• By RJ Walters, Editor •
More than 4,000 United Methodist members and leaders joined together electronically on April 6 to focus on the short- and long-term changes necessary to meet the future challenges of the church.
The consensus was accountability, creativity and the improvement and coordination of the clergy leadership system are integral to growing more vital churches.
But a lingering question remains — one that has been debated for years prior to the first-ever United Methodist Church Leadership Summit: “How does a global church of roughly 11 million members get there?”
Three gatherings of clergy and lay people around the Michigan Area joined the webcast conference hosted in Nashville to discuss how churches and conferences could better direct their resources toward meeting the physical and emotional needs of communities by looking at “measurable fruits” and statistics that tell the stories of local congregation.
“Think of how our mission will benefit if we give more attention to careful collection of key information and share it with each other more often,” said Charlotte Area Bishop Larry Goodpaster, president of the Council of Bishops. “Some annual conferences are now receiving weekly reports and telling the story of fruitful ministry using Internet dashboards.”
A comprehensive report by the Call to Action Steering Team — a 16-person committee charged with creating a plan that will lead to reordering the life of the church for greater effectiveness and vitality — strongly suggests using the following factors to get an initial look at the “vitality” of a church: regular worship attendance, faith professions during a calendar year, the number of and participation in small groups and statistics that indicate how much money is being given to mission, how many people are engaging in it and how many people are being reached.
The report also states the status quo of an aging UMC membership in the United States is “toxic and unsustainable” and the denomination’s “adaptive challenge” is to redirect the flow of attention, energy and resources to create a sustainable model.
The conference asked groups connecting to the webcast to discuss several key concepts presented in the Call to Action report.
Benton Heisler, West Michigan Conference Director of Connectional Ministries, shared impressions from the group of WMC clergy and lay leaders he was a part of on April 6.
He said the group wondered out loud whether or not local congregations are now supporting conferences instead of the other way around and whether or not the “moral and leadership will” are in place to discontinue churches that are no longer “producing fruit” and/or not viable.
There was a general consensus in Heisler’s group that strategic planning should be done based on demographics and population instead of where churches have always thrived or survived.
“Can we reclaim the circuit and put the pastor on the screen instead of the horse?” Heisler asked in an email.
Heisler also noted that his group thought guaranteed appointments should be examined and perhaps eliminated and the duties of a bishop should be more focused on his/her conference as opposed to a bevy of national and international responsibilities.
Jerry Devine, Detroit Conference Director of Connectional Ministries, said the Summit provided a jumping off point for future conversations, but he expects the next seismic shifts in the strategic planning of the church won’t take place until the 2012 General Conference in Tampa, Fla.
“The conversations were good, yet people were leery of whether this will lead to anything of substance,” he said in an email. “We all desire a transformed and vital future, yet we know the themes that were discussed are not new to us. They simply come with more urgency now then before.”
Goodpaster said the online conference was only the beginning of the critical thinking and he encouraged people to create focus groups to share the video of the Summit with their local church.
The Summit in its entirety will be available for viewing the next 18 months at www.umc.org, along with a survey of roughly 1,000 participants from the event.
Want more?
Watch the full UMC Leadership Summit, archived at www.umc.org/leadershipsummit. Also check out results from the post-Summit survey.
