Rethinking the Mission of the Church...and Fear for the Future!

I just got back from a Residence in Ministry (RIM) conference where we spent the 2 looong days hearing from 2 United Methodists about various Wesleyan theology and church issues. Honestly, I found it difficult to see the point of a lot of what we discussed, and a lot of it was coming from a professor who taught us like it was a classroom- lots of "stuff" but not a lot of "here's what you DO with this in your church." Needless to say, I was frustrated. If you're going to spend several HOURS talking AT us, at least give us some practical knowledge that we haven't already heard from our Wesleyan theology classes in seminary.

Anyway, the discussion did get interesting at a few points. The first was when a pastor of one of IN's larger UM churches got up and basically ripped apart the mission statement of the UMC as a whole: "The mission of the church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world." He basically called this statement idealistic and naive, and that anyone who actually bought into it was "confused" and "muddled" to say the least. Read his blog post that he read directly from HERE. This got quite a reaction from several people. His most promising argument said that he had issues with the statement because, Who are we to think we can transform the world when it is GOD who is our transformer? While I can certainly see where he is coming from on some of his qualms with the mission statement, I certainly still see the statement as valid. True, it is God who ultimately transforms us through Jesus Christ, but we are to be the Body of Christ- the hands and feet of Christ in the world. Therefore, we are to transform lives in the way we love and share the good news of Jesus through our actions and words when necessary. Another good argument was that yes, the idea of transforming the world does seem too ideal and out of reach. But we Wesleyans like the idea of always "moving onto perfection," always striving for peace, hope, and love, even though we probably won't see everything come together perfectly in our lifetimes. The point is that we are to have hope, to do the best we can, to transform the world one person at a time through the grace that we are so freely given. The point that kept running through my mind was that Jesus does transform lives, and we are to help aid in that transformation, so why shouldn't that be our mission statement? We were also reminded that we in America live in comfort every day and we forget how much transformation does happen elsewhere in the world on much bigger scales. We have colleagues serving in Kuwait and Africa who see lives transformed in much bigger and different ways than we could ever imagine happening here in the US. We also don't realize that in many parts of the world, that being a Christian is a crime or could put one in danger. Christians are killed every day around the world, and yet we can sit here in the US and complain about how our mission statement is ruining the church? At least we have the freedom to make disciples and begin to transform the world, while in other parts of the world, to utter the name of Jesus might mean death.

There was also a disturbing moment in the discussion where one of my RIM colleagues made a comment about his ministry with mentally challenged people and how these persons cannot transform the world. Obviously this hit a nerve with some of us, who may have special relationships with someone mentally challenged who transform us every day. Regardless of your mental capacity, your life is still transformed by Christ, by the people who minister to you because of their love for Christ, and really, these people usually transform us more than we transform them. This was a moment where I feared for the future of some of our churches. More on that in a moment...

So my personal conclusion was that this pastor had some misguided qualms about the mission statement of the church. If we cannot at least set a goal for some kind of transformation to happen through the grace of God, then what are we setting out to do?

I also found myself sitting among pastors who were obviously misguided about the sacrament of baptism. I couldn't believe some of what I was hearing! I heard people say that they were baptized more than once, despite their understanding of prevenient grace. I heard people saying that they have re-baptized people (which is a HUGE no no in the UMC, which believes that it is God's love and grace that is present in baptism is solid and good enough for the one time- to re-baptize would be to doubt God's grace and action in our lives.) I heard people say that their congregants have asked for re-baptism and the pastors did not question their motives or understanding of baptism, or bother to teach them about the sacrament. Is this really the future of the church? No wonder the Board of Ordained ministry harps on us about the meaning and understanding of baptism. After hearing some of the responses to this session, I can't really blame them.

Needless to say, we had a few interesting discussions, and as my good friend and colleague said, "Our humanness was definitely present" during these discussions. I hope that we all took away that we need to reflect on our ministries and what we need to be doing as pastors that set a positive influence, both practically and theologically. I fear that a lot of us have a long way to go!