Ben Rigbsy, a recent guest blogger on Heartlands, got me thinking about moving and relationships for his site, Leaving the Herd:
http://leavingtheherd.com/2018/04/20/7-ways-to-stay-in-love-in-the-midst-of-a-move/
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United Methodist
6 Steps to a Growing Church. Yes, Even Here! – Part 2
In Part One of Ben Rigsby’s post on reviving a church in a small town he talked about life-changing worship and reaching new people. In this post he discusses 4 more steps to growing a rural church…
Ben Rigsby (2nd from right) gathers with a small group at Murn’s Cafe in Archer City, TX
- It takes critical mass to launch a church, it takes the same to revive
This is a tough one to look in the face. Unfortunately, I’ve learned this lesson a couple times. When a new person visits your church, it needs to look like something is happening. The energy of worship must be present as soon as they enter the doors. You wouldn’t go back to a restaurant that never had cars in the parking lot and maybe one other couple in the whole building. Especially if that place only had mediocre food.
But a place that has a full parking lot and a buzz of energy as soon as the doors open tells you something is happening here. You’ll even put up with lower quality food if everyone else seems to be enjoying themselves. Why should church be any different?
If your congregation isn’t big enough to fill your sanctuary to this level of energy, maybe you need more small groups. Small groups are an entry way into the church. Once, you’ve got enough people attending those, then put them together for worship. Why should Methodists be afraid of Small Groups? It’s what started this whole thing anyway! Small groups also give the church sustainability that will endure whoever the person sitting in the pastor’s office might be.
- Take an Honest look at WHO you’re trying to reach
First United Methodist, Archer City
I’ve seen too many of our peers set off to reach their community of low income Hispanic families with a bunch of wealthy, white-haired, old ladies. The results are mostly the same. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but is it a battle you really want to fight?
If you’re in a traditional, rural, older town that loves piano and organ music, do not cram guitars and drop-down screens down their throats because you read about it in a magazine! It’s much easier to start an additional worship service than to dilute the one they love. Take a serious inventory of what you honestly have, and who you would honestly like to reach. Remember the first 200 people will determine what the next 200 look and act like.
- Find a mentor or coach
As much as we know after seminary, we all have a few weak spots. I needed a coach to encourage me and challenge me. This doesn’t have to be a paid relationship either. Henry Cloud wrote The Power of the Other, and in it I learned how all great leaders have a person who challenges them to go beyond their limits. Find a person who can do that for you. Then, be that person for your church leaders. You should be their greatest cheerleader.
In between sessions with your coach there are millions of coaches available to you through books. I enjoy Audible.com audiobooks because rural pastors spend a lot of time on the road—might as well make it count! I try to read as much as I can.
- “Pray like everything depends on God, and work like everything depends on you”
I don’t know where I picked up that saying, but if fits…it fits. Do not neglect the Spirit. Never neglect your own soul in the process. I know that pastors are told this at every conference we ever go to, but the ability to pray and meditate is not only necessary but establishes a good example for your congregation. Also, be open in sharing your spiritual practices with your congregation. Many of them don’t have a spiritual practice because they have never seen it demonstrated and wouldn’t know the first thing about meditating. They want to be taught.
Start Creating Your Slice of Heaven
There are plenty of reasons why you can’t build a church in a rural community. There are lists of problems, from money to facilities. There are people who will tell you the best you can do is to hold their hand while they (the church) dies. I don’t think Jesus would have ever said those words. I seem to remember him to say something more like, “Lazarus, come out!” and he did, and Jesus said, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
Now, it’s time for us to get to it!
Ben Rigsby is a United Methodist Pastor who lives in rural Texas. He has a passion for inspiring people to go beyond their limits and accomplish the impossible. A single father of two boys, he is excited to marry this June and move to the Baltimore area. Ben blogs at Leaving the Herd.
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The Country We Live In: Race, Sin, and the Birthday of the UMC
Behind every discussion in American life is the question of race. At this stage in our history, with the long shadows cast by slavery, Jim Crow segregation, the struggle for civil rights, and last year’s gathering of white nationalists in Charlottesville, the impact of race is not something we can ignore if we want to be honest about who we are. Race and racism are still the ocean we swim in, even if the vast majority of us are trying to shed old racist ways of thinking and behaving.
