UMR Communications is offering the latest headlines in the RSS format.
Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Church's future depends on asking new questions Eric Van Meter, Aug 16, 2007
Eric Van Meter
By Eric Van Meter Special Contributor
Editor's note: Mr. Van Meter is filling in for Andrew Thompson, who is on a short sabbatical.
The questions we ask determine the answers we get. Or more accurately, the answers we seek.
Over the past several years, the United Methodist Church has sought answers to questions like how do we resolve our differences on key social issues? Where are our young adults? How do we attract people to this church we love?
These questions in particular have led us to spend significant resources in search of answers only to realize that the answers elude us. And so we hire experts, attend conferences, read pop-Christianity books and otherwise search for answers that will elude us yet again.
Perhaps what we really need are some new questions.
What does it mean to live in authentic Christian community?
What characteristics do we as a community of faith want to embody?
How do we continue on a trajectory of faithfulness to our Wesleyan heritage without being slaves to the structures and patterns of previous generations?
What is God up to in the world around us and how can we be a part of that?
In conversations with both lay and clergy peers, I hear a tremendous amount of frustration over the UMC's preoccupation with our own well being -- our connectional health, our membership numbers, our prospects for surviving in the U.S. into the 21st century. Trying to stem the tide of decline consumes us.
Perhaps our task is not to find answers for saving our church but to learn to ask questions that will lead us to become more fully God's church, even in a changing world.
That's not as easy as it sounds. Two very real dangers emerge the moment we decide to re-examine the questions we ask.
The first is one of self-justification. When we formulate our questions with the answers already in mind, we confine ourselves to space we already inhabit. In effect, we build ourselves a comfortable mansion with no doors, not realizing that we are prisoners inside it.
The second danger is one of stamina. Asking new questions of ourselves will require us to have the discipline to see those questions through. But when answers are slow to emerge, the temptation is to give up -- to return to Egypt rather than wait for the Promised Land.
The first danger tells us that nothing we do can possibly improve such a perfect church. The second taunts us to despair, insisting we lack the capacity to build the kind of Christian community we dream about.
Giving in to either danger produces the same result: inaction. That seems to me a particularly sweet word to whatever powers of evil hold sway in this world.
Still I and many others -- lay, clergy, aged, young, liberal, conservative -- can't shake the notion that God is leading his creation into a new era and that he's calling us to re-imagine who we as the church are and how we live in the world. We'll never understand where God is leading the church of tomorrow if we remain mired in the arguments of yesterday.
The task of discerning new questions falls to the church of today.
What if we set aside our worries about the church itself and began living as if God's kingdom has indeed come?
What if we rediscovered the ability to hear God speak? What if we found the courage to act in response to God's voice?
The Rev. Van Meter is campus minister for the Wesley Foundation at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, Ark.
Eric Van Meter
