Leadership Gathering should focus on local church

Key points

• The organizers of the upcoming Leadership Gathering in Canada have talked a lot about revitalizing the denomination but little about local congregations.
• Local churches have been benignly neglected for too long.
• The path to vitality requires rediscovering the local church: renewing urban, rural and small-town congregations and coming alongside growing ones.

 

The Rev. Paul Seay.
Photo courtesy of the author.

What is going to happen at the United Methodist Council of Bishops Leadership Gathering in Calgary, Canada, Oct. 20-24?

Bishop Tracy Smith Malone, past president of the Council of Bishops, has said, “This gathering is about faithful leadership for such a time as this. We are being called to reimagine the Church — not to preserve what is familiar but to fulfill God’s calling and vision for our future. We will lean into the Spirit’s leading with boldness and humility, centering Christ in all we do, so that the witness of The United Methodist Church might be renewed, relevant, and rooted in justice, love, and hope.”

And Bishop Ruben Saenz, current president, is equally optimistic: “In Calgary, we will dare to envision the church that the next generation will receive and embrace. This is our moment to listen deeply, innovate boldly, and rekindle the hope and imagination that propel us forward as one community of faith — so together, we can offer a vibrant future to all those who come after us.”

It sounds great.

But something is missing, something big: the local church.

The organizers of the gathering talk a lot about the denomination but very little about the local church. Even the recent webinar on ecclesiology (our doctrine of the church), held as a lead-up event to the leadership gathering, dealt far more with our connectional ecclesiology than it did local ecclesiology.

It’s likely that the importance of the ministry of the local church is simply assumed by the organizers. But that’s precisely the problem. For too long the bureaucracy of the United Methodist denomination has been built on the assumption of stable, healthy local churches whose vital ministry supports the larger work of the connection. Surely, by now we all know that this is not a safe assumption.

The local churches are not all right.

Too many churches are struggling. The pews are empty. Giving is down. And fewer people are being reached with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

I hasten to add that there are many bright spots. Take a look at the vibrant ministries of churches like Trinity United Methodist Church of Greeneville, Tennessee, The Gathering in St. Louis, Missouri, or Open Hearts United Methodist Church in Greenville, South Carolina, and you’ll see something of what the Holy Spirit can do through local United Methodist congregations. Those are just three samples of what God is doing. There are plenty of other signs of life in local churches of all sizes and settings. We certainly must celebrate this.

However, we cannot deny that overall The United Methodist Church has fewer churches than we did before disaffiliation and fewer vital congregations than we had a decade ago. Many of the churches that remain find themselves significantly diminished and deeply concerned about their future.

Yet from what I can tell, our general church leaders don’t have much of a vision for the renewal of the local church. Their frame of reference continues to be The United Methodist Church as a denomination. At best, the hope seems to be that enthusiasm from this meeting will find its way back to local churches. That sounds like a churchy version of trickle-down economics to me.

For too long, the larger connection has benignly neglected the local church. The result is that more resources flow out of local churches than into them. The stated purpose of our United Methodist agencies is to provide resources and services for local churches. But it is time to ask whether these organizations are fulfilling this purpose or if perhaps the local church has become for them little more than the source of their funding.

I love the United Methodist connection. I celebrate the good work and faithful ministry we do together at all levels. And I see great potential for the future. I also see the possibility of further decline and the loss of a robust United Methodist Christian witness in the world. The path to future vitality starts not with boards and commissions or better mission statements but with the renewal of local churches.

Here are a few ideas:

Renew urban churches

Imagine a densely populated and underserved urban neighborhood with a dying United Methodist congregation on the corner. It has facilities for a church of 500 people but welcomes less than 50 people to worship on a Sunday morning. Most of the remaining congregation is older and whiter than the people who live in the neighborhood.

These faithful have hung on as the other members have died or left for other churches. They have a food pantry and run an afterschool tutoring program. Each fall, they collect school supplies for the local elementary school. But every year, it gets harder to pay the bills for their large building and support the part-time compensation for their pastor.

