Report of the Regional Conference Minister

Challenges Facing All of Us

For our New York Conference staff retreat this year, we read Jeffrey Jones “Traveling Together: A Guide for Disciple Forming Congregations”. (Alban Institute: 2006). Jones writes for a contemporary church struggling to reinvent itself in order to survive in a post-modern, post-Christendom world. He speaks of changed realities challenging the church:

The broadly accepted assumption that our essential needs can ALL be met by science, politics and economics, though well ingrained, is beginning to falter.

An emerging sense that “truth” is something more than can be determined by intellectual knowledge.

A greater acceptance of diversity, in people, ideas and lifestyles. This includes familiarity with and acceptance of competing, even contradicting worldviews.

An appreciation of humor and the ironic, as life's inconsistencies, limitations and absurdities have become impossible to overlook.

A cynical distrust of institutions, authorities and hierarchies.

An increasing hunger for the spiritual, particularly a desire for spiritual experience and participation.

At best, only marginal hope that the church can help with any of our needs; at worst, the church's complete dismissal as irrelevant.

Jones, a professor at Andover Newton, is empathetic towards congregations foundering without the undergirding social structures and philosophical assumptions that carried the North American mainline churches to their heyday of numbers and prestige in the middle of the 20 th century.

All The News Is Not Bad

But, Jones believes, all the news is not bad. In our changed circumstances, the church is beginning to see that mission is not something we do “over there” and “for them.” Instead, mission turns out to be also about reaching out to serve people of our own kind and in our own culture. No longer able to count on a crowd, congregations are now having to get serious about the difficult, one person at a time, task of making disciples. This is pointing writing the book: rather than just expecting a constituency, the church needs to undertake, as its core, the work of “disciple development.”

I worry that ‘disciples' connotes ‘followers who unthinkingly mimic a set of directions laid out in the beginning' (yes, I know, such a fear is so UCC!). Since our United Church is so committed to all the new situations and ways this world is calling for the love of God, we have to question Christian formulations suggesting a back to basics approach, or rediscovery of the original faith of Jesus, or return to the New Testatment church. I might restate Jones' description of our purpose as: ‘calling, equipping and sending of apostles into a world indescribably changed from the one Jesus lived in, but one that all the same desperately needs to hear of and be redeemed by the love of God.'

Still, I like much of Jones' prescription: how our churches need to change the way they see themselves, change what they do and change who they are. His remedy will be some tough pills to swallow, but, if we can get them down, they could help us to start to get well again. For example:

Putting new people who show up seeking spiritual help on a committee won't be sufficient to nurture a newcomer's relationship with Christ in a way that will impact his or her life!

Permanent governing bodies should limited to three: 1) a council-- focusing administration around discerned core values and beliefs; 2) a human resources team—prompting the discernment of every member's gifts; 3) a training team-- inspiring, motivating, training and sending people for their various ministries. All our other boards and committees, he suggests, can be better undertaken as ad hoc ministries by people who are called and impassioned to do a time-limited, goal-specific task.

Pastors and our people simply do yet know the answers to the questions facing the church today. Technical responses, fine-tuning with what we or the expert know, no longer work. Instead, we need to understand that the earth has quite literally moved from beneath our feet. We need to be seeking adaptive responses, based on information that is not yet known. In other words: change or die-- our task is to reinvent the church.

Why do I share this with you in my Annual Report? Because I find it an illustrative and challenging sketch of where we are. The church is in an arduous moment of rebirth. But even as I hope to turn our focus to the ways we must change, I want you to hear me say this : this situation—our need to change-- does not come as a result of some failing of your church . Instead, it's a symptom of a world has changed that much. Jones points out, even more deeply, that God always calls humans to change: even in God's accepting us as we are, God means for us grow to be more.

Good, Exciting Work Ahead

Beloved, we… you, me, our churches, associations, conferences and all the settings of the United Church… we have so much work to do. And it's good work. Exciting work. Because it's about God, even when the going gets tough, it's hopeful work. And, I believe, a bit grudgingly, and in fits and starts, we're getting on with it.