Recently we’ve had an opportunity to reflect on our racial history. Two weeks ago, some of my United Methodist colleagues participated in activities in Washington D.C. to recall the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee 50 years ago this month. Last weekend, the Virginia Conference sponsored the Bishop’s Convocation on Religion and Race in northern Virginia. Both gatherings recalled how Christians can be challenged by the gospel to confront the effects of racism in our nation and in our churches.
Next week we will recall another 50th anniversary—the birth of the United Methodist Church (UMC) from the union of the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church. The uniting of those two churches was not a sure thing. The Methodist Church still carried, as part of its legacy from a previous 1939 merger, a racially segregated Central Jurisdiction for its African-American churches. The integration of those churches into the larger church was a condition for the creation of the UMC.
When delegates gathered in Dallas on April 21, 1968, just 17 days after Dr. King’s death, there was a conviction among many of them that whatever this new UMC would be, it would have to be honest about its difficult racial history and commit itself to racial inclusion. There were losses in the dissolution of the Central Jurisdiction. It had been an engine for developing African-American leader in the church. But the vision was for a church where racial equality could be achieved.
We’ve still got a ways to go. Fifty years later, our churches are still largely segregated. The practice of open itinerancy has brought clergy of color into largely white congregations and some white clergy have made the move in the other direction. But those appointments still bring unique challenges due to the lingering effects of our racialized history.
The 1968 Uniting Conference
There was a time when the Christian churches might have imagined that they were on the forefront of the movement toward racial equality in the US, but now it seems we follow rather than lead. Sometimes we even resist. For all the progress we celebrate, we are still in the grip of principalities and powers that rule in our day.
Our national conversations spend a lot of time trying to delineate what and who is racist. Individual white people wonder if they are racist and try to convince themselves that they can be free of racism, like kicking a smoking habit. As an expression of purity, we can try to be free from racist sins.
But the truth is that racism is a manifestation of big ’S’ Sin and the only honest stance we can hold in relation to Sin is to admit that it infects our every action. It is the environment into which we are born. It is the air we breathe. And from that we need a Savior, not a resolution to do better.
There’s one more thing to say about Sin, though: God says ‘no’ to it. Said it definitively on an Easter morning. Delivered us from slavery to Sin and Death, as we say in the Great Thanksgiving. Has died. Is Risen. Will come again.
A conversation about where we are with race needs to start here—in confession that we all live in the deformed world that Sin has wrought and in confidence that God will reveal the restored cosmos announced in the cross and resurrection. If we’re all in this space, there’s no room to step outside into an imagined America that doesn’t have to deal with race anymore. We all live in the country where racism remains. We all need the conversation (not shouting match) on race that we’re avoiding. And Lord knows, we all need each other.
Spring and A Way Forward
photo by Ethan Robertson via Unsplash
You’ve heard it before in a thousand different forms: change is hard. In churches it can often come as a variant of the old stock phrase: We’ve never done it that way before. Even when we take the first steps of a journey toward something new, it’s easy to give up when the going gets tough. For the Israelites in the Bible, recently freed from slavery by God’s miraculous deliverance, it only took the first hardship in the desert to start the mumbling about how good the fleshpots in Egypt were. Even when your destination is the Promised Land, change is hard.
Our own denomination, The United Methodist Church, is headed for a time of change. In the next few months the Commission on A Way Forward will be handing over its work to the Council of Bishops and the bishops will produce a proposal for what the church could look like as we navigate a time of great divisions over issues like human sexuality. A special General Conference in February 2019 will consider the proposal (and probably others that will be introduced).
I’ve talked before about my fantasy of a time, following February 2019, when everything would go back to “normal.” It is a fantasy and I know in my heart of hearts that what would really cause me despair is not the stress of where we are but the idea that things wouldn’t change. My soul knows that it longs for the possibilities that come with old things breaking open (and apart) rather than everything remaining the same.
