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Will

A Short Account of a Continuing Journey – 3

In two earlier Bishop’s weekly messages this month I’ve been reflecting upon the journey that we have made as a church, in the past two decades – decades of unprecedented decline for our church but now – thanks be to the work of the Holy Spirit among us, a time of increasing growth.  I have highlighted what we have learned and what we are doing differently within the church.

This week I want to name a few of the external, cultural factors that we are struggling with and building upon that make life in the church today such an adventure.  As I’ve said before, the main difference between a growing, thriving church and a church in decline is usually the difference between a pastor and church that focus upon the internals as opposed to the externals.  “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son….”  God loved the world, all of it and we must respond to our world in the name of Christ, loving as God loves.

How our world is changing and how we as a church must change.

1. While we were changing, the culture was also changing.  Perhaps half of our congregations are now in areas that were centers of population a century ago but where today people are departing.   We grew as a church because we went where the people were, willing to make any sacrifice to start new congregations where no other church would risk.  At some point in our history we decided to maintain the churches we had and stop moving with the people.  This is the single most important factor in church decline.   About a tenth of our Conference budget now goes to establish new churches where the people are – that percentage needs to double in the next couple of years if we are to come close to keeping pace with our people.
    
2. Most of our institutions (colleges, children’s homes, and homes for the aging), that we founded in the last two centuries, are no longer totally dependent upon our church for their financial survival.  Much of our early growth and development was fueled by higher education.  How will we retain these institutions as truly Christian institutions when our financial stake in them has become negligible?  Two hundred years ago Methodists established dozens of institutions that would serve other people’s children.  We need to recover some of that same spirit in creatively ministering to contemporary needs – particularly because one of our Conference Priorities is reaching a new generation of Christians.  We need our institutions to teach us how to reach a generation that we have nearly lost.
    
3. Our VIM teams have experienced some of the explosive growth of the church in our southern hemisphere.  Hispanic immigration is presenting our church with some dramatic challenges (Alabama has about the third highest percentage of Spanish-speaking growth of the Southeastern states.).  We need to expand our Conference tradition of mission work in the southern hemisphere.  We also need to double our efforts to start Spanish-speaking congregations.  Thomas Muhomba is giving us great leadership in this area with a half dozen new congregations begun in the last two years, but we need many more.
    
4. We continue to be an aging church, with the average age of our clergy and our membership higher than the national average, particularly in our predominately African-American congregations.  While we have had some success in attracting younger clergy candidates (we are about fourth from the top in the Connection), we must do many things differently if we are to buck this trend.  Every church needs to make inviting new, young Christians into the leadership of the congregation.  This year’s Annual Conference will focus upon this priority and will share some of our successes in this area.
    
5. The past two decades will be known as the time of rapid growth in the number of our very small congregations (churches with under seventy-five members).  In many ways the United Methodist Church is organized to support, to find pastoral leadership for, and to produce more small congregations.  Our small congregations have shown themselves to be wonderfully resilient.  Our medium sized congregations have been those most threatened by present trends. Most of our resources, and most of our pastors continue to support small congregations.  We’ve got to find a way to deploy more of our pastoral and financial resources to start new congregations and to take new initiatives to reach a new generation.  All of our small congregations were given birth by a church that was determined to go where the people were.  We’ve got to show that same pioneering spirit in our time.

I fervently believe that God will continue to bless us and give us what we need to reach a new generation, to be faithful to the mandate of Christ in our time and place.

Will Willimon

An Affirmative Action Plan for African American United Methodists

Recently I was asked to contribute a commentary on the website of the General Commission on Religion and Race. I reprint it here, as a thought piece on this Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend.

When I saw the racial composition of the delegates to the Republican National Convention I saw a political party that was sadly out of touch with the future of this great democracy. In that vast throng of delegates, no more than thirty-seven were African Americans! Any party that so limited in diversity was doomed to failure in the election.

And yet, as a United Methodist, I grieve that our church is steadily looking more like the composition of this secular political party and less like the Body of Christ – racially speaking. During three decades of programs, agencies, and millions of dollars of funding to foster greater racial inclusiveness in our church, we have proportionally become less racially inclusive. I consider this to be one of our greatest scandals and an affront to the gospel.

We have made some remarkable progress in addressing historic patterns of racial exclusiveness in our church. In the past few decades we have shown growth in the number of Bishops, District Superintendents, General and Jurisdictional Conference Delegates, and Directors and Staff of General Boards who are persons of color. The trouble is, in all these categories, the percentage of people of color represented is much greater than the presence of people of color in the membership of the denomination.

Therein lies the problem. We have tried to address the issue of “racial inclusiveness” in an exclusively top-down fashion – electing and appointing persons of color in a high proportion to positions of authority in our church while failing to make racial inclusiveness a bottom-up phenomenon. The statistics suggest that we’ve got “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors” only for people of the racial group that is in decline of the percentage of the American population. Years ago, Bob Wilson and I said (in Rekindling the Flame ) that our church loves slogans about African Americans more than we appear to love actual United Methodist African Americans! African American United Methodists are a shrinking proportion of our church. In my own Annual Conference, 25% of my Cabinet is African American. Yet we are struggling to have thriving, growing predominately African American congregations. The rate of death of our African American constituency is about five times higher than our rate of new African American members.

True, our church shows decline in many segments (though our Korean and Spanish speaking congregations appear to be happy exceptions). My worry is that my African American congregations are declining faster, proportionately, than my non-African American congregations. The age of the average African American United Methodist appears to be even higher than the average age of United Methodists in general (which is already terribly high). We are losing our African American constituency -- particularly African Americans of the generation of our new President. Obama is President, in great part, because he marvelously succeeded in appealing to the generation that my church has (be they white, black, or brown) excluded – people under forty.

Though my immediate concern is reaching a new generation of African Americans, I fear that we are having similarly poor response from some other racial minorities. According to a breakdown of conference statistics by GCFA, since 1990 the conference that showed the greatest decline in average worship attendance was the Rio Grande Conference, declining by 30.14%. This decline is particularly sad because this geographic area has been the beneficiary of dramatic growth in Spanish-speaking people.

