What Should We Have Been Doing This Easter?

I don't have much time to post- I'm exhausted from today's Easter celebrations. But I've been reading some really interesting things I thought I'd share from the blog of my colleague, Ben, at Covered In the Master's Dust:

Meeting People Where They Are on Easter

Rethink Easter: Chreaster Hunting Season

Both of these articles are challenging and clarifying. I hope you'll find them enlightening too. Back to our regularly scheduled programming soon!

Interlude: Whither Methodism? Whither Christianity?

It’s a bonus post everybody! When it rains, it pours, right? I’ve been thinking about the last few posts recently, while reading about all of the recent news in the Roman Catholic Church. As you probably know, the RCC just gave birth to a new thing: the papal conclave elected a new pope, Francis I. It’s kind of a big deal because this is the first time there has been a pope from the Western Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere (heck, he’s the first non-European pope, though he is of Italian descent), and he is the first Jesuit pope. I’ve also been reading on my friend Brother Anthony’s blog about more indiscretions made by priests in California and the subsequent cover-up by the Catholic hierarchy there.

The studies we’ve been discussing in the last couple posts show that more and more people are leaving the Church, or never affiliating with it in the first place. They also show that young people overwhelmingly believe that the Church is a place of judgment and legalism, not a place of grace and mercy. I believe that these recent survey results are not documenting coincidental fluxuations in church participation or fleeting opinions. The attitudes and choices of the Millenials did come out of nowhere; they did not arise in a vacuum. They are connected to Christians’ actual behavior in recent times.

There is a doctrine in the study of the sacraments known as ex opere operato, which means "from the work done" in Latin. It means that the efficacy of the sacraments does not derive from the holiness of the person performing the sacrament, but instead from the action of the sacrament itself. In other words, if I give communion in church, that time and space is sacred, but not because I am Just That Holy. It’s because God is there and meets us in the sacrament, despite the fact that I’m a sinner just like you. This is an important doctrine in every orthodox Christian tradition because it prevents the clergy from becoming a separate, spiritually superior class, and from making membership in such a class a requirement for eligibility for holy orders. It also prevents clergy from becoming prideful and self-important (at least, it should). 

Unfortunately, while we know about this doctrine in our minds, our hearts often forget it, and I’m not quite sure why that happens. The RCC has some rigid social teachings, including prohibiting all birthcontrol other than the rhythm method. I bring up that one in particular because it’s a teaching that has little to no relevance in the everyday lives of Catholics in most Western countries. And it significantly impacts the lives of Catholics in the 2/3 world, whose families are already struggling to make do without having to worry about large numbers of unplanned children on top of it all. Some 89% of American Catholics ignore this teaching and use other types of birth control. That is a tough pill to swallow (no pun intended), not to mention very stringent views and (in my opinion) sometimes graceless language on issues of abortion, homosexuality, and women’s ordination. How can priests, bishops, and cardinals hope to enforce such prohibitions in a world that is modernizing much more quickly than the Church? I think that it was originally accomplished with an approach the priests took that was somewhere along the lines of, “I am a set-apart minister of God and I am chaste and obedient. If I can do it, you can do it.” When communicated in a spirit of compassion, equity, and solidarity as fellow sinners, I think this approach could have worked, and it did for awhile.

But then the pedophilia scandals broke. Parishioners could no longer count on priest to be moral examples. They realized that priests could be predators. They can betray our trust, harm their flock, and then cover it all up and expect to continue receiving the respect and honor of the community. What kind of sheep follows a bad shepherd (Is. 56:10-12; Ez. 34:4; Jn. 10:10-14)?  And so, slowly but steadily, the people have stopped participating in a religious institution that appears to be corrupt, hypocritical, and more concerned with protecting clergy cronies than their own welfare. Frank Brunni at the New York Times says it well:

It’s time for the church to stop talking so much about sex. It’s the perfect time, in fact. It’s on matters of sexual morality that the church has lost much of its authority. And it’s on matters of sexual morality that it largely wastes its breath. By insisting on mandatory celibacy for a priesthood winnowed and sometimes warped by that, by opposing the use of contraceptives for birth control, by casting judgment on homosexuals and by decrying divorce while running something of an annulment mill, the church’s leaders have enraged and alienated Catholics whose common sense and whose experience of the real world tell them that none of that is wise, kind or necessary. The church’s leaders have also set themselves up to be dismissed as hypocrites, unable to uphold the very virtues they promulgate.

