In Mark 14, a woman came to Jesus while he was with his disciples. The woman came and broke an alabaster jar full of “pure nard” on Jesus’ head. She dried his feet with her hair. And the disciples went bonkers, crying out “think of how much money that costs!”

This scripture bubbled to the surface of my consciousness as I sit right now in the General Administration committee of General Conference of the United Methodist Church. This is the primary locus of the Call To Action point five: to reorganize the upper echelons of the UMC. We’ve been writing about it a lot so I won’t rehash it.

But the tension in the room when all three plans were presented (including the body allowing MFSA to have two representatives present their plan, which I support) was that nearly every question from the Plan B supporters was about costs. What does it cost? How much does it save?

I think Kevin Nelson, New York reserve delegate, gave the best answer. He said that their goal was to look at the mission of the church and see what structure enabled the mission instead of how much it costs. The mission and the representation of the mission was the most important. Including more Central Conference representation increases travel costs, but, to the MFSA plan, it is worth it.

Adam Hamilton, in all fairness, says in his support of the Call To Action plan: “The goal is not how much money can we save. It is how we can work better together.” But all of the Plan B supporters keep asking questions of how much something costs.

In my evaluation, underneath the questions about costs is the reality that there are some VERY large church pastors in here. The pastor of the largest church in Oklahoma who pays the most Apportionments is in here. All of these churches stand to cut their apportionments the more they cut the upper bodies down. From the observers’ gallery, it seems like solely the proposal that cuts the most costs is going to win out.

Jesus said at the end of the exchange in Mark 14: “But remember I tell you the truth that, wherever in the whole world the good news is announced, what she’s done will also be told in memory of her.” (Mark 14:9 CEB)

Central conference representation increases costs, that is true, and money is one aspect, but the ability of our denomination to grow and represent is more important. The ability of our denomination to be representative and forward-thinking in our mandates (MFSA requires 10% more young people and racial/ethnic minorities than any plan).

My prayer is that we are also doing what allows us to announce the good news in ways that the people who receive it will also have a voice at the table.

In the 2009 Movie “Pelham 123,” good guy Denzel Washington asks bad guy John Travolta how he is going to get away with hijacking a subway train. Here’s their edited-for-language exchange:

Denzel: You gotta understand that the circumstances they’re different now for you. You gotta rethink this, you… you gotta adapt.
John: No, I gave you instructions and you know the consequences.
Denzel: I mean don’t you have a plan B?
John: No, plan B is enforcing plan A… and the minute you stop believing me ****, that’s it!

While “Plan B” is usually referred to as the humorous or less-than-stellar backup to plan A, Travolta says that Plan B is merely to reinforce Plan A. And that’s just the way it is going to be.

This is relevant because a Plan B has entered the conversation with the United Methodist Church: a group of discontent Methodists, most of whom are on the highest executive committee in the UMC (the Connectional Table), have published an alternative to the Call To Action that we love so fondly here at HackingChristianity.net. And in many ways, like the movie, Plan B is only a more palatable version of Plan A’s goal: greater executive authority in the UMC.

Comparing Plan B with the MFSA Plan

Let’s compare the two plans before us that are alternatives to the Call To Action (most specifically the IOT legislation).

The Plan B and the MFSA plan (of which I’m a co-signatory of) have two different proposals of what should constitute the highest executive committee in the UMC. Please click on the chart below to make it more readable and then we have some analysis. Update: the thumbnail below didn’t update when I updated the chart. So you have to click it to get the accurate numbers. Silly thumbnails…

When you compare the two plans, there are many similarities but many points of contention.

1. Plan B has fewer members than the MFSA plan and, indeed, the current executive committee. It looks the same, but with 11 non-voting members, there’s much fewer votes at the table.
2. Plan B seeks to limit the “non-voting” membership to voice on only topics where they have direct affiliation. MFSA’s plan allows for non-voting representatives from each General Agency and from 10 of the ethnic and advocacy caucus groups (UMRF, Good News, Confessing, MFSA, and RMN) to have voice but no vote.
3. Plan B seems to obfuscate that there would actually be six bishops on the executive committee, as the Agency Heads would all be Bishops.
4. The MFSA plan calls for a rather-high number of 40% of the Jurisdictional reps to the Executive Committee to be racial ethnic. While this is higher than the actual percentages of the UMC, a commitment to this percentage is an avenue of growth within the USA as racial/ethnic communities are growing while Caucasian communities are shrinking–and the church needs to reflect this reality to remain relevant.

