Recently, someone asked me to explain what Lent is in the Christian liturgical year. This person grew up with a variety of religious influences and had been exposed to a number of doctrinal explanations of Lent that seemed uncomfortable. When I asked back, “What do you think Lent means?” She responded, “Well, it seems to me that it sends the message, ‘We should all suffer,’ and I really don’t like that message.”

My aim here is to explain what Lent means to me theologically as well as what it is in the liturgical calendar.

Some basic nuts and bolts:

Lent can be found on your church calendar. It differs from lint, which can be found in your dryer. Lent is a 40 day period (excluding the Sundays) prior to Easter. This means it spans over a period of about six weeks. Lent is observed in what are called “high churches” or liturgical churches. There are many Christian churches that don’t really observe the liturgical year and follow a generally more free flowing cycle of holidays and observances for their worship themes.

Since the Council of Nicea in 325, the church calendar sets the date of Easter as the first Sunday after the first full moon occurring on or after the vernal equinox. This places it in the time frame of the Jewish Passover festival. Of course the Western churches (Catholic and Protestants) follow the now commonly used Gregorian calendar for the liturgical year while the Eastern churches (Orthodox churches) continue to use the Julian calendar. This is why some churches will celebrate Easter on different dates. This year, they’re 5 weeks apart because of how the Gregorian and Julian calendars differ.

Back to Lent. It begins with Ash Wednesday. Which is, of course, preceded by “Fat Tuesday” or Mardi Gras, a ‘last celebration’ before the more somber and reflective time of Lent that has taken on a life of its own in many cultures.

Ash Wednesday simply marks the beginning of Lent. It is observed with a service where ashes are placed on the forehead (often in the shape of a cross) with words that remind us the ultimate inescapable reality of our mortality.

The Lenten season then continues until Easter. Lent, as I understand it, is intended to be a time of introspection and preparation for understanding the death and resurrection narrative of Good Friday/Easter. Many people will often “give something up for Lent” such as chocolate, watching television, or some other ‘bad habit’ they wish to leave behind. This is a form of fasting which appears in a wide variety of religious traditions and non-religious traditions.

Fasting is generally observed as a spiritual practice manifested as a physical practice. That is, we purify ourselves through purifying our bodies. We deny ourselves of something not in a means of self-mortification or desire to ‘suffer more’ but as a means to aspire to attain something beyond the ordinary that we’ve been feeding ourselves.

For me, giving up something I don’t need but desire becomes a physical daily reminder that I should be giving attention to spiritual matters that transform me into a better person.

One year, I gave up eating meat for Lent. I went out on Fat Tuesday and had a beloved cheeseburger with a friend who also had decided to give up eating meat for Lent. We celebrated our ‘last cheeseburger in paradise‘ then begin a Lenten journey. For me, it mean rededicating myself to eating better, getting creative and being aware of what I ate everyday, and generally taking better care of myself. I learned a lot about food, health, and the injustice issues of food in American society.

40 days later, I felt better, I’d saved a lot of money in the grocery store, I was making tasty new meals I’d never tried before, my general health had improved…and I really didn’t miss the meat anymore. I’ve been vegetarian for 11 years now.

That Easter was not a celebration of, “Hooray I can have a cheeseburger again!” but rather a celebration of, “I’ve transformed myself into someone who takes better care of myself and lives in a way that is more sustainable.” It had also made me discover and become aware of issues of diet, health, affordable living, and how economic disadvantage can often lead to poor diet and thus, a host of health issues. Lessons that became a part of my ministry and teaching ever after.

So the message of Lent, to me, isn’t that, “We should all suffer” but rather an acknowledgment that, “We all do suffer.” The Buddhist tradition also acknowledges this truth as the first of the four noble truths. And Lent is one of the ways some Christian traditions provide an annual reminder of this reality, a way to fully acknowledge the human experience of suffering, and a way to transform our experiences and lives.

This is the understanding of Lent that leads to people often calling Lent a “journey of the soul.” A 40 day journey of introspection isn’t meant to be a self-mortification of suffering for the sake of suffering, it’s meant to be a transformative process that prepares us to see the transformative nature of the Good Friday/Easter narrative in our lives.

You may have noticed this blog has been rather silent for a long time.  The end of last spring’s term at Gallaudet was, as always, a busy one!  Over the summer, I got wrapped up with other projects and ideas.  And every time I went to clean out the inevitable spam comments, I would say to myself, “I should post something.”  Unfortunately, that’s as far as it got.  The fall term at Gallaudet was unexpectedly chaotic as well, I endured another kidney stone and had a number of travel events.  That, of course, left me rushed to keep up with course development and teaching.

With a new year, I’m aiming to make weekly posts again and here’s some things I have in store.

I.  A Deaf Ministry Together series of posts.

Part of of the motivation to begin this blog was a hope that Deaf theology and Deaf ministry topics could be shared and discussed.  This series will begin next Friday and post every other week.

Planned topics include:

1. Clergy burnout and leadership overload

2. Laity leadership

3. Deaf ecclesiology or, just what is a Deaf church anyway?

4. Theological and Biblical literacy

5. Oppression, Liberation, and being Deaf in the 21st century

6. A dearth of resources, a hope for ecumenicism

7. Cultural worship and liturgy

II.  A series of unfortunate posts

One of my earlier attempts at a blog had begun examining the moral agency of children in A Series of Unfortunate Events.  Unfortunately, the whole iDisk system for blogging that Apple had created was discontinued before my series of posts reached its conclusion.  So I’m going to port them over here and edit them.  And seeing as Lemony Snicket has begun a whole new series revealing more about the mechanism of the VFD, we’ll see about branching into that as well!  This series will run on the weeks that Deaf Ministry Together does not.

III.  Ask a question, get an answer

I get asked questions.  I guess it comes with the territory of being an assistant professor of religion, but people will occasionally say things like, “I hope you don’t think this is a dumb question, but…”  Usually, they’re quite good questions!  People get odd ideas about religion, theology, and life because of the general unwillingness of American culture to truly discuss and examine religion rather than simply teach doctrine or debate without listening.  These posts will be an occasional feature when these questions pop up.  And if you have a question, ask it!  I’ll be pulling up questions from time to time that have been asked of me in the past that make good posts too.  As always, my answers are simply one answer of many possible answers.

While I’m not able to be in the peanut gallery in Tampa this time around, I’m participating as I can digitally.  Thanks to the way social media is changing how live events are covered, Twitter (and a number of ‘secret agents’ on the scene) are keeping me fairly well informed.

