Blogging Hiatus

While Bishop Willimon is on a blogging hiatus, here are some recent links from Twitter:

Willimon's Podcast on iTunes

And "How Many Methodists Has Will Willimon Ruined" by John Meunier

Sheep and Shepherds in the Methodist Ministry: Andrew C. Thompson

***Disclaimer: this post is not written by Will Willimon.

Bishop Willimon invited Jason Byassee and Andrew C. Thompson to respond to criticism about his focus upon numbers as an evaluating tool in accessing effectivness in ministry for United Methodist clergy and congregations. This is Rev. Thompson's response to that invitation.

One warm autumn evening a few years ago, my phone rang. I had been lying on my living room couch, half-dozing while a Red Sox game played on the television. The cell phone jingle woke me up, and I looked at the display of the incoming call.

It was my district superintendent.

In early September.

Now I was only serving my first pastoral appointment. But I knew enough to realize that a D.S. calling in September probably meant trouble.

The conversation that followed confirmed the worst of the possibilities that flashed through my mind when I saw the incoming call: An associate pastor’s position had opened up quite unexpectedly, and the bishop had tapped me to fill it. He had considered letting the position lie vacant until annual conference the following year, but it was a large church with a lot of ministry going on. The senior pastor at the church was already overloaded, and 10 months seemed too long to leave him without a junior colleague. As a campus minister, I could be moved without causing the “domino effect” familiar to Methodist clergy who get caught up in mid-year moves (a factor the D.S. was frankly honest about, though he was also careful to explain that the bishop’s decision had only come after a careful consideration of the congregation’s needs and my particular pastoral gifts).

All of a sudden the itineracy became very real for me. And the end result of that fateful September phone call was, in fact, a mid-year move. In accordance with the needs of the church in my annual conference, I left a campus ministry appointment where I was finally building momentum after almost 3 years and where I had many friends. And I moved to a town and a church where I knew practically no one.

I gotta be honest. It was tough at first.

But it was also what I accepted when I entered a Methodist ministry. I realized that at the time. And I bring it up in this post because I think that experience helped me begin to think about what it really means for those of us called to be Christ’s shepherds to give the whole of our lives to ministry in the church.

It helped me begin to think about what it means to live a life that is not my own.

The Contentious Nature of Itineracy

As I see it, the itinerant system in the United Methodist Church is seen as contentious by the clergy for two reasons – one practical and the other cultural. The practical bone of contention has to do with fear and mistrust on the part of individual pastors, namely that they and their families will get caught up in the gears of a bureaucratic machine and be sent to a ministry setting not because it fits their gifts & graces but rather because an episcopal cabinet is simply trying to fill slots.

I see this issue of the itineracy process as a real challenge, both for bishops and their superintendents as well as for elders under appointment. I also don’t see any magic pill we can all swallow to make the challenge disappear. Clergy need to continually remind themselves that they are yokefellows in the gospel with every other member of their annual conference as well as with their bishop. Bishops and their cabinets should look upon the fear of their pastors with understanding, realizing that trust in an ecclesiastical polity led by human beings (even human beings guided by the Holy Spirit!) is liable to error and that some their preachers have been on the receiving end of those errors. We all need to seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit, recognizing that we have been fitted together as stones in the same spiritual house that Christ is building.

I recently heard a reading of Queen Elizabeth I’s speech to her coastal militia prior to the English struggle against the Spanish Armada in 1588. It reminded me how much strong leadership depends on those being led having the sense that their leaders stand with them rather than simply over them. Even more, that those leaders are willing to suffer and die along with their followers if needs be. I think it would be a real gift to the church for God to call more of us into martyrdom as a witness to the gospel. That may happen in our day, or it may not. But bishops and superintendents do at least have the opportunity to preach before those they lead – as Elizabeth had the opportunity to speak directly to her army – and they should consider addressing (and modeling) the deeply connectional nature of our covenant together. The connection in Wesley’s day was, after all, rooted in the common fellowship of the preachers.

The second contentious aspect of itineracy for clergy is a cultural one. It is related to the time in which we live. And it is, if anything, more difficult to address. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas has an insightful view of modernity where he says that the story of modernity is that we have no story except the story we chose when we had no story. (You might want to read that again.) Basically, Dr. Hauerwas means that our culture teaches us that we should be self-made, constructing our lives and futures and even our very identities according to our own felt desires. This deeply embedded idea assumes that we come into the world like baby sea turtles hatched from eggs on the beach – needing no instruction, no formation, no catechesis. We live in a world that tells us to “Have It Your Way,” which is both a Burger King slogan and modernity’s overriding motto.

It’s all wrong, of course. Those of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death (Romans 6). The lives we live now are possible only in his resurrected life. And the stories we inhabit are, finally, his story.

But modernity’s false promises haunt us. And so we find ourselves falling into the rut of the self-created story time and time again. So hear me on this: The reason many of us fear being sent as Jesus sends his disciples is that we’ve bought into the myth that the life we live should be of our own choosing. For those who follow Jesus, I simply don’t think that can ever finally be the case.

Anxiety over the “Guaranteed Appointment”

There’s a lot of anxiety amongst Methodist clergy right now over the possible alteration of the so-called “guaranteed appointment.” That anxiety – like all anxiety – is born out of fear. For the record, I think the guaranteed appointment is a bad idea with no biblical or Wesleyan basis. I know why it was instituted and the good intentions with which that happened. But like so many lamentable parts of our Book of Discipline, it attempts to make a rule out of something dependent on character and virtue. That “something” is our covenant relationships in the annual conference. And while character-building takes longer than rule-making, it is by far the more worthwhile activity.

Trees that do not produce fruit are nothing worth. And shepherds who cannot do the work of shepherding should not be entrusted with sheep. These convictions seem as necessary to the vitality of the church as anything I know related to leadership. Fruits can and must be judged in different ways, depending on the variety of settings in ministry. In fact, a reassurance of that fundamental aspect of episcopal oversight on the part of bishops might allay some of the anxiety we see over the possible change in the guaranteed appointment. But even so, those who continually cry out that they “don’t trust the system” might ask themselves why they assume such a de facto cynical posture and why on earth they’d want to be a part of a “system” that they fundamentally distrust in the first place.

In the end, I think the debate over the guaranteed appointment is symptomatic of our wider struggle with itineracy. That makes me hesitant to speak about it separate from the itinerant system in general, and it certainly makes me hesitant to consider it apart from core Christian virtues of patience, trust, repentance, and love. We have several layers of shepherds and sheep in our church, and we need to realize at every level that flocks only maintain health and grow when they realize that they’re all in it together. And yes, it is an inescapable quality of such healthy flocks that the shepherds are competent for the tasks to which they’ve been given.

Oh, and by the way, that mid-year appointment I was asked to take turned out very well. I experienced the Holy Spirit at the very center of the whole process, in fact. I took that as a sign of providence. And I continue to think that God has got work for the People called Methodists to do.

The Rev. Andrew C. Thompson is an elder in the Arkansas Conference of the UMC. He writes for the United Methodist Reporter and maintains a blog at www.genxrising.com.

Good News – by the Numbers

We opened Annual Conference this year with our Conference Statistician (and Connectional Ministries Director) Lori Carden, giving us some dismal, rather frightening statistics. Then the next day Adam Hamilton opened his address by saying that if the general church continues on its present path of an aging and shrinking membership, the United Methodist Church will no longer be a viable entity in just five decades. Bad news indeed.

But now the good news: North Alabama has been engaged in a process of visible accountability for congregations and pastors (the Conference Dashboard), has instituted the evaluation process and renewal programs of Natural Church Development in all our congregations, and has cast a new spirit of setting goals for growth.

And here’s even better news: It’s working! In the last two years we have reversed the trend that has afflicted us for the last twenty years. We are showing measurable growth in our numbers for Professions of Faith and for Baptisms. This is because effective pastors and congregations throughout our Conference are making reaching a new generation of Christians into a top priority.