It is without irony that the Plan B people state that one of their guiding principles is to create a coordinating body “without a concentration of general church power.” Ha! When compared to the MFSA plan, those six bishops and smaller number of people certainly concentrates power in fewer people with greater power. In addition, with the lower mandates (of racial ethnic members, young adults, and gender), there would be fewer representatives of those classifications than the general population.

Numbers are great, but what are their purposes?

More than the numbers and the statistics, MFSA has a completely different understanding of what this executive body’s responsibilities and purposes should look like.

• MFSA envisions the CT as a coordinating body and thus renames it the Coordinating Council.
• MFSA seeks to give this body a clearer purpose than the current CT, “to serve as a forum for coordination of the mission, ministries and resources of The United Methodist Church.”
• The responsibilities of the CC flow from this purpose and include providing a forum for understanding and implementing the vision, ministries and mission of the global church; providing a forum for inter-agency conversation; enabling flow of information; reviewing and evaluating missional effectiveness of agencies, in collaboration with their governance boards; making proposals to General Conference; leading general church planning and research; and collaborating in the preparation and review of the general church budget.
• In short, the Coordinating Council is a forum for conversation and visioning, rather than a micro-managerial group of the entire church and the church budget.
• Plan B envisions the CT as a strong executive body (like the Call To Action proposal)
• Plan B gives the CT oversight responsibility for all program agencies.  MFSA reserves this kind of responsibility for the respective governance boards.
• Plan B gives the CT responsibility for evaluating program and operational audits of the agencies, with the power to withhold approval of programs or activities and the power to direct GCFA to withhold funding in relation to unnecessary duplication or failure to achieve established outcomes. MFSA reserves this kind of responsibility for the respective governance boards. 
• Plan B gives the CT authority for the annual evaluation of the strategic planning, goals, objectives and quantitative commitments made by general church agencies.  With this, the CT would be given the power to withhold funding if the CT determines that an agency has not achieved established outcomes. MFSA seems to assign the CC to have a role in creating the proposed quadrennial budget, and they would receive and approve agency budget reviews. But that does not translate to authority to withhold funding, reserving this for the respective governance boards.
• Plan B gives the CT a pot of funds, called the “Connectional Table Adaptive Challenge Fund,” to be distributed to the agencies in accord with the evaluation and review of their measurable outcomes and facilitation of initiatives to increase vital congregations. MFSA calls for utilization of both quantitative and qualitative standards of measurement rather than just ‘measurable outcomes’ which are, for the most part, quantitative: butts in the pews, dollars in the plates.

1. Both the MFSA plan and Plan B call for a “right-sizing” of the denomination. Currently, there are 641 members of the General Agency boards.
• The Call To Action reduces that number down to roughly 153 (60 members of the two executive boards, plus the anticipated board memberships of UMM and UMW, and the Publishing House)
• Plan B reduces that number to 280 (40 member Connectional Table plus proposed 25-30 member boards at all other agencies)
• The MFSA plan lowers it only to 397 (includes the 67 members of the Coordinating Council, plus 33-member boards at each of ten different agency/centers)
• In every case, there is a significant reduction of the number of board members, but both MFSA and Plan B have larger boards than the CTA. I think it is appropriate to shoot for the middle ground somewhere between MFSA and Plan B rather than turning over the power of 641 people to barely 25% of that number. Again, it seems like too much executive power to me. I’m reasonably confident that between the backers of the MFSA and the Plan B plans, it will shake out to be somewhere close to these two.
2. One of the biggest differences between the MFSA plan and Plan B (and the IOT legislation) is what to do with the General Commission on Religion and Race (GCORR) and the Commission on the Status and the Role of Women (COSROW).
• Both Plan B and IOT place these monitoring agencies under a General Agency, whereas MFSA keeps them separate. Their rationale is that in order to maintain the independence of their monitoring functions, they must report to an independent board rather than reporting to an agency of which they are also monitoring.We often choose impartial people to monitor the government and  the monitoring and accountability-encouraging functions in the UMC are no different.

When you wade through all the particulars, Plan B’s proposed setup:

• concentrates power
• subjects the process to politicization
• overwhelms a staff that does not have the capacity or internal insight for this level of evaluation
• exclusively prejudices quantitative measurements over qualitative, with no account for ministries that produce great value yet are challenging to quantify with numbers or require a long-term commitment in order to yield results.

In short, everything that HackingChristianity criticizes about the Call To Action (executive authority and quantitative evaluations, to name two) is also found pretty easily in Plan B. Boom!

Where do we go from here?

I think the only way to end this post is to repost the end of my most recent piece for Ministry Matters:

Given all this, the question remains: which executive body both looks most like the United Methodist Church that we recognize, and which body is closest to what we need right now?

The key thing for me is to decide if the “Methodist” way of doing things has value. Every faith organization has this identity and structure. For example, when our Catholic friends have crisis in their communities, they turn to the monks. When Cardinal Law presided over the Boston Child Abuse scandal and stepped aside, the RCC went to the Capuchin (a monastic order) Cardinal O’Malley. O’Malley sold the opulent mansion and cleaned house, as far as I can tell.  My worship professor at the time said that has been their process through the ages: when the priestly order falls short (I forget the proper term for Law’s vocational lineage), they turn to the monks whose order is more bottom-up than top-down.

That’s the Catholic way of handling crises. Criticize the results how you may want, but it’s the Catholic way. The Methodist way to handle crises is through representative democracy: elected executives, diversity of opinion, big-tent Methodism, social action in varied stratum of society, committees, boards, and mutual accountability. This has been the Methodist way ever since we lost our chief executive in John Wesley and we haven’t replaced him until, perhaps, now. It is through this unwieldy Methodist connectional system that we find both our bane of slow to respond and our strength of holding together diverse groups.

I’m a young clergyperson and my generation has not seen any segment of society become more centralized. For example, music distribution went from the Big Records to Napster to Gnutella to Limewire (becoming more decentralized at each step). I honestly cannot think of any other organization in the world that is movingtoward a “top-down” system rather than away from it . . . other than corporations and 20th century power bases. And yet this move towards centralization and negation of connectionalism is exactly the direction the UMC seems to be heading with the Call to Action movement.

To me, the Spirit is found in the back-and-forth, the struggle for consensus in groups, the diversity of belief and passion that larger more-representative groups bring. They are unwieldy, they are not uniform, they are slow, they are full of sinful humans…but they are Methodist. And it is exactly that quality which I fear is being lost if we choose a proposal that excises difference and consolidates power in the hands of the few. There’s trimming that needs to happen to our family Methodist tree, but I don’t think cutting off the taproot is the best way to go about it.

Thoughts? What kind of church do we need for the 21st century? One with a group of executives at our top (like the Plan B and IOT plans), or one with a forum for conversation and visioning (the MFSA plan). Which is best to guide the church faithfully in our increasingly post-Christian context? And more importantly…will you tell your delegate which you see as best? The power is yours, use it in the next week before it is too late.

Thoughts? Thanks for your comments.

I have been contracted to write six blog posts for Ministry Matters that deal with the Call To Action and General Conference.

My first one was a repost of “Blowback: Lamenting an Open Source Call To Action.” My second one is an original piece that I have a teaser for below, with a link to the full article at ministrymatters.com

==============

What Is Your Church Structured For?

I am envious of my friends who know architecture. They can walk around a building and say it is this style from this century made famous by this architect who had this type of weird hair. They know the building not by its pieces, as, apparently, even if it has Roman columns doesn’t mean it is Roman. Rather, the architect has arranged the pieces in such a way as they become distinctive when you look at the whole structure together.

It is only when I bring those friends into a church that we are on a level playing field. As a pastor, when I walk into a church I can also usually guess what type of church it is or was. Here’s the way to do that and impress your architect friends: look at the chancel.

• If the preaching pulpit is in the center of the chancel, then we are likely in a Protestant church that values the Word in the language of the people.
• If the communion table is in the center, then we are in a likely Catholic or high-church Protestant congregation that values the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper. (And if the communion table is against the wall, then we are likely in a Catholic church that doesn’t recognize Vatican II, which recommended that priests face the congregation while celebrating the Sacrament rather than put their back to them).
• If the baptismal pool is in the center, we are likely in a Pentecostal church or a nondenominational evangelical church that views baptizing new Christians as their primary mission.
• This also works when you watch TV. What’s behind Joel Osteen, pastor of the largest church in America? A spinning globe, which represents Osteen’s mission to preach and teach to more and more of the world each week (as evidenced by book deals, streaming services, and an ever-increasing worship footprint).

