Review at (Ir)Regular Christian

The Rev. Casey Taylor - a friend and fellow pastor who blogs at (Ir)Regular Christian - has posted a review of Generation Rising: A Future with Hope for the United Methodist Church on his website. You can find the review at this link.

I've known Casey since he and his wife Angel were students at Duke Divinity School. They are now both doing great ministry in Illinois, and Casey is a dedicated Wesleyan whose online writing serves as a great resource to pastors and laity in the church. So check out his blog often!

I also did an interview with Casey about Generation Rising that he'll be posting at a later date. I'll be sure to notify readers of it when it appears. In the meantime, check out his recently posted review ... and check out the book itself as well!

Update on flood relief

A few days ago I posted some links to organizations that are doing disaster relief in the areas affected by the Mississippi River flood and other recent weather events. Since then I've received notices about other avenues of giving that can help people whose lives have been upended by the weather-related damage in the Delta region.

The Arkansas Conference of the United Methodist Church is collecting donations for relief work through its Disaster Fund. You can donate to the fund at this link, and the monies collected will be used to help people whose homes have been damaged from flooding in eastern Arkansas.

A second disaster relief ministry to which I've been alerted is Nazarene Disaster Response, which is a part of the Church of the Nazarene. The Nazarenes seem to be focusing their relief efforts at present on the devastating tornadoes that damaged parts of the U.S. South.

These are two more ways to help those whose lives have been affected, and I hope you'll prayerfully consider contributing.

Mainline or Methodist?

A few years ago Dr. Scott Kisker of Wesley Theological Seminary wrote a book called Mainline or Methodist? Recovering our Evangelistic Mission.

The book made a strong case that the United Methodist Church's identification as a "mainline" church is not only unhelpful but downright un-Methodist. By that he means that the connotations of being a mainline church within American society have really nothing to do with the Wesleyan teaching on salvation and the original Methodist understanding of mission and evangelism.

I've used Dr. Kisker's book as the background for my current column in the United Methodist Reporter. As we approach our annual conference sessions around the connection, I think his argument is an important one to bear in mind. The UMC has a strong tradition behind it and a great deal of potential ahead of it. God ain't done with us yet. But for the church to respond faithfully to the calling Jesus Christ has given to the People called Methodists, we need to take seriously the reason Christ had for raising us up in the first place.

Go to this link to see my current column. And better yet, pick up a copy of Dr. Kisker's book.

Blog updating odds and ends...

I've fallen a little behind lately in keeping my United Methodist Reporter column archive up-to-date. I'm happy to report that I finished adding all my recent columns this evening. For those who access my writing in the Reporter via the links on this website, you can find the fully updated list here.

Also, I'm going to be attending a Young Adult Clergy Retreat in Pine Knoll Shores, North Carolina, in a few days. I've been asked by the organizers of the retreat to speak about the book I recently edited, Generation Rising: A Future with Hope for the United Methodist Church. I'm excited about the chance to share the content of the book with a group of young adult clergy leaders in North Carolina. I think there's a lot in the book by the 12 contributors that bears on ministry in the UMC in our day. Our intent in writing it was to take an honest look at where the church finds itself while offering a hopeful path forward for all Christians in the UMC both young and old.

You can find Generation Rising on Cokesbury's website here, while the Amazon page is here. If you are planning on attending your annual conference session in the next few weeks, the title should also be available at annual conference Cokesbury book displays.

Revisiting the GracePoint issue

In late 2009, one of the most visible stories within the United Methodist Church was the decision by the Rev. Bryson Butts to resign as a clergy member of the Kansas West Annual Conference and take almost all of his congregation of GracePoint UMC with him. Butts founded GracePoint Community Church just afterward.

What has gone relatively underreported is that Butts was fired by the Board of Directors of his new church in January of this year (see the article on Butts' firing in the Wichita Eagle).

At the time of Butts' departure from the UMC, a lot of criticism was directed at the annual conference in Kansas. Butts was a dynamic young pastor whose ministry was proving itself, so the thinking went, and his decision to take himself and his congregation out of the UMC was just another example of church bureaucracy getting in the way of the gospel.

I was skeptical of that view from the beginning, and my skepticism only increased when I had the chance to speak to an elder from the Kansas West Conference near the end of 2009. This pastor suggested that there was a lot more under the surface, specifically that the conference leadership had a lot more information than it felt willing to speak in public. The view given to me was that public opinion about Butts was ill-informed at best, and that people would view the annual conference with a lot more sympathy if they knew what folks in Kansas knew.

There are good reasons why a bishop or annual conference doesn't go public with all the details in situations like this, despite the contemporary craving for such things (a facet of our culture that I blame on the 24/hr news cycle). In the GracePoint situation, my guess is that most people will never know the full story. But they might get an inkling of the character of the person at the center of the controversy by considering the subsequent history of Bryson Butts and his former church.

I say 'former' not just in relation to GracePoint UMC but also to GracePoint Community Church. And that's because Butts was fired by GracePoint Community Church just about a year after he founded it following the GracePoint UMC exodus. A widely-distributed letter from the GracePoint Board of Directors to the GracePoint congregation details the reasons for Butts' termination, which I have personally read.

My current column in the United Methodist Reporter takes a look at the story with an eye to the lessons we can learn from it for those of us who are committed to something other than bare congregationalism in our church polity. Check out the column at this link.

Flooding along the Mississippi

(I wrote a post with this same title a few days ago, but some problems with Blogger resulted in that post's deletion. Not sure what was going on, but I believe it was a system-wide issue. Blogger now appears to be fixed, so I'll re-post the relevant parts of what I had written before.)