The skeptics of our day look at the church and the world and see only what’s not working. We inhabit structures, (bureaucratic, financial, and physical), that were built for a day that has passed. The energy we have for doing what we used to do is flagging.
But seen through God’s eyes, within those structures there are people waiting to be unleashed upon the earth to be engaged in some new great movement. John Wesley was one of those people in the 18th century who came out of the old at the compulsion of the Spirit. Today, new leaders and new energy are poised for the launch of God’s next new thing. Whatever the outcome of the next General Conference, I want to see that.
photo by Anisur Rahman via Unsplash
Which means we should be ready. When Spring is in the air, there is a natural impulse to plant seeds, clean the house, prepare the lawn, and get in shape for all the activity that will come with the new warmth of the season. There will be challenges in getting our churches and our souls ready because, you know, change is hard. But Spring IS in the air. I believe it.
Why Churches Can’t Be Normal Again
photo by J.D. Mason via Unsplash
Sometimes I have a fantasy that March 2019 will come, the special General Conference of the United Methodist Church designed to heal our rifts will have passed with a grand reaffirmation of our union, and we’ll all go back to normal. That’s the funny thing about normal in the church, though—there’s no going back there.
Being the Church in the 21st century is going to involve some of the basics that have made us the Church through the previous centuries, but one of those basics is that the Church does not exist for itself but for God and for the new people God is welcoming in to the body of Christ. And new people will need new spaces.
At least that’s the argument of Jacob Armstrong, the founding pastor of Providence Church in Mt. Joliet, Tennessee. In this continuing series where I dialogue with Armstrong’s book, The New Adapters: Shaping Ideas to Fit Your Congregation [Abingdon, 2015], I have tried to think about the implications of the ideas here for rural communities like the Eastern Shore. And much as I love the church as it was, which raised me, it’s hard to look at the changing world around us and argue with Armstrong’s thesis:
“A major adaptation is needed to reach people who have stopped feeling the need to come. Almost everything will have to change. When worship, children’s ministry, youth ministry, and adult discipleship are all built around knowing what to do with the people when they get in the building, we can’t make incremental change here. An adaptive change is required.” (28)
Easy to say for a guy who is starting a church without a building, (which is what Providence Church did), but that congregation eventually did move into its own space and now they faced a challenge—fighting the temptation to turn inward. Armstrong proposes a question to counter that temptation: “There are many ways to leverage the land and the buildings you have to serve the community, but for a couple of events a year I suggest pretending like you don’t have those things. How would you reach out and encounter new people if you did not have a building or land?” (30)
For Providence Church this meant holding a free cookout at the local trailer park, recognizing Armed Forces Day with a community event for military families, and showing up at public places and festivals. Several churches on the Eastern Shore have tried similar things. Franktown UMC has done that cookout in a local trailer park under a tent. St. John’s took over the Pocomoke coffee house for a young adult night. Grace Church went out on the Parksley square for a Halloween Trunk or Treat. Drummondtown and Metropolitan churches marched together in Accomac on the Fourth of July and Trinity UMC has taken a decorated golf cart and a kazoo band into the Cape Charles parade.
Efforts like these not only help the community know about the churches, they also help the church see and get to know its mission field. We break the pattern established by that unusual period that reached its peak in the 1950s and 60s when it was possible to build something and they would come. What happens in our buildings is still vitally important to who we are, but the new people God desires to know about the good news of Jesus are now going to be “out there” for the most part.
I do recognize that the fantasy I have about “getting back to normal” is just that and that the future will have some discomforts as we do the work of adjusting, whatever the shape of our denominational home. But I also get excited when I recognize that God’s Church does have a future and that the mission it has always had will not be changing. In fact, I do believe that I am meeting that future in the faces of those who are searching for a home in God’s love.
Sure, there’s no going back. But there are a lot of places yet to go!
The Most-Read of 2017: A Heartlands Retrospective
2017 began with a quaint and quixotic belief that one more blog might be helpful in addressing the Great Divide. Post-election I was casting about for a way to explore this strange, new world we all seemed to be living in. Were we really as divided as we seemed? Had we forgotten how to talk to each other? What new languages might we have for new conversations? And how could the church reclaim its own language for this new day?