Sometimes these do not apply, of course. But the way a church is structured in its most sacred of spaces often reveals what it holds up as most important. Be it pulpits or communion tables or spinning globes or a Bible or a baptismal font, the worship space is structured towards that object of the congregation’s adoration.

Form Follows Function

With such a diversity of structures that point towards a diversity of values, then the question is not “what is your church structured like?” but rather “what is your church structured for?” What does your church have as its center both in its physical structure and its organizational structure? And what do these structures allow the church to do?

Read the rest of this post here.

The following blogs participated in the synchblog on ‘Lord I Love the Church and We Need Help’ by Virginia Bassford:

• Jim writes about Saying Too Little on Epistle of Jim.
• Kirk writes about the distraction of stories on Signs Unseen.
• Jeremy writes about Trust, Relationship and Non-Engagement on Hacking Christianity.

Any more? Add them to the comments below!

‘The Jesus Insurgency’ Synchblog, coming up next!

In her book “Lord, I Love the Church and We Need Help” Rev. Virginia Bassford writes story after story to illustrate her points of need in the United Methodist Church. It’s a terrific read with several laugh-out-loud moments (like slapping a lamb) where I really felt a connection, a relationship with Bassford, a digital trust in her quirky wisdom. It is precisely that type of relationship, of a shared mutuality, that Bassford believes will save the church.

Bassford writes from her experience of being both a pastor and a district superintendent in Texas. She has lots of good practical advice for how churches will navigate the Church Metrics phenomenon. For example:

1. Cultivate trust between the church and District Superintendent: Local churches can work together with the DS to create a narrative goal for their specific congregation with a challenging timeframe.
2. And a reminder to DSes and Bishops: “Keeping an eye on  numbers through  a reporting dashboard as a means of accountability makes us nervous” (page 32).

In short, relationships are about trust. Trust, then, is one of the sinking qualities of the church according to the Call To Action report. Trust in the Bishops to send good pastors to the local church, trust in the pastors to shepherd a difficult appointment, trust in the missionaries that they are doing good works abroad or across the street. Heck, trust that the secret you told your Sunday School teacher will stay between you.

Diane Butler Bass writes about four major events that tainted the public perception of religion in general, and they all revolve around trust:

• The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, in which religion fueled violence on many sides;
• The 2002 child abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, in which “the worst scandal of the church in 700 years” showed institutional religion abused the most vulnerable;
• The 2003 election of an openly gay, partnered cleric, the Rev. Gene Robinson, as a bishop in the Episcopal Church, in which religious adherents were shown to be mean-spirited;
• The 2004 presidential election, in which George W. Bush, the candidate with the lowest approval rating of any sitting president, was re-elected by an evangelical Christian bloc of whom 87 percent voted for Bush.

So when you couple cultural despair over religion with the actual cases of distrust in the local congregations, spread wider and wider through an increasingly global and news-hungry world…and there is little wonder that trust is both the biggest challenge in the church and the one that we need the most.

But the thing is that…there are PLENTY of committed people to reviving the church. Whether progressive or conservative, hipster or traditional, old or young, ethnic or stale white, there’s a group committed to revival and discipleship in every stripe of every church. What keeps them from working together?

Trust.

We are suspicious about growth in our “rivals’” backyard. This is evident in the comments on my previous post on the Hegemony of the South. We are not willing to give up some theological points to do joint worship services (though sometimes the differences ARE irreconcilable depending on the goal of the event). When we get to the political nature of the church, we elect delegate so that “our side” has more than the “other side.” We do lists and slates and “suggested votes” and distribute cell phones to African delegates so that we can text them how to vote.

And so we work alone, building up parallel churches alongside each other in the same denomination.

• The South does its own thing, the West does its own thing.
• When the evangelicals got mad at the General Board of Global Ministries over missionaries, they created their own parallel Mission Society.
• When evangelical women got mad at the Women’s Division, they created RENEW for their women.
• When LGBT-affirming Methodists get all uppity and prophetic-feeling, they identify with the Reconciling movement and differentiate their church through membership and rainbows.
• When Oklahoma evangelical UMs got mad at district camps, they started going to Disciple and Dayspring instead.

