Check out the new website

My new site is up and running now. We'll be doing some tweaking to the look and feel of it over the next few weeks. But for the most part, the major components of the website are now in place.

The URL for the new site is www.andrewthompson.com. I think you'll find that there are a number of elements to it that go beyond what I've been doing here on this blog over the past few years. But if reading the blog is your thing, then never fear! My new site has a blog as well, which you can find at this link.

Feel free to leave feedback and offer any suggestions you think are worthwhile. I want it to be a user-friendly website so hearing about your experience on it will be helpful.

Turning the page...

As I mentioned in a post a few days ago, I've got some news to share as we close the chapter on 2011 and prepare to launch into 2012. This blog post is intended to follow-up on my most recent article in the United Methodist Reporter.

I began this blog over five years ago as something of a companion to my regular column in the Reporter. The column itself has been running for seven years (and began with this piece still available online).

Put them together and you've got a lot of words, sentences, and paragraphs published under the "Gen-X Rising" theme. I've written somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 columns for the Reporter, and a conservative estimate of the word count would be around 105,000 words. This current post is my 564th for the blog over the course of 5 1/4 years (averaging about 9 posts per month).

The point of all this writing has been to speak to the church from the perspective of a Generation X Christian on issues of faith, discipleship, and culture. At times my readers have mistakenly thought that I only wanted to speak to other Gen Xers, but nothing could be further from the truth. I don't believe the church should allow itself to be divided into ghettos defined by age, station in life, etc. But I do think different cohorts within the body of Christ have different perspectives to share; hence, the generational angle on much of my writing. At any rate, I think most readers got that. In fact, much of my reader responses in the form of e-mails and letters have come from older readers who tend to have as much desire to raise up younger leaders in the church as I do.

Still, all good things must come to an end. And for a number of reasons I've decided to retire the "Gen-X Rising" moniker. Let me mention four of them. The first reason is that the purpose of my writing in this vein was largely fulfilled with the publication of Generation Rising: A Future with Hope for the United Methodist Church by Abingdon Press this past spring. If you want to know my views on how the generational perspective bears on the health and future of the church, check it out. The parts of the book that I personally wrote (the introduction, chapter 1, and conclusion) lay it all out.

The second main reason to shift gears a bit in my writing is due to the vocational and professional changes I've undergone in the past six months. After ministry appointments as a campus minister and local church pastor, I am now serving as a professor at Memphis Theological Seminary. At MTS, I am called to help form other men and women for ministry in the church. And my specific area of teaching is church history and Wesleyan studies. So reflecting on the Wesleyan tradition and its relevance for ministry & discipleship is at the forefront of what I'm doing as a pastor these days. I want my writing for the church to reflect that ministry focus -- which it always has to a degree, but will even more from here on out.

And then a third reason I'm making these changes is that my bishop, the Rev. Charles Crutchfield, has recently appointed me to serve as the Wesley Scholar for the Arkansas Conference. This is really a new thing in United Methodism (so far as he and I are aware) and amounts to me serving as the canon theologian to the annual conference in Arkansas. I am extremely excited about the opportunity, and the fact of it gives me all the more reason to define my ecclesially oriented writing toward what I've been trained to do.

Finally, the final reason I'm retiring the "Gen-X Rising" label and branching into a new direction is that I've got a wonderful partner here in the Memphis area who is helping me to develop a new web presence. The first step in this new venture is a new site that can be found at www.andrewthompson.com. It isn't quite finished yet, but feel free to visit it and let me know what you think. This site will be the first step in an effort to expand what I do through writing, speaking, preaching, and (hopefully) podcasting from here on out.

That's all the news that's fit to print. The old Gen-X Rising site will remain up and its archives accessible to people who are interested in digging through them. And I'll continue to write for the Reporter under my own name. In that sense, not much will have changed. But it seemed like a tune-up was in order and that's what I've been working on behind the scenes for the past few months.

So Happy New Year to all! I'll look forward to seeing you in 2012.

