A colleague recently wrote a VERY interesting post for his blog. He recently discovered that some of his blog posts were upsetting folks. He was asking too many questions. So what did he do? He asked more questions.
You can read the post here: Hard Questions, Hard Answers.
Let me back up a bit for those of you who don’t know who this guy is. Dan Dick is one of the pre-eminent thinkers in the United Methodist Church, mostly because he doesn’t take anything at face value. If I had to sum him up in one word, it would be, “Why?”
I choose that word because, to me, Dan just wants the world to make a little more sense. God isn’t the author of confusion [1 Cor 14:33] and wants us to do a little better job of making sense when we talk about the Church…and each other.
Dan has questions about what it means to be Methodist. Oddly enough, as you can read in his article, there are people who are made nervous when you question their definitions of Methodist belief. They don’t like the questions.
I don’t mean to make them sound like they are in a conspiracy to cover up their activities of ministry. I don’t think any of us are particularly excited about people asking questions about what we are doing, especially if we think that they are ‘against us’ or potentially undermining a lot of work.
So what are these questions? What are the queries that Dan has compiled that are so terrifying to some of the Powers That Be? Without further ado, here’s the list. Brace yourself.
- why do we need to make disciples?
- why do we need to transform the world?
- why is marketing more important than missions?
- why do we believe that new churches will make us better than the churches we already have?
- why do we think the next million new members will be better than the last million we lost?
- why aren’t we more concerned about sustainability than short term results?
- why are we so enamored with size?
- why do we continue to produce so many resources and programs that fail to yield positive results?
- why do we keep shifting focus every few years instead of focusing on our core and staying the course?
- why are we so committed to preserving the institution instead of transforming the world?
Well, that’s them. They don’t look as devious as you might have suspected. In fact, these questions don’t require long answers. Take any one of them and puzzle it over in your mind for a moment, and you find that the answers are as simple as the questions.
The trouble is that the answers aren’t easy. Thus Dan’s title for his blog post. These questions are hard because they require us to turn the massive machinery of the United Methodist Church around, and sooner rather than later. The answers are simple but difficult because they take away many of the presuppositions about the waning membership of the church.
And these answers are potentially inflammatory because the agencies at the very top are beginning to realize that the average member of the average United Methodist Church has become a giving unit rather than a disciple to be engaged and equipped. Without opening the conversation about who is at fault (I think that ship has sailed), the first ramification becomes the potential realization that the agencies are no longer fulfilling one of their major reasons for existence: Equipping the local church, the local clergy, and the individual disciple.
Of course, the major role of the agencies is to accomplish those jobs that are too large for individual disciples, pastors, churches, districts, or even conferences.
The trouble comes when the agencies make decisions in spite of the local bodies rather than in conjunction with them.
Some of these questions really deserve answers that I don’t think Dan has come across yet. And we should recognize that some of the answers vary from place to place and church to church.
For example: “Why do we believe that new churches will make us better than the churches we already have?” Some of the churches we already have are viable outposts of Christian witness, mission, and evangelism. They are working towards the goals of the Kingdom, and they are working to make new disciples and to better the disciples they already have.
With that in mind, Dan’s question makes a lot of sense.
But there are a ton of churches that are turned in on themselves. My guess is that there are five churches turned in on themselves for every one that is outwardly bound.
I’d like to suggest just two questions to add to Dan’s list:
- Are we accurately assessing the needs of our churches?
- Are we promising things at the national level that our congregations can’t or won’t provide at the local level?
In the mean time, I think I’ll focus in on being a solid link in the chain, even if the rest of the chain isn’t what it used to be–or ever was.
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