Hello Blog followers. Pardon my interruption to the flow of the reading from Luke. Several things have happened in the last two weeks and it has diverted all of my attention. Let me try to catch you up. I hope you don't mind this little side tracking from our regular sharing of the chapters in Luke.
A few days ago, and it will seem like a lot longer very shortly, the Bishop of the Baltimore Washington Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, of which I have been a part of for almost 50 years between youth delegate/member to Annual Conference sessions and forty years under appointment to be a pastor, has re-appointed me to the North Bethesda United Methodist Church beginning on July 1, 2014. That has meant a great deal of prayer, visits to the church, meetings with the personnel committees of both congregations and the announcements in each church on the same day. This has also meant a great deal of reflection and conversation with the people at Liberty Grove who are having a hard time understanding how all of this works.
To try to explain, with apologies to John Wesley and Francis Asbury, how the UMC does this. John Wesley believed that an overall plan or vision for the growth of disciples for Jesus Christ, would take several people to accomplish. The idea of rotating pastors was to provide a congregation with an overall more thorough training for ministry with several pastors than just one for a long time. The belief was each pastor was good at somethings, blessed with certain gifts of the spirit for the ministry, but not all of the gifts. If we switched pastors around, the local church would benefit from a good preacher onetime, a good administrator, at another, a good educationally focused pastor, a good mission minded pastor, a good social service pastor, etc. The local church would then be encouraged by a step in the right direction under the leadership of each pastor.
One way to look at this is to consider a barrel. The barrel has many staves, (the up and down parts of the barrel) and each stave could be at a different height. If the church was a barrel and only had one tall stave, the others would be much lower and wouldn't hold much in the barrel. So if the church only got encouragement and growth in one area, it would be a funny looking barrel. But with rotation of pastors, a good administrator would raise that stave. A building pastor would enlarge the building for ministry, a good fund raiser would help bring in the resources for ministry, a good evangelist, would bring in more members. A good teacher would help develop the spiritual life of the members, and after a while they would be a much taller staved barrel, capable of holding more in the barrel. That's the way it was seen in John Wesley and Francis Asbury's day. And as the country grew, it would take an appointment to move across the mountain and start a new church, because some pastors would like to stay put once they got to know everybody. But then the church would not expand and it would eventually be left alone. So Methodists covered the country and by the Civil War nearly a third of the country had a Methodist connection. We had more churches with our name on the door, than there were post offices.
The country and the culture have changed but our way of doing church has not so much. So the Bishop still makes the changes, and they are supposed to be strategic, helping the churches and the Church grow in faithfulness. It doesn't work as well and since all pastors are not trained the same way and people have learned to be consumers with their own choices for almost everything, the connection to a church is much harder to do. And with so many churches under the responsibility of the Bishop, it is harder to be able to fit every situation and every congregation and every expectation of what their pastor is supposed to be like.
So now you can see why it's a challenge. And it needs much prayer. And I can use your prayers. For a church loses a pastor and lots of people grieve the loss of their spiritual shepherd. The shepherd on the other hand loses a whole congregation which includes many really good relationships and experiences and suddenly the grief and loss can be overwhelming when you think about that. So I am grieving the loss of many of my friends all at once. I am wrestling with the challenges of moving to another church and learning to love them and provide the kind of ministry and leadership they need, not knowing them yet. So keep me in your prayers.
I too am on a journey of faith, called by God to leave the comfort of familiar and travel, like Abraham, to a new place God will show me. Like Jonah, there are times we would rather not, but God will track us down and help us to see clearly that we are going to Nineveh and share the good news. Best of all, God is with us.
Thanks for your prayers
Pastor Jeff
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