Wesley for Everyone

The most wonderfully Wesleyan aspect of the spectacularly successful Disciple Bible Studies is its name. It’s not “Thinking Long Thoughts about Scripture” or the “Noble Ideas from the Bible” series. It’s Disciple. As I see it, John Wesley made two enduring contributions to the church universal:

(1.) Belief in Jesus results in discipleship. Scripture is meant to be embodied, performed, and enacted in our daily lives (Wesley’s “practical Christianity”). We’re not talking distinctively United Methodist Christianity if we’re not talking practical, incarnate, obedient Christianity. Randy Maddox characterized Wesley’s theology as “responsible grace,” [1] an interplay between the loving work of God in us and the work of God through us, all of us.

(2.) Discipleship is for everybody, young and old, rich and poor. Wesley truly believed that it was possible for ordinary Eighteenth Century people, of every age and rank, to be transformed into saints – if they were disciplined, educated, and formed by Scripture. Early Methodists designed a score of creative means to enable the accomplishment of those two goals.

Recently I asked a successful youth minister, “What is the chief factor in the growth of your ministry with youth?” He replied, “the spiritual needs of students match up perfectly with Wesleyan Christianity. They want to be transformed and they yearn for connectedness with others in their walk with Christ. Methodists know how to do that!”

Uniquely Wesleyan identity doesn’t come naturally. Randy Maddox showed me an exchange of letters between Wesley and Miss J.C. March that illustrates the twofold particularities of Wesley’s practical Christianity. Miss March had written to Wesley about inadequacies in her spiritual life. Wesley replied, without noticeable sympathy for her plight, chiding her to give up her “gentlewoman” airs and be a disciple of Jesus. How? “Go see the poor and sick in their own poor little hovels. Take up your cross, woman!... Jesus went before you, and will go with you. Put off the gentlewoman; you bear an higher character. You are an heir of God!” [2]

Two years later, in response to Miss March’s continued whining about her sad spiritual state, an aggravated Wesley replied, “I find time to visit the sick and the poor; and I must do it, if I believe the Bible….. I am concerned for you; I am sorry you should be content with lower degrees of usefulness and holiness than you are called to.” It’s vintage Wesley – nobody is too low (or in Miss March’s case, too high) to be outside of the reach of responsible grace. For Father John, faith in Christ meant being busy in Christ’s work, going where Christ goes, doing what Christ commands. (I count 86 references in his sermons to the importance of prison ministry.)

A major pastoral responsibility is to inculcate and indoctrinate our people, young and old, in distinctively Wesleyan Christianity, even as Father John worked on Miss March.

1. We ought to love Wesleyan Christianity and our people enough to entice them into the joys of Wesleyan believing. I know of no really vibrant, growing church that does not take the orientation and education of new members seriously. Methodism is not synonymous with being a thinking, caring, average American. Everyone who joins a United Methodist congregation should be asked, “What do we need to give you that would enable you to participate fully as a Wesleyan Christian?”

In 2008, our Conference celebrated United Methodist Believing, urging every congregation to have lay-led learning opportunities organized around my book, United Methodist Beliefs: A Brief Introduction (Westminster John Knox, 2008). A team of our laypersons designed a fine downloadable study guide. (Go to www.northalabamaumc.org/laity, click “Resource: United Methodist Beliefs” in the left menu)

I recently visited a congregation that requires a four Sunday new member class – led by laypersons. One layperson has fine-tuned, “United Methodist Beliefs in Forty-five Minutes,” a class that is organized around the doctrinal section of the Discipline. At the end of that session, each prospective member is asked, “Which United Methodist belief would you like to know more about?” The pastor and lay leaders then point that person to additional resources.

The Wesley Study Bible, with its commitment to biblical interpretation from a Wesleyan perspective, is a great new resource. Adult Sunday School classes could work through the entire WSB in the course of a year, reading selected Wesleyan Core Terms and Life Applications found within the text of each biblical book as an exercise in Wesleyan hermeneutics.

I have written a Downloadable Discussion Guide that takes the Four Emphases from the last General Conference and utilizes the Wesley Study Bible for study by individuals or groups. Teachers of youth and children could easily adapt this study guide for use in leading even very young Christians into scripture.

I met with a group of High School students who had a “Walking to School With Wesley,” in which they took various key Wesleyan terms – justification, sanctification, New Birth, “almost Christian” – and wrestled with how these ideas could be put into practice in their lives as students. “It’s great to see that scripture isn’t just ancient stuff to be understood in church but also truth to be practiced in my high school,” said one sophomore. I see Father John smile.

The Wesleys taught that it is possible not only to come to faith in Christ but also to experience significant growth in faith in Christ. We’ve got to be half as resourceful as our spiritual forebears in creating means whereby Christians can grow. You probably know that Methodists were among the originating leaders of the Sunday School Movement in Nineteenth Century America. That movement was, in great part, a creative attempt to get the Bible into the hands of everyone, particularly those who had been excluded from the educational systems of the day. I just had lunch with a Disciple Bible study group for homeless persons at one of our congregations in Birmingham. How very Wesleyan.

Confirmation is a grand opportunity to emphasize the special qualities of Wesleyan believing. Confirmation materials that pair a confirmand with an older, experienced adult mentor seem to me a wonderfully Wesleyan way of stressing that Christianity is not just a way of believing but a practiced way of living, a mode of apprenticeship in which we take responsibility for one another’s spiritual growth.

2. The love of Christ, working in us, transforms us, as we are drawn closer to Christ and become more joyfully obedient to Christ’s will for our lives.

God’s grace is not a facile pat on the head with God murmuring sweetly, “I love you just the way you are, promise me you will never change.” Wesley taught that God’s grace is the power of God to live a transformed life. The first Methodists pioneered the use of small accountability groups where each person took responsibility for “watching over others in love,” holding one another accountable to the disciplines of discipleship.

In too many of our congregations, the way pastors utilize their time, the way educational opportunities are offered, and the way the congregation expends its resources, human and material, suggest that the congregation has limited itself to responding to the spiritual needs of one generation. There is a reason that the average United Methodist is about 58 years old.

From my observation, youth may be more attuned to the adventure of Wesleyan transformational Christianity than people in my age group. Young people love to be worked over, turned upside down and transformed. The peaceful, sedate, placid life is rarely a goal of activist Wesleyan believing. In campus ministry, we formed “Holiness Groups” – small groups of students who covenanted with one another to hold one another accountable for five spiritual disciplines each day. Disciplines included practices like praying for one another at the same time each day, attending church together each Sunday, and studying the same biblical passages together once a week. We Wesleyans believe that Christ can transform and empower any life and Christ tends to do some of his most transformative work through small accountability groups.

I have high praise for the Volunteers in Mission from some of our congregations that pioneered the “Grandparents/Grandchildren” teams to Panama. That effort was so successful that they are now doing a team for “College Students and Grandparents” to Haiti. The church needs to realize what a wonderful resource God has given us in the intergenerational nature of the church.

3. God expects not only to be loved but also obeyedby practice of the faith in disciplined communities of faith. Nobody is expected to be a solo United Methodist Christian. Discipleship is too difficult, survival as a Christian is too demanding without habitual, formed and formal practices of discipleship that are taught in the church. Prayer, Bible study, sacraments, public worship, and the small group Christian conferencing that we methodical Wesleyans once cultivated with enthusiasm, may be taken up again by all age groups as essential to Christian believing. It is no small thing that Wesley’s greatest theological work was in his crafting of liturgies, hymns, and sermons – those theological practices that were near to the needs of actual believers in their daily walk with Christ. Any real, deep spiritual transformation must be cultivated and sustained through good habits. The most important Christian virtues are too important, and too against our natural inclinations, to be left to when we feel like doing them.