Last night the live stream fired up for opening worship and sessions.  It wasn’t closed captioned.   Not that I expected it to be as The UMC has a long history of forgetting that anywhere from 30 to 140 of every 1000 people in the US alone have significant hearing loss.  So I tweeted something to that effect and it got retweeted a few times.  I fired of an email to my good friend, Bishop Peggy Johnson to start pestering the tech people to either figure out closed captioning or simply add a live feed of the ASL interpreters that are already on site providing access for those in Tampa.  We’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, catching what bits I can from the feed and supplementing it with a bevy of Twitter hashtag feeds, I had the interesting experience of not being sure what was being said, but getting everyone’s reaction to it.  It was probably far more amusing and interesting to see what people retained from the onslaught of sensory rich worship and stimulation deprived discussion of the rules of order.

In that rules discussion, I noted that the new language of Rules 26 and 27 passed by an 82% margin.  As my “secret agent” Pastor Becca notes, these rules change how the General Conference will deal with substitute motions.  Rather than taking the substitute motion and working to perfect it then voting on whether it will replace the main motion or not, The first vote will be a simple “which of these two motions do we prefer to work on?”  Then the work of perfecting the language of the preferred motion begins.

I took great delight in the passage of these changes because I know I had some influence in their development.  After the crush of the 2008 General Conference in Ft. Worth, where we saw the retention of exclusionary language that devalues, degrades, and in three instances prohibits ministry with and by LGBT people in The UMC, I began to reflect on all that I witnessed.  My theological mind was in high gear of course but, as a practical theologian, the “how we do things” part of my mind was equally engaged.

What I saw was a wonderfully and carefully crafted paragraph on human sexuality that admitted the truth of where The UMC stands as a body.  That we do not yet fully know the mystery of human sexuality given to us by God.  This paragraph was crafted by arduous, careful, and honest Holy Conferencing in a very diverse legislative group.  Yet, when this committee’s work came to the floor, the minority report was a substitute motion that more or less retained the existing language that excludes LGBT people (although also removed language that explicitly prohibited marital rape– go figure.)

Since the rules were that the minority report would be open to amendments, etc. before being considered as a replacement for the main motion, the body went to work on it.  It was the usual grueling, emotional, and long drug out series of amendments and debates.  As a result, the debate exhausted the body over the span of several hours and when finally they were exhausted enough to call for the question, the bulk of the body was voting with a spirit of, “Whatever, let’s just move on.”  It passed and became the main motion.  The body never had one bit of discussion about the work done and passed by a majority of the legislative committee.

It was clever.  It was cynical.  It was a violation of the spirit of Holy Conferencing where respect and dialogue are the order of the day.  But, it was within the rules.

So I wrote a long email where I laid out a theological rationale of Holy Conferencing that the General Conference should consider amending the rules to prohibit substitute motions (as the Faculty Senate where I work at Gallaudet University does)– or find an alternative that would at least allow for the work of legislative committees and minority reports to both get a hearing during debate before the whole body.  While I’m sure I’m not the only one to have observed and reflected on this.  I know that my email circulated among a number of people and was forwarded on more than once to Randall Miller who is the head of the planning committee for this General Conference in 2012.

(As an aside, I didn’t get the chance to thank Randall in person when I was on the campus of PSR for an interview in February.  I was disappointed!)

In that email, I also reflected upon how delegates sitting in rows clustered into their delegations seemed to encourage insular thinking, enforced bloc voting, and a lack of interaction among the great diversity of people who represent our church.  Sitting in rows also seemed to lend a strong air of political process rather than spiritual process to the proceedings.  We looked more like the UN than The UMC.

So seeing the delegates sitting at round tables and reading their tweets about meeting different people around their tables then seeing rules 26 and 27 pass by a 82% margin was a moment of satisfaction for me.

I may not be there, but I’m there.  Behold the mystery of General Conference!

As a child, I remember getting up while it was still dark out on Easter morning in order to trundle to church with my mom, dad, and grumpy but compliant older sister. I was usually chipper after shaking off the the sleepyheaded effects of whatever I’d been dreaming through the night. Easter sunrise service in Ft. Wayne, Indiana was usually a brief but joyous affair often including liturgical arts not featured on other Sundays.

I remember one year Ann Slen did a fantastic ballet which culminated in tugging the dark shroud from the enormous wooden cross on the rearadox over the communion table. It was a dramatic moment ushering in the crescendo of Easter morning. A feast of visual motion which contrasted with the usual worship through one’s ears and mouth style that predominated.

For many years, we also had a balloon lift where each of us filled out a card that simply expressed the joy of Easter and asked it to be sent back to the church. We’d track where they went and whose went the furthest on a map over the next few months. I remember one year mine went all the way to Western Pennsylvania and was the furthest we ever had one go.

Somewhere in my seminary years, I became a night owl and my fervor for sunrises and sunrise worship waned accordingly. During my undergraduate years, the Wesley Foundation at Ball Stqate University held our Sunday services in the evening to take a pause before starting the new week of classes. And for the last 10 years or so, I’ve been attending worship services either at Cambridge Welcoming Ministries or Foundry UMC that are on Sunday evenings.

While some people find Sunday evening an odd time to worship, for me, it’s a natural fit. I spend the day Sunday relaxing, reading, watching TV programs, and catching up on whatever needs to be done. By evening, I’m in contemplative mode and worship fits into that nicely.

But what happens for Easter? The defining moment of the Christian faith was discovered at dawn and sunrise services have always been the ritualization of the discovery of the empty tomb. But there’s another story we often overlook at Easter.

On that same day, two disciples were traveling to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were talking to each other about everything that had happened. While they were discussing these things, Jesus himself arrived and joined them on their journey. They were prevented from recognizing him. He said to them, “What are you talking about as you walk along?” They stopped, their faces downcast. The one named Cleopas replied, “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who is unaware of the things that have taken place there over the last few days?” He said to them, “What things?”

When they came to Emmaus, he acted as if he was going on ahead. But they urged him, saying, “Stay with us. It’s nearly evening, and the day is almost over.” So, he went in to stay with them. After he took his seat at the table with them, he took the bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he disappeared from their sight. They said to each other, “Weren’t our hearts on fire when he spoke to us along the road and when he explained the scriptures for us?”

