Vision - Intentional spontaneity - By Rudy Rasmus / Partners in renewal

Urban and ethnic United Methodist churches, with very few exceptions, are currently in a prolonged season of membership decline, organizational frustration, and missional detachment. These congregations are locked in a pattern of family power struggles, pastoral marginalization, closed social circles, and aging leadership that stifle their ability to grow. As a result, most churches have virtually no focus on clearly articulating their mission, vision and values, and there is no intentional effort to market, or reach out to their communities. According to studies the United Methodist Church is losing an estimated 1500 members per day and has been largely unsuccessful at planting new ethnic congregations. A small group of thriving congregations is responsible for most of the ethnic church growth over the past several years. In fact, many of the denominations most sizable ethnic ministries are the "daughters" of large parent churches. Curiously, there has also been what appears to be a systematic underutilization of the largest ethnic churches as vehicles for launching new congregations. This reality needs to be addressed and reversed.

Traditionalists, by their nature, look to the past for answers for the future. They do things this way because they've always done them this way. I'm not an anarchist (though I've been accused of being one), but I feel very sad when I see churches in our urban centers that aren't touching their communities because they are so inwardly focused, bogged down by their insistence on safety, and fear of taking risks. Several years ago traditionalism even threatened to alter the course of St. John's, the church in downtown Houston that I pastor with my wife Juanita.

My friend Christian Washington of Real Coaching Inc. helped our organization embrace its authentic mission by using the "IDEA" Model. We first gathered Information on our "Current State." The information caused a Disturbance (the Chaos State) which moved us to the Emergence of new thoughts (the Clarity State) and ideas. We were ultimately led to the Adaptation (the Change State) of these new ideas as part of our cultural and missional ethos. We accomplished positive change by clarifying our vision by making conscious choices on which activities we should continue and which ones we should stop immediately.

Conscious choice. That's what I'm advocating-conscious choices to ask hard questions, be brutally honesty, commit to change, and muster the courage to touch people in our communities. Without this process, we'll stay stuck having good enough ministries that touch only enough lives that we're satisfied and complacent. When I read the gospels and Acts, I don't see people who were satisfied with "good enough." Jesus modeled, and the disciples eventually followed, the example of selfless humility and radical activism. The mandate Jesus gave his people was to reach the entire globe, and their zeal was fired by his sacrifice.

What's needed is an honest appraisal of our current state as churches, conferences, and as a denomination and to honestly ask the question "Do we have the passion required to touch people's lives."

In the early stages of our denomination we were spontaneous and fully alive. As we have aged as a church, we have gradually moved from being "intentionally spontaneous" to "intentionally safe." I see "intentional spontaneity" as the answer to the challenge of decline. Ministries that are intentionally spontaneous measure and celebrate the intangibles of love, embrace change, focus resources on community impact, value creativity, become a welcoming family, begin selecting leaders who are transparent, authentic, and capable, and take reasonable risks to make a difference for Christ.

The United Methodist General Board of Discipleship's initiatives like Path One, Discipleship University, and the L3 Incubator exists to provide the leadership, training, and resources to start over 600 new congregations in the United States. The best chance of reaching this benchmark lies in building on the success of the connection's healthiest ministries by aggressively replicating their models and "DNA" throughout the nation.

Rudy Rasmus is senior pastor of St. John's UM Church in Houston and author of Touch: The Power of Touch in Transforming Lives (www.pastorrudy.net) with Christian Washington, managing director of REAL Coaching (www.realcoaching.org).

Partners in renewal
By Will Willimon

Good News was born the year I entered the United Methodist ministry. That makes us partners in renewal of our beloved Connection. Sometimes we were adversaries when I thought that Good News mixed up renewal with right wing politics (your affection for George W. Bush or the current war yet eludes me). Always we have been friends who loved the same thing (United Methodism), albeit in somewhat different ways.

Over the years Good News has managed to be a holy pain in the neck. I mean that as high compliment. In Methodism that too often sinks into sentimentality and trendier-than-thou fuzziness devoid of theological substance, a church sometimes defensive and tempted to denial, lurching from one quick fix to the next, Good News kept caring about what matters most: Scriptural Christianity. Good News kept calling us back (or was it forward?) to experienced, practiced biblical Christianity, a salubrious Wesleyan endeavor.

From time to time, Good News has been bad news for us obfuscating bishops, lethargic General Conferences, moribund church committees, and anybody who settled into the cynicism of thinking that God cannot or will not work signs and wonders in the United Methodist Church. I'll admit that now that I'm in charge of a part of the church, at times I wish Good News would leave us bureaucrats alone and let us run things as we please. God willing, Good News never will.

Good News remembers that Jesus came preaching, "Repent! The Kingdom of God is at hand!" There's no way to get the Kingdom without the repentance. In every gospel word of good news, there's usually bad news or the news isn't gospel. There's no true renewal without gospel-induced transformation.

I've got a long wish list of things I wish our church would do to be more faithfully aligned with the movements of the risen Christ. But none of that matters if Jesus Christ was not bodily, surprisingly, exasperatingly raised from the dead and returned to the same losers who betrayed him, commanding them to, "Go! Make disciples, baptizing, teaching." (Matt. 28). Good News is the renewal movement that really believes that God can rout demons, raise the dead, overcome the world, and renew the United Methodist Church with nothing but words. This little magazine is thus a testimony to the truth of John 1 and regular encouragement to someone who, every Sunday, tries to set corpses in motion through nothing but the words of a sermon.

I'm sure that the evidence of the Living God that I'm witnessing in churches in North Alabama-the fresh young voices who are gaining clarity and power in our church, the new communities of faith, the great hunger for study of the Word, as well as the six new Christians that I baptized last Sunday-is all testimony to God's beneficent utilization of the efforts of Good News. Almost every day I'm seeing signs of a church that is acting as if Easter is true. By God's grace, we may get even more than renewal. We might get resurrection. Good News, I'm glad that you lived to see it.

Some people settle in and get tame and stodgy when they reach forty. Good News, my prayer is that you'll never grow old, never exchange organizational respectability for hope of renewal, and never lose your bite.

Will Willimon is the author of numerous books and the bishop of the North Alabama Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.

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Vision Intentional spontaneity By Rudy Rasmus

Partners in renewal By Will Willimon

Vision
Intentional spontaneity
By Rudy Rasmus

Partners in renewal
By Will Willimon