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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: We need to privilege people over process Andrew C. Thompson, Sep 24, 2009
Andrew Thompson
By Andrew C. Thompson UMR Columnist
Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series. See the first installment here.
Jesus’ flock needs shepherds—good ones and lots of them—if it is going to grow and be healthy. His flock is the church, and the shepherds are its pastors.
“Pastor,” after all, simply means “shepherd.”
God has been calling shepherds for a long time. We see it way back in the call of Old Testament prophets and kings. And we see it in the powerful instances of calling by both Jesus and the Holy Spirit in the New Testament.
Methodists have always believed God called them into existence to proclaim a powerful gospel of repentance, faith and holiness. John Wesley claimed that the beginnings of the Methodist movement were wholly providential. Looking back on the beginnings of the revival that he led, Wesley spoke about the calling of Methodism’s early leaders: “God then thrust them out, utterly against their will, to raise a holy people.”
We face a challenge at present, though. The way we recognize and affirm the call to ministry—our ordination process—has grown cumbersome and bureaucratic. Raising up future generations of shepherds depends on reform.
In my last column, I addressed the need for continued structural reform. Today I am looking at the “human element” in the process. In the United Methodist Church, there are two major realities that can often make our ordination candidacy process seem impersonal and inflexible.
First, there’s the reality of our large, complex denominational structure. That’s just who we are, and our size is often an asset to our mission. So in a denomination like ours that carries on mission and ministry all over the world, we have to accept that responding to a call and eventually receiving ordination will involve some fairly structured steps.
This first reality isn’t necessarily bad in and of itself. But it is very much a factor that impacts the experience of candidates in the path to ordination. We need to recognize that, particularly when the complexity of the church begins to affect the ability of candidates to navigate the steps we put in front of them.
And that leads to the second reality. The United Methodist Church is no less prone than any other institution in contemporary culture to the tendency to trust processes over people. The complexity of the modern world can seem overwhelming at times to all of us. In all types of institutions, balance and fairness are attempted by having everyone follow the same regimented process.
Our ordination process reflects that mentality. We’ve codified it for the whole church in the Book of Discipline. And annual conferences often set in place further steps that they feel are appropriate to their own settings.
The result? Our best intentions have produced an overly rigid bureaucratic process that remains inflexible to human elements and encourages us to focus on the structure rather than the people working through it.
Structural revision can happen over time, but a good way to improve the experience of the ordination process for our candidates right now is to accentuate person-to-person mentoring. The men and women responding to God’s call need to experience a process that reflects the relational quality that we want their own ministry to ultimately have.
For instance, instead of just making sure forms are completed and required meetings are attended, candidacy mentors should take a personal interest in their charges. Regular times of fellowship, prayer and conversation can be enormously important to a seminary student or commissioned minister who feels unsure about her place in a challenging vocation.
It doesn’t have to stop there, either. District Committees on Ministry and conference-level Boards of Ordained Ministry should be more than hurdles that candidates have to cross. They should be arenas where the formation of pastors really happens—through personal relationships and active assistance in discerning pastoral vocation.
If you or your annual conference have been working to humanize the process in your local context, you should share it as much as possible. Put that light on a stand for the rest of the church to see!
The fate of our future shepherds is too important to do otherwise.
Andrew Thompson
