Happy New Appointment Year!

 Today is the first Sunday of the new appointment year. For those who are receiving new appointments, it is a day of anxiety: will this new relationship between pastor and parishioners be fruitful? Will it help us all grow in our discipleship? Will it foster ministries that extend beyond the walls of the church to those in the community who are most in need? Will it hone our prophetic voices and witness, as we seek a more just world for us all, in particular for the most vulnerable in our midst?

I am praying for you!

The appointment year is so uniquely United Methodist. While we plan for the long haul, we also know that at the end of June, we who are pastors may be passing the baton to someone who will be following us. For parishioners, it can be a time of grief as a beloved pastor moves on to another church in need of their gifts. If you are continuing with the same pastor/appointment, I pray that you will do some introspection: where have we been most faithful together? Where do we need to forgive each other? What do we need from each other to grow in faithfulness? Are we helping one another engage in ministries in the community that are life-giving and life-transforming? If not, why not?

I am praying for you as well!

When I came to the Mountain Sky Conference eight years ago, I was so struck by how missional our churches were: nearly every church had an outreach ministry that made an impact on the lives of others—whether in the community in which the church was, or even in other continents through mission trips and missional giving. I was and continue to be moved by this sign of vitality in our churches.

Your church is needed to be a beacon of hope as you share the love God has for all people. In these
highly divisive days, how you live together, honoring the differences that exist between your neighbors in the pews, can be a witness that diversity is a sign of a wildly creative God and adds contour to community.

I am praying for us all through these days of transition. May the Holy Spirit continue to draw us more deeply into God’s grace, and lead us all into Beloved Community.

PREPARING FOR ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2023

Much of the work of conference leadership has been laser-focused on preparing for Annual Conference, which will be held next week at First UMC in Colorado Springs. Annual Conference is a time when clergy and lay members of the Mountain Sky Conference gather to help us order our life for the coming year. We will worship together, engage in mission, share in bible study, engage in learning workshops, approve new candidates for ministry, adopt a budget, remember those saints who served God and now rest from their labors, and renew old friendships and make new ones.

I have been watching reports from Annual Conferences across the country. I have been struck by the joy and hope that has been expressed across the connection. As we move past the heartbreak of disaffiliations, there is a renewed commitment to our mission to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. There is a desire to deepen the United Methodist connection. There is a vision for who God is calling us to be that is contagious, captivating clergy and laity.

In these few days before we gather, I will be in deep prayer for our time together. I pray that the winds of the Spirit will carry us safely to Colorado Springs and that those who will be attending via zoom will feel the connection we share.

I pray that everyone who is a part of annual conference will find joy knowing they are a part of something lifegiving and will rediscover we can do more together than we can apart.

I pray that someone will find Jesus tapping them on the shoulder and hear him say, “Come, follow me.”

I pray that we will offer one another generous grace as we commit to listening to one another, even when there are sighs too deep for words.

I pray that we will do what United Methodists are told to do from the time they enter Sunday School: to leave a place better than we found it (whether that place is First UMC, Colorado Springs, or each session we are a part of).

The words that continue to surface in my prayers are these: Grace. Joy. Connection. May these words guide our time together.

Mountain Movers

Tomorrow is the story of the transfiguration (Matthew 17), when Peter, James and John went to the mountain top with Jesus and he was so completely filled with God’s light and love that he literally shone. And God’s voice was heard, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”

I find what follows in the scripture to be fascinating. A man begs Jesus to heal his son. He had brought him first to the disciples, but they weren’t able to provide a healing. When we think of Jesus getting angry, we usually think of the time in the temple, when he overturned the money changers. But Jesus is pretty livid here, and this time the focus of his anger isn’t those outside his social circle. This time, his anger is directed at his own disciples. In the Message version, Jesus responds saying, “What a generation! No sense of God! No focus to your lives! How many times do I have to go over these things? How much longer do I have to put up with this?”

It is only after Jesus heals the boy and he and the disciples move on to be by themselves that the disciples finally get up the nerve to ask, “Why couldn’t we heal the boy?”

Imagine yourself a disciple. Imagine having walked all through the Judean hills and valleys learning from Jesus, wanting to know still more because clearly you’ve missed something. How would you feel if Jesus answered your question by saying, “Because you’re not yet taking God seriously. The simple truth is that if you had a mere kernel of faith, a mustard seed, you would tell this mountain, “MOVE!” and it would move. There is nothing you wouldn’t be able to tackle.”

We are the disciples of Jesus. We are the ones Jesus is speaking to. We are the ones God is wanting to move mountains.

Are you ready to move mountains?

This is the question that is held before you and me as followers of Jesus every single day. When we rise in the morning, God has an expectation of us. There are needs within our churches and communities that only you can respond to. Do you have the right stuff? It doesn’t take much, only the faith the size of a mustard seed.

