Hollow, But Hopeful


When we asunder part
it causes inward pain
but we shall still be joined in heart
and hope to meet again.

Blest Be the Tie That Binds
#557, The United Methodist Hymnal

Each time I pray at the end of a disaffiliation presentation or a disaffiliation church conference, I end the prayer with the lyric quoted above. I try to remind those gathered together that by the power of the Holy Spirit working in and through the body of Christ, come what may, we are still somehow one. And then, during the drive home, hollow but hopeful, I think about what all of this means, and what it means for Christians around the world and throughout history, to be one as Jesus prays for us to be in his Farewell Discourse in the Gospel of John. 

I have, quite literally, driven thousands of miles alone, mulling this over, trying to discern how history and generations yet unborn will regard us. I remember, as a young twenty-something sitting beneath the florescent lights of seminary classrooms hearing lectures about the schisms of centuries past. I remember studying in the musty stacks of the Duke Divinity School library, reading about the Christians of ages past who died a martyr’s death rather than compromise their principles, and I think about future students of theology, decades or centuries from now, studying for their final exam in church history, looking back at us.   

And so, we prepare for the upcoming special Annual Conference on May 6, where 64 churches will come seeking ratification of their discernment to disaffiliate from the United Methodist Church over matters of conscience related to human sexuality. These churches have prayed, discerned, organized, worked, and prepared for this moment, as they embark on a new mission to be and make disciples of Jesus Christ without the familiar network of support they have heretofore relied upon as they depart the connection that they helped to create and maintain.

I have been a pastor since I was twenty-five years old. Pastoral ministry is the only job I have ever had that was not minimum wage, where the interview questions were more difficult than “Do you think you can operate the register?” and “Are you available nights and weekends?” My time on this earth will be marked by my children and my churches, and I have to admit, it is very difficult to watch individuals and congregations regard what has been my life’s work and turn away from it. It never gets any easier.

And still, Christ is with us, in our midst, preparing us with a future with hope.


           Following this May 6, 2023 special Annual Conference, there will be one more opportunity for ratifications of disaffiliations under Paragraph 2553. Paragraph 2553.2 (approved in 2019) states:


“2. Time Limits—The choice by a local church to disaffiliate with The United Methodist Church under this paragraph shall be made in sufficient time for the process for exiting the denomination to be complete prior to December 31, 2023. The provisions of ¶2553 expire on December 31, 2023 and shall not be used after that date.”

The Virginia Conference’s final ratifying Annual Conference will be held on SaturdayOctober 72023(virtually).  All process, documents and deposits must be received 30 days prior, by September 72023.  In order for a local church to complete the disaffiliation process by the timeframe established by the Book of Discipline and the VAUMC Disaffiliation Process, a local church will need to have had their Congregational Information meeting with me no later than July 72023.  

After Paragraph 2553 sunsets on December 31, 2023, we will have a pause on disaffiliations until after General Conference meets (April 23-May 3, 2024 in Charlotte, NC). It is important to remember that the General Conference is the only body that can amend our Book of Discipline, including ¶2553. 

At this point, we cannot say or predict that the outcome of the 2024 General Conference will be. However, as I tell congregations on the Valley Ridge District, “while we do not know what the future holds, we know who holds the future.” God will continue to work in and through us. The United Methodist Church will continue to proclaim the gospel, to make disciples of Jesus Christ, and transform the world, abiding with the broken hearted and binding the wounds of the suffering. As Dr. Thomas Langford was fond of saying to his students at Duke Divinity School, “When it seems to you that the church is too human to succeed, remember it is also too divine to fail.” 

It is hope for us, and the best hope for the world today.

The church succeeds, not because of the glory of our architecture, the beauty of our music, or the purity of our preaching. It succeeds because it is the place where Christ has graciously decided to locate himself for nothing less than the salvation of planet Earth. 

Grace and peace, 

Doug

Called

7th Sunday After the Epiphany – February 20, 2022

1 Samuel 3:1-18

There is a situation in which I would like for you imagine yourself this morning: corruption is rampant, and everything seems to be falling apart. Your leader is an ever-weakening, failure of a man with two astonishingly sinful and repugnant sons who always seem to do whatever they please, regardless of how abhorrent it is, and they never suffer any consequences for it. Also, no one is hearing from God anymore, and when God finally does speak, God speaks to you and informs you that God’s punishment will rain down upon this leader and his morally bereft household. You quickly learn that it is your responsibility to deliver this difficult news directly to the leader, who while not your father, happens to be the man who raised you. 

And by the way, you are eleven years old, a fifth grader. 