Heartlands is about the way these questions play out in rural America. Over the year, it has developed a particular interest in how place and story can ground us. Hence, book reviews, travelogues, and interviews with authors and artists. But you have helped shape what this blog looks like. And it’s time to count down the most read posts of 2017. So here they are:
10. How to Preach a Bad Sermon – reflections by one who has delivered and heard more than my fair share. Includes obligatory Annie Dillard reference.
9. Why don’t country people just get out? – What happens when we give up on country life?
8. In Which I High-Five a Bishop – The new bishop of the Virginia Conference, got me (and the whole conference) fired up at our annual gathering last June. Here’s where I tell why.
7. We’ve Got an Open Door Problem – revisiting the deceptive slogan of the United Methodist Church.
6. Why the Duke Divinity School Controversy Matters – not sure, but I think a few Duke alums might have helped goose this post up the list. But the controversy did matter in helping us define the stakes of 21st century theology.
5. The Last Thing I Want to Talk About – Bishop Oliveto and the United Methodist Church – The legal wrangling over the status of the denomination’s first openly lesbian bishop got me thinking about what I really wanted to be talking about.
4. When Robert E. Lee was in the Walgreen’s Parking Lot – An interview with Photographer Michael Mergen – Passing through Farmville, Virginia one day, I took a break at the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts and discovered the work of a great photographer of place and memory. Man, I’m glad I did.
3. This Old House: The Love Story – an interview with Trudy Hale – One of my favorite people who lives in one of my favorite places – The Porches writing retreat.
2. The Empty Bench at the Book Bin – Remembering Kirk Mariner – the Eastern Shore and the UMC lost a giant in 2017.
1. What Goes Without Saying – Some Thoughts on Charlottesville – a fitting #1 considering how much time we spent discussing that awful day in August in a city I love. Race, faith, and the Great Divide in one terrible package.
But the true #1 is you, dear reader. Thanks for giving these posts some life and breath and for moving toward something like a community – a far less quaint and quixotic concept. Thanks as well to Christopher Smith and Sara Porter Keeling who contributed guest blogs this year and all the authors and artists who gave me their time. Happy New Year!
Considering Our Hearts (& the Future of the UMC): A Review of The Anatomy of Peace
photo by Gerome Viavant via Unsplash
Let’s get this out of the way first: If Dan Brown wrote a book about conflict resolution it would come out looking something like The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict. If that sounds like an endorsement to you, you’ll love this book. If, like me, you threw The DaVinci Code across the room sometimes out of sheer frustration with its cardboard characters, forced allusions, wooden writing style, and overall smugness, well, you’re not going to have a good time getting through this book. The author is listed as the faceless Arbinger Institute but I suspect a member of the Institute is, in fact, Dan Brown.
Whew. That said: I came to the book at the recommendation of the Rev. Tom Berlin, one of the most gifted (and un-Dan Brown-like) communicators in our United Methodist connection. Berlin, pastor of Floris UMC in northern Virginia, is a member of the Commission on A Way Forward, the 32-member group appointed by the Council of Bishops to craft proposals for maintaining the unity of the denomination in the face of divisions around questions of human sexuality. The Anatomy of Peace is being used by the Commission to help them grow closer to one another as they confront their own differences.
Tom Berlin
Berlin has led the Virginia clergy delegation at the most recent sessions of the General Conference, the global gathering of United Methodism held every four years to rewrite The Book of Discipline, the denominational rule book. In that role he has seen the sad way that such gatherings devolve into the same rancor that plagues our national political dialogue. “When these topics [e.g. ordination of LGBTQ clergy] are discussed,” he told the Virginia Annual Conference last summer, “the hearts of many delegates are at war rather than at peace.”
Berlin chose that phrasing purposefully. It comes right out of The Anatomy of Peace and its unusual choice to use the Era of the Crusaders as an analogy for developing a ‘heart of peace.’ The conquest of Jerusalem by Christian crusaders in the Middle Ages was bloody, a character tells a group of parents who have been united by a desire to help their troubled teenaged children. He goes on to describe how the Crusaders plundered and murdered in the wake of their victory, seeing their foes merely as objects to be eliminated.
