by Steve | Oct 11, 2010 | Magazine Articles
By Duffy Robbins
The hard part is getting them to give you a listen!
It’s that time of year when youthworkers and Sunday school teachers are heading into a new school year, praying, brainstorming, dreaming, stressing, and panicking about how they will make biblical truth come alive for a roomful of adolescents. For some it’s the excitement of a new Fall. For some it’s the fear of falling. And for some, it’s the fear of total failure.
We’ve been talking in the last several issues of Good News about how we can more effectively communicate biblical truth. Specifically, we’ve been looking at some of the factors that make it hard for students to hear us such as program flow and students’ openness to new ideas. Before we leave this topic, there are a few more issues to consider:
• How much of a threat is the message? (cf. John 6:60, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”) Students are asking, “What are the potential costs and benefits if I respond to this truth?”
• Are we speaking in their language? Missionary Cam Townsend founded the Wycliffe Bible Translators because a Guatemalan Indian posed to him the question, “Why doesn’t your God speak my language?” It’s still one of the fundamental questions that kids ask about our preaching. That doesn’t mean that we need to talk like teenagers, but we surely need to craft our messages based on how teenagers talk.
• Is this the best time and place for this lesson or this message? We’ve all had conversations in which someone has said, “Can we talk about this later? Now is not a good time.” The ambiance of time and place makes a difference in what we hear and the way we hear it. A group that is open and receptive in a late-night lock-in setting, might not be as much so on the following morning. The message that seemed powerful and inspiring when you gave it at the campfire somehow seems cold and sterile at the Wednesday night Bible study. Time and place matter. That’s why your wedding proposal was made in a romantic soft-light bistro and not in the drive-through lane at Chick-fil-A.
• What is the mood of the students? Sometimes a crisis at school or a national news story provides a unique window of opportunity to address a topic with our students when that topic might otherwise be very tough to talk about with a fair hearing.
• How crowded is the teaching venue? Yeah, believe it or not, there is substantial evidence that having students crowd together in a room makes them more susceptible to persuasion than would be the same number of kids in a larger room. Moral to the story: Always use a room—or, at least, try to arrange the room you are using—so that students feel jammed in together.
• Is there a way I can add humor to this lesson? Communication research has confirmed what most youth workers have learned through experience: humor makes an audience more open to persuasion. Numerous studies have shown that humor relaxes an audience and makes it feel more at ease. Humor can break down barriers and increase receptivity to our message. Again, that doesn’t mean you need to be Rev. David Letterman. If you’re naturally funny, that’s great. But, for the humor-impaired, there are wonderful resources for visual humor and funny stories on the internet (still pictures, funny movies, outtakes, clever television commercials, YouTube clips). One of the keys to being funny is not creating humor, but learning to see it when it’s there in everyday life.
• Does this talk or Bible study really scratch where they itch? This is probably the most important gateway factor: are we speaking to their felt needs? Does this study answer their questions or our questions? One of the ways to think about this as we prepare a talk or a lesson is by asking of every biblical text four simple questions:
1. What would my students find hard to embrace in this text? What would my students doubt to be true?
2. What do my students need to know or re-hear in this text?
3. With which inner feelings, longings, hopes, and hurts does this passage connect in their lives? How will they feel this truth?
4. If this text is true, what does it say about the world in which my students live? What might they need to rethink or reevaluate if they accept the truth of this message?
Jesus was wise enough to understand that even the disciples had limits to what they might hear. And, whether it was due to their lack of maturity, or the circumstances they were in at the time, Jesus knew not to push matters beyond their limits: “I have much more to tell you, but now it would be too much for you to bear” (John 16:12). Understanding how our students hear can help us to think more strategically about how we communicate.
Duffy Robbins is Chairman of the Department of Youth Ministry at Eastern College in St. Davids, Pennsylvania, and a long-time columnist for Good News.
by Steve | Oct 11, 2010 | Magazine Articles
By Linda Bloom
In rural Zimbabwe, there is not much relief—physically or emotionally—for those dying from the complications of HIV/AIDS.
But, by training nurses at United Methodist-related Mutambara Hospital and other hospitals, as well as educating volunteer community caregivers in hospice skills, the Foundation for Hospices in Sub-Saharan Africa is making a difference.
That project is among the 155 projects in 33 countries receiving $527,165 in grants from the United Methodist Global AIDS Fund in 2009. The United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) administers the fund.
