Video: Bishop's Day 2010 gathering in Mt. Pleasant (Mike Slaughter, Bishop Keaton)

By RJ Walters, Editor / Online exclusive

All month long districts are coming together to learn and be inspired at Bishop's Day 2010 events.

The theme for this year's events is "Called Out — Creating New Places For New Faces," and the spirit of continual education in Christ to elevate the church is alive and well in the state.

This video shows a few clips of the Bishop's Day gathering at Mt. Pleasant First UMC on March 13.
Highly regarded Methodist pastor Mike Slaughter, a nationally renowned author and visionary of The Sudan Project, taught on the mandate for mission in the Bible and how to overcome "the numbers neurosis in the Methodist Church" to focus more on empowering people through active missions. His new book "Change the World: Recovering the Message and Mission of Jesus" was a reference point for much of his speech.

With Bishop Jonathan Keaton on hand to provide an introduction to the event, Slaughter delivered an insightful, sometimes provocative teaching on finding ways to create ministry that "comforts the afflicted, while afflicting the comfortable," referring to the church.

"Isn't dying with your boots on better than dying watching Grey's Anatomy?" he asked, when calling people out of their comfort zone.

The video is just a glimpse of one event that went on throughout the two conferences. If you have videos, pictures, or stories from other Bishop's Day gatherings please send them to Michigan Area Reporter Editor RJ Walters at editor@miareaumc.org.

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Bishop's Day 2010: Called Out

By RJ Walters, Editor / March 2010 Issue

For full-length interviews with Mike Slaughter and Steve Sjogren click HERE.

Sometimes making a difference requires stepping outside of one’s comfort zone and Bishop’s Day 2010 encourages people to do just that.

From the radical vision of mission work from nationally acclaimed author and church leader Mike Slaughter to the basics of a concept called “servant evangelism,” which has been fashioned by church-expansion expert Steve Sjogren, Bishop’s Day has expanded to offer ideas and hope the people of the United Methodist Church.

The 2010 theme is “Called Out – Creating New Places for New Faces” and sessions will be held in six different regions throughout the state in the month of March.

According to Michigan Area Bishop Jonathan D. Keaton the events are much more than just speaking engagements, they are “continuing education events that should be worshipful, creative and full of ideas — something that has some sort of fellowship to it.”

Bishop’s Day is Keaton’s brainchild, an initiative he created to help support and affirm the opportunities UMC members have to make a difference through discipleship, evangelism and stewardship.

It started out as being a day where the bishop would invite people from throughout Michigan to come to Lansing for a day of teaching and enlightenment, but Keaton soon realized God had bigger plans for Bishop’s Day.

“(After two years) I realized that I look over an area with about 170,000 United Methodists, so I should have more than 300 people show up to come visit me,” he said. “So the following year I decided that rather than being the sponsor of this event and have everybody come here, I had the idea of talking to my 13 (district) superintendents and telling them we should have Bishop’s Day in every single district.”

Now over 3,000 people attend sessions each year and Keaton said ideally he’d like 10 percent of the membership from each district to be trained and inspired through this mission.

This year’s lineup of speakers is as diverse as the general church population itself.

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Timeout with the Bishop, March Edition

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.

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