Unlike the burst of joyous praise associated with Easter sunrise, the encounter outside Jerusalem on the Emmaus road is far more sedate. The disciples have spent the day hardly able to believe the stories shared by those who first ran from the tomb, but unable to deny them either. They find themselves exhausted, hungry, and scared as they leave a city that where it has become dangerous for them to linger. They ponder the meaning of these events, perhaps on the verge of writing them off as unbelievable in the face of pressing concerns of safety and survival. Until some man who has apparently been living in a hole for a few days asks, “What things?”

So, on yet another Easter sunset, I sit in church asking myself, “What things?”

I made a last minute snap decision to go to the noon service today at Foundry UMC for Good Friday services. I attend Foundry because they’re one of the few UMCs in the city area that provide ASL interpreters for just about anything that there’s a request for. But, since I made this decision at the last minute, it was beyond the time frame needed to arrange for an interpreter.

In addition, I headed out the door this morning without my hearing aids, as I don’t really need them at Gallaudet, I tend to leave them behind…it’s very liberating to be able to do so. But as I was riding in toward Dupont Circle on the metro, I realized this would mean that there would be very little of the service that I would be able to hear. The hegemonic voice of the world which says worship is about hearing/receiving the sermon, readings, and songs had me weighing whether it was worth going again if there wasn’t accessibility to the service in place. I began to have that discouraged feeling that in a world made for people whose ears are different than mine, last minute decisions aren’t a luxury afforded to me.

Then the Deaf theologian in me popped up and asked, “Really Kirk, is the mystery of Good Friday any more accessible through ears and mouths? Really?”

And you know where that question leads…

So I went.

After all, I sort of know the story the service covers by now…and I can read and watch with my eyes. So while the rest were doing whatever they needed to do with their ears and mouths, I read the Lukan and Johannine accounts from the prayer in the garden to the laying in the tomb. Then when Rev. Dean Snyder lifted the flask of anointing oil for the ritual of forgiveness, it was a moment of pure visual attention, there simply were no words– and none were needed.

And so, I find myself deeply contemplative today. Far away in another time and place, where I should be on Good Friday. (Although that time and place is connected to the now as I tap out my thoughts on an iPad.)

What then is the mystery of Good Friday. I’ve never liked the traditional formation of atonement that requires violence to ensure salvation. Saying Jesus died for our sins implies that God exacts. Price from us because of our mistakes. How loving and just can a God be that sets up such a price?

Rather than traditional atonement as a ‘price that must be paid,’ I see Jesus on the cross as the image of sacrificial love par excellence. That is not to imply that sacrifice is necessary. But to say that Jesus is the prime example of a love so deep and abiding that you’re willing to die for someone. I love my parents enough to die for them and I’ve every reason to believe that they love me to the same degree. Fortunately, we’ve never had to make that decision to die for each other and neither should we ever have to find ourselves in that position in order to have that depth of love.

But being loved with that depth transforms how we live in this world. It provides a baseline and foundation for understanding what love truly is and can do. It doesn’t require us to actually have someone die on our behalf to achieve that transformation. There’s no actual violent blood price being demanded by God. Instead, there is an abiding and profound love being offered that shields us on the most devastating effects of the violence that is already out there in our world.

That’s the mystery of Good Friday I find myself reflecting upon in the silence of my communion with a congregation and God at the foot of the cross today.

I know I’m quite late with this post.  Although the ‘sync’ part of the syncblog idea launched by Jeremy over at Hacking Christianity unraveled, I’d hoped to keep as close of a schedule as I could in order to build some content to this blog as I get it kicked off and running.   Jeremy was of course busy with his big announcements!  Congrats to you and best wishes and prayers as you adjust to all the changes coming down the road!  I was busy bringing some folks from the Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary down to Gallaudet to promote their book Pedagogy of the Poor.  More on that in another post!

Now, on with the review blog.  I liked what Hunter puts forward in this book a great deal, of the five books selected for General Conference delegates, I feel this is the strongest of the lot.  While I don’t see eye to eye with Hunter 100%, I’m thrilled to see distinctly United Methodist missiology make an impact on these discussions.  In most discussions regarding the Call to Action, missiology is either 1) entirely overlooked, 2) reduced to “church growth”,  or 3) talked about in vaguely defined terms.

As Jim over at the Epistle of Jim notes, its very focused on what local churches can begin doing to turn The United Methodist Church around.  While his question to Hunter about what the General church levels should look like is valid (because that’s where the lack of financial sustainability seems to be) Hunter is dead on in recognizing that the shape of the future polity of The UMC absolutely must be driven from below at the congregational identity level.

I do agree with Hunter that we seem to be a very confused denomination from the vantage point of outsiders.  In some sense, whether media coverage focuses either on ugly things like the denominational struggle to include (or exclude) LGBT people or the more attractive things like the UMC origins of the  Nothing But Nets program, people walk into local UMC congregations and often find very different messages.   A similar problem arises when The UMC media blitz of commercials is closed caption to include the Deaf and hard of hearing but when Deaf or hard of hearing people show up at local UMC congregations, they’re met with the usual, “we’re glad you’re here, if you expect us to spend any money or energy to change things to make sure you know what’s going on, you’re just being unrealistic.”   So I’m not sure that the “confusion” Hunter notes is in some way tied to a “theological anarchy” which he implies is the result of theological development that doesn’t emphasize the primacy of scripture.  After all, the recognition of the primacy of scripture doesn’t ensure that one follows the mandates for hospitality to the strangers and outcasts of the world!

But what he does note is a decision to become more ‘mainline’ and less ‘Methodist’ in the 70′s and 80′s as The UMC entered into the ecumenical project of “The God Box” or Interchurch Center in NYC has led to a lot of confusion about what makes us unique as a denomination.  While I would assert back that our willingness and deep commitment to ecumenical work is one of the things that makes us unique, it can’t be the only thing that makes us unique.  This is where all the anxiety on the UMC University Senate about having a ‘United Methodist ethos’ at our theological schools and programs comes from.

While Hunter is correct that there are explicit theological claims such as Wesley’s conception of grace and salvation that mark us as unique among the denominations, the most critical thing that makes us unique is the practical theological constructions of how Methodism organized itself as a movement.

