Major Moves in Ministry

All of the gospels depict Jesus and his disciples as people on the move. They never stay anywhere long. Jesus teaches or performs some wonder, then immediately moves on. A dead god is a god who locates, settles in, never surprises. A living God is a God on the move.

We are privileged to minister in a time when ordained leadership is changing and adapting to be more congruent with the mission of Jesus Christ. After decades of floundering, thrashing about trying this and that latest scheme to renew the church, we are at last focusing and moving in a definite direction.

Recently I was asked to identify some of the most significant moves that we clergy are making in our leadership. I believe in these moves we are not only becoming more effective leaders, but also we are being more faithful to our Leader, Jesus Christ and his peculiar style of leading his church.

Today, the most effective, faithful pastors are making these moves:

Move from caregivers to passionate, transformative leaders
Moving from mere maintenance of the congregations that we have been handed from the hard work of previous generations of pastors, we are daring to let God use us to rebirth, new birth, and to transform our people to more actively participate in Christ’s mission. Any church that cares more about itself and its inner life than it cares for the world is a church in decline. Pastors are ordained for more significant ministry than merely care of the congregation.

Move from contented church of monopoly, to church in competitive, missional environment
We mainline Protestants have lost our monopoly on American religious life. We find ourselves in a mission environment in which our churches must compete with the lures of the world for our people’s faith. It’s a time when the church has the opportunity to recover the oddness and the joy of the peculiarity of ministry in the name of Jesus Christ rather than ministry as service to the infatuations of the world.

Move from nonchalance about results to attentiveness to results
One of the most dramatic developments among the churches of North Alabama is the creation of and the almost 100% participation of our churches in the North Alabama Conference Dashboard. We are determined to notice the numbers and to interpret the numbers as valid indicators of what God is doing among us. God intends for us to bear fruit and promises to give us what we need to bear fruit.

Move from preservation and sustaining to adaptation and supple, flexibility
Church observer Bill Easum told our Conference (the year before I got here) that the “seniority system is killing you.” United Methodism has no seniority system in our Discipline. We have put far too much stress on experience, wisdom, and continuity when we need more stress upon talent, adaptation, flexibility, and innovation. Our Conference mission statement states that our goal is to have, “Every church challenged and equipped….by taking risks and changing lives.” I am so inspired by the outbreak of innovative ministries among our congregations.

Move from the pastor as head of an organization to the pastor as spiritual leader and congregational catalyst
Pastors are becoming more than efficient managers. Pastors are preachers, those who tell the story which is the gospel, laying that upon the congregation on a regular basis and then pastors get out of the way, leaving Jesus to deal with his people. Pastors are there not to do ministry, no really even to lead ministry, but rather to “equip the saints for the work of ministry.”

Will Willimon

Our focus at this year’s Annual Conference is LEADERSHIP. Adam Hamilton will be teaching us all day Saturday, June 5. All pastors are urged to be present with their key lay leadership. See you at Annual Conference!

My First Sermon

Some of our pastors will be moving to new churches in a few weeks. Later this year Westminster John Knox Press will publish a collection of my sermons over the past forty years. Pouring through my old sermons has been a fun, humbling experience. I found the very first sermon that I preached at my very first church, Trinity, North Myrtle Beach, S.C. My father-in-law, Carl Parker had given birth to Trinity the year I was born, but the congregation had never thrived. So I went there in fear and trepidation, as witnessed in this first sermon. Trinity turned out to be a wonderful place to begin my ministry, a congregation whose rebirth validated the importance of faithful preaching as the key to congregational renewal.

First Sermon

1 Corinthians 1:26-2:5
March 3, 1974
Trinity United Methodist Church
North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

A first sermon is much like a first date – I want to do well, put my best foot forward, not say anything too dumb that might render impossible a future relationship, impress you, reassure you that the Bishop made a wise decision in sending me to Trinity.