Here are the numbers that Lori has assembled:

Year	Prof. Faith	Baptisms
2009	2703	2549
2008	2945	2600
2007	2544	2485
2006	2621	2566
2005	2532	2413
2004	2480	2581
2003	2583	2569
2002	2485	2581
2001	2719	2750
2000	2773	2958
Average	2638.5	2605.2

The ten year average for POF is 2638. We have surpassed the ten year average over the past two years. Among most Conferences, the goal is simply to slow the decline. North Alabama has dared to pray for more. And it is deeply gratifying to see visible evidence of the Holy Spirit moving among us. Behind every one of these numbers is a family reached, a person saved, a soul that is welcomed and included into the family of faith. And behind every number is a congregation and a pastor who is not threatened by our Wesleyan ethos of accountability and growth but is excited that we are focused on “the main thing” – salvation of the world in Jesus Christ.

“You only count what is important and whatever you count becomes important,” says one of our slogans. By counting every week the new life that God gives us, we are making that new life the engine that is driving our church life. Not content to care for the needs of who is already there, our churches are reaching out to those who are not.

It’s good news by the numbers which is Good News indeed.

William H. Willimon

More On Numbers: Jason Byassee

***Disclaimer: this post is not written by Will Willimon.

Bishop Willimon invited Jason Byassee and Andrew C. Thompson to respond to criticism about his focus upon numbers as an evaluating tool in accessing effectivness in ministry for United Methodist clergy and congregations. This is Jason Byassee's response to that invitation.

“It’s easy to get people in the building,” the theology professor opined. “Just put a sign out front announcing, ‘Free Beer!’” The joke, of course, hinges on the obvious fact that a body in a church doesn’t make a disciple any more than a body in a hospital makes a doctor. It’s disciples we’re after, not statistics.

The beer advertisement is the kind of comment we theologians have been making about church growth emphases for at least a generation. Will Willimon used to make them too. When I was his student, I remember stories about preachers who had been so faithful to Jesus’ preaching about non-violence, money, and carrying the cross that they’d preached every church they ever served down to a handful of rock-hard disciples too crazy not to leave.

But Willimon’s not a theology professor or university employee anymore. He’s a bishop of a church that has lost a staggering, unimaginable number of people since the height of our numerical success in the mid-20th century. It’s not hard to project similar numerical results out into a future church that does not exist.

I also remember the general criticism bordering on mockery in certain academic quarters when Willimon was elected bishop. “He’ll be asked to consecrate every outhouse from Mobile to Montgomery,” folks said, less knowledgeable about Alabama geography than alliteration. Why’d he want to do it? No other candidate for the episcopacy was looking at a pay cut, a loss in prestige, a curtailment of freedom, moving from a place where Bill Clinton was almost unacceptably right-of-center to life in the thick of Dixie. Stanley Hauerwas had an answer. “Will’s doing this because he loves the Methodist Church.”

Willimon’s emphasis of late on numbers is not some sellout to corporate bean-counting, and it’s certainly not about his ego, which could have found greater fulfillment in any of a number of other ways. It’s that he loves the Methodist Church and he sees a future coming soon that’s none too bright. So what’s he to do? Kill time till retirement, as so many clergy do? Knock out a few more books and let the ship run itself into the shoals? Or use the power the church has entrusted him with, to appoint and oversee and discipline, in short, to lead, to do what he can to make for a better future?

I confess I can’t find a Methodist argument against Willimon’s claim that Wesley insisted on numerical measures as a plumbline of effectiveness. Amidst the spasms of bile heaped on Willimon in this blogstorm, no one has been able to show a Wesleyan argument against Willimon’s claim that numerical growth is a mark of Methodist faithfulness. They’ve attacked him personally, or attacked adherence to Wesley, or suggested bishops be held to the same standard (agreed—and so would Will), or offered red herrings (“What about the poor?” As if anyone is asking only for new rich members) or just whined and kvetched. But they haven’t overturned his claim that numbers mattered to Wesley and their upward trend is a sign of church health.

And as an elder in the UMC this makes me personally quite nervous. I’ve not only not ruled out an appointment in a local church, I actually hope to serve a parish again someday—I miss being a local pastor enough that a day doesn’t pass when I don’t think about it (don’t tell my DS or my bosses here at Duke!). And I don’t much like the idea of my future hinging on whether the church I serve grows. What if I’m sent to an area that’s shrinking in population? Or to a congregation tied up in knots of generations of inter-family hatred? Or that doesn’t care for my sense that American patriotism often tips over into idolatry and votes with its feet after my first Sunday near a July 4th? Or . . . (you get the idea).

But then I remember my time as pastor in a rural parish. And numbers mattered to me. One thing I loved about pastoring a church of 80 members was adding a family of 4 meant 5% growth. That’s huge! On the other hand, numbers could mean bad news that needed attending to. Numbers could mean that this family had slipped from once a month to once a quarter. Or that family, that I thought we could bring in, had fallen off altogether and needed visiting. Or that I really had offended him this time and needed to go apologize. Here, numbers weren’t generic. They were faces, people I’d been called to serve, even love. And if they weren’t there I had to do something about it. Not for my job’s sake, or the Methodist Church’s, but for the Kingdom of God’s and for the sake of these people, beloved of God, anointed by the Spirit in baptism, for whom Christ died.

Finding myself on Willimon’s side of these attacks reminds me of the times I’ve written against church growth as a sign of faithfulness. One friend, a former evangelical megachurch youth pastor in the suburbs, said his old church couldn’t not grow. They opened the doors and minivans full of families of four-to-five came rolling in. So he quit to pastor an Emerging-style congregation in the city. Or I think of the snide things I’ve said about Rick Warren or Bill Hybels, who opened churches in Orange County and the northwestern Chicago suburbs in the 1980’s when you’d have to be a nincompoop not to grow a church.

The thing is, that’s not true. Willow and Saddleback grew because those pastors introduced people to Jesus and to a church lively enough to want to give one’s life to it (and plenty of other attempts in the “right” places failed quickly). And minivans full of families (such as the family I'm in now, but wasn’t when I disparaged them) need Jesus just as much as pierced graduate students living off the largesse of university insurance, parents, and government-backed loans. And not only that: large churches often grow because they’re Wesleyan, even if they don’t know it. They break people into small groups for friendship, discipleship, service, and love. And they notice if folks aren’t there. People don’t go to church because of big parking lots and crowds and coffee shops—trust me, they’re not idiots, they know they could do better for entertainment any number of other places. They endure the headaches at big churches because energetic leadership has made a space, a canopy, in which they and their families can worship Jesus and be remade in his image.

It should sound familiar. We Methodists used to do the same thing.

Jason Byassee

Jason is an executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity School and author, most recently, of “The Gifts of the Small Church.”

For further conversation and insight, visit their blog: http://faithandleadership.com/blog

Gifts of God – for the Work of Ministry

Service of Ordination
Canterbury United Methodist Church
Birmingham, Alabama
June 4, 2010

11The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, 12to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, 13until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. (NRSV)
-- Ephesians 4:11-13

Tonight we gather to celebrate the truth of Ephesians 4:11-12. It is theologically impossible for there ever to be a shortage of clergy, a dearth of leaders for the church, not enough people to do the mission Jesus has called us to do. The New Testament, from Jesus’ first calling of his disciples, all the way through the Acts of the Apostles testifies to the truth: Christ never leaves his church without leadership.

The writer to the Ephesians calls leaders, the gifts of God for the church. So I first want to say, “Thank you Lord, for the gift of these lives whom you have given us tonight, those on whom hands will be laid. John, Mary, and all of you are God’s great gifts to us.

Sometimes the poor old myopic church has difficulty seeing God’s gifts as gifts offered to us. It only took us 1500 years to see the gifts God was giving us in women whom God had called to ministry.

Sad to say, in the last thirty years we have so shrunk the United Methodist Church that we cannot utilize all the gifted people God has sent us, which has made being on our Board of Ordained Ministry a real heartache this year.

