How to Help After a Natural Disaster

In the wake of recent hurricanes Milton and Helene, many people are looking for ways to help. Six years ago, my community was devastated by Hurricane Michael. Prior to going through that tragedy, I had led mission efforts and responded to natural disasters for decades. And yet, being the recipient of mission taught me lessons I could have learned no other way. I 'd like to share some of those lessons to be hlepful to those who are inclined to serve.

First and foremost, I learned anything that anyone does makes an enormous difference. I experienced some kinds of help that were extremely helpful and some that were less helpful. But for those in a disaster zone, just knowing that people care and haven't forgotten makes all the difference. During Michael, I had one man from Oklahoma send our church over $20,000 to help victims. A church from Ohio send us a small prayer quilt. A huge financial gift and a prayer quilt were both extremely precious--they were both signs that while the national consciousness moved on quickly, many people still cared and that we would not be alone in recovery. So, whether it's a donation, or sending a team to clean up debris, or putting together a flood bucket, do something, anything. It makes more of a difference than you can ever imagine. Even if you serve small way and even if you make mistakes in serving, it's better than not serving at all.

That being said, let me share some things that I didn't know before I went through Michael that changed the way I will serve in the future.

I learned that communities experience distinct phases of recovery after a disaster, and that the help they need in each phase is dramatically different in each phase. Immediately after a disaster, power is out, roads are blocked, homes are destroyed, grocery stores closed. Things feel apocalyptic. Big disaster organizations, whether governmental or charitable, are set up for long term recovery, so much of the immediate stabilization happens through churches and neighbors helping neighbors. In the first week or two after Michael, bottled water was desperately needed, but once the water came on, we didn't need it anymore. Churches heard we needed water and weren't able to send it quickly enough to help us, but by the time it arrived we had little use for it and it stacked up in an enormous pile that took nearly a year to be used up.  People on the ground are grateful for any help at all, so they will not tell you when something that was once helpful has become a burden. For example, they won't tell you not to send clothes because they are afraid to sound ungrateful and because they are afraid that they won't get the help they need if they reject what they don't need. So an enormous pile of clothes ends up sitting outside the church begging for anyone to take it. It makes a big difference to be sensitive to this reality. If you want to be as helpful as possible, especially in the first few weeks after the storm, give the help needed when it's needed for the appropriate phase of recovery. How do you know what's needed when? Ask the people on the ground. 

I learned that various organizations partner together to serve affected communities after storms, and I learned what each group does in relation to the others. United Methodist Committee on Relief provides money in the form of huge grants. UMCOR's grants are distributed through Annual Conferences. What they do best is "case management"--they train local people to serve in a role like a social worker specifically for disaster victims. Mennonites have the best teams of house builders. Mormons have the software that keeps track of all the projects in a community and they send huge teams of young people for very short term clean up. I've seen up close what FEMA does and does not do, what Red Cross does best (their shelters during the storm itself are indispensable, for example). I never would have known the infrastructure of disaster response without experiencing up close and being part of it. I've learned from this experience that giving money is super important for many reasons. Going to a place and doing projects is good, sending supplies is good, giving money is really good. These people know what they are doing. UMCOR is better than you can imagine, and the stuff we know they do like flood buckets and sanitary kits all comes from on-the-ground understanding of what really helps. Also, United Methodist Annual Conferences really do great work, and they often have to wait for the grants to come through from UMCOR, so giving to UMCOR and also to the Annual Conference creates flexibility and helps with immediate needs.  Also, disaster organizations have extremely strict guidelines for the use of disaster funds for good reason. But those very good guidelines can sometimes be restrictive in ways that make it difficult to help with situations on the ground. During Michael, we had several hundred thousand dollars given to our church that went directly to help people in our community, and without those donations many people would never have been able to be helped or would have had to wait a long time to get any relief.  So finding a trusted local church with a terrific accountability structure within a disaster zone to support with relief funds is wise also. I have a dear friend, Ed Glaize, who is pastor of the United Methodist Church in Boone, NC, and I am glad to see people sending support to his church as they serve that area. I've noticed that First UMC in St. Petersburg, FL has a QR code on their website specifically for disaster relief. It really helps to give money, and it really helps to give money through UMCOR, conference disaster relief, and a trusted local church. 

I also learned that quite a few people who go on mission have an unrecognized desire to have a certain experience on their mission trip. I learned to pay close attention to the teams coming to help and to try to find them work that would meet their desire for the kind of experience they wanted to have in serving.  I learned that occasionally teams could be difficult if the work we asked them to do didn't provide the experience they desired.  Many years ago, I went to help in Biloxi, MS after Katrina. We were asked to help with debris at a large, nice home. At the time, I had mixed feelings about helping someone who appeared to be well-off when I assumed there must by many less fortunate people who needed help more. Since going through Michael, I learned that a disaster puts everyone at the same level, that everyone needs help. As someone who has now coordinated teams with projects, I understand just how difficult it is to identify the work that needs to be done and to coordinate the teams and their abilities with the known needs.  I've looked back on my thoughts and feelings while working at that big house in Biloxi with regret. If every team came with a willing spirit and without judgement, the recovery work would be far more efficient. At one point I had someone on a team complain about a person who seemed to be taking more supplies than the team member thought he needed. What that person didn't realize was that the person was distributing supplies in his neighborhood, that no one was hoarding or taking advantage. Everyone was just trying to help everyone survive. Like I said before, it's better to show up and make mistakes than to stay home. But if you want to help, it's more helpful to come with a willing heart without judgement to serve however needed to whomever you are sent for whatever project you are assigned. I can still remember the conversations with people who simply told me the skills and resources they could bring and told me to just put them to work wherever and however they could be helpful. A few times a dealt with knowledgeable and experienced team leaders who could tell I was feeling them out for the kind of "experience" they were looking for, and knowingly assured me they only wanted to help however they could.  Those people with open servant hearts were like angels of God to us.

Here's something else I learned about mission from going through Michael--people are more important than the task. The debris will get cleared, the roof will be repaired, supplies will be distributed. Eventually the work will get done, and it makes an enormous difference to do the work and help the people see progress. But when a disaster survivor seems to be holding you up from your job to talk to you about their pain, listening to that person is the priority. When a tough guy breaks down in tears talking about how he doesn't recognize the town he's lived in his whole life, hearing him out is what he needs. People in a disaster zone need to talk when they need to talk (or not talk when they don't want to talk). After Michael, I was invited to go to the Bahamas to help following Hurricane Dorian. We had no task, no project. We just listened to people, especially pastors. They were so grateful. If I hadn't gone through Michael, I wouldn't have understood why a mission trip with no task was important. It was important because people are important. By all means, do the task. But go for the people.

Here's something else I learned--the world moves on quickly. The news cycle turns over daily. In a week or two, Helene and Milton will be forgotten by most of the nation. When that happens, a deep dread will settle into the collective soul of affected communities. They will feel like the recovery will never end, and, in fact, their communities will have permanent consequences (not all of them bad). People who come in three months and six months and a year will let the communities know that they are not alone, that God has not moved on from them. Those who come after the immediate rush is over will embody hope. It's OK to plan to help with Helene recovery in three months or six months or next year or even the year after that. Help now. Help later.

Something else to be sensitive about--When you go into a disaster zone, you are also going into a person's home. It helps to respect survivors' space and routines. We are all creatures of habit, and none of us likes having our world turned upside down. When a disaster strikes, everything in life gets disrupted. Anything a team can do to respect the need for a community to get back to a sense of normalcy is helpful, and anything that disrupts life further can be a real challenge. When we went through Michael, we were so grateful to Crosspoint Church for putting on our Fall Festival for us. We host a Fall Festival each year, but we just couldn't make it happen on our own without help. Our children needed to dress up in costumes and play games and get candy. On the other hand, we had another team that came in and took over the kitchen. That wasn't so bad. That happened pretty often, actually. But one morning that group decided to make breakfast themselves and for our breakfast Bible study group without asking. When the folks who had planned to cook breakfast showed up and were pushed out of their own kitchen, they were understandably upset. All I'm saying is when you go on mission it helps to be a good houseguest.

