way to "save the denomination" is to stop trying to save the denomination and focus on the church's identity as the body of Christ in the world today. The early church grew amazingly quickly, and it did so with an anti-publicity campaign that actually kept everything secretive and subversive, meeting at night and communicating with codes. They basically just cared for one another, ate meals together, and talked about Jesus. What would be the 21st century equivalent?

I love church, and I would like to see the United Methodist denomination flourish by being the body of Christ in a distinctively Methodist way. And I think that if we do, we will grow. Eric Van Meter asks, "Does wanting to save my church mean that I should fight to keep her young, or let her die and trust in the hope of resurrection?" I think that is a false choice; there is another way to think about it.

I think that wanting to save my church means that you have to abandon all thoughts of saving your church, and simply be the church as best you can. God will save the church if God will. In the meantime, we just live faithfully.

Young Clergy - "Don't Try So Hard"

It has been more than a week since I wrote last – a lot has happened in that week. Last Tuesday and Wednesday I was in Columbia, MO for a conversation among the conference’s younger clergy, Bishop Schnase, and a few of the conference staff (more on that below). Then Thursday and Friday my family drove to Wisconsin for a family funeral. Saturday was a day of rest and Sabbath for us. Then Sunday happened, with all of its activity and hubbub. So I haven’t had much time to sit and write, though I do have a lot of stuff in my noodle that needs to get written down.

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I think the Bishop’s conversation with young clergy was really good. I’m pretty sure I was the oldest young clergy there at age 37, and I’m not really sure where the cap is on that category, but I felt like we had a lot of time to talk about a lot of things the conference is dealing with – and not just as token young people, but as conversation partners with the Bishop. The people there were either commissioned or ordained, and they were all Caucasian, and they were almost all men – so there definitely were some people left out of the conversation.

We talked about a LOT of stuff – youth ministry, church camp, blogging, Facebook, worship, apportionments, church planting, training events, Annual Conference. And I had to leave before the group got together to come up with a letter or statement or something for the Bishop to take to the Conference Council meeting the following day. That was the final thing the group did on Wednesday afternoon.

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My favorite moment of the two days was the “Don’t try so hard” moment. Bishop Schnase was asking about blogging and how often and what content and should he post pictures and what about Facebook and should he have a profile and … someone said, “Just don’t try so hard.” But I completely understand where he is coming from. Everything he says and does has the extra weight of being said and/or done by a Bishop.

I think I actually saw a light bulb above his head, though, when he realized that being real about who you are and not worrying so much about that extra Episcopal weight is one of the most important values shared by people of younger generations. Authority is carried a lot differently by people in their 20s and 30s than their parents and grandparents.

For example, the Board of Ordained Ministry pushed me on my ideas about pastoral authority back when I was up for my ordination interview. I think the root cause of that point of disagreement was a generational conflict in what “authority” is. I was thinking of authority as an aspect of community and of relationship, something that is earned via trust and respect. That was rubbing up against an idea of authority as an aspect of position and rank, something that is given to an individual through a hierarchical system like the church.

Similarly, I think that Bishop Schnase’s “Don’t try so hard” moment came as he realized that his authority with the people in that room came not because the South Central Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church had elected him Bishop, but because we all like him and trust him and respect him for who he is. So if you have an idea and you want to post it to your blog, post it! If you see a cool thing and you want to share it, take a picture with your fancy new iPhone and share it!

It is better to be authentically who you are than to be overly concerned about what someone else thinks your role should be. That’s what “don’t try so hard” means to me.

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My favorite personal moment from the two days was when I offered the suggestion that we needn’t worry so much about high schoolers leaving the church when they go off to college. In fact, I think we should encourage it! We should let them go, and figure out how to be the church for them wherever they land.

There is a lot of anxiety about young people leaving the church – but what better time of life to be going away, cutting the ties of childhood, figuring out who you are going to be in your adult life than the years right after high school? Maybe we should concentrate more on equipping them to be faithful disciples than to be good church members, then when they decide to leave the church, they’ll be more secure in their identity and therefore more likely to one day return.

I do not think that my suggestion was very well received – at least there wasn’t really any further conversation about it.

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And my favorite all-around moment of the two days was simply being together with young people in ministry. There is just a different vibe in the room. We hung out, shared some things, disagreed about stuff, laughed a lot, talked about our passions, shared personal stories about families and friends, envisioned ministry as it could/should be, and just generally had a good time together. We got our picture taken by a big fake moose. We went to Jazz for supper and made jokes about Coonass. We reflected on the possible meanings of a bumper sticker claiming, “My Other Car is Made of Meat.”

One informal conversation pondered the viability of a Fantasy Church League where we could choose various ministries from various congregations and accumulate points on a weekly basis, like Fantasy Football except with Church! We’re already tracking attendance, baptism, and mission numbers online, Fantasy Church can’t be too far away.

The future of the United Methodist Church is bright, I think because younger people seem to know better how to get along with one another as colleagues and friends. I hope we never lose that. Somebody smack me if I do. Like this:

Still my favorite.

Bolt

Usain Bolt is a fast man. He runs faster than any human being alive and for that matter - any human being who has ever lived. He not only won the Olympic sprints, he made the other runners, who also happen to be very, very fast people, look slow.