I therefore find myself in agreement with Dr. Lovette Weems, Jr. of Wesley Theological Seminary who, last fall, told the Council of Bishops, “We need an affirmative action program for ethnic minority United Methodists!” Our church has proved that having more bishops and denominational executives of color, while enriching the quality of leadership of our church, has no positive effect on the number of members of our church who are persons of color. It seems that no African Americans become United Methodists simply because we have slogans about racial inclusiveness and a few persons in top positions. We need a church wide effort to do what we need to do to increase the number of professions of faith by people of color.

Weems noted that, “All mainline denominations have wonderful statements about racial inclusiveness but no mainline denomination has demonstrated that it can reach any racial group other than whites at the same rate it can reach white people.”

If one examines the website of the General Commission on Religion and Race one searches in vain for emphasis on increasing the diversity of our church through making our church more accessible, attractive, welcoming, and inclusive of a new generation of persons of color. It as if the Commission has not heard that “making disciples for the transformation of the world” is the bishops’ priority for this quadrennium. (To be fair to the Commission, most of the other agency websites are guilty of the same omission.) Sadly, it is easier to elect and appoint a few persons of color to leadership positions in our church than to welcome new United Methodists. I wish the Commission on Religion and Race would show the same commitment to set goals and monitor diversity in the areas of evangelism, new members, baptisms, average attendance, and professions of faith that it has shown in monitoring delegates to G eneral Conference.

My friend Nathan Hatch, great American church historian, notes that in the Nineteenth Century, “More African Americans became Christians in 10 years of Methodist preaching than in a century of Anglican.” Our movement, in its first years in this nation, showed a peculiar genius for reaching African Americans for Christ and Wesleyan Christianity. A gracious, ever seeking God can use us again if we decide that reaching a new generation of Christians and making disciples is a priority. We do have a few congregations and pastors who know how to do this crucial ministry. They must teach the rest of us. In my experience, persons of color are attracted to a congregation and decide to join that congregation for exactly the same reasons as anyone else – vibrant, Spirit-filled worship, engaging preaching, a warm, exciting congregational culture, and opportunities for service and witness in the name o f Christ. Though it pains me to admit this, I have never met a single person of any racial group who became a United Methodist Christian because of bishops!

The way to be a more racially inclusive church is not through monitoring, slogans, or the election of bishops – it is by being more racially inclusive in our membership. The youthfulness of the growing racial ethnic diversity in the United States makes its impact even more significant for the future of an aging denomination. Our church’s vitality in the next century will be dependent upon its willingness and ability to respond to the changing face of America.

I would love to see our church move from a vague statement like “making disciples” to set specific goals for reaching persons of color as members of our church. Then we should commit to give pastors the skills they need to lead toward that goal. We should hold bishops like me, churches and pastors accountable to those goals, and we should appoint and deploy pastors on the basis of how well God uses them to reach a new generation of United Methodists who will enable us to be a church that not only talks about racial inclusiveness but embodies, practices, visibly demonstrates inclusiveness in our membership.

William H. Willimon

P.S. Next week, I’ll return to and conclude my messages on A Short Account of a Continuing Journey and focus on how our world is changing and how we as a church must change.

A Short Account of a Continuing Journey – 2

Last week I noted some of the things we have learned about how to grow our church and better to position ourselves for reaching a new generation for Christ. Now I note some of the ways we are doing the work of Christ differently in order to get different results from our labors.

What we are doing differently in order to keep up with Jesus:

1. Our pastors are learning the skills needed to be transformative leaders. Most of us inculcated those skills needed to maintain the church, to react to crises in the church, to organize the church on the basis of our Discipline, but we had no training in how to change the church, grow the church, or reorganize the church for different results. Our pastors told us that they needed a new skill set to lead in the ways that the church was asking them to lead. NCD, our Healthy Congregations program, the interventions by the Pastoral Care and Counseling Center, and the attention of District Superintendents who now function more effectively as trainers, coaches, and mentors is making our pastors more into transformative leaders than merely care givers.
   
2. In A New Connection Andy Langford and I urged every congregation to devise a mission statement in order to mobilize and focus for the work that Jesus demands. Little did I know that soon I would be serving a Conference that had one of the most succinct and empowering mission statements in our Connection. When I came here, I inherited The North Alabama Conference has a vision statement, which I have found very helpful in focusing our ministry. The Cabinet and I have utilized that statement to set our Conference Priorities. The statement and the Priorities, now given quantifiable shape in the Conference Dashboard, are revolutionizing the way that our church is led by its pastors.
   
3. We learned how to do community demographics as a way of starting new churches. Methodism is a movement that grew in great part because we obeyed the Great Commission and went where the people were. Having noticed that we had many churches today where the people had left, we became savvy in analyzing where the people were and in finding the resources to move toward them. We moved from being a church that occasionally did good things for marginalized persons to a church that started congregations that are led by and who empower marginalized persons to be the church. Here I’m thinking about new churches like The Church Without Walls in Birmingham, Glen Addie in Anniston, and Genesis in Guntersville.
   
4. We realize that our clergy who seek to be transformative leaders place themselves under more stress, and have a more demanding ministry than if they simply tried to maintain the church as they received it from the last generation. We have therefore encouraged clergy sabbaticals, sought grants for clergy renewal leaves, worked with ICE to obtain training for clergy leaders, and sponsored retreats in spiritual formation and spiritual groundedness for clergy. In addition to this, the Cabinet took steps to exit some of our noticeable clergy non-performers, attempting to deal compassionately with those clergy who seemed unable to function well in a new culture of growth and accountability for outreach.
   
5. We have transformed our clergy recruitment procedures, revolutionizing the way we make visits to seminaries, making our Conference a magnet for talented new clergy, regardless of their place of birth. We have brought in new personnel to help us in our work (like Thomas Muhumba and Eddie Spencer). Our new, young clergy said that they needed better supervision and mentoring so we created the Residency in Ministry program for probationers and we are continuing to revamp our mentoring process.