By contrast, the Muslim sultan Saladin’s reconquest of the city was marked by acts of mercy towards the defeated Christians. “The secret of Saladin’s success in war,” one of the leaders of the parent group says, “was that his heart was at peace.” (28) Thus, he concludes, “there are two ways to take Jerusalem: from people or from objects.” (33)
If you can accept your history flat and unambiguous, this analogy might work for you. Similarly, if you can accept the repeated interpretations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as offered by the pair of leaders (one of each nationality) at face value, you may be able to see through to the point of the book more easily than I could. I found these attempts to use one of the most complex international situations of our day as a simplifying and clarifying tool misguided at best. I’ll chalk that up to Mr. Brown again. But I digress.
The point of the book is very simple. The heart of conflict is seeing people either as people or objects. When we see our opponents as people we can have hearts at peace. When we see them as obstacles or objects, our hearts are at war.
The book goes on to show how that plays out in any number of situations, from dealing with family conflict to business relationships to international relations. The journey towards peace, as in most journeys with a spiritual dimension, is first an internal one. When we address our own “way of being” it begins to have an impact on those around us. “As important as behavior is…most problems at home, at work, and in the world are not failures of strategy but failures of way of being.” (39)
There are some good psychological insights here. The book addresses how we collude with those we oppose in producing the very things we say we’re fighting against. There is a long section on self-justification and how our own preferred methods for doing it serve to perpetuate conflicts. And there is a pyramid of actions that emphasizes personal work and building relationships before attempting anything like correction.
There is no doubt that our relationships and institutions would be better if we approached one another with hearts of peace. Given our tendency toward anxiety and the belief that we can only lose in conflict, we need some practice in the art of engaging with those we regard as enemies. That’s just what Rev. Berlin suggested to the Virginia Annual Conference last summer. Noting his own congregation’s attempt to start some conversations on human sexuality, Tom said, “The church hasn’t fallen in.”
photo by Ian Schneider via Unsplash
I’m grateful for Tom’s encouragement to keep trying. We all know the deadly taste of cynicism and despair in our mouths. We are thirsting for something more.
Whether this book, beyond its flaws, holds out hope for United Methodists is an open question. I know that others are reading it as well and earnestly seeking a new day. The hope Berlin talked about as a result of reading it seemed to be that we Methodists, by “walking together loosely” instead of seeking to come to conformity or agreement, might be able to concentrate on the mission objectives of the church rather than its divisions. In the year to come, as we see the Commission’s work come to the form of proposals, we’ll all have a chance to sound our hearts to see what’s there. I’m praying we find hearts of peace.
Security in An Age of Gun Violence
photo by Kathy Hillacre via Unsplash
The recent shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas got our attention because of its grisly violence and its location – a church in the midst of Sunday worship. It was a church like many of ours on the Eastern Shore. A video of the church’s service the week before the shooting made the rounds on the Internet and it shows a praise band, not entirely in sync and singing a bit off-key, but nonetheless joyfully. Children fidget in the pews. The passing of the peace goes on a little too long, but there is genuine affection among the congregants as they wander the room and hug.
Police say the same camera that records the services was running last Sunday, too, when the gunman came to First Baptist Church. I don’t need to see its horrors. They’ve been repeated too many times in too many places – in country music concerts, nightclubs, elementary schools, movie theaters, and other churches.
Following the shootings at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, we had a meeting of our Eastern Shore clergy to discuss church security with two law enforcement officers. We discussed practical ways to improve security during our worship services. Rev. Rebekah Simon-Peter offers some very useful pointers in a recent article that appeared on Ministry Matters, and I commend it to you for review.
There are things we can do to be wise and we should. But we should never be under the illusion that we will eliminate our vulnerability. It’s part of what being a follower of Jesus means, coming together with the armor of God, which is very different than the armor of the world. In fact, United Methodist churches are officially “weapons-free zones” by action of the General Conference. are encouraged to “display signs that prohibit carrying guns onto church property,” something that is consistent with a resolution the UMC had in previous years that churches should be “weapons-free zones.”
What churches do, in their vulnerability which is their strength, is to bring light to situations where death and darkness seem to reign. Rev. Stephen A. Curry is the pastor at La Vernia UMC in the same county with First Baptist Church. In a recent New York Times editorial, he talked about the things churches have done since Sunday:
“Immediately after the shooting the churches started receiving and making offers of help. They rushed meals to those grieving and to the emergency workers. They were called on to help fund funerals and host a blood drive. Lutheran, Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, nondenominational — it didn’t matter.”
The larger conversations about reducing gun violence need to happen, too, but we ought not to overlook the strength Christians can show to others in times like these. Advocacy for new laws and casseroles to grieving families are what “thoughts and prayers” look like.
Ultimately, Curry says, we are at our best, not when we become armed fortresses, but when we are church:
“A church in Wilson County [where La Vernia and Sutherland Springs are located] is a community center where good people strive to do good for fellow human beings. A church in Wilson County is a home for extended family to share their lives. A church in Wilson County is a place where we come to mourn losses, grieve the death of a friend or relative, celebrate the joys of life and love. A church in Wilson County is a place where we connect with the God who loves us, watches over us, and, in the end, welcomes us home.”
Rural Soul: Evolution of a Liberal, Guest Blogger – Sara Keeling
I’m traveling back from Israel & Palestine Monday, but not before the Rev. Sara Porter Keeling continues her guest hosting with a post on anthropology, theology, and the continuing journey of discerning the Word. Many thanks to Sara for bringing her rural soul to Heartlands while I’ve been away…
Sara Porter Keeling
It goes without saying that we have trouble hearing one another and talking to each other. But it seems to be helpful to try to understand why we may think and feel the way that we do: particularly about social and political issues.
I used to be concerned that The UMC might allow for the full inclusion of LGBT persons. Now I’m much more deeply concerned that we never will.
It doesn’t feel right that people who are gifted for ministry, called by God, should not be ordained because of who they are attracted to and who they commit their lives to.
It doesn’t feel right that that is the number one issue, life choice, character trait, even as we allow for outright, named, unquestionable sins to exist amongst our clergy. We pick and choose what we want out of the Bible. We pick and choose what we want out of the Book of Discipline. Are we all so blameless and striving for perfection? We don’t mind sinful clergy so long as they are not gay. And there’s nothing else to say except that we are fascinated and grossed out and consumed by sex.
I managed to leave the town of Orange, Virginia as a moderate conservative. I confess that I voted for a Republican my first election. Shortly thereafter, my liberal arts education lived up to its name. That’s what happens to all small town girls right? We go off to college, cut our hair short, and become raging feminists. That was true for me.
I majored in Anthropology and English at UVA. And yes, since you asked, my first paying job—post diploma—was making coffee.
Brooks Hall at UVA
It turns out that the study of human culture was a very euro-centric, very 19th-century way of documenting and cataloging other cultures–the non-European, therefore non-civilized, generally inferior and primitive cultures. This way of study was often to prove such inferiority and primitiveness in the first place. To document cultural aspects as they “vanished” in the march of progress, civilization, colonization, slavery. Often proving along the way exactly why these cultures and groups of people were so “easily” destroyed and obliterated or assimilated or enslaved.
In general, keeping bones, and other sacred objects that were acquired through “discovery.” Despicable things such as keeping skulls in museums to measure was also a practice. Which is why many indigenous peoples are dubious, even unwelcoming, to an anthropologist in their midst—to an outsider attempting to tell their story or stealing their ancestral heirlooms.
Now done differently, of course, anthropology is a way of actually understanding how very different and unique and valuable each culture is—how so many things that we consider natural and normal are really our cultural ways of understanding.
To uncover the lost stories and different perspectives that were lost to the written history books. To challenge our assumptions about race, class, gender, sexuality, and on and on.
I took all of this and thought what does God have to say about this? About indigenous cultures, minorities, colonists and the colonized? Aren’t we all God’s children no matter the winners and losers of history?
