Bishop Jonathan D. Keaton has been serving the Detroit Area and West Michigan Conferences as bishop since 2004. He has been actively involved in the United Methodist Church as a clergy member for 40 years and one of his primary goals is to enforce the UMC mission to “make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.” Editor RJ Walters recently sat down with Keaton to discuss the state of the church and the Michigan Area as 2010 gets underway.
Q: From your position as the bishop, what do you see as some of the strengths and weakness of the two Michigan conferences in particular?
A: There are so many different visions and dreams people have about the way they do church, so one of the challenges is always getting the conferences on the same page. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t have dreams; for example, if someone has the gift of working on social justice issues or being in Christian education or one church does a lot of work with camping, (that’s good). Both annual conferences have a real strength in mission — it’s mission, mission, mission. The United Methodists in Michigan do mission right, and they have for many, many years long before I was here —I’m not responsible for that. The Michigan Area has been one of the top areas in giving in the United Methodist Church….we have folks all over the world in Jamaica and Africa and a seminary there in Russia, so just mission. But I think we’ve had the great struggle in “How do we get ministries organized on the same page?” What helps that is we have two conferences and two connectional ministry leaders and they have primary responsibility for directing program areas. So I would say the greatest strengths of the Michigan Area are mission work and worship services, and if we would say what some of the weaknesses have been, you look at how the denomination has seen membership decline over the last 40 years, and secondly stewardship, which is why we need continuing education.
Q: How do you get church members to feel like they are all part of one singular vision that they can all see tangible results in?
A: I need to learn how to make better use of the media to communicate what’s important. I think what will ultimately help us in terms of apportionments, or what we call ‘ministry shares’ on the West Michigan side, is we have to make connections to where the money is going and what benefit it has for the local church or annual conference. For example, some of the money goes to help the 13 (UMC) seminaries, places that train pastors, there is an apportionment called ‘The Black College Fund’… we need to see how that (monetary) support can come back and provide for the needs of the people and the youth. We of course have money that goes to the General Board of Church and Society; sometimes people have different responses to that if the (board) takes on an issue that’s really controversial that nobody can draw one line on and they are advocating for something that gets people perturbed, upset or mad and has them asking why should the church be involved. We also have agencies like (the General Board of) Global Ministries and UMCOR — there’s virtually no emergency in the world, where if there’s not already United Methodists on the ground, there will be quickly.”
Q: One issue people are talking about at the national level, as well as here in the conference is clergy pensions, and how there is a cry for re-structuring the current model because of the market collapse in recent years. What do you see as a viable solution at this point and how important of an issue is this for the church as a whole?
A: I don’t know what the answer is. But I know one of the means for an answer is what has been happening the last few months, as the General Board of Pensions just finished having conversations with the five Jurisdictional College of Bishops and treasurers, etc., etc. In fact we just had our conversation with the General Board of Pensions (late last month) in Chicago. We talked about the mounting costs, should there be any limit to benefits? So the right people I think are starting to talk and they say we’ll have to make some decisions if the stock market continues to go down, but in ’09 it really came back. In any case, an issue is what benefits aught the church be responsible for to those who give themselves to ministry for a lifetime? And in addition to that, if the pastor dies, what aught be the pension for the surviving spouse? I think right now the surviving spouse gets 70 percent of the pastor’s pension, so to use that as an example, maybe they’ll look at it like Social Security, and if we keep giving surviving spouses 70 percent we may run out of money, so let’s make it 65 or 60 percent. So we’re dealing with things called unfunded liability; we have past services rates where we’d say if you serve the conference your pension is going to be (whatever) each year and add that up for 40 years. So some conferences as they bring in clergy and others go out, have not had sufficient reserves so that whenever those people retire they can in fact pay out what they owe for their service. It exists for some, but some have an unfunded liability they are looking at all the time. The bottom line is, can the Board of General Pensions plan in such a way that when everybody retires, can they have what they were promised to have, just like with Social Security? It’s the same kind of debate. Future generations are always paying the bill for us right now of course.
Q:With so many important issues circling around the global Methodist Church and in the conferences you overlook, how do you manage to succeed at your job of being the bishop? It seems like there can’t possibly be enough hours to cover it all.
A: There is not enough time. But the thing that’s a powerful presence is A.) I’m not in this alone, I believe God is at work in this, and my gifts are offered each day, “God this is what I have, you’ll have to take the rest,” so it’s not totally in people’s hands; and B.) You’ve got to have the belief or the faith that God is a part of this and will help us in what we have to do, just as in 1929 or whenever they had the stock market crash. There were some people who believed it was the end and there were others who said no, it just feels like it, but we believe the nation can go forward. Or was 9/11 the end? No it was not. Is the earthquake in Haiti the end? No, it’s the end for some, but ultimately you know God’s people will help Haiti awaken. It may take a long time, so there’s a faith we have to have — like the woman who was underneath the rubble (in Port-Au-Prince) for 10 days and came out singing. She could’ve said on day two, “I just want to die,” but she didn’t. People wanted to give up in the business world when the market crashed, but others had faith. So I can’t give you hard facts that this will happen or that will happen, but belief is very much a part of who we are.
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