I know a children’s choir director who, when I praised her for her choir’s stirring rendition of “Love Divine, All Love’s Excelling,” said, “We used to sing those silly little songs that you buy off the internet. Then I said, ‘Wait! We’re United Methodists! We have some really good ways of praising God that we ought to be sharing with our kids.” I hope that Charles Wesley heard that.

Last Advent, a group of young couples expressed dismay at the anticipated effect of Christmas commercialism upon their young children. “What can we do to rescue our children from this holiday onslaught?” they asked. A group of a half dozen older women in the congregation stepped up and offered a series of crafts workshops in which parents and children made Christmas gifts that simplified and made more faithful their celebration of Christmas.

So Miss March, take heart! A new generation of Wesleyan Christians is putting our beliefs into practice and being transformed in the process. Discipleship is for everyone. Everyone.

William H. Willimon

Bishop Willimon is General Editor, with Joel B. Green of The Wesley Study Bible.

________________________________________
[1] and [2] As discussed in Randy L. Maddox, Responsible Grace, John Wesley’s Practical Theology, (Nashville: Kingswood Books (Abingdon Press), 1994, 19.

Ten Theses About The Future of Ministry

Last fall I met with a group of Lilly Transition into Ministry fellows in Pennsylvania. These are some top recent seminary graduates who are in their first years of ministry. For our discussions I presented some of my hunches about the future of the pastoral ministry. This provoked a lively discussion among these new pastors. I share my theses here in encouragement of discussion of the future of pastoral leadership in our church:

Ten Theses About The Future of Ministry

The pastoral ministry in mainline Protestantism will continue to experience numerical decline as well as be pushed to the margins of this culture. The mainline is old-line that is becoming sidelined.

The pastoral ministry in mainline Protestantism will need to lead the church in redefining itself in the light of the spiritual needs and aspirations of people under 35 or else will continue to decline because it has limited itself to the spiritual affairs of one generation.

The pastoral ministry in mainline Protestantism will need to find a theological way through the intellectual death of theological liberalism (“Progressive Christianity”) and the cultural compromises of traditional evangelicalism (the IRD and evangelical Protestantism’s alliance with the political right).

The pastoral ministry in mainline Protestantism may recover the joy of denominational identity even as denominations are dying. (The Wesley Study Bible’s enthusiastic reception by the church may be a sign that Wesleyans are joyfully recovering their roots.)

The pastoral ministry must be supple, adaptable, and willing to experiment on the basis of biblically supported leadership styles.

The mission of the church will take precedence over internal maintenance, real estate, fellowship, therapy, pastoral care and other factors that have driven the church in recent decades and have contributed to our decline.

Methodists will either become engaged in the mysterious, relentless growth of the Kingdom of God or they will continue to decline. Growth is our most needed focus.

Ministry will be energized by theological refurbishment and a recovery of the theological rationale for ministry. Ministry will become more dependent upon a theological construal of the pastoral ministry.

The pastoral ministry will recover the oddness and the excitement of salvation in Jesus Christ.

The pastoral ministry will either find a way to attract and empower a new generation of pastor’s critique and reconstruct pastoral ministry or we will pass away with this generation.

Will Willimon

Preaching and Resurrection, Jesus Continued

If one considers the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus – the birth of the church from the once despondent and defeated disciples, the perseverance of the saints even unto today, last Sunday’s sermon that changed a life -- it is difficult to see why anyone would disbelieve it, except for two reasons:

1. The resurrection is an odd occurrence, outside the range of our usual experience, so that makes it difficult for our conceptual abilities. We tend to reject that which we lack the conceptual apparatus for understanding. Because we cannot conceive of resurrection we deny its possibility.

2. Perhaps more importantly, if Jesus is raised from the dead, if the resurrection is true, a fact that is real, then we must change. Resurrection carries with it a claim, a demand that we live in the light of this stunning new reality or else appear oddly out of step. Now we must acknowledge who sits upon the throne, who is in charge, how the story ends. Now we must either change, join in God’s revolution or else remain unchanged, in the grip of the old world and its rulers, sin and death.

Thus because we preachers must, at least on a yearly basis, preach resurrection, we keep being challenged to live and talk in the light of the resurrection. We keep being born again into a new reality. We are not permitted the old excuse for lethargy, “people don’t change.” Certainly, everything we know about people suggests that they usually don’t change. But sometimes they do. And that keeps us preachers nervous and sitting lightly on our cynicism. Change is rare, virtually impossible, were it not that Jesus has been raised from the dead. When a pastor keeps working with some suffering parishioner, even when there is no discernable change in that person’s life, when a pastor keeps preaching the truth even with no visible congregational response, that pastor is being a faithful witness to the resurrection (Luke 1:2). That preacher is continuing to be obedient to the charge of the angel at the tomb to go and tell something that has changed the fate of the world (Matt. 28:7), which the world cannot know if no one dares to tell.

Preacher Paul was not only the great missionary to the Gentiles but also living proof that the dead can be raised, thus accounting for his frequently self-referential testimonials of his encounter with Christ. In Paul’s encounter, the dead Jesus was not only seen as raised, but the Church Enemy Number One, Paul, was also raised. On Easter, Jesus was not just raised from the dead. He did not just return to us, he returned to us, to the very ones who had so forsaken and denied him. When he appeared first and most frequently to his own disciples (the ones who, when the soldiers came to arrest him had fled into the darkness) the risen Christ thereby demonstrated that it is of the nature of the true and living God to forgive. And not only to forgive but also to call, commission, and commandeer. “Go! Tell!”

Easter keeps differentiating the church from a respectable, gradually progressive, moral improvement society. Here, there are sudden lurches to the left and to the right, falling backwards and lunging forward, people breaking lose and getting out of control. Easter keeps reminding us pastors that the church is the result of something that God in Jesus Christ has done, not something we have done. When the world wants change, the world raises an army, arms itself to the teeth and marches forth with banners unfurled to storm the wilderness. When the God of cross and resurrection wants to change the world this God always does so nonviolently, through some voice crying in the wilderness, through preaching.

Easter is great grace to those well disciplined, hard working, conscientious preachers who are so often in danger of thinking that the Kingdom of God depends mostly on their well constructed and energetically delivered sermons. Easter is also a warning to cautious and too prudent preachers that they ought to expect to live on the edge, ought not to expect to be “kept” by the church. A resurrected Christ is pure movement, elusive, evasive, he goes ahead of us, will not be held by us. A true and living God seems to enjoy shocking and surprising those who think that they are tight with God. We therefore ought to press the boundaries of what is possible and what is impossible to say in the pulpit, ought to keep working the edges as if miracles were not miraculous at all but simply typical of a God who loves to raise the dead. We ought to preach in such a reckless, utterly-dependent-upon-God sort of way that, if God has not vindicated the peculiar way of Jesus by raising him from the dead, then our ministry is in vain. But, as Paul says, thank God, our faith in resurrection is not in vain because, by the grace of God, our preaching is not in vain.

