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| Bill Dobbs |
This month's questions come from two different laypersons who are giving voice to questions I have heard, in one form or another, from people all across the Area.
They were posed to me within a 24-hour period and seemed, to me, to be opposite sides of the same coin. I would like to pose them both and then respond to them as one, believing that they are parts of one whole.
Question one came from an e-mail that was requesting conference and/or Episcopal action on behalf of a smaller congregation. I will try to present the question in such a way that it does justice to the questioner without identifying their congregation.
In essence, the question was: We have paid our apportionments/ministry shares at the 100 percent level for years and years. Now that jobs have gone away and people are moving away, we are having problems making ends meet and we want to know why the conference is not helping us more with our bills or our pastoral support payments? We sent all that money in to the conference office and now we think some of it should be coming back to our local church!
Question two arrived less than a full day later, this time courtesy of the United States Postal Service. In the lengthy, thoughtfully written letter, the author wanted to know when the Bishop or the Superintendent or someone from the "conference" was going to come in and shut the doors of their struggling little congregation. It was clear to the author that the 10 or 12 people who were there most Sundays for worship were not really a healthy church as the Discipline defines the heart of Christian ministry.
But it was also clear that everyone remaining loved their little church and could not bring themselves to close the doors. So, the author wondered, when was somebody from outside or “the big church” going to come in and make them do what the 'faithful remnant' didn't have the heart or the will to do?
Can you see how these questions are related?
"Please come in and do for us what we cannot do for ourselves." "Take care of us." "Let us continue to do things our way, even when our way is clearly not working, because this is the way we have always done things!"
And, lest you think that this is somebody else's problem, please understand that this question comes from many different situations and many different people every day.
Instead of dealing with the situation as we find it today, many of us United Methodists persist in trying to force the proverbial square peg of yesterday into the round hole of today, and we expect people in leadership to help us do just that.
There is a short factual answer and a longer personal answer to these two questions. The short answer is that the Annual Conference is not a bank and does not have stockpiled resources for the proverbial "rainy day." Secondly, bishop's powers are defined and limited by the Discipline; much of what is being requested is beyond the scope of the bishop's authority.
But there is a personal answer I feel compelled to give as well. What I want to say in response is that people in leadership lead us best by helping us to move forward and supporting us as we make the difficult decisions about what that forward movement will look like.
Every Bishop I have served as a pastor, superintendent and clergy assistant over the last 39 years has had to make difficult leadership decisions that local congregations have not liked. That is not a new phenomenon for the 21st century.
Often that decision has been "not" to do something that someone thought the bishop should do.
The advantage of the longer view of history is that we can often see the handiwork of God, which we cannot see when we are too close to the situation. All across this Area I see local churches, for instance, that were not propped up artificially but who were allowed to find the path to health through merger with other congregations, which, at the time, surely must have felt like death and resurrection for many of the
members.
Today, these merged congregations are signs of life and hope even in these difficult days for Michigan's economy.
When the children of Israel came to the very difficult place between the rock of Pharaoh's army and the hard place of the Red Sea, Moses did what many of us might be tempted to do when the people complained about the hard times they were facing. "Don't worry, he said. Just be still and watch God rescue us!"
Today's pastor might be tempted to say, "watch the Conference and/or the Bishop rescue us" but the emphasis is the same.
"Don't worry. Someone is going to do something to "fix" things for us. But look at what God says to Moses (Ex. 14:15): "Why do you cry out to me? Tell the Israelites to go forward." Get those people moving! If they want to be saved, they have to take the first step into the water!"
These are difficult days and we are facing difficult decisions. If we will find the way forward, we have to do as the church has always done and step out in faith, trusting God to be with us.
Bishop and superintendent, pastor and parish together, we will find the path to the Promised Land, But no one is going to do it for us - not the Bishop, not the Annual Conference, not the Director of Connectional Ministry, and not the pastor of our local congregation.
It is a journey we will all have to take. The Good News is that God is with us and there is a Promised Land waiting for us all!
1 comments:
This is so true - thank you for the insights and challenge Rev. Dobbs. We all need to push on and continue forward in His strength and authority. I honestly believe if more smaller churches merged together there would be new life and growth and the ability to move forward by making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world as we are called to do and it would allow the pastors serving three-point churches to be more effective in their ministry and not stretched so thin. They could focus more on growing the church and that to me is exciting!
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