Before digging into those practical theological constructions, I want to touch on Jeremy’s great thoughts about how the Two-Natures controversy of “waybackago” pokes holes in the dichotomy that Rendle and now Hunter both seem to make in separating the ‘institutional church’ and ‘the church as a movement’ as opposites.  Rather than taking these two distinct natures as oppositional and irreconcilable, a recognition of the mystery of being “fully this, fully that” formulation that was used to resolve the controversies of Jesus’ divinity and humanity might be another fine example of  letting theology lead our polity rather than borrowing the constructs of the business world.

Now, back the the practical theology.  Hunter notes that in meeting with Dr. Byounghoon Kang of the Korean Methodist church, Dr. Kang stated,

From what I could tell, Methodism does not really exist in America.”  When he noticed my puzzled expression, he explained, “Your ‘Methodist’ churches do not have  class meetings.  Your people do not minister to each other through class meetings.”

Hunter continued talking with other Korean ministers and found the same general observation among them,

One pastor quoted John Wesley as saying that the class meeting is “the sinew (the connective tissue) of Methodism.”  I wrote that down and later, I looked it up.  Yep, that was Wesley’s view all right!

I’ve experienced a similar nature to The UMC in Zimbabwe where congregations are organized into ‘sections.’  Most sections are geographically determined in bringing together people who live in a particular neighborhood to sit together at worship and care for one another through the week as they share their joys, losses, needs, and life together as an extended family.  Other sections are organized around other factors, a section for the leadership of the church to care for one another, a section comprised of women who have been recently widowed, etc.  And at Hilltop UMC in Mutare, Zimbabwe, a section of those who are Deaf!

In asking about the role and purpose of the sections, because they’re unlike bible study groups, or small group ministries I’ve seen in the US, laypeople told me that they were originally meant to function as the extended family network that city dwelling Zimbabweans found was missing in city life when compared to the rich network of extended family care of traditional forms social support in rural areas.  While the specifics of that exchange of one’s extended family in the rural areas for the support of the section in the church in the city may not be as simple as that, it does provide a way for The UMC to make local contextual connections that echo the purpose of class meetings of early Methodism.

But, will it work in the US?   We’ve never had that extended family support system in our culture to the degree that Zimbabwean culture manifests.  We’re far more atomized into the nuclear family structure of parents and children (and occasionally grandparents) when envisioning where the economic, emotional, and social support of our families comes from.  The notion of turning to a distant cousin for financial help or child care with a full expectation that distant cousin will respond is simply foreign to how most Americans view “getting on in the world” as a family.

In the cities, we’re even more atomized as young working professionals live in single unit dwellings and even when coming to the age of pairing up, pairs rarely go beyond ‘being friends’ with other pairs when the chips are down and the hand life deals you is busted.  Yet, we hear all sorts of echoes of a desire for community and meaning.  TV shows like Friends proved to be immensely popular because they showed how a cluster of mostly unrelated people formed a tight social bond of care and support.

So the challenge to us becomes, how do we recover the class meeting concept of our Methodist heritage not as a restrictive meeting of obligations to follow rules, but rather as a manifestation of the kind of close knit care people seem to be calling for in our society?  And how do we make it comprehensible in the local contexts of our world?

These are the thoughts that inspire me the most about Hunter’s book because rather than focusing on abstract notions of church structure or depressing financial outlooks, he’s calling us to organize ourselves in specific ways to better care for one another.  He’s telling us it has to happen from the ground up…what the upper levels of The UMC decide to do with themselves may ultimately be irrelevant if the grassroots do what they should be doing.  And he’s telling us this it in a uniquely Methodist way.

This post is a day late in the ever increasingly unsynchronized syncblog sponsored by Jeremy Smith over at Hacking Christianity.   Jeremy has found this Lenten season full of all sorts of busy and hasn’t really kept up with the discussion and sync posts thus far, but check out The Epistle of Jim for at least one other blogger covering these books!

Like Jim, I find this my favorite of the bunch thus far.  I’ll admit that a portion of my liking this book is that it shares some of the same left-leaning theological pre-commitments I hold, but there’s a lot to like about this book aside from those things as well.

First, this book, like Lord I Love the Church, And We Need Help, lets theology lead its discussion and analysis.  Whereas storytelling and storylistening were the key theological aspects of Bassford’s book, a grassroots insurgency to open the breadth of whom the church is oriented toward serving is the driving idea behind Rasmus and Escobedo-Frank’s book.  They find fault with the current structure of The UMC in being hierarchically shaped in how decisions and resources are made.  Similarly, they find fault in the Call to Action proposals in elevating the power of the Council of Bishops while flattening all other things.  Instead, the argue for returning the impetus of The UMC to the laity in noting that

The original dream of the Methodists was simple: create a free-flowing structure that allowed for movement, innovation and growth.

And noting that while the Call to Action reinserts the word accountability into United Methodist discourse on polity, it does not do so in the way that laity watched over the church in the original structure but instead, makes the Bishops the purveyors of accountability.  This effectively heightens the top-heavy hierarchical problems of our denomination by offering a top-heavy solution.

Instead, Rasmus and Escobedo-Frank want to flatten the church and hand the reins over to the laity who have been displaced by the professionalization of the clergy role.  Edward Farley’s Theologia was an early practical theological call for reform in theological education out of concern that the training of clergy had fragmented among different specializations.  These specializations fragmented theology and removed the pastoral tasks of things like preaching, pastoral care, church leadership and administration, etc. from the theological moorings of biblical interpretation, church history, systematic theology, etc.  As a result, clergy were trained to be ‘professional caregivers and caretakers’ more than leaders of a church in mission to the world.

I think that Rasmus and Escobedo-Frank, Farley, and myself are all ultimately concerned with a sense of classism within the church that results from this professionalization of clergy roles.  This classism tends to put laity on the low end of the totem pole as the ‘untrained’ who therefore aren’t to be the prime movers of a church’s ministry.  This to me is a horrible mistake.

Gramsci speaks of “organic intellectuals” in social movements and this idea carries a lot of weight for me as I consider what The UMC needs.  While trained clergy are important, we need more bi-vocationally adept clergy who can do more than “church work.”  Such clergy would be able to move more easily in the days of post-guaranteed appointments.  But more importantly, it would put clergy more in touch with the organic level of laity skills.  Rather than things like Shepherds Ministries or Certified Lay Speaker programs that train laity to do clergy tasks, clergy can learn to recognize and utilize the skills already present in lay members.