I give thanks to God not only for the privilege of serving in a transforming, forward moving Conference but also for being able to be the Episcopal leader at a time when, having debated and studied church growth and decline for the last two decades we at last are doing things differently in order to give as a very different future. The things that we are doing differently, the new ideas that we are embodying are all evidence of the renewing, transforming work of the Holy Spirit among us.

Will Willimon

A Short Account of a Continuing Journey – 1

As we move into a new year together, our 201st year as a Conference, I thought that the next three weeks would be a good time to assess where we have come from in recent years and where we think God is leading us.

Just over two decades ago we began to wake up and realize that we were experiencing a phenomenon that had never occurred in the two hundred year history of the Methodist Church. Since that time, the North Alabama Conference has been one of the leaders in honestly confronting our contemporary challenges and organizing ourselves to confront the challenges.

What we have learned:

This has been a grand two decades of self-reflection and beginning realignment by our church. Most of our thought has been stimulated by the realization that we have lost nearly 20% of our membership. We could not continue doing church the same way without getting exactly the same poor results.

Church growth guru Gil Rendle (who has been very helpful to our Cabinet in its work) notes some of the stages we have been through on our way toward positioning our church for reaching a new generation for Christ.

1. We have confronted our passive barriers to growth. We discovered that we have unintentionally excluded new members and younger members simply by the unintended passive barriers that we erected. Some of our churches had to unlock the doors that lead into the church from the parking lot. We found that many congregations lacked noticeable, effective signage. We placed reserved parking signs for visitors and worked to make our church more accessible. We shortened, and attempted to make more effective our church meetings – dramatically shortening the time expended for Annual Conference, making Annual Conference more accessible for the laity.
   
2. We debated the theological factors that might have contributed to our decline. We learned that it wasn’t a simple matter of conservative vs. liberal (such labels came to mean less and less). It wasn’t a matter of taking controversial stands on social issues (sorry, IRD and Good News, that’s virtually irrelevant to the issue of church growth). We found it was a matter of robust believe in the Trinity – a God who is constantly reaching out into the world, a Christ who is determined to have a family, constantly calling disciples. A faithful church is a church that is always growing, always making new disciples.
   
3. We heard some saying that, for a new generation, our denominational identity had become a problem. People had moved from being apathetic toward denominational labels to being downright hostile. We were told to take “United Methodist” off our signs and letterheads. Eventually we discovered that our denominational identity could be a gift – many people in Alabama have a very positive reaction to the name “Methodist.” We have a great theological heritage and a responsible polity. Furthermore, we have found that our Conference can be a great resource in training church leaders in how to grow their churches (NCD) and a means of growing new churches (while I look forward to the day when individual congregations will start new churches, today ALL of our successful new church starts are attributable to planning and funding by the Conference).
   
4. We realized that too many of our congregations had no expectation that they could grow; they thought that unmitigated decline was their fate. We therefore have been engaged in a decade of training churches in who to move from being inward focused to outward focused, in how to stress mission over maintenance. Although over half of our congregations are still in decline, we have at last communicated to all our churches and pastors that growth is expected, planned, and is God’s will for the church. The new Conference Dashboard is a dramatic, visible means of creating expectation for growth and recognizing and honoring those churches where God is giving a rich harvest.
   
5. We heard those church observers who taught that the fastest growing churches, the churches of the future were “megachurches” – young, large congregations. By my count we have only two of these megacongregations, yet they account for a disproportionate share of our growth. These two congregations – Asbury and ClearBranch – have had a remarkable effect upon dozens of our growing churches, pioneering new practices and changing the attitude of decline to the expectation of growth.

All of these understandings have arisen in the last few years of reflection, critique and visioning. Next week, I’ll focus on some of the things we have learned about transformative leadership and change in our church.

Will Willimon

Faithful in the New Year

I am no longer my own, but thine.

Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.

Put me to doing, put me to suffering.

Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,

exalted for thee or brought low for thee.

Let me be full, let me be empty.

Let me have all things, let me have nothing.

I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

thou art mine, and I am thine.

So be it.

And the covenant which I have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen.

as used in the Book of Offices of the British Methodist Church, 1936

The Baby Jesus Among Neighbors in Need

On Christ the King, the last Sunday of the church year, the Sunday before Advent, we always read from Matthew’s gospel, the twenty-fifth chapter -- Jesus’ parable of the Great Judgment. At the end, when the King sits on the throne, all shall be judged on the basis of how well we responded to the needs of “the least of these.” Christ is encountered in giving the cup of water, the loaf of bread, in visits to the sick and imprisoned. Jesus is served by deeds of mercy to the “least of these.”

The parable is typical of the Savior who was born in a stable, the King of Kings who came among us as one of “the least of these.” Christians learn to encounter Jesus incognito, in the form of those who are marginalized, pushed to the bottom, neglected.

In my visits to dozens of United Methodist congregations this fall I’ve been impressed by the sort of people who are formed by listening to stories like the Great Judgment and the babe who is born in a manger. They are people, these Methodists, who, though their church is tiny, gathered a ton of food for Angel Food ministry. They got organized and built this year, by my count, about a dozen Habitat Houses. They welcomed the homeless into their churches and they continued work on the devastation of Katrina. In a year of economic stress, dozens of our churches, large and small, have postponed anticipated building expansions or staff increases and pastors have forgone salary increases so they can pay 100% of their fair share of Conference ministry support. They have put the needs of poor children, and overseas missions, and a wide array of benevolences ahead of their own.

Why, in a society that encourages much self-centeredness and personal acquisitiveness, did these Christians buck cultural trends and take responsibility for the needs of people who weren’t among their own family or friends? I think it was because they know by heart the story of the Nativity, the story of a God who came among us as a helpless, needy baby, born to peasant parents, lying in a feed trough.