We do these things because we want to work with those whom we trust. Heck, we are often more willing to work with people outside of our denomination who share similar views because they can’t hurt us on the inside like those who are part of our denomination can. Bassford alludes to this with this quote by education consultant Tony Wagner:

“We know that isolation is the enemy of improvement in education–and in all other professions.” page 79

Isolation and echo chambers have made our denomination where it is today: parallel ways of doing church.

From Bassford, we also get clues as to how to fix these deep-seeded issues and distrust. She articulates a really great “Cup Theology” on pages 52-54. Basically, God’s grace is continually pouring out into our cups, but because of our sin, it leaks out the holes in the bottom and we are never “full” of the spirit. If we fix the holes, then the whole thing overflows from the top and we are pouring out God’s love on each one.

If we make this image communal rather than individual, then we see that the holes in our communities can’t be held up with one hand. They are dams with a patchwork of fixes needed. Each hole filled forces more water out the remaining ones, and even if we take off our shoes, there’s too many crevices to fill.

Perhaps now is the time to share our stories: the ones that are hilarious, the ones that are poignant, the ones that you can’t get through without your voice getting hoarse.

What it will take is for these groups and individuals to stop isolating ourselves and practicing non-engagement with the ‘other’ and actually spend time building up relationships with each other. Perhaps then, we can find the common ways how we can patch the leaking bottoms of our chalices and allow God’s grace to flow out the top. If we can put our animosity and our parallism in abeyance, floating somewhere ephemeral, then we might, just might, figure a way to do Church-ing together.

It’s a pie-in-the-sky vision, but at least through Bassford’s use of narrative, we have a glimpse of how to get it done.

Thoughts?

I was all set to write about this photograph that displays the “Denominational Goal” in five words: (1) Stop the Decline (2) Encourage Growth.

It’s such a perfect summation of the divide between those who are convicted by the Call To Action to grow the church through fear, metrics, and output…and those who are convicted by the Call To Action to grow the church through mutuality, re-dedication, and input of prayer and spirit. Are there those that are in both camps? Sure. But the problem of the Call To Action, which cost the church $250,000, is shown in this one photograph by Heather Hahn, UMNS.

But then I saw that Becca Clark had written a much better response. So, instead of spending any more time here, go there and read it. Here’s a key segment where she talks about this focus on satisfying others’ numerical requirements :

It reminds me of a story entitled “Panic” in the fantastic book Friedman’s Fables. To paraphrase, a ring of dominoes finds itself in a pickle, as one by one, the dominoes fall. Each domino tries to hold its neighbor up, to stem the tide of crashing dominoes, but to no avail. Finally, one domino manages it; the crashing stops and the dominoes right themselves. The others ask how in the world that one domino was able to stay up, and it replies, “while you were all busy trying to keep others from falling, I just focused on keeping myself from going down.” This one domino held fast to its own strength, it’s own principle, rather than reacting to the instability around it.

The mission of the United Methodist Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. What if we really tried to figure that out and commit to that? What’s a disciple? How do you “make” one? How do you know you’ve got one?

Instead, we are focused on stopping the crashing around us, on preserving our institution. Has survival of the institution become our denominational goal?

Boom. Go check it out.

Thoughts?

         Then they laid hands on him and arrested him

Jesus in an orange jumpsuit.  That look on his face.
Detained without charges at Guantanamo.
Immigration police taker her in the night to deport her.

         The chief priests accused him of many things

The Messiah, bullied on the playground. Bullied in church.
Pepper sprayed.
Solitary confinement.
Afraid of her husband.

         After flogging Jesus, he handed him over

Christ, waterboarded.
Convinced by fear that her only way is working the street.
Gang raped by soldiers.
Homeless, arrested for trespassing.

         They twisted some thorns into a crown and put it on him
They struck his head with a reed and spat upon him

The Son of God unemployed on the Reservation,
his language forgotten, his history buried.
Arranged at 14 in a marriage to a 45 year old.
Kept out of view in an asylum.

         Then they led him out to crucify him.

A rape victim murdered for shaming her family.
Onlookers gather to watch Jesus receive the lethal injection.
Silenced, even her grief taken from her.

         The centurion said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!”