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Shouting at the Sky

Shouting at the Sky

Warwick Memorial United Methodist Church

16 September 2001

Luke 23:13-34

On September 11, 2001, I was serving as the associate pastor of my first pastoral appointment. Tracy was pregnant with our first child Ellen, but we were not telling people yet. The day before, on September 10, our church’s beloved lay leader J.T. Johnson had died suddenly. I had already been scheduled to preach, and the Rev. Larry Adams, our senior pastor, graciously allowed me to preach. What follows is what I said that Sunday.

We have all lived through one of those days where we will always remember where we were and what we were doing. We will always remember how old we were and to whom we were talking and what we were going to do when we heard the news. We will live the remainder of our days remembering how when we heard the news we quickly scanned our mental Rolodexes, trying to remember which loved ones were where. Did anyone have a reason to fly today? Was anyone in Manhattan or in northern Virginia? Maybe I should call, just to be sure.

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Why Your Pastor Can’t Come Back

It was only my second day in the parsonage of my rural, three-point circuit of churches when the phone rang and a voice on the other end of the line informed me that John Ben Varga had died. John Ben was, in many ways, a patriarch of that small community, and his death in the middle of the week meant that my first sermon in my new pastoral appointment would be a funeral sermon for someone known across the county, just not by me.

Almost immediately after I received the phone call regarding John Ben, I received another call from the pastor who was my predecessor in that appointment, offering to return and help in any way I needed, or to allow me to handle things myself. I told him I appreciated his generous offer but felt comfortable handling things myself.

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Ten Thousand Spoons

When I was in divinity school, the twenty-one-year-old singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette released an album titled Jagged Little Pill. It was a tremendous hit, yielding six singles, charting at number one in the United States for twelve weeks, and selling 33 million copies worldwide. If you remember those days, you have probably heard at least one song from the album. In the days before YouTube and streaming music services, Jagged Little Pill was played on practically every radio station, it seemed, all day long.


One of the best-known songs from the album is titled “Ironic” and it is known for, among other things, the lyric “It’s like ten-thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.” In many ways, this lyric succinctly describes how church life and pastoral ministry feel in a postmodern age.

Spoons


Allow me to explain: For centuries, the cultural landscape in this nation was like a seemingly infinite field of bowls of soup that stretched all the way to the horizon and the church possessed a seemingly endless supply of serving spoons. When I was a young person, like so many of my colleagues in ministry, I felt a calling to serve soup. I graduated from college and enrolled in seminary. I was ordained, graduated, and received my spoon, just as I expected based on what I witnessed in the lives of those who led me to the soup in the first place. I was a soup-server, and I anxiously awaited a lifetime of service to the people and communities to which I was sent; communities I believed would be hungry for soup for as long as anyone dared imagine. The soup line seemed to stretch forever. Besides, you basically had to eat soup in order to fit into most places.


And then, it seemed, the world lost its taste for soup.


It did not happen overnight. Sometimes people simply grew tired of soup and sought other forms of sustenance. Other times we only served the soup to people who looked and lived like us, and not like our communities. Still other times, we simply served bad soup that made people so ill they were done with soup forever, no matter how we changed the recipe.

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On Being Still

Screen Shot 2020-08-18 at 8.57.11 AMBe still, and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations; I am exalted in the earth.” The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. – Psalm 46:11-12

Dear sisters and brothers in Christ,

This past spring, my two daughters begged me to watch an animated film with them. “This one is different!” they promised me, “You will like it!” I was not so sure, but they refused to give up. This is how I found myself watching a movie called Frozen II.

To be honest, all I can remember about the original Frozen are three things: the talking snowman, the song “Let it Go,” and the refreshing fact that the heroes are female instead of male. So, armed with a serious lack of information, I sat down to try to enjoy the sequel to a movie I barely remember.

It was wonderful.

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Both Sides, Now

What follows is my July 2020 newsletter article to the Roanoke District of the United Methodist Church. 

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, Screen Shot 2020-07-16 at 7.42.53 AM“Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” – Acts 17:22

          A few years before I was born, Joni Mitchell composed a song titled “Both Sides, Now,” a song inspired by a novel by Saul Bellow. The song includes the lyric “I’ve looked at life from both sides now.” I have to say that this lyric speaks to my life in this time and place as I learn to inhabit the ministry of Roanoke District Superintendent.

It is a strange and difficult time to be in ministry, as of course, you already know. When Bishop Lewis approached me about joining her Cabinet, I had no idea how much of the work would not be serving as “missional strategist” as the Discipline envisions, and I knew not how much of the work would be directed, if not dictated, by COVID-19. What I imagined would be numerous drives on backroads to churches and pastors across the Roanoke District has been replaced by things like Zoom meetings and reading reports from Healthy Church Teams.