But thanks be to God once again God has not left us to our own devices, God has sent us just the new leaders that we need for the future, and you gifts of God now sit before us.

Barbara Brown Taylor says that the most miserable job she ever had in the church was sitting on her church’s Board of Ministry, having to decide whom to admit to the priesthood. She said the candidates that year were a motley crew, people who had bombed out in marriage or other better paying careers, people of questionable emotional stability.

For her, the straw that broke the camel’s back was one guy who, as proof of this call into the ministry, pulled up his shirt showing where the off duty policeman’s bullet entered his side, exiting his back. He took the bullet as a young man while attempting to rob a convenience store.

“That bullet,” he said pointing to his side, “was my burning bush. That was my call into the ministry.”

The committee was aghast. In the discussion that followed some said, “Look, he’s served his time in the state Pen. Maybe he’s been redeemed.”

But Barbara said the most moving argument was in the man’s citation of the burning bush story, the call of Moses to lead God’s people. “I knew enough of the Bible,” she said, “to know that God loves to call some strange, strange people into the ministry.”

We don’t have time to hear all of your stories tonight, but I’m sure if we did, we would all say in unison, “God still calls strange, strange people into the ministry!”

You are here tonight because you have been summoned, called. You are here as God’s idea of what the church needs. You are here as God’s gifts to God’s people.

Why? Our text tells us: to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ. Maybe you know that Greek has no punctuation. So there was some debate in the church over where to put the comma in this long sentence. The old King James had it, “The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors” comma, “and some teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.” This wrongly implied that the church has apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. The teachers equip the saints for the work of ministry. Newer translations rightly remove the comma so it reads that we have prophets, evangelists, pastors and some teachers (no comma between pastors and teachers) why? To equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.”

The whole point of ordained evangelists, pastors, and teachers is to equip the saints (that is, everybody in the church) for the work of ministry. It’s not that pastors do the work of ministry, it’s that we equip the people of God for the work of ministry. Our whole point, as pastors, the judge of our ministry is how well we equip the baptized to do the work of ministry.

Thus my friend John Westerhoff said, “If you are a layperson who spends more than ten hours a week at church, then you are wasting your time.” Your ministry is not to be at church, running errands for the pastor; your ministry is in the world with Jesus.” Westerhoff added, “And it you are a pastor who spends more than ten hours a week working outside the church then you are wasting your time. Your ministry is to equip the saints for the work of Jesus in the world.”

We dare not send anyone into a bank, or a middle school, or to the statehouse in Montgomery these days without giving them the essential equipment to survive as a disciple of Jesus.

That’s one of the reasons why I worry that some of our Sunday worship just doesn’t have enough biblical/theological substance. I’m not worried that some of the music is cheesy and some of the content is trivial – though it often is! I worry that we are not giving the saints enough equipment to do the work of ministry.

I beg you newly ordained (I beg all of us, myself included!) not to rob your people of their God-given ministries in your attempts to be a good pastor. We have churches that have too much pastor for too few laity. The result is the pastor, because he or she has enough time to do it, takes over ministry that God has given to talented laypersons.

The Methodist movement spent its first century, it’s most productive century, under the premise that you should keep Methodist clergy moving constantly, never letting them stay long enough in any one place to become embedded so that the laity gave to the clergy that which God expected the laity to do.

Each years as the Treasurer hands the figure for connectional giving (apportionments) to me -- so I can hand it to the DS’s, so they can drop it on the clergy, who then drop it on the laity – I ask myself: how did our financial support for mission and administration, for benevolences and the connection become the sole responsibility of the clergy? Not one single congregation in our Conference treats its stewardship in that way. We are getting the sad results that we deserve.

My last congregation was an inner city church that had shrunk in ten years from a thousand members to barely thee hundred when I arrived. I was overwhelmed by all that needed to be done. First meeting with my SPRC I handed them a stack of note cards. On each card I had written one task that I did as a pastor – everything from preaching, to visiting the sick, to evangelism, to composing the Sunday bulletin. Then I said to the SPRC, “I’ve only recently arrived here. These are all the tasks that I could do as your pastor, but I don’t know what’s most important for me to do here. Arrange these tasks in order of importance.”

