Bishops Adopt "Calls to Action" for United Methodists - Can You Say Pipe Dream?

From an article by the United Methodist News Service (Nov. 13, 2006, By Linda Green):

MAPUTO, Mozambique (UMNS) - The bishops of the United Methodist Church are calling members of the denomination to “live the United Methodist way” in their daily lives and public witness and be a community of believers who offer hope to the world. Nearly 80 bishops affirmed that call to action Nov. 6 during their first meeting outside the United States. The bishops accepted the concept but are seeking to clarify what living the United Methodist way really means.

The council also introduced an action plan that includes . . . planting at least one new church every day outside the United States, where there is significant membership growth, but also starting a new church every day in the United States, where the membership has declined for 40 years, he said.

A few sentences after these quotes comes the statement: “Currently 75 new U.S. churches are begun each year.”

Oh for the ability to dream big dreams and see grandiose visions. It seems that every decade or so some group or team or committee in the United Methodist Church comes up with a big plan to change the declining fortunes of the denomination. Since I have been around (1984), our church has had two different slogans: Catch the Spirit and the current one - Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors. The first one makes it sound like the Holy Spirit is a virus, much like a cold, but better for you. The second one is, well . . . it’s inane. In an attempt to show how inclusive and welcoming the UMC is, it makes the Church sound like anything goes, so y’all come on in. Besides almost every church I have ever been a part of is very strict about keeping its doors and even gates closed and locked (with the exception of an hour or two on Sunday mornings).

We have also had over the last 20 or so years several attempts to “grow” the church through big pronouncements and plans. The General Conference and the Council of Bishops are the primary offenders here, and what they say or do usually has little, if any, effect. Does anybody remember Vital Congregations, Faithful Disciples: A Vision for the Church issued by the United Methodist Church (U.S.) Council of Bishops a little over 16 years ago? If you don’t, look around your church office, and you just might find a copy of it gathering dust on some out-of-the-way shelf. I remember what Will Willimon, the former Chaplain at Duke and current UMC Bishop once said about his own feelings concerning a resolution passed by the General Conference:

In 1986 the United Methodist General Conference, on the last day of two weeks of meetings, passed a resolution that said we were going to make 9 million new United Methodists by about 1994-this in a denomination that had been losing about 65,000 members every year since the early seventies [since 1984 the UMC in the United States has lost over 1.1 million*]. Nine million new United Methodists!

Well, I laughed. I thought, Isn’t this typical! We don’t want to do the systemic changes in our church that would enable us to reach out and get new people. This is just window dressing, sloganeering, platitudes. We aren’t serious about it; it’s just more guilt to lay on pastors’ backs!

I went home and wrote an article, “My Dog the Methodist.” In it I argued that there was no way in heaven we were going to make 9 million new Methodists unless we started baptizing dogs. And I offered as a fit recipient for the sacrament of baptism my mixed-breed terrier sleeping in my garage. I said, “This dog, as far as I know, has shown no interest in biblical studies. Therefore, it would make a perfect Methodist.” I also said, “This dog has the sexual ethics of some members of my former congregations.”

I laughed. When the article came out in The Christian Century, not everybody laughed. The magazine lost about four subscriptions, and two Methodist bishops have not spoken to me since. But I was serious. The cynicism behind that move! We don’t intend to really change the way we would have to change to be that kind of church. I laughed.

Of course Willimon is now a member of the Council of the Bishops which just passed the latest attempt at window dressing or “shuffling the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.” Now don’t get me wrong, I am all for starting new churches, but I have seen most of the new churches in my home conference (Eastern Pennsylvania) either flounder or completely fail over the last decade. As far as I know, only one new church start in that time has truly succeeded. The problem is that it takes nothing and costs nothing to pass a resolution, and so I would like to ask the following questions (among many others):

• Will there be any funding provided for such an audacious undertaking?
• Will individual conferences do more than pay lip service to this idea?
• Where will we find the leadership necessary for such an endeavor when most of our pastors, even the good ones, are currently trying to stave off an inevitable decline in the dying churches in which they serve?

* In a UMNS Report dated June 21, 2006 (By Linda Bloom), we find the following:

For the first time since the 1930s, the U.S. membership of the United Methodist Church has dropped to just under 8 million. A preliminary report from the denomination’s General Council on Finance and Administration, released June 21, shows that total U.S. membership dropped to 7,989,875 in 2005. The final statistical report will be completed in the fall. Membership decreased 1.05 percent in 2005. Earlier this spring, a GCFA report released in April, “The State of Our Connection,” noted that U.S. membership had decreased by 0.81 percent, to about 8.07 million in 2004. Membership had declined annually since the formation of the denomination in 1968. Church attendance in 2005 was 3.34 million, the lowest level in reported history, according to GCFA. Attendance had decreased by 1.63 percent from 2004 to 2005.

[On the bright side] the trend is different for membership outside the United States. According to information released by GCFA in April, lay membership in the central conferences - regions of the church in Africa, Asia and Europe - increased more than 68 percent between 1995 to 2004. As of 2004, the non-U.S. membership stood at 1.88 million.

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