Online giving to organizations like the American Red Cross, the United Methodist Committee on Relief, and the Salvation Army makes it easy to contribute to the areas affected by the Mississippi River flood.

If you would like to contribute to the ongoing relief efforts for those affected in the Delta region, please consider these organizations:

-- The website of the American Red Cross

-- The website of the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR)

-- The website of the Salvation Army

With the flood waters still causing displacement of people and destruction of property, the needs will undoubtedly be great for sometime to come. I hope you'll prayerfully consider offering assistance if you are able.

Reaction to (the reactions to) Bin Laden's death

I haven't posted anything on this blog about the death of Osama Bin Laden. It isn't because I haven't been paying attention. Quite the contrary. I've devoured news articles since the news broke about the Navy SEAL team's May 2nd raid on Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

My lack of posting is also not related to any qualms I have over Bin Laden's demise. I'm not an absolute pacifist when it comes to issues of war, and I have not forgotten what September 11, 2001, was like. Bin Laden was a cold-blooded killer and one, indeed, whose crimes were not limited to that one day ten years ago. He and his organization have always made it clear that they believe they are are at war with the West generally, and the United States in particular. Given the alternatives the U.S. military could have used, I think the surgical strike by the SEAL team was clearly the most prudential, "proportionate" choice of the various options that were considered. (News reports mentioned the option of dropping large bombs on Obama's hideout in Abbottabad, an act which would have killed perhaps dozens in the urban area in which the compound was located. The Obama administration considered and rejected that option in favor of the SEAL raid.)

I believe the commentaries over the nature of the firefight and whether some type of arrest could have been employed (rather than the use of deadly force) are worth hearing - especially since some of them are coming from Christian theologians who are calling us to think critically about the incident as a moral issue. But I also think there is a strong element of "Monday morning quarterbacking" in those views; I imagine the actual participants in the engagement would - if they were ever allowed to do so - tell of an experience that played out like an assault on an enemy position where the number and capabilities of the enemy within were not fully known. The only potential factor that would cause me to question the soldiers' judgment during the raid would be if it became clear that Bin Laden attempted to surrender and was shot with his hands in the air. And while theoretically possible, I simply have a hard time believing that happened.

The actual reason I've resisted posting on Bin Laden's death until now is because I've felt so conflicted over the reactions of many people in our own country. There was an attitude of outright celebration in many quarters, and the quotes gathered by news reporters made it clear that the celebration was not just relief but rather a kind of revelry in the killing itself.

I am not only skeptical of such celebrating. I am convinced that it is a deeply misguided reaction for Christians, and even those Christians who believe the killing of Bin Laden was a permissible act of just war.

The easy response to people skeptical of the revelry over Bin Laden's death is that they are either out-of-touch, or else morally squeamish at a time when such squeamishness has no place. Another approach, taken by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in a recent New York Times column, is that such collective celebrations are simply rooted in human nature-as-lived-in-society and thus socially healthy expressions of collective patriotism. (A similar story by Benedict Carey also in the NY Times can be found here.)

But the easy response is also the lazy response. It is weak and shows a decided misalogia in favor of joining the crowd (on more than one level). I think the biological arguments offered in the linked Times columns noted above are lazy and weak as well, though the intellectual context out of which they are made means that they are simply unintelligible outside of an atheistic framework.

Instead of writing something longer myself on this issue, I'm going to stop here and just point any interested readers to two reflections that I think are worth reading. The first is a blog post by Dr. James Howell of Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte, NC, which he wrote within a day or so of Bin Laden's death. Howell offers a good reflection on the celebratory reactions to Bin Laden's killing.

The second reflection is a sermon preached this past Sunday by my brother, the Rev. Barkley Thompson, who is the rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Roanoke, VA. His sermon is as good a meditation on the Christian attitude toward Bin Laden's death as I've seen. You can find the sermon text at this link. An audio file is available online here.

Eat Mor Chikin (except on Sundays)

I've long been fascinated by Chik-fil-a's decidedly counter-cultural policy of remaining closed on Sundays.

My first real job was at the Dairy Queen in my hometown of Paragould, Arkansas. The owner of our local DQ maintained a "Sundays Closed" policy as well. While I never asked him directly, I always heard that it was for purposes of religious observance.

Chik-fil-a is the only national fast food restaurant that observes such a policy. Lisa Landoe at the Christian Century's blog recently wrote about it.

Large corporations are easy to criticize. (And often there are good reasons for the criticisms.) But I think Chik-fil-a's policy is commendable. It serves as a public Christian witness in a time when such witnesses are rare. The profit motive long ago caused most corporations in the services industry to forgo the traditional practice of closing on the Christian Sabbath. (As Ms. Landoe points out in her blog post, Chik-fil-a loses $500 million per year in income from being open only six days per week.) Chik-fil-a's policy means that all its employees at least have the opportunity to attend worship services and spend time with their families every Sunday.

The decision to close on Sundays was made long ago by Chik-fil-a founder S. Truett Cathy. And while he and his family could be even wealthier than they are if the company had done otherwise, he insisted that he wanted to run his business as a Christian. And his particular ethic can remind us that there are things more important than profit motive.

I've struggled with Sabbath observance myself for a long time. As a pastor, I have tried to practice Sabbath in various ways and preach about it from the pulpit. But it's tough. Everything in the culture pushes us to treat Sunday like any other day -- and truth be told, our willingness to patronize the businesses in our towns and cities only encourages business owners to stay open.

We take most of the other 10 Commandments pretty seriously, so why not the one about Sabbath observance? Is it possible that a fast food restaurant might serve as a prophetic voice for Christians today?