While we Protestants have learned from the scandals in the RCC and have taken measures like Safe Sanctuaries policies to make sure that kind of thing does not happen in our churches, we are still learning the hard lessons that come from broken trust in the Church universal. Some have said that what the church has is an image problem. But the bigger problem is that people's perceptions of us are correct; they do not misunderstand us. What we really have is a "credibility gap": a gap between what the Church says on certain issues and the lived reality of ordinary people.

As I pointed out in last week's post, ideology wars are not the answer. Even an ideology war is won in a way that brings the church's teachings closer to public opinion, it would be irrelevant because we have already lost. We've lost members and money, yes, but even worse, we've lost something we might never get back: trust. 

How can we gain it back? 

Well, Brunni offers an idea: "To many Catholics, active and lapsed, the beauty of the faith and the essence of Jesus Christ reside in a big-hearted compassion that has been eclipsed and often contradicted by church leaders’ excursions into the culture wars."

Indeed. It's time to stop fretting about life issues and whether the earth is 8,000 year old or 4.5 billion years old. Who cares how old the earth is when its climate is out of whack and its creatures are scraping for survival? It's time to stop arguing over the earth's age and start doing something to protect it. If we really care about children, then it's time to stop arguing over the abortion and start doing something about the 22,000 children who die due to poverty each day (about 15 million each year). And we can start at home, with small acts of compassion and mercy. When we do as Jesus did, we can start to show to world what we're really about- and we'll be transformed in the process.

But all this good work- from small acts of mercy to social action- takes energy. Where do we get that energy and find the gumption to do it? In the next few posts about what will save Methodism, I will argue that worship and spiritual formation are essential foundations that allow us to do mission- the things Jesus sent us into the world to do. Whither Methodism? Tune in next week for the first installment!

Winning an Ideology War Won't Save the UMC [Lo-Cal Snacks 03]

Oh my goodness, I can't believe it's been an entire month since I last posted in this series. Mea Culpa. I probably should not have planned such a long series with so many crazy weeks in the middle, but what's done is done. In the interim, I interviewed with the Board of Ordained Ministry to be considered as a candidate for commissioning as an Elder in the UMC- and I passed! *Kermit the Frog voice* Yaaaayyyyy! Today, I just finished a concert cycle with Chorus Pro Musica that included very difficult music, including quite a bit of Bach. I came back from the BOM and almost immediately went into concert week. Whew! It was tiring but more than worthwhile.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. In our series so far, we have talked about things that folks sometimes think will "save" the UMC, but which will actually do the opposite. Last week month (groan), we looked at the Worship Wars in the church. This installment is on something similar, but more insidious and harder to stamp out: Ideology Wars.

The media are fond of phrases like "culture wars" and "class warfare". The global UMC encompasses so many cultures and social stratifications throughout the world that we are always working to bridge these gaps in order to do God's work in the world. But unfortunately, we have been caught in battles over ideology almost since our inception in 1968. The 1984 General Conference resolved a fight over the Wesleyan Quadrilateral that had been raging since 1972 when we passed the Our Theological Task portion of the Book of Discipline. Also since 1972, we have been in disagreement over homosexuality (and, to a lesser extent, abortion). It seems as if almost every conversation had at General Conference, and Annual Conferences as well, falls into the ideology ruts of American political parties. Given that we are a global church, that's bad news. And given the recent polarization of American political rhetoric, that's terrible news.

The UMC is not the only church with this problem, however! Certain groups and leaders that are part of America's religious right have been major players in national conversations over life issues (particularly abortion), evolution, and homosexuality in the last 50 years or so, and have allowed polarities to arise. We expect people to be either pro-life or pro-choice; anyone who tries to articulate care for both mother and baby is hard-pressed to succinctly and clearly explain such a position (though the UMC Social Principles do a darn good job of it). Likewise, we are expected to either believe in creationism or evolution; though many people believe in both, they are often afraid to say so. The highly polemical discussions taking place in the media and in the church today tend to place people in ideological "camps" without really giving them the time or space to thoroughly explore the issue. We start to make assumptions about people based on the way their views align with political party platforms. For example: a person who is pro-life is, ironically, likely to oppose gun control. In other words, we pre-judge them.