Many theological schools have begun curriculum reforms to incorporate what Farley and resultant conversations in practical theology brought to their attention.  But, in my experience in parish ministry, there’s more work to be done as it seems the laity have been dutifully trained to expect clergy to perform certain tasks and do things rather that be shapers of Christian formation in their congregations and communities.  Breaking dependence is difficult.

The second thing I like about The Jesus Insurgency is the willingness to recognize that some things need to die– and that dying is not always a bad thing.

So we must be willing to die.  And we must acknowledge our own death.  Our structures, our traditions, our preferences, our way of being and our control must be set free to die.

Now, those of you who know me, know that I love pretty much all thing Star Trek.  Yet my favorite series is Deep Space Nine, perhaps because it is the least “Trek-verse” of all the Star Trek series.  DS9′s abiding strength for me is that it complexifies Gene Roddenbery’s vision that technology will the solution to humankind’s problems and creates a space for the truly unknown and unexpected to find solutions where technology fails.  This is done in the guise of the Bajoran religion and worship of The Prophets, despite the Federation counter-narrative of these being ‘wormhole aliens’ who have extraordinary abilities to alter the timeline.

What this twist within DS9 does is shatter the Western cultural myth of eternal progress that is evident in the technological salvation of Roddenberry. In a similar way, we need to shatter the myth of eternal progress within The UMC.  There are things that need to die, churches that need to pass the baton, and clergy that need to move on to whatever their calling truly is if it’s not making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.  Rasmus and Escobedo-Frank offer up a lovely theological model for how to shatter this myth by pointing out the central message of Christianity is one of death and resurrection–not eternal progress!

Or, to paraphrase Tim Rice’s lyrics to Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Jesus Christ Superstar,

While you live, your troubles are many, poor UMC,
To conquer death, you only have to die.
You only have to die.

But, as in the scriptures, death does not get the final word.  The third thing that’s great about this book is that love gets the final word.  And it is a radical and deep love for all.  Rasmus and Escobedo-Frank are not shy about expanding the circle of The UMC to include those who are currently ignored or outright kept outside.  They take seriously the arguments, expressions, and approaches of modern society in showing how our denomination, and much of Christianity, has become incomprehensible to people outside our congregations.  This is a message we can’t be told too often!  As my UMC Inside Out post stated, this sort of insular bubble is very very dangerous for us.

The solution Rasmus and Escobedo-Frank present to this dilemma is based in their own experiences in ministry and personal faith.  Love is what brings people in.  And love is what keeps them in.  Far more than programs, preaching, or gimmicks, a community that expresses and expands the love of Jesus Christ for all people will push us outward.  Thus, the Jesus Insurgency for love begins at the edge of the church, not it’s center.  At the edge, where we meet the other and welcome them by loving them.  Homi Bhabha agrees with the importance of the edges of a culture by noting that this is precisely where the Location of Culture lies.   It is NOT at the center of a culture where identity and cultural practices are created and shaped.  It is in the overlapping areas at the edges of cultures where they meet and bump into others.  It is in the stairwells between the floors of buildings that seem hidden and out of the way.

This is where our United Methodist culture and ethos must be forged.  Because, it was John Wesley, in a field, preaching and talking to factory workers after they got off from a grueling 12 hour work day where the world became his parish.  Not until his dying days did he locate his ministry in a building.  So, maybe its time to die, so that we can be reborn in a field, or a stairway, or a street corner as we were truly meant to be.

The third book in the “not so synched” syncblog plan led by Jeremy over at Hacking Christianity is Virginia Bassford’s Lord I Love the Church and We Need Help.

I’ll admit to being a bit concerned with this one after reading the introduction.  Bassford starts out by describing her work as influenced by ethnography inasmuch as she lays out her analysis of The UMC’s current state and a way forward in a series of stories that illuminate her points.  She merits ethnography with the following:

Instead of arguing about who is right or who is wrong, ethnography finds value in simply what is and what is shared.  Ethnography opens an opportunity for and and a guide to ethical conversations.  Bochner encourages us to wrestle with hard ethical questions such as, What do we do, now that we know this information about behaviors? and, How does knowing this story impact my behavior in the world and my community?

What bothers  me with this discussion about ethnography is that it seems to imply that ethnography is fundamentally about understanding ethical actions.  Ethnographical methods can be loosely defined as writing, or mapping, the cultural realities of a people.  While this does involve attention to stories, their meanings, and their functions among a people, it’s primarily a descriptive task more than a prescriptive task as I’ve always encountered it.

It’s a pet peeve of mine when teaching ethics to undergraduates that they spell it out as ethnics in their paper.  Since the spell checker doesn’t flag it as a “wrong word,” they leave it alone without any consideration if it’s the word they want.  Every year there’s a bunch of students who do it on their first paper and no matter how much I drill editing and clarification in class, there’s a few that will do it on their final paper.  Sigh.

I truly don’t think Bassford is guilty of confusing the mapping of ethnic/cultural with the delineation of ethics though having read the full book.  What she seems to what to say is that listening to stories gives us a picture of the cultural heart of a people that can become an effective guide to ethical decision making.  This maintains a distinction between ethnography and ethics while suggesting a possible relationship.  But, I fear a lay reader might walk away thinking ethnography was a subset of ethics.  Eep!

Also, since the word ethnography was used, I was hoping to have a patina of stories that captured the muti-ethnic character of Texas.   After all, that land was part of Mexico before it became the Republic of Texas for a brief period then joined the United States.  As a result, it remains heavily influenced by Mexican culture, not only because of “immigrants crossing the border” but because in its history, that border crossed over the people first.

Also, Texas has a number of congregations worshipping in buildings that were built by African-American slave labor.  While a number of these congregations have done serious work to acknowledge this and offer acts of repentance and reconciliation, the scars of slavery and segregation are still evident in the racially lopsided demographics of many UMC congregations.

And lastly, Texas is home to many sacred ancestral lands of American Indian nations.  Many of these indigenous people found themselves forced off their lands, forbidden from practicing their spirituality, and forcibly and violently “converted” to Christianity.  While acts of repentance and reconciliation are again being worked out to address these historical realities, it is important that we as a church listen to the actual lived realities of these peoples today.  Yet, Bassford’s book doesn’t pull out much of the ethnicities of Texas beyond a general rural, homespun, farming and ranching life.

It’s moments of somewhat unclear writing an omissions of a variety of ethnicities that get in the way of what Bassford seems to want to say in this book sometimes.  But aside from these things, it’s a very nicely accessible book that will reach a very different audience than Focus or Back to Zero because of its “homespun stories” feeling.

