A Place at the Table: Finding our mission field

One of the e-mails that has been regularly showing up in my in-box is a mailing from the Texas Methodist Foundation called A Place at the Table. The site describes itself as “an online quarterly journal  . . . that seeks to nurture a critical and reflective understanding of challenges facing the United Methodist Church by engaging dialogue amongst those seeking a faithful part in God’s hope for the future.” The site features articles by a variety of church leaders on thinking about ministry in missional terms.

Read the rest of this entry »

Top ‘Leading Ideas’ of 2012

Here’s a suggestion from Bishop McAlilly – another post from the “Leading Ideas” blog from The Lewis Center for Church Leadership. The text blow is an image that will take you straight to the full blog post in another window. Happy reading – and we welcome your additional ideas and comments below!

Goma once more needs reason to hope

READ FULL ARTICLE on BloomBytes Blog

United Methodist Bishop Ntambo Nkulu Ntanda, part of a delegation from the Democratic Republic of Congo, testified Sept. 19 before a subcommittee of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee. Photo by Jay Mallin.

Excerpt: In September, I watched online as a United Methodist bishop from the Democratic Republic of Congo pleaded with a sympathetic U.S. congressional subcommittee to help end the rapes and killings in eastern Congo.

Bishop Ntambo Nkulu Ntanda and other members of a Congolese delegation were visiting New York and Washington on an urgent mission. They wanted to persuade Congress and the United Nations to pressure neighboring Rwanda to end its support of the M23, rebel fighters causing havoc in the region.

Two months later, as today’s front-page headline in The New York Times observed, “Congo slips into chaos again…”

As a denomination, we need to pay attention to this crisis for a variety of reasons — to support our fellow United Methodists in the DRC, to honor our decades of mission and ministry there and to join the international call for an end to the continuous violence that especially has plagued vulnerable women and children.

Last week, with the M23 advancing, United Methodist Bishop Gabriel Unda Yemba, who leads the East Congo area, said Goma and nearby villages “are not a place to live because of all the horrors that take place.” The United Methodist Board of Global Ministries responded with a message of prayer and support.

I remember a period during the 1990s, amidst the horror of the Rwandan genocide, when the Board of Global Ministries was helping United Methodists bring hope in Goma, Bukavu and Uvira.

Refugees from Rwanda and, later, Burundi, fled to what was then known as eastern Zaire and its residents were struggling to deal with the influx of 2 million people.

United Methodists from Zaire and several hundred international volunteers-in-mission offered assistance in refugee camps and worked to create the Goma Children’s Village to care for a small portion of the more than 100,000 lost, abandoned or orphaned refugee children from Rwanda. Local street children also were welcome.

United Methodists also established medical clinics in Bukavu and Uvira and built a large church in Uvira that also housed a school for refugee children. It was hoped that additional children’s villages could be set up in those two cities.

In early 1996, the United Methodist Committee on Relief received a $3.5 million grant from the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees to manage firewood cutting and distribute pharmaceuticals to Rwandan and Burundian refugees living in the region… | READ FULL ARTICLE

RESOURCES:
> DOWNLOAD sermon by Bishop Gabriel Unda Yemba, East Congo Episcopal Area, to the Council of Bishops at Epworth By The Sea on November 7, 2012 (.PDF)

Keeping Hope and Closing the Gap

> CLICK HERE to read the article on the TX Methodist Foundation’s blog A Place At The Table

Gil Rendle serves as Senior Consultant with the Texas Methodist Foundation in Austin, Texas and as an independent consultant working with issues of change and leadership in denominations and large churches.

FULL ARTICLE: Hope is now building in the United Methodist Church like a fire. What started at first as a small spark some years ago among a small group of loosely connected leaders has continuously and increasingly found fuel and is now spreading. It is not just hope that is building but an impatience to engage the possibility of the mission field instead of the problems of the institution. A movement is forming.

