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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Sheep and shepherds in ministry Andrew C. Thompson, Aug 4, 2010
Andrew C. Thompson
By Andrew C. Thompson UMR Columnist
One warm autumn evening a few years ago, my phone rang. I had been lying on the couch, half-dozing while a Red Sox game played on the television.
I looked at the display of the incoming call. It was my district superintendent—in early September. Now I was serving my first pastoral appointment, but I knew enough to realize that a D.S. calling in September probably meant trouble.
The conversation that followed confirmed the worst of what flashed through my mind: An associate pastor’s position had opened up unexpectedly, and the bishop had tapped me to fill it.
He had considered letting the position lie vacant until annual conference the following year, but it was a large church and the senior pastor was already overloaded. As a campus minister, I could be moved without creating the “domino effect” so familiar to Methodist clergy who get caught up in mid-year moves.
All of a sudden, the itineracy became very real for me.
I left a campus ministry appointment where I was finally building momentum after three years and where I had many friends, and moved to a town and a church where I knew practically no one.
I gotta be honest. It was tough at first. But it was also what I accepted when I entered a Methodist ministry.
That experience helped me begin to think about what it really means for those of us called to be Christ’s shepherds to give the whole of our lives to ministry in the church. It helped me think about what it means to live a life that is not my own.
Contentious system
As I see it, the itinerant system is seen as contentious for two reasons: one practical and one cultural.
The practical bone of contention has to do with fear and mistrust on the part of pastors; namely that they and their families will get caught up in the gears of a bureaucratic machine, and be sent to a ministry setting not because it fits their gifts and graces but because an episcopal cabinet is trying to fill slots.
I see that as a real challenge, for bishops and their superintendents as well as for elders under appointment. And I also don’t see any magic pill we can swallow to make it disappear.
Clergy need to continually remind themselves that they are yokefellows in the gospel with every other member of their annual conference as well as with their bishop. Bishops and cabinets should look upon the fear of their pastors with understanding, realizing that an ecclesiastical polity led by human beings (even ones guided by the Holy Spirit) is liable to error, and some preachers have been on the receiving end of those errors.
We all need to seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit, recognizing that we have been fitted together as stones in the same spiritual house that Christ is building.
A recent reading of the 1588 speech given by Queen Elizabeth I before the struggle against the Spanish Armada reminded me that strong leadership depends on those being led having the sense that their leaders stand with them rather than simply over them.
Bishops and superintendents have the opportunity to address and model the connectional nature of our covenant together. The connection in Wesley’s day was, after all, rooted in the common fellowship of the preachers.
The second contentious aspect of itineracy is cultural. Our culture teaches that we should be self-made, constructing our lives according to our own felt desires. We live in a world that tells us to “Have It Your Way,” which is modernity’s motto—as well as Burger King’s!
It’s wrong, of course. Those of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death (Romans 6). The lives we live now are possible only in his resurrected life. And the stories we inhabit are, finally, his story.
But modernity’s false promises haunt us. And the reason many of us fear being sent as Jesus sends his disciples is that we’ve bought into the myth that the life we live should be of our own choosing. For those who follow Jesus, I simply don’t think that can ever be the case.
Guaranteed appointment
There’s a lot of anxiety among Methodist clergy over possible changes to the so-called “guaranteed appointment.”
For the record, I think the guaranteed appointment is a bad idea with no biblical or Wesleyan basis. I know why it was instituted, and the good intentions with which that happened. But like so many lamentable parts of our Book of Discipline, it attempts to make a rule out of something that depends on character and virtue.
That “something” is our covenant relationships in the annual conference. And while character-building takes longer than rule-making, it is by far the more worthwhile activity.
Trees that produce no fruit are useless. And shepherds who cannot do the work of shepherding should not be entrusted with sheep. These convictions seem as necessary to the vitality of the church as anything I know related to leadership.
But fruits can and must be judged in different ways, depending on the setting in ministry. A church in the inner city, a church in a small rural town, and a church in a thriving suburb all call for different approaches—both in ministry and in the evaluation of it. Were bishops to reassure us of that, it might allay some of the anxiety we see.
Even so, those who continually say they “don’t trust the system” might ask themselves why on earth they’d want to be a part of a system they fundamentally distrust in the first place.
In the end, the debate over the guaranteed appointment is symptomatic of our wider struggle with itineracy. That makes me hesitant to consider it apart from core Christian virtues of patience, trust, repentance and love.
We have several layers of shepherds and sheep in the UMC, and we need to realize that at every level, flocks maintain health and grow only when they realize that they’re all in it together. And yes, it is a quality of such flocks that the shepherds are competent for the tasks they’ve been given.
By the way, that mid-year appointment turned out very well. The appointment was made with a serious consideration of the church’s needs and my gifts for ministry. And I experienced the Holy Spirit at the very center of the whole process. I took that as a sign of providence.
And I continue to think that God has got work for the People called Methodists to do.
The Rev. Thompson is an elder in the Arkansas Conference. He maintains a blog at www.genxrising.com.
Andrew C. Thompson
