CHURCH AS AN ACQUIRED TASTE

I have just about given up trying to fly out of Washington DC due to thunderstorm delays and cancelations.  My flight was cancelled and United Airlines was unable to get me to Chicago in time to speak to the Northern Illinois Annual Conference.  So I emailed my notes to the Rev. Trey Hall, who spoke for me.  Here are a few excerpts from this speech I never gave, but sort of did...

 

We are gathered tonight in conference.  ...  the first time I ever attended such a Methodist conference, I was appalled.  It was the most tedious and boring human gathering that I had ever witnessed. Some of you were once 24 and attended your first conference, and your response was similar.  

Over the years, conference becomes an acquired taste.  

Sort of like church.

A lot of folks look at our local churches, and at the age of 24, they are just as appalled with our local gatherings as you and I were once concerned about this kind of gathering. To them, church feels boring, pedantic, tedious.  

And they don't stay around long enough to acquire the taste.  

The churches that are having fun in the 21st century are learning to excel in another kind of conferencing.  They are learning how to conference with their neighbors, with people younger than themselves, with people of diverse culture and who come with varied stories and primary values.  They are listening to their neighbors, sharing with them.  And rethinking ways to do gospel community so that we can work with many of the tastes our neighbors have already acquired.  

All of us should be making the effort to learn our neighbors - but new churches have no choice, because unless they connect with community, they will never even make it to the starting line.  So our new churches are the research and development division of American Christianity.

Groups and denominations that plant lots of new churches grow.  Those that don't, they slowly fade away

I travelled to the Philippines this spring to learn from local United Methodists about their amazing turn-around in the last quarter century.  Bishop Emerito Nacpil taught me that the fundamental shift was that the churches reclaimed their missional identity, both in terms of their origin and in terms of the destiny.  That they were born of mission and born for mission.  So every church was expected to plant something, to work a mission site somewhere.  They began to plant churches.  And to grow again as a movement. 

Their shift occurred in the 1980s, and if their UM cousins in America had made the same shift at that time, we would be looking at about 20 million United Methodists today instead of 7.5 million.  In the Manila Cavite Annual Conference, all the pastors tithe to a conference fund for new church development, forcing their laity to step up to the plate to carry financial support of the existing congregations, and raising a lot of cash to fund new church start leaders.  And the new churches continue to innovate and to teach the rest of the churches what works, what it takes to reach increasingly diverse people.  And so they grow, and they grow, and they grow.

Here in Chicago, you are leading the beginnings of such a shift on the American Methodist front.  Where just a few years ago, you rarely started a new church, you now are starting them all over the place.  Some of the most creative projects anywhere! The whole church is watching you and starting to learn from you.  ...

Diverse, inclusive, passionately evangelical, Jesus-centered, multiplying, mission-centered - your community of new churches, rapidly expanding, yours is one of the best ministry R/D labs on the planet.  It is a game-changer!

So I want to say, 'Thank you, Northern Illinois Conference for your leadership. You are helping to invent 21st century American Methodism.'