Evolutionary psychologists have found that this is just how the brain works. We make categories, and then when we encounter a new person or thing, we attempt to place them into the correct category. This is a survival mechanism. If we know that large animals with sharp teeth can hurt us, we realize that it's a good idea to avoid large animals with sharp teeth. Our ancestors survived because they were able to predict when certain actions were advantageous or certain situations were dangerous. Today, in a society that is highly socially developed (and in which we go into the supermarket for food rather than into the jungle), this tendency doesn't serve us so well.  

Lately (as in, within the last 60 years), it seems as if the Church has majored in judgment. When I was home in Ashland recently, I recalled a local church's policy of prohibiting women who have engaged in premarital sexual relations from wearing a white dress or being married in the sanctuary (they are relegated to the basement). This is just one example of some of the judgments rendered in churches yesterday and today. And recent research in partnership with the Barna group has shown that young people are receiving a message of judgment. People ages 16-29 believe Christians are: antihomosexual (91%), judgmental (87%), hypocritical (85%), too political (75%), out of touch with reality (72%), and insensitive to others (70%). These people, who are largely outside the Church by now, "firmly... reject-- and feel rejected by-- Christians". Ouch.

This research is borne out in experience of real UMC ministers. A friend of mine, the Dean of the Chapel at Syracuse University, read the following statements her students' papers a few weeks ago (I obtained permission to quote them from her):

"I can't be Christian because I had a child out of wedlock."
"I am not Christian because I believe in evolution."
"I am not a Christian because I don't believe a loving God would send people to hell."
"I am not a Christian because I don't think gay people are sinners."
"I can't be a Christian because I am divorced."
"I am not a Christian because I don't believe people of other faiths are damned."

And while I'm thinking of Syracuse University, I also read an article about a student there who identifies as Pagan and Christian. She describes her participation in campus groups of both faiths, and she calls the Pagan group “the most accepting community I’ve ever been a part of". She's part of a Christian group and a non-Christian group, and it's the non-Christian group that is the most accepting! We are a tradition built on the example of a man who touched lepers and hung around with prostitutes and tax collectors. Jesus taught us that faith is not about following a bunch of rules to the letter. And yet here we are, judging as the Pharisees did, based upon our own rules which we follow inconsistently.

Now there are plenty of good people in the Church and it's easy to think, "Well, outsiders just don't know us. If they got to know us better, they would see we're not that bad." It's true that getting to know diverse people helps dispel misjudgements. But, as one author recently wrote of good people who have racist views, "I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I could take." Church, the rising generation has had all the Good Church People it can take.

Some folks try to make the case that winning an ideology war over a specific issue will bring young people back to the church. Both liberals and conservatives made this case about homosexuality in their floor speeches at General Conference 2012. They have a point. In Seattle, our current stance on this issue is ruining the Christian witness of our sisters and brothers there. Likewise, to change our official stance would ruin the Christian witness of our sisters and brothers in the Congo. We need to find a way to coexist as Christians who have different opinions and different ministry contexts without ruining each others' witnesses, but that's a discussion for another day. This is an evangelism problem in specific cultural contexts, and coming to a forced resolution on the issue of homosexuality will not be a panacea that "cures" the UMC of its ills. Either way, someone would leave, and those someones are valuable parts of our denominational body.

No, focusing on one social issue or another- and "winning" in official Church policy over that issue- will not save the UMC. It will further divide us and perhaps cause a schism. Like the Worship Wars, winning an Ideology War will not "save" the UMC. So... what will? We begin to find out the answer to that next week (I promise)!

Worship Wars Won't Save the UMC [Low-Cal Snacks 02]

Welcome back to GT's series on what's going on in the UMC right now- and what will and won't help us moving forward. Last week, we talked about the idea of a false proxy. When we have a tough problem to solve, or something that's difficult to measure, sometimes we select a proxy: something to solve instead of our actual problem, or something that's easy to measure that stands in for what we actually need to measure. I compared this to choosing a low-calorie snack over real food. It promises convenience and "results" in the short run, but choosing the low-cal snack actually sabotages us in the long run. Likewise, focusing on a proxy instead of the real problem or metric sabotages our efforts to meet the challenges before us by distracting us and directing our energy toward something else.