“There are many of you,” Martin Luther scolded his sixteenth century German congregation, “who think to yourselves: ‘If only I had been there! How quick I would have been to help the little baby!’…You say that because you know how great Christ is, but if you had been there at that time you would have done no better than the people of Bethlehem…. Why don’t you do it now? You have Christ in your neighbor.”

Christ gave us himself, present in the needs of our neighbors. The one who was born in a Bethlehem stable commanded us to care for “the least of these.” We cannot see Christ, we do not truly worship him or follow him without obeying him in our acts of mercy to those in need. Thanks be to God there are thousands of Alabama United Methodists who not only believe the Bible, but obey it as well, who not only love Christ, but see him in the neighbor.

Merry Christmas.
Will Willimon

I'm convening a Bishop's Summit on Ministry to the Marginalized on the morning of February 19, 2009, here at the United Methodist Center. If you are working in ministries with those in need, please mark your calendar now.

Effective Churches

Earlier this year our Conference Lay Leader, Ellen Harris and I participated in a conversation, with Jurisdictional leaders on what makes for an effective congregation.

What are some of the main characteristic of a growing, effective church? I thought they devised a fascinating list. How does your congregation embody, or conflict with, these characteristic?

EFFECTIVE CONGREGATIONS:

1. Love their particularly community. Their pastors have found a way not only to love their congregations but also their neighborhood. Effective pastors help their congregations move beyond love of themselves, turning their congregations outward.
2. Rise above mere contentment with things as they are and do what is necessary to expect and welcome change, disruption, and movement, similar to that of the Risen Christ.
3. Find a way to welcome the stranger and to practice radical hospitality in the name of Jesus Christ. They find a way to be as interested in those who have yet to join the church as those already in the church.
4. Have a clear sense of their primary purpose and keep focused on their primary God-given missions.
5. Enable lay leaders to lead, not just manage. Lay leadership that feels a strong sense of responsibility for the future of their congregation.
6. All have a strong, change oriented, gifted pastor.
7. Make growth a priority and figure out how to grow.
8. Keep focused upon Jesus Christ as the originator of, and the purpose for the church (rather than church as just another human oriented institution).

How does your church answer to these qualities of effective churches? What specific steps would your congregation need to take to live into the future in a different way?

William H. Willimon

Church Growth Keys: Multiracial, Happy, More Males Active

Kirk Hadaway is a veteran church observer of mainline church growth and decline. Recently, Hadaway released the results of a study he completed on mainline churches. I think it has real relevance for our work in North Alabama:

Congregations interested in increasing their weekly attendance would do well to make a plan for recruiting new members, become multiracial and make sure that serious conflict doesn’t take root. That’s the message of an analysis recently released by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at Hartford Seminary. The “FACTs on Growth” report, based on data collected in a 2005 survey of nearly 900 congregations, found that congregations reporting growth in worship attendance between 2000 and 2005 tended to exhibit certain common attributes.

Multiracial congregations had a better chance of growing than those predominantly consisting of one racial group. Some 61 percent of multiracial churches said they had experienced growth, while just 31 percent of predominantly Anglo congregations said the same.

But even more important may be whether people in the pews, no matter their race, actually get along with one another.

“Whether or not a congregation finds itself in serious conflict is the number one predictor of congregational decline,” writes C. Kirk Hadaway, director of research for the Episcopal Church and author of the report, released in December. “This finding points out the need for conflict resolution skills among clergy so minor conflict does not become serious, debilitating conflict.”

Conversely, congregations were most likely to grow if they:

• had a clear mission and purpose as a congregation
• conducted “joyful” worship services
• adopted a specific plan for recruiting new members
• had changed worship format at one or more services in the past five years
  

What’s more, congregations were likely to grow if men constituted the majority of active participants, said Hadaway.

Among congregations in which at least three out of five regular participants were men, 50 percent reported growth, but among churches where no more than two in every five regular participants were men, only 21 percent said they had experienced growth.

“As American congregations become increasingly populated by women,” the report says, “those congregations that are able to even out the proportions of males and females are those most likely to grow.”

-- Excerpts from Christian Century, January 23, 2007, p. 14

Will Willimon

Church of the Second Chance: Empowering A New Generation of United Methodist Leaders

In Anne Tyler’s novel Saint Maybe, nineteen-year-old Ian tells his parents, Doug and Bee Bedloe, of his decision to leave college and become an apprentice cabinetmaker. This will enable Ian to raise the young children of his deceased brother, Danny. Ian has arrived at this decision because of the influence in his life of Rev. Emmett and the Church of the Second Chance, a congregation that believes in actual atonement, that is, that you must do something “real” to be forgiven for your sins. Ian’s sin was that he led his drunken brother to believe that his wife was unfaithful, after which Danny committed suicide.

In the crucial scene in which Ian tells his parents of the change in the course of his life, church and faith enter the conversation. Ian explains that he will have help from his church in juggling his new job and the responsibility for the children. This alarms his parents.

"Ian, have you fallen into the hands of some sect?” his father
asked.
“No, I haven’t,” Ian said. “I have merely discovered a church
that makes sense to me, the same as Dober Street Presbyterian makes sense to you
and Mom.”
“Dober Street didn’t ask us to abandon our educations,” his mother
told him.
“Of course we have nothing against religion; we raised all of you
children to be Christians. But our church never asked us to abandon our
entire way of life.”
“Well, maybe it should have,” Ian said
His parents
looked at each other.

His mother said, “I don’t believe this. I do
not believe it. No matter how long I’ve been a mother, it seems my children
can still come up with something new and unexpected to do to me.”[1]

Ian’s is a story of two kinds of churches. Dober Street is a church that mainly confirms people’s lives as they are. The Church of the Second Chance disrupts lives in the name of Jesus so that people can change. In my experience, young adults are more attracted to the church that promises them change, new life, and disruption than in the church that offers little but stability, order, and accommodation. Alas, too many of our churches have contented themselves with meeting the spiritual needs of one generation with the resulting loss of at least two generations of Christians. If we are going to fulfill our Conference Priority and summon a new generation of young Christians, I expect that we’ll have to look more like the Church of the Second Chance.

