Is it too much to ask?

Yesterday I observed that local churches sometimes receive members who come from outside their tradition because an individual has become disenchanted with their former congregation.  This can happen for some good reasons.  But frequently it is a form of pouting.  “I don’t have to put up with this, I’ll just leave” is not the greatest rationale for leaving one fellowship and uniting with another.

There is a kindred malady, and it is wreaking havoc in The United Methodist Church.  I am talking about the practice of wholesale receiving already-credentialed clergy from other denominations.  I want to go on record as affirming many of my sisters and brothers who, as they matured in their spirits, theology and ecclesiology turned to The United Methodist Church for the carrying out of their ministerial call.  I know a great number of clergy whose journey has carried them not away from something, but to something they valued in the UMC.

But there is another bunch.  And they are driving me crazy.  They come from denominations that will not countenance divorce among clergy for whatever reason.  The clergyperson doesn’t have to be flaming practitioner of adultery for their denomination to excuse them. They can be pillars of the community, but if their spouse leaves them for any reason at all, their denomination disqualifies them from the practice of ministry.  The UMC has no such prohibition.  Consequently, people who never change their denominational spots seek credentialing as Methodists because divorced clergy have a place in our structure. Some of these folks come in, receive church appointments, and then rail at our practices.  But we’ll give them a paycheck, and so here we are.  And they’re killing us.

These preachers have some kinfolk in a class of people who may bounce around church-to-church in their congregational denominations for years.  In such settings a local church can arbitrarily and immediately dismiss a pastor just because they do not like the cut of the preacher’s jib.  These clergy can wake up one morning not knowing if they are going to have a position by nightfall.  In The United Methodist Church, we have a practice of assuring pastors a “guaranteed appointment.”  That means that a minister in good standing will always have a place of assignment.  If a congregation becomes disenchanted with its clergy, s/he may be moved down the road, and the location might not be the most desirable in the mind of the pastor, but there is a place to go, a check to be collected and a roof over their head.  As you can imagine, that has an enormous appeal to some folks.  And, as was the case with their cousins above, once in the system they pretty much have the freedom to be as un-Methodist as they like.  And they’re killing us.

A separate but equally calamitous set of circumstances concerns the retirement arrangements for Methodist clergy.  Ministers are, for Social Security purposes, self-employed.  So, Methodist pastors pay around 13.5% of their earnings off the top to Social Security.  But they also make private contributions to a denominational retirement fund.  The local congregation where the individual ministers makes an in-kind contribution to the pension fund.  Over the course of a lifetime of pastoring the amount is not exorbitant, but it is superior to the plans in which many other denominations participate.  Especially as a clergyperson gets older, this looks pretty good.  As is the case with the aforementioned imports, once in, clergy who formerly ministered in another fellowship can practice a lot of theological – and therefore, hermeneutical – latitude.  And they’re killing us.

I may sound bitter.  That is not my aim.  But our great church is in crisis, not only in the area that the General Conference of 2019 addressed, but in almost every sphere of church theology and practice.  I don’t know how to fix it.  But I don’t think that it is too much to ask Methodist clergy to act like Methodists.

Otherwise, you have the hodge-podge that faces us now. 

And they’re killing us.

Taking License

Like most pastors I have a lot of pieces of paper framed and hanging on my wall.  A friend of mine calls such collections our “works righteousness” walls.  In one cluster there are my academic parchments – my college and seminary diplomas.  In another grouping are my ecclesiastical credentials.  These include the parchments recognizing my ordination as deacon and as elder (these date back to a time when elder’s ordination was a two-step process.  Elders and Deacons are separate orders in the United Methodist Church now).

But there is one more.  It is my License to Preach in the United Methodist Church (UMC).  This is a document that signifies that the church granted me limited authority to carry out certain pastoral acts while I served as a student pastor (a designation that no longer exists in the UMC).  The church appointed a student pastor to a church or charge, and the student could preach and do a few other things there.  

A student pastor visited in hospitals and sickrooms.  Student pastors could conduct funerals.  They could officiate at weddings in the churches where they preached.  The student pastor did limited administration within their own pastoral charge.  But the student pastor could not administer the sacraments.  If a Baptism was in order the student had to recruit an ordained elder to do that task.  An elder was also necessary for serving Communion.

The rules of the church are a little different now.  Local Pastors (who have a bit more training and who are examined a tad more closely before they receive a pastoral assignment) can now baptize and preside at the Communion table in their own appointment (although they cannot administer the sacraments beyond their own local congregation).

I spend this time because in the past week I have passed the 43rd anniversary of the issuing of my License to Preach.  I had been doing church work for a little over a year.  I went through the certifying process during that time.  Then, with the reception of that first certificate, I began a long journey of credentialing and ministry.

In those days a pastor went through a renewal of license process annually as long as s/he was preaching.  This held true until ordination as a deacon.  At that point the student preacher ceased to be under the supervision of the District Committee on Ordained Ministry (the entity that granted the License) and began a time of oversight by the Conference Board of Ordained Ministry.  When the candidate received Elders ordination s/he attained a status of being able to execute all duties of the pastoral office without restriction.

So, in practical ways, that License on my wall doesn’t reflect my current status at all.  The print is fading. The paper itself has begun to deteriorate. It contains the signatures of the folks on that long-ago committee who helped me get started.  Some of them are no longer alive.    It is a reminder of a time gone by.  But it is also a symbol to me of a beginning, of an attitude and an enthusiasm for my pastoral work that I had when I first started out.  It sometimes pushes me when I feel the occasional pressure of these tasks closing in on me.  

It’s not coming down.