Will Willimon

Many of our congregations had an incredible response to their Easter services. Riverchase boasted the “earliest Easter Sunrise Service in Alabama” with a Holy Saturday Service that drew over five hundred persons. Trinity Homewood and Alabaster had record breaking Easter crowds. In the Northeast, little New Market has 113 members and had 261 in attendance! In Madison, Asbury had 5,100 at church in all their Easter services. Scottsboro First has 647 members and had 854 at church. St. Paul/Triana has 137 members and had 365 on Easter. In every one of these churches, these attendance figures validate the specific steps these congregations and pastors have taken to make their churches be inviting congregations.

The Effect of Easter on Preachers

It makes a world of difference whether or not a preacher has been encountered by the living, speaking, resurrected Christ. Thus, making doxology to God (Rom. 11:33-36), Paul asks that we present ourselves as “a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” by not being “conformed to this world” but by being “transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:2). All of this is resurrection talk, the sort of tensive situation of those who find their lives still in an old, dying world, yet also are conscious of a new world being born. Our lives are eschatologically stretched between the sneak preview of the new world being shown to us in the church and the old world where the principalities and powers are reluctant to give way. We throw out our frail voices into a dying world and they come back to us, in the lives of those in the congregation who have seen and heard the risen Christ and who now embody that new life in their lives.

As pastors, we see a world in the grip of the Enemy, the final Enemy, but we also, by the grace of God, get to see the Enemy losing His grip upon some of the territory He once thought was His. We see death and the cross being raised again in a thousand place but we also see Jesus. In the meantime, which is the only time the church has ever known, we live as those who know something about the fate of the world that the world does not yet know, something so grand and wonderful that we cannot keep silent. We must go and tell. We must preach.

Paul confesses his own internalization of the resurrection in which he places Easter at the center of his discipleship:

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the community of
his sufferings by becoming just like him in his death, so that I might be like
him in his resurrection. No, I have not already obtained such a state, nor have
I already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ
Jesus has made me his own. Sisters and brothers, I do not consider that I have
already made this my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind
and straining forward toward what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal, the
prize, the upward call of God in Jesus Christ. (Phil. 3:10-14, my
translation)

Because of Easter, we preachers are not permitted despair. We keep forgetting what is behind and straining forward, eager to see what else a risen Christ can do through our preaching. There is certainly enough failure and disappointment in the preaching life to understand why depression, disillusionment, and despair could be considered the three curses of the preaching ministry. Despair is most understandable among some of our most conscientious and dedicated preachers. Any pastor who is not tempted by despair has probably given in to the world too soon, has become dishonest and deceitful about his or her homiletical failures, has become too easily pleased by and accommodated to present arrangements, is expecting too little of the preached word. Weekly confrontation with the gap between what God dares to say to us and what we are able to hear, leads many of our best and brightest to despondency. We grieve for the church and we despair that preaching really is as effective as God promises it to be. It seems sometimes as if our faith is in vain and our preaching is in vain. It seems as if God’s Word returns to God empty.

Yet, as Paul says, after the resurrection of Christ we do not grieve as those who have no hope. If our hope were in ourselves or our techniques for the skillful and effective proclamation of the gospel, we might well abandon hope. Our hope is in Christ, who for reasons known only fully to himself, has determined our spoken words to be a major means of his powerful presence in the world. Many Sundays I do not know why, and many Sundays, standing at the door of the church, bidding farewell to the worshippers, I see no evidence for Christ’s faith in us preachers. The congregation appears to have heard nothing and the world seems sadly the same.

Yet by the grace of God, I do so believe. I do believe that we have something to preach and I do believe that we preachers work not alone. In Jesus Christ, God is reconciling the world to himself. And Easter tells us that God’s purposes shall not be defeated, not by the Enemy, nor death, nor principalities and powers, or even by the church itself.

There is that sort of homiletical despair that leads some of our brothers and sisters to quit, to stop talking and to go into less demanding vocations. Yet there is also that despair, which I find more widespread, that leads some of us to slither into permanent cynicism about the efficacy of preaching.

“Preaching doesn’t change people,” becomes their mantra.

Some of this sense of the vanity of preaching is due to lack of faith that God can do any new thing with us. It is sad to see such accommodation to sin and death. How do we know that Easter is not true? Who told us that Jesus used bad judgment when he made us his witnesses to the resurrection even to the ends of the earth?

In order for the powers-that-be to have their way with us, to convince us that the rumor of resurrection is a lie, they must first convince us that death is “reality,” and that wisdom comes in uncomplaining adjustment to that reality – “This is it. This is all there is. Preaching is woefully archaic, one sided, authoritarian indoctrination that is bound to fail. Get used to it.”

The world, the flesh and the devil have a stake in our convincing ourselves that preaching doesn’t work – it’s one of the ways that the world protects itself from the reality of resurrection.

So, by the sheer grace of God and our faith in Easter, we still preach and that we continue to preach, last Sunday and the next, becomes a sort of proof of the truth of the resurrection.

Will Willimon

Easter Preaching

The call of Paul the apostle was his experience of finding himself living in a whole new world. He changed because of his realization that, in Jesus Christ, the world had changed. It was not merely that he discovered a new way of describing the world but rather that his citizenship had been moved to a radically transformed world. Paul’s key testimonial to this recreation is in his Second Letter to the Corinthians:

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed
away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to
himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. (2 Cor.
5:17-18)
Verse 17, in the Greek, lacks both subject and verb so it is best
rendered by the exclamatory, “If anyone is in Christ – new creation!”

Certainly, old habits die hard. There are still, as Paul acknowledges so eloquently in Romans 8, “the sufferings of the present time.” The resistance and outright rejection that preachers suffer is evidence that the church has not yet fully appreciated the eschatological, end of the age, transformed arrangements that ought to characterize the church. We always preach between the times and rejection is often a sign that the old age and the principalities and powers still run rampant.

That many of us preachers still preach using essentially secular (i.e. godless) means of persuasion borrowed uncritically from the world is yet another testimony to our failure to believe that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, thus radically changing everything. In so doing we act as if Jesus were still sealed securely in the tomb, as if he did not come back to us, did not speak to us and cannot, will not speak to us today, as if preaching is something that we do through our strategies rather than through the speaking of the risen Christ.

Resurrection is not only the content of gospel preaching but also its miraculous means. Where two are three of us are gathered in his name, daring to talk about him, he is there, talking to us (Matt. 18:20). All the way to the end of the age, in every part of the world, in our baptism and proclamation, he is with us (Matt. 28:20).

I once heard a church growth expert declare, “Any church that doesn’t have a pull down video screen will be dead in ten years.” But I believe that better technology does not make sermons work. Lack of technology cannot kill a church. Only God can kill a church. Only a living Christ can make our sermons speak to a new generation.

Christian preaching can never rest on my human experience, or even the experience of the oppressed, as some forms of Liberation Theology attempt to do, because human experience tends to be limited by the world’s deadly, deathly means of interpretation. The world keeps telling Christians to “get real,” to “face facts,” but we have – after the cross and resurrection – a very particular opinion of what is real. I don't preach Jesus' story in the light of my experience, as some sort of helpful symbol or myth which is helpfully illumined by my own story of struggle and triumph. Rather, I am invited by Easter to interpret my story in the light of God's triumph in the resurrection. I really don’t have a story, I don’t know the significance of my little life, until I read my story and view my life through the lens of cross and resurrection. One of the things that occurs in the weekly preaching of the gospel is to lay the gospel story over our stories and reread our lives in the light of what is real now that crucified Jesus has been raised from the dead.