Above all, know that when you serve people going through a tragedy of a natural disaster, you make an eternal difference. Any act of service, great or small, will never be forgotten and will touch lives in immeasurable ways. To all who helped us then and to all who are now helping after Helene and Milton, to all who do anything to alleviate the suffering in the world---THANK YOU. You shine like stars in a dark world (Phil. 2:15).

 

Bible Questions/Bible Answers

"I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions and that we need only to ask insistently and with some humility for us to receive the answer from it." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from a letter to Rudiger Schleicher.

During the Reformation and through subsequent centuries, the church was divided about the nature of the sacraments--transubstantiation, consubstantiation, real presence, memorial, and how many sacraments are sacraments. These debates over questions of "what is it?" tore the churches apart. Of course, the debates weren't just about the sacraments, but also about power and who yielded sacramental power. One of the things I love best about my Wesleyan theological heritage is that it shifted the conversation about sacraments from "What is it?" to "What is it doing?" Wesleyanism tends to leave the nature of sacrament to mystery ("musterion") and emphasize that the Trinitarian God is present and working in and through the sacrament. This emphasis is empowering, humbling, and uniting.

The divisive conversation about "What it is" has shifted since the Enlightenment to the question of the nature of Scripture. The fight over the nature of the Bible is even more entrenched because it has even more to do with power. As the authority of the institutional church declined and as human beings increasingly looked to science and observation as a tool to know what we know, scripture was given a new role as a sort of legal authority on the nature of all things. It began to be read as a tool to say "See, the way I think things should be is the way they are because God said so because look here he said exactly what I say in his book and so you have to just swallow it or be against God." And so, now we have debates about the authority of the Bible, inerrancy, infallibility, etc.

What is the Bible for? What does it do? Why did God give it to us? How does it function in our living? Those are better questions. They are uniting questions. They are questions that lead us to listen to God through scripture humbly, to be taught rather than to look for tools to impose our views and ways upon others.

In my experience, I have encountered people with extremely varied views on the nature of the scriptures who humbly yield to the voice of God through it and find a meeting place for a living relationship with God when they read it with open heart. I have also encountered people with all kinds of views of the Bible who use it as a tool to impose their ways and ideas upon others and who never seem to humbly yield before God and seek answers for which they honestly don't know the answers as they listen to God through the Bible.

Provenance

I am a book person, and to book people, the word "provenance" has special meaning. Provenance refers to a book's particular story, its connections to its previous owners and its special relevance as an artifact because of what it meant to the people who have handled it.

For example, I recently read a story about Umberto Eco, the brilliant academic, author, and bibliophile who became famous with has first novel, "The Name of the Rose," in which a monk is murdered by poisoning. The monk had a habit of licking his fingers when he turned the pages in a book, so his murderer put poison on the pages of a book. Eco got the idea for this weird means of murder from a nasty old paperback he bought for 70 cents in a secondhand bookshop. The book had gunky pages that were stuck to one another, and Eco was so disgusted that he had the thought that someone could get sick or die from handling the book. Then the thought occurred to him that a book could be used as a murder weapon. The rest is history. And that little paperback, which was once worthless, is now a valuable and treasured part of literary history. That's provenance.

I suppose one day I will die and someone will cart my many books to the Goodwill. That's fine by me, as long as they get to someone who might read them. At the same time, my books have provenance, too. I wish I could let it be known to whoever makes the decisions about my books one day that these books have stories beyond the ones contained on their pages.

For example, I have my great-grandfather's set of the Harvard Classics, the five-foot shelf of over 50 volumes of the world's greatest literary works. I use them, too. I've read fairy tales to my children from them, my father read the works of a Quaker abolitionist from his grandfather's set when he visited me once, I have little markers from things I've quoted popping out of the tops of the volumes. Frederic Attwood gave them to his son, William Attwood, my grandfather. Long after his death, my grandmother let me have them. They were printed in 1909. My little girl was born over a hundred years later. From time to time she sits on my lap so that I can read the original Cinderella story to her. They are more than books to me.

I also have a set of Brittanica Great Books, the other big collection of the best writing human beings have produced. The family of Rev. Torrence Maxey gave them to me from his library after he passed away. Torrence Maxey was an amazing man--a United Methodist pastor and District Superintendent who had served as a chaplain in combat during the Korean War. During the Civil Rights Movement, Superintendent Torrence Maxey once went uninvited to a church meeting in which the congregation was voting to leave the denomination because they wished to exclude African-Americans. He informed them that they had no authority to make such a choice. They physically threw him out of the meeting. The ensuing legal battle went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which supported what Rev. Maxey said to them in the beginning. That case affirmed that church buildings could not go with a congregation when they left the denomination and held the Methodist Church together through the battles over racial issues. Appropriately, I also have Rev. Maxey's six volume Sandburg biography of Abraham Lincoln.

One day I got a call from the widow of another pastor, Bob Beckley, who had spent most of his career serving a number of roles at Huntingdon College. She told me that he had left quite a few books and that he would have ben pleased if someone would take them who could appreciate them. When I went to her home, she took me to his upstairs study, which was packed with several thousand fine volumes. I didn't want to be greedy, but I also didn't want to disappoint her, so I limited myself to taking about a hundred of the things I found most useful. Only later, I realized that several were signed, including signed copies of books by Reinhold Niebuhr and Harry Emerson Fosdick.

I especially treasure books given to me by perhaps the holiest man I've known closely, Bishop Paul Duffey. He gave me his set of Interpreter's Bible Commentaries. They are underlined and annotated throughout, a sign of his deep engagement with scripture and his sincere life-long efforts to live what the Bible teaches. He also gave me a set of commentaries that were given to him by his student appointment when he graduated from seminary. I had a few others that had belonged to Bishop Duffey's mother, Bible Study books she had used in a class at Montgomery First UMC. I gave those to David Saliba to thank him for officiating my daughter's wedding. I couldn't think of anything more precious to offer him and anything less would have seemed cheap for the gratitude I felt to my brother for being a part of that holy and happy day. That's provenance.

I have books my grandfather gave me, too. When I was a little boy, he would ship me cases of things he had read when he was a little boy himself. Some of them have his name written in the front covers in little boy script. The Penrod books, Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Kidnapped. I learned to love to read from the same books that hooked my beloved grandfather.

I have my mother's Bible. When I was a teenager, she took me out to eat one day. She slid a worn out, underlined, highlighted, falling apart Bible to me. She said, "If I had made different choices in my life, I might have been able to give you things I wasn't able to give you. But because of the choices I made, I am able to give you this instead." I have many Bibles, but this one is the most precious, because this one represents the costly and precious nature of God's Word.

For the last several years, Rev. Al Harbour has been slowly bequeathing major parts of his enormous ministry library to me. His books, too, are ragged, underlined, loved and used. He has given me countless books by modern spiritual gants like Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. They give testament to his deep connection to God. They encourage me to dig deeper into prayer. They always remind me of Al, our friendship across generations, and the partnership we share in the Gospel that spans decades.

I have books signed by my former professors and others who came through while I was in school--Barbara Brown Taylor, Walter Brueggemann, Gail O'Day, Jaroslav Pelikan, Luke Timothy Johnson, President Jimmy Carter, Roberta Bondi, lots more. I always felt a bit awkward asking my teachers to sign their books, but they were always gracious and usually a little embarrassed to be asked. I'm so glad I got them signed anyway.

I have thousands of books and hundreds of stories. I have Rev. Bob Calvert's 19th century Book of Ritual from the M.E. Church. I have a shelf of books written by my grandfather, my great-grandfather, and my mother. I have the copy of "Black Like Me" my father gave me when I was a teenager, a constant reminder of the family heritage of commitment to racial justice he passed to me and I passed to my children.

I have books whose provenance is about my own life story--for example, my New Interpreter's Bible Commentaries, which I bought semester by semester when I was a dirt poor student pastor. I've used them for teaching and preaching ever since, ever mindful of how much they cost me when I used scholarship money each term to buy one volume at a time. Travel books from life-changing trips. My stacks of tattered and marked Bibles.

Maybe someone will care enough about the books to hear the stories attached to them, and maybe someone will want to preserve them in some way. It's very doubtful. Lord knows, my wife would love to never move them again. What "provenance" really means is that the people, relationships, and stories associated with the objects are the source of true treasure, not the objects themselves. So I take heart knowing that what is truly precious about my books can never be taken away, even when they and I are long gone.

Illegal Alien Separated from Parents Dies in Custody

A small child illegally crossed the border from her homeland as her family sought asylum from political persecution. They lived as strangers in another country without proper documentation for several years and had to hide from the authorities.

Her family was eventually found and arrested in a raid. The children were separated from their parents. She was detained in a facility. She contracted a communicable disease and died in custody.

Her name?

Anne Frank.

The Military Historian and the Soldier

I once had a friend who was a world-renowned military historian, perhaps the most knowledgeable Vietnam War scholar alive.

Interestingly, he had never served in the military himself. He knew more about what soldiers had done in the past than any soldier alive. But he had never been in combat, never followed an order, never taken a pledge, never put on a uniform.

We are all tempted to be experts on the Christian faith rather than disciples of Jesus. We can know all about the Bible without ever being gripped by the living Word of God. We can know all about great saints who have come and gone without letting Christ's glory overtake and overwhelm us. We can easily become people who know all about what God used to do in the world while we never notice the miracles all around. We can become experts in mission strategy who never live with a sense of Gospel call. We can drone on all day about the theology of the cross without ever abandoning our lives in self-sacrificial humble love.

May God deliver me from being a military historian and instead make me a soldier for his peaceable Kingdom.

Christian Celebrity as an Eye of the Needle

Two somewhat prominent evangelical figures have recently announced their apostasy via social media. One, Marty Sampson, has led worship and recorded with Hillsong for decades. The other, Joshua Harris, was a pastor and author of "I Kissed Dating Goodbye," a book with inestimable influence on the courtship habits of two generations of evangelical young people. Both have had successful careers and made enormous amounts of money producing content for evangelical culture since its heyday in the 1990s.

We who follow Jesus should grieve the loss of faith for each of these men. We should earnestly pray for them to find authentic discipleship and to find healing for whatever has caused their need to break with the faith.

It's also wise, as much as possible, for the Christian community to do exit interviews with those who walk away from us. We would do well to not only hope for repentance for those who abandon the faith but also to seek redemption for ourselves for whatever signs of brokenness in our community these apostasies reveal.

Perhaps a good place to begin would be to question whether we should have Christian celebrities at all. From the very beginning of the faith, we have had prominent Christians. But most of history's famous Christians have, at the very least, become famous as an accidental by-product of doing something purely for the Gospel's sake. Many of them have run from celebrity and self-promotion. In the early church, many bishops had to be seized by force and made to serve because their humility caused them to run away and hide rather than be promoted.

Jesus himself continually ran away from celebrity. Jesus was the only person ever worthy of worship, and yet he continually commanded those whom he healed to keep quiet. Whenever he sensed that the crowds wanted to make him king, he would run and hide. He lived his life very carefully in humility with actions that determined that he would die a shameful death and be completely dismissed by the greater culture. Most Christians throughout time have recognized that an attention-seeking Christian leader who actively self-promotes in an effort to build a career in Christian ministry has completely missed the point of what it means to follow Jesus.

I am a pastor, and so I can't help but be a public person. I can't help but earn my living and making a wage through leading others in Christian practices. I have always understood that my vocation is filled with spiritual peril. I've made many intentional choices to undermine my own capacity for building myself as what our culture would call a "brand." Sometimes painful choices to sabotage my career in ministry for the sake of my soul and the integrity of my ministry. But I am always aware that in living as a public Christian, even for a person like me, a mediocre, mainline, traditional, small-town pastor, I am seeking to pass a proverbial camel through the eye of a needle.

Soren Kierkegaard was keenly aware of this danger to his discipleship. He went out of his way to avoid attracting admirers. He wrote under pseudonyms. He would leave his study and allow himself to be seen at the opera so that people would think he was lazy and shallow. When he felt that he needed to break an engagement, he made himself appear to be a jerk to his fiancee so that no one would think him noble and so that his fiancee would have easy closure from the relationship. He would be horrified that so many people would eventually become admirers of him and his work. He tried hard to keep this from happening, because he only wanted his work to inspire others to encounter Christ and never notice himself. Kierkegaard's way is unknown in a world of self-promoting Christian celebrity.

I cannot begin to understand what it would be like to be a famous Christian "influencer" filling an arena of adoring "worshipers" in a massive concert-style "event," dressed in the hippest clothes, projected on a jumbotron, and at the same time be expected to authentically maintain a living relationship with a God who shows his values by becoming a peasant murdered by an illegal lynching. I cannot imagine the pressure put upon the marriage of a man who earns millions of dollars and creates a personal industry around identifying himself with a purity movement. How can people in these circumstances not become victims of this celebrity culture? What relief these men must feel after freeing themselves from such a terrible burden.

I have no judgment towards these two men or the many, many more who have likewise walked away from a faith that was so vapid. They are all victims of a culture, even if they unwittingly helped produce it.

My sincere hope is that these two men have not truly abandoned the faith, even if they think they have. My hope is that they have merely abandoned a brand of Christian culture and pseudo-discipleship that cannot help but be fake. I can't help but think that many, many people who live as Christian celebrities are already apostate without realizing it. My prayer is that these two will encounter the real thing. My prayer is also that we all in this American-individualistic, selfie/insta/Kardashian, cult-of-personality culture will likewise lose faith with Christian fakery and be seized by a true savior who invites us to join him on the lonely but satisfying path to the cross.

Kids Acting Up in Church

From time to time a child makes a scene in church and parents or kids' workers freak out about it, or I see a young mom apologizing for their child's behavior in church on social media, or I visit a church and someone prepares me not to be offended by a particularly rambunctious child. In all of these situations I try to minimize the situation as graciously as possible, sometimes making an affirming comment, sometimes smiling and engaging the little person, sometimes gently coaching a volunteer or nursery worker. Behind closed doors with staff people, I have a number of rants about this subject that I'd like to share more broadly. Oftentimes, I'd very much like to stop a church service and share my rant with the congregation, but that's never appropriate. I feel compelled to share publicly my thoughts of this issue:

All people are loved by God unconditionally and their presence in the house of God is a treasured gift. The church's job is not to make them behave. The church's job is to embody Christ's embrace of his children and make sure that these kids want to be in God's house because they know that they are at home with family.

My conviction about this is grounded in our theology. We believe in Gospel, not law. We believe that trying to get people to act redeemed causes them to be confined and either live in chains or to rebel. We believe that God's true law is the law of love, that a living, righteous law is an expression of the fulfilling of the law to love God and neighbor. We believe that when we are fully loved by God, we will learn to reflect that love toward neighbor and that our behavior will straighten itself out on its own.

Unfortunately, many churches fail to embody our theology in the way they treat children. They act as if the purpose of church is moral training. It's because of this bad theology that many adults don't go to church anymore even though they believe church is great for children--they think children need instruction in good behavior but they believe they learned all they need to know when they were kids in church decades ago.  Church is not a finishing school. Church is about the people of God glorifying God for God's sake and being transformed into the image and likeness of Christ by freely receiving the fulness of the love of Christ.

Many children's activities are designed around getting the kids to sit down and shut up, to act right and be good. Undoubtedly, children need to learn to be kind to one another and they sometimes need to be protected from one another so that church is a safe place for every kid.  But sometimes I see adults treat kids in such a way that the unspoken message is, "We are in charge here and you need to learn to tow the line and act right." That's the spirit of law, not the spirit of Gospel. Gospel always sets people free, never compels, constricts, or oppresses. Gospels only trains our behavior to embody love of neighbor.

So what about the kid who makes a racket in worship? Isn't that kid a distraction from the purpose of worship? What about the kid who doesn't pay attention during the children's minute? What about the kid who squirms or yaks at parents or makes faces at the people in the neighboring pew?

Thank God for those kids! They bring life and vitality and a reason to stay awake to the people all around them. In all actuality, most worship services are improved by the kind of distraction caused by kids acting up. I'd certainly prefer the kind of distraction caused from a little kid acting like a little kid than I would a room full of people who are all acting properly and barely keeping awake.

Those kids are a tremendous gift to us. Everywhere in American Christianity, and especially in the United Methodist Church, we are concerned about losing our children. We are concerned about the aging of the church. Why would kids want to come to a church that treats them like they are pupils in school who need to sit up straight and behave?