William H. Willimon

[1] Anne Tyler, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), p. 127.

Strategic Dis-Harmonization

In their excellent book, Episcopacy in the Methodist Tradition, my friends Russ Richey and Tom Frank quote from a book that I wrote some years ago with Andy Langford. “In a church that is overmanaged and underled, we desperately need our bishops to become leaders in the decentralization and creation of a new connection.”

I believe that more than ever after four years as a bishop. Tom Bandy has a wonderful phrase, “strategic dis-harmonization.” That is what a declining institution needs from its leaders, in my opinion. Unfortunately, too many of our leaders continue to administer the church as their greatest challenge as leaders was to insure constant, undisturbed harmony in the church. They still act as if the church were growing by leaps and bounds, as if our greatest challenge were to keep things in order, slow down movement, and stifle change.

We have expended too much time tweaking structures and machinery when what we need is to abandon unproductive, laborious, slow moving structures. Sometimes I think that many of our traditional ways of working were designed to make sure that they take the maximum amount of time to produce the minimal amount of fruit! Simplify, simplify!

I therefore applaud the work of the leaders of the North Alabama Conference who, in just a few years - completely reorganized the work of Connectional Ministries, getting the staff out into the Districts; moved from twelve to eight districts thus greatly simplifying administration and saving nearly a million dollars a year on administrative costs, money than can now be put directly into ministry; and changed the format of Annual Conference to make our annual gathering less expensive, more accommodating of the laity, and more efficient.

A number of our elected members of this year’s General Conference and Jurisdictional Conference said that they did not know how much had been accomplished in North Alabama until they witnessed the laborious, poorly planned, time-consuming and ultimately unproductive work of these gatherings. (Hooray for the North Alabama Delegation that introduced a resolution at Jurisdictional Conference entreating the planners to be more respectful of delegates’ time and patience by planning a better Conference.) All the more reason for us in North Alabama to forge ahead and show the rest of our Connection the good that can come by holding the church more accountable for the use of our time, the actually results of our work, and the stewardship of our resources.

William H. Willimon

Weak Clergy, Watered Down Christianity

I’ve said it before, I say it again. Few writers are as tough on us clergy as Soren Kierkegaard, that melancholy Dane. However, few writers better remind me of the high calling to which we clergy have been summoned.

Kierkegaard, here in his Journals, notes that in his day clergy had moved from being powerful people in their societies to “being controlled” by the surrounding culture. The result was a desperate attempt on the part of the clergy to be useful, to get a hearing, to appear to be relevant to whatever it was that the culture wanted. Thus was Christianity “watered down,” according to Kierkegaard.

The good news is that the situation now calls for clergy who are as tough on ourselves as the gospel is tough on humanity. Lacking the former crutches and accolades of the culture, we now must get our courage strictly from the gospel itself. We clergy must begin by applying the gospel to ourselves, before we apply it to others.

“Even then,” says Kierkegaard, “things may go badly”:

As long as the clergy were exalted, sacrosanct in the eyes of men, Christianity
continued to be preached in all its severity. For even if the clergy did
not take it too strictly, people dared not argue with the clergy, and they could
quite well lay on the burden and dare to be severe.

But gradually, as the nimbus faded away, the clergy got into the position of themselves being controlled. So there was nothing to do but to water down
Christianity. And so they continued to water it down till in the end they
achieved perfect conformity with an ordinary worldly run of ideas – which were
proclaimed as Christianity. That is more or less Protestantism as it is now.

The good thing is that it is not longer possible to be severe to others
if one is not so towards oneself. Only someone who is really strict with
himself can dare nowadays to proclaim Christianity in its severity, and even
then things may go badly for him.
--Kierkegaard, Journals[1]

Still, all things being considered, being a pastor is a high vocation, a great way to expend a life. The way of Christ is narrow and demanding, but it is also a great gift, even “in its severity.”

These are my thoughts, thinking with Kierkegaard looking over my shoulder, as I begin this week of ministry.

Will Willimon

[1] The Journals of Kierkegaard, Ed. Alexander Dru, Harper Torchbooks, 1958, 205.

The Best of All God (Yet) With Us

Saturday, a week ago, we had a grand celebration of 200 years of Methodism in Alabama. Thanks to our North Alabama Conference Historical Society for providing us this opportunity to celebrate our heritage. From the Flint Circuit, we’ve grown to a strong, far flung Conference. This past month I’ve preached in two of the churches of the Flint Circuit (Shiloh and Ford’s Chapel). They have a grand 200 year history. The best of all, both churches are growing
The week before, at our Cabinet Retreat, I asked the District Superintendents, “What Biblical text have you found most helpful in your current ministry?”

One DS responded with Joshua 1:9 – “I was with Moses, I’ll be with you.” Joshua was reassured by God that even as God had supported and led Moses in the past, God would stand with Joshua in the present and future.

We have a wonderful past. We have huge challenges in the present. We wonder if we can show half the risk, creativity, and faith in a living, moving God that was shown by our forebears 200 years ago.

To us, as to them, God promises us that we need not face these challenges alone. God says to us, “I was with Lorenzo Dow (1803), I’ll be with you.” “I was with Matthew Parham Sturdivant (1808), I’ll be with you.” “I was with James Gwinn (1808), I’ll be with you. Therein is our hope for a future.

The last words of John Wesley were, “The best of all, God is with us.”

As we tackle our present challenges, as we hold ourselves accountable to the Conference Priorities, as Jesus demands our obedience to his Great Commission and the Great Commandment, the best of all is, God is with us.

William H. Willimon

“The weather is so bad today, there’s nobody out and about but crows and Methodist preachers.”"the Methodists around here are few in number, poor, and much despised."
- Comments heard in early 19th Century Alabama

Young Pastors' Network

We have had four young clergy from North Alabama attend the Young Pastors' Network that recently met in Tipp City, Ohio, at Ginghamsburg UMC. One of our young pastors recently posted about his experience at our Young Clergy Blog

SAVE ALL YOU CAN, GIVE ALL YOU CAN

John Wesley famously said that the “people called Methodists” should “make all you can, save all you can, give all you can,” with the emphasis decidedly on the third part of that exhortation. Early Methodists dressed simply and lived simply. They founded societies for thrift, not in order to hoard but in order to give.

