Jurisdictional Conference Area Report - Birmingham Area

At our Jurisdictional Conference this July, I will be submitting an "Area Report" for our Annual Conference.  I thought that you might enjoy seeing the report that I will be submitting.  Thanks to all of you for a wonderful first four years serving you in North Alabama.

BIRMINGHAM AREA

At a recent Annual Conference we modified our vision statement to read: “Every church challenged and equipped to grow more disciples of Jesus Christ by taking risks and changing lives.”   The change reflects our determination to hold ourselves accountable to the Great Commission in every aspect of our Conference life.

From our vision, we have developed Four Priorities: Natural Church Development, Empowering a New Generation of Leaders,  New Congregations, and Effective Leadership.  We are in a process of aligning every aspect of our church life to these priorities.

Natural Church Development is a proven means of revitalizing congregations and moving them into a mission mode of life.  We have trained dozens of Natural Church Development coaches and we are holding every congregation and pastor accountable to the expectation to utilize NCD.  Our monitoring of our congregations that utilize NCD shows us the effectiveness of the program.  For the first time in two decades we are showing growth in numbers of professions of faith and new members.

We are reorganizing our Board of Ordained Ministry and the process of ordination in order to focus on recruitment of new, young pastors.  We are determined to streamline the ordination process and to be more attentive to the fruit of the process – effective pastoral leaders for the Twenty-First Century.  We created a three year Residency in Ministry program to equip our newest pastors in leadership skills that are required for growing our church in the future.  Faced with an aging clergy membership as well as a shortage of qualified candidates, we are moving into a posture of recruitment.  We are devising means of equipping every congregation to notice, name and encourage top candidates for the ministry.

For some years our Conference has been working at establishing new communities of faith.  We have led the church for a couple of years in the number of new church starts.  Through a process of constant evaluation and assessment, we have reorganized our training for new church pastors and our selection of those called to serve.  We are pioneering in the exploration of different models for starting new congregations, stressing the need for multi-ethnic congregations in economically marginal communities.  Our success rate for new church starts is considerably above the national average.  Our goal is to start a minimum of twelve new congregations each year.

We have found that the path to more effective clergy and lay leaders is through accountability.  For the past three years, on our Conference website, we display graphs for every congregation showing patterns of attendance, giving, and baptisms for the past six years.  Making these statistics more available for all to see has been a big step forward for us.  Beginning this year we are instituting the “North Alabama Conference Dashboard” that will display weekly figures for attendance, giving, professions of faith, and baptisms.  Every Monday, every congregation in the Conference will log in and report their figures for that week.  District Superintendents will be able to make comparisons and to monitor every congregation’s faithfulness on these bases of the “Dashboard.”  We believe this will be a huge step forward in accountability.

Every full time pastor who may be involved in a possible move is interviewed by a panel of three District Superintendents who get a clear picture of that pastor’s productivity and strengths.  Every congregation submits a statement of goals and objectives in ministry before consideration for a change in appointment.  Every full time pastor who moves to a new appointment in our Conference is trained to devise a “First Ninety Day Plan” that outlines what the pastor will do in his or her first three months in a new parish.  Working with the District Superintendent and the lay leadership of the congregation, the pastor will work through the Plan so a tone of transformative leadership will be engendered in the congregation.  In four years of these procedures for appointments, we have not had a single appointment that we have had to change due to a poor fit.

In 2006 we reduced the number of our Districts from twelve to eight.  This not only led to more efficient oversight of our churches but also gave us nearly a million dollars a year in savings that we were able to put into New Church Development. 

Mainly as a result of our economy in administration, we have limited the increase in our Conference budget to about 2% per year, the smallest consecutive increases in the Conference Budget in decades.

While we continue to struggle with a comparatively low rate of apportionment participation, this past year we increased our apportionment percentage by over two percent (for a total of over 82% giving to apportionments).  This meant that we raised nearly a million dollars more for ministry in 2007 when compared with 2006.  Our goal is to increase our percentage of apportioned giving by 2% each year until we are at 100%.

In 2007 our Camp Sumatanga launched a 4.5 million dollar capital campaign that is ongoing.

We have conducted a Conference-wide study of United Methodist Beliefs, led by our lay leadership.

We have also had good participation from our Conference in the Katrina appeal (over half a million dollars raised), the Nothing But Nets Campaign, and the Central Conference Pension Initiative.

For the past four years we have enjoyed our beautiful new Conference Center on the campus of our Birmingham-Southern College.  This 4.5 million dollar facility has been a great help to our work and has provided a wonderful cohesiveness to our Conference.

Patsy and I feel grateful to God for our first four years in the North Alabama Conference.  We have learned much and look forward with eager anticipation to our next four years.  Christ has given our Conference some exciting new ideas and the people and the resources to act upon those ideas.  We are seeing our Conference vision become a reality in the lives of the churches in our Conference.  For all this, we give thanks.

William H. Willimon
Resident Bishop
 

Tax Reform as a Religious Issue

Susan Pace Hamill, a member of Tuscaloosa’s Trinity United Methodist church and a professor at the University of Alabama Law School (also a graduate of Samford’s Beeson Divinity School) has become the conscience of our state on matters of taxation. I’m proud of the work that Susan is doing in this area.

And she has done so with an approach deeply rooted in the notion that Jesus judges us on the basis of how we treat “the least of these among us.”

Professor Hamill says that many of our state’s laws do more to burden the poor and relieve the rich than vice versa. She cites the worst states (her “sinful six”) as Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Nevada, South Dakota, and Texas.

She believes, as do I, that part of kingdom work is pushing for economic justice, particularly for poor working families. Tax revenues are essential to fund the reasonable opportunity for a decent life for all made in the image of God.

She quotes a well-known verse (Luke 12:48) “To whom much is given, much is required.”
I agree. Our resources as a church and as a state are a means to “spread scriptural holiness across the land” as Mr. Wesley taught us. Reform of our tax policy is one important part of our work for the Kingdom.

Our state legislature’s recent failure to remove the state portion of the grocery tax disappointed me as I hope it did you. I pray that the upcoming special session of the legislature will pass the Tax Fairness Amendment. This amendment would end the $550 million state income tax deduction for federal taxes, remove the 4% state portion of the grocery tax, and expand personal exemptions and the standard deduction raising the income tax threshold to $20,000 from the current shockingly low $12,600 for a family of four.

I commend Susan Pace Hamill’s work to you, particularly her book AS CERTAIN AS DEATH (Carolina Academic Press, 2007) and hope you will join me in praying for and working toward a more just and equitable tax system for our state. A good way to involve yourselves and your church in these matters is to work with and support Alabama Arise, a coalition of 155 faith-based and community groups (www.alarise.org) a number of whose leaders (such as Mark Berte) are active United Methodists. Alabama Arise has all the facts and figures of the Alabama tax problem and is working hard to change things.

We can do better. With God’s help, we shall.

Will Willimon

Empowering A New Generation Of Leaders

One of our Annual Conference priorities is equipping and empowering a new generation of United Methodist leaders. With a median age of 59 years old, our Conference is determined to empower a new generation to lead our church into the future that God has for us.

Dorothy Scott, one of our fine pastors, sent me this letter just after this year’s Annual Conference:

I thought you would appreciate the highlight of my annual conference experience
this year. Both the lay member and youth member from my church were experiencing annual conference for the first time. I drove Izabella Godsey, my youth member, back to Huntsville Saturday afternoon. She shared with me how wonderful and meaningful the entire experience had been for her. She talked about how this experience had her considering going into the ministry. I asked if she would be
willing to speak in church this morning, to share what this experience meant to her and what the church needed to know from Annual Conference.

This is just some of what she had to share, "Annual Conference was a very special experience for me. I learned a great deal about the United Methodist Church. We as Christians need to be about making disciples for Jesus Christ. I need to be making
disciples for Jesus Christ. From now on I intend to be about making disciples for
Jesus Christ. Thank you for making this experience possible. I hope that this experience will lead me to helping Valley to grow more Christians."

Izy has always been a wonderful example of faith. She was in the first confirmation class I led at Valley. One of the joys of being at Valley has been watching us develop a youth and children's program. I thought about this as Lovett Weems shared that
young ministers came from growing up in the church. Izy's grandparent's and aunt
had been active at Valley when I arrived. The first change I made at Valley was to develop a children's program and Izy was one of the first new children to begin coming regularly to church. Izy is currently 17 and when she turned 16 she became a more active member because she could drive herself to church and not depend on her parents for a ride. She loves opportunities for leadership and she has been in
charge of crafts at VBS for three years. I do not know what the future will hold for Izy but I believe that this conference strenghtened her faith and encourage d her toward serving Christ.

My lay member had to leave on a business trip at 8 a.m. this morning. She wrote me an email at 6:30a.m. saying that she had written up a series of educational moments
to share in the next few weeks about the ministries of our church. She and I discussed these moments during conference. They are designed to help Valley learn about what great ministry the church is about and encourage greater financial support. Jenny is a very successful and busy business woman who is in the midst of great professional transitions. She worked her entire month around being able to
come to conference. Her two children returned from our first youth mission trip on Friday. She hoped to spend time with them before having to leave for the next two weeks on business. However, in the midst of all this she took the time to take what she learned from conference and write it up so that it might be shared by her husband with the church in the next few weeks.

Both Jenny and Izy give me great faith in the future of the United Methodist
Church. This weekend strengthened and encouraged them. As a pastor when you push people to try something new it is so important that it enrich them. Thank you for making this happen for them.

Yours in Christ,
Dorothy Scott (Thankful to be serving at Valley UMC for another year)

Dorothy’s story is far from unique. This is what happens when we really focus ourselves upon the priority of a new generation of Christians. I’m recommending that next year our entire Annual Conference be focused upon the single priority of empowering a new generation, that any reports be made exclusively by those under forty, and that every church send lay delegates who are all under forty. Jenny and Izy are in every congregation. We must notice them, nurture them, and empower them for God to use them in giving our church a future. By God’s grace, we will!

Thanks for a great Annual Conference.
Will Willimon

HOPE

The women returned from the cemetery on the first Easter morning, announcing, "He is Risen!"

The response of the disciples, the church, us?

With one voice we responded that the women preached "an idle tale" (Luke 24:11).

What is there about us that tends to disbelieve the possibility of resurrection, to be cynical and hopeless? Let's be honest. Something there is in us that has a stake in hopelessness. Those who would protect the status quo, these who profit from the present system, tend to be threatened by hope.

In one of my previous churches I had a member who was negative about everything. When anything new was proposed, he could be counted on to produce a doleful litany: It won't work. We tried that a few years ago and it failed. We just don't have a really committed congregation.

There's no money.

On and on it went. He managed to kill every new initiative with his hopelessness.
I complained to an older, wiser pastor who said to me, "The only way to defeat such defeatism is by having one honest to goodness success. Nothing disempowers cynicism like success."

He was right. For the first time in recent memory, we had a very successful Stewardship campaign. That was the last we heard from Mr. Defeat.

I've got this on my mind because this year's Annual Conference theme is simply "hope." Scripture tells us that we Christians are always "to be prepared to give an account for the hope that is within you."

As I prepare for this year's Annual Conference, here are some specific gifts of God that fill me with hope:

• This past year we raised nearly a million more dollars for mission and ministry, the highest rate of giving in our history.
• Nearly a dozen new communities of faith were formed, making our Conference one of the leaders in New Church Development in the United Methodist Church.
• Our churches brought over four thousand people of faith in Christ this year.
• We created the Residency in Ministry program to equip and mentor our newest clergy, a model for the rest of the church in the development of new leaders.
• This July we will institute an extensive on-line system (created by our Conference Connectional Ministries Staff) for weekly measurement of discipleship – accountability for all of our congregations. Every congregation will report, every week, on its fidelity to Christ. This is a groundbreaking effort to recover Wesleyan accountability.
• Natural Church Development has transformed and energized over two dozen of our congregations that were previously in decline.
• Our Cabinet has greatly streamlined, personalized, and made more results-sensitive our methods for clergy appointments. Through our triad interview process, the First Ninety Days program, and other means we are greatly improving our success rate for clergy appointments, giving churches the clergy leadership they need to be faithful to our Priorities.

Signs of hope! Easter continues! The women were right! He is risen indeed! Defeatism is being defeated by the Risen Christ.

William H. Willimon

NON-SYNOPTIC CHURCH LEADERSHIP IN CHURCH

You probably know that important guides for the Christian faith are the Synoptic Gospels.  Synoptic is a word that comes from the Greek meaning literally to "see together."   A "symphony" is when everything sounds together. Synoptic is when we see everything together – such as the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, whose accounts of Jesus more or less parallel one another.

The Cabinet and I have found helpful the leadership insights of Gil Rendle from the Alban Institute in Washington.  During one of our sessions Gil stressed the need today in the church for what he called "non-synoptic leadership."  Gil said that in organizations of the past, when there was low complexity and low conflict, leaders could be simply problem solvers.   Here is a problem; here is to fix it.  In the modern world, where problems seem to be so complex, leaders adopted strategic planning. Much energy was spent in thinking through a complex problem and engaging in complex long-term solutions.  