Devotional reading in 2012

Less than 48 hours left in 2011 ... Wait! What?!?

Yep, another year is drawing to a close. And 2012 is right around the corner, whether we're ready for it or not.

The beginning of the new year is an excellent time to think about your habits of Scripture and devotional reading. If you're looking for a pattern to follow, the start of January is surely a good time to begin one that can carry you through the year.

I'd like to recommend one possibility that I had a part in writing this past year - the 2012 edition of the Upper Room Disciplines. The Disciplines follows the Revised Common Lectionary and offers meditations on the Scripture passages for each week. If you are familiar with the Upper Room's popular devotional guide that many churches purchase and make available to their members, you can think of the Disciplines as a more in-depth version of that. The meditations are still brief, but I think they do go a little deeper in terms of challenging readers and encouraging them to think about the Scripture and its teaching for the life of faith.

I wrote the devotionals for the week of August 6th - 12th. My theme is "Sustenance for the Journey," and that week's meditations can be found on pages 231-237 of the book. It was a challenge to pray, consider, and write for the lectionary passages that fall on my week (from 2 Samuel 18, Psalm 130, John 6, and Ephesians 4 & 5). But it was also a real means of grace to me to do so, and I hope reading those meditations would help the Scriptures be a means of grace to you as well.

The 2012 edition of the Disciplines is filled with great spiritual writers. Some of the other featured writers for the guide include Blair Gilmer Meeks, Don Saliers, Kevin Baker, Robert Mulholland, and Enuma Okoro. If you would like to obtain a copy, you can find the Disciplines at Amazon and Cokesbury.

Merry Christmas

Good Christian friends, rejoice
with heart and soul and voice;
give ye heed to what we say:

News, news! Jesus Christ is born today!

Ox and ass before him bow,
and he is in the manger now.
Christ is born today,
Christ is born today!

Good Christian friends, rejoice
with heart and soul and voice;
now ye hear of endless bliss:


News, news! Jesus Christ was born for this!

He hath opened heaven's door,
and ye are blest forevermore.
Christ was born for this,
Christ was born for this!

Good Christian friends, rejoice
with heart and soul and voice;
now ye need not fear the grave:


News, news! Jesus Christ was born to save!

Calls you one and calls you all,
to gain his everlasting hall.
Christ was born to save,
Christ was born to save!

Don't cancel Christmas

Tomorrow is Christmas. And as the calendar would have it, Christmas falls on a Sunday this year.

The last time Christmas day came on a Sunday was back in 2005. Several well-known megachurches around the country decided to close their doors, canceling regular Sunday services. The controversial decision was reported by major media outlets.

I wrote about the incident in my column, and I made no bones about the fact that I thought churches' decision to close on Sunday was a deep mistake. I feel no different now than I did back in 2005. So I feel no hesitation about pointing readers to the opinion I expressed at that time.

A very merry Christmas to all my readers. I hope you have a blessed holiday wherever you happen to be tomorrow morning. As for me and my family? We'll be in church.

By the teeth of wild beasts

Martyrdom of St. Ignatius

This semester I taught a seminar in the history of the early Christian church, from A.D. 100-451. One of the figures we covered in that seminar was Ignatius of Antioch. St. Ignatius was the bishop of Antioch, one of the largest cities of the Roman Empire at that time and home of one of the oldest Christian communities. He was born sometime in the middle of the first century A.D., and he died a martyr's death in Rome around the year 113.

One of my students made the comment in our class the week we read Ignatius that he thought the modern-day message of the "prosperity gospel" is particularly ill-fitting with what you find in the Christian writings of the first and second centuries. He was right, of course. In fact he's so right that I wonder if our predecessors like St. Ignatius would recognize much of the Christianity of our culture as even the same religion.

The Christians who lived during the time of Ignatius were often in a precarious position. The wider Roman world regarded their religion as a newfangled "superstition" and its relatively recent origins meant that it wasn't afforded the legal protections of the much-older Judaism out of which it sprang. (Although truth be told, the Jews' revolutionary tendencies in the late first and early second centuries meant that Christians were pretty keen on distancing themselves from Judaism at any rate.)

