Burning Questions with Bill: How to stoke the fires of enthusiasm after a surge of personal inspiration

• By Bill Dobbs, Clergy Assistant to the Bishop •

Question: This month’s question came from a younger pastor at Annual Conference who came up to me right after the ordination service, face still full of the emotion we all were feeling, and said, “What now? What do I do with all this passion and enthusiasm for ministry with the poor in my local church?”

Dobbs: I recognize the question. It’s the same question I’ve heard from youth over the years when I was counseling at one of our summer camps. (Shameless plug: Christian camp counseling is an outstanding opportunity to share with, and learn from, children and youth, and I highly recommend it, pastors!)

More than one teenager, full of a week of faith-changing time, has been disillusioned when they arrive home only to find that people at home don’t share their newfound enthusiasm for the faith. Even worse: they find a kind of patronizing tolerance which knows, from experience, that if you just wait a while, the “camp fires of enthusiasm” will pass and things will go back to normal!

Will that be our experience of annual conference this year? Will we go home, full of enthusiasm for what we have heard and experienced, and find a congregation that does not share our passion for ministry with the poor? Will we find a congregation that has come to expect these annual surges of enthusiasm on our part, but which knows, from experience, that they only have to be patient for a time and the enthusiasm will pass. “How can this year be different?” the pastor asked. Please let me share, briefly, something of what I’ve learned over the years:

First, do everything you can to help those who were not at annual conference share your experience. It is much easier today that it used to be, but the principle still holds true. Get together with your lay or clergy partner at annual conference and develop a strategy for reporting back on annual conference. Don’t let that report just be about the ‘business’ of conference, even if that was part of what excited you.

Share the messages you heard and the things you saw. If your people were following the ‘live-stream’ of the conference, that will be even better, but there are recordings and videos of the conference which are available for you to use as a way to tell the story of annual conference. Just don’t wait too long. Your excitement will be contagious.

Second, don’t get discouraged. Your people were not there. They didn’t have your experience, so they don’t share your excitement. But that doesn’t mean they can’t get excited or don’t care about the poor.

They have been called by Christ, just like you. The Holy Spirit will change them just like you have been changed, if you keep the door open to God. Share the stories you heard and how they impacted you.

Your personal witness is powerful testimony that God can use to reach others, so keep sharing.

Finally, don’t try to do this alone. Partner with the other person or persons from your congregation who attended annual conference with you. Form a small group. Invite people with like minds and passions to join you. Become an “Acts Two” church within a church. Devote yourselves “to the apostles teaching, and to fellowship, and to sharing in meals (including the Lord’s Supper) and to prayer” (Acts 2:42, NLT).

And then hang on! God did “signs and wonders” in that first century church. People were changed – transformed by the Holy Spirit – so that they shared their money and meals, joyfully and generously, with those in need. And I’m here to tell you that God will do “signs and wonders” in your church as well! Thanks be to God!

It all begins with you. You must be willing to share what God has given you in these few days of annual conference! Don’t go back to business as usual or that is, most assuredly, what you will find.

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Burning Questions with Bill: Challenges of the church and emotions of the appointment process

• By Bill Dobbs, Clergy Assistant to the Bishop •

Two questions from clergy this month which speak to the core of our mission and our care for pastors and parsonage families.

Question: “What is, or are, the greatest challenge(s) facing our Church today? And are we addressing the right issue?”


Dobbs: What I am about to say is my answer to the above question; other persons would likely answer differently. For me, the greatest challenge facing our Church today is the likelihood that 60 to 65 percent of our current membership will be deceased within the next 20 years and we are still not committing our resources and energy to making disciples of Jesus Christ among the youth and young adults in significant numbers. When I listen to our debates about “right thinking” on either side of the aisle, which have gone on for years now, it feels very much like moving the deck chairs on the Titanic. I confess that I have been part of my share of “right thinking debates” in the past. I’ve even started a few. But I am part of that majority which is running out of time and I want this church that I love to be here for my grandchildren and their grandchildren. We have a mission and a vision! The only question that remains is: Do we have the will to put the Kingdom first?

Question: “How closely does the Bishop and DCOM (District Committee on Ministry) listen to the needs of pastors with respect to appointments and spiritual matters?

Dobbs: The District Superintendent is every clergyperson’s link to the Bishop and the Cabinet table. It is our responsibility to help the superintendent know our complete situation. “But if I do that, what guarantee do I have that my appointment will fit my needs and desires? If the call comes and the appointment doesn’t sound like what I think I should have at this point in my career or doesn’t seem to fit my family’s needs, does that mean that nobody listened? Or, more importantly, that nobody cared?”
The appointment system, as we presently have it, was not designed to meet the needs of clergy and parsonage families as a primary goal. It evolved as a means of deploying clergy to advance the kingdom and support the ministry of laity in local congregations. When we are ordained, we agree to go where we are sent by the Bishop .(¶333 & ¶338 in the United Methodist Book of Discipline) That being said, the Bishop and Cabinet go to great lengths to deploy clergy on the basis of their personal and family situations whenever possible. But it is not always possible.
We have churches and appointments in places where people don’t always want to go. (Call systems often have pulpits that they cannot fill for months and even years because they can’t find people willing to come and serve in that place. The United Methodist church has not faced that situation because we send pastors to meet the needs of the church where it is located.) And when we are sent somewhere we don’t want to go, it is easy to think that the Bishop doesn’t care about our feelings or our families.
As one who has sat at the table and watched those difficult decisions being made, I can tell you that it is just not true! The Bishop and the Superintendents do care about every pastor and parsonage family. They also care about every local congregation in every place all across the state of Michigan. So, prayerfully and, often, tearfully they make difficult decisions.
They do listen – to all the voices, all the needs.
It is, in my opinion, a sign of God’s grace that they are able to “fit” as many clergy to as many places as they do.

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Burning Questions with Bill: Clergy Assistant to Bishop addresses making difficult decisions in times of unrest

Bill Dobbs

By Bill Dobbs, Clergy Assistant to the Bishop

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.

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