Will Willimon
Speaking of resurrection, Patsy and I joined the congregation of Alexandria UMC on Palm Sunday for a wonderful service. Rev. Paula Calhoun is leading a remarkable turnaround at this church. In an attempt to stay on the move with the Risen Christ, they are planning a bold relocation. I believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus - I've seen it at Alexandria UMC!

Thinking Resurrection

In a curious passage, Paul links the resurrection with preaching and preaching with resurrection:

Now I would remind you, brethren, in what terms I preached to you the gospel, which you received, in which you stand, by which you are saved….. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared….Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that three is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. (1 Corin. 15:1, 3-5, 12-14)

Some at Corinth are denying the resurrection. What proof do they have that Jesus truly arose from the dead and appeared to his first followers? In response, Paul says that they know that Christ is raised because that’s what Paul preached to them. Is that all? Listen to Paul's logic, "I have preached to you that Christ is raised from the dead. Now if I preached that how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?"

Paul goes on to say, in effect, "Now if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised and that would mean that, when I preached, I lied and that your faith is in vain. But I did tell the truth in my preaching and just to prove it, I'm going to preach it to you again. Christ has been raised from the dead.'" There.

Tom Long asks, What sort of circular, merry-go-round logic is this? We want proof of Easter and all Paul gives us is more preaching? “I told you about the resurrection. You don't believe in the resurrection? Let me tell you about the resurrection," [1] Logicians says this is an "if this-then this" sort of logic. If X is true, then Y must be true. Such arguments are dependent upon their ability to touch down somewhere in irrefutable human experience. The first proposition must be true. If not, the second proposition is false. If X is not irrefutably true, then there is no way that Y can be true.

This logic moves from what we don't know for sure back to what we know for certain, rippling back toward affirmation.

Thus reasons Paul:

If there is no resurrection of the dead...
...then Christ has not been raised.
And if Christ has not been raised...
...then our preaching was a lie
And if our preaching was a lie...
...then your faith is futile.

At this point, I think Paul expected the gathered Corinthians to shout in unison, "But our faith is not futile." The Corinthians may have had problems with love (I Corinthians 13), with getting along with each other in the church, but they had faith -- spoke in tongues, worried about eating meat offered to idols, had knock down drag outs over baptism. They were just chock full of faith. Nobody could argue over their experience of Easter. Paul implies that the Corinthians were so full of faith, so dazzled by the resurrection that, when he preached to them, he was forced to preach Jesus Christ and him crucified in an attempt to get them back down to earth for a few moments. Anybody who worshipped at one of their Sunday evening free-for-alls might go away thinking that Christians were weird, out of control, but nobody could deny that some life-giving power had been unleashed among them.

So let's reverse the order:

Because your faith is not futile,
Our preaching was not a lie,
Christ has been raised,
There is resurrection of the dead.

"Because your faith is not futile....There is resurrection of the dead." It's an important truth. Easter begins to dawn, not in the preacher’s assembling alleged "evidence" from history. The dry reconstruction of historians will not get us to resurrection. Easter begins in the recognition that our faith is not futile, in our present experience of the Risen Christ roaming among us. It is the testimony, not just of preachers like me, but of countless believers like you, that is the evidence. When bread and wine touch your lips and you see, feel the real presence. When you thought your heart would break in disappointment and pain, but it didn't because He was standing beside you in the dark. When you didn't know what to say and there were just the right words, words not of your own devising, being spoken by you. When you dragged into the church, cold at heart, skeptical, and distant, yet at the hymns, your spirit rose to greet His, your faith is not in vain.

This is the logic of Easter.

Will Willimon

[1] Thomas G. Long, The Senses of Preaching, pp. 92-93.

Foolish Preaching

We're in the appointive season. As a bishop, sometimes it’s quite an achievement to converse with my fellow clergy about things more important than appointments, budgets, and numbers, though all that is important. Here are some thoughts about the task of cruciform preaching, from my earlier book, A Theology of Proclamation (Abingdon).

The cross is a story about the obedience of Christ, obedience even unto death. A faithful preacher’s life will be characterized by obedience to the task of proclaiming a foolish (by the world’s standards of wisdom) gospel. Preachers must discipline their lives so that there is no time in the pastoral week when a sermon is not in process, when the pastor is not wrestling with the biblical text and the demands of the congregational context. Preaching is hard work, requiring the cultivation of a host of skills that are difficult to develop. If we are called to preach (and who would take up this task without being called to do it?) then we must be obedient enough to the vocation to work at it. I believe the roots of clerical sloth are theological rather than primarily psychological. We become lazy and slovenly in our work because we have lost the theological rationale for the work.

Yet to take up the cross of Christ, to be willing to assume a yoke of obedience upon our shoulders, oblivious to the praise or blame of our congregations is also the basis of what it means to have life and that abundantly, to live one’s life in the light of true glory come down from heaven in the person of Jesus the Christ. As gospel preachers, preaching in the shadow of the cross, we get to talk about something and someone more important than ourselves. We get to proclaim Christ and him crucified, a rebuke to the world’s means of salvation, the great promise to a world dying for the truth. We get to expend our lives in work more significant than the lies by which most of the world lives. Working with a crucified God is a great adventure, a risky, perilous, wonderful undertaking that is so much more interesting than mere servility to the wisdom of the world. Every time someone is confronted by the cross of Christ and hears, believes, responds, every time someone is liberated from enslavement to the world’s false promises, then the preacher can take great satisfaction that the promises of God are indeed true, that God graciously continues, in us preachers and our sermons, to choose and to use “what is foolish (moria) in the world to confound the wise" (Rom. 1:27).

Will Willimon

On March 27th, I'll be meeting with the Central and South Central Local Pastors and the Key Lay Leaders to discuss the amazing growth of God's church. Hope you will join us.

Preaching and the Cross

Here are some thoughts about the task of cruciform preaching, from my earlier book, A Theology of Proclamation (Abingdon).

A robust theology of the cross is a reminder to us preachers that there is no eloquent, rhetorically savvy way by which our congregations can ascend to God. All of our attempts to climb up to God are our pitiful efforts at self-salvation. The gospel is not a story about how we are seeking God, but how God in Christ seeks us. God descends to our level by climbing on a cross, opening up his arms, and dying for us, because of us, with us. Paul’s thoughts on the foolishness of preaching that avoids “lofty words of wisdom” suggests that Christian rhetoric tends to be simple, restrained, and direct – much like the parables of Jesus. The Puritans developed what they called the “plain style” of preaching out of a conviction that Christian speech ought not to embellish, ought not to mislead hearers into thinking they there was some way for a sermon to work in the hearts and minds of the hearers apart from the gift of the Holy Spirit that makes sermons work.

Christian theology has always affirmed that the cross is not only a window through which we see the true nature of God as the embodiment of suffering love but also the truthful mirror in which we see ourselves. Cruciform preaching can’t help but speak of our sin. Jesus was nailed to the wood on the basis of a whole host of otherwise noble human ideals and aspirations like law and order, biblical fidelity, and national security. Preaching offers the grace of God along with a good dose of honesty about the human condition, honesty that we would not have had without the cross. After Calvary we could no longer argue that we are, down deep, basically good people who are making progress once we get ourselves organized and enlightened. The cross is also a reminder that Jesus’ preaching was brutally rejected and if our preaching is about Jesus, then it will often be rejected as well. There is no way to talk about gospel foolishness without risking rejection. Preachers therefore ought to be more surprised when a congregation gratefully understands, receives, and inculcates our message rather than when it misunderstands, rejects, and ignores our message. "We are fools for the sake of Christ" (1 Cor. 4:10).

Because of the cross, preaching Jesus can be a perilous vocation. One of the first great Christian sermons was that of Stephen who, for his homiletical efforts, was stoned to death (Acts 7-8). Christian preachers not only talk like Jesus but sometimes suffer and die like Jesus. Jesus was upfront in saying that the cross is not optional equipment for discipleship: “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake and for the sake of the gospel will save it” (Mark 8:34-35). When this episode is reported by Luke (Lk. 9:18-26) Jesus goes on to relate cross bearing to “me and my words” (v. 26). Sometimes, the particular, peculiar cruciform burden that preachers must bear is the words of Jesus. The cross is not some chronic illness, not some annoying person. The cross is that which is laid upon us because we are following a crucified savior and, for us preachers, having to proclaim the words of this savior can be quite a burden. For Paul, the cross is not only something that God does to and for the world, unmasking the world’s gods, exposing our sin, forgiving our sin through suffering love, but also the cross is the pattern for Christian life. He could say, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:19-20, as translated in the NRSV footnote). And yet, the good news is that his yoke is easy and his burden is light, which is to say as burdensome and difficult as Jesus and his words can be, they are less burdensome and more fun than most of the other burdens the world tries to lay on our backs. Of this I am a witness.

Will Willimon

Cruciform Preaching: Inglorious Talk

It's Lent, season of the Cross. In your own Lenten devotion you might be interested in a couple of my previous books, Thank God It’s Friday: The Seven Last Words of Jesus from the Cross and Sinning Like a Christian: The Seven Deadly Sins for Today, both published by Abingdon, both available from Cokesbury.

Cruciform Preaching: Inglorious Talk

A cruciform faith in the God who reigns from a cross requires a peculiar way of preaching that is foolishness to the world. When the speaker points to Jesus hanging helplessly on the cross and says, “Jesus Christ is Lord!” the predictable audience reaction is, “Why? How?”

Then the speaker is tempted to offer assorted evidence for such a patently ridiculous claim: citations from religious authorities, illustrations from everyday life, personal experience, and connections with the presuppositions of the audience. Classical rhetoric said that there were three means of persuasion of an audience: reason, emotions, and the character of the speaker.

Note that Paul, in writing to the Corinthians about the folly of his preaching 1 Cor. 1), rejects all of these classical means of persuasion, perhaps because there is no way for a speaker to get us from here to there, from our expectations for God to God on a cross, by conventional means of persuasion. When asked, “What is your evidence for your claim?” Paul simply responds, “Cross.” What else can he say? The cross so violates our frames of reference, our means of sorting out the claims of truth, that there is no way to get there except by “demonstration of the Spirit” and by “the power of God.” The only way for preaching about cross to “work” is as a miracle, a gift of God.

To underscore the miraculous quality of cruciform Christian proclamation Paul said that he spoke “in weakness and in much fear and trembling” – hardly what we would expect from an adept speaker. Yet Paul says he preached thus to show that nothing – neither the eloquence of the speaker nor the reasoning powers of the hearers – could produce faith in a crucified savior except the “power of God.”

Martin Luther was fond of contrasting a “theology of glory,” in which the cross was seen as avoidable, optional equipment for Christians, a mere ladder by which we climb up to God with a “theology of the cross” which, according to Luther, calls things by their proper names and is unimpressed with most that impresses the world. A theology of glory (the current “Prosperity Theology”?) preaches the cross as just another technique for getting what we want whereas a theology of the cross proclaims the cross as the supreme sign of how God gets what God wants. The cross is a statement that our salvation is in God’s hands, not ours, that our relationship to God is based upon something that God suffers and does rather than upon something that we do. To bear the cross of Christ is to bear its continual rebuke of the false gods to which we are tempted to give our lives. Autosalvation is the lie beneath most theologies of glory. When self-salvation is preached, reducing the gospel to a means for saving ourselves -- by our good works, or our good feelings, or our good thinking – then worldly wisdom and common sense are substituted for cruciform gospel foolishness and blasphemy is the result.

I’ve spent some time with a young person who is not a Christian, not a follower of the cross. I have these conversations with her because I’ve found it to be a salubrious spiritual exercise. Almost every conversation she reminds me of the oddness of the Christian way of salvation. The cross continues to be the strangest, most countercultural, truthful and ultimately life giving thing that the church has to say to the world.

Will Willimon

I continue to be amazed by the outpouring of aid from Methodists in Alabama to Haiti. Ray Crump and his team of volunteers have now shipped about two million dollars in supplies to our missionaries there!

We also are now lifting prayers for the people of Chile as they begin recovery from a devastating earthquake. UMCOR has already begun working with our partners in Chile to be a part of this disaster response. Rev. Matt Lacey has reported that our North Alabama Conference missionary serving in Chile John Elmore is safe.

Women in Ministry in North Alabama

I keep a picture in front of me in my office in Birmingham. It is a picture of Patsy’s grandmother, Bessie Parker, the first the first ordained woman in South Carolina Methodism, ordained in 1956. Bessie Parker was a mentor and she performed our wedding. Perhaps more importantly, she was a remarkable leader in the growth of churches in South Carolina.

In 2006 we celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the Ordination of Women as elders in United Methodism. In the last five decades, women clergy have been leading our Conference in some remarkable ways. For instance, The Reverend Clauzell Ridgeway Williams, only two years out of seminary, is working a near miraculous transformation at Sweet Home United Methodist Church in Gadsden. Clauzell is growing a church that has not grown for decades. The Reverend Deborah Moon founded a new, very special church while she was still in seminary, Genesis Church in Guntersville. She now serves a thriving church, Goshen United Methodist Church. Deborah is relentless in her determination for a church to grow and to reach out to the world in the name of Jesus. The Reverend Mary Bendall has created and leads “The Bridge” services at First United Methodist Church in Tuscaloosa. This means that Mary is preaching to one of our largest Sunday morning congregations -- a congregation that has been created under her leadership. The Bridge is doing some remarkable things in pioneering worship and outreach. We sent the Reverend Julie Holly to our Discovery Church, a new church that was in a great deal of difficulty. Julie, using new web based resources for communication, as well as her interjected leadership is giving Discovery a rebirth ministry.

One of my frustrations, in utilizing women clergy leadership, is that we have a comparative small number of women clergy in North Alabama. This means that we really need our talented clergy serving as effective pastors. My job, and the job of the District Superintendents, is to get every church the best leadership it needs to be faithful to the mission that Jesus Christ has given that congregation. This means that in calling women to Conference leadership we have at times been frustrated because we do not want to rob congregations of effective clergy leaders.

Nevertheless, our Conference is being lead by some remarkable women clergy leaders. The Reverend Elizabeth Nall has established a new level of Children’s Ministries in the North Alabama Conference, wonderfully fulfilling our Conference Priority of reaching a new generation. Elizabeth has established a network of children ministry leaders throughout the Conference that are providing training, events, coaching, and some transformative ministry.

Our Pastoral Care and Counseling has been lead for the past five years by an ordained deacon, the Reverend Dr. Sheri Ferguson. Sheri not only sees herself performing a physiological, therapeutic service for us, but also in leading congregations. Her Healthy Congregations program has been an invaluable resource for the Cabinet and has saved many of our congregations.

The Reverend Sherill Clontz, pastor of New Life United Methodist Church, has served admirably as our Conference Secretary. Now she will also serve as Associate District Superintendent of the Northeast District.

The Reverend Lori Carden has made our Conference a leader in Natural Church Development (NCD). Within a short time Lori will have reached her goal of having every congregation benefiting from the fruits of Natural Church Development. Lori is an extraordinary leader. She will now be serving on the Extended Cabinet to help the Cabinet utilize insights of NCD in better understanding the congregations under our care.

Nacole Hillman is administrative assistant to the Director of Connectional Ministries and the support staff for all of Connectional Ministries. She is the delightful voice on the end of the phone whenever anyone calls the office. She helps scores all the NCD surveys and is passionate about working with the Youth volunteer leadership in the conference.

This year I have brought Ms. Danette Clifton into the Episcopal Office. Danette, as you know, has made our Conference website a standard within the larger church. Danette also helped invent and is now helping to lead our North Alabama Conference Weekly Benchmark Dashboard. Danette is a master educator and essential part of getting our message out to our pastors and churches.

The Reverend Deb Welsh has assumed leadership in our outreach to the innercity of Birmingham by serving as Director of the Joe Rush Center for Urban Mission and Volunteer Recruitment for our beloved Birmingham Urban Ministries.

I have learned much from the insights of the Reverend Sherri Reynolds, pastor of Eulaton UMC in the Cheaha District, and the Reverend Paula Calhoun, pastor of Alexandria UMC in the Cheaha District, who are masters at energizing and growing the small membership church. I am going to be preaching at Alexandria on Palm Sunday, because I wanted to be there to learn more about the transformation that is taking place and to thank them for their exemplary leadership on the connectional giving.

These women are bringing extraordinary leadership to our Conference leading us to growth in our ministry together.

Words about the Cross

We’re entering the season of Lent, time of focus upon the
cross, so this seemed to me a good Lenten exercise for us preachers. During Lent
you might be interested in a couple of my previous books, Thank God It’s Friday:
The Seven Last Words of Jesus from the Cross and Sinning Like a Christian: The
Seven Deadly Sins for Today, both published by Abingdon, both available from
Cokesbury.

Imagine being asked to stand before a grand gathering of the good and the wise and being asked to make a speech about goodness, beauty, the meaning of life, the point of history, the nature of Almighty God or some such high subject and having no material at your disposal but an account of a humiliating, bloody, execution at a garbage dump outside a rebellious city in the Middle East. It is your task to argue that this story is the key to everything in life and to all that we know about God. This was precisely the position of Paul in Corinth. Before the populace of this cosmopolitan, sophisticated city of the Empire, Paul had to proclaim that this whipped, bloody, scorned and derided Jew from Nazareth who was God with Us.

As Paul said, he had his work cut out for him because preaching about the cross “is folly to those who are perishing,” foolishness and stupidity. A cross is no way for a messianic reign to end. Yet what else can this preacher say because, whether it makes sense to us or not, “it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.” (1 Cor. 18, 21)

Tailoring his manner of speech to his strange subject matter, Paul says that he chose a foolish sort of preaching that was congruent with his theological message:

When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that our faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. (1 Corin. 2:1-5)

This is probably our earliest, most explicit statement on the peculiarity of Christian preaching, and one of the few places in the New Testament where a preacher turns aside from the task of proclamation to discuss the nature of proclamation now that God has come as a crucified Messiah.

A crucified Messiah? It is an oxymoron, a violation of Israel’s high expectations for a messianic liberator. In order to bring such a scandal to speech, Paul eschewed “lofty words or wisdom,” the stock-in-trade of the classical orator. Rather than avoiding the scandal of the cross or attempting to sugar coat its absurdity in order to make it more palatable, he limited his subject matter so that he knew, “nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” His manner of presentation, his delivery was “weakness,” “fear and trembling,” a rather peculiar demeanor for a public speaker. Why? So that nothing might move his hearers, nothing might convince them but “the power of God.”

For God the Father to allow God the Son to be crucified, dead and buried is for God to be pushed out beyond the limits of human expectation or human help. The cross is the ultimate dead end of any attempt at human self-fulfillment, human betterment or progress. Hanging from the cross, in humiliation and utter defeat, there is nothing to be done to vindicate the work of Jesus or to make the story come out right except “the power of God.”

Paul says that he attempted to preach the gospel to the Corinthians in just that way. Rather than base his proclamation on human reason, common sense, or artful arguments, he spoke in halting, hesitant “fear and trembling” so that if they were to hear and to understand, to assent and to respond, it would have to be solely through “the power of God.”

Paul says to the Corinthians that the cross is moria, moronic foolishness:

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.'Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom. God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength." (I Corin. 1:18-25)

When Christians are asked to say something profound about ourselves, to say something about the nature of God, this is what we say – “cross.”

Will Willimon

Growing the Church, One Small Group at a Time

One of the most impressive areas of growth for us is in the area of involvement in small groups in the church. Small group involvement is important for two main reasons: 1. The Wesleyan movement was, in great part, a small group movement. John Wesley creatively utilized small, face-to-face groups to ignite his revival. In the groups, evangelical passion was wedded to Wesleyan accountability. Small groups are a very “Methodist thing.” 2. Studies show that churches grow through the increase of the number of small groups in the church and an increase in lay membership in these groups. In fact, part of the remarkable transformation at Helena UMC, is explosion of small groups being led by Paula Jones there. Mike Edmondson and Paula tell me that there is no vital, dynamically growing church that does not have at least 65% of all its adults involved, sometime during the course of a year, in small groups.

Elizabeth Nall, is our Conference leader and coach in educational small group work, particularly among parents and children. Elizabeth, in reporting our documented gains in the number of United Methodists in small groups in North Alabama says, “Small group formation is where faith development is deepened through study and relationships. There is potentially as much or more opportunity to reach people through small group participation in our churches as through our worship experiences.”

John Tanner, the pastor from Cove UMC (I call Cove the “Research & Development department for the North Alabama Conference”), credits small groups as the major factor in his congregation’s dramatic growth. At Cove (1030 Total professing members - 1050 was their average weekly worship attendance) a total of 950 people participate in small group ministries every week. John estimates that about 70% of Cove’s members participate in weekly small groups.

I have participated in teaching in a number of small group settings at ourCanterbury UMC. Oliver Clark leads a fine adult educational ministry at Canterbury that is small group based. Of Canterbury’s 4804 members, 1,428 attend regular small group meetings. An estimated 328 people are involved in Canterbury small groups who are not otherwise related to the church. Small groups, for many people, are the door through which people enter the church.

At Helena UMC, they have set a goal to give birth to at least a dozen new small groups every year in order to keep their forward motion. Elizabeth Nall says, “As a Christian educator, I believe that ii is essential to be intentional about faith development in small groups as we remain passionate about worship. There is ripe opportunity to make disciples for Jesus Christ through these small group encounters.”

This past Saturday, Feb. 6, 2010, Elizabeth and our Conference Adult Ministries Team arranged for Debi Nixon, Adult Discipleship Coordinator, from the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, to lead our conference in a discussion on small group ministry at Canterbury UMC.

