Bandits No More

I would be happy to have some perspective on this. The Central Texas Conference, like many if not all Annual Conferences, will be establishing a new way of figuring clergy pensions for 2007. For more information about the new plan in general, please check the General Board of Pensions site.

Here is the way our conference Board of Pensions is proposing we fund it: each church will pay 12% of each clergy’s compensation package, up to the DAC (Denominational Average Compensation), then an additional 5% on the entire compensation.

Thus, some churches will be paying a total of 17% of their clergy compensation towards pension. On the other hand, a church that pays its clergy $150,000 (and we have at least a couple who do) would pay only 9.2% total. For a specific example, the cost to our cabinet-level folk will be 11.3%.

Sure, in actual dollars the higher paying church is out quite a bit more money. As a percentage of its budget, though, the larger, higher-paying church will be spending far less than the smaller churches.

I ran the numbers provided by the Conference Office, and a flat rate of 14% across the board would adequately fund our conference’s pension. In response to this suggestion, I was told that our largest two churches already pay 10% of the total apportioned budget of the CTC, and that this would be too much to put on them.

I wonder how many of the smaller churches, many of which are declining anyway, will be driven under by this new plan, which shifts more budgetary weight (as a percentage of budget) to them, rather than to the larger churches.

I remember listening to Keith Green back in the early 80s. In those days I thought he was a better speaker than singer, though it was the latter he was best known for. I remember hearing him inveigh against “Jesus Junk,” the sentimental mementos we fill our homes with. Well, Nathanael Blake seems to be on the same page as Green. Here are his final comments:

Treating Christianity as an industry, a business with a profit margin, has corrupted the church, and the crowning achievements of the CMI are at the core of the refuse pile. It’s time to end the token preaching to the choir, the coded religious messages, and the charging of money for events that supposedly exist to preach the gospel.

Get out. Those who want to create worship and devotional music, go back to where you belong, which isn’t arenas, festivals, and clubs, but churches. The rest of you, go out into the world; claiming Christianity and presenting Christian messages in your songs won’t prevent you from succeeding…if you have the necessary musical ability (U2, anyone?).

Quit pretending that Christianity is a brand name, because there will be Hell to pay for it, in the most literal sense. If Christianity is true, then there are lost souls dying and going to Hell all around us, while the church sits and sells Jesus to itself.

Go read the whole thing. I’m happy there are still some young trouble makers out there.

We’re in the midst of some big changes. As of June 1 we’ll be part of the North District of the Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church. The old Texarkana District will be history. Conference wide we’re seeing a huge shift in accountability structures. The Annual Conference will exist to equip local congregations (like ours) to fulfill our mission to reach people for Jesus. That’s a huge change from the ethos of the local church existing to support the general church.

At the closing worship service for the Texarkana District we heard one way this will work itself out. In her first year in the Texas Conference Bishop Huie visited all the churches, inquiring into their strengths and challenges. Can you guess what the most commonly reported strength was? “We’re a friendly loving church.” It sounds better than, “We’re an unfriendly hateful church,” doesn’t it? But the dirty little secret of our “friendly loving” churches is that they’re not fulfilling their God-given mission. Some are so self-absorbed in their friendly love that they want nothing to do with outsiders (I’ve pastored one of those churches before). Some settle for being loving by just being nice to people. When it comes to evangelism we either reduce it to “being nice” or we add the thought, “When people see that I’m a nice person they’ll come to believe good things about Jesus.”

I don’t know if outsiders think of our churches as “friendly and loving” or not, but the statistics have been consistent over many years: we’re not winning people to Christ. Many churches aren’t even maintaining their membership levels. Attendance is dropping. “Friendly and loving” may be nice, but it’s not fulfilling our primary mission (Remember – Jesus said, “Go make disciples of all nations. Baptize them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” – That’s our mission).

Bishop Huie has noticed how many churches are happy to be friendly and loving while the people around them miss Jesus. Our preacher Sunday night, retiring Texarkana District Superintendent Howdy Dawson, reported that she told the cabinet, “If I hear one more church say, ‘We’re friendly and loving’ I think I’m going to puke.” Mighty strong language from a bishop. And just what we need to hear.

Howdy recognized the seriousness of the issue. He spoke of being a friendly loving pastor to friendly loving churches throughout his whole ministry. Everyone who knows Howdy knows he has a big heart. We like friendly and loving. But Howdy said that after listening to the bishop over the past couple of years he’s wondering if he hasn’t missed something – that by settling for being friendly and loving he’s missed out on leading his churches to reach people for Jesus.