To continue the dating analogy, my anxiety is much like that of a “blind date.” I don’t know you and you don’t know me. You have heard about me, but only through the advance information from the District Superintendent, and you know that District Superintendents are sometimes not to be trusted.

So here I am –wanting to appear wise – but not overly wise, not offensively wise like William Buckley. I want to entertain, to engage you, but not to appear trite or comical. I’m thinking now, “I wonder what they expect of me? What would they like to hear?”

And there you are – wanting to appear likeable, congenial, a nice group of people with whom any preacher would love to live, wanting to impress me that the Bishop is really impressed by you and looking out for you when he sent me to you.

And here I am thinking….there are lots of empty pews out there; am I equal to the task? I wonder why they pay so little of their fair share of mission giving? Why did Peggy have such a pained look on her face when I mentioned finances to her. How come Joan said to me, after handing me a lemon pie, “Well, you really have got your work cut out for you, preacher”?
The District Superintendent told me that this church had lots of “potential,” but I don’t trust D.S.’s anymore than you do!

And there you are thinking….he looks young, too young. Some are thinking….he looks old, or if not old, at least short. He can’t play softball, I can tell that by looking at his arms. Oh well, maybe we can use him, second string, right field. I wonder why he really left his last appointment? How long will the “honeymoon last”?

Will there be a honeymoon?

I’m sure that George Baker told you that I had a good reputation, even though I’ve only been a pastor for a couple of years. But then George told me the story of the preacher who left a congregation. It was his last Sunday. End of the service the preacher is standing at the door. One woman was overcome with weeping and emotion. The preacher, touched by her grief attempted to reassure her with, “Oh Sister, don’t weep. Even if I’m leaving I know that the bishop will send you a wonderful preacher.”

She replied through tears, “That’s what they’ve been telling this church for twenty years and it ain’t happened yet!”

Here I am and there you are and you are wondering – will he take time for me? Will he listen to my story? Will be care that I’ve got problems? And will his ministry be adequate to meet my needs?

And here I am wondering – will I have time for all of them? Will they take time to know me as a person, or will they only know me as “The Preacher”? Will my talents be adequate to their need?

In other words, here I am – wondering, if I’m honest “are they good enough, kind enough, enlightened enough for me?” Will they receive my offbeat way with sermons? Will they pay me enough so that next year I can go to Annual Conference and look good enough to all my fellow preachers so I can say, “Look how I turned around things at Trinity?”
And there you are wondering – can he fix my marriage? Can he make my children behave? Can he keep me interested on a Sunday in a sermon? Can he attract more young couples to our church? Will he embarrass us in town?

For you and for me the first sermon is like a first date; we’re both putting each other on trial.

Knowing all this, I tossed and turned in preparing my first sermon, wondering what I should say and how I should say it to you.

“Preach that one on redemption that worked so well at Broad Street. You really wowed them with that one.”

Too heavy. Don’t want them to think they’ve got an egghead for a preacher.

“Use some football analogy; can’t go wrong by mentioning sports. They all love football.”

Better stay out of controversial matters – don’t know whether they tend to be for Clemson or for Carolina.

And so it continued, rummaging about in my old files, frantically searching for something impressive enough, entertaining enough, yet spiritual and humble enough, inspirational too – and do it all in about twenty minutes in my first sermon!

Then, as so often happens, I managed to get some good advice from an older, wiser friend of mine, a tired old preacher who has served (and even survived!) some of the toughest, meanest, hard-to-please congregations that ever were – Brother Paul.

In reminiscing about his preaching at First Church Corinth – a difficult appointment if ever there were one – Paul said:

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters, not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus who became the wisdom of God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not be in human wisdom but in the power of God.

Saint Paul says to his first church: there you are, not wise by the world’s standards of wisdom, not the brightest candles in the box, not by a long shot. No Ph.D’s among you. Few of you rich, few prestigious. Not much ground for boasting among you.

And here I am, Paul: no silver-tongued orator here. Just a poor, often inadequate, sometimes disconnected, often boring, poor Bible-quoting preacher. No charismatic, good-looking TV Oral Roberts. Just a plain speaker of the plain, unadorned Good News.