I had taken a bit of a break from church at that point, but I returned and picked up at the Wesley Foundation. Where Alex was serving as director. (It all comes back to Alex, like it’s his blog or something.) I discovered that the language of Wesley and our Social Principles aligned quite nicely with my social conscience. My academic language and the native language of my religious upbringing were not at all at odds.
As a minister, I bring cultural understanding to the scriptures. Realizing that our stories as the people of God are so highly tribal and interwoven with all of the stories of God. From other times and places and cultures and understandings. Sometimes the people of Israel were the oppressed and downtrodden. And sometimes they were the mighty victor and the oppressor. Both slaves and slave holders throughout history. Sometimes with God on their side and sometimes not. Words that were not written for us in 21st Century America, and yet words that still speak to us and guide us.
We’ve Got an Open Door Problem
photo by Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash
I’ve always been a little worried about our open doors. When the United Methodist Church adopted the slogan “Open hearts, open minds, open doors,” some twenty years ago, it captured a sentiment that many United Methodists have about themselves. Whatever else we may be, (and that’s an area of great contention), we have been the broad middle, accepting and celebrating a wide variety of peoples and viewpoints.
When the planes hit the towers of the World Trade Center in 2001, our then-new slogan had just been unfurled on a giant billboard in Times Square. In the aftermath of that attack and in the wake of the other scares of that awful fall (anthrax, the elusive sniper), the whole tenor of the country changed and the impulse was to close every door and to go into lockdown mode. Our openness stood out in prophetic contrast then and that slogan helped us adhere to our faith in the One who made himself vulnerable and who, in his crucifixion, “broke down the barrier of hatred that divided us” [Ephesians 2:14].
But there were always dangers in the slogan. One was that it might get confused as a mission statement—as if openness was our reason for being. In that case, openness might as well be emptiness because the slogan doesn’t speak to its source. Open hearts, open minds, and open doors are a byproduct of a vital faith in Christ, not an end in themselves. What we’re about is the worship of a God who is making all things new and one sign of that is that walls are coming down.
A larger danger was and is that the slogan might be taken for a description of how things are rather than as an aspiration of what we hope to live out. Fleming Rutledge goes after this in her book The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ:
Congregations are claiming for human beings what is possible only for God. No congregation can include everyone. No self-identified inclusive and welcoming church can live up to this assessment of itself. Many a person who has attended a church advertising radical hospitality has come and gone from church coffee hours without being greeted by anyone…The congregation that makes a place for torchbearers with Downs syndrome might fail to embrace an unwashed, unmedicated, disruptive man off the street…Despite the good intentions of congregations that proclaim themselves as diverse, welcoming, and all-inclusive, the fact remains that no one and no group can be, in this life, all-embracing. (576-7)
If the danger were just false advertising, we might just tweak the slogan: “Mostly open hearts, minds, and doors.” Or better yet, choose another one. But Rutledge points out that the problem is ultimately theological. We are overestimating our potential to do what only God can do and has done.
It isn’t that we shouldn’t be about the work of hospitality. Lord knows we could use some freshening up in how we acknowledge and include new people, and all kinds of people, in our churches. But we could also use some real honesty and humility about our need for God in order to understand how openness happens.
photo by Tim Marshall via Unsplash
John Wesley invited the same danger when he talked about Christians moving on to perfection. When you separate such language from a bedrock trust in God’s work in Jesus Christ, it sounds like Wesley is putting his faith in human efforts. But Wesley understood the ways that the we are warped by slavery to Sin and Death. He knew that human work was always done in the light of Christ’s prior work on the cross to free us, despite our lack of potential, to nevertheless follow where he leads.
All of this to say, that the slogan needs some grace. Grace that will allow us to stop using it as a weapon to needle our brothers and sisters for not living up to it. Grace to accept the freedom God gives us, not just for earnestness, but for joy and wonder. Grace to not attempt to be more than we are called to be.
For generations, we have tried to be too much as a church—social scientists, political theorists, psychologists, urban planners, non-profit charities. And all-inclusive at that. God bless our curiosity and ambition. But God forgive our forgetfulness and lack of faith in the centrality of being a Church living out of the deep well of its faith in the crucified and risen Christ. It is enough.