I realized the other day that I have been a pastor for 1,196 Sundays, and a District Superintendent for two. Prior to moving to Roanoke, I served as the lead pastor of Reveille UMC on the Richmond District, and for my last quarter-year there, ministry was largely dominated by filming worship, editing video, uploading services, forming a Healthy Church Team, and learning how to do ministry in what felt like a distant, disconnected, bleak new landscape, as I partnered with anxious staff and anxious laity, all while trying to manage my own coronavirus-induced anxiety.

And yet, as difficult as it was, I give thanks for this local church experience. I am one of five active clergy in the Conference who have experienced ministry as both a pastor and D.S during this pandemic. and without this experience, I do not see how I could regard this odd and holy work God has called us to share from “both sides now.”

All of this is to say that I believe that those experiences at Reveille have helped me to read what you ask and send to me as a local church pastor as much or more than I do as a Superintendent. I find myself thinking, “Who would I have stand at the door to make sure masks are being worn? What would I say to someone anxious to complete a health form? How would it feel for me to preach wearing a mask? How would I help assure that the people in my charge were safe?”

I remember worrying about apportionments and waiting to see what kind of offering would come in for the week. I remember checking YouTube analytics to see how many views the service received and how it compared to the week before.

In Acts 17, a greatly distressed Paul stands in front of the Areopagus in Athens and speaks the words at the top of this page, greatly destressed because the idols were so many and the job seemed so large, if not impossible. So, what does he do? He simply starts where he can and he does his best: “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way…”

It is a profoundly difficult time to do ministry in an already post-Christian world. Even before I became your District Superintendent, I was convinced that at no time in the history of this land have clergy and laity had to work as hard we do today. And yet, as I read documents sent to me from so many of you, I find that they are not the dry safety manuals I thought they would be. Instead, they read like love letters written by the church to the people, members and neighbors, saying simply “We love you and want you to be safe and well,” all in the name of the One who described faithfulness as loving God and loving neighbor as oneself.”

Thank you for all you are doing. I know it is not easy. None of us are alone. God is with us, and I am grateful to the God of life for allowing me to be in this time and place together with you.

Grace and peace,

Doug

 

Daughter

IMG_6098Back in 2003 or 2004, I volunteered to write a couple of reflections for a Virginia Conference devotional called A Summer Read. One was a hymn about the sabbath called “On the Seventh Day God Rested and the other was a poem titled “Daughter.” When I wrote it, I had only been a father for a short while after the birth of my oldest daughter Ellen. Based upon Mark 7:24-37, it imagines the unfolding of Ellen’s life until she leaves home, a day that I thought at the time would come much, much less quickly than it has. I offer this as a meditation for Fathers’ Day.

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Transitions: More Than This

Fresco paying tribute to George Floyd, Brussels, Belgium - 04 Jun 2020Reveille United Methodist Church

Trinity Sunday – June 7, 2020

Amos 5: 21-24

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

There is a temptation, in a sermon like this one, preached on a day like today, for a white pastor like me from a mainline Protestant denomination like ours, to a white congregation like Reveille to follow a very well-trod path. This path typically begins with a quote from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and then makes a left-turn somewhere around a quote from the Epistle to the Galatians, where Paul speaks of how in Christ there is “no longer Jew nor Greek, no longer male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The path continues towards a vague statement of Jesus’ commandments to love our neighbors, and how this commandment is inextricably linked to his commandment to love God, all before the white preacher reassures the white congregation that hearing all of these non-specific entreaties on love and unity are all the gospel requires of us, and as such, that everything is going to be all right.

I should know. I am sure at some point I have preached this sermon.

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Transitions: A Tale of Two Churches

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAReveille United Methodist Church

Pentecost Sunday – May 31, 2020

Acts 2:1-21

 

Today, May 31st, is Pentecost, one of the high holy days of the liturgical year. If you ask most anyone who plans worship for this day, they will likely tell you that this is one of their favorite Sundays of the year. One could argue that of all of the Sundays in our liturgical journey, Pentecost is perhaps the brightest, most vibrant, kinetic, colorful, bombastic days of worship. See the bright red/yellow/orange tongues of fire alight above the heads of the disciples. Feel the mighty rush of the Spirt/wind across your face, filling the upper room. Hear the cacophony of different languages from all over the world calling out in praise of the wondrous deeds of God, diverse languages spoken from the lips of the Galilean disciples. Imagine the scent of fire and smoky mist as Peter preaches so boldly of a darkened sun and a blood-red moon.

Were things like they once were, today would be the day of confirmation for our eighth graders, as they stand before the congregation who, in so many cases, has raised them and who will be their witnesses when they stand in our majestic chancel and say words of salvation: “I believe.” This would be their day of a reception at noon and photographs on the steps of Reveille House after a service where names spoken into the mystery of worship at their baptisms so long ago now reverberate again amidst the marble and the pillars and the red paraments and the words proclaiming “peace on earth and goodwill to all” as these young people kneel and receive a new name, the name we all have: Christian.

This is a day that would have included a sequence hymn and this morning’s text proclaimed from the center of the worship space, this text with all of those difficult-to-pronounce nationalities, this text that tells of three thousand people becoming believers and giving birth to that which God has chosen and set apart as both a sign of God’s grace and as an outpost of Heaven on earth: the church.

This is the second-to-last sermon I will ever preach as your lead pastor, and since today is the birthday of the Christian church, I would like to use this sermon to give glory to Christ by discussing his church, his bride, his body on earth as scripture attests by giving voice to the choice that stands before this church, today, and in all of the days to come, and I will do this in the bright, colorful, flickering light of Pentecost. I believe that doing so will help explain several facets of our relationship as pastor and parish over these last six years.

In the grandest sense, perhaps without meaning to, churches tend to situate themselves in to one of two broad categories in regard to how they understand themselves and how they relate to the world, and those models are known as the Attractional Model and the Missional Model. Now, let me be very clear from the outset in saying that there is no purely attractional church just as there is no purely missional church. Every church, regardless of doctrine, has elements of both. However, churches also tend to lean more in one in one direction than the other, and it is that which I am speaking to today.

The self-image of the Attractional Church trends this way: our predominant purpose is to “bring people in,” and we do this through elements such as beautiful worship, elegant facilities, and large, attractive, popular programs. “If we can offer these,” Attractional Churches believe people will come, and the house of God “will be filled,” to use an image of the Lord’s in Luke 14. The Attractional Church understands its primary mission to bring people in.

By contrast, the Missional Church understands its purpose to be going out. It asks questions that attempt to locate the pain, the need, and the injustice in their community and world, and measures success not as much on how many people it brings in as much as how many people it sends out, and how many people and situations are ministered to though the congregations’ living out of its purpose. These churches often like to quote the Epistle of James, chapter two when they say “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead,” as well as  “Show me your faith without works, and I by my works will show you my faith.”

Again, let me be clear when I say that all churches have elements of both of these models, they just tilt more in one direction than the other.

For most of its history, Reveille has tilted on the side of the Attractional Model, which makes perfect sense. We have the most beautiful building and grounds of any church in the city, if not the Commonwealth. I have loved showing Reveille’s sanctuary to people seeing it for the first time because to a person, I always hear them catch their breath. Throughout its history, Reveille has taken pride in offering the very finest music to be found anywhere in the Conference, a large and amazing youth group, and profound youth performances. You have had pastors like Bishop R. Kern Eutsler preach from that mighty pulpit, thirteen steps above the nave. You offered studies and classes that many people wanted to join. The Reveille Weekday School was so popular that I have heard stories of women learning they were pregnant from their OBGYN and driving directly from the doctor’s office here to secure a spot for their yet-unborn child.

And anytime we did something grand and people came, we felt successful. Reveille has been throughout its history a very, very attractive church, not without important missions, but a very attractive, and attractional church.

Yet what I think explains so much of the relationship between pastor and parish during my tenure here over these last six years comes from the fact that I have worked to push Reveille, in our life together and in our programming in a more missional direction. This is why I have spent so much time in Swansboro while encouraging you to do the same. It is why I preach on things like social justice and inclusion. It is why I have challenged us to not only serve those in need, but to be in relationship with them as well. It is why I have always tried to challenge you, why I feel so connected to our early Methodist roots. It what informs everything about how I think, pray, and lead.

And as I have pushed, you have understandably pushed back, especially in the fair questions you have asked of me, questions such as “Help me understand how doing ministry in Swansboro gets people to come to Reveille?” and “Why are you always telling us to do things?” and comments I have received when I have preached challenging sermons on prophetic texts asking why I could not, in essence, preach on topics more lighthearted and encouraging, and why you hear so many sermons and prayers about God’s pervasive sense of justice, and how the church should reflect that sense of justice.

This is all fair. If I am going to enter into an established community and question fundamental assumptions you hold dear about who you are, about your identity, I should absolutely expect you to ask “Why?” Likewise, it would be an abdication of my role as your pastoral leader if I failed to respond to these queries.