I left the room. They debated for an hour, then called me back. I was shocked to see “preaching” at the top of the list, followed by “teaching,” followed by “prayer”!

“This congregation is desperate for new members,” I said. “I thought you would have put evangelism at the top of the list, visitation of prospective members, something like that.”

“We’ve lived in this town all our lives,” one member said. “You just moved here. If there’s any visiting to be done, any evangelism, it’s up to us, not you.”

Another said, “We haven’t had a sermon or a worship service that I wanted to invite anybody to. You preach well; we’ll find you a congregation to hear it.” (Laity!)

God help us if, in your ministry, you don’t equip the saints for their ministry but rather rob them of their God-given ministry.

The good news is that God has given us all we need to be faithful to God’s commands, to further his mission in the world. You will find, if you open your eyes, that God (or the bishop!) will never send you to any church where God will not give you the people you need to do God’s work.

The gifts of God for the people of God! Thanks be to God!

William H. Willimon

The Truth Shall Set You Free

***Disclaimer: this post is not written by Will Willimon.

I recently received my Olan Mills' 8 x 10 portrait photograph in the mail this week from our North Alabama Annual Conference clergy pictorial directory. As I looked at the portrait in disbelief, I showed it to my wife and said: "I don't look like this!" I realized on that day that I have an entirely different mental picture of myself. This mental picture is not based upon how I look right now; it is based on what I looked like six years ago. It is the Facebook affect. We would rather not put the true pictures of ourselves out in social media, and so we post pictures from 2, 5 or 10 years ago.

I love the lyrics to the song, "You Can Do Better Than Me," by Death Cab for Cutie: "I've been slipping through the years. My old clothes don't fit like they once did. So they hang like ghosts of the people I have been."

It's hard to look at a realistic picture of who you truly are. My church is currently going through a ministry assessment and long range plan development as we look ahead to the year 2020. We began looking at the worship attendance for the contemporary worship service I regularly preach and we realized that the attendance spiked in 2004 and 2005. No one realized that this had happened. We thought we were still doing that well. The numbers told us the truth about ourselves. We needed to change the things we are doing that we shouldn't be doing and we should do the things we are not doing in order to help the service return to its upward trajectory. We also have to be honest that this service may not be the answer for many people and a fourth style of worship may be needed in our congregation.

There has been a lot of buzz online about numbers and clergy effectiveness due to Bishop Willimon's post and recent news about guaranteed appointments. It seems as though tension is rising in our denomination. We know that we need to turn the ship -- to help the United Methodist Church return to being a movement of transformed people rather than a connection of loyalists sustaining a structure. However, it seems as though whenever a suggestion is made to help us transition towards growth it is criticized and shot down. I am starting to feel that we are becoming less like the church in Acts, which prayed things out together, and more like a church that resembles our current political landscape where we shout at each other and ignore the core problems. Just like many meetings in the church, we think that talking about it is actually doing something about it.

And if you think about it, being evaluated by attendance seems so corporate. It seems as though members and visitors are becoming "customers." We rightly point to the fact that quality is just as important as quantity. But if we are honest, we are most likely celebrating other numbers in our denomination and in our local churches: we count the number of flood buckets sent to Nashville; we count the number of folks that are engaged in mission; and we count the offering which goes to support our buildings and ministry and mission. We care about numbers to an extent, but then there is that invisible line where it just doesn't feel "Methodist" to count those numbers.

So what does that say about us? Are numbers really the problem or is it the accountability that follows that makes us queasy? My guess is that some do not trust the powers that be with making the right decisions with the reported numbers. If that is the case, we do have means by which to hold cabinets accountable within the Discipline. However, might it also be true that we do not want to know the truth about our own churches and our own ministries? The truth is sometimes excruciating, but at least it has the potential for transformation.