Bassford describes her book at one point as a “book full of sermon illustrations” and in some sense it very much is.  She has a very disarming and humorous way of applying the many experiences in she has had as a minister and a district superintendent in Texas.  The sheep slapping incident is not to be missed!  And as a collection of amusing, inspiring, and motivating stories, it works quite well.

What doesn’t work so well in this approach is that it’s hard at times to pull out the practical directions that her stories imply.  Like all stories, they suggest a multitude of meanings.  While the strength of this multitude of meanings is that everyone can find something to work with in most all these stories, they don’t point the way to a coherent “plan of action.”  So, as a reader, I end up saying, “These are charming stories that cause me to reflect on what ministry can be, but I’m still no closer to understanding what UMC polity should look like to enable such ministry.”

But perhaps that’s Bassford’s point.  The strongest sense I get from reflecting on this book is that maybe we’re not at the point where coherent action as an international body is a possibility yet.  We need to truly listen to one another’s stories without the anxiety of having to act as a body or respond to one another just yet.

Bassford is spot on correct in saying that “stories work on us and change us.”  And particularly stories of God’s grace in the world.  The Reconciling Ministries Network recognizes this in their approach to training people to talk about love and acceptance for LGBT people in The UMC through telling personal stories of God’s grace and love for LGBT people.  Such stories humanize what many consider to be simply a theological or scriptural controversy.  Stories change how we talk about one another because, when we actually listen to one another, we see images of ourselves in others and a reflection of the God in whose image we are all made.  And if there’s one thing the Methodist Left, Right, and Center often lose sight of in the political mechanizations that lead us up to and through General Conferences, it’s that we need to listen to each other for these very reasons.

So, with that in mind, Bassford’s book perhaps has a lot to offer our discussion of UMC polity.  However, she doesn’t always draw that out and make it explicit.  So…it’s probably going to be very easy to overlook this book in the discussion.  And to me, that’s a big shame.  Primarily because this book starts closer to where I wished Focus and Back to Zero did, with a theological understanding of what it means to be a church.  Bassford grounds her theology of the church in relationships (although she could have done a more explicit job of calling it a theological point of view) and moves forward from that point letting it shape her discussion of The UMC.  So for all this book doesn’t have, it does let theology lead the discussion in a way that the previous two books on our list did not.

I have survived the grade-a-thon that is midterms weekend and will actually get this blog post up in time!  While it is my fault for setting assignments that come due at midterms for all three of my classes at Gallaudet University, it’s also somewhat unavoidable to have this sort of crunch in the middle of the term.  While students may procrastinate until the last minute then complain about having a rough week of writing papers for all their classes in one week, teachers are stuck with it.  We can be lenient and have things due the last day the class meets in that week, but we have only until the next Monday at noon to get our grades in to the registrar!  Students don’t always realize this as they often belabor under the notion that they’re doing all the work in the classroom and we’re cruising on easy street.  It’s not quite as cushy of a job as a pastor who “only works half a day week” but it’s (mis)perceived in the same manner!  So I tend to grouse about it and make sure my students know the troubles I see.

But random musings aside, let’s talk about Gil Rendle’s Back to Zero, current book up in Jeremy Smith’s Lenten syncblog study over at Hacking Christianity.

There’s a lot I like about this book.  Rendle’s primary thrust is that The United Methodist Church needs to shed a great deal of its institutional calcification that has built up over the years and return to being a movement of the people, led by the Sprit.  This call to be more of a movement than an institution resonates well with me as I recall taking United Methodist History from Jean Miller Schimdt at the Iliff School of Theology and getting a sneak preview of the page proofs for Heitzenrater’s Wesley and the People Called Methodist as one of our textbooks.  Heitzenrater’s take on Methodism’s early days is that it was largely a movement of the working class masses.  Wesley, having been denied his own parish, began preaching in the fields to workers as they left their jobs after a gruelingly long day of factory exploitation.  Much of what became the Methodist movement was not only a religious revival among these people but a rise in class consciousness as working class people began to mobilize and organize for their own interests in religious affairs instead of accepting the nature of class structure in England which left them shut out of many Anglican churches.

The idea of a church as a movement where the everyday person can become involved and invested in expressing, discussing, and developing their own faith based responses to the trials and troubles they face is pretty much what I point toward in my dissertation as the primary task of practical theological methodology.  Rendle plays the movement card throughout his book in pushing a missional vision of The UMC in loosening rules that restrict to allow for local flexibility to reach outward.  Thus The UMC of the future, for Rendle, will be less of an institution that creates members to perpetuate its existence and more of a movement to “make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.”  Which, of course, is The UMC mission statement.

With all this going for it, you probably think I’m a big fan of this book by now.  Well, the news is, I’m really not.  I’m ambivalent at best about what Rendle puts forward for his solutions on how to get “back to zero” and turn The UMC into a movement again.  What makes me ambivalent is that I don’t see Rendle letting theology lead this process.  While Rendle’s movement talk is theologically informed in my opinion, he doesn’t really unpack and examine where this theology comes from.  If he did so, he might find that Wesley’s practical theological approaches might lead us back to zero in a much different way than the techniques he proposes.

So where does Rendle get his techniques of Church metrics?  By and large, they seem to carry the language of business management models  His talk of the entrepreneurial spirit or most productive churches jumps out in page after page.  And this is where my, by now tired and overused, phrase of “trading Methodist bureaucrats for Methodist technocrats” comes from.   In 1968, The UMC merged and borrowed a system of interlocking boards and agencies from the corporate world without much regard for theological reflection on how this structure would shape ministry.  I fear we’re doing the same in 2012 in borrowing metrical methods of “nimble businesses.”

As previous posts mention, I’m not necessarily against metrics, I just would like to see them led by theology rather than a business ideology.   When we start talking about “marketing the church to a new generation” I get nervous because I know that business sense says “skip the small markets, they’re not profitable.”  It’s this familiarity with business models that makes me buy Deaf theology and ministry books the moment I find them, because I know they’ll be out of print in less than a year and are lucky to see print in the first place.

What might it look like if instead of adopting capitalist influenced business models for the backbone of our polity and instead used Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals?  Aside from what might be a somewhat entertaining apoplectic fit by those on the political right of our denomination, it would provide a much different shape to our transformation into a movement.