And not only is Bolt fast, he runs so easily that it actually looks like he's running slow, kind of jogging along. I know he's not, but it just shouldn't look so easy, you know? If he is going to crush the competition into oblivion, at least he should make it look like he's working at it.

Not only is Bolt fast, and not only does he make it look easy, he has a really good time while he's doing it, and it shows. He's out there posing, mugging the camera, dancing, taking off his shoes, messing around with other runners - he's having fun. He's 22 years old, the fastest human on earth, and he's having fun.

Which, apparently, is not okay with the Olympic people. "That's not the way we perceive being a champion," said Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic Committee president, and confirmed stick in the mud. It seems Bolt's behavior might be perceived as disrespectful to the other runners, and not fitting for an Olympic champion.

Never mind the thousands of people screaming their lungs out in the bird's nest for him

or the other runners obvious admiration for his accomplishment, saying things like, "I love watching him when he does his thing" and calling him names like "Superman 2."

But the sight of a young man thumping on his chest and throwing out his arms at the end of a race is just too much for the IOC, or at least for its president. He said, "He might have interpreted that in another way, but the way it was perceived was 'catch me if you can.' You don't do that. But he'll learn. He's still a young man."

I think it's that "You don't do that" line that gets under my skin. Because when Rogge says "you don't do that" of course what he means is "I don't do that." Obviously, Usain Bolt does do that, and Rogge just thinks it is somehow not reflective of the Olympic attitude or something.

And because "he's still a young man" that means obviously he just doesn't know what's appropriate. The corollary being, if he were older he would therefore know what was appropriate and then act ... well, ... appropriately. But it doesn't cross Rogge's mind that Bolt might, in fact, know exactly what Rogge thinks would be appropriate and has another idea altogether about what "appropriate" really is.

AS USUAL, I see something here that the church might learn. (You knew I'd get to it eventually, didn't you?)

Here's the question: How often do church people say "You don't do that in church" when what they really mean is "I don't do that in church"?

And further, how much do church people say, "The young people might be a bit ... 'energetic' ... now, but they're young and they'll learn how to act more appropriately when they grow up" or something along those lines? As if being energetic in church is something we should grow out of over time.

MAYBE, JUST MAYBE the people in church who are doing things differently know exactly what all those "church people" think would be more appropriate, and have their own ideas about what makes something appropriate.

And maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't expect the young people in our churches to one day grow up to be just like all us old folks. Maybe we should just let everybody be who we are and figure out how to be okay with that.

Usain Bolt says, "I do not compare myself to other people, I am just trying to be myself." And I for one love watching him be who he is.

Update: Pink hair in Springfield schools: Disruptive? Apparently, "You don't do that" also applies to hair coloring. I hope Springfield School administrators are rooting out all those teachers who are hiding their grey!

Young Adults

My brother likes to say that young adults are not a field of sociological study, an observation which is especially true for people who happen to be young adults. For young adults, young adulthood is called life, and the tendency for the church to objectify young adults as a demographic to be analyzed and then "reached out to" seems a completely disconnected and sometimes even insulting endeavor.

I personally am dismayed by the almost desperate tendency to pin the "savior" lable on young adults and so-called "young adult ministries," whatever those are. It sometimes feels like church leaders think that, if we can just get enough people under 30 here, everything's going to be okay. All of the decline in membership and ministry and relevance and all that jazz will just magically go away if we can grab a hold of a few twenty-somethings and bring 'em in. My response, simply put, is that the church's approach to young adults is counterproductive. Let me 'splain:

Let's start with the premise: It seems as though there is an effort to get more young adults into the church by studying ways that the church can reach out to them. Now, do you hear that? The question on the table is how can "we" (the church) get "them" (the young adults) involved with "us" (the church again).

So, what usually happens next is that somebody who thinks they are clever says something pithy like, "The answer is to meet them where they are, not expect them to come to us." Have you heard that one before? But notice the problem with that line of thought is exactly the same problem as before - the artificial separation between "them" and "us" is still there. If "we" are metaphorically going to meet "them" where they are, young adults are still objectified and separated from the church, rather than thought of as the church themselves. This line of thinking says that young adults are a mission field, they are not part of the church.

What would happen if we started with the belief that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female (i.e. Galatians 3) - and then added to that list OLD nor YOUNG? How would the church engage in ministry differently if we truly believed that and made that idea the foundation for what we do? What if, instead of "bringing them in" or even "meeting them where they are," we just let young adults (ALL adults, in fact) just be who they are and do what they do where they are, and everyone could just be okay with that.

Even my brother misses the mark sometimes. He has this big thing about bringing a rock concert experience into the church worship service. What if, instead of that, we just thought of the rock concert experience itself as worship? What if, instead of trying to find the magic program to install into our church ministry plan to attract young adults, we just gave people permission to rethink what church is all about in the first place?

Young adults, who are the church, could just do what they do, and everyone would be okay with it. Retirees, who are the church, could just do what they do, too, and everyone would be okay with that, too. Youth, who are the church, ... Children, who are the church, .... you get the idea. In fact, young adults and retirees (and youth and children for that matter) might just find themselves doing things together every now and then, and everyone would be okay with that, even.

There is no "them" and "us" - it's all us. Young adults are not the saviors of the church, they are the church, here and now, wherever they happen to be and whatever they happen to be doing.