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Commentary
WESLEYAN WISDOM: Call for GC special session is ‘reality check’ Donald W. Haynes, Jan 20, 2010
Donald Haynes
By Donald W. Haynes UMR Columnist
No book revisioned my ministry more than Bishop Richard Wilke’s 1986 book, And Are We Yet Alive?, which was, for the most part, ignored by our connectional leadership.
Bishop Wilke writes: “Our sickness is more serious that we at first suspected. We are in trouble, you and I, and our United Methodist Church. We thought we were just drifting . . . instead we are wasting away.
“Once we were a Wesleyan revival, full of enthusiasm, fired by the Spirit. . . . Now we are like a tired old man who remembers but can no longer perform.”
Two years after I read Bishop Wilke’s book, I was appointed Director of Conference Ministries. His book was my inspiration for launching, with help from the General Board of Discipleship, a comprehensive program of holistic evangelism known as “Vision 2000.” It had a good run, but after a season was pulled by those who did not want their ministry to be “quantified.” We should have listened to Bishop Wilke instead!
Today, our beloved United Methodism is being weighed in the balances. We must not resort to panic, but neither should we be ostriches with our heads in the sand.
The Council of Bishops is being asked by the General Council on Finance and Administration to call a special session of General Conference for the United Methodist Church before the next scheduled churchwide gathering in 2012. This is a reality check for us.
First, the bad news:
The bishops are rolling back their own salaries to the 2008 level, reflecting genuine economic concern as well as magnanimity on their part.
The United Methodist Publishing House reports its greatest decline in sales in 20 years. This represents a decline in magazines and books as well as in Sunday school literature orders, partly because of lower attendance but also because fewer churches use the denomination’s literature.
The General Council on Finance and Administration is asking for no staff increases anywhere in 2010. The General Board of Global Ministries is eliminating 45 positions and not filling 20 open positions.
All general and most jurisdictional boards, agencies and connection-supported institutions and ministries are reducing staff by natural attrition and downsizing. Many annual conferences are doing likewise.
Discipleship Resources, a publishing arm of the General Board of Discipleship, has shut down. That board has eliminated 30 staff positions.
Colleges, camps, hospitals, homes for the aging and other extension ministries are worried that connectional support might be cut. Most have already defined themselves as separate legal entities to prevent connectional liability arising from lawsuits.
Membership continues to decline slightly; our average member age is 19 years older than the general population. Many churches are supported predominantly by retired people. Deaths are eliminating income in many churches, both large and small.
Retired clergy are being told that current levels of pension income might not be sustainable.
The polity that has provided United Methodist clergy an enviable model of job security is on the table for discussion: “Can we continue to afford guaranteed appointments?”
Now, the good news, of which we cannot lose sight:
Many large local United Methodist churches are thriving and sponsoring creative ministries. We need to know more about Myers Park UMC in Charlotte, N.C.; Hope UMC in Southfield, Mich.; Windsor Village UMC in Houston; St. Luke’s UMC in Indianapolis; Edenton Street UMC in Raleigh, N.C.; Lovers Lane UMC in Dallas; Village UMC in Auburn, Ala., and hundreds more larger churches.
Many of our suburban churches are growing deeper, together, outward and more. There is infinitely more engagement with local missional needs than in the day when we were supporting more missionaries overseas.
An amazing number of our rural churches are fiscally healthy and missionally engaged. Many are near exurban sprawl or retirement meccas, but some are living off fundamentalist “refugees” who are seeing the benefits of grace theology.
We have thousands of effective clergy who are engaging and penetrating the secularism of our culture. Almost every local church thriving in any socio-economic or racial context is led by a visionary, energetic, community-engaged pastor or staff. Some are theologically conservative and some are theologically liberal, but almost none is on the theological fringes.
In liturgy and theology, we remain a “church of the middle way.” In the midst of divisive issues, we have been sustained by our catholic spirit and avoided schisms of consequence.
Whether we have a special session of General Conference or not, this is the time for a painful reality check. We can no longer copy the corporate culture of the 20th century; connectionalism can no longer mean an obsolete, hierarchical organizational flow chart.
We must cut overhead at all levels of the church. We no longer need trickle-down information in an age when the Internet makes it accessible to all. The local church is not looking to denominational “headquarters” in Nashville, New York and Washington like we did in my generation.
The church’s general agency and conference staffs came with the 20th century; they must go with the 21st.
These words are not a cheap shot. I write this with a lot of personal pain.
Our boards and agencies have served us well. Every general board or agency staffer I have known since the 1950s has taught me something and has helped me in my local church or district or conference, depending upon my appointment.
No responses to my columns have been more insightful nor have been received with more appreciation than the e-mails from general church staffs; they are bright and wonderful people. I write this with no intent to denigrate our agencies, but simply to say with the poet James Russell Lowell: “New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth, they must upward still and onward who would keep abreast of truth.”
Secondly, we must set free the marvelous institutions we have brought to birth: colleges, homes for the aging, children’s homes, camps, assemblies and office buildings. We have enormous real estate holdings in strategic locations; we need to sell some of them. Some are quasi-independent of the church already. They are mature; it is time to cut the apron strings.
While their purpose is laudable, we have to balance that with the cost of maintenance, insurance and liability. Many of our institutions have development staff who have solicited substantial endowments and other philanthropic gifts. Every institution and campus is unique, but this is a moment of truth and we must be honest to our constituency.
Thirdly, when I was ordained in 1956, retirement compensation was the last thing on my mind. In the 1960s, astute laity began to warn about “unfunded pension liability,” telling us that we were paying current pension checks from current income!
We undertook massive campaigns in every annual conference to “fund our liability claims.” Laity helped to fund these claims and the stock market gains put us over the top of our goals before the 30-year time period ended. By 1982, we adopted a much more generous retirement plan, then upgraded our disability support.
Pastors like me have retired in fiscal comfort whereas earlier generations either “died with their boots on” or retired into marginal frugality. The comfort zone has been great, but local churches have often contributed more than 16 percent of the pastor’s salary into the pension fund. Add to this the cost of medical insurance and the increasing cost of parish-related travel, and churches of smaller membership are in trouble.
Corporations have cut their pension programs and retirement packages; if we in the Church cannot sustain ours, we must also bite the bullet with grace.
I worked hard to get our pension claims “funded.” Now I can do nothing less than volunteer to live on less if the price of my comfort is to see local churches close.
I committed myself to be a Methodist preacher in 1954 to serve the church; I don’t recall expecting the church to serve me. I do not mean to sound pious, but for the life of me, I cannot see our total pension package as either the mind of Christ Jesus or the practice of John Wesley.
Wesley wrote: “As to gold and silver . . . if I leave behind me ten pounds above my debts and my books . . . you and all mankind bear witness against me that I have lived and died a thief and robber.” Upon his death, the Leeds Intelligencer reported, “Mr. Wesley’s real worth is demonstrated by nothing more convincingly than by his dying worth nothing.”
Let us be clear: I am not the voice of the church. I am an isolated voice, a retired preacher, a foot soldier. I write as one who was stirred as a teenager by the covenant prayer of John Wesley: “I am no longer my own, but thine . . . let me be full, let me be empty . . . I freely and heartily yield all things to thy disposal . . . Thou art mine and I am thine. So be it.”
As a young preacher, I was stirred anew watching my black-and-white television on a cold January day when a young president said to my country and to me: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
I propose that across this great connection we stand up to that challenge, substituting the word “United Methodism” for “liberty.” Here I stand; God help me.
Dr. Haynes is an instructor in United Methodist studies at Hood Theological Seminary. dhaynes11@triad.rr.com.
Donald Haynes
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