This situation is not hard to imagine because it’s quite common across United Methodism.

Now imagine The United Methodist Church deciding that in a setting like this it’s not enough to give people canned food and school supplies. Wonderful as these things are, the people in this neighborhood need also to be fed with the Gospel through the ministry of a local church.

Usually, in situations like this, if we do anything at all, we provide funds to support a pastor. But it’s asking too much of any pastor to re-ignite this ministry by herself. She needs a team.

So let’s send not just a pastor but a ministry team — a pastor to preach, teach and minister to the neighborhood; musicians to lead passionate worship with excellence; an administrator to take care of the neglected facilities and run the day-to-day business of the church; a children’s minister to teach (in word and deed) the kids in the neighborhood (and their families) about Jesus. As the children’s ministry grows, a youth minister also could be added.

Let’s mobilize our resources to reach and bless a neighborhood through the holistic ministry of a local church.

Renew or relaunch rural and small-town churches

Imagine a small town in a rural county where the factory closed several years ago, the opioid epidemic has ravaged a generation, and grandparents are raising their children’s kids. Even though the population hasn’t grown in decades, there are still plenty of people and children living in and around the town. There is a small elementary school, a middle school and a decent-sized consolidated county high school.

There’s also a United Methodist church, right there in the center of town. For years, the church had a full-time pastor, but as the makeup of the town has changed, and the congregation’s size has dwindled, it now has a part time, bivocational pastor. The church has about 75 people in worship on Sunday. And though the members may not be as young as they used to be, they’re still active and dedicated. But they worry about the future. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision this scenario. It’s happening everywhere across the Southeast and Midwest.

What if The United Methodist Church decides that when it comes to ministering to a community, there are more important considerations than whether a congregation in a small-town rural setting can afford a full-time pastor. So we make sure that this church has a gifted, energetic full-time pastor who wants to do ministry in a context like this. And as with the above example of the urban church, we support a staff person for age-level ministries to minister to the many children and families touched by the opioid crisis.

Again, a community’s ability to pay doesn’t have to determine whether The United Methodist Church will show up in full force over the long haul.

Come alongside growing churches

Imagine a medium-size congregation. It has become a beacon of hope in its conference as it’s grown over the past several years, both in number and in spirit. It’s been exciting and more than a little exhausting. Now, the church is bumping up against some barriers as a result of its growth. It has needs for its facilities and staffing.

Normally, The United Methodist Church looks at a church like this and determines that it doesn’t need any help. Better to put our effort and energy into difficult situations, try to fix what’s broken instead of support what’s working. What if, though, we decided to find ways to offer support to growing churches like this so that their growth can be sustainable and can last beyond the tenure of one pastor?

Perhaps you’re saying, “My conference already does things like that.” Great! Keep doing it, and do more of it. Most conferences, however, are not doing things like these. Many conferences are letting dying churches die and leaving growing churches to figure out the next steps on their own.

Let’s find ways to innovate on a large scale, across the connection. The connection exists for local churches, not the other way around.

Rediscover the local church

Without strong local churches, our witness for Christ is weakened, our stand for justice is muted, and our stewardship of the resources entrusted to us is questionable. Rediscovering the local church is the key to a future of loving boldly, serving joyfully and leading courageously. If the upcoming Leadership Gathering is not about the rediscovery of the local church for United Methodism, then, I’m sorry, but it will be a waste of time and money.

I understand that The United Methodist Church is a complex entity and that the situation in which we find ourselves is complicated. The priority for our way forward, however, is quite simple: the local church.

We must become laser-focused on the ministry of local churches. Our resources must be radically realigned to enhance the ministry of growing churches, revitalize struggling churches and plant new churches to reach new people for Jesus Christ.

We have more than enough resources to do this and to continue to do faithful ministry across the world.

Seay is a pastor in the Holston Conference, serving Abingdon United Methodist Church and Charles Wesley United Methodist Church, both in Abingdon, Va. He served as a delegate to the 2020/2024 General Conference. A version of this commentary can be found on UM Insight.

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