No one is making these kids come to church. No one in today's culture is going to force them to come to church. They don't have to be there. The days when young parents make their kids come to church out of habit and good citizenry have come to an end. Parents will not drag their kids to church. But, when properly loved and accepted in a fun and Gospel-drenched manner, many children will drag their parents to church or at least find a way to come whether their parents bring them or not.

Kids acting like kids in church don't ever distract me. Not ever. Never. Not when they get loud. Not if they run into the chancel and mess with the microphone. Not if they break free and run all over the place. Not if they throw stuff from the diaper bag so that it loudly reverberates when it hits the stone or wood floor. Not when they sing or yell during the sermon. Not when they dance in the aisle during a hymn. Never ever.

I believe that parents are always, always, always more concerned about their kids being a distraction than anyone else.

I believe that there is no more terrible sound in a church than the horrific silence of a church with no kids to make little kid noises.

As a practical matter, when I look out on a congregation, I generally find that the kids are almost no distraction, but the adults trying to get the kids to behave a a major distraction.  Oftentimes, no one notices a squirmy toddler until someone tries to quiet down or subdue the little person. If you must be concerned about some kid being a distraction, please don't create a distraction by trying to restrain the kid. No one but you, whoever you are, you uptight grown up, cares about the distraction of the kid until you try to restrain the kid. Let the kid be a kid and no one but you will be distracted. Restrain the kid, and now we are distracted. Let it go. Seriously. It's OK.

If the Gospel is true, then we can love these kids, treasure them, give them a family that wants them to be there, find joy in their energy and enthusiasm, keep them busy and fascinated and engaged. And we can expect that the love that they receive will eventually returned in all kinds of ways, including joyfully and freely growing into cooperation with the church's non-distracting, well-behaved worship culture. I'm not sure if that last bit is entirely a good thing.

So grown ups, young moms, children's workers, and all others, pretty please... When kids act up in church, please don't worry about it. Let them be kids. We want them there. Jesus wants them there and, after all, it's his church, not ours. God is the audience of worship, not us, and he's not distracted by his children acting up in church, he loves it.

Me too.

My United Methodist Family

I have not used social media to comment on the recent Called General Conference of the United Methodist Church that addressed LGBTQ+ issues. I will not directly do so here or in any social media post. Many of my online friends are not United Methodists, and this conversation is a family issue. The many Methodists who have talked to me about these decisions have shared views that encompass the full spectrum of our connection. Anyone who is within this family has a right to share their thoughts and feelings freely. But anyone else--it feels to me like they are commenting on my parents' divorce. It's not their business. One reason this is a painful time for us is that we are family with each other and family fights are the most painful.

We all live within our covenants. Our covenantal relationships define our lives. When our covenants are tried, our identity is on the line. Every covenant is tried from time to time. We must sometimes make hard choices to stay in covenant with those with whom we share life or to break covenant. Scripture teaches us that God is a covenantal God, that God keeps covenant with people no matter what. Still, we are fallen people and covenants force our unfaithfulness to bump up against the unfaithfulness of others. Every family, nation, congregation, marriage, friendship faces this challenging dynamic. Sometimes it hurts. From time to time, we are compelled to break covenant. Most of the time, sticking with the covenant forces us to learn the true meaning of love.

I will stay true to my covenant with the United Methodist Church. I will do all I can to seek repentance for myself and grace toward all others.

I have many dear United Methodist friends who are gay, or have children or grandchildren who are gay, or who have ministries with people who are gay. These precious children of God within my denomination are hurting right now. So I hope that my affirmation of my church will not be ill-timed to cause any more hurt.

But I still deeply love the United Methodist Church and all my brothers and sisters, no matter what their views or recent behavior may be. I sincerely hope that our denomination will hold together and that our gifts will continue to be shared with the world-wide body of Christ and for the sake of the healing of the world's suffering.

I share a few of those gifts worth preserving:

First, our denomination provides perhaps the safest environment for the the protection of children and other vulnerable populations of any expression of American Christianity. Our polity, policies, and culture protect the vulnerable and hold predators accountable.

Secondly, the United Methodist Church affirms the ministries of women as consistently as any church. I mostly grew up in more conservative traditions and watched my own mother have her calling to ministry consistently rejected. One reason that I hope our conservative and progressive wings hold together is that our connection provides perhaps the best place in American religious life for a conservative woman who is called of God to fulfill her potential in sharing the Gospel in vocational ministry.

Thirdly, all United Methodists share a deep and practiced conviction of activist mission. When my town was recently devastated by a hurricane, Methodists from around the country came to help us. Some came from WCA churches. Some came from progressive churches. Some held deeply exclusive views, and some actively support full inclusion of LGBTQ persons in all aspects of the life of the church. They all felt compelled by their understanding of the love of God to do something to help our community. We welcomed them all and were grateful to them all.

Fourthly, while United Methodists have theological disagreements, I believe we have the best theology. The world needs Wesleyan theology more now than ever. We have the best understanding of individual and corporate grace and redemption.

We struggle to understand how that theology is applied--we all believe that God loves us as we are and yet God's love transforms us into something else. While we disagree on what transformation looks like, I truly believe that, by and large, we are genuine in our desire to offer welcome to all people. Even the most conservative Methodists I know (with few exceptions) are quick to say that we need to love everyone and welcome everyone. Our ideas of what love and welcome entail are not consistent. But it is worth recognizing that many traditions are not this way--many forms of American Christianity are actively hateful to all kinds of people and seek to drive people out. Again, I say this not to minimize or excuse. But even in the most conservative churches I've served, I've felt comfortable when inviting gay people to church to tell them that no one would be cruel to them or make them feel unwelcome. Before I was a Methodist, I have been in churches where this was not the case.

Fifthly, United Methodists do not have celebrities. If you're thinking that Will Willimon or Adam Hamilton are exceptions, you don't have the first clue what a cult of personality driven religious community is about. Believe me, this is a very good thing. We are not free from our own forms of pride and vainglory, but we have a kind of humility built into our ethos that keeps in check a kind of spiritual cancer that our culture celebrates and many church cultures embrace.

I could go on and on. Methodism almost universally values substance over show. It embraces learning without empty intellectualism, theological clarity without dogmatism. It's community based. It has systems in place to provide financial accountability at all levels. These are good things and they are rare. I was not raised United Methodist. Perhaps I still have covert's enthusiasm. But I believe, warts and all, we are a great option, maybe the best option.

I have become increasingly careful not to expect the United Methodist Church to conform to my ideas of what it should or might be. In "Life Together," Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that we enter the Christian community not as dreamers making demands, but as grateful participants. I am grateful to the people of the United Methodist Church that they welcomed me, a sinner and an outsider, and have given me a treasured place. They have nurtured my children and carried me through untold difficulties.

The United Methodists who have extended grace to me, loved me imperfectly but well, and made me who I am, are people who fit every description--conservative, moderate, progressive, straight, gay, WCA, Reconciling, Southern, Northern, black, white, Asian, Hispanic. Many have joined the Church Triumphant and are, I pray, interceding for us even through this tribulation.

Why Churches Should Send Their Pastors Away

When I began ministry many years ago as a youth pastor, the senior pastor I worked for offered me the very good advice that the largest part of a pastor's job is to be present. Unfortunately, I've also tended to see time away as a drawback to the church, a concession they gave me. Mostly, churches don't feel that way. They have tended to encourage me to enjoy vacations, ministry in other contexts, and continuing education experiences. I've had particular support in this regard from my current congregation. Upon returning from the first long vacation I've taken in years, I've been reflecting on reasons that congregations should not only give pastors time away for the pastor's sake, but also for their own self-interest.

1. When congregations encourage rest, renewal, and family connection, their pastors work more diligently, gratefully, and joyfully throughout the rest of the year.

2. Being a pastor has much more to do with the way work is done than it does with the number of hours worked. A pastor whose soul is diminished and who is tired and stressed will make poor decisions and have a poor attitude. When a pastor's soul is in trouble, more work creates more problems for the congregation. It's not like cutting lawns or shoveling snow. When ministry is done from a healthy place, the hours worked will bring fruit and good things for the congregation.

3. When a pastor's family feels neglected, the pastor begins to feel pulled between the competing interests of the family and the church. When a pastor's family feels supported by the congregation and satisfied that the pastor invests time and attention to the family, the pastor is freed to do ministry with support from the family.