=========

(reposted with permission from Pastor Steve, www.unfoldinglife.net)

In Virginia Bassford’s book (which is recommended reading for General Conference) she states:

Hegemony…is the perspective of the dominant culture, race, or group, as if it were the only perspective–everyone else needs to get on board. Hegemony is blind to the notion that we–you and I, perhaps most especially when we are divergent–are in this together. We each have distinctive points of view. Together, we can have a wide-angle outlook [that we need].

V. Bassford Lord, I love the Church and We Need Help, page 35.

One of the newest developments in the Call To Action conversation is that the pastors of the largest churches sent an open letter to General Conference delegates. It’s nice. It talks about the death tsunami and the coming doom and gloom of the UMC, the inefficiency of the General Boards, and the graying of the clergy. It asserts a need for organizational change so that the church can be focused on nurturing vital congregations. All boilerplate CTA stuff but worded in a way that even my skeptical young clergy friends are signing it.

But as I was reading Bassford’s book, that quote jumped out at me as I read the original signatories to this open letter, purportedly the pastors of the largest churches in the UMC. “Hegemony”  means a dominant group that thinks alike. Now, each of these churches has grown and they meet regularly to learn from each other how to continue growing, so they clearly think of their churches in similar ways (at least on a spectrum, they would be together). And that’s fine, we want our churches to grow and it is great to learn from leaders that have grown their churches effectively. I don’t mind this hegemony group.

But as I read the signatories, I began to wonder if there was a regional hegemony as well in the Call To Action.

When we map the 87 clergy originators of this petition on Google Maps), we get a disturbing trend as far as how many signatories are from one area of the country. (here’s a map of the jurisdictional breakdown [or PDF here]):

• Northeast Jurisdiction signatories: 3
• Western Jurisdiction signatories: 2
• North Central signatories: 10
• South Central and South Eastern signatories combined: 72

So the Southern jurisdictions have nearly 5x the number of crafters to the letter than the other regions combined. That immediately put up a red flag for me. It becomes very difficult to not be disturbed when the recommendations coming from these churches represent the population density but not the vast diversity of the United Methodist Church.

Often people say “well, the smaller numbers are because of smaller populations. Not so. If we do the delegate-to-signatory ratio, the Southern Juridictions still come out on top (delegate totals PDF):

• Northeast Jurisdiction ratio (3:114) = 1 signatory for every 38 votes.
• Western Jurisdiction ratio (2:32) = 1 signatory for every 16 votes.
• North Central ratio (10:112) = 1 signatory for every 11.2 votes.
• South Central and South Eastern ratio (72:400) = 1 signatory for every 5.5 votes.

So the signatories and pastoral leadership of the Open Letter are overwhelmingly (a) large churches (b) Southern churches and (c) disproportionate in voice to their population in the UMC. Like No Child Left Behind, the Call To Action is supported by those churches that will seem to benefit the most by lower apportionments and less “official” resources to compete with the sales of their regional resources (ie. Hamilton’s resources, Mike Slaughter’s resources, etc). We’ve seen in the responses from the African Students and the Ethnic Caucuses that the reorganization plans are not on the line with ministry to these groups, and indeed take some money from these mission fields.

It really doesn’t matter if we map this trend out. Because no matter what we say or do, the Southern jurisdictions will prevail on this issue.

Why? Remember when we talked about the dearth of young adult voices and saw there was only ONE young adult on the General Administration committee (which handles the bulk of the Call To Action legislation)? Yeah…when we map out the U.S.-based members of the General Administration committee, we get this awesome percentage:

• Northeast Jurisdiction (10:77) = 12% of the vote on the Call To Action
• Western Jurisdiction (5:77) = 6% of the vote on the Call To Action
• North Central (7:77) = 9% of the vote on the Call To Action
• South Central and South Eastern (33:77) = 43% of the vote on the Call To Action
• Central Conferences (22:77 ) = 30% of the vote on the Call To Action

The Call to Action is supported by and will be crafted by a Hegemony of large Southern churches. I don’t want to get into regionalism here, as for my entire ordained life I’ve been a part of the South Central Jurisdiction, and I don’t want to get into criticism of successful churches. I’ve been a  part of both.

But isn’t it a symptom of hegemony that a hegemony wants more power? Case in point: Robert Sparkman, drawing on the data from Joe Whittemore (Plan B Originator), decries the “unfair” distribution of delegates at GC2012. He says:

Areas which have grown are again under-represented. Some of the growing conferences have had their delegations reduced. Whenever an area is under-represented it threatens the legitimacy and support of the connection.

