Open letter to my friends at General Conference…

Dear United Methodist Friends and Acquaintances attending General Conference,

First, I want to thank you for enabling me and many others to have a glimpse into this week in Tampa.  I’ve been casually following Facebook statues, blog posts, twitter feeds, and websites that many of you have shared, and it has been helpful in knowing how to pray for the gathering.  I also want to thank you for your hard work.  I don’t agree with everything I am seeing and hearing so far, but it does seem clear that you and many others are working hard under some challenging circumstances.   So thank you…

I spent 45 minutes tonight watching the end of the General Administration committee meeting (via iPhone live stream while following the GC twitter feed).  I’m still searching for the right words to describe what that was like, honestly, lol.  My favorite tweet during the whole thing was “at what point does a meeting become a metaphor?”

It seems to me that institutions are – in their very nature – committed to self-preservation.  And I think people formed by those institutions, and elected by those institutions to attend those institutional gatherings, all of whom are deeply committed to that institution…of course they will have a difficult time trying to reform that institution.  We have collectively decided that “conferencing” still means gathering with (mostly) strangers every 4 years to legislate via Robert’s Rules. And many of these strangers try hard to be at this gathering specifically because they have strong passions about particular opinions they already hold regarding certain areas of our shared institutional life.  They are there not so much to conference as to advocate.  And our recent institutional narratives have been so dominated by decline (in the U.S.) and differences (age, theological, etc.), that people in that institution…part of that narrative…are of course going to come to Tampa expecting mistrust and resistance to change.   Because if that is how we are formed as leaders within the institution, then that is the institution we will experience.

So I want you to know that I don’t hold you responsible for failed restructuring plans or difficulties in crafting particular language or making guarantees about my job or anything else being discussed in Tampa.  If you feel that pressure, it’s not from me.  And I don’t expect General Conference or its delegates to renew the UMC.  Only a deep and abiding commitment to prayer, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, prophetic and anointed leadership in our local fellowships and at every level of our connection, and Methodist people everywhere seeking greater depths of relationship and faithfulness with Jesus…only in these things will we experience renewal, revival, and ultimately, restoration…

But I do expect that we will be Christian to one another.  I do expect that we will follow the kenosis [self-emptying] example of our Lord, that we will be humble with one another, be willing to put aside our own selfish desires and interests for the sake of one another and the larger body.  How we talk to (and tweet about) and treat one another matters.   That is something the General Conference can do.  GC can try and set the tone for how we have conversations.

General Conference can also help me understand how I can further join God already at work in the world.   I want to hear more stories from our non-U.S. brothers and sisters about the Spirit growing their part of our fellowship!  I want to hear more talk of how we as Methodists in America can divest ourselves – empty our storehouses of properties and pension investments and financial reserves – for the sake of supporting the work of the church overseas and the mission of Christ beyond our specifically United Methodist institutional walls.

And I want General Conference to inspire each of you to be a better leader for our church…not make you more hardened or more cynical or more despondent about our church.  There is already so much that we read and hear that pulls us in that direction.

At the end of the day, our risen Lord reigns.  A world with – or without – a vital movement of the people called Methodists is still a world Jesus loves and saves and ultimately will restore.   So I’m not in this to save the present day American incarnation of the United Methodist Church.  I’m part of this Methodist movement because we have a message of deeply transformative grace and practiced discipleship and a call to personal and social holiness and a prophetic and evangelical gospel that – when preached and embodied – is the best contemporary picture of the gospel of Jesus I know.  I bet the same holds true for many of you.  So somewhere in the midst of these couple of weeks, I hope you are reminded of why you are Methodist, and I hope there is time and space (not governed by parliamentary procedure) to truly conference about how we rediscover who we are…

Continuing to pray for you and our fellowship.  But more importantly, continuing to hope and expect Jesus’ kingdom to come and will to be done…

Peace, Paul

Why I need Lent

I really need Lent this year.  I really need a season of intentional prayer, fasting, and time in the Word.  I really need to turn off my TV, pick up some deep reading, do some more thinking and reflecting and blogging.  Normally, I try and make a big deal about this season for people connected to my ministry (whether in a local church or more recently with my students).  But this year, I think it’s going to be very personal for me…

…because I know I need to draw closer to God.  Several things just in the last week reminded me of how deeply in need of continued growth and transformation I am.  A fairly nasty email exchange with a colleague the other day…very little patience recently with my youngest, Michael….not wanting to take time to pray…frustration with one of my staff that boils over into saying some things I probably didn’t need to say.  Even as I was writing that last sentence, Amber came in and reminded me of something I needed to do…and I rolled my eyes…

The simple truth is that I am a sinner.  I deserve the ashes on my forehead that remind me death is inevitable, a consequence for my selfish and sinful nature.  And so I need the season of Lent to help draw me back to God…to help draw me into a place where the Spirit can once again cleanse and fill and renew me.  I’m reminded of the words from the old hymn “Come thou font of every blessing”…

O to grace how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be!

Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee.

Prone to wander Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love;

here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.

Lent is the season for all of us who are prone to wander to be brought back, bound and sealed to the God who loves us and never leaves us…

Discernment: examples

So how does listening to God actually work?  Not surprisingly, I think it’s different for different people.  But I also think there are some common elements.  A couple of examples from my life…

Example #1. Several years ago, I took our confirmation class on a retreat to a retreat center in St. Simon’s Island, GA.  The first item on our weekend agenda was a guided tour of the retreat center’s Methodist museum.  The tour guide told a story about Susanna Wesley that I had never heard.  He shared how this mother of 19 (9 children died as infants) would do her personal, daily devotions.  Apparently, she would sit on the couch and throw her apron (or something else) over her head to create a sort of tent.  This was a sign to the kids that she was to be left alone, apparently at their peril…

Cute and humorous story that I didn’t think much about…until I went on vacation a week later and heard the same story again, this time told by a Baptist preacher during worship in a tiny church in the Bahamas.  Then after worship, we got in the boat and headed back to the house on the neighboring island where we were staying.  We had lunch and then settled in for a lazy afternoon of reading.  I picked up a new book, opened it to the introduction…and the author was telling the exact same story about Susanna Wesley. Now God had my attention.  A story of the mother of Methodism that I had never heard, and then I hear it 3 times in 3 places within a week…

Significantly, during that season of my life, my personal devotional life was struggling, and I knew it.  I had already been thinking and praying for God to help me find more time or figure out different rhythms in my schedule around church responsibilities and parenting.  So the Susanna Wesley story was a clear indication that yes, I needed to pay attention to this area and work on some things.  Coming back from vacation, I began doing some different things and creating some different rhythms that led to a richer season in my devotional life…

Example 2. Toward the end of last semester, I had been thinking and praying about Wesley, trying to hear from God about where we should focus more of our time and energy.  An area that seemed to keep coming up was prayer.  One of my interns had starting talking a lot more about prayer and feeling like God was leading her to pray more for campus and God’s movement on campus.  A student leader had felt a similar leading, prompting our Wesley group to take the lead on a 24/7 prayer covering for a campus-wide “spiritual awareness week.”  Then during finals week, I traveled with my interns to Kansas City for a campus ministry conference.  As it turns out, two of the featured speakers were leaders in recent revivals of the 24/7 prayer movement.   The aforementioned intern also bugged me enough to go visit IHOP (international house of PRAYER, not pancakes) while we were in KC.  And in my conversations with colleagues and friends at the conference, as well as my own prayer and reflection, a concept that kept coming up was “creating movements.”  This felt vague to me, but I left KC feeling like “prayer” and “movements” were things the Spirit wanted me to pay attention to…

Then the confirmations came.  The day after I got back from the conference, I went with Amber to a baby shower for her administrative assistant.  One of the guests I met was a man launching an IHOP (again, prayer) in Miami.  Hmmm.  Later that week, I was at church and noticed the Upper Room devotional books in the narthex.  I had just attended a workshop (at the conference) led by the Director of the Upper Room, so I picked it up and turned to that day’s devotional.  It was on “praying without ceasing”.  Then not too long after these things, some of my students started talking about this “movement” they had heard about called “God Belongs in My City” that was growing out of some organized youth activity in New York…

It still felt vague, but it was clear enough that we as a ministry needed to praying and needed to be open to if/how God was going to use us as part of a movement He was creating.  So this semester, we starting praying more – prayer rooms, prayer events, prayer groups, praying as staff and leaders, encouraging prayer on campus.  And some of our students started getting more involved in conversations about developing a “God Belongs in my City” movement here in our city.  Four months later, we have a noticeably different depth of community at Wesley, and I think that is largely through the emphasis on prayer.  And tonight, me and many of Wesley’s students will be among more than 200 young adults at a rally to cast vision for a “God Belongs in My City” march being planned for downtown Miami in June…

So in both examples, I was already seeking God about something…

…God used people and other unexpected, unrelated events (“coincidences”) to get my attention…