Everything I have done since I landed here in 2014 has been done with an eye to two things. The first is asking how Reveille can grow in grace and be the embassy of the Kingdom of God that God calls all congregations to be? In other words, how can we live and love such that we resemble a glimpse of heaven, such that the world will see the Christ in us? The second thing is to ask how Richmond and how the world are different because we are here?

In Matthew 11, John the Baptist is in prison for speaking out against King Herod and he sends messengers to ask Jesus, in essence, if he is indeed the messiah, or if they should wait for someone else. Jesus’ reply is telling when he says “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” Jesus, like the Epistle of James envisions an active, visible faith that transforms lives and communities as God utilizes them for nothing less than the salvation of the world.

Through it all, the conviction that I have carried with me in regard to our life together has been this: a largely attractional church can often survive for a season without being very missional. However, there is little more attractional than a truly missional church, for no other reason than we are actively in the world into which God sends us, living what we believe, resembling the one who saves us, showing them the Christ in us. Throughout my life I have met many, many people who gave up on God because of the actions of Christians. However, I have yet to meet anyone who lost their faith because of the grace, acceptance, compassion, and love of Christ. To be like Jesus, and to prioritize in our life what was most important to him, is to be attractional.

It is how, in a world of doubt, we earn the right to be heard.

A year ago, it was Holy Week, and our Director of Children’s ministries Tammy Tipton-Nay and I were in the chapel having worship with large groups of children from our Weekday School. When the oldest group arrived, the children who were on the very cusp of kindergarten, I told them the Easter story, and when I was done, a little boy spoke into the silence and said “He is not alive. It is just a story.”

Friends, I believe that Reveille has the God-given ability, with all of our gifted people, talent, creativity, and resources to work towards creating a beloved community here and world around us that we can partner with God in fashioning a world where that boy grows up and changes his mind, where he, too stands one day in our chancel on Pentecost, amidst the marble and the majestic columns and words on the reredos promising peace on earth, and that he, too can one day stand before the congregation and say the words of everlasting life: “I believe.”

On Pentecost, when the tongues of fire descended and the wind of the Spirit began to blow and people from all over the world began to hear the disciples from Galilee speak words of praise to God in foreign tongues, in their tongues, the Spirit did not tell the disciples to hold tight and await the arrival of the crowd in their upper room, but instead, the Spirit sent them into the crowd, into the community in Jerusalem, to go where the people are.

When John the Baptist sent messengers to essentially say to Jesus “If you are the Messiah, please start acting like it,” Jesus replied with stories, missional stories about changes being wrought in the lives of real people in real communities. Even Luke 14, where Jesus envisions the Master’s house being filled, he tells his disciples to go out to where the people are, find them, and bring them in to make it so.

Now to be clear, nothing I have said precludes beautiful buildings, beautiful music, attractional programming, or the importance of excellence in worship and preaching. And yet, in the world in which we find ourselves today, the church, unempowered by the culture around us, must regain the right to be heard, and we do that by walking the talk, embodying the message, reflecting the light of Christ into the dark places, living the words of the prophets by doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with our God. This is how the infant church lived in the immediate aftermath of Pentecost towards the end of Acts chapter two. They loved one another and they loved their community in a way that was attractional because it was missional, and as such, our faith is the descendent of their life and witness. Acts tells us that as they lived in this visible, missional way, “the Lord added daily to the number of those being saved.”

Does Reveille have the courage and the will to live as Pentecost people? I believe we do. I believe Reveille can live and love and serve out loud, in a way that makes the love of God in Jesus Christ real, tangible, and believable, such that children like the little boy in the chapel can grow into young adults who regard the Kingdom change wrought by this church in your life and in our witness to the world in a way where he will someday say “It has to be true. Christ must be alive. How else can I explain these things I have seen done by these believers who claim to know him?”

Over these last six years, I have preached the word to you. I have broken the bread of life for you. I have baptized your babies, married your couples, and buried your dead. I have visited in your homes, sat beside your hospital beds, and heard your most private confessions. I know you and I love you, so hear me when I say this to you: Transitions are indeed difficult and change is rarely easy. And yet, Jesus says we gain our lives by losing them, and that this loss is the very first step towards gaining them forever.

Living as an authentic missional Christian witness in the world is not only how Christ’s kingdom comes to bear in this realm, it is also the means by which, in a time of change and doubt, Reveille saves its very life, for the sake of Christ, for the sake of this community, for the sake of generations yet unborn, and for the sake of the world Christ died to save.

The Spirit of Pentecost is moving. God’s voice is speaking words we can understand. Do we have ears to hear?

 

Gloria In Excelsis Deo.