Our Bishop's call to ReThink Church

April 24, 2010 at Visalia UMC

Notes by Nick Strobel

 

Here are key points I gathered from Bishop Brown talk to us why we need to restructure at the conference level.

 

• The world has changed around us and we must change so that we can reach out. The old ways worked in the old world. We're still using the old ways and we're wondering why they're not working.
• Over the past 40 years the general population in the area of our conference has grown from 8 million to 18 million people. Most of that change has been an increase in diversity: the Caucasian (white) population has stayed pretty much the same while the other races/ethnic groups have increased.
• The number of laity in our churches has declined while the number of clergy has increased. This does NOT mean we need to decrease the number of clergy. No, we need to increase the number of laity by re-engaging the laity to answer God's call to transform the world.
• There is abundance all around us. Plenty of potential laity.
• We who are called Methodist have something to offer the world. Indeed, the values we hold/proclaim are the things that the world is hungering for but the world doesn't know about us.
• We in the church need to remember that the world cannot hear us proclaim the gospel if we're quarreling with each other.
• The bishop with his cabinet of superintendents are focused on deploying the clergy for mission, NOT for saving churches. In a follow-up answer to a question on how appointments will be done, the bishop said that the churches need to be mission-focused instead of preference-driven.
• There is an over-dependence on clergy and staff to do the ministry for us [representational ministry in the Vital Signs book we studied last year]. Laity need to do the ministry. Clergy ministry is not “more legitimate” or better than lay ministry. Bishop Brown asked who of us had been baptized. We all raised our hands. He then proclaimed that we are all authorized to do the ministry.
• We need to try new things. Some things will be successful and some things will fail. We won't know which until we try.
• We've already started our experimenting with the new circuit structure. The circuits have led to more cooperation among clergy and less competition. Under the new structure superintendents are now visioning and coaching, not managing a bureaucracy.
• Empowering the laity to be in partnership with clergy. While we do this we must keep Wesley's 3 basic rules that are (in modern English): 1) Do no harm; 2) Do Good; 3) Stay in love with God. We do #3 with prayer, scripture, spiritual disciplines and being in intentional covenant relationship with each other.
• The clergy's role is to help and push the lay person to grow so that the lay person can do the ministry in their community.
• We're going to build the plane while it is flying. He showed a video of an old Super Bowl commercial of building an airplane while it is flying.

 

Pieces of legislation for the 2010 Annual Conference Session that will start us on this way:

1)    Proposal to reduce the number of districts in our Annual Conference from 7 to 4. It is the hope that this will improve consistency as the district superintendents will be in more frequent contact with each other so that they can speak with one voice rather than acting as 7 different “silos”.

2)    Proposal to suspend Division V of our Standing Rules to enable us to experiment. This division is about the conference administrative structure---our boards and agencies. We're going to work toward flattening the bureaucratic structure.

3)    Proposal to Direct-Bill active clergy pension costs (to the local church) instead of paying for it through our apportionments. Over 90% of our churches already pay all of the pension part of the church apportionment (and most fail to pay the full amount of the rest of the apportionments). Most churches don't have any idea of what it really takes to bring a full-time clergy to their church, so this will be one way to improve transparency. Furthermore, when the pension funding was put into our apportionment payment years ago, the pension part was a small percentage of the total. Today it has grown to about 40% of our apportionment. Apportionments are supposed to be mission/outward-focused, so the pension proportion is now too much and makes it less clear to the churches what our mission is.

Under direct billing about 100 churches will pay less than what they pay now in our pension-apportionment system. The pension costs for a full-time elder is between $9000 to $10,000. Wesley's pension apportionment for 2010 is about $9100, so our pension payment will go up a little.

We also need to be aware that our Annual Conference is in last place by a significant margin in paying its apportionments to the general church. Sixty annual conferences pay apportionments to enable ministry in the entire church. Our Annual Conference pays just 50% of its apportionment to the larger church and the next Annual Conference in the list pays about 75% of the general church apportionment.

4)    Proposal to change Minimum Compensation Rules to increase flexibility in tough economic times, simplify the formula and make it fairer to the churches. The Equitable Compensation Commission (a required group specified in the Book of Discipline) will be tasked with setting annually a single figure for elders conference-wide and a single figure for certified local pastors conference-wide. These figures will get rid of the minimum comp range that includes years of service and they will not use the Denominational Average Compensation that has tended to artificially inflate salaries despite what is happening in the local economy. The Equitable Compensation Commission will use a set of indicators/factors to set the two conference-wide figures but the proposal does not say what those indicators will be.