So my concern is that much of what we’re talking about in the Call to Action metrics and Back to Zero metrics is driven by business ideology rather than allowing theology to lead.   The dangers of letting ideology lead theology instead of vice versa are a well worn path.  Critics of Latin American liberation theology often make this claim.  Much of that critique though was a huge red herring drug across the path of Latin America which was driven by the ideology of the Cold War rather than theology itself.  Critics were guilty of letting ideology lead theology as well.  And no matter how entertaining an Alinsky style denomination might be, it too would fall into this trap.

What makes ideology different from theology then?  In my view, ideology is a systematic construction of beliefs that provides all the right answers.   Theology, for me, is the flip side of this coin where we construct our beliefs in a continual search for the right questions.  In recognition of the Theos portion of theology, because the answers we seek are ultimately not of our own making, we can never fully know them.  Therefore, theology will never be a completed task where we can say we have and know all the answers and simply need to implement them.  Letting ideology lead theology flips this relationship in a dangerous way and says, “This interpretation of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience is correct and therefore implementing it in this way is our Wesleyan tradition.”  Or if your source is external to ecclesial discussions in general, “This approach to transforming an organization from an institution to a movement is a proven business model, therefore we must implement it in our churches to achieve the same goal.”

But, the dangers of walking a path made by others in methodology (theological or otherwise) are real risks in my view.  One of my critiques of Hannah Lewis’ Deaf Liberation Theology is that despite the fantastic contributions she makes toward Deaf liberation, she’s following the path of Latin American liberation theology with Deaf vocabulary without considering what methodological changes might arise from doing theology in ways that mesh with Deaf cultural practices.  Thus she may be missing out on an opportunity to make Deaf informed contributions to theological method as well as contributions to theology that informs Deaf ministry.

In the same manner, by adopting business models for the transformation of our institutional church into a movement of the masses, I’m wondering if we’re missing a vital opportunity to let theological questions lead this transformative process in new and creative ways.

Ok Kirk, focus now…focus!  Honestly, it was a hectic weekend and I just finished this book this morning.  Hence why my syncblog is posting in the PM hours instead of earlier. But since Hacking Christianity hasn’t posted up their main snycblog either, I don’t feel terribly guilty.

Let me begin by saying I didn’t expect to like this book.  However, that was based on the presumptive knowledge that this is the “death tsunami” book talked about in UMC circles.

I dislike the metaphorical use of tsunami to explain the inevitable effect of an ever aging denomination.  Weems chooses this term because he’s looking for something that triggers alarm and horror.  He states,

In the Scriptures, prayers and hymns of our tradition, our psalmists and poets described dire situations in the most compelling words they could find– a flood of mortal ills, as in the summer drought, a famine of compassion, life shaken as by an earthquake.  Some images have become so familiar that we may no longer be moved by these stark words.  Even so, one must be cautious when using analogies or metaphors that mirror such tragedies, recognizing that the effects of physical disaster differ from the results of the dire situations that writers attempt to describe.

Whether its a natural disaster like Indonesia or Japan or the political tragedy of the Zimbabwean ‘tsunami’ of Operation Murambatsvina, those events are talking about lives cut short with sudden violence. The very terror Weems wants to evoke in using the word tsunami is created by a sudden, wrenching, ‘gone before its time’ sort of death.

While one can play metaphorically with a UMC gone before its time, this works against his later description of a denomination that’s moved into its maturity and perhaps old age.  The actual human deaths of his ‘Death Tsunami’ are largely natural results of the aging process and by metaphorical extension, perhaps the institutional deaths he reference are a natural result of aging as well.

It seems that in playing the tsunami card metaphorically, he cheapens the actual human lives cut short in tragedies that are still fresh in the minds of the world and traumatic effects on the survivors even as you read this. I’m not comfortable with using tsunami from a pastoral theology point of view. Even when discussing polity, we cannot forget we are also pastoral caregivers in all we do.

This concern aside, its a very accessible book in presenting Weems’ theses regarding how The UMC needs to engage in both changing our techniques of ministry but also adapting to our contemporary contexts.  He gives a lot of attention to the need for The UMC to focus resources on reaching younger (if not “the young”) generations and committing itself to diversifying our denomination to match the diversity of the US.  What Weems contributes in this book to the wider discussion of issues is not engaging these as separate issues but seeing how they are intimately connected.  That means he recognizes two important things: 1) the younger generations are far more diverse than we realize and they value that diversity, and 2) this increased diversity is a result of larger population growth among racial ethnic minorities when compared to white population growth in the US.

In short, a failure to become comprehensible to racial ethical minorities = a failure to become comprehensible to younger generations and vice versa.

His remarks on the efficiency of smaller boards and agencies does resonate with me.  An example from The UMC’s experience with Deaf ministry comes to mind.  In 1988, the General Conference commissioned a study group to gather information on Deaf and hard of hearing ministries in the denomination.   This study committee quickly grew to somewhere between 25 to 30 members in the eight years of existence.  This not only made it difficult to meet in person but also made decision making processes very complicated and, at times, contentious.

With the 1996 General Conference looming ahead, that study committee had produced a statistical survey that gathered limited data on the severe lack of awareness and access to The UMC for Deaf and hard of hearing people.  I was in charge of writing legislation that led to a small 10 person committee that would be responsible for a fairly specific task over the next quadrennium.  That task was to enable small teams of our members and others in regional areas to identify annual conferences who were receptive to learning more about ministry with those who are Deaf and hard of hearing and run comprehensive awareness events.

We did find that we were able to balance geographic representation, laity/clergy, gender, race/ethnicity, and the varieties of Deaf, hard of hearing, late deafened, and Deafblind identities within a 10 person committee.  We also found that a 10 person committee given a specific task led to a very efficient decision making process that enabled us to make whirlwind tours of the connection doing our awareness events and thus equipping and engaging new people in the idea of doing ministry with our communities.  This committee became a standing committee under GBGM and was also tasked with disbursing funds allocated by the General Conference for our ministries as well as funds collected in an Advance Special account for Deaf ministry.  (click. give.)

In its second quadrennium however, it became more focused on being a granting body with these funds and less emphasis was given to awareness events.  Unfortunately, the work of the 10 seemed to drift somewhat as the subcommittee on grants was engaging in a lot of the work around the granting process while other members were unsure what their tasks involved.

So when I read Weems talking about smaller more efficient committees with specific tasks, I found myself nodding my head with the experience I had in seeing this work quite well.  Yet when I read that such committees would become primarily granting agencies, I found myself shaking my head thinking, “no, it’ll need more than that in some way in order to work.”

