From This Angle: The Future of The United Methodist Church

by

I was among several individuals invited to participate in a series for our Sunday school class at Belmont United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tenn. The series focused on “The Future of the United Methodist Church.” The proverbial identification of an elephant, based on descriptions of blindfolded persons touching one part of the animal, seems apropos. Each presenter approached the topic from a slightly different angle resulting in a variety of perspectives, descriptions, and predictions.

I come to the question about the future of the UMC from the vantage point of one who possesses ecumenical roots, but who has been radically formed and actively engaged in the UMC— first as a child, youth, and young adult; later as an ordained clergy called to serve as pastor, district superintendent, general agency staff, and now to retired status. The invitation to share what I see as the current state of our denomination and what I see as possibilities for the future, pushed me to articulate more clearly something about which I have pondered but shared with only a few.

What We All Know

There is one thing that is indisputable among United Methodists, namely, that our denomination (along with other mainline Protestant denominations in the West) is experiencing a decades-long decline. By that I mean, the UMC as we have known it, has shrunk in membership, worship attendance, numbers of baptisms, confirmations, and the number of young people enrolled in seminary. This decline in membership has been accompanied by shrinking financial resources.

In May 2015, Heather Hahn, writing for United Methodist News Service, reported that Don House, who chairs the economic advisory committee for our denomination, told members of the Connectional Table and the General Council on Finance and Administration that unless the UMC in the United States finds a way to turn around by 2030, it will not be possible to reverse the decline, and the connection will collapse by 2050.

What United Methodists do not agree on is why this decline is occurring and what is a faithful response. The predominant response to this reality has been marked by lamentation that the church “isn’t what it used to be”; frantic attempts on the part of leadership to reverse the decline through strategies of revitalization; efforts at restructuring; and the development of systems of accountability aimed at those blamed for what’s wrong while accountability systems for those “at the top” remain unclear and weak.

What Do I See?

• I see a denomination divided by regionalism that is embedded in the way the denomination distributes resources, makes decisions, defines its mission, and measures vitality. Representation at General Conference and the formula for distribution of Ministerial Education Funds to the 13 UM seminaries are just two examples.

• I see a denomination preoccupied with matters pertaining to clergy (i.e. credentialing and rights and privileges) at the expense of the ministry of the laity. (For example, Ministry Studies for successive quadrennia have focused on the roles, rights, and privileges of the ordained and those credentialed to serve in pastoral roles). I see a denomination weakened by its disproportionate focus and investment on educating persons for ordained ministry with meager focus on baptism. Equipping and encouraging laity who are gifted as teachers, lawyers, nurses, police officers, homemakers, construction workers, artists, etc. for the exercise of their gifts as persons called in baptism remains marginal in our ordering of ministry and expenditure of resources. This is not to suggest that ordaining clergy be abolished, but rather that the ordained take their proper place in the church; that attention and resources be directed to developing, nurturing, equipping the laity for ministries in the workplace, community, and home.

• I see our denomination increasingly creating policies, practices, and legislation that is more restrictive and competitive than expansive and inclusive. This is evident in the policies that govern the 13 UM theological schools as was well as the exclusionary language pertaining to homosexuality.

• I see an anxious denomination pre-occupied with survival and self-preservation grasping at short-term solutions. Called by different names (Seven Vision Pathways, Vital Congregations, Four Foci . . .) but with essentially the same assumptions and measures of success, the effect of these programs and strategies is akin to rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.

• I see a reactive system employing strategies based on tacit, unexamined, and “un-discussable” assumptions. The Young Clergy Initiative is one example—7 million dollars designated to develop more young clergy without serious reflection given to the kind of leaders needed for the Church in our rapidly changing context in the US and globally. What seems to be missing is an articulation of our theology of Church (ecclesiology) and how that informs the way we form, recruit, educate, and deploy leaders, lay and clergy, who are equipped to lead the Church which, in the words of Walter Rauschenbusch, “is set amidst the perplexities of a changing order, and face to face with a new task.”

The Good News

On the face of it, this all sounds like bad news! That may be, but I think it may very well be the Good News that often sounds bad before we can hear it as good.

The question that doesn't seem to let me go and about which I long for conversation with other thoughtful people, is: “Where is God in the decline? Could it be that the church has been struggling for decades to “turn back” rather than to “turn around?” Could it be that God is present in the very decline that we desperately keep trying to reverse? Could it be that God is in the dismantling of the church as we have known it? Is it possible that this place that we experience as exile and wilderness is actually the place of empowerment by the Holy Spirit, is the place not only where God has led us, but instead to where God dwells? What if this decline, this death, is in fact the way to new life? What if relinquishment of what has been will enable the church to see the new thing God is doing among us? What if we stopped asking, “how will we reverse the decline” and began asking “how are going to “uproot and tear down” before we “build and plant.” (Jeremiah 1:10) What would happen if we were to embrace this disequilibrium as the place of refinement and hope?

Walter Brueggemann’s book, The Prophetic Imagination (Fortress Press, 2001), has much to contribute to the work of discerning what God is up to in our time. Brueggemann speaks of relinquishing a preferred world, treasured power, and present arrangements and receiving the new life that God is raising up. He suggests that like the world in which Jeremiah lived and prophesied, our known world is under judgment and is ending . . . all of the energy to keep that old world intact is not helpful. God disclosed to Jeremiah one compelling reality— that God has destined the brutal end of the known world.

As God was in the destruction of the City of Jerusalem (“I am giving you into the hand of Babylon”) so God may now be discerned as moving against the present reality until it is dismantled. Jeremiah knows that the yearning for equilibrium is an idolatrous escape from reality. “That. . . put Jeremiah deeply at odds with all the children of equilibrium who did not notice where God was going and who were well defended against noticing.” Jeremiah believes that God is able to do an utterly new thing that violates our reason, our control, and our despair. So what would happen if the church were the place where there is talk about the newness of God in the midst of the shambles of the church? (Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination)

Brueggemann goes on to say that Jeremiah’s language was free, porous, and impressionable. Poets have no advice to give people. They only want people to see differently, to re-vision life. They want to entertain a world not yet visible. They do not need to see the end of their words or all the implications before they speak. I take some comfort and “shelter” from Brueggeermann’s affirmation of poets. I consider myself a “poet” who wants the church to see differently but who has no precise prescription for how to do that except that we do it collectively, one step at a time, while we remain engaged with people in the margins where God is at work, and that we be ready to let go of what has been in order to receive God’s new gifts.

The Rev. Dr. Gwendolynn Purushotham is an ordained elder in the New England Annual Conference. She has served 20 years as pastor, 8 years as district superintendent, and 7 years as staff at the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry. She is the author of Watching Over One Another in Love: A Wesleyan Model for Ministry Assessment first published in 2007 by the Division of Ordained Ministry of the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry.