by Steve | Jan 9, 2013 | Front Page News, Jan-Feb 2013
By Tim Weeks
Epworth United Methodist Church, in Elgin, lllinois, outside of Chicago, looks like a typical suburban church. But on Sunday afternoons, the brick and glass vibrate to an infectious rhythm, as an eight-piece orchestra with drums, bongos and congas pumps out praise music with a Latin beat. Four music leaders sway, sing and pray in Spanish as angelic young ladies twirl banners triumphantly in front of the congregation. Some 130 parishioners are gathered this Sunday, praising Jesus with wide smiles on their faces, many with their hands raised to heaven, like Pastor Ruben Rivera.
This is La Luz de Cristo, a new Hispanic/Latino faith community established two years ago, and the atmosphere is heartfelt and spirit-filled.
Rivera, 47, a native of Mexico, was recruited to be a lay missioner by the Rev. Oscar Carrasco, the Elgin District superintendent, and the Rev. Mario Mayer, pastor of an established Hispanic/Latino congregation, El Mesias.
“We began talking to Rev. David Newhouse at Epworth about hosting us,” Rivera said. “It began with me and my wife, Julissa, knocking on doors and starting Bible studies in homes, and, in four months when Pastor Newhouse said OK, we were ready to go with 12 people.”
Construction worker by day
Now a leader of a faith community of 120 to 150 people on most Sundays, Rivera, who works asphalt and concrete construction by day, has seen God turn his life around.
“I was addicted to alcohol and drugs for 20 years,” he recalled with tears filling his eyes. “I prayed one day for God to free me, and I pledged to serve him for the rest of my life. Now, I’m honoring that promise.”
“He used to disappear on weekends and spend all of our money,” said Julissa Rivera, who was born in Nicaragua. “But when he came to the Lord and we started working with families, Ruben completely stopped a lifetime addiction, and I know only God can do that.”
Rivera as a preacher is inspiring and charismatic. He doesn’t use the Epworth United Methodist Church pulpit; a music stand at floor level on the front row is good enough. Full of energy and evangelical zeal, he moves about freely with Bible in hand, speaking loudly and clearly in Spanish to a congregation that hangs on to every word. Frequently they respond to his questions and exhortations with applause and “Amen and Aleluya.”
This Sunday, his sermon includes the story of Abraham and Sarah and how God blessed their faith in old age with a child. “It’s not our timing but God’s timing,” he proclaims. “Never lose faith!”
“There are so many Rubens out there to be reached,” Rivera said later. “That’s why I have the passion to serve the Lord, because there are people who used to hang around with me on the street who now know Jesus Christ and worship at this mission.”
Rivera’s training as a lay missioner is through the Conference Academy for Faith Community Development, an ongoing series of monthly meetings created by Carrasco, the district superintendent, and the Rev. J. Martin Lee, director of congregational development and redevelopment for the Northern Illinois Annual (regional) Conference.
The conference has started 30 new faith communities under Lee’s leadership, and since 2003, when the academy first started, nine new Hispanic/Latino communities have been planted.
“In order to rekindle the movement of Methodism, we have to use indigenous lay leadership and not depend on ordained clergy anymore,” Lee said. “What we are doing now is passion-driven, not money-driven, because subsidizing the salaries of pastors of small congregations is not working in the Hispanic community.
“Chicago has the third-largest population of Mexican-Americans in the world, so the opportunities for church growth are tremendous,” he continued. “We can’t wait for Hispanic leaders to go off to school and earn divinity degrees because the needs are now and there are so many eager lay missioners ready to go to work.”
The academy has trained 100 Latinos and Latinas, 45 of whom are lay missioners, he said. “This is the future of our denomination,” Lee said. “Some will go on to a course of study (curriculum for local pastors) and get a local pastor’s license from the bishop. But the John Wesley movement was a lay movement, not just clergy, so we’re recapturing a passion for the Methodist movement here in Chicago.”
A thin man with a runner’s build, Lee is constantly on the go, promoting faith community start-up and development. His entertaining and energetic training sessions are translated to a full conference room of Spanish-speaking participants.
Ruben Rivera is appreciative of the training. “Learning how to make a church sign sounds pretty basic. But our first sign for La Luz de Cristo had too much information, and people fly by our church driving 50 miles per hour,” he laughed. “So when I ordered the next sign, we got a bigger one with less information, and now we have eight or nine new families in the church just because of the new sign.
“More importantly, we learn how to start cell groups and what to do in a cell to make it grow, so that’s how we equip other people to do the same thing that I do with the same passion,” he said. “But it’s not about me… . It’s about multiplying the congregation and reaching the whole neighborhood.”
From 12 people to more than 120 in two years is effective multiplication as La Luz de Cristo is a light, not just to Elgin but to all of The United Methodist Church.
Tim Weeks is a writer and producer of independent television programming. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Distributed by United Methodist News Service.
by Steve | Jan 9, 2013 | Front Page News, Jan-Feb 2013
By Mary Jacobs, The United Methodist Reporter
Jen Mulford has had the job of helping choose materials for women’s groups at her church, Providence United Methodist in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, for several years. She opted for books and DVDs featuring Bible study teachers like Beth Moore, Kelly Minter, Jennifer Rothschild, and Priscilla Shirer.
All of whom are popular among women’s Bible study groups — but none of whom are United Methodists.
Why no Methodists?
Until recently, Ms. Mulford said, “I’ve never been aware of any [United Methodist] women who were as compelling as a Beth Moore or a Priscilla Shirer.”
But that could be changing: Ms. Mulford now plans to offer a Bible study that Abingdon Press will release in February, called Namesake: When God Rewrites Your Story, and she believes women at her church will like the study’s author: the Rev. Jessica LaGrone, pastor of worship at The Woodlands United Methodist Church in Houston.
“She’s just real,” said Ms. Mulford. “I felt like I knew her. We can’t wait to do this study.”
Filling a gap
Leaders at Abingdon Press are hoping that many other United Methodists will discover Ms. LaGrone, too. She’s one of four authors that the publishing house is touting in a new line of Bible studies called Abingdon Women. If it succeeds, it could help fill a gap that United Methodist leaders and bloggers have lamented for years—the lack of a United Methodist voice in the pantheon of popular female Bible teachers.
Abingdon Women was launched this fall with a Bible study called Embraced by God by Babbie Mason, and another, Healing Waters, based on a series of novels by Melody Carlson, a popular Abingdon Fiction author. But with Ms. LaGrone, the series will have its first United Methodist author. The six-week study includes a book as well as video segments, which Ms. LaGrone taped in Nashville in September.
While the publisher won’t disclose how much money it has invested in Ms. LaGrone, Abingdon is clearly making Namesake and Abingdon Women a priority. Plans are underway for ads, promotions online, in Christian retail stores and other book distributors (including Cokesbury), and at trade show and special events. Also, Ms. LaGrone has tentative plans to tout Namesake at annual conferences next spring and summer.
Susan Salley, associate publisher for ministry resources at Abingdon, loves to tell the story of how the publisher “discovered” Ms. LaGrone. Speaking at a workshop last spring, Ms. Salley noted that Abingdon was seeking female authors for the series. “I told the group, ‘We’re looking for the kind of speaker who you always have to get a bigger room for,’” she recalled. Just after she finished her talk, “I had not taken two steps before someone came up to me and said, ‘You need to call Jessica LaGrone.’”
Ms. Salley checked out Ms. LaGrone’s blog, and immediately forwarded a link to colleagues.
In Ms. LaGrone’s writing, she saw a rare combination. “She’s got this ability to combine Bible insights with stories that are so close to women’s daily lives,” Ms. Salley said. “She’s had the questions, doubts and triumphs that we’ve all had.”
Even better, Ms. LaGrone also came with a “platform”—the built-in audience that publishers like to see before they commit to an author. Ms. LaGrone, 38, is the first female pastor at The Woodlands, which averages 4,000 in weekly worship; she authors a popular blog (www.jessicalagrone.com) called “Reverend Mother,” a nod to her dual role as a pastor and mother of two young children; and she’s already a popular speaker who’s been called on to speak at women’s retreats and in the pulpit at dozens of churches in several different states. Also, in 2010, her church published her six-week Bible study, called Women in the Word; the participant book has sold 500 copies with no marketing or advertising. She’s also got a fine pedigree: at Asbury Theological Seminary, Ms. Lagrone was mentored by the Rev. Ellsworth Kalas, a revered preaching professor.
It also turns out that Ms. LaGrone has camera presence. She taped six segments, with six wardrobe changes and virtually no retakes, in one day — a “preaching Ironman,” as she called it — and nursed her 4-month-old daughter, Kate, between taping sessions. (Ms. LaGrone and her husband, Jim, also have a son, Drew, age 2½.)
Abingdon executives say Ms. LaGrone made an immediate connection with the studio audience of about 25 women.
“Her genuineness, her realness, her ability to connect with women, that really came through,” said Sally Sharpe, senior editor for ministry resources at Abingdon.
Ms. Mulford and her friend, Whitney Simpson, a United Methodist in Gallatin, Tennessee, were among those in the studio audience.
“I think she has the knowledge and the passion and the real-life relatability to connect to a lot of people,” Ms. Simpson said.
On her blog Ms. LaGrone shares mommy-pastor moments, like the time she went into labor 20 minutes after arriving at the Texas Annual Conference in June, and speaks openly of personal heartbreak shared with her husband.
“Our dreams of starting a family were delayed several years by a battle with infertility and miscarriage,” she writes on her blog. “Those years of heartache and grief brought us closer together and closer to God, although it didn’t feel super-spiritual at the time.”
That kind of self-revelation is part of what makes authors like Beth Moore and Ann Graham Lotz popular, according to Jana Riess, an editorial consultant and author of Flunking Sainthood (Paraclete Press, 2011).
“They’re very personal about the struggles they’ve had as wives and mothers,” she said.
Ms. LaGrone seems to be comfortable doing that while maintaining her clerical dignity. In her blog, she transitions deftly from theological commentary to a confession about staying at home in her pajamas all day while on maternity leave.
“It’s like talking to a girlfriend,” said Jeanne Damon, director of adult discipleship at Christ UM Church in Sugar Land, Texas, where Ms. LaGrone spoke at a women’s retreat last year. “She’s very open about her life, her history, and her struggles.”
What women want
The Rev. Sky McCracken, a district superintendent in the Memphis conference, posed the question, “Where are the Methodist women?” a few years ago on his blog, naming authors of successful Bible studies, like Ms. Moore, Kay Arthur, Liz Curtis Higgs, and Anne Graham Lotz. Women’s groups at churches he’s served have used the materials, and he doesn’t mind — “it’s basic, exegetical Bible study,” he says — but he wonders why there are no United Methodist Bible teachers on that list. Historically, he adds, the Methodist church has had high-profile women, like Anna Howard Shaw and Belle Harris Bennett, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“I just hate that the other denominations get to have all the fun,” he said.
The missing Methodists also represent a missed opportunity to speak to tens of thousands of women. Tyndale reports there are 450,000 copies in print of Ms. Moore’s recent book, So Long, Insecurity: You’ve Been a Bad Friend to Us, and that’s just one of her dozens of titles.
Ms. LaGrone has contemplated the gap, too.
At her church, women’s groups use books and videos by Ms. Moore, who is a Southern Baptist. Ms. LaGrone doesn’t criticize — “I applaud anyone who can get people excited about digging into Scripture on a daily basis and applying it to their own lives,” she says. “But from time to time, there is a twinge of something that is not quite in step with Wesleyan teachings.”
Ms. LaGrone notes that Ms. Moore speaks from a theology that emphasizes Jesus’ “justifying grace” but not the Wesleyan idea of sanctifying grace. While Baptists might argue “once a sinner, always a sinner,” Methodist teaching “affirms that with God’s grace we can get better,” Ms. LaGrone says. She also notes that Ms. Moore’s Calvinist bent doesn’t jibe with Methodist belief.
“I’ve also had to do a lot of corrective teaching and pastoral counseling to help people understand that God isn’t causing bad things in their lives to test them and try them,” she says. “Beth has some great content and a compelling style, but she’s just not singing in our key.
So now, with Namesake, Ms. LaGrone has the chance to sing in a Wesleyan key, and Abingdon officials hope many women will be listening.
Which is a just a bit ironic, because Ms. LaGrone says she never set out to be a “women’s Bible teacher.”
“I’ve always considered my call to be one of ministering and speaking to both men and women,” she said, adding that, earlier, she had a “misguided perception of women’s ministry as tea parties and fashion shows.”
Over time, however, she’s changed her mind.
“God really worked on me to have a heart specifically for women and their needs and issues,” she said. “I believe there is a real fruitfulness when women gather together with other women to learn and grow.”
Ms. Damon, meanwhile, looks forward to purchasing Namesake and introducing Ms. LaGrone to even more women in her church.
“She’s someone who has good Wesleyan theology,” Ms. Damon said. “The message of grace really comes across in her work.”
Mary Jacobs is a staff writer for The United Methodist Reporter. Reprinted by permission of The United Methodist Reporter.
by Steve | Jan 9, 2013 | Features, Jan-Feb 2013, Magazine, Magazine Articles
She captured America’s heart every week as the divine messenger with the lilting and soothing Irish accent on Touched by an Angel. He is the creative genius behind Survivor, The Apprentice, and The Voice. Together, Roma Downey and Mark Burnett are one of Hollywood’s most uniquely equipped married power couples.
Beginning March 3, you will be able to catch their latest ambitious venture on the History Channel. The Bible is a fabulously scripted five-part docudrama produced by Downey and Burnett after a 4 month location shoot in Morocco.
The 10-hour version of this Biblical epic was conceived after the husband and wife team watched the spectacular Ten Commandments by legendary filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille (1881-1959) for the first time since childhood. “Give me two pages of the Bible and I’ll give you a picture,” DeMille once said. With this new venture, Downey and Burnett have produced an entire photo album.
Good News editor Steve Beard spoke with Roma Downey and Mark Burnett about their new project.
How did this become a project that you both wanted to do?
Roma Downey: Well, that was a God thing. I believe we were called to do this, for such a time as this. We are at the fortunate place in our careers where we can choose projects that honor and are pleasing to God. And we joined forces, bringing our talents together and our faith and our love and it has been the most exciting and thrilling and humbling few years of our lives as we’ve brought this to light. And we are so excited because it’s within inches of being finally finished, Steve.
How do you go to the History Channel and make this pitch in a way that they’ve not heard it before?
Roma Downey: Well, if you were me, you would go and knock politely on the door and wait until you’re invited in. But if you were my husband, you would arrive and you would kick the door down. And you would just somehow go in there and present it in such a way that they absolutely knew they had to be part of it.
I love that. And Mark, how did you go about doing that?
Mark Burnett: We heard of a documentary someone was going to make about the Bible that was asking why God is so mean to everybody and why would God flood the earth and kill everybody, why would God tell Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, et cetera, et cetera. Roma was so offended and she said to me, “You know, we should just do a Bible project on…” I said, “What, the whole Bible?” She said, “Yes, we should do that.” I said, “Roma, you’re crazy. There’s no way. Who do you think we are? Cecil B. DeMille?” She said, “Maybe. We should do this.” I said, “Roma, this is impossible, you know.” And she said, “Well, so was Survivor, so was The Voice. Why don’t we do this. We love the Bible, we love these stories, we believe.” And I said, “No, no, no, this is crazy.” And then a couple of days later I decided, you know, maybe she’s right, maybe I should listen to my wife.
We took a year and a half to think exactly how to present it in a way that would be impossible to say no to. There is an art form to how to present an idea in our business, to get someone to say yes.
Mark, you certainly know how to do that.
Mark Burnett: Yes, I’m probably the most experienced person in television at doing exactly that.
This obviously is much more serious than anything else we’ve ever done. But you have to decide upon what’s the entry point and what’s the three-line message? What is the story of God’s love for all of us? And realize that the worst thing you can present is like a rule book: Don’t do this, don’t do that — and in a dry kind of way. If you do it in a dry kind of way, why would someone want to see it on television?
If you want to do it on television, it better be a fresh visual, emotionally connecting way of presenting the sacred text. And I think that’s what we did. Rather than telling you the rules from the Bible, we tell stories and the moral underpinning and rules are evident in the stories of the interaction with the characters. And that’s what we’ve done. And it just took a while to figure out exactly how to do it.
Ten hours of television is nearly the equivalent of half a season. That is a gift-wrapped blessing in Hollywood. What stories did you tackle?
Mark Burnett: They are not going to give us 100 hours, you know, which is what you’d need. So obviously, if you were approaching this as almost a Sunday school greatest hits, there’s certain things you’ve got to do, right?
What we outlined was Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Samuel, Saul, David. Then on to Zedekiah, which led nicely into Daniel and Cyrus and the releasing of the Jews from Babylon and Daniel’s dream about the coming of the Son of Man which was the entry point, naturally, into the New Testament. The New Testament is through the Gospels and then dealing with Stephen, his martyrdom, and dealing with Saul/Paul and on to Revelation.
As we were filming, we realized something had to give. Eventually the story we didn’t film was Joseph. It was Moses or Joseph and we had to do Moses. You just have to because of the parting of the Red Sea, the Ten Commandments and leading into Joshua, because otherwise, that’s the entry point of how you meet Joshua at Jericho. Obviously we wanted to do more, but that’s how we did it.
Roma, how much praying did you have to do through all of this because everything didn’t go as planned? I’ve got to assume there was all kinds of headaches. What was it like going through this process with your husband?
Roma Downey: The fact that we have gotten through the project and we haven’t killed each other yet, I think, is a testimony to our faith. [laughter]
And our God is a good God. We had a few moments where the challenges were great. There were logistical challenges on the set. We filmed in Morocco. We were there from the beginning of February to the beginning of July. We crossed all seasons and all kinds of terrain and there were snakes and scorpions and there were casts of hundreds and herds of sheep and chariots and horses. You can imagine the endless things that might go wrong and they did go wrong, but ultimately I think the hand of God has been on the project from the beginning. We have great teams of people who have been praying with us and for us and in the way that the sea parted for Moses, unbelievably things just kept turning up for us and the right people kept arriving for us and things that we did not know how to do, suddenly somebody was there who did know how to do it. And even in terms of casting, we were challenged right up to the last minute with finding the actor who would play the role of Jesus for us, which was our singular most important cast member.
Very understandable. That’s one casting decision you want to have serious faith in. [laughter]
Roma Downey: We were just a month away from filming and we hadn’t found him yet. We were praying, we were looking for Jesus everywhere. And we had everyone we know praying for him. And then, he just remarkably showed up and he was the perfect actor and he brought all of the qualities that we were hoping this actor would have for this most important part. We cast a Portuguese actor called Diogo Morgado and he is simply sensational. He brings the qualities of the lion and the lamb to this role. And his natural charisma and his natural humility and his natural strength all come off the screen in this beautiful and authentic way. No one has ever played Jesus like this before and I think that his performance is going to touch the hearts of millions of people around the world.
That was a very key piece of casting for us. And there were other moments, too, where God just kept showing up.
One night we were filming a scene where Nicodemus asks Jesus about the kingdom of God and Jesus tells him that he, too, can see the kingdom of God – that he has to be born again of the Spirit. Nicodemus doesn’t fully understand what that means and Jesus describes to him how the Spirit can blow like the wind and it goes where it wishes. And suddenly, as if on cue, the most amazing wind on this very still night blew in through the camp as if God was saying, “Here I am, I’m right here.”
Everybody had hairs stand up on their arms and we all looked at each other in awe. And thankfully, the actors never broke concentration for a moment. And even though the trees were blowing behind them and the hair of the actor playing Jesus was blowing, they both held the moment and it’s just a fantastic moment on camera where it really felt like the Holy Spirit showed up. And there were numerous moments like that for us throughout the experience.
You filmed in Morocco. You’ve mentioned a Portuguese actor and a British actor. What was the international flavor of the rest of the cast?
Roma Downey: The cast is mostly made up of UK actors – English, Scottish, Welsh, and a good healthy sprinkling of Irish.
I love it. I’m a seventh generation Irishman in the United States so that warms my heart. [Laughter.]
Roma Downey: Oh, you are, really? So I have to tell you that King Saul is Irish. Our Moses is Irish. And I stepped myself into the role of Mother Mary. And as you know, I am Irish.
Splendid. I was going to ask if you crossed lines from co-producer to actress.
Roma Downey: I hadn’t planned to play the part, but we had cast the younger Mary through the annunciation and through the Nativity – a beautiful young English actress. And we knew that we would have to find someone that would bear some resemblance 30 years later to the actress picking up that role through the mission of Jesus and then through the Passion of Jesus and so on.
Sounds like a perfect fit.
Roma Downey: Mark said to me, you know, of all these actors that we’re considering for the Mother Mary role, you actually look more like the young actress than any of them. Would you not consider playing it yourself? And I hadn’t really considered playing any part at that time. I had my producer’s hat firmly on my head, but I thought, well, I’ll pray on it. It was the right thing to do and I’m so glad that I did. It was just such a fantastic experience for me. I have loved Mary my whole life.
Oh, believe me, I’m a big fan of her’s as well. I’m glad you took the role.
Roma Downey: It was maybe through loving Mary that I really came to love Jesus. My own mother had died when I was a little girl and the role of Mary in my life became very much like a nurturing mother figure that I didn’t have.
I simply love that. Let me shift gears here. I think a lot of people would be surprised to discover that there is a very vibrant faith within the Hollywood zip code and in the creative world.
Mark Burnett: Let me say that what we’ve done on this project is the best collective work of our entire careers. And that means everything from Roma’s incredible portrayal early in her career of “A Woman Named Jackie,” playing Jackie Onassis, as well as “Touched by an Angel,” “Survivor,” “The Apprentice,” “The Voice,” “Shark Tank,” the Emmys, all the things we’ve done. I don’t lightly say this, the Bible project is the best work we have ever been involved with or made.
That is quite a statement. Are people surprised to discover that the guy who created “Survivor” and “The Voice” is a Christian?
Mark Burnett: My answer is, why not? Why would you assume that because someone was really good at making commercial television they wouldn’t be a Christian? Why would that matter? You’d be pleasantly, happily surprised at the enormity of people of Christian faith within the creative community. That is not the challenge. The challenge is to actually get something about faith on television.
People are very quick to want to put shows on which call faith into question or shows that might say was Jesus married, was the parting of the Red Sea a phenomenon of nature, all these sort of shows are on TV that you’ve seen. Why would they do those? Because, I guess, they think it’s sensational and shocking. But when you want to make the story of God’s love for all of us, people are a little slower for whatever reason to buy into it. Well, we were called because we’ve got great credibility and people think we’re really good at our jobs and we got the opportunity and we’ve made it and we are really grateful to History Channel to seeing that and stepping up for us and with us. No one in our zip code in Hollywood will be surprised that Roma and I are Christians and have made this.
But I wanted to let you know how deep the community is and that many of us who choose to walk in the creative arts also have deep faith. And every now and then you get an opportunity to live that out in the project.
How do you hope the viewers who usually turn to the History Channel for “American Pickers” will experience your project on the Bible?
Roma Downey: Well, the over arching embrace is of God’s love for us, it’s woven through every segment of the show, leading through, of course, to the New Testament, that He loved us so much that He sent His only Son to redeem us. So it’s a beautiful story of love and redemption. And it is our hope that the series goes out and that it touches people’s lives and that it is a great reminder that God loves them, and that it draws people back to the book itself, that they are reminded of how amazing our story is because it is our story, you know, we are those characters.
It’s as current today as it was when it was written. We all go through the same journey. The situations have changed but the feelings are the same, the challenges are the same, the hopes and dreams are the same. So it’s our story. They mirror us. There is such an opportunity here for the faithful, yes, but for people maybe who have never opened a book or who have never stepped inside of a church, but who will get to turn their television set on and see something like this. It’s just a very exciting prospect for the Kingdom.
I should say it is. Thank you both so very much for your time.
Roma Downey: Good. We appreciate you. Thank you for your partnership on this, in helping us to spread the Good News.