…there were confirmations…

…I had to respond – do some work, make some changes, try different things…

…I experienced fruit…

Discernment: guidelines

One of the questions I get asked a lot (and was asked again today) is this: “How do you know you are hearing God?” How do we discern what God is telling us or how do we discern where God is trying to lead us or how can I discern God’s voice from my own or worse?  Great and important questions. Here are some guidelines to think about…

God wants to lead us, wants us to experience His leading, and wants us to trust Him when He leads. This is just a quick reminder about our expectations.  If we are in a relationship with Jesus, the Holy Spirit is in our lives and so is seeking to counsel, guide, lead us into truth, etc. Expect to hear and expect to be led…

God will always lead us in a way consistent with His Word and character. This is the most obvious and most important thing about discernment.  God is not going to tell us to harm ourselves or to hate others; God is not going to tell us it’s OK to have sex with someone outside of marriage; God is not going to lead us into jobs that make money to support our families in ways that are illegal or unjust.  Such examples would be inconsistent with who God is and what He tells us in Scripture.  However, God may ask us to sacrifice and deny ourselves for the sake of Him or others; God may require us to be completely honest and forgiving and even bless those who hurt us, even if we don’t want to; God may want us to go to unexpected places.  And God will lead us and speak to us in ways that will ultimately produce good fruit, refine and grow character, and experience assurance and peace.  Because these are all things in line with God’s character and promises found in Scripture.  Which means that knowing and studying God’s Word to begin with is a HUGE part of developing an ability to discern…

Know and be honest about your own heart. A big part of discernment is also understanding yourself – your personality, your passions, your dreams, your weaknesses, your fears.  Part of hearing God’s voice is recognizing your own, recognizing those times when what you think you are hearing is actually your own anxiety or hurt or ambition or whatever….

Seek wise, trusted counsel. We live faith as a community.  Part of sharing life as a community is seeking counsel and wisdom from one another.  So when we are struggling with a decision or trying to decide if something is really from God, seek good counsel from trusted Christian friends.  These folks can help us with the previous suggestion too – help us be honest with ourselves about our own hearts…

Withdraw and wait. Be intentional about creating space and time to focus and pray and listen.  And be patient; God leads and speaks in His own time…

Multiple confirmations are the norm. My experience has been that when God wants us to know something, He will make sure we hear it multiple times.  For me, things often are confirmed in “3′s” – 1) prayer/study, 2) friend’s/loved one’s counsel, and 3) something unexpected…

Experiencing assurance and peace. Eventually, this should come.  If it doesn’t…if there is nagging uncertainty or growing dread or unease…then going back and diving more deeply into some of these guidelines again may be needed.  Even if God is leading or speaking in a way that is challenging or surprising, God does not want us to have a spirit of fear or timidity, but rather confidence in Him and assurance of His presence and leadership…

Preaching to myself

Sometimes as preachers, we end up preaching to ourselves.  I had one of those nights on Monday.  I was talking about living a life fully surrendered and yielded to Christ…and asking my students what that would look like for them and for us as a ministry on campus.  We looked at several images from Scripture of God’s unrelenting love for us…standing at the door and knocking in Revelation 3….the recklessly gracious Father in Luke 15….the radical, redeeming love of a compassionate God buying back His unfaithful people in Hosea 3…and concluded that there is nothing lukewarm or halfway or complacent about God’s love for us…

But what about our love – my love – for Him?  Hmmm….

For me, it is captured well in the following prayer from John Wesley used in covenant renewal services…

 

I am no longer my own, but yours.

Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will.

Put me to doing, put me to suffering.

Let me be employed for you, or laid aside for you,

Exalted for you or brought low for you.

Let me be full, let me be empty.

Let me have all things, let me have nothing.

I freely and heartily yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.

And now O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

You are mine, and I am yours.  So be it.

And the covenant which I have made on earth,

Let it be ratified in heaven.  Amen.

 

Do I really try and live a life in which I “freely and heartily yield all things” to Jesus?  How often does this kind of prayer – this kind of vision of a completely surrendered life – guide our conversations about life, ministry, etc.?

Much to think and pray about.  Much to be transformed in me…

Judging others, continued again…

So here is the final installment of the “judging others” series.  After my message on judging others a few weeks ago, I received a number of questions from students.  Here’s the last one: So what do you do when the other person doesn’t realize they have a plank in their eye?