I’d also like to reflect on Weems’ approach to outcome based reporting.  Weems’ rationale for moving to outcome based reporting of congregational ministry is very much in alignment with what the Call to Action (CTA) report proposes.  However, he is not quite explicit as the CTA report in what is to be measured as a mark of vitality.  This works to his advantage as he articulates a somewhat different vision of metrics than the CTA and Vital Congregations puts forward.  Yet it also works against him at times as his inexactness also allows for a tacit endorsement of the CTA proposals.  I have my own reservations about what we need to measure in church metrics.

What Weems gets right is that outcome based metrics need to be sensitive to local contexts.  What one church needs to measure to declare their vitality might be quite different than what another church needs to measure.  Yet when Weems wants to tie these metrics to funding and resource allocation, we run into the difficulty of comparing apples and oranges.

So we encounter a pit and pendulum here.  Different metrics for different contexts will make funding allocation a somewhat subjective decision by those granting funding and those making appointments of clergy to congregations.  On the opposite side of the pendulum the CTA seems to suggest by imposing a “one dashboard to rule them all and in the darkness bind them” metric system is to provide a technocratic objective measure that for comparison.   The pit beneath this pendulum is of course the difficulty of measuring theological concepts like “discipleship” and “transformation of the world” in the first place.  Blah!

Stepping back from this conundrum for a bit, I recalled my experience with a Deaf non-profit agency in Boston where I worked part time while writing my dissertation prospectus.  DEAF, Inc. is a fantastic example of a grassroots organization becoming a vital provider of services that no one else provides.  It began as a part of the nationwide spread of the Independent Living Movement and has branched out in a number of other areas as the Deaf community in Boston has identified them.  They are largely funded by government grants for social services and in particular, independent living services.  During my time there, we were transitioning to outcome based reporting that was being mandated by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

A transition to outcome based reporting meant that instead of counting how many service hours were spent helping people find housing, we were going to be counting how many people we assisted in successfully finding housing.  This caused a great concern because many of us knew that the numbers wouldn’t look so good…not because we weren’t helping people look but because there was so little affordable housing available and wait lists were absurdly long.  But how would this impact our funding when people in the budget rooms of the government who had little knowledge of what we do looked at the statistical reports?  Our anxiety was looming large!

However, we were given the flexibility to establish our own outcomes and build our metrics with sensitivity to what we were doing.   That is, the ultimate outcome goal was six months of stable residency in affordable housing.  But what we would be measuring is each step of the process along the way.

For example:

Goal:  Six months of stable residency in affordable housing.

In the last year how many consumers of our services have:

1.  Spent six months in stable residency in affordable housing

2. Begun residency in affordable housing

3.  Applied for three or more affordable housing programs

4.  Identified 10 possible affordable housing options for application

5.  Begun training to understand how affordable housing programs work

6.  Identified themselves as needing affordable housing

As you can see, with such metrics, we could easily identify the many many people we worked with along the path to affordable housing and what we were doing with them to move them along that path.  It would provide those unfamiliar with the work a snapshot of what we do and also a glimpse into where the glitches in the process may be.  If we had a lot of people progressing along this path and getting stuck at metric #3, then that would indicate the problem with not reaching the ultimate goal lies outside of our work and in the lack of affordable housing.

This sort of outcome based metric system would provide funders (the government budget wonks in this case) with a much clearer picture of what the problems are than “we provided x number of hours helping consumers with affordable housing issues.”

It would also reshape how our agency viewed and designed our work.  Previously, we’d simply sit down with people 1:1 and help them start filling out forms and getting on waiting lists.  They’d end up with no real understanding of why they were forever waiting when they needed housing.  With this sort of metric, we’re engaged in first identifying the needs, training consumers to understand the process, then engaging them in identifying options and filling out applications.  It becomes more empowering for consumers of our services to learn these skills and become self advocates.  It also builds an awareness among not only agency workers but consumers of our services where the problem really lies and this awareness can be translated into community organizing for advocacy work to push for more affordable housing.

Weems seems to understand this sort of contextualized outcome based reporting and tracking when he discusses the idea.  Yet he doesn’t spell it out specifically enough to translate this into ministry contexts.  Instead, we’re left with the CTA wanting to measure the number of professions of faith, membership, worship attendance, etc.

What if we explode these “ultimate outcome goals” into contextualized tiers of metrics like what I did above?

Completely off the top of my head and through my fingertips into my iPad, maybe something like this would be possible:

Outcome desired:  More professions of faith next year than this year.   (This is lifted directly from Weems’ ideas for creating achievable forward looking outcomes.)

Working from a theological understanding that a profession of faith is the result of an understanding and acceptance of the complexities of Christianity and, in the context of this book, United Methodist teachings.  Curiosity in such understandings is unlikely to occur without a hospitable and warm environment to discuss such matters with like minded people.  Working off the study of younger generations I mentioned in a previous post, such community and opportunities for critical engagement with belief is what Millennials are looking for.  Also based on this research, service programs are more likely to attract these younger people than traditional activities like worship.  Based on this practical theological understanding we might end up with metrics that look something like this:

In this year, how many people have we engaged in the following:

1.  Professions of faith.

2.  Educational opportunities for study of Christianity and United Methodist teachings.

3.  Small community fellowship groups that extend hospitality

4.  Invitations to our worship services.

5.  Invitations to programs, activities, and service opportunities in our community.

6. First contact with those outside of our usual congregational demographics.

You can start to see how this gives steps to achieve along the way to genuine professions of faith that become achievable measurable goals in their own right.  It also allows a congregation to identify what aspects this process are becoming roadblocks.  If invitations to service programs aren’t connecting with worship services, then we have an indicator that it’s time to sit down with these people and ask what they’re looking for in a worship service and create something that deepens the spiritual and theological aspects of their service engagement.

While the apples v. oranges concern comes when comparing what different metrics among different congregations in different contexts.  I think this sort of outcome based reporting that is led by theological understandings developed within and for the contexts of local churches would serve to create more vital congregations than the CTA dashboards I’ve seen.

So, despite the weakness of Weems not going as far with outcome based reporting and connecting it to his general push to contextualize revitalization and mission in The UMC, he did get me thinking in practical ways in developing alternatives to what I see wrong with many dashboard indicators I’ve seen proposed.

Hats off to a successful engagement in dialgoue!