4. Going away allows that pastor to see things with fresh eyes. Once, I moved into a home with a small rust stain on the carpet. At first, it drove me crazy. Soon, I never noticed it. When we first arrive at a church, we recognize opportunities and challenges clearly. After time goes by, we acclimate and forget. Going away and returning allows us to come back with newness of vision.

5. It's a very good thing for other people besides the primary pastor to preach. People need to hear fresh voices. The primary pastor needs a break from the incessant return of Sunday. Developing preachers need an opportunity to develop. The primary preacher needs to embody the reality that he or she does not have a corner on the Word of God.

6. When the pastor ministers elsewhere--preaching in other pulpits, mission trips, etc.--the home congregation benefits in many ways. Recently I preached at a former congregation and told of our church's ministry recovering from a hurricane. The congregation I visited gave thousands of dollars to my home church for hurricane ministry. The connections I maintain with other congregations have created partnerships that have proved invaluable in our recovery in many ways. Being connected has paid off big for our church with staff searches. Above all, when a pastor does ministry somewhere else, the pastor embodies the reality that no single congregation contains the Church, that we are all in ministry to all people everywhere and partners in ministry with all other congregations.

7. Pastors often act as if their role in the daily functioning of the church is absolutely essential at all times. This is very unhealthy. When the pastor is away, staff and lay leadership are forced to run things on their own. They find out that they can do so just fine! This allows leadership and the congregation as a whole to function more smoothly and in a more healthy manner whether the pastor is there or not.

8. Pastors have fresh experiences, learn new things, and become more interesting people when they get out of their routine. Once, when visiting relatives in Ithaca, NY, I encountered the idea of a "Alternative Gift Fair" in which people could shop for donations to local non-profits to give in lieu of Christmas presents. I brought this idea back to Montgomery, AL and it was a big hit. We all get stuck telling the same stories, doing the same things. A church whose pastor has a life outside of church life will necessarily be a more interesting person who makes church life more rich and meaningful.

Reading the "Brothers Karamazov"

I just read Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov." It's about 750 pages, dialogue heavy, written in Russian in the 19th century. It started out as a pretty tough slog, but I've always heard how great it was and I wanted to experience it myself. It was, indeed, definitely worth the time and effort. In case anyone else decides to take the plunge on this great classic, I thought I might share a word of advice that made the book open up for me.

"The Brothers Karamazov" is divided into four parts and twelve books. Each book contains many smaller chapters, sometimes a dozen or more chapters per book. And there's an epilogue with three additional final chapters. Whew!

Shortly after I began reading the book, I read somewhere that it was originally publishes as a serial. Like the writings of many 19th century novelists, Dostoyevsky published "The Brothers Karamazov" in installments, short articles, in a magazine. The first readers would have read the book a week at a time. The whole thing came out over a period of two years.

It feels overwhelming to read the whole thing all at once. That's because it was never meant to be experienced that way. Reading all of "The Brothers Karamazov" front to back is like binge watching a decade of "Friends" over a weekend.

That analogy--comparing the totality of the book to a long-running series--was a very helpful key for me to engage. I treated the books as seasons in a series and the short chapters as episodes designed to be experienced with an integrity each in themselves designed to build suspense leading into the next one. The book as a whole, much like a dramatic series like The Sopranos or Six Feet Under, holds together much more through the relationship the reader builds with the book's complex, compelling character than it does through the plot. And the point of the book (again, much like the best dramatic TV series) is an exploration of consistent and heavy existential themes as the characters navigate complicated and sometimes crazy circumstances.

That might not help anyone but me. But if you love TV dramas and can binge watch a really good Showtime or Netflix series, I believe you could really enjoy "The Brothers Karamazov" by approaching it similarly.

A Modest Methodist Proposal Regarding Union and Disunion

If, like me, you are a United Methodist, you are likely aware that our denomination is having its turn going through troubles. Like us, many mainline denominations have cultural divides that have erupted over the issue of human sexuality. Next year, we have a special world-wide meeting to discuss how we will deal with this issue (for non-Methodists--the name of the meeting is "called General Conference").

Our bishops have made three recommendations regarding how the General Conference might approach the issue. None of these are acceptable to everyone. All of them have serious problems.

So we United Methodists are very likely to split. In preparation for schism, some conservatives among us have put together a group called the "Wesleyan Covenant Association," which provides the connections and infrastructure for a new denomination if they do not get their way at General Conference 2019 (and perhaps even if they do get their way). At first, they said the WCA was not a preparation for schism, but they have given up even pretending that they only wanted to express their views and lobby for enforcement of our church's rules on these matters. They now have their own conferences, apportionments ("membership fees"), and curriculum. We have churches that are still United Methodist Churches and yet are members of the WCA--simultaneously part of an existing denominational covenant and also members of a secondary covenant with a new denomination that might or might not come into existence. It's as if these churches and pastors have moved in with the girlfriend while they are waiting for the divorce from the wife to be finalized.

I strongly believe in covenants. I believe schism is a sin. I believe that faith communities hold together as an expression of our belief in God's steadfast love and faithfulness. Splitting from each other on the basis of our perception of others' unfaithfulness is a lived heresy. We stay together because of God's faithfulness, not because of our own faithfulness or the faithfulness of others with whom we are in covenant. So my hope and prayer is that the UMC will hold together and that we will not split up. I will not participate in any other covenant group as long as there is a United Methodist Church, for the same reason that I will not have a Tinder account as long as I am married.

The WCA (as well as progressive covenantal communities like the "Reconciling Movement," which also has member churches and pastors) make me pessimistic that people who see the situation like I see it will prevail in these conversations. As much as it pains and sickens me, it feels to me that a split is almost inevitable.

To be clear, I'm for unity. But if unity is impossible, I have another idea besides a split. My idea is crazy and I share it almost tongue-in-cheek. But everyone with whom I've shared this idea likes it. So here it goes.

First, the last thing the world needs is more denominations. To split up the second largest Protestant denomination into two or three denominations is crazy. We don't need more denominations. We have too many of them already. If anything, we should be consolidating rather than fracturing.

Second, the splits within the UMC are mirrored in all the mainline denominations. A progressive PCUSA Presbyterian Church has lots more in common with a progressive United Methodist than either has with their conservative counterparts in the same denomination.

So, rather than a split, how about a realignment?

If they just can't stand to pray and serve and live in the same tent with New York liberal United Methodists, what if the WCA people, instead of creating a new denomination, just united with the Church of the Nazarene? Or the Wesleyan Church? Or any of the existing conservative denominations in the greater Methodist family? Or all of them?

Of course, this proposal assumes that the WCA's concerns are what they say they are and that they are not just seeking to free themselves from the accountability and shared concerns of a greater covenant community while using complaints about liberalism as a mask for personal ambitions and personal power. But I'm quite sure the WCA folks are uniformly concerned about ethical purity, so a merger with the Nazarenes should be no problem. Assuming that the Nazarenes would take them.

And the Northeastern United Methodists--they could just hook up with the Episcopalians. They seem to want to be Episcopalians anyway. John Wesley was an Anglican. Why not go back to our roots? Maybe the West Coast UMCs could do the same thing, or maybe they could join the PCUSA or the Unitarian Universalists. This might be a great opportunity for all the progressives mainlines (including whatever Lutheran group Nadia Bolz-Weber is in, the American Baptists, the Congregationalists, anyone who just can't get enough of Barbara Brown Taylor) to lash their rafts together and make a go of it. They did it in Canada. Progressives love Canada.

What about the rest of us? The good, old fashioned, John Wesley quoting, casserole eating, hymnal using, acronym-addicted, agenda-less, centrist, institution-trusting, non-axe-grinding, easy going Methodists? Many of us have no interest in being in a WCA style of denomination, but we are concerned about the kind of UMC we would have left if we lost the orthodox pull of our conservatives. Many of us see ourselves as moderates--theological orthodox, creedal, biblical Christians, but not quite so wrapped around the axle about the evangelical political social agenda as our Good News/WCA/Confessing Movement culture warrior friends. Where do we fit? What kind of UMC would be left for people like us?

How about if we hooked up with the CME, AME and AMEZ? They, too have a commitment to orthodoxy and true Methodist covenantal connectionalism, only without the right wing political agenda. I believe I could find a home there. Whenever I find myself in an AME church, it feels very much like home.

