Where are the youth?

One of the common laments we church people utter when we think about our churches is the basic absence of meaningful youth programs. I can’t help but think that the youth of Hartford are lamenting this fact too.

Just a few weeks ago, a man was shot thirteen times on Farmington Avenue, a block and a half away from our church. A woman was also shot by a stray bullet. Remarkably, the man survived. The same night, an eleven year old was shot in an incident in the North End. Both of these shootings are thought to be gang related.

Gang signs mark the streets of the West End. Our church’s parking lot sign was recently “tagged.” Our schools are filled with violence and drugs, and I’m talking about elementary schools…

In typical fashion, many in our community want to deemphasize these realities, fearing that such news only affirms the worst opinions of our city. I understand that fear. Hartford is a great city – with great cultural institutions, great parks and green spaces, great businesses and opportunities. We have much to celebrate.

But Hartford – and the surrounding nexus of interrelated communities and towns – has a deep sickness. Inner city children are the ones who pay the hardest price for the poverty, broken families, and incompetent schools. Sadly, I know why the youth of Hartford are not in our churches. And though I don’t like spreading bad news, I don’t like avoiding hard realities either.

Can we in the church inject some good news into these stories? Can we find a way to transform a culture of drugs and violence with a message of hope and a commitment to peace? Can we equip our children – and they are ALL our children – with a sense of God’s love for them and the self-respect and dignity that comes from knowing you are loved? When an elementary aged kid is debating which gang to join or which drug to consume or which classmate to punch, can we offer them a positive alternative?

I would like to think so. But it will require us to face these challenges head on, to refuse to cover up the darker realities around us, to expose those elements that have a vested interest in maintaining a culture of violence, and to work faithfully to provide meaningful and rewarding alternatives to gang and drug culture. It would not be easy. But it would be worthy of our best efforts.

Annual Conference 2010

Each year, the New York Annual Conference meets on Long Island. We gather from all over our conference – the Catskills, the western half of Connecticut, New York City, Long Island. And we hold a large meeting for a few days to worship together and debate various issues and concerns.

Pastors are automatically required to attend, and thus I was there. In addition, each church gets one member to conference, plus an extra member for churches with over 200 in membership. Steve Derby was our lay delegate this year (for the third time!).

The worship services are always a highlight for me, since the feature an upbeat spirit and (generally) good preaching. This year, our guest preacher was Bishop Swanson, who offered a fiery and energized sermon during the Ordination Service. His words reminded me of why I got in to this line of work in the first place, and inspired me to remember my own ordination (which featured a much less dynamic sermon…).

In this technologically sophisticated age, you can see much of Annual Conference online. If you have never been to conference, it’s a good way to get a sense of the event.

A missional community

What makes a church? That’s a really good question. This article challenged me to think about that question again.

What if we decided to create a “missional community” for the people of Hartford? It might not look like a church as we commonly think of it….but it might bring more people into an awareness of God’s love and grace.

God’s Initiative

If revelation is to come to human beings, they need to be changed entirely. Faith itself must be created in them.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Act and Being

We are what we are because of God’s initiative, not our own. I suppose this idea is fundamentally the problem some have with evolution. How can we be the result of rational evolutionary processes and at the same time the product of divine creation?

The apparent contradiction, however, is false. It is false because it tries to “out-rationalize” science itself. Creationists use logic to defeat logic. Faith may be intelligible, but it need not be rational. It is first and foremost revelation – an act of divine disclosure – that allows us to be open to ever deeper dimensions of God’s being and acting in this world. Evolution is simply our effort to understand the development of biological species in the context of dynamic environments. It is a valid way of knowing in so far as science allows us to go. Revelation, on the other hand, is only grasped by faith. Faith itself is form of revelation – the envelope in which God delivers the messages about God’s self to us.

I think it is one of Christianity’s worse mistakes to condemn those who do not believe as we do. Such a position ironically undoes faith itself, since it credits the thinker as the origin of the thought. Is not God’s revelation a gift to us? Is not grace an act of God’s own choosing, freely extended to us from beyond ourselves? And if it is not, than what is there to believe?

God is acting in this world. I can’t prove it. But I can believe it.

Prayer and Service

Service and prayer can never be separated; they are related to each other as the Yin and Yang of the Japanese Circle.
– Henri Nouwen in The Living Reminder

When we prayer, we serve. When we serve, we pray. Our actions are simply our prayers given flesh. I often marvel at the insistence that we open and close our meetings in the church with a perfunctory prayer. While these prayers serve as useful “bookends” to the meetings, they seldom raise to the level of prayer as prayer. I remember one of my seminary professors who was confronted by a student who objected to the fact that this professor never began his classes with a prayer. The professor’s response was “What do you think we are doing all hour?”

Prayer is not simply the utterance of formal words. It is the expression of our deepest yearnings. Sometimes we articulate these yearnings with words in solemn petitions. Often it is our actions and deeds that give form and shape to our deep desires. All is prayer.

The Center

Today, with ashes on my head and a heaviness in my heart…

Christ is the center. That is the affirmation of my faith. Not that I put Christ at the center of my life. Rather, God reveals Christ to me as the center of everything. And that is all I have, ultimately, to bet my life on.

Lent is a season of re-centering. Not of putting something in the center, but of returning to the center that is always already there. Perhaps that is the heaviness of heart I feel – a deep, gentle, but decisive tug pulling me closer to that center of all, like a tiny asteroid spiraling around the sun, ultimately to be consumed by its fire.