In a new book, The Decline of Thrift in America, historian David Tucker notes that throughout much of American history we saved up to 15% of our income. Thrift was an all-American virtue. Since the 90’s as credit got easy and borrowing became a way of life, there was a dramatic change. The average American now owes more credit card debt than at any time in history.

After one of the most tragic days in U.S. history, how did the President urge us to deal with our grief? “Go shopping.” Spending had replaced thrift as the chief American virtue. Those who had accumulated wealth for themselves and their families were lauded as representatives of the “American dream.” Our biggest trade deficits in history, along with unfunded spending on multiple wars are now bearing their bitter fruit. Reports from many of our pastors suggest that we are moving into a time of very painful recession.

Perhaps now is a good time to recover some Christian virtues that we thought we had outgrown. I pray that we will be given new moral direction that will point us back (or is it forward?) to the time-honored Wesleyan Christian values, like thrift. Times of financial crisis are good times to be reminded of what’s really valuable, from a Christian point of view.

To that end the Cabinet and I have planned ways in which we think we can save thousands of your generous dollars, changing the way we do business. Although we increased our Conference budget just over 1% this year, smallest increase in years, we have a philosophy of spending less on administration so we can spend more on mission and ministry. We’re having fewer meetings and we will spend even less on administration in the coming year. Mike Stonbraker has found some creative ways to cut administrative costs in the Northwest District. He says that his district is determined to keep utilizing the majority of their financial resources for mission and new church development. (The NW District just had a spectacular celebration of gifts to the Sumatanga Campaign.) Dale Cohen is leading Connectional Ministries in similar cost-saving measures, as is Scott Selman at our United Methodist Center. (This summer Scott set up the four-day work week at the Center, which has already saved us over 20% in utility costs.) I’ll be suggesting some ways that the Council of Bishops could follow our Conference lead in cutting costs in light of the present crisis.

In the present financial crisis, Charlie Carlton offers the resources of the United Methodist Foundation for counseling pastors and churches who are affected by the crisis. The Foundation has helped many congregations deal with building debt retirement and financial management. At my request the Foundation and Stewardship Resources will hold a summit on the church's response and solution based ideas to contnue funding our ministries, “WALL STREET, MAIN STREET AND CHURCH STREET FUNDING MINISTRY IN DIFFICULT TIMES” on Tuesday, October 21 at 10 a.m. at Cullman First UMC. All are invited.

Our goal is to practice thrift and cost-cutting measures in our work as a Conference in order that we make no cuts in our funding for mission and the Conference Priorities.

Those of us who work with the gifts of the hundreds of United Methodist churches have a responsibility prudently to expend your gifts in Christ’s work. By drawing upon our Wesleyan theological resources, the current financial crisis could be transformed into a God-give spiritual and moral opportunity.

Will Willimon

The Church and the Conversion of Emerging Adults

One of our Conference priorities is to reach a new generation of Christians. Our focus is upon the 18-30 age group, those who are being called “emerging adults.” If we are to reach this age group—the age group that we have sadly neglected and therefore find absence from our churches—we are going to have to understand them. Fortunately, a number of new books are helpful in that regard.

A major defining characteristic of this age group is their postponement of marriage. In just a couple of decades the average age for women to marry moved from 20-25 years old, and then the average age rose from 22 to 27 years old. Interestingly, this change in marriage began in 1970—about the same year that our church started losing membership and we began losing touch with the next generation.

Studies of the emerging generation seem to agree that the ages of 18-30, that is the threshold of adulthood, has become more complex, disjointed and confusing than in past decades. In his book Emerging Adulthood, Jeffrey J. Arnett (Oxford University Press, 2004) notes that young adults today put a high premium on finding their identity in an uncertain world. They are impressed with economic and political instability and live their lives accordingly. They focus much more on the self and less upon groups, and they tend to be overwhelmed by their sense of possibilities.

This summer I also read James L. Heft’s Passing on the Faith: Transforming Traditions for the Next Generation of Jews, Christians, and Muslims (Fordam University Press, 2006). Adults, who grew up in the church retain very little of what the church taught them, says Heft. Our churches have not passed on the faith to our children. (The chances that someone who grew up in the United Methodist Church will still be United Methodist by age 30 are something like 1-6. For Episcopalians, Presbyterians and many others, the rate of attrition is even worse.) Jeffrey Arnett agrees with Heft’s gloomy analysis of those who happen to have grown up in the church. Arnett says, “The most interesting and surprising feature of emerging adults’ religious beliefs is how little relationship there is between the religious training they received throughout childhood and the religious beliefs they hold at the time they reach emerging adulthood….” A recent survey showed that today’s young adults attend church less, pray less, are less lik ely to believe in authority of the Bible, more likely to identify themselves as non-religious, and tend to be extremely suspicious of institutions and organized religion.

Not too long ago the church could count on a return to church by young adults when they had their first children. That appears not to be a pattern for today’s young adults. Because they are postponing marriage, the church can expect at least a 20 year gap between young adults leaving the church and returning. In her book, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young American’s are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled, and More Miserable than Ever Before, Janet Twenge(Free Press, 2006) depicts this generation of young adults as extraordinarily self-absorbed and narcissistic. Twenge thinks that we parents made a mistake in fostering in our children an aura of self-esteem, but did not give them realistic assessments of how challenging the adult world would be.

Today’s young adults are documented as having a great love of God, but less commitment to a particular religious tradition. When it comes to religion many of them are “dabblers and deferrers.” I believe that this is not only one of the most important challenges facing the church with this age group, but also one of our most difficult challenges as United Methodists.

Fortunately, we Wesleyans believe in conversion. We need to know more about what young adults need to be converted from and to. We also must set higher priorities on reaching today’s young adults. Young Christians are not a priority for us until every pastor spends as much time with this generation as with older generations, until each congregation shows in its staff, its budget, and its energies that it is really taking seriously our mandate to reach this generation for Christ. With God’s help, we can.

William H. Willimon

A New Generation of Clergy Leaders

One of the North Alabama Conference priorities is to call and cultivate a new generation of clergy and lay leaders.  Why have we made new, young clergy a priority?  The average age of our clergy is 59.  We are facing massive retirements in just a few years.  In the past decade, we have been ordaining only about a third of the clergy we’ll need to replace retiring clergy and the average age of our ordinands has been rising.

This priority has been one of our greatest challenges: most of the leaders in our Conference, nearly all of the pastors of our most vibrant congregations, are over 50. In fact, at a recent conversation I declared, “this has been the most difficult priority of all our priorities to realize.”

Well, I was wrong!  Bill Brunson, the new chair of our Board of Ordained Ministry, reports that at the end of 2007, our Conference was forth in the entire connection in the percentage of elders under 35 years of age.  Here are the top four:  Arkansas - 284 Total Elders - 25 under 35 - 8.80% Holston - 322 Total Elders - 28 under 35 - 8.70% Oklahoma - 329 Total Elders - 28 under 35 - 8.51% North Alabama - 368 Total Elders - 31 under 35 - 8.42%

Sadly, that percentage, just twenty years ago, was about 30%.  Still, I am gratified that we are in the lead in the calling of a new generation of leaders.

Bill Brunson has led our Board of Ordained in a complete overhaul of the Board’s procedures for naming, noticing, and nurturing new clergy. They have changed scholarship funding procedures, visits to seminaries, and revamped the interview process.

I am pleased to report that already the Board’s work is bearing fruit:

This year we have 24 applicants for Provisional Membership.  The average age of those 24 is 38.5 years.   22 are applying for Provisional Elder with an average age of 37.68.  12 of the 24 applicants are 35 or under.  This is marked progress over the past two years.  However, it also indicates that we have much work to do.  This is still only about a third of the young candidates that we need, just to keep pace with retirements.

Robert Lancaster, pastor at Wesley Chapel, Northwest District, testifies to his congregation’s commitment to this priority: “Our Lay Leadership Committee has made it a priority to elect young adults to each of our committees.  We also put youth members on many of our councils and encourage them to speak up and be heard about their needs in the church.  Several of our older members are coming off committees, after many years of service, this year.  Please be in prayer they will also see the need for younger leadership to be trained, involved and supported….  Our Lay Delegate this past year to conference was under the age of 30….  He came back and gave two reports to the Sunday Morning congregation about the need for young pastors and leaders in the church.  We have made younger committee members a priority at Wesley Chapel.“

It is gratifying to see positive results for our efforts.  I call upon every congregation to pray and to make intentional efforts to notice, name, and nurture prospective new pastors.  ALL new clergy come before the Board of Ordained Ministry because one of our congregations has sent them there.  How many new pastors has your church produced in the past decade?  The 2009 Annual Conference will focus on this priority.  We are asking each congregation to identify and to send as member of the 2009 Annual Conference your most talented young adult.

It is wonderful to see progress being made on this priority.  Thanks for your efforts to give our church a vibrant, faithful, future.

Will Willimon

An Emerging Generation for the Church

That the North Alabama Conference made reaching a new generation of Christian leaders a Conference Priority was prescient, according to recent reading that I’ve been doing on young adults.

Robert Wuthnow, a noted sociologist of religion at Princeton, has just done a thorough study of the twenty to thirty something. Wuthnow’s After the Baby Boomers (Princeton University Press, 2007) is a challenging read for those of us who are entrusted with the future of the church. Unfortunately, much of his data suggest that the future of the church is being shaped more by the absence of younger adults than by their presence. With few exceptions, the church has failed to respond to the changing life patterns and social trends that characterize contemporary young adulthood, says Wuthnow.

For one thing, young adulthood is getting longer. While those in their forties were once considered to be middle-aged, Wuthnow contends that young adulthood today extends to age 45. This is due, in part, to increases in life expectancy that make age 49 the midpoint of adult life. And while young adults age 20-44 still make up 50.7% of the population—roughly the same percentage as 30 years ago, they are a much smaller percentage of the constituency of most major faith traditions. Since the early seventies, the percentage of young adults that say they attend religious services weekly has fallen from 19% to 14%; and the percentage that never attend has increased from 14% to 20%. We Mainline Protestants have been hit hardest by these trends. The proportion of young adults 21-45 among mainline church adherents has declined by five percentage points since the early seventies, and the proportion in their twenties has fallen by seven points.

The most pronounced social trend defining the life patterns of this generation is delayed marriage. In 1970, 62% of people in their twenties were married; whereas now only 28% are married. Among those in their thirties, the percentage married fell from 83% to 52%. “Being married or unmarried,” says Wuthnow, “has a stronger effect on church attendance than anything else.” Almost all the decline in religious attendance among 21-45-year-olds has taken place among unmarried younger adults. Increasingly, when our churches manage to attract young adults, we are attracting an unrepresentative cross-section of young adults—those that are married with children.

“Many congregations have gotten spoiled,” says Wuthnow, “thinking they can serve young adults by sponsoring a lively high school group and then catering to young married couples with children.” Unfortunately, this approach leaves out three-quarters of today’s young adults. His research identified several characteristics of youthful congregations (those where more than 35% of participants are under age 35). For instance: 1) newer congregations seem to have an advantage in attracting young adults—30% of congregations successful at attracting young people had been founded since 1970, compared with only 16% of less youthful congregations; 2) youthful congregations tend to be located in metropolitan areas where many young adults live; and 3) youthful congregations are more racially and ethnically mixed.

I want to stress that reaching young adults is more than a matter of institutional survival. Of the most important decisions that we’ll make in life, most of those decisions are made during young adulthood. The church ought to be there. Also, Jesus is doing some amazing things within this generation. We ought to be working with Him.