The Rev. Don Messer and other members of the denomination’s Global AIDS Fund Committee are proud of that accomplishment. However, donations to the fund have dropped from a high of $977,541 in 2007 to $395,851 last year, with receipts even lower as of July 2010.
While the church alone cannot solve the HIV/AIDS crisis, Messer pointed out, its participation is essential.
Lighten the burden. The committee hopes to rejuvenate denominational interest in HIV/AIDS mission work with its third international conference on the subject. “Lighten the Burden III,” set for October 14-16 in Dallas, will offer participants the opportunity to discuss how to work “towards an AIDS-free world.”
Dallas was chosen as a way to attract participants from the Hispanic community and highlight the concern over growing HIV infection rates among Hispanic and African-American women in the United States, says Patricia Magyar, an executive with UMCOR Health.
Magyar senses a call from the denomination’s annual conferences for more educational tools to help them respond to the pandemic. Such information sharing will be part of the conference. “The hope is to re-energize and re-charge,” she added.
Messer believes the speakers—who include an African theologian, a U.N. expert, two United Methodist leaders and, possibly, the director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy—“can motivate us to see that clearly we are responding from the call of Christ.”
Etta Mae Mutti, the wife of retired Bishop Fritz Mutti, also will share in a workshop session her experiences of having lost two of her three sons to AIDS.
Maureen Vetter, a member of Trinity United Methodist Church in Grand Island, Nebraska, has found inspiration from Etta Mae and Fritz Mutti, as well as the stories she heard from local caseworkers dealing with people with HIV/AIDS.
One of the denomination’s “AIDS Ambassadors” organized through the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, Vetter knows of people coping with HIV/AIDS in silence. “I feel it is time for churches to start talking about HIV/AIDS and those struggling and ways we can reach out to others,” she said.
Messer—who has attended four international AIDS conferences, including this summer’s event in Vienna—finds acceptance of church involvement. “Increasingly, there’s been an openness by AIDS activists and government officials around the world to get the faith-based groups involved,” he said.
The Vienna conference, which drew almost 20,000 people, focused on human rights, understanding the scope of the pandemic in each nation, and “marshaling the resources to meet that need,” he added.
Messer, director of the Denver-based Center for the Church and Global AIDS, believes that creating or supporting such resources is the type of action that any local church or individual member can take.
Phil DiSorbo, whose organization runs the hospice project in Zimbabwe, certainly depends on such support. “Many people would like to turn their backs on the suffering, especially in tough economic times,” he pointed out.
But “the church needs to be in the forefront,” DiSorbo declared, not only addressing HIV/AIDS, but also the social justice, health care, gender inequality, and child abuse issues related to poverty and disease. “It’s our calling.”
Linda Bloom is a United Methodist News Service multimedia reporter based in New York.
by Steve | Oct 11, 2010 | Magazine Articles
By Elliott Wright
In today’s world, Christian mission flows in all directions.
The rapid growth of African, Asian, and Latin American missionaries, and the evolution of Western Europe into a mission field, are two of the major changes that have occurred in the hundred years between a historic World Missionary Conference of 1910 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and a global mission conference this month in the same city.
About 40 percent of the United Methodist Church’s missionaries, for example, are from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
A century ago, as numerous speakers at Edinburgh 2010 pointed out, planet Earth could be divided into the “Christian world” of Europe and North America and the mission fields of Africa and Asia. In the view of the entirely Protestant participants in 1910, mission energy flowed from north to south, with denominational mission agencies usually in charge.
Today, the “global South”—Africa, parts of Asia, and Latin America—contain vibrant, growing churches and Christian communities, both mission-founded and indigenous. Many are Pentecostal or independent. Meanwhile, the older churches of the Northern Hemisphere have lost members to secularism or new forms of spirituality.
Impact of religious liberty. The Rev. Bertil Eksrom, a missionary in Brazil with the World Evangelical Alliance, speaking in a conference plenary session, saw the growth of all kinds of religious expressions as one sign of the growth of religious liberty in formerly closed societies.
Presbyterian, Pentecostal, and Methodist churches in South Korea send thousands of missionaries into the rest of the world. Korea’s Yoido Full Gospel Church, whose leader, the Rev. Young-Hoon Lee, spoke in Edinburgh, has missionaries throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, with some in the United States and Western Europe.
The Rev. Tinyiko Sam Maluleke, president of the South Africa Council of Churches, said Africa had both benefited from and been a “victim of mission.” Much of the past, notably northern Christian assumptions of superiority, must be undone, he said.