One of the things that has absorbed a lot of energy in the Church, especially c. 1995-2005, is the Worship Wars. You know what I'm talking about. One faction within the church starts to tell everyone else that it's time to introduce a new worship style: "praise band" or "contemporary" music (never mind that this is the Christian equivalent of Muzak and its heyday was sometime in the 1980's). The worship style previously used, regardless of whether it can be considered High Church or Low Church, is inevitably labeled "traditional" and out-of-date. Certain others within the congregation respond that there are valid reasons to continue worshiping in the "traditional" style, and lo! Another skirmish in the Worship Wars is begun.

Christians have slung a lot of mud at one another over worship styles in the last few decades. The things we say to each other are often pertinent observations that have been exaggerated into outright insults. Charges leveled at traditional worship often include:

1. This worship isn't "passionate" (read: overtly emotional).
2. Traditionalists don't consider the needs and desires of the younger generation(s). Often this accusation includes phrases like "stuck in the past", "afraid of change", or "not missional".
3. Traditionalists place tradition above people and god, therefore engaging in idolatry.
4. This worship style isn't very portable, i.e., it's hard to worship anywhere that doesn't have a bulky keyboard instrument.

Complaints about contemporary worship usually include:

1. The lyrics are often theologically vapid and human-centered rather than God-centered.
2. It's musically unsophisticated. If you don't know what I mean by this check out this parody video, "How to Write a Worship Song (In Five Minutes or Less)":

3. The nature of the production of such music borders on becoming a performance for those attending worshipers, thus turning the congregation into a passive audience.
4. Buying all new instruments and electronic equipment is a considerable burden on already strained church budgets.
5. Installing screens into older sanctuaries is often a physical and architectural challenge.

While many of these charges contain kernels of truth, most of them are mostly untrue. Here's an example: I have worshiped at Harvard-Epworth UMC, a church that prefers traditional worship, for several years. While I would say most folks behave in a way that is not emotionally demonstrative, I have heard great emotion in their voices as they speak in prayer time and coffee hour. When the choir sings a song they find uplifting, they express their joy in their body language and by responding, "Amen!" after the final cutoff. While this is a self-proclaimed progressive congregation, H-EUMC members value tradition, creeds, and liturgy. They deeply feel their confessional prayers and pray them earnestly. While reason and intellectual knowledge are valuable to them, their faith is certainly not "all in their heads." Their faith is in their hearts as well, and they show it in their loving actions toward others inside and outside of the church. This is one of the most missional churches I have ever met for many reasons, including donating some of our space to a shelter for homeless youth. Our Young Adult Group boasts upwards of 30 members, and while that is partly because of our location near Harvard, MIT, and Bard College, it's also a testament to the congregation's concerted efforts to keep those who visit coming back regularly. To describe H-EUMC as not missional, does not consider the needs of young people, is idolatrous, or "emotionally or spiritually dead" would be to gravely mischaracterize this church.

Likewise, to say that all contemporary worship music is theologically shallow and musically simplistic, while all traditional music is the opposite, is also incorrect. For instance, "Everlasting God" by Chris Tomlin uses syncopated rhythm:

And tons of the new Catholic folk music uses complex melodies, the verses of which are often through-composed (non-repetitive) rather than strophic music like hymns. In fact, a lot of contemporary Christian music can be difficult to learn because it's through-composed. Likewise, there are plenty of "traditional" hymns that are not very theologically rich. "In The Garden", "I'll Fly Away", and "Onward Christian Solders" are all examples of traditional songs that don't have a lot of theology, are people-centered, and/or have bad theology in them (specifically "Onward"). While it is true that new instruments and sound equipment are expensive and sometimes unnecessary, it also takes a lot of money to maintain organs and old equipment that is outdated; sometimes it is more cost-efficient to buy a new sound system than try to work with the old one.

As you can see, it's very easy to become caught up in a lot of these theological and practical arguments. But arguing one's point in the Worship Wars doesn't help to alleviate the problem. The problem that churches are trying to articulate is a drop in attendance among young people, and a fear that the way we do things doesn't speak to them. Our core desire is to speak the spiritual language of our young people, and we are afraid that we aren't doing that. Instead of addressing our fears, we argue about things that are mainly matters of taste, as one author puts it, "preferences [that] are almost entirely cultural and nostalgic." Worship Wars are really a proxy for our problem of absent young people. It's important to stop spiritual mud-slinging in Worship Wars and start addressing the problem directly.