So there's my crazy idea. Plan B if unity fails should be realignment, not division. The idea is terrible, I know, and absurdly impractical. But a split is also an impractical absurd idea. My idea does much less violence to the Body of Christ and our Lord's prayer that we would all be one.

Hurt

Last fall, I foolishly took up basketball again. I'm 43 and I should be done with it by now. But I loved to play, and basketball was a regular part of my life from my teen years until a hip problem made me cut it out a few years ago.

The hip started feeling better. I was in Wal-mart with my wife and spotted a basketball. I couldn't resist. I picked it up and began going to the park everyday. The ball was falling through the hoop again, better than I expected. I even played some pick-up games and held my own with folks less than half my age. I had aches and pains, especially in my knees and ankles. But that was to be expected and I figured it would get better.

It didn't. My knee kept swelling and had to be drained. I decided to take some time off to heal up. It didn't help. Every time I sat down for a while, my knees stiffened up terribly. Every time I tried to exercise, every step hurt. I wore braces on both knees all the time. Months passed. No improvement. I began to put on weight. I finally went to the doctor. The doctor sent me to an orthopedic doctor.

The orthopedic doctor told me that I had nothing wrong with me except arthritis. She said that I had inflamed my knees, that I needed to take Aleve, use cushioned inserts in my shoes, and most of all, keep moving. She told me that my knees were getting worse because I responded to the pain by becoming inactive, that the swelling and stiffness would be helped by low impact exercise.

So I started going to the gym every day. Each and every day. Half hour on the stationary bike, weights, half hour on the elliptical machine. Spin class on Wednesdays. It worked! After months of this regimen, my knees feel much better. I can feel the pain and stiffness all the time, especially when I sit for a while. But sometimes it's barely noticeable. Along the way, I've lost a good bit of weight and improved my overall health and well-being.

I've learned something from this experience. I've always tried to stay in shape and remain active. But health and vanity have never been enough for me to keep at it long-term. The only thing that brings me back to the gym every day is pain. Pain is my reminder that I need to obey my doctor and do what it takes to get well.

The Apostle Paul once said that he was given a thorn in the flesh, a messenger from Satan, "to buffet" him. Three times he begged God to remove it from him. Three times God refused. Finally, Paul heard the voice of the Spirit tell him that God's grace would be enough for him, that God's power would be made perfect in him through weakness.

I have no clue what Paul's thorn was, but I know a bit about my thorns. There's the pain in my knees that brings me back to the gym, of course. That pain is something I would love to do without. But I'm also aware that God has used it as a constant reminder of my need to do what it takes to get better. I'm grateful in a way, though I'd sure prefer anything else. It seems that the awful truth about me is that I'm too stubborn or lazy or distracted to learn from any other teacher except pain.

I have other thorns. Paul wouldn't name his, and I don't blame him. I'm claiming the fifth on all my meaningful thorns, too. Some have to do with my emotional health, some relate to my relationships, some relate to my discipleship. I want them fixed. I want them handled. I want them over. I want them removed.

But they probably won't be removed in this life, as far as I can tell. I don't think God put them there. They will not be in the New Jerusalem. But in the meantime, they will nag at me, humble me, and drag my face to the ground to keep me continually at the foot of the cross. I would love to think that God would just remove what I don't like about myself or my life. But I've learned that I would quickly forget him if he did. I would quickly become proud and superior.

That's not to say that I can live with my thorns. If I ignore them or treat them my own way, they will kill me and all that I treasure most. My arthritis was crippling me. My thorns are crippling me. But if I will continually use the pain of my thorns to bring my weakness to Christ, then God will manage the wounds and use my battle against the thorns as a way not only to improve the thorns but also to bring life and healing to the rest of me.

Sometimes, I've known alcoholics and people who love alcoholics who went to treatment and put time into 12 step groups when the pain of alcoholism become to much to bear. All they wanted was to get relief from the alcoholic situation. And the pain usually got better, but it never went away. The alcoholism may or may not have improved. But I've seen over and over again that the application of grace to the pain of the alcoholism did more than treat the alcoholism. Just as my treatment of my knee pain brought strength to my whole body (and mind, too), the grace applied to their alcoholism made them better, stronger, more loving, wiser people and improved everything else in their lives.

This is a mystery. But it's a mystery we must embrace. I've known lots of people, each and every one with, a thorn, a pain, just under the surface. Some of them tried to surgically remove the thorn, or they tried to numb the pain, or they pretended it wasn't there. I've seen thorns badly managed. I've seen them kill.

You have a thorn, too. It may be that if you will allow the pain of your thorn to draw you to Christ that your thorn will be the agent of your healing and the portal through which Christ's strength renews you and makes you whole. It may be that you, like me, can only be shaken from your distraction by the pain of the thorn, that good intentions and accountability and discipline just won't hack it. If so, then may the grace of God be enough for all of us and may his power be made perfect in our weakness. 

Caffeine Free

My life has been surprisingly changed by what I expected to be a minor adjustment.

I've up drinking coffee (and all other caffeinated beverages, also).

My relationship with coffee began when I was sixteen years old. I was an extremely busy teenager, made good grades, played in the youth group praise band, and worked over 30 hours per week at the local hardware store. Saturday mornings started way too early. I would pour a cup of heavily sugared coffee and sip it as I made my way through the aisles helping customers, cycling through the store and back to the coffee pot all day long.

A dozen years of theological education, late night paper writing, burning the candle at both ends while working and serving churches only solidified my addiction.

We Methodists treat coffee as the third sacrament.  Coffee is everywhere. I've loved my coffee habit. I have a whole collection of coffee makers--french press, Keurig, Ninja, Italian stovetop expresso maker. I love the taste, the warmth, the buzz.

But I was starting to be concerned. My sleep has been off for a long time. I knew I was drinking way too much coffee, drinking cup after cup all day long and into the afternoon. I was tired a lot and knew I was treating an addiction cycle less and less successfully.

So I decided to give it up for Lent and see how it went.  I'd done it before about a decade ago, painfully. That time, I had terrible headaches. I also had a surreal experience of feeling as if my head was disconnecting from my body while I was sitting in a meeting.  But I got through all that and felt great for a while--until Holy Week hit and I fell off the wagon.

This time was easier. Easter morning came, and I had a decision to make--to joe or not to joe. I decided to stay off of it.

Coffee's great and everyone I know drinks it, so please don't get tangled up about what I'm going to say next about what I am discovering. Please drink your Joe.  I'm just telling you what I'm learning.

First of all, I feel better.  I sleep better. I wake up more easily in the morning. I've had terrible nighttime heartburn for years, but no more. All of that is good.

I'm also discovering that I have habituated the moderation of my mood and energy with a substance for my entire adult life. It's been a huge adjustment now that it's gone. Sometimes, my energy dips and I feel like a nap. I have a knee jerk reaction to get a warm drink. I tried drinking green tea for a while, but it doesn't do anything. What am I supposed to do? Just be tired? Maybe so. Maybe when you're tired you're supposed to be tired and not mask it with a drug! It's dawned on me that it has never been a healthy thing to regulate my energy this way, that all along maybe I should sleep when I'm tired, get some exercise, or adjust what I do so that my activity energized me.

I'm also noticing that my approach to life is changing a bit. Caffeine doesn't just wake you up. It makes you nervous. It makes you edgy, especially when you've had too much. It makes you impatient. I'm getting used to feeling less driven, less busy-feeling. This is a good thing, especially for a spiritual leader.  But I have to admit it feels a little like boredom. Who would have thought that I would need to relearn how to be motivated without coffee?

So my caffeine-free experiment is producing some more substantive results.

I have no clue whether this is true or not, but many years ago I heard that evangelical Christians in Germany don't have the kind of taboo about alcohol that American Christian conservatives have. Beer is perfectly OK for them.  But they don't allow caffeine.  Mormons don't allow caffeine either. Seventh-day Adventists avoid it, too. 

I'm not into any kind of prohibitions. I grew up around prohibitions and I found them suffocating. The Apostle Paul prohibits prohibitions, thank God. But I am thinking some about how any kind of substance (caffeine, refined sugar, alcohol, nicotine, etc.) that we use to alter our mood, perception, personality, energy puts a hook in us and masks our need to find behavioral remedies for our weaknesses and challenges.  That's not healthy, physically or spiritually. It was for freedom that Christ has set us free.