In the complex and conflicted human organization called today's church, Rendle says that leaders can no longer function well with either problem-solving or strategic planning.  It is unproductive in a conflicted organization where people feel very differently about many different subjects to spend so much time negotiating, bargaining, and planning for a distant future.  Now leaders must act, even if they aren't sure if they have a consensus backing them up, even if they are unsure of the results of their actions.  This is "non-synoptic leadership." 

When I was a young pastor, put upon the church with virtually no training in pastoral leadership, an older, more experienced pastor gave me a couple of bits of advice that I have not forgotten.

 "I am sure someone has told you that you shouldn't change anything when you go to a new church for at least a year," he said to me.  Indeed, someone had told me just that. "Well, forget it!  Don't change anything in a new church unless you become convinced that it needs changing!  Change anything you think that needs changing and anything you think you can change without the laity killing you.  Lots of churches are filled with laity who are languishing there, desperate for a pastor to go ahead and change something for the better.  Lots of times we pastors blame our cowardice, or our lack of vision, on the laity, saying that we want to change something, but we can't because of the laity.  We ought to just go ahead and change something and then see what the consequences are."

I was surprised by his advice.

"And don't wait until everybody is on board, and every possible person agrees with you until you act on some issue," was his second bit of advice.  Sometimes we ask people to make a decision about some change and they don't yet know enough about it to make a decision. There are a good number of people that will never be for the change, no matter what.  Waiting for them to be positive about change is to unfairly empower them over the church. "Don't put every move you make to a vote, unless you have to," was his final bit of advice. 

That older pastor was a practitioner of "synoptic leadership" though he did not know it by the name. 

In any difficult issue Gil Rendle said, automatically about 20% of people in the organization are for doing things differently.  About 20% will never be in favor of doing things differently.  That leaves over half the people of the organization who stand a chance of changing their opinion on the matter.  "A pastor can waste a huge amount of time waiting for, and trying to convince the 20% who will never change.  Work on that 60%, and try to give them room to feel positively about the change at their own rate."  These are some of the principles of non –synoptic leadership.

In the Book of Acts the Apostles have the so called "Jerusalem Conference" in which there is "no small debate" over what to do about the inclusion of Gentiles into the church.  We are not given the details, but I am sure that when you have got people like Paul and Peter locked in debate, there was no small debate!  However, the conference ends with a compromise, an agreement of what to do about the Gentiles.  Luke comments, "It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…" 

I take this as a biblical example of non-synoptic leadership.  The scriptures do not say that everyone at the Conference agreed with the solution.  It does not even say that a majority agreed with the solution.  Rather it said that there was a sense in the meeting that the Holy Spirit was in this, though not everybody could say for sure in what way the Holy Spirit was in this.  It also seemed good to try to keep with the movements of the Holy Spirit to move ahead, even though everyone could not see the ultimate outcome of their decisions.

Thank the Lord that the ultimate outcome of their decision was the church as it has been given to us today.

It has not been given to us to see the ultimate destiny of everything that we are doing in the church today.  We do not have a complete synoptic point of view.  And yet, by the grace of God we don't have to.  We can trust God.  We can attempt to follow the leadings of the Holy Spirit and move along, confident that God gives us what we need to be faithful in our own time and place.

 William H. Willimon

  

Please pray for the work of our Annual Conference, meeting this year at Clearbranch. Our present Annual Conference, in its two-day form is a great example of the fruits of non-synoptic church!

General Conference 2008: North Alabama Leading the Way

The theme of the 2008 General Conference was "a future with hope." Our 2008 North Alabama Annual Conference theme is "Hope." And this is not the only parallel between what our Conference is doing and the work of the recent General Conference.

Just as the North Alabama Conference has four priorities which help to guide our ministry as an Annual Conference (new congregations, natural church development, effective leadership for the 21st century and empowering a new generation of Christians) the Council of Bishops and the staff of the church's general agencies called upon United Methodists to adopt four "areas of focus."

• Developing principled Christian leaders for the church and the world
• Creating new places for new people and renewing existing congregations
• Engaging in ministry with the poor
• Stamping out killer diseases by improving health globally

Two of these foci match with two of ours. We have also been active in the "Nothing But Nets" campaign to stamp out Malaria (which will be our Annual Conference Offering this year).