Numbers are not the product or the fruit. They are merely a means by which to access the health of missions and ministry. People matter. So the goal is not simply better numbers but healthier churches reaching more people - making them into disciples. May the numbers be a means of grace and a challenge to minister more fervently!

Mike Holly
Canterbury UMC

Let the Children Come

A couple of decades ago, in a sincere attempt to make our churches more accessible and welcoming to children, some of our churches adopted an innovation: the children’s sermon. Today the children’s sermon is, to my mind, a prime example of a noble effort but an unfortunate strategy. I’ve heard lots of children’s sermons. Tried a few myself. For what it’s worth, here is my assessment of children’s sermons.

I sometimes say that I’ve only got two objections to children’s sermons: they are not for children and are usually not sermons.

They are not for children. Any child younger than older elementary age (who usually avoid coming down for children’s sermons) cannot possibly comprehend the complicated analogies and object lessons of most children’s sermons. When an adult says to a preacher, “I get more out of your children’s sermons than your regular sermons,” this is not a compliment to children’s sermons but a criticism of our sermons! At their worst, children’s sermons put children on display, sometimes embarrassing them with a “Kids say the darnedest things” routine. At their best, they reach only a small proportion of children. Besides, if we really want to reach our children and to affirm them, the sermon strikes me as the least effective liturgical act to reach children.

They are not sermons. If a sermon is an attempt faithfully to proclaim the Christian faith, then the moralism and trite common sense of children’s sermons make them questionable. “Let’s all be good boys and girls next week,” is a long way from the truth of the gospel.

From what I observe the most effective children’s sermons are delivered by lay persons who are called and equipped by God to communicate with children. A stiff, uncomfortable, age inappropriate lecture by a pastor sends the wrong message to children and congregation. True, it is important for the congregation to see the pastor as relating well to children (our aging church desperately needs more young families and children) but there are numerous ways to do this more effectively than in exclusively verbal, abstract communication. For instance, every time the church celebrates a baptism, why not call all the children down front and have them gather about the font so they can see what’s going on? Try to explain one thing we believe about baptism to the children. They may have difficulty knowing what to make of “redemption” but they all know about water! Jesus communicates with us through ordinary, everyday experiences like eating and drinking, bathing and singing, all activities that are accessible, though at different levels, to children.

I fear that children’s sermons tend to backfire, saying to parents and children that which we do not intend to say. We wouldn’t interrupt the congregation’s worship with, “And now I would like all those of you who are over 65 to come down front while I say something sentimental and sappy to all of you old folks.” That would be ugly. So why do we single out the children saying in effect, “Boys and girls, I know that you are bored stiff by Christian worship, that you can’t get anything out of what we do when we praise God, so come down front and I’ll take a few minutes to try to make this interesting for you.”

Be suspicious when someone says, “My child doesn’t get anything out of worship.” Children can sing, pray, read, or simply enjoy being with others in praising God. Children can be asked to prepare and read the scripture on Sundays, or to usher. I have been in the habit of producing a “Children’s Bulletin” for our children each Sunday (Dale and Kelly Clem began this practice at Duke Chapel when I was there.) I was deeply moved when I visited an African American congregation in our Conference where the children all processed with the choir and the children’s choir sat in the choir loft for the service. “It’s our way of saying to them how proud we are that they are here with us,” explained the pastor.

United Methodism has a problem, as do a number of denominations, in retaining our young. I saw a study a few years ago that proved to me that those churches that remove their children from worship on Sunday (taking them off to ‘children’s church’) have a difficult time of retaining their children in their church as the children grow up. Those churches that lovingly find a way to keep their children with them on Sunday tend to keep their children as throughout their lives. We must not squander the most formative years of our children’s lives by removing them from the central, defining act of the Christian faith – the Sunday worship of the congregation.

I therefore hope that our churches will show their full commitment to the full inclusion of children in our Sunday worship, that we will not imply that they are not full and valued members of our fellowship. Our Lord has expressly given little children a place at the center of his Kingdom. We are not in any way to hinder or to forbid them. Let’s pray that God will give us the determination and the creativity truly to include our young in our church.

Will Willimon