In my annual conference of Oklahoma, we lost ONE delegate slot (one clergy, one laity) out of 10. Whooptie. I know that it irritates the Southern Jurisdiction when they lose a handful of delegates and Africa gains a ton of delegates, but the answer isn’t to remove more delegates from the places that are even smaller. I completely disagree with Sparkman when he says:

We needed to represent more fairly and strongly the vision of the growing and vital areas of the church. Each General Conference of the last three has affirmed that we need to hear the voices of Africa and the growing conferences of the United States.

In my opinion, if we are to avoid becoming a sectarian church with a power base in the South, then we need to legitimize the mission field voices. We cannot just reward success with more representation: they already have that. The Southern Jurisdictions can have their way with anything in the UMC with only a modicum of support from the global church. Instead, why aren’t we valuing the voices from the margins, from the extremes, from the areas of the country where slow growth is the norm? The creeping secularism will reach the South one day, and if they do not empower the churches already in this culture to deal with it now, then the South will be under-equipped to deal with it later. As Bassford says, “we each have distinctive points of view. Together, we can have a wide-angle outlook.” We can weather this storm together, but only if the hegemony opens itself to its role of guidance, not dominance, in the global church.

So, in conclusion, my contention is this:

• If we want a Solution that furthers the growth of the UMC so it becomes a regionalized Church like the Southern Baptist Church, then the Call to Action is clearly a step in that direction.
• If we want a Solution that welcomes and listens to the voices of the Church on the mission fields, the bleeding edges of the Church, the Diaspora, the Frontier, then the Call To Action does not honor those voices or grant them voice of any consequence at the table.

I don’t want to see our church go the way of the Southern Baptist Church that became a regionalized center of influence that became more and more insular to the point that their hegemony took over the SBC and removed the women and progressive voices.

I fear that moment may be upon the United Methodist Church as it seeks to be the church that began with “the world is my parish” and ended with “the world is my parish, but only the South and Africa are really important.” May it not be so with our beloved United Methodist Church.

Thoughts?

This old one is making the rounds again.

And as my friend Chett said on Facebook “In every joke, there’s a little reality.”

“Biblical Instructions Not Necessary To Build” hahahaha

(h/t Sacred Sandwich)

For those who followed and read the Exploration 2011 blog posts I ran back in…2011, there’s a tweet-up on April 11th with the participants to find out how their lives have changed after this great event. We hope to share many stories via twitter tag #explo11 and the conversations will be super-easy to follow.

Here’s how to join and follow the conversation. Two suggested methods: Basic and Pro

Basic – Tweetchat

• Create a twitter account at www.twitter.com. Pick a username (may take a few tries to get a unique one) and enter your email address and you are done.
• Go to www.tweetchat.com and click “Sign In.” It will ask you to “authorize” Tweetchat to access your account, click Authorize (it can’t see your password and is an approved service).
• Enter in #explo11 into the “hashtag to follow” field at the top of the screen and hit GO
• You are IN! Now you will see streaming in all the updates with the hashtag on them. Also, whenever you post something in the box, the hashtag will automatically be added. Play around with it but you will be able to follow the conversation.
• Now, just login to tweetchat at 8pm CST on April 11th to join the conversation!

Pro – Tweetdeck

• Create a twitter account at www.twitter.com. Pick a username (may take a few tries to get a unique one) and enter your email address and you are done.
• Go to www.tweetdeck.com and install the desktop client (Mac or PC) or the Chrome app (I’m using the Chrome app and it is boss)
• Register with tweetdeck.com, then launch the program. It will ask you to “authorize” Tweetdeck to access your account, click Authorize (it can see your password but it is an official Twitter service…they have your password anyway).
• You should see the three columns. Sweet, right? Click “Add Column” at the top. Click on “Search” and enter in #explo11 into the search field at the top of the screen and hit enter.
• You are IN! Now you will see streaming in all the updates with the hashtag on them. Unlike Tweetchat, whenever you post something using the blue feather button, the hashtag will not automatically be added…you will have to add it yourself. Play around with it but you will be able to follow the conversation.
• Now, just start up Tweetdeck at 8pm CST on April 11th to join the conversation!

If you have any questions, feel free to follow me on Twitter and I’ll try to help you out.

Check out the Facebook page to find out more.