Thoughts on Eberhard Bethge's "Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography"

I've recently finished reading the nearly thousand page biography written by Bonhoeffer's close friend, Eberhard Bethge. It was fascinating reading, even though the writing style is a bit challenging, no doubt because it was translated from German, and also because its meticulous detail, particularly regarding Bonhoeffer's participation in ecumenical gatherings, is often ponderous.

I admittedly tackled the book now because I thought it would provide guidance in the midst of a challenging time in our own country's collective life. Many people are deeply concerned about perceived challenges in the new administration to religious and ethnic minorities, the rule of law, free press, and the relationship between faith and culture. Bonhoeffer has been depicted as a hero, a pastor and theologian who navigated fidelity to the Gospel in challenging times. My hope was that this life and teachings could inform the way forward. Bonhoeffer's story has been helpful for these issues and for many more.

I was struck by how much Bonhoeffer's concern was consistently for the witness of the church as the church rather than using the church for advocacy in the midst of political controversy. Bonhoeffer was consistently opposed to Hitler. But his central concern was not to oppose Hitler, at least initially. His central concern was that the state would not so influence the Church that the Church was not longer be the Church.

The perfect example of this concern was the issue of the Aryan Clause. The Aryan Clause required that German government officials prove their Western European ethnic heritage. German pastors were employed indirectly by the nation because Germany had (and still has) a state church. Confessing Church Christians affirmed that ordination must be sealed off from the power of the state because only the Christian community could determine fitness for ministry. The Church must welcome all people, so it cannot use an ethnic test for ordination. Otherwise, the Church, even if it does religious things, is nothing more than an organ of the state and is no true community of the living Christ.

I find this helpful. Though the Church has a responsibility to advocate for all people, I don't think that the Church faces an existential crisis in the way that the German church did in Bonhoeffer's time. Bonhoeffer never said that a disciple couldn't be a Hitler supporter. He certainly never said that Christians couldn't support the German nation in the war effort--many Confessing pastors and many of his own students served in the war and even volunteered for service. There is a place for people of every political persuasion in Christ's community, even people who are profoundly wrong in all kinds of ways. The line we must draw is in making the church an arm of any political movement, even a good one. The Church must not be coopted into making Christ the servant of an earthly purpose, even a good one, and certainly not a bad one. This is an important line to draw as Christian people are so polarized in our churches. It's the line that the Barmen Declaration draws. I am hopeful that one unexpected benefit for the Church in the midst of our current cynicism about politics is that people who have strong political opinions will recognize that their views are not necessarily God's views and  that God will not be brought into our political disputes. It seems to me that most Christians are less likely to claim that their politician or movement is God's person or movement than they were in the Messiah-talk I heard with President Bush or, contrarily, about President Obama. I hope I'm not wrong about this. But it looks to me that though the times are difficult they may actually be good for breaking our habit of equating leaders or political parties with identification with Christianity.

Something completely different--Bonhoeffer's little seminary at Finklewalde was, as Bonhoeffer enthusiasts have so often celebrated, a beautiful experiment in Christian community. It was also an experiment in a different way of doing ministerial preparation. Bonhoeffer was a product of academia, but he came to believe that academic training needed to be done in intentional and small community. And that community needed to be a community of spiritual formation and active collective discipleship. After Finkenwalde was over, he expected that if he survived and the church survived, he would take part in new experiments in re-imagining and re-creating ministerial preparation. We live in a time that we are seeing the limitations of the seminary model and its tendency to shape clergy as people who are disconnected from the community of faith and unsettled in their spiritual lives. Bonhoeffer should inspire us to look to other models that are community based, collegially based, practice based, and founded upon prayer and worship rather than purely intellectual pursuits.

Something else--Bonhoeffer walked every step of a terribly difficult road seeking step-by-step to know the most faithful way forward. He embraced the lack of clarity of all his choices even as he continued to act. So often, we seek clarity--what side should we be on? What crusade should we take up? What is the right group to join? Who should we resist? How long should I go until I split from people who interpret things differently than me? Bonhoeffer himself was marked by a rare combination of humility and courage. He was burdened by the decision to participate in a plot against Hitler, burdened by what the Confessing Church must do or not do to maintain its integrity, burdened by choices of vocation. He was constantly squeezed by circumstance. And yet, he found his justification not in being right but in Christ's justification. He could move forward boldly and even lovingly.  He was a rare person who could love his enemies even as he resisted them. Even the guards who mistreated him in prison, and even, in a certain sense loving an enemy like Hitler. If we are honest, even the most headstrong crusaders among us harbor deep doubts. Maybe those who crusade the most virulently do so to mask our deepest doubts. We must always recognize that we may turn out to be wrong. And so, we must have humility and love in our all actions. But even in humility and love, we must act. In the case of Hitler, Bonhoeffer struggled with the determination that when a madman drives a car down the road and runs over pedestrians, at some point a bystander is called not only to help the victims but stop the car. There are no easy answers here. Bonhoeffer did not pretend otherwise. But he still stepped out.

And something else--Bonhoeffer himself would have been horrified by the way he has been deified since his death. Death was certainly very good for his "brand." If he had survived, his final views of "religionless Christianity" may have been actually harmful to Christian theology. I'm not smart enough to know that for sure, but I think it's a mistake that so many modern people have swept his later views under the rug. Certainly, his death made his life and views interesting to a world who would have never known him if he had grown into an old theology professor or pastor. Who knows if he could have found employment if he had survived and had been condemned as a hypocrite whose participation in an assassination plot was inconsistent with his pacifism? He certainly expected so. but terrible times allowed him to say some of the most beautiful and powerful things we know any Christian ever said. And they allowed him to back them up with faithful actions.  We all try to avoid suffering. Bonhoeffer himself did all he could to avoid suffering as he faced it gracefully and bravely.
The next book I read is going to be a novel.  No more than 250 pages.

Pastoral Prayer following the US Presidential Inauguration

Holy God:

We give you thank for the gift of your Son, who has given us new life, who has offered us a new way of life.  We thank you that through our shared love of the living Christ, we have become true family with one another.  Jesus, you said that to know you is to have eternal life.  And so, teach us today what it means to live in the fullness of that life, to walk as a heavenly people, to live with heaven in our hearts, to share the eternal life of the eternal kingdom in all our living in this world.  Help us to tread lightly on this good earth, to remember where we have come from and where we will go to, to taste the eternal banquet even now as we live this life in living loving relationship with you and with your people with whom we will live forever.

You have blessed us to be a blessing.  We thank you for the gift of living in a good land.  On this inaugural week, we offer intercession for the new president, Donald Trump, his family, his administration and all who advise him. We pray for our federal legislature, especially those newly elected. Shape all of their hearts, guide their thinking, help them to have just courage and compassionate sensitivity, to care and advocate for all citizens, to speak with wisdom, clarity, and discretion, to act with the highest ethical standards and rise above even the appearance of corruption.  We also ask that you would bless our outgoing president, Barack Obama, and his family. May he feel the gratitude of the nation for his service and may you bless and guide him in his service to come.  

Forgive us, holy God, when we have succumbed to the temptation to enter into the increasingly uncharitable partisanship of our culture.  Help us to rise above, to speak the truth in love, to listen more than we speak, to find solidarity with those who are different than us.  May we never give in to the contempt so often expressed in our culture.  May we always remember that we serve a Lord who commanded us to love our enemies and demonstrated his love to us while we were yet sinners and rebels to your kingdom.

Amen.

A Prayer for the Upcoming Election

Lord, you taught us to pray for those in authority over us, to pray for leaders and for your blessing to rest upon every land you would send us. We have been blessed to live in a good land, a nation that lets us worship and offer witness to our faith freely. We are blessed to live in abundance and freedom. We thank you for a land without dictators, a land governed by its own people, a land in which we have a say in our leadership at every level of government. 

We confess that many of us have allowed our nation’s election to fill us with anxiety, especially in this year. Many of us have participated in the demonizing of our opponents and have often overlooked and excused the failings of those we support. We have held uncharitable thoughts and shared uncharitable words about those whose views are different than our own.  