That’s all.

Not that wise a congregation, not that wise a preacher, says Paul. Just you, just me, just the gospel.

Paul’s sermonic strategies are interesting in that they don’t try to be interesting. “I decided to know nothing among you – no six steps to salvation, no sure fire way to riches and happiness, no smooth, religious-sounding big words – I was determined to know nothing but the gospel. That’s the only good reason for you, or for me, to be here. The church isn’t about me and it’s not about you. It’s the wisdom and power of God. It’s about the gospel.

That’s a tough gospel truth. It’s so easy to get confused that we could really have a great church – if we could find just the right pastor who, along with being good with older folks and youth, also visits everybody all the time, prepares profound and moving sermons, and walks on water to boot! Or we could have a really great church if we could weed out all the half-way committed people and get this down to the really, really serious Christians.

But Paul says that’s not the way Christ works. Christ works by taking a group of people – not many all that wise, none too powerful and competent, not many rich – and uses them to show what a great, wise, powerful, competent God can do.

In my better moments I know: any good that I’m able to work here is that good that only God can do. God is going to have to work through frail, all-too-human, flawed people like you, like me, or no real good will get done.

I was asking one of you last week (I’m not going to tell you who it was but I bet you can guess), asking, “What do you love most about Trinity Church?” And you responded, “I love that God really is here. When I think of the sorry preaching we have endured over the past years I think it’s a miracle that we are still here! With the sorry preachers we’ve had it’s a testimony to the power of God that there is a Trinity Methodist Church!”

Can you guess who said that to me? And you know: he was absolutely right. Maybe not right about preachers but right about God. That there is a church here, that people like us are being saved, being used by God to take over the world for the kingdom of God. It’s “a miracle.”

So here I am wanting to come up with something brilliant for you and there you are wanting to be brilliant for me and Paul tells all of us: It’s not about brilliant people; it’s about a God who loves to create something out of nothing.

I confess I’d rather trust what wisdom I’ve got than to risk trusting the goodness of God to create a world out of chaos (Genesis 1), to raise the dead back to live (Luke 24), and to make the People of God out of those who were once nobodies and strangers (Trinity United Methodist Church).

There I am and there you are. Despite our weaknesses and inadequacies a loving, resourceful God is stupefying the world, using what the world regards as low, foolish and dumb to make something wonderful. We’ve only been in town a week now and yet already we have been amazed and what God is doing through you at Trinity Church. A Baptist mechanic was testifying to what a good church I was getting just this past Wednesday.

I’m not the greatest preacher in the world and you’re not the greatest church in the world but that’s OK because the greatest God in the world is surprising the world with God’s ability to create something out of nothing, right here in this congregation. So on this our first Sunday together pray for me that I would, week-after-week keep real clear about why we’re here, that I would look to Jesus and not to myself to make this a faithful church. Pray that on my last day here, when I’m preaching my very last sermon to you, I’ll be able to say, “When I came to Trinity Church, I didn’t come preaching lofty words of wisdom, fancy spiritual stuff and highfalutin theology. I preached Jesus Christ and him crucified. I preached the simple, unadorned Good News that God is saving the world through us. My only boast is the wisdom and power of God.”

There you are and here I am with nothing to bring us together, and no hope in life or in death, no chance of ever being the Body of Christ – nothing except Christ, the wisdom and power of God.

Frankly, I can’t wait to discover just how great and wise a God we’ve got. Let’s go!

Will Willimon

Lucky to Be Here

Some of our pastors will be saying good bye to their present congregations as they move to new congregations in the next few weeks. Later this year Westminster John Knox Press will publish a collection of my sermons over the past forty years. Here is my last sermon in Duke Chapel, a sermon about a student delivered with gratitude before a new group of Duke students on Orientation Sunday, students on their way in as I was on my way out.

Orientation Sunday

August 29, 2004

A young man named Eutychus, who was sitting in the window, began to sink off into a deep sleep while Paul talked still longer. Overcome by sleep, he fell to the ground three floors below and was picked up dead. Acts 20:7-12

I asked the class to write an essay, “My Life.” Just to introduce themselves. One essay, I shall never forget, began, “Last year I awoke from an eighteen year coma that was my life.”

He went on to tell of the influence of an incredibly wonderful art teacher who had, in his words, “awakened me from the mediocrity to which I had become accustomed.”

When I read that line, I knew that he had come to the right place. That’s what we do well at this university, when we’re doing our job. We snap people awake out of their coma. We call it “enlightenment,” or “the acquisition of knowledge,” but we could as well call it “awakening.”

I teach for the privilege of seeing the eyes light up, the lids spring open, the neck crane forward.

I fear the somnambulant, etherized, anesthetized morbidity of a class at three in the afternoon. My brilliant lecture killed by zombie-like night-of-the-living-dead drooping eyelids.

I have found that if I continue to talk in a low monotone, quietly, serenely and then, carefully, ever so carefully, slam a large book down on the desk while screaming, “WAKE UP!” It will do the trick.

Last year we were told that a study of students showed that sleep deprivation was the major health problem on campus. We needed to study to know that? Just visit my afternoon class about three thirty, you could have learned that for free!

Church is a favorite quiescent location for sleeping. I can see some of you bedding down out there! A few years ago, we broadcast our services on the local cable channel. I was excited about this extension of our ministry. I rushed home, flipped on the television to see how we looked on TV. There I was horrified to see one of our sopranos bedded down, head thrown back, soprano mouth gaping open throughout my sermon!

I complained to Dr. Wynkoop. He excused her sleeping with, “Look, she’s a student. Sometimes it’s hard for me to stay awake too.” I said, “She was dead to the world, brought a pillow in with her, a stuffed teddy bear and duvet! It was an outrage!”

She is no longer in our choir.

Last Sunday of last term, April, we had two services, the early service for the alumni who were with us that weekend. I concocted a different sort of sermon on Christian music and its effects. I was helped by the choir. I spoke, then the choir sang a favorite anthem, then I spoke again – the sermon was my commentary with the choir’s anthems interspersed throughout.

A couple of days before this sermon I asked Craig if he would like to take some of the speaking parts of the sermon. He was eager to do so.

Well, after the first service and our first time with this dialogical sermon, Robert Parkins, University Organist, who spends the service up there, encased within the Flentrop Organ where he can hear but can’t see what we are doing, came up to me and said, “I didn’t know that Craig was helping you out with the sermon so, after you spoke, and the choir sang, when I heard Craig speak I assumed that you had collapsed and died and that Craig had to take over the sermon.”

“You idiot,” I replied, “You mean that you thought I had died and that Craig just stepped over my body and continued the sermon?”

“Right.”

Church has become, for many, a place of slumber, a place of death. Sad. It ought to be place of resurrection, awakening.

Back in the summer when we thought we would do a “young heroes of the Bible” sermon series, it seemed like a good idea to me. Trouble is, there aren’t that many young people in the Bible, heroes or otherwise. So I have to go with who we’ve got, so today we look at a young man named Eutychus. Maybe he’s no hero, but he was young. He reminds me of some of you.

Paul arrives with Luke in Troas. On the “first day of the week,” that is, Sunday, they join other Christians for worship. “First day of the week,” is surely meant as an echo, of that phrase as it appears in Luke’s first book, the Gospel of Luke. First day of the week was when Jesus rose from the dead. So there’s a good chance that we’ll hear something about Easter. The congregation meets to “break bread” and to “hold a discussion” (v. 7). This is the very first, the very oldest description of a Christian Sunday in all the New Testament. Why do Christians meet on Sunday, the “first day of the week,” rather than on the Jewish Sabbath, Saturday? It’s because it’s the day when Jesus was raised from the dead. Every Sunday is supposed to be Easter all over again.

