Gifts of God – for the Work of Ministry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William H. Willimon

The Truth Shall Set You Free

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Holly
Canterbury UMC

Let the Children Come

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will Willimon

Psalm 121:8

“The Lord will preserve your going out and your coming in from this time forth and for evermore.”

On a day last spring I returned home (the afternoon that I put Patsy on a plane to rush to the bedside of her dying mother). I opened the door and immediately realized that we had been robbed.

Of course my first concern was not for the things that were taken (I could see that the burglars had not taken anything of value), but rather that the burglars were still in the house. I immediately exited and called the police.

To this day, even months later, we enter the house with some anxiety. At last we have a functioning alarm system. Still, one can’t be too sure.

I remember a woman in my church telling me how difficult it was for her to attend evening meetings at the church, saying, “I'm not fearful to drive to the church. The hard part is leaving my home and then returning home after the meeting.”

She is right. Entrances and exits are the most dangerous part of your day.

We pastors spend much of our ministry helping with entrances and exits. In baptism we welcome new life into the church. In funeral we bid farewell to those who leave this life, sending them over the threshold to the next. We work to integrate new members into the congregation; we send forth beloved members to another congregation. Thus, on our Conference Dashboard every week we count baptism and professions of faith and we count loss of members.

Entrances and exits, coming in and going forth are often frightening. We come into a new space, a new world and there is often anxiety. We leave a place, relinquish an old, accustomed world, and there is a sense of loss.

One of our most important innovations in North Alabama is our First 90 Days plan that is required of all full-time pastors and district superintendents. We ask for a specific, public, plan for succeeding in a new ministry. What occurs in the first days is crucial.

We are now devising a similar program for The Last 60 Days in which exiting pastor and the entering pastor work together, with the receiving congregation and receiving DS to produce a productive, smooth transition. Here is connectionalism at work!

Here is the Psalmist’s promise: In the often anxious times of arriving or leaving God is there. Our God promises to be with us in our coming in and our going out. We cross no joyful or painful threshold in life where God does not go with us, preserving us, coming in or going out for evermore.

William H. Willimon

From the letters that I’ve received, this year’s Annual Conference, with teaching by Adam Hamilton, was the best ever. Pray for all of our pastors and their families that will moving next week to new assignments.

THE THREE SIGNS OF A MISERABLE JOB

Every person who joins the North Alabama Cabinet including our newest members: Lori Carden, Sherill Clontz and Bill Brunson read a book that has revolutionized our ministry of oversight. Marcus Buckingham’s First Break All the Rules. Now Mike Stonbraker has had the Cabinet read a related book, Patrick Lencioni’s Three Signs of a Miserable Job. Miserable jobs share three things: Anonymity, Irrelevance and Immeasurement.

Anonymity

Fulfillment of any job requires being known by the management. “All human beings need to be understood and appreciated for their unique qualities by someone in a position of authority.” (p.221) The Cabinet has learned that following up with responses on our weekly Dashboard reports is one way we can show that no one is just blending into the system. It is pertinent for us to make sure all our pastors are aware that those of us who are in the ministry of oversight know them, down deep, and that we know the challenges they are tackling.

Irrelevance

Lencioni defines irrelevance as knowing that your job matters. This is one of the greatest stresses of being a pastor. Many times we do not see the finished product. “It’s so ridiculously clear, and yet almost none of the managers out there take the time to help their people understand that their jobs matter to someone! (p.133)

DS’s must never require pastors to do “busy work” or to attend meaningless meetings. “If a manager has any responsibility in the world, it’s to help people understand why their work matters. If they don’t think that’s their role, then they’re the ones who don’t deserve their job.” (p.134). Much of what we do may not have effect for years to come. How one impacts another’s soul may never be known except by God. So this brings us to the final stage.

Immeasurment

For Lencioni this is focused more on an individual gauge of measurement than overall corporate gauging. We can set up the benchmarks, but there still has to be a personal sense of measuring success and accomplishment. “…if a person has no way of knowing if they’re doing a good job, even if they’re doing something they love, they get frustrated.” (p.128). He goes on to say that it is all about feedback. Buckingham says, “people don’t change that much. Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That’s hard enough.” (p.79) No pastor excels in every area of ministry. “Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers?...but covet earnestly the best gifts.” (1 Corinthians 12:29 and 31) We must help pastors measure those areas that are important for the life of the church and areas in which a pastor excels.

Measurement is necessary for accountability. Immeasurement robs pastors of the joy of saying, “God did that through me,” and “I am going to improve in this area and measurement will confirm when I improve.” “Because people who aren’t good at their jobs don’t want to be measured, because then they have to be accountable for something. Great employees love that kind of accountability. They crave it. Poor ones run away from it.” (p.131)

Mike Stonbraker says that after reading Lencioni he, as a District Superintendent, was led to ask some self-assessment questions that might help our pastors to have more fulfilling ministries: Do I really know my people? Do they know how their work impacts, and how? Do they know how to assess their own progress and success?

Through the Conference Dashboard and other changes in the way we are working, those of us in the ministry of oversight can be used by God to make ministry more fulfilling for all our pastors.

Will Willimon

Anything Worth Doing For God Is Worth Counting

How do we Methodists define effective clergy? We do it with one word: growth. Effective clergy know how to grow the church in its membership, witness, and mission.

In North Alabama we now have a “Conference Dashboard” that every church logs in on Monday morning and reports their numbers for that Sunday’s attendance, baptisms, professions of faith, offering, and participation in mission. Anyone can see the numbers for any church in our Conference over the past three years. The push-back we have received in this endeavor has surprised me. In nearly every group of clergy in which I’ve discussed our work, there is always someone to repeat at least one of these mindless mantras: ‘It’s all about numbers is it?’ ‘You can’t measure clergy effectiveness, can you?’ ‘So it’s come to this: putting the butts in the pews.’ Yada, yada, yada.

There may be something to be said for some of these slogans. Except not in the United Methodist Church. We’re Wesleyans. That means we believe in the growth of the Kingdom of God. John Wesley had friction with the established church of his day, not only because of his vibrant Trinitarian theology, but also because of his refusal to limit his ministry to the moribund English parochial system.

From the beginning, Methodists were inveterate counters and numbers keepers.

Dick Heitzenrater tells me that in the annual minutes of 18th British Methodism, beginning in 1769, the Circuits that had fewer members than the previous year were marked with an asterisk (12 of the 48). By 1779, that number had expanded to 18. The question was asked at the Conference, “How can we account for the decrease in so many Circuits this year?” The answer: this was “chiefly to the increase of worldly-mindedness and conformity to the world.”

As of 1781, Wesley marked with an asterisk those Circuits who had an increase in membership, which was the case with 32 of them, or exactly half. This method was used for a few years until the percentage of Circuits that experienced increases in membership were 75% of the connection.

Our North Alabama Conference once had four full time people who spent their whole day collecting numbers from our churches. These numbers were duly reported and printed in the Conference “Journal.” Yet here’s the thing: not one single decision was ever made, by the Bishop or Cabinet, on the basis of any of these numbers! It was as if we were all engaged in a studied effort never to notice any of the numbers we were so assiduously and expensively collecting. Of course, when the numbers were as bad as ours -- over half our congregations had not made a new Christian in the past three years, a twenty percent decrease in membership -- it takes courage to note the numbers.

Wesley frequently cites numerical growth as indicative of spiritual vitality. In his sermon “On God’s Vineyard,” Wesley celebrates that the London Methodist Society grew from 12 to 2,200 in just about 25 years. Heitzenrater speculates that Wesley was trying to spur them on, since their membership had slowed to a gain of only 400 new members in the latest 25 years.

Wesley sent pastors to those areas where, in his estimate, there were the most souls to be saved. He told his traveling preachers not just that they ought to read, but also put a number on it: at least five hours a day. Wesley also kept a close eye (with charts in the annual “Minutes”) on how much money was collected each year—for Kingswood School, for new preaching houses, for the pension fund, for operating expenses. The Annual Conference was invented, not just as opportunity for worship and fellowship, but mostly for the purpose of everyone rendering account and confessing their numbers.

I can’t speak for other church families, but in the Wesleyan family, studied obliviousness to results, deploying pastors without regard to their fruitfulness, pastors shrinking churches, pastors keeping house among the older folks left there by the work of a previous generation of pastors, and churches having a grand old time loving one another and praising God without inviting, seeking, and saving those outside the church, do not make for faithfulness.

“Numbers aren’t important.” Really? Tell it that to Jesus and his parables of growth and fruitfulness. Tell it to the Acts of the Apostles.

Tell it to John Wesley.

William H. Willimon

See you at our yearly Accountability Session - - Annual Conference at ClearBranch, June 4-5. Leadership is this year’s focus.

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