Our delegation was committed to containing costs in the General Church. A budget of almost $642 million was developed. The budget was aligned with the 4 ministry foci (just as the North Alabama Conference has been aligning our Conference budget with our Four Priorities). This new budget keeps more resources at the local church and Annual Conference level rather than having large increases in the General Church budget. Our North Alabama Delegation helped keep the budget to less than a 2% increase per year, the smallest increase in decades. Our Treasurer Scott Selman, a lay delegate to General Conference, served on the Finance and Administration legislative committee and led in this area (just as Scott has enabled our Conference to have two years in a row with the smallest budget increases in years.).

Another action that parallels some of our work here was when the General Conference revised the mission statement of the United Methodist Church. It was revised from "the mission of the church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ" to "the mission of the church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world." A couple of years ago we in North Alabama changed our Conference vision statement to "Every church challenged and equipped to make more disciples of Jesus Christ by taking risks and changing lives." This addition of "more" has helped us focus on our mission of making disciples.

In North Alabama we have a priority of empowering a new generation of Christians. This year's General Conference had the highest participate of people under 30 than any other General Conference in history. We had several young adult delegates and reserve delegates from North Alabama. Again, this is an area in which our Conference has been changing our ways of working (see this year's Nominations Committee report) in order to reach more young adults and empower them for church leadership.

General Conference added "your witness" to the church membership vows of supporting a congregation with "your prayers, your presence, your gifts and your service." All United Methodists are witnesses of Jesus Christ. It is gratifying to see General Conference take up this passion for disciple-making that has characterized our Conference in recent years.

Another piece of legislation that will have a big impact is the new eligibility of local pastors, probationary members and associate members to vote for clergy delegates to General Conference. They still cannot serve as delegates, but their voices will be heard. Our Conference has more local pastors working in ministry than any other Conference in the Connection.

The worldwide nature of our church was apparent throughout the Conference. One of our delegates, Robert Sparkman, worked at legislation ensuring equal representation on general boards and agencies. This means those areas where the church is growing (such as Africa and Korea) will also have voices on General Boards and agencies to help guide our denomination in our disciple making mission.

We heard a memorable speech from Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia. She shared that the influence of the United Methodist Church helped shape her. She was educated in a school United Methodists started. Now she is a proud United Methodist serving as the first democratically elected woman head-of-state on the continent of Africa. One of our District Superintendents, Richard Stryker is a native of Liberia and Oliver and Elaine Clark served there as missionaries.

During General Conference we heard a report of the recovery from Hurricane Katrina. Scores of North Alabama VIM workers continue to play a big role in this effort.

One sign of hope that was present throughout the Conference was that the altar and podium were both made from wood that came from the property of Gulfside Assembly. Though Gulfside was destroyed in Katrina, we are rebuilding this historic center. North Alabama's own Mollie Stewart is serving as interim executive director for Gulfside Assembly.

So, in a number of ways, the direction of the North Alabama Conference -- as we work toward our priorities, as we attempt to focus our efforts - is having an influence beyond our Conference. It is a sure sign of hope to find our United Methodist Church, in it recent General Conference, moving in much the same hopeful direction.

William Willimon

Pastoral Wisdom

Recently I wrote to our retired pastors asking them to share with me their best insights on the work of pastoral ministry. In their years of ministry, what had they found to be the essential qualities for faithful pastors?

I have received over fifty wonderful responses. They represent over two millennia of wisdom! Here are some recurring themes in their responses.

• Successful pastoral ministry requires not only theological ability, biblical fidelity, and a good personality; it requires hard work! Pastors must be "self-starters" who proactively engage their parishioners and their communities by knocking on doors, engaging in conversation, making contacts and other efforts to reach people. Disciplined, determined work is required.
• Faithful pastors must have a vivid sense of vocation, a sense of being summoned by God to do this work. The work that pastors do is too demanding to do it for any other reason than the conviction that one is called to do this work, that God wants you to do it.
• The only enduring reasons for being in ministry are theological. Pastors must constantly refurbish their sense that this is a "God thing," that ministry is more than a mere "helping profession." Pastoral ministry arises out of theological commitments and is dependent upon what God is doing in the church and the world.
• Though some seem to believe that pastoral visitation is outmoded, there is no substitute for meeting people where they live, from offering yourself to them through visiting in their homes and businesses.
• Pastoral ministry is relational. Your people must believe that you care about them, that you know them individually, and that you are trying to love them.

I find these to be enduring insights about ministry, gleaned from many years of collective wisdom. I share these with you in the hope that you will be inspired as I have been by our retired pastors.

Will Willimon