Bad Ideas for the #NextMethodism
If there’s a silver lining in the recent troubles in United Methodism it’s that there are a panoply of voices — both young and old; established and new — engaging the Methodist public sphere in ideas for the next iteration of our Church. You can find some of those voices here…here…here…here…and many other places around the web.
A lot of these ideas are creative and inspiring. Implementing them might just help put our denomination on a path towards renewed growth and vitality in the twenty-first century. The conversation around the #NextMethodism is one that needs to be had, especially as it seems more and more likely that we are headed for a reconfiguration of what the United Methodist Church has looked like for the last fifty years.
I’ve been giving the next Methodism some thought and wanted to contribute to the conversation in some small way, but I decided I wanted to offer something a bit different…I want to write about some bad ideas for our Church.
Or, if not bad, per se, then implausible ideas…unrealistic ideas…naïve ideas…those kinds of ideas. Why? Mainly because I think we, as a Church, have suffered far too long from the sin of “good enough.”
I’m convinced that the decline in the U.S. wing of our denomination is not the result of liberal or conservative theology; it’s not the result of a particular creed being said or omitted; it’s not the result of organs vs. guitars or liturgy vs. spirit-led — our decline is a result of a systemic feeling that we only have to be incrementally better than we were last year (or, at the worst, maintain) and things will be fine.
Incremental progress was fine in 1969…it’s not fine in 2019.
I’m not offering incrementally better ideas here…I’m not writing about some tweaks to the current system or some new initiatives or tactics. Instead, I offer some possibly horrendous ideas that could cause us to fail miserably, waste massive amounts of time and/or treasure, and possibly set us back decades if not a whole generation.
If we’re going into a time of crisis, I say, let’s don’t waste it in a slow downward spiral. As of this writing, if our retirement policies don’t change and my health holds up, I’ve got about 34 years of possible ministry left to give to the church. I have zero interest in running an institutional hospice for those years.
I’d prefer to do some crazy things that will either ensure we’ll die a quick death or, start some things that, if gripped by the Holy Spirit, might just spark us back to life.
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There’s work, really good work, that many conferences are doing and that we need to keep doing to try and spark institutional revitalization: planting or restarting new churches; closing dying congregations; moving younger clergy and laity into leadership sooner; investing in mission and ministry programs; rethinking our polity and structure for whatever the UMC turns out to be in the next ten years.
These are sorts of the things we all know that we need to be doing but sometimes find it hard to do. It’s the institutional church equivalent of eating healthy and going to the gym. I applaud these things and the people doing them.
For my bad ideas posts, I took a different standard: if I thought at least 65% of Methodists I know would agree with one of my ideas and say these are things we should do, I immediately tossed it out.
Instead, I wanted to come up with some ideas that are counter to business as usual; ideas that will hopefully make you roll your eyes and question my judgment. Why? Because those are the types of ideas that get me excited about church.
So, here’s what I’m going to write about over the next few weeks:
• The UMC should be less democratic.
• It should be really difficult to become a UMC clergy person but…
• …it should be easy to start a new church (and you shouldn’t have to be a clergy person to do it).
• The UMC needs a huge infusion of cash into the Global Mission Fellows program with 80% of those new funds going to Central Conference missionaries who will come be missionaries to the U.S.
• We should create a new General Board called The United Methodist Board of Digital Networks, Media, and Ministry.
• The UMC should get rid of membership.
• UMC clergy should be vegan on Monday’s and Friday’s.
• The UMC needs better carrots and better sticks.
• The UMC should start a record label.
• The UMC should raise money like politicians do.
• Instead of youth ministries, our largest churches (or bands of smaller churches) should start private high schools.
• At their ordination service, each new elder and deacon should be given a stole, ordination and full connection certificates, and a promissory note that cancels their seminary student loan debt after seven additional years of service.
• The UMC should re-write its theological task for the twenty-first century.
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You might notice none of these (except the last one) directly deal with theology and none of them deal with sexuality. That’s not because I don’t think these are important. In fact, I think we as Methodists are in a fairly deep theological crisis that needs to be addressed alongside these more practical concerns. I’ll get to the theology part last, not because I think it’s less important but because I think it’s most important and I need more time to stew on that one.
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The thought experiment is this: if you had to start a new Christian denomination tomorrow, what could it look like?
Thirty-four years. The clock’s ticking. Let’s don’t waste a crisis with a bunch of incrementally good ideas. Maybe we should break some things and see what happens.