Ideally, he added, mission is an exchange among equals and cannot be understood as what “the rich do to the poor, what men do to women, what people from the North do to people of the South.”
Maluleke also said the lack of any controls leads to “new challenges” of relationships and objectives. The awareness that mission today goes in all directions without clear lines of accountability figured in deliberations on how various Christian denominations or theological perspectives relate to one another in the context of evangelism and church growth.
An underlying consensus at the conference was that the various parts of the Christian family have done a better job historically of collaborating in providing humanitarian services than they have in evangelism aimed at church growth.
The World Council of Churches, the Vatican, and the World Evangelical Association are currently working on what could become guidelines on how churches respect one another’s members. The council represents Protestant and Orthodox churches.
New mission fields. Mission from Africa to the north is also happening today, although in what degree is not easily determined. Such work relates to migration, with African Christians, including United Methodists, moving to Europe for professional or economic reasons and then setting up churches or linking to existing denominations.
The Rev. Fidon R. Mwombeki, top executive of the United Evangelical Mission based in Wuppertal, Germany, said many of these emerging churches are independent of European church structures.
“They do start with the people from their own countries,” he explained, “but they are slowly getting a footing in Europe and with not a few European members and interested people.”
Maluleke, speaking in a press conference, commended this trend as good for north and south and wished it were more common.
“All sorts of problems stand in the way of getting into European countries—racism, immigration issues,” he said. “I celebrate the few and wish for more.”
Elliot Wright is a freelance writer based in New York. This article was distributed by United Methodist News Service.
by Steve | Oct 11, 2010 | Magazine Articles
By Frank Billman
“For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour out my Spirit on your offspring, and my blessing on your descendents.”
—Isaiah 44:3
Based on the above promise from God, the theme for Aldersgate 2010 was “Unleashed.” “Prior to the conference, God lovingly challenged us to recognize that if we ask an infinite God to be ‘unleashed’ in our lives, the reality is that he may choose to answer our prayers at the conference in a way that goes beyond our finite comprehension, understanding, and experience,” said Jonathan Dow, executive director of Aldersgate Renewal Ministries (ARM). “I believe he did so.”
Numerous attendees testified that the power and presence of God were noticeably “kicked up a notch,” as Chef Emeril would say. Written testimonials after the conference confirmed the observation. “We came away greatly encouraged. This event has given new meaning to the word renewal,” wrote one lay couple from Michigan. “I came dry and empty. I leave filled and refreshed,” wrote another. “This is my first Aldersgate and I am amazed by the unleashing of the Holy Spirit on his people. I have never experienced church like this!”
Held July 14-18, the national family conference was held in Charleston, West Virginia, and sponsored by Aldersgate Renewal Ministries, an affiliate of the General Board of Discipleship (GBOD). With more than 1380 registrations, the attendance reflected an increase of 24 percent for the adults and for the youth at The Gate youth conference from the previous year.
Bishop Ernest Lyght welcomed Aldersgate 2010 to the West Virginia Area annual conference. Bishop James Swanson of the Holston annual conference attended the entire conference with his wife and preached at the Sunday morning Holy Communion service. United Methodist clergy, the Rev. Terry Teykl, the Rev. Candace Lewis, and the Rev. Stephen Handy also spoke at the conference.
New this year was an opportunity for 15-minute appointments for people to receive healing prayer or personal prophetic words. The available time slots were filled before the main conference even began.
Also new was a young adult artist who painted as the Spirit directed her during worship. She completed two paintings during the conference.
For the first time, the General Board of Discipleship offered advanced Lay Speaker credit for Lay Speakers attending a prescribed track of conference sessions. Over 60 Lay Speakers took advantage of this new opportunity.
During his keynote, the Rev. Randy Clark, a pastor/evangelist who has preached all around the globe on revival and the power of God, invited people who needed healing to stand and then asked people around them to lay hands on them and pray for their healing. More than 130 people testified that it was their first time praying for someone to be healed who was then healed.
Since the conference, testimony from clergy reflects the fresh impartation for ministry they received at the conference. In response to the question “How has the conference helped you in your spiritual journey?” a pastor from Pennsylvania wrote: “Renewal. Revival. Equipping. Empowering. New vision. New determination. More anointing!” A pastor from North Carolina wrote: “To be able to see and experience the presence of the Holy Spirit among so many other United Methodists is so very encouraging to me as a United Methodist minister.”
The youth facet of the conference, The Gate, created an atmosphere where young people were challenged and equipped to minister through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Aldersgate 2011 and The Gate 2011 will be held July 28-31, 2011, in Dayton, Ohio. More than 500 people have already pre-registered, a 45 percent increase in pre-registrations over 2010. To learn more about Aldersgate 2011 and other ministries, call toll free 1-877-857-9372 or visit www.AldersgateRenewal.org.
Frank Billman is the Director for Church Relations for Aldersgate Renewal Ministries.
by Steve | Oct 11, 2010 | Magazine Articles
By Linda Bloom
Ten years ago, the Rev. Greg Dell was put on trial by the United Methodist Church for performing a same-sex union ceremony. Since then, a few states have legalized gay marriage and some mainline Protestant denominations, including the Episcopal Church and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, now accept non-celibate gay and lesbian clergy.
The United Methodist Church, however, has remained firm in upholding its traditional stance that homosexual practice “is incompatible with Christian teaching.” In a November 2, 2009, decision, the Judicial Council, the church’s highest court, struck down a resolution from the Baltimore-Washington Annual (regional) Conference that said the church is divided on the issue.
“The effect of the Baltimore-Washington resolution is to negate the church’s clearly stated position,” the council wrote.
In looking to the future, the question is whether the United Methodist Church is separating itself from other, more liberal Protestant churches on this issue, or whether the momentum toward gay rights will lead to an eventual shift in church policy.
Dell, for one, is not expecting a change any time soon. “If we’re not the last holdouts, we’re going to be very close to that,” said Dell, who was convicted of the offense but returned to his position as pastor of Broadway United Methodist Church in Chicago after a year’s suspension. He retired early two years ago because of Parkinson’s disease.
A policy since 1972. The denomination’s top legislative body, the General Conference, first took a stand on the incompatibility of Christianity and homosexual practice in 1972. Since then, Dell said, “the General Conference has moved steadily to more and more explicitly conservative positions.”
The voiding of the Baltimore-Washington sexuality statement is the latest example of how the denomination continues to uphold its official position. Earlier in 2009, the church’s top court overturned resolutions from two California conferences supporting clergy who perform same-gender marriages.
Many rejoice that the church is not abandoning its stance.
“I believe that the position of our church is faithful to Christian teaching,” said the Rev. Eddie Fox, head of world evangelism for the World Methodist Council. “We are called to faithfulness to the covenant which is expressed in the Discipline of the United Methodist Church.”
But Dell and other advocates for change see these actions as tragic. A church with “a wonderful history of being involved in and advocating for social justice movements” is now “ignoring the pain it causes” to a segment of society, he said.
Strong advocates. A survey taken in 2008 among senior clergy in seven mainline denominations showed United Methodists were among the strongest advocates of traditional church policies on marriage and ordination, ranking below only their colleagues from American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A.
The 2008 Mainline Protestant Clergy Voices Survey, conducted by Washington-based Public Religion Research, found that two-thirds of United Church of Christ clergy support same-sex marriage, but only one in four United Methodist respondents favored the practice.
Seventy-two percent of Episcopal clergy back the ordination of gays and lesbians, compared to 32 percent of United Methodist pastors. Eighty percent of Evangelical Lutheran clergy support gays and lesbians as lay leaders, compared to 51 percent of United Methodist leaders.
The Rev. Troy Plummer, executive director of the Reconciling Ministries Network, a movement supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender United Methodists, believes church members are simply lagging a bit behind their Protestant counterparts.
“The United Methodist Church in the United States clearly follows the trajectory towards inclusiveness mirrored by our North American sister denominations—the UCC, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches,” Plummer said. “Our timing may differ, but God’s dance with us will be the same.”
Staying true. The Lutheran Church in Sweden is now allowing same-sex marriages in its churches, noted United Methodist Bishop Christian Alsted, who represents the church’s Nordic and Baltic Area. Lutherans in Norway may do the same.
But Alsted believes United Methodists must stay true to themselves. “I don’t think we should try to define ourselves in terms of other denominations,” he explained. “I think we should try to discern what we think is right for us as a church as we understand the biblical message.”
He would like to see less debate on homosexuality in the future. “It seems to me we are directing far too much energy and resources into that question, and it is putting our focus in the wrong place,” Alsted said. “We should focus on what we need to be about as a church.”
Fox argues that the United Methodist Church, which represents about one-third of world Methodists, “is not out of step” on the homosexuality issue.
“You’ve got to look at the world church,” he said. “What we hold is very much in keeping with the expression of Christian faith around the world.”
Linda Bloom is a United Methodist News Service news writer based in New York.