In our traditional worship at H-EUMC, we enjoy the presence of many young adults each weeks and often our Brunch Bunch groups are parties of 12 or more. Members of our group like both traditional and contemporary worship. So why is our group full and other churches have no one between the ages of 18 and 45? I think there are a few factors that contribute to the loss of young people in our churches:

1. Lack of spiritual formation. Our Sunday School curricula have been too shallow and have not encouraged really digging into the Bible or learning to pray. Both of these skills should be taught from a young age. If you aren't sure kids can handle these things, just talk to our resident spiritual formation expert at Christ UMC, Pastor Jane! She'll tell you all about spiritual formation of children. If we fail to engage our kids in these vital spiritual practices, they will not form a relationship with God that will keep them coming back to church.

2. Lack of engagement in mission. Mission is the natural result of living a balanced Christian life. Justice issues are important to young adults, and they have been important to God through the ages. The 9th century prophets and Jesus Christ are excellent examples of people who brought God's Good News to those who live on the edges of society. A church that focuses only on personal spiritual renewal and not at all on mission will miss out on engaging young people in an important way.

3. Polemic rhetoric regarding divisive social issues and science. In my first post, I mentioned the recent study by Pew Research showing young adults are less engaged in the church overall. Two of the reasons cited were that young adults feel the church is judgmental regarding these issues, and that they are weary of the same old arguments. It's time for the church to stop talking about moral problems that divide us and start talking about what unites us.

As you can see, I have several ideas for a way forward in the UMC, including an approach to worship that avoids the Worship Wars and lets us do what we do best as a church. It's time to uncouple our tastes and preferences for worship from our desire to help engage young people. We ought to address excellence in worship separately from ways to engage young folks in our life as a church. Both are important things that deserve our complete attention separately. If we do our worship well and beautifully, we can educate our young people regarding the forms and expressions in worship so that they will not be intimidated or turned off. [Because news flash: the "contemporary" style of worship is not music that is native to Milennials or even Gen-Xers; it's a distinctively Boomer form of music, and as such, must be learned to be appreciated just like "traditional" music.] Rather, many young people are drawn to more ancient forms of worship, like Taize. The important thing is that our worship is an expression of our best efforts as a congregation- that it truly is an offering to our holy God. When we have beautiful worship, regardless of the style, our young people will engage in worship with us.

But first, next week, we'll examine the last thing that won't save the UMC: Ideology Wars. This will tie into my 3rd point above and unpack it some more. I hope to see you back in a week!

Christian Fads Won't Save the UMC [Low-Cal Snacks 01]

This post is rather late, but I had a hard time sitting down to write it because I just kept on finding new things to consider about this topic in a United Methodist Facebook group! I guess it's back to Sunday posts, at least for now. In the end, I'm sticking with my original outline.

Blogger friend and colleague Jeremy Smith pointed me to a post by Seth Godin on the topic of the false proxy, and explained how it relates to the UMC. Here's the entirety of Seth's short post:

"Sometimes, we can't measure what we need, so we invent a proxy, something that's much easier to measure and stands in as an approximation.

TV advertisers, for example, could never tell which viewers would be impacted by an ad, so instead, they measured how many people saw it. Or a model might not be able to measure beauty, but a bathroom scale was a handy stand in.

A business person might choose cash in the bank as a measure of his success at his craft, and a book publisher, unable to easily figure out if the right people are engaging with a book, might rely instead on a rank on a single bestseller list. One last example: the non-profit that uses money raised as a proxy for difference made.

You've already guessed the problem. Once you find the simple proxy and decide to make it go up, there are lots of available tactics that have nothing at all to do with improving the very thing you set out to achieve in the first place. When we fall in love with a proxy, we spend our time improving the proxy instead of focusing on our original (more important) goal instead.

Gaming the system is never the goal. The goal is the goal."