Christians were monotheists and believed that acknowledging other gods was idolatrous and absolutely forbidden to do. But such behavior was deeply offensive to Roman sensibilities, which wanted to placate the gods of all locales and required subjects of the Roman empire to do obeisance to the figure of the emperor himself. Because Christians denied the existence of other gods (or considered them to be demons masquerading as gods) they were considered - perhaps ironically to our eyes - to be "atheists."

So what do you do when the requirements of the faith you take to be true is so perilously at odds with the values of the surrounding culture? For Christians like Ignatius, the answer was that you remain faithful to the God known in Jesus Christ even if it means terrifying persecution by the governing authorities. Ignatius himself was arrested and sent to Rome to die in the arena there as sport before the mob. We know nothing about the specific circumstances of his arrest or trial, but we know quite a bit about his theology and ecclesiastical views due to a series of letters he sent to churches along the route from Antioch to Rome.

Too often in our own culture we assume that Christian discipleship and life as a citizen (or "consumer") in society are perfectly compatible. We don't see people getting thrown to the lions, so we figure that there's no discord between society's values and the life of Christian faith.

Is that actually true? I don't think so. Neither did my student this semester, and I think his observation about the prosperity gospel can be applied to a lot of churches and a lot of preaching that we wouldn't normally stick with that label. We live in an "easy" time, buffeted by wealth and (in the case of the United States) a political stability that make us sleepy disciples. Reading a figure like Ignatius isn't a cure-all, but it does provide a helpful perspective that can alert us to some of our own cultural blinders.

Message from the Sky

The Rev. Sky McCracken is a pastor in the Memphis Conference of the UMC, and he has recently written some thought-provoking articles in the United Methodist Reporter.

Sometime ago Sky penned an op/ed on theological education in which he argued that seminaries have not been serving the church as well as they might. From what I heard, Sky got quite a bit of flack over that article from seminary deans and professors.

As a seminary professor myself, I frankly thought the article was challenging in all the right ways. I even used it in a talk before a group of pastors and seminary alumni connected to my own institution, Memphis Theological Seminary.

Sky's take on seminary education was critical, but it wasn't unfair. By his own admission he highly values theological education. He simply thinks seminaries need to do a better job at pastoral formation, which I understand to be the task of shaping men and women for ministry in such a way that is academically rigorous but also spiritually grounded.

I think Sky's argument (though he doesn't say it in exactly this way) is that seminaries tend to accentuate the academic while neglecting spiritual disciplines when, in fact, both sides of formation for ministry are crucial. Read Sky's article on theological education for yourself and see what you think.

A more recent article Sky has penned in the Reporter takes a look at the Call to Action proposal before next year's General Conference and, in particular, its advocacy of forming vital congregations in which disciples are formed.

This op/ed piece is bound to strike some as controversial as well, if only because its subject matter (Call to Action) is being so hotly debated around the connection right now. On this point I think it is important to read the full intent behind Sky's article. He doesn't dispute that the Call to Action proposal is imperfect. (My own view is that it has significant shortcomings both in the way vitality is measured and in the way in which it intentionally passes on doctrinal issues crucial to the health of the church). But, Sky argues, the notion of vitality as it should be construed as a Wesleyan concept is spot on in terms of where we need to be heading.

Consider this statement: "Methodists should be teaching others in Christendom about mission, discipleship, holiness and piety, for those were the things that we were founded upon and took on as our vision for ministry."

That strikes me as entirely accurate. (Well, I might quibble with the language of "Christendom," but let's not get hung up on that.) Sky's comment couches the notion of vitality in Wesleyan terms, and it does what Call to Action as a whole does not -- grounds our future in a robust reclamation of both our doctrinal heritage and evangelical impetus.

Again, I urge you to read Sky's commentary on the subject. And by all means, feel free to sound off with your own thoughts!