COMMENTARY: Let’s look at effectiveness of the itineracy Eric Van Meter, Nov 4, 2009
Eric Van Meter
By Eric Van Meter Special Contributor
“Daddy, when will we move to our new house?”
At first, Jonathan’s question didn’t make sense to me.
“We just moved,” I answered. “This is our new house.”
Only a few months before, my current charge decided to sell their parsonage and offer me a housing allowance. My wife and I had chosen a small, white house 6 miles from town, with a big backyard and space for a tree house.
“No, Daddy,” he said in his most patient voice. “I mean, when will we go to our new house?”
A sickening thought occurred to me. All the work we’ve done, all the agonizing over finances, and my kid doesn’t even like the house we bought for him.
“Don’t you like our home?” I asked, with some trepidation.
Jonathan looked down at the grass. “I like it a lot. But I know we won’t get to keep it.”
In a sense, Jonathan’s concern is no different from millions of Americans. Our culture is not only mobile—it’s restless. Families move. Houses come and go. That’s life.
But when Jonathan speaks, I don’t think about millions of Americans. I think about my son. And I realize with a rock in my stomach that, at age 3, he’s already learned that a Methodist pastor’s kid should not get too attached to people or places.
To love too much will be to hurt too deeply. Better to anticipate loss than to live too fully in any one spot.
That is the reality of the itineracy, and not just for me and my family. The anxiety fostered by our practice of itineracy affects the entire United Methodist connection.
Before any punches get thrown my way, I’m not advocating a move toward a “call” system, in which congregations hire and fire pastors. I’m simply suggesting that our practice of itineracy needs to be considered for its current effectiveness, not for its place in our history.
While writing this column, I browsed a sampling of annual conference Web sites to find out if any approached the itineracy differently than my own. Granted, my poll was thoroughly unscientific. But without fail, every site tried to educate what it assumed to be an ignorant public by providing information about the theories of itineracy.
When we spend so much energy defending our practice, however, we can forget that we created it to serve us, not the other way around. The itineracy is merely a tool, and nothing more. And as any good carpenter will attest, even the right tool used in the wrong situation will wreck the project, and maybe even hurt someone.
Rather than defend the institution of itineracy, perhaps we should take time to imagine a better story.
Church planters do this as well as anyone I know. They enter a setting with the resources and encouragement of the conference, and often of a larger “mother” church. They start out not with board meetings and council decisions, but with coffee-shop visits and high school football games. They learn how to share life with their people before they try to preach to them.
It strikes me that Jesus did the same kind of patient pre-ministry learning about the people around him—for three decades, give or take.
I imagine an attitude toward ministry that models stable relationships in a world of frantic schedules and fanatic opinions. I imagine pastors who commit to knowing and loving people without yielding to the chosen isolation the threat of a move encourages. I imagine congregations who learn to solve their conflicts in healthy ways, who commit to honestly challenging their pastors without killing them with demands.
Shared ministry works best when both parties expect the relationship to last long enough to carry significant meaning. Shared life as a means of disciple-making requires an investment over the long term.
I’m speaking about more than longer tenures, although that will certainly come into consideration. But neither clergy nor their charges can throw blame onto episcopal leaders for the problem, nor expect them to provide the solution.
A positive adjustment to arbitrary itineracy has to begin among rank-and-file United Methodists willing to drop the grass-is-greener attitude toward leadership.
For congregations, this means rejecting a consumer approach to ministry. When the primary mission of the church is to provide services that will attract clientele, the pastor’s role is simply to produce; if he fails, he gets replaced, like a broken cog or faulty valve.
A consumer church will constantly search for a more productive employee.
But Jesus never seemed obsessed with disciple production or religious market share. He made plenty of invitations and instructed his disciples to do the same. Still, at the end of the day, he cared more about the character of his followers than their assembly line numbers. And character is revealed through relationship—through loving and bringing out the best in one another, including our leaders.
On the clergy side, we need to remember why we became pastors to begin with. None of us (or at least very few of us) entered ministry in the United Methodist Church to build a career or satisfy an ego.
We became pastors because someone modeled God’s love for us, and we wanted to make a life out of loving others in the name of Christ. A concern for “advancement” gets conditioned into us by an unhealthy clergy culture, or forced upon us by seminary debt. But it’s not our first love.
If we United Methodists are to quiet our anxieties about leadership and move toward greater health, our first step is to relearn the art of loving one another in specific time and space.
We need some help from our bishops and cabinets, of course. They will have to be disciplined enough in their appointment-making to keep consumer churches and unhealthy pastors from controlling the appointment process.
Even as they look at the so-called big picture, they will have to understand that the forest they are charged with is only as healthy as the individual trees. Their best work is not to solve a problem through a series of moves, but to give their pastors and congregations time enough to grow together.
I cannot promise Jonathan that he will get to keep his house forever. Life situations change rapidly, and so do ministry situations. Graceful living requires a fair amount of agility.
What I can do—and have done—is to promise him that I will not uproot my family at the first offer of a pay raise. I will model for him a commitment to Christ that is lived out among people I will dare to truly love.
That may mean I lose something in salary or outward success. But I’m more than willing to lose that life for the sake of a fuller one.
Jesus said something like that, I think. I’ll have to remember to look that up for Jonathan.
The Rev. Van Meter is director of the Wesley Foundation at Arkansas State University.
Eric Van Meter
While writing this column, I browsed a sampling of annual conference Web sites to find out if any approached the itineracy differently than my own. Granted, my poll was thoroughly unscientific. But without fail, every site tried to educate what it assumed to be an ignorant public by providing information about the theories of itineracy. 
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