Nixon discussed the Wesleyan and Biblical concept of small groups, how to start them, maintain their health, and the purpose and the goal of small group ministry through sharing the story of Church of the Resurrection - another church which chose to grow by "growing smaller" and focusing on small group ministries. Top leadership in our conference guided nineteen breakout sessions during the event encompassing more specific discussion in small group areas that our North Alabama local churches are using with success.

I am so glad so many of our churches gained important insight from Saturday’s Growing Successful Small Groups event. If your church needs guidance in strengthening your small group ministry contact Rev. Elizabeth Nall atenall@northalabamumc.org or (205) 226-7993.

Will Willimon

Ray Crump, who leads our relief warehouse in Decatur, has just reported to me that United Methodists of North Alabama ”are responding to the crisis in Haiti in a way that I have never seen in all my 50 years of ministry and relief work.” Ray and his volunteers are shipping tons of supplies to Haiti nearly every week. Thanks for this wonderful outpouring of Christian concern.

Episcopal Report for 2009

Vision for the North Alabama Conference:
Every church challenged and equipped to grow more disciples of Jesus Christ by taking risks and changing lives.

Conference Priorities:
New Congregations
Natural Church Development
Effective Leadership for the 21st Century
Empowering a New Generation of Christians
Missions

My Goals for 2009:

1. Have 95% North Alabama Conference Dashboard reporting for 2009 from all districts.
   We have achieved about a 90% reporting average, lower than we need, but we are on the way. We are just beginning to discover how weekly, real time statistics from all of our churches are empowering churches, pastors, and the Cabinet in our work.
   
   
2. Achieve a 2% increase in Apportionment payments (79% in 2008) to 81% overall.
   2009 has seen a dramatic drop in our shared mission giving in which we lost all of the ground we had gained in 2008. This has been a huge disappointment for me.
   
   
3. Increase the Sunday attendance percentage in our churches by 4%.
   Our statistics have shown an overall 2% decline in attendance. We are perplexed by this, since a number of our churches have shown increases in attendance. This figure may be a function of sporadic reporting from some of our congregations (or more accurate reporting due to the weekly, public quality of our Dashboard!). Average attendance is the single most important measurement of the vitality of a congregation. We are determined to impact this number. The good news is that we are showing a modest increase in overall membership for the first time in decades and a dramatic increase in the number of small groups in our churches.
   
4. Increase presence in the Conference to 35 Sunday visits preaching in the churches, 3 days spent teaching and listening in each district.
   This is one goal that I have exceeded in my expectations. I’ve preached in 40 different congregations in 2009, preaching a total of 60 sermons. I have also met for face-to-face conversations with the pastors and staffs of 26 of our most vital congregations. I have had at least four days of teaching and/or listening in every district, including meetings with the pastors of our largest churches. I have conducted six half day sessions on “Reading the Bible Like Wesleyans” to introduce the new Wesley Study Bible that I helped to edit.
   
   
5. Increase the number of trained, certified new church pastors by 6.
   This year we reorganized our new church efforts with a new Director who is also the Superintendent of all of our new church starts. We have completely reworked our process of choosing new church pastors and supervising them. This goal was met, but in a way different that I had planned.
   
6. Increase number of churches participating in NCD process to 200 (from 158 in 2008).
   We are just a few churches below this goal and we now have asked EVERY church to take the NCD survey by mid-2010. We are well on our way to accomplishment of this goal. I have also appointed the NCD lead staff member, Lori Carden, as a member of the Cabinet. Our NCD efforts are changing the way we evaluate churches and deploy pastors.

2009 has been one of the most difficult years for the North Alabama Conference, financially speaking. We ended the year with a shortage of about $600,000 compared with 2008 (which was a year in which we saw marked financial progress). Throughout this time of financial stress, my watchword has been “Don’t let a financial crisis go to waste.” We have used this time to make some tough decisions that we probably should have made sometime before. We have tried to see all of this as a God-given opportunity for innovation and adaptation. Dale Cohen has led our talented Connectional Ministries Staff in a complete downsizing and reorganization that now basis our staff in local churches rather than in the Methodist Center. We have one DS is serving two districts. Our greatest cuts have been in administration so that we can avoid making greater cuts in mission and program. Scott Selman and the CFA have given us wonderful leadership.

Our Cabinet has continued to improve our supervisory and appointive process – the First 90 Day Plans, triad interviews by three DS’s of each pastor who moves, weekly monitoring by the DS’s of the Dashboard, as well as closer accountability systems devised by the DS’s are all changing the way that we utilize our clergy. In the coming year I and the Cabinet will be trained by Paul Borden to do local church interventions whereby we will be able to make a decisive, focused, helpful intervention in congregations that seem to be stuck or to have plateaued. Jim Griffith, our new church consultant, has trained the Cabinet to do better interviewing of pastors. All of this is empowering the Cabinet to move beyond the traditional role of making appointments to the new role of making appointments work!

While I continue to be disappointed and frustrated by the slow pace of growth in our Conference, I do think that we have made great headway in making our church more fruitful and productive, in setting up those structures whereby we can be more fruitful, in clearly letting churches and pastors know that they are expected to grow and that they will be held accountable for growth.

During 2009 the Wesley Study Bible was published, along with my Undone By Easter: Keeping Preaching Fresh, and The Early Preaching of Karl Barth. I published eight different articles in various journals and magazines and authored chapters in four different collections on preaching and theology, along with my weekly Bishop’s Emails. I taught and gave lectures in six seminaries, seven colleges and universities, and taught a D.Min. Course for Fuller Seminary on the Theology of Preaching and well as my semester long “Jesus Through the Centuries” course for undergraduates at Birmingham-Southern.

I chair the Theological Education Committee of the University Senate and serve on the Faith and Order Commission. This requires eight meetings a year plus accrediting visits to three or four seminaries each year.

The Cabinet and I are in the process of formulating our goals for 2010. Among the plans for 2010 are for continued innovation in the way DS’s are utilized, with increased overlap of districts, fewer DS’s with more different responsibilities, a new system of organizing our small congregations and our local pastors into clusters that are supervised by trained elders, a complete reorganization, led by Dale Cohen, of our Conference structure, a reorganization that will leave us with fewer committees that are clearly task oriented and focused upon results, much smaller, more accountable committees, and the equipment of the Cabinet to do congregational intervention.

Adam Hamilton will be our key resource person at Annual Conference this year and our focus will be on effective leadership in our churches.

William H. Willimon

El Viaje

We now have dozens of churches who are engaging in some groundbreaking ministry with Spanish speaking persons in North Alabama. After school programs, English as a Second Language instruction, Sunday School, Sunday worship, not to mention the ten or so new congregations that we are forming. Recently I preached at Iglesia de la Communidad in Huntsville, one of thriving Spanish speaking congregations that is celebrated its first anniversary. This was my first attempt to preach in Spanish!

El Viaje

Obispo Will Willimon
Iglesia de la Comunidad

Es un gran placer para mí estar aquí con ustedes en este día de fiesta. Yo vine desde Birmingham hoy para reunirme con ustedes, y se que hay unos de ustedes que han venido de lugares mucho mas lejos. Han hecho un viaje largo para estar aquí.

Se darán cuenta que en todo el Evangelio Jesús se muestra como en un viaje. Jesús siempre está en movimiento, moviéndose rápido desde Galilea, a través de Judea, todo el camino hacia la cruz en Jerusalén. Y cuándo Jesús invita un grupo de hombres a ser sus discípulos, él los invita a unirlo en un viaje. “Síganme,” les dice. Y lo siguen. Siguen a Jesús en el viaje.

A ser un cristiano, un seguidor de Jesús, es estar en un viaje. Cada uno de nosotros aquí hoy estamos en un viaje con Jesús. Estamos aquí porque Jesús nos invitó a caminar con él. Y como con cualquier viaje, no siempre sabemos la destinación final. No sabemos lo que Dios quiere que hagamos o donde es que Dios quiere que nos vayamos. Por lo tanto, debemos viajar con la fe que, aunque no sepamos el fin de nuestro viaje, caminemos en la dirección derecha porque caminamos con Dios.

Con cualquier viaje, hay tiempos buenos y malos. A veces el camino es difícil. Y eso nos pasa en nuestro viaje con Jesús. Jesús no nos promete que la caminata será fácil, él sólo nos promete que él caminará con nosotros, en particular cuando es difícil.

Una de las mejor maneras para hacer amigos es viajar con ellos. Es verdad con nuestro viaje con Jesús. Cuando él nos dice, como les dijo a sus primeros discípulos, “Síganme”, no sabemos mucho acerca de él. Por lo tanto, tenemos que aprender quien es por caminar con él. Yo no los conocería y ustedes no me conocerían si nosotros no andábamos de esta manera con Jesús. En la iglesia (piensen en la iglesia como nuestro viaje con Jesús) tenemos la oportunidad de conseguir amigos nuevos porque estamos viajando con Jesús.

¿Verdad que es interesante que Jesús no dijo, “hablen de mí?” Sino, dijo, “Caminen con mí.” No dijo, “piensen en mí,” pero dijo “síganme.”

Dios le bendiga en su caminata con Jesús. Espero que su iglesia y su pastor le de lo que necesita para que camine fielmente con Jesús.

Oremos:
Señor, te doy gracias por cada uno de estos estimados discípulos quien tú has invitado a caminar con ti. Refuerza cada uno de ellos en su viaje. Dalos lo que ellos necesitan para caminar con ti cada día de sus vidas para que caminen con ti por toda eternidad. Amen.

It is a great joy for me to be with you on this day of Fiesta. I have driven up from Birmingham to be with you but many of you have come even farther than that to be here. You have made a long journey to be here. I thank God that your journey has led you to the United Methodist Church.

You will notice that in all the gospels Jesus is depicted as being on a journey. Jesus began his life, as a baby, as a refugee, a stranger with his family in Egypt. And when he grew up, Jesus is always on the move, moving quickly from Galilee, through Judea, all the way to his cross in Jerusalem. And when Jesus invites a group of people to be his disciples, he invites them to join him on a journey. “Follow me!” he says to them. And they do. They follow Jesus on a journey.

To be a Christian, a follower of Jesus, is to be on a journey. Each one of us is here this afternoon on a Journey with Jesus. We are all here because Jesus invited us to walk with him. And on any journey, you don’t always know the final destination. We do not know what God wants us to do, where God wants us to go next. Therefore we must travel in faith that, though we don’t know the end of the journey, we are walking in the right direction because we are walking with God.

In any journey, there are good times and bad. Sometimes there is rough going. And that’s true of our Journey with Jesus. Jesus doesn’t promise us that the walk will be easy, he just promises us that he will walk with us, particularly when the walk is difficult.

You all know that one of the best ways to make new friends is to go on a trip with them, to journey with them. And that’s true of our Journey with Jesus. When he says to us, as he said to his first disciples, “Follow me!” we do not know much about Jesus. We must therefore learn who he is by walking with him. And I wouldn’t know you and you wouldn’t know me if we were not walking this way with Jesus. In the church (think of the church as our Journey with Jesus) we get to meet new friends because we are journeying with Jesus.

Isn’t it interesting that Jesus did not say, “talk about me,” he said, “walk with me.” He didn’t say “think about me” he said “follow me”?

God bless you in your walk with Jesus. I hope your church and your pastor give you what you need to faithfully walk with Jesus. Let me pray for you:

Lord, I thank you for these dear disciples whom you have invited to walk with you. Strengthen each one of them in their journey. Give them what they need to walk with you every day of their lives so that they may walk with you in eternity. Amen.

William H. Willimon

Last year our church experienced our largest growth in our ethnic congregations. Would YOUR congregation like to get into ministry with Spanish speaking persons? Call or write Thomas Muhomba at tmuhomba@northalabamaumc.org to learn how your church can get involved in mission. Some of our dynamic congregations have expanded their ministries to begin Spanish-speaking congregations in their churches. Among some of the most exciting are Bart Thau’s new congregation at Pleasant Hill UMC, of course. the booming congregation at Riverchase, also Albertville First and St.Mark- Tuscaloosa are sites of exciting new work among Spanish speaking Methodists.

The Six Percent Solution

When I was at my first church, I was complaining to a wise, experienced pastor that I had “too few talented lay persons” in my little church to change the downward course of the congregation. (Even forty years ago I was trying to change the church!) “I have no more than five or six folks who show any ability to move forward,” I whined.

“Well consider yourself fortunate,” replied the wise pastor. “My congregation is twice the size of yours and I can count no more than five or six Spirit-filled, innovative leaders. Fortunately, God rarely needs more than that to get the ball rolling.”

What? Jesus changed the whole world with twelve (only eleven of whom panned out) disciples. Malcolm Gladwell’s, The Tipping Point is a study of how human organizations change. How does a system reach the “tipping point” whereby an organizational culture is transformed? Gladwell documents that it takes no more than six children in a school to begin wearing a certain brand of sport shoe to reach the tipping point whereby in just a few days a hundred children will begin wearing that same brand of shoe.

I believe Gladwell is right. In all of the churches I have served as a pastor only six percent of the members gave nearly two-thirds of all the financial gifts to the church. I’ve served some wonderful churches but I’ve never served a church that wasn’t being led by six percent of the members. Only six percent of the congregation are people to whom God has given the passion and the position to lead the whole church.

There is a word of grace here for church leaders. If you want to give the church a brighter future, you only have to convince six percent of the people in the church. As a bishop, if I want to reverse the decline of my Conference, I only have to identify a mere six percent who know how to make that turnaround happen.

When Gil Rendel was advising us on the transformation of our Conference, as we were thinking about how to convince the Conference to move toward eight rather than twelve districts, Rendle put before us the proverbial Bell Curve. He noted that in any significant change 15% of the people are against the change and will remain against the change no matter how that change is presented to them. On the other end of the curve, 15% will say “let’s go for it” no matter how risky the change may be.

“That leaves a full 70% of your people who show a good possibility of conversion into support for this change,” said Gil. “Too many pastors wait in the vain hope that they were good enough to get everybody on board, don’t move until they are sure that they can take everyone along with them. As a result, they never go anywhere.”

Christianity tends to be a minority movement. Jesus occasionally attracted multitudes, but his transformative work tended to be through a small group of disciples. Thanks be to God we don’t have to wait to follow the Spirit until 99% of everyone thinks this direction is a good idea. God can work through something as seemingly small and insignificant as a mustard seed to grow the Kingdom.

Thanks be to God, on our way to “make disciples of all nations,” we only need six percent to get the job done.

Will Willimon

Rick Owen of our Stewardship Resources is sponsoring a "Core Strategy" summit for pastors and church leaders on January 26, 2010, at Vestavia Hills UMC with me and Reggie McNeal. You can register at www.corechurches.com