The center is reveled to be Jesus. God lived and breathed. And died. The center is reveled to be weak, broken, torn, poured out. The center leads us back to the edges and the fringes and the brokenness of our world.

Welcome to the only one in whom we can hope.

Towards a New Model for Discipleship

What would a new model for discipleship look like?

Well, a new model would of course be faithful to the oldest model – that utilized by Jesus and his disciples. Here are some elements of a new/old model for discipleship that migh be helpful for us in the old-line church to consider:

1. Discipleship is about forging relationships. A “disciple” is a student, which suggests that there is a teacher. Our ultimate teacher, of course, is Jesus himself, who called the first disciples. And the relationship that Jesus had with his disciples should be the model for discipleship in the church. We are first of all a community of disciples – which means we are in relationship with each other. And, of course, the fundamental word we use to describe the nature of this relationship is love. The basic instrument for defining our relationship to each other is the covenant.

2. Discipleship is integral to all that we do. Discipleship is not a separate program. It is not limited to learning opportunities (an educational model) or to community outreach (a service model) or to committee membership (a bureaucratic model). Everything that we do as the church is a form of discipleship. So, when we gather as the church, we should be deepening our relationships with each other and God as we cultivate our discipleship by being the church.

3. Discipleship is a life-long journey. Though we affirm the idea of perfection in the Methodist tradition, we always remain disciples. People need ongoing opportunities to grow in their faith, and the church can provide a wide variety of ways that people can engage in discipleship based on where they are in their faith walk. One-size-fits-all approaches fail to acknowledge the various phases of life and the different needs of real people.

4. Discipleship is an open process. God calls us as we are. There are no requirements for starting on the journey of discipleship. Everyone is invited. God calls us all. A special focus should be placed on those who are entering the life of discipleship for the first time, and the church can be intentional in extending the invitation and creating entry points for those new to discipleship.

5. Discipleship is dynamic and engaged. Disciples gather in order to accomplish a goal or fulfill a purpose. Fellowship, learning, growing are all valid reasons for disciples to gather – but the reason should be clear and everyone should be committed to the purpose. Disciples support each other in their shared journey of discipleship in a loving relationship defined by covenant in order to discern and fulfill their calling.

Maybe discipleship can be defined in other ways. Perhaps there are modifications to these ideas that you would suggest. But I think these five points serve as a good foundation for a discussion about what discipleship is and how we, as the church, might facilitate people in their response to God’s calling in their lives.

Rethinking Discipleship

Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.”
- Luke 5: 10b

I wonder what happened to that idea. Somewhere along the way, the church stopped catching people. Or, I should say, the mainline protestant church in America stopped catching people.

The mission of the church, from the days when Jesus walked the earth to the present moment, has essentially been the same: make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. It is a clear, simple mission, and yet it seems so hard to rally the mainline church around this fundamental task. We have become overburdened with buildings we built to accommodate large congregations that only lasted for a season. We have invested in the nurture and care of the needs of our present congregation at the neglect of reaching out to a changing culture around us. We have encouraged our children to accelerate their careers and their futures while sacrificing their religious, ethical and moral development.

We need to rethink discipleship for a new time.

Discipleship can begin at any stage of life. For some, it begins at birth with baptism and a lifetime of growth and teaching in the church. But for many today, spiritual formation and faith development are agendas adopted later in life. The church is challenged to meet people where they are, recognizing that everyone is in a slightly different place. For some, the basics of faith – prayer, Bible study, worship – are alien concepts. For some, there is a hunger for a sophisticated approach to scripture. For some there is a need for a deepening spiritual awareness. Needless to say, no one pastor can provide all the needs around us. A comprehensive approach to discipleship will require the focused efforts of the entire congregation. Leaders will need to rise up who are willing and able to joyfully lead people through various stages of growth.

Discipleship is our business. It is the mandate Jesus gave the earliest disciples even as they themselves were being called into a life of discipleship. Our faith is worth sharing with a world that desperately needs the rich resources of our tradition, faithfully interpreted for a new time. As we look to the people of Greater Hartford, we are presented with an amazing challenge and a great responsibility. The gospel is ours to proclaim. As we extend the invitation we must match those who respond with an opportunity to grow that meets their needs.

Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

As the annual tradition of celebration and reflection begins, I hope your heart is filled with expectation. Each year, we remember the birth of Christ and are presented once again with the opportunity to welcome Jesus more deeply into our lives. As a church, we have been taking this season of transformation seriously, hearing the call of John the Baptist to repent and reorient our lives toward God. And we have also been filled with joy as we have celebrated the goodness of our life together and the wonders of God’s love for us all.

Jesus came into this world to be Emmanuel, “God with us.” That is the powerful witness we offer the world in this season. Through our worship, our carols, our special services and events, we proclaim the good news that God has come in the person of Jesus Christ. It is a joyful season that leads us all to ponder the mystery of God’s mercy and grace.

I am always grateful that I have a community of faith within which to reflect, understand, celebrate and embrace this season. I hope you will consider making a special gift to your church as Christmas approaches. Your gift supports our ongoing ministry together.

I also hope that you will take advantage of some of our special Christmas events. I hope you can join us as we celebrate the wonder of the season.

Where is the church?

Something to think about…

(from The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus)