UMR Communications is offering the latest headlines in the RSS format.
News
Church needs courage, hope to grow leaders Robin Russell, Nov 6, 2009
UMNS FILE PHOTO BY MIKE DUBOSE
Bishop Gregory Palmer reminded the council, during their fall meeting in Lake Junaluska, N.C., that they should pay attention to the "soulful qualities" of Christian leadership.
By Robin Russell Managing Editor
LAKE JUNALUSKA, N.C.—The United Methodist Church must maintain a courageous balance between evangelism and justice if it wants principled leaders for the future.
But it’s not always easy or popular to help United Methodists pay attention to those essentials, said Council of Bishops President Gregory Palmer during his fall address.
“It took courage to recover the vocabulary of evangelization and growth,” he told fellow bishops during their Nov. 2-6 gathering. “And now it is also going to take courage on our part not to neglect the full formation of those that we will invite to Christian discipleship—not only to have their hearts ‘strangely warmed’ and to have a deep and abiding personal relationship with the Lord of the church, but to find their voices in their communities to address the most pressing issues of our age.”
Church leaders, he added, “must speak the words of justice even as we issue the invitation at the altar, to come alongside them and to be tutored by them. We need courage to do these things.”
The denomination’s bishops centered their fall meeting around preparing principled Christian leaders, one of the four areas of focus adopted by the 2008 General Conference. Bishop Palmer urged them to focus on the more “soulful” qualities of being an effective leader rather than on the management techniques that are often outlined in popular books on leadership. Skills and competencies are important, he said, “but absent having heart and soul for the mission, even skills and competencies well-honed will seem stiff, wooden and even forced.”
Principled Christian leaders, for instance, know how to encourage people as well as explain the harsh realities, Bishop Palmer said. Especially in times of economic uncertainty and concern over membership decline, leaders in the church have a significant role to provide spiritual perspective.
“We are awash in truth and in reality checks,” he said. “We have told it like it is so well that we have become a fearful people. And I fear sometimes that we have imbued more anxiety in the system rather than ratcheting down the anxiety.
“Naming the realities is only a part of our job. The other part of our job as principled Christian leaders and bishops of the church is to say, ‘But we have everything we need. . . . We must infuse the conversation with lots of ‘buts.’ We do not need to repudiate or turn our backs or eyes away from the truthful realities. We need to bring a different truth into the conversation.”
Though a common refrain in the United Methodist Church is that there are not enough leaders, particularly in certain demographics, that’s not the whole picture, Bishop Palmer said. “There are leaders everywhere in this church and outside of this church waiting to be invited into the circle. There is enough. We only need eyes to see.”
He reminded church leaders that they “traffic in hope,” and that hope depends on knowing God’s overlying purposes, not their own abilities to lead.
“We ought to give it all we’ve got, but we ought to get over ourselves that it all depends on us,” Bishop Palmer said. “We are hopeful because we are engaged in God’s purposes in the church and in the world. And God is relentless in God’s purposes for the whole of creation.”
Call to Action
In other action, Bishop Larry Goodpaster presented several recommendations from the council’s Call to Action steering committee, created in May to study the church’s future. The recommendations, he said, would help the church “to really dig in and figure out what it means to be a United Methodist in 2050,” rather than continue to function within the current structure of the church, which was organized in 1968.
“How do we become the church that accomplishes its mission?” he asked. “We don’t know yet what that will look like, but there are steps that will lead us into that conversation.”
Bishop Grant Higaya, a member of the steering committee, said the current structure of the church is dysfunctional because it is so “fragmented and siloed,” with different entities having their own governing bodies. He urged the bishops to approve a more “broadly embraced seamless and comprehensive leadership development process.”
Among the committee’s recommendations: hiring an independent contractor to conduct an operational assessment across the denomination—including the Council of Bishops, general agencies and annual conferences; developing standards for effectiveness and accountability; eliminating the guaranteed appointment for clergy; and revamping the quadriennial General Conference, including its frequency and format.
UMNS FILE PHOTO BY MIKE DUBOSE
“Naming the realities is only a part of our job. The other part of our job as principled Christian leaders and bishops of the church is to say, ‘But we have everything we need. . . . We must infuse the conversation with lots of ‘buts.’ We do not need to repudiate or turn our backs or eyes away from the truthful realities. We need to bring a different truth into the conversation.” 