The Association has recognized and been about this change for the last couple of years. The Board of Directors has been asking these kinds of questions and working on these kinds of issues, but many of your leaders' conversations only got noticed last fall, when they suggested some drastic changes in the way we lead our lives, our use of our financial resources. And change engenders conflict…

The job of rethinking the Association so that it can do its work and support the changes our congregations need to make is so big that we have called a special Blue Ribbon Committee to continue asking those questions, polling our churches and developing a vision and a plan for your future consideration.

Please pray for the Blue Ribbon Committee, the Board of Directors and all the Committees of this Association, the Association itself, and, of course, its constituent congregations and all its members. We are a diverse and wonderful collection of saints, sometimes hard to keep together, but surely one of God's great joys is when we figure out how to work together and show the world something of the light and love, sound and fury of God's love.

Changes Among Us

Over my five years as your Regional Conference Minister, I have marveled at how much lower our clergy turn-over rate has been than other associations in the New York Conference. Showing my NYC metro. area parochialism, I have figured our consistency has been a sign that most of us would rather not live any place else!

But, undeniably, we have moved into a period of appreciable pastoral change. Briarcliff, Broadway, Bronxville, Chappaqua and Judson have called new pastors. Emanuel, Evangel, Grace Congregational, Nazarene, Rockville Centre and Victoria are searching. Rockaway Beach is just opening up. A number of associate ministers have moved or been down-sized. Christ Congregational quietly closed. Finally, we are nearing the retirement of some pastors who've played important part in the life of this association.

And there are the “retirements” from Association leadership. I would especially mention Ron Williams Wells for his leadership as Board President and Fannie Dunston Davis for her service as Treasurer for these last years. And Jan Powell for her work as Chair for the Ordination and Standing Committee.

And then there are the changes in congregation's lives: Grace UCC's moving to share space and ministry with Chatterton Hill in White Plains ; all the uncertainties before Union/Richmond Hill; the sale of La Palabra's property.

And the pastors we've ‘lost' along the way: Al Carmines and Bill Coffin.

Our cast of characters is changing, and I have to admit, I am conscious of “losing people” who have been a great joy to work with and become very dear to me. I hope they all know that. I am grateful for the ways working with them have inspired, educated, ministered to me.

Closing Words

Let me close with words from the service for “Times of Passage: Farewell” in the UCC Book of Worship (that we recommend congregations use to say goodbye to pastors) and from Jonathon Schell's “The Fate of the Earth:”

“Our church family is constantly changing. People come and go. Babies are born. Children grow up. People commit themselves to one another. Loved ones and friends among us come to the end of their lives. Individuals move into our community and church life. Others leave us, moving away to new places, new experiences, and new opportunities.” (Book of Worship, p. 255).

Though I have used this next quote at weddings often, in this context I am taking a risk after all the uproar over the Marriage Equality Resolution. I refer to ‘marriage' in its broadest sense… and metaphorically: heterosexual marriage, same-gender marriage, the ‘marriage' between a pastor and a congregation, the ‘marriage' by which we are an association, even the marriage between Christ and his church:

“Marriage lends permanence and a public shape to love. Marriage vows are made by a couple to one another, but they are also made before the world, which is formally present at the ceremony in the role of witness. Marriage solemnizes love, giving this most inward of feelings an outward form that is acknowledged by everyone and commands everyone's respect. In swearing their love in public, lovers also let it be known that their unison will be a fit one for bringing children into the world—for receiving what the Bible calls “the grace of life.” And the world, by insisting on a ceremony and by attending as a witness, announces its own stake in its continuity.

Thus, while in one sense marriage is the most personal of actions, in another sense it belongs to everybody. In a world this is perpetually being overturned and plowed under by birth and death, marriage—which for this reason is rightly called an “institution”—lays the foundation for the stability of a human world that is build to house all generations. In this sense, as well as in the strictly biological sense and the emotional sense, love creates the world.” (Schell, p.157).

A Parting Blessing

And so a parting blessing:

“Go now (into the future God's prepared for us), surrounded by our love and led by the promises of God, and the presence of Jesus Christ, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” (Book of Worship, p. 259).