One concrete way to understand the concept of a false proxy is an idea I introduced last week: the Low-Calorie Snack. Nabisco's Snack Well's products are the poster child for low-cal snacks. They are, quite literally, knock-offs of treats that we all know and love, like Oreos and candy bars. They aren't really Oreos, though. Theses low-cal versions are actually pseudo-foods that are stripped of most of their nutritional value. The only reason they taste good decent is that Nabisco pumps them full of flavor-enhancing chemicals that fool your tongue into thinking they're yummy. 

Dieters, particularly women, can get sucked in by the Snack Well's claim that you can still treat yourself even when dieting. What people who need to lose weight need to know is that it's more important to eat normal portions of good, healthy food and get enough exercise than to severely restrict calories. Some diets may work for some people, but they don't work for most people, hence the overwhelming success of the Weight Watchers Points System. It works by letting you choose to eat normal foods, but it helps you control your portions. Using so-called diet foods, on the other hand, doesn't work well because these pseudo-foods actually make you hungrier! By choosing the Snack Well's to ward off temptation to eat more, dieters are actually sabotaging their efforts to lost weight and be healthy!

Likewise, using false proxies in response to challenges in our Church can sabotage our efforts to improve ourselves as a denomination and to adapt to the changing culture in which we live. Jeremy has some suggestions as to ways in which that is taking place right now (hey, he even referenced one of my past posts here at the GodTalk blog!):

• "Instead of doing the hard work of defining effectiveness (as Carolyn outlines here), we defined the punishment for ineffectiveness in eliminating guaranteed appointments, patted ourselves on the back, and were shocked when the Judicial Council struck it down.
• Instead of doing the hard work of defining cooperation between governance and fiscal responsibility, we conflated governance and fiscal responsibility in PlanUMC, patted ourselves on the back, and were shocked when the Judicial Council struck it down.
• Instead of doing the hard work of consulting judicial counsel for our reforms, the reformers now want to defund the Judicial Council (see Andy Langford’s comment at the end of the article), convinced that the guardians of our polity are the problem instead of bad legislation.
• Instead of doing the hard work of defining unity in diversity, we are stuck in a cycle of seeking schism and ignoring new ways forward, with caucus groups widening the chasm by their own self-interest."

Yikes! We're doing a lot of ignoring the real work, and we're doing a lot of work on... everything else except what we should be working on. Jeremy's list indicts our recent legislative failures and the latest Christian fad, which had been dubbed Church Metrics, after the metrics fad currently running its course in the business world. (And I can tell you, as a tiny cog in a corporate machine, that metrics isn't saving any businesses either.) There are a host of other church fads we've been through that aren't going to save the UMC:

• "Servant" Leadership: the newest business literature on leadership applied to church leadership
• Megachurches/ Church Growth: large church = large numbers of converts = large income stream (too bad the people who came weren't actually converts)
• The Prayer of Jabez: basically, the Prosperity Gospel watered down and combined with "biblical teaching", which was actually a complete contradiction of the biblical story Jabez fans had prooftexted
• Worship fads: this includes a host of things like lighting effects/ light shows,"multi-sensory" worship (how is worship not multi-sensory now?), praise music hits, and praise bands achieving star status, e.g., the David Crowder Band

Side note: are you sensing a theme here? I am: MONEY. Servant leadership and megachurch emulation were all about "church growth", also known as butts in pews and bucks in plates. Numerical decline (and therefore revenue decline) is, I suspect, the reason behind our recent foray into constitution-changing legislation and our current obsession with metrics.  

Anyway. When all of these fads came down the pike, they promised to reverse the trend of numerical decline, bring back the bucks, and "fix things" or "save" what we saw as an ailing church. But every last one of them have failed to do that. We have turned to these fads, sold to us by slick-looking and smooth-sounding pastors and worship leaders, for a quick fix to our "numbers problem"(ahem, our money problem). But they didn't help us!

There are a couple more false proxies that we need to examine in more depth, which we'll do in the next couple of weeks: Worship Wars (this is a distinct topic from worship fads!) and Ideology Wars. Instead of coming together as a people of God and problem-solving, we've spent the last several decades infighting. In certain cases, especially with ideology, this can affect our witness, and thus our ability to attract new members, or at least, keep old ones from leaving. But most of the time, we've wasted a lot of time and energy on them. Many of us are very invested in our "side" of both of these wars, and it's important to unpack them so as to disentangle them from the real issue, which is how to cope with change in the UMC. We need to look at why winning the war won't help the UMC in order to understand what will.