If your congregation has launched some new, fruitful ministries with Emerging Adults, share what you have done with Robert Mercer, who coordinates and encourages our Conference Student and Young Adult Ministry. Let’s share those practices that God is using to get us back in touch with this generation of Christians.

William H. Willimon

Mercy Despite the Misery Among North Alabama Methodists

In the past month I’ve met with dozens of United Methodists individually and in groups discussing the future of their church, their discipleship and their response to the Conference Priorities. Our discussions were focused on church matters, but in the course of those discussions at dozens of locations throughout our Conference, mostly in small congregations, I became aware of other concerns.

From what I’ve heard I am becoming increasingly troubled about the economics of the middle class. Methodism is a mostly middle class movement, in our past and today as well. Something about the way we do church (maybe our middle-of-the-road theology?) appeals to folks in the middle. Today, folks in the middle are hurting. The “misery index” – inflation linked with the wages and jobs – is squeezing our people. Add soaring energy prices to this, as well as the housing crisis that is greatly reducing the value of homes, and it’s a crisis. It is downright un-American that our tax and wage structure have enabled the rich to get richer and the middle class to get squeezed. It’s ironic that we have chosen to wage the ill conceived “War on Terrorism,” borrowing most of the money for the war, charging it to our grandchildren, when the economy is hurting mid dle class Americans more than Islamic terrorists. For the first time in our nation’s history, the middle class is shrinking.

I heard little from either political party, at their conventions, that specifically addresses the problems that are engendered by our government related to the economy. Alabama has lagged behind the rest of the nation economically; now we are among the first to feel the middle class squeeze. Dozens of our congregations have programs to feed “the poor.” They report for the first time ever they are having members of their own congregations ask for help and they are having record numbers ask for help. Pastors are reporting an increased number of pastoral care cases that are directly attributable to economic pressures. A United Methodist student at Birmingham Southern told me last week that he could not go to college (because his mother and his father have been laid off from their once good paying jobs) if BSC had not given him a full scholarship. He thanked me for the church’s help. I sure don& rsquo;t have the answer to this increased misery, but let’s be sure to push our leaders to get out there and listen, learn, and pray that God will give them the political creativity and courage to act.

Of course, my major concern is the church. And my point is not the ineptitude and insensitivity of our national leaders, which is self evident. My point is that the current middle class squeeze makes all the more remarkable the response of the United Methodists of North Alabama . I thank God that I have the opportunity to see people in the middle show, even amid various levels of misery, the mercy of Christ. Last Sunday I dedicated a beautiful new building at little Hopewell Church in the Southeast District. Their pastor led them in doubling their space, building mostly with their own hands, debt free, AND paying more than their fair share of Conference obligations (apportionments)! (Cost of church buildings is the main excuse that pastors give for their congregations not paying 100% of their apportionments.) This summer the apportioned giving of the Northeast and the Southeast Districts has risen rather than fallen.

Alabama Christians are near the top of national percentage of income giving to charity and church. Last year our churches (filled with people in the middle class squeeze) gave millions of dollars to help people in need – two dozen Habitat Houses, 160 Volunteer in Mission teams, half a million dollars in Katrina relief, and more. It’s an amazing testimony to Christian generosity and gratitude to have such stewardship even in tight economic times. It is a sign that the mercy of Christ for those in need is astir among us. It’s evidence that good preaching and teaching, passionate worship and opportunities bear fruit. In a culture in which people are encouraged to look after themselves and their families, to vote their self-interest, and conspicuous display of affluence is praised as realization of “the American dream,” Christian stewardship has become a countercultural witness.&nb sp;

Average, middle class people made this country great. The promise of entrance to the middle class has been, at least until this last decade, part of the American dream. But more than any of that, the mercy being shown toward those in need among us by people who are themselves under economic stress, is a credit to the power of Jesus Christ to enable average, ordinary, people in the middle, to be spectacularly faithful.

So, this Sunday, when the offering plate is passed, or you are asked to make your yearly commitment to the work of the church, thanks for your witness. The world is seeing the mercy of Christ in you.

Will Willimon

Learning and Growing

Recently I saw a study of “successful aging.” According to the study, the number one factor in whether or not a person ages gracefully experiencing "the joy of being a ifetime learner" . . ,” There really is something to the old adage that we older adults must “learn something new every day” in order to stay youthful in spirit.

Perhaps that’s why I have so enjoyed my role as Bishop – I am forced, by the demands of this job, to learn something new every day. It’s rather amazing that I could say that – after all, I spent over two decades working at a university before coming here. And yet, it’s true. This job has been the most demanding educational experience of my life.

Recently I spent a day learning from a group of our assembled clergy and laity who were convened by Dale Cohen to discuss the state of the church, to label what we’ve learned and what we’ve achieved, to note lingering problems, and to give me my job description for the next four years. It was a great day, a gratifying time in which we claimed what has been done and we named that which is yet to be done to make our church more faithful to Christ’s mandates.

After the day was over, I listed my major learning from the discussion:

1. A great deal has been changed in our Conference that moves us from a culture in which decline and loss are normal into a culture in which growth and forward movement are planned for, evaluated, and expected.

2. There seems to be widespread understanding and enthusiasm for our Four Priorities as a way of focusing our work and moving us forward for the Kingdom.

3. There is much encouragement, particularly from the laity, about more attention to results, particularly growth in our churches.

4. There is a need for, and much encouragement of, greater accountability among our clergy and churches that is specifically linked to growth.

5. Many note and appreciate the changing role of the District Superintendent as a coach, mentor, and supervisor. As I noted, one of our slogans on the Cabinet is that the D.S. doesn’t only “make appointments” but also “makes appointments work.”

6. There is real pride that our Conference has become a leader in starting new communities of faith.

Thanks to all of you who are teaching me that our beloved connection can have a future, that God has great things in store for us if we will take risks for God, change lives, and grow more disciples (Conference Vision Statement).

I am so grateful to have been given another four years among you.

Will Willimon