Instead of being held accountable for being friendly and loving, we’re now going to have to give account for winning people to Christ. That’s going to cause some discomfort and conflict. We’re going to be roused from our sentimental apathy, complacency and comfort. Nice just won’t cut it anymore.

The bible says, “We love, because he [Jesus] first loved us.” That same book said that that same Jesus is the standard for our love. If we really love people we will tell them about Jesus. Though it’ll cost us, we won’t settle for having them think, “Those Methodists sure are nice.” Instead it’ll be, “That Jesus those Methodists exhibit sure looks interesting. I think I’d like to follow him too.”

Perhaps you’ve heard the joke, “How many United Methodists does it take to change a light bulb?” Sometimes the answer is, “Change? What do you mean, Change?” The other answer is, “About a hundred. You need to set up a study commission composed of equal representation from each Conference, Jurisdiction, Racial/ethnic group, every gender, etc. Give them a quadrennium or two and maybe something will happen.”

One of our current study commissions is looking into ordained ministry. If you’d like, you can read a news report of their latest gathering. What most struck my interest are the final comments.

The Rev. Grant Hagiya said the commission needs to explain the theological foundation behind current practices. He is superintendent of the Los Angeles District of the California-Pacific Annual Conference and a member of the ministry study commission.
“We think the church is confused because it’s not presented to them in a way that’s a practical understanding. If we can do that, we can provide a great service to the church,” he said.
“We have a dual ecclesiology, Catholic in that we have bishops and elders, but Protestant in that we have deacons and local pastors,” he said. “There’s a healthy tension about this, but it also points to the practical ways we need to deal with polity.”

Rev. Hagiya could go farther. Our Catholic ecclesiology also shows up in much of our sacramental thinking. The church is seen as the dispenser of grace. I think that’s a major reason for the outcry against the Ed Johnson decision. When Rev. Johnson denied membership to a practicing homosexual, some took it as akin to shutting the doors of grace to the man. Since grace comes through the church, closing the door of membership to him was equivalent to closing the doors of grace. Rev. Johnson’s supporters (I’ve read more from them than from Rev. Johnson himself) take a more Protestant point of view. While the church may be a place of grace, it has no monopoly on grace. Thus the statement, “You are not at the appropriate place for membership now” is not at all the same (from their point of view) as “No grace for you, bub, until you straighten yourself out.”
In this sense at least, we have come so far from Wesley’s position that our membership policies would be unrecognizable to him. Unrecognizable as Methodist, any way. He’d likely see in them a mirror of the Church of England of his day. In Wesley’s day it was remarkably easy to become a Methodist – just evidence a “desire to flee the wrath to come.” Getting in was easy. Staying in – that was the tough part. The old time Methodists used the General Rules as a sort of “epistemology of seriousness” to see if the evidence was real. If you weren’t living according to the Rules, then they’d judge you weren’t really interested in fleeing the wrath to come. Wesley practiced strict discipline with his people.
We gave up on strict discipline long ago. We’ve come to think discipline, rather than an expression of grace, is the antithesis thereof. Oh, we still play at discipline – one the one side we come down on the homosexuals, on the other, we condemn our Presidential and Vice Presidential United Methodists for their participation in war. Because we’ve given up being a disciplined people (who hate nothing but sin and love nothing but God), so many of our current attempts at discipline seem to unchristian pettiness to those in the opposite camps.
Our Catholic/Protestant bi-polarity doesn’t help us in this regard. Notice how Rev. Hagiya divides the territory. On the Catholic side: Bishops & Elders. On the Protestant side: Deacons & Local pastors. Where is the power in the church? Who makes the policy? Who makes the decisions? Sure looks like a power imbalance to me. Is there any wonder our “Catholic” side argues for a “Catholic” view of church membership?
But don’t think it’s easy for the bishops. While they may have the most power, they also experience the greatest conflict. In their (“Catholic”) position they have a duty to stand up for the unity, holiness and purity of the church. They are to lead the application of discipline in the church. But many don’t want to. Some don’t want to remove their homosexual friends from ministry. Who would want to remove a friend of any kind from ministry? Some want to have theological freedom akin to their peers who work in the university – to be able to rationalize key doctrines like the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection without consequence. But they can’t – their job is to uphold the doctrine and discipline.
While I think many things can and should be held in “healthy tension,” I’m afraid, contrary to Rev. Hagiya, the Catholic/Protestant divide within our ecclesiology isn’t one of them.

Just finished Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz. It was a good read. Sometimes it was a great read, sometimes a less than satisfying read, so overall I’ll settle with good.

For two reasons I really do recommend it to you, though.
1) it is written from the perspective of a person who, though he grew up in church, “gets” why so many people in our society do not want anything to do with “The Church.”