Once we've done that, we'll dig into what will help the Church, and what are our next steps forward. Stay tuned for next week, folks!

What Won't Save the United Methodist Church- And What Will

United Methodists of all ages throughout the Methoblogosphere are conversing about what is happening to our church and what we should do about it.

• Some people think the UMC is imploding.
• Some people think the UMC is dying, like Teddy, Marla, and Don. 
• Some people think we're in the midst of a failure of discipleship.

And some people think the church is merely changing.

• Taylor thinks the rhetoric of dying is merely a function of how we feel about the church, and that we need leadership to help us adapt to change. 
• Jeremy thinks that we are a church pregnant with possibilities and what we need is a midwife. 

Meanwhile, the Christian blogosphere in general is trying to process the most recent Pew Forum American Religious Identification study that shows that people in the US who claim no religious affiliation is rising. People whose religious affiliation is Agnostic, Atheist, and "None" (No Affiliation) now number 1 in 5 people in the US, which is a dramatic increase. People everywhere (Christian and non-Christian alike) are trying to figure out what this means for the future of the Church.

• PBS did a video miniseries on it.
• The New York Times covered it.
• Newsweek wondered if this is The End of Christian America.
• NPR also did a series on it called Losing Our Religion.
• Sojourners has covered it extensively, including their profile of a None, and this article on skepticism. 
• Some wondered if it has anything to do with the polarizing social issues debates the Church continues.
• Matthew Myer Bolton analyzed the study and showed that perhaps it's not as alarming as we might think, and that we are still a very religious nation in Much Ado About Nones.

Where do we go from here? Is this survey simply announcing the most recent nail in the coffin for the UMC? Are we in trouble? Or are we facing a painful but important opportunity? I can tell you right now that I believe it's the latter. If you want to read another blog proclaiming gloom and doom for the UMC, you'd better come back halfway through Lent, because we are about to embark on a series on this topic here at the God Talk blog.
 
The main idea for our series, which has to do with food (hey, I'm Methodist, what did you expect?). We have choices to make in the coming years, and they're somewhat like nutritional choices. We can choose healthful, real food, which sometimes means we eat things we don't care for or think are boring. Or we can choose foods like low-calorie snacks, which are often marketed as delicious, diet-friendly ways to satisfy our cravings, but they have almost no nutritional value and they actually make us crave more food!

These "diet foods" are insidious because they trick us into thinking we are doing the right thing, but we are actually hurting ourselves in the long run. Likewise, certain ideas are circulating in the UMC today that sound good and healthy, but they are not. They are actually false proxies (more about that later) that take up our time and energy, and prevent us from having the conversation we really need to be having about the future of our church.

In the series that follows, we will look at things that are false proxies (low-cal snacks that take the place of real food) versus actual solutions (real food). I hope you'll come along with us as we take a look at:

Christian Fads [Low-Cal Snacks 01]
Worship Wars [Low-Cal Snacks 02]
Ideology Wars [Low-Cal Snacks 03]

Mission [Real Food 01]
Spiritual Formation [Real Food 02]
Worship [Real Food 03]

Each week, I'll examine what will not "save the church" (if we must call it that- also more on that later) and what has the potential to help us become the Church that God dreams we can be. I'll try to get my posts up on Thursday evenings, so you can enjoy them with your Friday morning coffee. See you next week!

Pre-Series Potpurri

I've got a series brewing, folks, but I'm not ready to start it yet. We'll begin it next week. I hope you'll come along for the ride! In the meantime, here's a bunch of random stuff I've been reading recently:

A Heart for Peace via Sojourners
- Evangelicals reflect on the first Evangelical peacemaking conference
Recognizing the Importance of Good Health Throughout a Clergy Career by Susan Keaton
- a reflection on differences in health concerns between female and male pastors in the UMC
Big Beasts and Little Prophets: Activists Cooling Down the War Machine With Holy Water by Shane Claiborne
More Young People Are Moving Away From Religion, But Why? @ NPR
- a series of interviews with young people of various faiths regarding why religion no longer works for them
Grace for the Privileged Too? by Rachel Held Evans
- a meditation on confronting our privilege
Gandalf, Gollum, and the Death Penalty by Tobias Winwright
- Gandalf theologically illuminates a hot-button issue