OK, another good question.  Before going any further, let’s remember the passage I was originally discussing…Matthew 7:1-5.  Jesus commands us not to judge others and then uses the analogy of how we can’t see clearly the speck in our neighbor’s eye when we have a plank in our own.  So the first thing to say to this question is that Jesus is really talking about our planks, not our neighbor’s.  That’s important to realize, and I’ve discussed these more at length in my previous two “judging” posts…

That being said, there are certainly situations in our lives when we are very frustrated because someone around us has a huge plank – an addiction, a bad and hurtful habit, a personality issue, a character flaw, etc. – that they either cannot see or simply refuse to see.  And it is hurting people, including the person with the plank…

I have some experience with this, both in my personal life with friends and family, as well as in the life of a community of believers.  And here is the long and short of it….at the end of the day, people have to see – and be willing to deal with – their own planks. You can confront someone, by yourself and with others; you can pray (and should pray) often; you can even attempt some more dramatic interventions (and I’ve been involved with a couple of those).  But if someone doesn’t want to admit and deal with a problem, they won’t.  That’s just the bottom line…

Which means you have to make a decision about protecting yourself from getting whacked over and over again with the plank.  At some point, if someone refuses to see and deal with an issue that is hurting you and others…you have to make the decision to turn away from that person and their plank….

The hope is that God may use your decision to grab the person’s attention so dramatically that a process of transformation begins to happen.  And God does that sometimes. That is what we hope for and pray for…

But ultimately, our planks are between God and the person staring back at us in the mirror.

Breakfast Meeting

Someone stood me up this morning for breakfast.  It was supposed to be an 8am meeting with a guy I’ve been trying to get together with for awhile now.  I got there 5 minutes early, so I took my new testament in with me in case I had a few minutes,  I sat down and started reading Ephesians.  When he wasn’t there at 8, I texted him to make sure he was on his way…and then waited an additional 15 minutes before calling him, leaving a message, and ordering.  I got my Denver omelette 10 minutes later (which was quite good), ate by myself because he never showed, finished up Ephesians, and left about 8:45 a little frustrated…

OK, more than a little frustrated.  After all, it’s been a really crazy couple of weeks.  Since arriving back from vacation, it’s been non-stop busyness.  There was the wedding I performed that ended up requiring significantly more of my time than I had initially planned; multiple work days trying to get the intern house in shape before next week; trips to the zoo and the beach while hosting my nephew who was in town; hiring an intern and helping with her transition questions; staying up all night in the ER with my very sick sister before getting on a plane for a 24 hour round trip to return my nephew back to North Dakota…all while recruiting board members and guest preaching and filling out annual evaluations for my boss and planning a student leadership retreat before next weekend.  It’s not one of those weeks when I have a lot of extra time to be sitting in restaurants waiting for people…

Then at some point this morning, it dawned on me…maybe my breakfast meeting was supposed to be with the apostle Paul and the church in Ephesus.  Truth be told, in the midst of everything else going on, I haven’t spent a lot of time in my Bible – or in prayer – the past couple of weeks. “Important” things have needed doing; long to-do lists needed to get checked off…

Here I was frustrated with a guy for not showing up for me; but how often do I leave Jesus sitting at the table alone…waiting…wishing for me to show up?

Spiritually Bipolar

I’m at a gathering of Florida Methodist young adults called “Reclaim” today in Orlando.  The speaker this morning, Rev. Andy Sistrunk, was great – lots of good food for thought and several good challenges….

He used a phrase that I loved – “spiritually bipolar.”  In his talk, he was saying that we can become abusers of grace; that worship can become a drug that we seek out (often in various places at various churches) and get enough of it to recharge and keep us going.  We “graze” various church “pastures” looking for God and the high of worship and experiencing Him….

I see that.  A lot.  Students and others seeking “highs” and going around from place to place looking for it…

But what that creates is what Andy called “spiritually bipolar” people.  We seek tremendous emotional highs in “worshipping” God which are followed by tremendous emotional lows when we try and live our daily lives…

But worship is an every day, all the time kind of thing.  Worship is cultivating a life a personal holiness, a life that becomes an agent for justice and transformation.  Jesus becomes Lord of our lives….and together, Jesus becomes Lord of the church (the community of people who have Jesus as Lord of their lives)…and then Jesus becomes Lord of the world through the transforming lives of His transformed people…

THAT’S WORSHIP.  Don’t be bipolar.  It’s not about highs and lows; it’s about holiness and lives that transform the world…

Standing in the Gap

I went to a great event last night on campus that Wesley helped cosponsor.  A man named John Prendergast gave a lecture about the genocide and “rape as war strategy” atrocities occurring in Congo and Sudan.  He shared the personal story of a woman he knows who was essentially a sex slave for a militia group for two years, and then after escaping, is now seeking to find a way to turn her experience into something that can help others.  Amazing story of amazing courage.  He also talked about the misconceptions we have in America about what is going on in Africa, how our ignorance is fueled by the media and movies, and shared a testimony of hope for the the transformation that is happening all over that continent.  John also challenged those gathered – many already dedicated social justice advocates, as well as a handful of other people I’m sure – about the importance of even small groups of people raising their voices and how people movements can make a difference.  We also munched on cold pizza and stale tortilla chips.  Like I said, it was a great college event…

The evening brought to mind a passage in Ezekiel 22.  The prophet is speaking words of judgment from God.  After a litany of evils including corrupt politicians, unfaithful spiritual leaders, abuse and exploitation of the poor, and a variety of other things, the prophet says these words in verse 30: “I [God] looked for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found none.”