But movements must deal with gaps that arise when some have been in the conversation about the purpose of the change from the beginning, others join later, and there are still many who don’t even know about the conversation (or don’t want to). If hope is to grow we will need to address the gap.

In this issue of our TMF e-journal we offer two vignettes about hope and the gap:

• An Experience of the Gap – Rev. Bobbi Kaye Jones shares a real-life experience as a district superintendent where she has been working intentionally to shift people’s focus from protecting their own church to engaging the mission field. Consider what it is like to be a leader who sees the hope, who works intentionally to help others see and respond, and is then confronted with the gap. This is a picture of where we are in the wilderness of an established denomination living in a deeply changed mission field.

• An Example of Bridging the Gap – One of the great supports of the new and growing hope is that there are already examples of people who deeply understand the new mission field – which often demands very non-traditional responses that are very different from standard congregational fare. The ability to offer non-traditional responses is often the key to addressing younger generations. However, it requires that these people actively bridge the gap between what ministry once was and what it is yet to be. It means standing between being accountable to the long established institutional church and simultaneously risk building non-traditional approaches that can introduce discipleship to people who live in a changed culture. District Superintendent Ellen Alston from the Louisiana Conference helps us listen in on the experience and reflections of some young clergy who are already bridging the gap. One of the reasons we can hope for a changed and more Wesleyan United Methodist Church is because it is already happening. There are some already bridging the gap.

Every brave pilgrimage through a wilderness requires us to continue to draw the picture of the faithful future, to look back at that part of ourselves that is lagging behind, and to be willing to close the gap as an effort of hope.  Where are you in the conversation?

The One Room (Church) School House

Dr.Lew Parks is professor of theology, ministry, and congregational development and director of the Doctor of Ministry Program at Wesley Theological Seminary.

> CLICK HERE to read the article at Lewis Center’s LeadingIdeas

FULL ARTICLE: My mother attended a one room schoolhouse for all but the last two years of her public education. As a Baby Boomer, I grew up riding the wave of school growth and consolidation and the several accommodations that went with the territory: school buses, area rather than local sports, and, above all, specialization in curriculum with division of the student population. The churches I attended as a teenager and young adult emulated the best practices of the public school system: dedicated spaces, quality and colorful curriculum supported with the latest innovations in audio-video equipment, and credentialed experts to model and train teachers.

If this were the only script for doing Christian education and formation in a community of faith, small churches would seem to have been left behind — again. It’s the same familiar story: the needs are too great, the resources are too small. But those who are familiar with small churches know otherwise. The biblical portrait of transmitting the faith from one generation to the next in the context of everyday life continues to thrive in small congregations. The best teaching begins in the character of the teacher (put these words of mine in your heart and soul), capitalizes on teachable moments (when your children ask), and is achieved regardless of setting (when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise). (Deut 6:20-21; 11:18-20).

This is good news for small churches struggling with self-worth but also for the many formerly larger congregations today faced with the upkeep of empty Christian Education buildings, the loss of Sunday School as a primary port of entry (see Mission as the Emerging Entry Point for New People, Leading Ideas, April 6, 2011), and the need to consolidate classes or even grade levels. There is something to be said for the one room schoolhouse model of Christian formation and education, a model that capitalizes on the energy of the intergenerational experience with gentle regard for real differences in cognitive development and literacy.

There are one room schoolhouse examples of Christian education and formation that look like the last desperate efforts of a dying institution. There are others that flourish. The difference seems to be in the element of intentionality. Someone has to care enough to carry the vision of a dynamic community of learners across age and skill levels, together developing faith foundations. Outside help is available, even a curriculum specifically targeting the one room schoolhouse model (see “One Room Sunday School” at http://www.Cokesbury.com), but someone has to take the lead in that wonderful small church alchemy of turning necessity into opportunity.

Dr.Lew Parks is professor of theology, ministry, and congregational development and director of the Doctor of Ministry Program at Wesley Theological Seminary. His most recent book is Preaching in the Small Membership Church (Abingdon, 2009). It can be purchased at Amazon or Cokesbury.