Paul was preaching, and he’s on a roll. Paul’s come a long way to be at First Church Troas and so he gives them everything he’s got, the whole ball of wax. The sermon begins about eleven-twenty a.m. and continues “until midnight” (v. 7). (And you have the nerve to criticize the length of my sermons!)

Well, Paul as going on at some length about the Doctrine of the Trinity, or explicating the mystical connections in the Book of Numbers or whatever, “a young man named Eutychus” is mentioned. This is where you come in. If you are a Sophomore. His name “Eutychus” means in the Greek, “Lucky.” Young Lucky is precariously seated on a sill at an open window where, as Paul drones on about the awfully interesting last chapters of Leviticus, Lucky falls asleep just before midnight, topples out the open window, falling to his death three stories below where Luke says that a couple of ushers “picked Lucky up dead” (v. 9). (I guess his Mama goofed when she called him “Lucky.”)

Well, Paul stops just long enough to go downstairs, resuscitate Lucky and announce to the others, “Do not be alarmed, his life is in him. Now, as I was saying….” (v. 10).

That’s it? Paul’s not going to let a little thing like the violent death of the President of the Methodist Youth Fellowship and his subsequent resuscitation from the dead stop him. Paul’s on a role, it’s only one o’clock in the morning, and so he continues with the sermon.

As one commentator says, Paul’s resurrection of this dead boy “appears as a mere hiccup” during the middle of his lecture!

Lucky is brushed off, his breathing resumes, and church continues. Next day Paul is off to Melitus and Lucky is back at school with a bad headache but raised from the dead and no worse for wear.

In a mere two verses we are told that Paul has paused just long enough in his sermon to raise a young man from the dead and then church goes on as if nothing happened and young Eutychus, Lucky, was named patron saint of all those of you who have trouble staying alive during church.

Maybe Luke is saying, in this curious story about young Lucky, that this is the way church is supposed to be, not just then, but now. Somebody seated in the third pew from the back left, once was dead, now alive? Somebody near the left transept door awakened from a coma, big deal! Now, can I continue with my sermon? It’s another day at the office for the church, just your average, predictable, raising of the dead.

“How was church last night?”

“Fine. Preacher had some good points to make about Leviticus, but he went on too long. Lucky died during the service, but Paul raised him from the dead and we continued.”

The resurrection of Jesus means not only that Jesus is loose, on the move among us but it also means that we can get loose. Something about this God that just loves to wake people up, shake people up, raise people up. Something about this God’s preachers like Paul just loves to raise the dead without missing a beat in the sermon.

“Do you really think he can get over his addiction to heroine?” she asked, “I’m told that most people don’t. I’m told it’s terminal.”

“I think it’s possible,” said I. “But what do I know? I’m just a preacher who’s accustomed to seeing people raised from the dead all the time on Sunday.”

Some of you are quite new here in this church. This church probably impresses you as old, heavy, ponderous, and stable. It’s meant to. But don’t be deceived by first appearances. I could line up before you a whole gang of people named Lucky who, on some Sunday, some first day of the week, stumbled into this place, sleepy-eyed and somnambulant only to be jolted, rocked, shocked awake. We were just reading scripture, just singing a hymn, just finishing a sermon, and they fell out of line, sat straight up in bed, eyes opened -- like they were raised from the dead.

And I love to tell stories about the dead raised. I preached not long ago at a clergy conference, and after four of my sermons, a fellow clergyman asked, “What would you do without all those great stories of students who scorned their parents and thumbed their noses at the establishment?” God only knows what I’ll do, in my new life as a bishop, for sermon material when I don’t have clueless Sophomores raised from the dead.
I’ve seen young people here, fall out the window, land on their heads, die, get born again, be raised from the dead, get a life they wouldn’t have had had they not come in here on the first day of the week. One of great joys of preaching here is to get a front row seat on resurrection.

I was lucky to be here.

Will Willimon

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.

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[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.