Woah…the more I reflect on this verse, the more I just say….woah.  In the midst of the evils and struggles of the world, God looked for someone to stand in the gap, and found….none, nobody.  Yikes.  It made me think of that quote about how all it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing…

There are lots of issues in the world that need attention; there are lots of problems in the world that need to be solved; there are lots of people in the world who need to be helped and protected and saved; there are lots of evils in the world that need to be named and fought and overcome.  So here’s the question: where am I…where are you…supposed to stand in the gap?

I want to be clear – this is a question for all of us to answer.  I’m not just talking about the John Prendergasts of the world.  All of us have a place somewhere on the line….somewhere along the wall…that is our place to stand in the gap.  For my sister Summer, it is her role as a social worker, seeking to make a significant difference in the lives of children and families and protecting the vulnerable from harm.  For my friend Ryan, it is taking his place on the front lines of fighting the AIDS pandemic by serving as a doctor in an overseas clinic.  For a former church member Patty, it is caring for the needs of developmentally challenged young people.  For my father-in-law, it is his ongoing involvement in prison ministry and personal witness for Christ in his business partnerships and relationships.  For some, it may be their vocations as nurses or teachers or stay-at-home parents or volunteers with those in need in their local community.  But the point is, we all need to stand – for God, for good and against evil in all its forms…

So where are you standing in the gap?

Lord, you made the world…love the world…gave your life for the world…and you desire to reach and restore and renew the world.  Help each of us to stand with you and for you.

God Speaks

So it hasn’t been the best week.  We got very little response for the intern program we’ve been advertising, so it feels like that is “back to the drawing board.”  I’ve been reminded several times this week in different ways that this new ministry is still pretty far down on most people’s (and churches) lists of priorities.  There have been several frustrating conversations – some in person, others on facebook.  I feel like students are flaking out about things.  A few people have disappointed me with things they have said or done.  And we’ve all been a little grumpy around the house; Michael has been less than eager to go back to school this week, Amber and I have been trying to play catch-up after being gone, etc.

And yet, God is present and faithful…and He is reminding me of that.  In the midst of what has been a frustrating several days, God has spoken…

I was at a worship gathering Tuesday night, a place I’ve been meaning to check out for awhile.  It was interesting and worthy of a blog post of its own another time.  But in the midst of this gathering, the leader directed our attention to a verse that has been one of those bedrock verses for me the last several months as we have made this transition to Miami and this new ministry – Ephesians 3:20-21.  Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.  Amen. For a year now, I’ve been meditating, praying, teaching and preaching on these verses; they have been a wonderful source of encouragement and vision and hope for me.  And so on that particular night when I finally make it out to the gathering, in the midst of this particular week when I find myself struggling to be encouraged…this verse shows up, as if God is saying, “These words are still true, Paul; hold onto them and live into them.  God is still able to do abundantly far more than what you can imagine, and wants to do so through His Spirit at work in and through you.  Have faith…”

Then this morning, I check my email and see I have a comment on a recent blog post, so I click on and read it.  It’s from a facebook friend (who I haven’t actually met in person yet) who is also blogging through Lent.  We are supposed to be reading along on each other’s posts as a form of accountability to ensure we keep at it.  So I click on his blog to read his most recent post.  It’s on Philippians 4:6-7.  Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. These two verses have been guiding verses for me the last couple of years – through painful conflict at our former church, through the uncertainty of discernment during our leave of absence and time of renewal, through God’s leading us back to Miami.  Over and over again I have prayed and claimed these words, and over and over again God’s peace has filled and guarded my heart.  And so again, God speaks a reminder through familiar words that appear in an unlikely and unexpected place…

God is good, and I am grateful that He is concerned enough to speak reminders and encouragement.  Lord, renew my hope, increase my vision, grow my expectation for what you long to see in this city and through this ministry.  Lord, help me to pray and to take everything to you in prayer, for in knowing that you hear me, knowing that you are involved, I find assurance and peace…