2) it is a provocative account of Christian spirituality that is written entirely without Christianese. More than two decades after Steve Taylor’s “I want to be a clone,” this book finally follows through on translation. Not that others haven’t done it before, but Miller does a fine job at talking things Christian without using language you would only know if you had never missed a VBS.

When Christians immigrate to America (or any other country), they not only have to learn a new language, but also a range of concepts that either have no role in the Kingdom of God or else are understood very differently. One such concept is “enemy.”

Those whose lives are shaped by following Jesus remember the Master talking about enemies. “If they hate me, they will hate you also,” he said. Jesus demonstrated that this hate was unidirectional, however. How else could it be when we also hear him say, “Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.” When we combine Jesus’ statements with what we see in his life, we get the idea that this enmity is a one-way affair. They hate us, we love them. They try to hurt us, we try to bless them. Their decision to stand as our enemies in no way forces us to take the same stance toward them.

But then we immigrate to a country that has enemies. Once we arrive we learn that our position has weakened. When we lived with our primary allegiance to Jesus, someone’s declaration of enmity did not compel us to make a similar declaration toward them. With our new dual citizenship (or have we been naturalized – given up our Kingdom citizenship?), we learn that the declaration of enmity does control us. Now when someone speaks enmity or acts as an enemy to us we are required to respond in kind.

Doubtless this relinquishing of control to those who would be our enemies makes sense in the logic of our new citizenship. Although we are allowed to trust in a god, this trust is not allowed to go very far. Instead of trusting in a god who commands us (often in ways contrary to our own desires), we get guns, bombs, tanks, planes, etc. Apparently, it is thought, these are more powerful than any god, and thus more worthy of our trust. When we read the bible we see Israel thinking similar thoughts. Unfortunately, we also see that it didn’t work very well.

Millions of people have come to America – in ways not in accord with America’s laws – looking for a better life. Many stubbornly refuse to assimilate and learn American language. Even as they work hard, participate in and contribute to their new communities, they retain their primary allegiance to their homeland. Who knows – maybe Christians can learn something from them.

I’m going to join the crowd and comment on the rising price of oil and gasoline. Here are some random thoughts in no particular order:

• I’d rather pay low prices than high.
• I hear lots of complaints about the high prices. At the same time, I still see lots of low MPG vehicles on the road. The high prices have not significantly cut into demand yet.
• From what I’ve seen, most of our elected officials want to make prices lower. Some seem to believe this can be done by legislative fiat. The PRC (other folks unelected officials) have tried this. While it makes buyers happy, it has the effect of keep demand high and creating supply problems. What has happened is that while the price for consumers has been held artificially low, someone still has to pay the asking price.
• There are two ways to bring about lower prices: raise the supply or lower the demand. In our country the Republicans tend to favor the former, the Democrats the latter. Middle of the Roaders tend to say we need to do both.
• Reducing dependence on the other countries for our oil supplies looks like a good thing from the point of view of national security. Several major Middle East producers – and nations beyond the Middle East like Nigeria and Venezuela – are politically unstable. As long as Mexico can’t (or won’t) get it’s economic act together and provide for its own population, it will face political instability also. On the other hand, it is good that poor countries have something of value to sell. As Christians, we should rejoice that they have something to jumpstart their economic growth. As Christians we should also lament that their wealth is all too often being sucked up by corrupt leaders and oligarchs.
• Oil will only last so long. The current understanding of petrochemistry and the formation of oil tells us that oil is not a renewable resource. Once we burn it, it’s gone. (I’m not talking about biomass diesel, which is renewable). At some point in the future the currently available supply with be small enough relative to demand that we won’t be able to pay for it.
• Burning hydrocarbons has bad side effects. If we reduce the burning, we’ll reduce our addition to the side effects.
• Some point to mass transit as the solution to rising travel costs. I like mass transit when it goes where I want when I want at an affordable price. We Americans are strongly habituated against it, however. We’re also too spread out to make it feasible as a universal solution.
• Exxon et al. sure are making some large profits. What are the mechanisms behind their profit margins? If they have control over profit margins (and I assume they have at least some control), then would I be wrong to say that either people are buying more from them than ever, or, that their profit margin is too high? What do they do with their profits (other than give truckloads of cash to Lee Raymond)? Are their shareholders profiting from this? If so, how does one become a shareholder?
• When talking about money, John Wesley advised to “Save all you can.” He was speaking not merely of having a large and ever growing bank account, but of not spending. As those who learn from Wesley, we can apply this maxim by minimizing our driving, combining trips, and filling our cars with more than one person. While it isn’t always possible to do these things, I believe it’s possible more often than we do it now.