I have been a church goer and a pastor long enough to know that oftentimes we don’t focus on what’s really important to God. We care more about the number of people in the pews than the state of their souls. We treat our churches like museums rather than triage centers, where wounded people can come for healing and not worry that they are messing up the feng shui of the place. We worry more about filling in all the bodies needed for the nominations report than what the people who inhabit those bodies are called to do in the world and whether or not we are equipping them to go do it.

We don’t make the main thing the main thing. We allow ourselves to get distracted by the small stuff. But God doesn’t call us to the small stuff. God calls us to the things that are crushing, bruising, damaging God’s beloved children. God is calling us to make a difference in the world. To move mountains, not molehills.

You and I know what is going on in our world. We see the needs around us. We know that there are people in our pews whose homes resemble battle fields. We know there are people in our churches and communities that struggle with demon addictions. We know that poverty is taking a terrible toll on those around us. We know that schools don’t need armed teachers, they need teachers that are armed with enough money so that they don’t have to buy the basic supplies for their classroom instruction.

But do we possess faith, yes, even the smallest amount of faith, to respond to the needs, hurts and hungers of our world. Do we believe we can move mountains?

St. Teresa of Avila reminds us:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours; no hands but yours; no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ must look out on the world. Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which He is to bless His people.

We are called to move mountains. God expects nothing less of us. May our faith strengthen us, inspire us, and move us, so that we can usher in the Beloved Community God desires of us.

Here Am I, Send Me!

I love Isaiah 6: 1-8. It is the call of the prophet of Isaiah, “Whom shall we send and who will go for us?” Isaiah doubts his worthiness, even though he has seen the Lord, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” Yet, he experiences a cleansing of the guilt of sin he has been carrying, and is able to respond, “Here am I, send me.”

God calls the most unlikely people to carry God’s message of saving love into the world. Isaiah felt unworthy, Moses was a murderer, Sarah laughed at what God had promised. Jesus picks unlikely ones as well: fishermen, tax collectors, a woman at the well…not the people you would automatically assume would be chosen for such sacred tasks.

God continues to ask, “Whom shall we send, and who will go for us?” Our task is to help one another hear and respond to God’s call. God has a particular task for each one of us: some are called to teach Sunday School and train up a new generation in the ways of Jesus. Others are called to create mission pathways so people can bring Good News in tangible ways to communities in crisis. Some are called to administrative work, to help the church use its resources to further its ministry. What has God called you to do? How have you responded, “Here am I, send me!”

I was blessed as a child to have someone recognize something in me that I wasn’t able to see in myself. One day when I was 11 years old, Ken White asked me if I ever thought about becoming a minister. His question rocked my world and forever changed my walk with Jesus. Through that simple question, God’s call for my life was given the space to grow.

Each church should be nurturing future leaders. How is yours doing it? Do you see the fruits of the Spirit in a young person’s life, just waiting to be encouraged to develop? Have you offered a spiritual nudge and asked, “Is God calling you to ordained ministry?” Are you staying alert and looking at those who might seem like unlikely candidates for such work? The teen who is always hanging out in the background of church activities, who seems to have no where else to go? The addict who has found sobriety whose joy at a new lease on life is contagious? The single mom with several children of her own yet still has the emotional bandwidth to be a mom to all the kids in the neighborhood?

When was the last time your church sent someone into ministry? If you are not nurturing the next generation of ministers, how will your church have the spiritual leadership to continue to be a living witness of God’s generous grace in the future?

May you and your congregation allow God to speak through you, “Whom shall we send, and who will go for us?” as you encourage deeper discipleship in one another, and may someone—may many people--respond, “Here I am, send me.”

ReThink WHAT??!!

I was making my way to Glide one morning, and when I stopped off BART at the Powell Street station, I looked around and saw that the station had been plastered with "RETHINK" ads.  I was excited to see this that The United Methodist "Rethink Church" campaign had invested to much in marketing in San Francisco.  Rethink Church is a four-year marketing strategy "to invite the church and those unchurched who seek spiritual fulfillment, to become more outwardly focused and engaged in the world." 

Well, imagine my surprise when I saw that these RETHINK ads had nothing to do with the church. They were for Bare Escentuals, a make-up company! 

I began to think about these two RETHINK campaigns.  The church is experiencing an aging membership, empty pews, and the inability to sustain mission and ministry due to decreased donations. 

I believe that the church possesses a life-giving message of transformation and liberation, so needed in our day and age! But too many of our churches have become museums and historical relics of a by-gone era.  Instead of looking unflinchingly at the world and seeing where faithful witness is needed, the church has turned inward.  Instead of engaging as bold disciples and offering the world ministries of compassion and justice, the church has too often turned its back on the cries of God's children.

I am glad The United Methodist Church is calling us to RETHINK the church...my only hope is that it is not a slick make-over job or a glossy cover-up.