In just a few days, this election will be over, and no matter who wins, our nation will need to find healing. So, Lord, may your people, followers, become healers of the breach. Make us people who speak the truth in love, who refuse to slander our opponents, who seek common ground, who serve and listen and love our enemies. We pray that you would guide this election this week. We pray also that you would guide us as we begin the work of healing in our nation afterwards.

Pastoral Prayer for September 11, 2016 (inspired by the Parable of the Lost Sheep and Remembrance of 9/11/01)

Holy God:

Once again, we come before you in humility and joy, offering our hearts, our lives, our prayer to you.

We thank you for the love we have found in your son Jesus Christ, who took flesh and died, who rose from the grave on the third day, because, as he said, he came to seek and to save the lost.  We have been lost—we have known what it means to be completely unable to save ourselves, completely without direction, trying to make our way in the world and making everything worse through out own efforts.  We have known what it means to take our lives apart with our own hands, to hurt the ones who love us the most.

And we know what it means to feel the grip of your grace grabbing ahold of us, drawing us to your side, turning us back to truth, to wholeness, to sanity, to love, to joy.  We who claim your name have experienced the tremendous joy of being found.

The hymn writer confessed as we confess to you, “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” We, too, have been prone to wander once again.  So we ask you to find us through your grace today. draw us to yourself.  may we feel the joy we found at the first.  

If anyone here today has yet to taste of the joy of your grace, we ask that you would reach out to that one this morning.  We ask, Lord, that no one would leave this service without having been born anew through a gift of your grace.

Today, Father, this nation and the nations of the world remember a dark and tragic day fifteen years ago in which the human family was torn asunder by an evil act. Ever since, we have, as a global community, wandered from you in many ways. None of us could have imagined on that day the rage, the violence, the killing and misunderstanding that would come.  we are still trying to figure out how to put things back together.  We don’t know how to stabilize the world, to return to a world without hatred and fear between nations, regions, religions, and political opinions. One evil act seems to have spawned one outpouring of hate after another, a cycle of recrimination and untruth.  Our efforts to fix it have failed. And so, Lord, we cry out for mercy. Bring peace to our world. Heal the wounds of our world.  May we be ready to allow you to be our shepherd.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer for September 4, 2016

Holy God:

We thank you for the love of Jesus Christ.  We praise you today because we have found life in him.  He has made us new people.  He has made us family with each other .  He has given hope to our world.  In sending Jesus to the cross, you put to death death itself, and all that is lifeless and broken.  In raising him to new life, you opened up the beginning of all things being made new, everything in heaven and on earth being restored.

We openly admit to you, Lord, that living in this world is often difficult.  We have come today believing in our heads that what Christ has done is true and real.  And yet, all that we face causes us to struggle to have a mind and heart to live as people who trust what Christ’s work has done.  We believe that he has conquered sin and death, and yet we are weighed down by the effects of sin and death.  We struggle to live as free people.  We struggle to overcome despair.  We struggle to overcome discouragement.  We forget who we are.

And so, our living is often halfhearted.  We live with one foot in heaven and one foot in the ways of the world.  We try to live Christ’s way, but we are so used to the old way that we find ourselves constantly compromising, equivocating.

Today, we ask that you would give us new life.  Give us fresh vision.  Overwhelm us with your spirit.  Renew us. Restore us.

We give our lives entirely to you.  Have us as your own. Every choice, every dime, every moment, every relationship.  body, mind, soul, spirit.  The good, the bad the ugly.  Our businesses, our children, our marriages.  Our thoughts, our dreams.  Our hurts and sorrows.  Our gifts and our shame.  Have us entirely.  Make us entirely a people whose heart and life is entirely dedicated, entirely consumed, entirely shaped by Jesus.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer (August 28, 2016)

Holy God:

We praise you for you are worthy of praise.  You are great, greater than all we can ever know.  You are all wisdom, all knowledge, all power, all goodness.  Everything belongs to you, and all things and all people have been made to praise you.  

And so, we have gathered in your house and with your people to offer the sacrifice of praise.  We join our voices in song, we join our hearts and prayer, we approach you with open hearts and open ears, waiting upon a word from you.  

We open our lives to you. May the words from your holy book, the words from your beloved son, reshape the way we see ourselves and our world.  May we, each and every one, leave different than we arrived.  Today, make us a little more joyful, a little more holy, a little more like Jesus. Free us from our ways, our thinking. Free us from what we’ve been taught, what we’ve always done.  

Make us into a people who serve you.  Make us into true followers of your Son Jesus Christ.  we yield to his ways, even though we don’t always understand them.  Sometimes they seem so foreign to us, sometimes Jesus teachings seem so impractical to us.  We are born selfish creatures, and he has taught us to yield our lives in humble service and joyful abandon.  We have come to the end of our ways—what we have always done is no longer working for us. So, holy God, teach us your ways today.  Grace us to live in your way.

Our hearts break for those who have been affected by recent floods in Louisiana.  Lord, be merciful to the victims of this disaster, and to all who are affected by natural disasters around the world.  Turn our hearts to compassion to ease the sufferings of others.  May our faith be of action and never of words alone.

Amen.    

Thoughts on Young People's Ministry

I've been very blessed in my new appointment to get actively involved in ministries with children and youth, and so I've had opportunity to think through and share my thoughts on these ministries.  After I shared my thoughts to a group discussing children's ministry, one of the participants asked me to share them more broadly.  So here we go.

Why are ministries with young people important, and who should be involved in ministries to young people?

Psalm 78 recites the story of God's redemptive work throughout Hebrew history.  Before the story is told, the psalmist says, "We will not hide them from their children; we will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might, and the wonders that he has done (Psalm 78:4)."

I have a Jewish uncle.  He almost completely abandoned practice of Judaism after his Bar Mitzvah. But when he had children, he was absolutely insistent that they go to Hebrew school, prepare for Bat Mitzvah, celebrate holidays, etc. When I asked him why, he said, "I'm part of a people who have had this faith for thousands of years. I don't have the right to take it away from my children."

We live in a time when many children, including children who are raised in homes that consider themselves "Christian," no longer know the basics of the faith. They have never sung "Amazing Grace" or "Jesus Loves Me This I Know." They don't know John 3:16. The don't know who Jesus was, or that he died on a cross, or that Easter is about his resurrection, or even that Christmas is about the celebration of his birth. They've never heard of the Ten Commandments and certainly have no idea what they are. It's hard for those of us who grew up in Christian culture to comprehend, but please trust me that this is true.

These things are precious to us and they were offered to us as a gift from others.  We have no right to hide them from our children.  And all children are God's children. Young people's ministry is EVERYONE'S responsibility.

We take this responsibility upon ourselves every time a child is baptized in our gathering.  We promise to "surround this child with a community of love and forgiveness, that s/he may grow in his/her service to others. We will pray for him/her that s/he may be a true disciple who walk in the way that leads to life."  This is a promise for the whole community. Young people's ministry is not the work of a staff person, a children's council, a few ladies, or the parents of the children alone.  Ministries with young people are a central task of the entire community of faith, every single person. Not everyone is suited to lead a children's moment or lead a small group. But everyone can do something (even if it's taking out the garbage during VBS) to strengthen ministries with young people and insure that the congregation keeps its promise.

I firmly believe that it is wrong for clergy to absolve themselves of responsibility for young people's ministry by shuffling off the work of children's ministry or youth ministry to a children's ministry or youth ministry staff person.  These staff people are necessary and important and churches must employ them in order to allow clergy to do the many things that they must do.  But a pastor is called to be a pastor to all the people.

In our United Methodist ordination charge, we are asked, "Will you diligently instruct the children in every place?"  We say that we will.  In part, the keeping of this promise means that we will organize the congregation to make sure that children are being nurtured in faith in Jesus Christ.  But it also means that children and teenagers know their pastor, that even in the largest church, we take the time to be present in young people's ministries and develop relationships with kids.  I think it's important for pastors to teach confirmation, to show up for football games, to stick their heads into children's Sunday school classes, to play on the church lawn.  Our tradition has determined for us that these ministries are a priority for us.

Whose job is young people's ministry?  Who is supposed to work in children's ministry and youth ministry?  EVERYONE.  We all have a part.  We all have a responsibility. We all have the gift to offer the love of Christ and pass on the gift of the Gospel to emerging generations.