“Where are you from?” That’s a standard question we ask each other when we meet new people. My two most common answers are, “Around,” and “A small town in southern Illinois, though I’ve never lived there.” Both are the consequences of growing up in a military family – and a desire to extend the conversation.

Geographically I’ve lived in California, Washington, D.C., Massachusetts, Japan, Korea, Maryland, Kentucky and Texas. In my formative years, however, it wasn’t so much the geography that mattered but the regular moving and the two types of culture I experienced. Being a military family, we spent some years living on base (in Japan & Korea). Though these were outposts of American culture, we daily experienced reminders that we weren’t in America: no English language TV, different money, and strange smells to name just a few. From my perspective as a child it was all a great adventure.

From the time we moved back to the US in 1972 until I finished high school, I lived in suburbia. After high school, I spent my next seven years in a third type of culture: academia. One of the best classes I took in those years was my mission anthropology course. Dr. Whiteman taught us that every culture shapes the way we live life, interact with God, and do church. My Annual Conference, being firmly committed to cross cultural ministry, considered my experience on military bases, American suburbia and academia and sent me to – small town East Texas! The closest I’d ever come to living in the country was when we lived in Hayama. In case you’re not up on your geography, that’s in Japan. It’s across the peninsula from Yokosuka. The emperor has a palace there (on the beach). It might have been a small town, but it wasn’t any closer to the culture of East Texas than any place else I’d lived.

While my experience hadn’t prepared me specifically for small town East Texas, the great diversity and constant moving of my childhood, combined with training in mission anthropology did keep me from culture shock. (It also helped a lot that my wife grew up in East Texas. It’s great to have an in-house informant.) I’ve lived enough places now that I’m pretty adaptable. I can see the benefits of most places.

Of late, there has been a renaissance movement both toward the (large) city and the small town – to the detriment of the suburb. As one raised in suburbia, I’m not always happy to have my (former) way of life impugned. Usually it’s condemned as an inauthentic way of life. If one wants authentic culture, the big city is the place to be. If one wants to have deep relationships and be closer to nature, the small town is the place to be. The suburbs fake culture with their housing developments, and fake nature with their large yards. While my experience has made me a cultural relativist in this particular fight, I’ve just run across a book by Dave Goetz that approaches the “problem of the suburbs” from a Christian point of view. His website posts 8 sets of “toxins” and the “practices” that overcome them. From my point of view, they will valuable to many of us, whether we’re in the suburbs or have the suburbs living in us.

Toxin 1 – “I am in control of my life”
Practice – The Prayer of Silence
Toxin 2 – “I am what I do and what I own”
Practice – The Journey through the Self
Toxin 3 – “I want my neighbor’s life”
Practice – Friendship with the poor
Toxin 4 – “My life should be easier than it is”
Practice – Accepting my cross with grace and patience
Toxin 5 – “I need to make a difference with my life”
Practice – Pursuing action, not results
Toxin 6 – “My church is the problem”
Practice – Staying put in your church
Toxin 7 – “What will this relationship do for me?”
Practice – Building deep friendships
Toxin 8 – “I need to get more done in less time”
Practice – Falling in love with a day

Whether these “toxins” are peculiar to suburbia or are more generally endemic to the current American ethos, my guess is that many of us have been negatively affected by at least some of them. If you’d like to explore how Goetz develops each of these, you can check out his website, or better, read his book, Death By Suburb.

When we hear about Job Fairs we think about bringing employers and job seekers together for mutual benefit. The former need workers, the latter need to make a living.

A group in Tehran is now sponsoring a different kind of job fair. They need suicide bombers to attack Israel. The Guardian reports:

Mohammad Samadi, a spokesman for the group, told the Guardian that striking at Israel was the priority of his recruitment drive. “The first target is Israel. For us, that is the battlefield,” he said. “All the Jews are targets, whether military or civilian. It’s our land and they are in the wrong place. It’s their duty to pay attention to safety of their own families and move them away from the battlefield,” he said.

“It’s our land.” That’s the Muslim idea that Muslims should always rule any land ever ruled by Muslims. Though a common idea in history (“What’s mine will always be mine”), is has always had the potential to cause war. If Christians and Muslims both thought this way today, we’d not only have violent conflict in the Middle East, but also in North Africa (which used to be “Christian” before the Muslim armies conquered it), the Iberian Peninsula, and other parts of Europe.
It doesn’t take much knowledge of history to know that peoples move, and boundaries and ideologies change. Some have noticed that we have a major people movement underway here in the US. As people movements go (think of the Huns, Mongols, Vandals and the European conquest of North America), this one appears fairly benign.
Back to Iran.
Mr. Samadi claims to have over 50,000 people (30% women) signed up to be suicide bombers. If recent Iranian history is any indication, they probably have children among that number also. It wasn’t long ago that current president Ahmadinejad was involved with thousands of Iranian children being used as mine sweepers during the Iran-Iraq war.
Samadi’s group is also recruiting in the Muslim Diaspora in Europe:

“Britain and other European countries have a lot of disaffected Muslims who are ready. We understand the suspicion with which Britain, America and other western countries regard their Muslim populations. We don’t condemn them for this because we believe every Muslim has the potential to turn into a bomb against the west.”

Because of my experience with Muslims, I don’t believe what he believes – that every Muslim is ready to turn into a bomb to kill people. Unfortunately, not everyone has an opportunity to meet non-Samadi-like Muslims. All they hear are the claims of Samadi and his co-belligerents in Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, etc. Also, unfortunately, there are a number of folks who think Samadi et al. are merely posing, and have no intent of acting on their stated beliefs – even with plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Guy Williams writes today about United Methodist campus ministry. He says,

Many churches send students to the college and university campus assuming that they will be stepping away from the church and the Christian life for a brief time. The generation gap in many congregations alerts us to the fact that our assumptions (expectations?) are coming true. But they may not be stepping away for a brief time after all. What if they don’t return when we expect—say, after marriage, or at the latest, a child or two? A part of our call to faithful ministry on the campus frontier is to fulfill our congregational baptismal vow to support and uphold one another in our Christian walks.

Guy is the current chair of the Division of Campus Ministry here in the Texas Conference. It’s very encouraging to hear someone in that position speak so clearly.

In my undergrad days (at a UM school) I saw a number of people come to school as professing Christians, but before too long many appeared to be little more than practicing hedonists. If this is the pattern at a Christian school (and I haven’t seen evidence to show that things have changed much in 25 years), I wouldn’t be surprised if it were also the pattern at non-church-related schools. How does this happen?

It’s easy to blame academia. While our UM schools tend to have religion departments and chaplains, these frequently embody the scientific study of religion (either the dead thing we dissect or those archaic practices other people engage in). The central doctrines of Christianity – the Incarnation, the Trinity, the Resurrection – are treated from a Humean or Bultmannian point of view (impossible or mythological). It’s easy to say that it’s these and other acids of modernity that eat away the faith of college students.

While the current character of academia likely has some effect on the faith of students, I think there is a larger factor – a factor that we can’t blame on those other folks. I perceive that in our congregations we have either (a) adopted the Humean and Bultmannian positions – or their correlates – that faith has no substance, no connection to historic Christian doctrine, but is rather a personal (individual) expression of authenticity or trust (in something); or, (b) we’ve seen the naturalistic position and assumed that scholarship in our era must take that form; since we don’t want a naturalistic approach to the faith we evacuate it of intellectual substance. To put it bluntly, we’ve failed to love God with all our minds.

What might an alternative look like? Here are a few ideas.

1. We need to shepherd our kids through challenges to their faith so that their first experience of such challenges doesn’t happen when they’re alone at college. This is very different from sheltering them from the “acids of modernity” (or postmodernity). Not only will this sharpen them for their encounter, it will also remove reasons for them to think the “old church back home” was simply ignorant, living in the medieval world.
2. We need to teach our people that there are reasons Christians believe and do what they do. It’s not just because Mom, the preacher or the Sunday School teacher say to do it. Our kids have the advantage today of being exposed to difference at an early age. Our Christian kids go to school and play with Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and non-theist kids. They are engulfed by a consumerist, hedonist culture. They are taught early on that violence and vulgarity are perfectly normal and acceptable. They need to be taught by the church what Christians do and believe and why Christians do and believe what they do. While they don’t need a foundationalistic account of Christianity, they need some account of the rationality of the faith.
3. We need to maintain relationships with our students. For this to help, we’ll have to do more than just send them a church newsletter or a scholarship. We’ll need to visit them on campus. We’ll need to find ways to enter into their academic world. We need to make sure they know that they never stand alone. If we wait to start this kind of relationship when they go off to college, it may not work well. We need to start now, while they’re in high school (and earlier grades!), to interact with what they’re learning, to help them contextualize it within a Christian worldview.

Even once we figure out what to do for our college students, it won’t be easy. As I tell my young people all the time, “When you go off to college you’ll be away from Mom & Dad and the church folks. You’ll have the freedom to be and do whatever you want. Now is the time to find your identity and security in Christ.” That freedom is a dangerous thing. At the same time it is necessary and good. As Guy observes, we’re going to have to pray.