Poll Finds Many In State Unsure About God

Really? What a surprise….

Salvation is only secondarily assuring you of an eternal life; it is first of all giving you that life now, and saying, “If now, then also later,” and that becomes your deep inner certitude! If God would accept me now when I am clearly unworthy, then why would God change his policy later? You can begin to rest, enjoy and love life.

- Richard Rohr in Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality

Ok….

So, Firefox 3 was finally released recently, and I started messing around with it….and I started testing out the ScribeFire plugin which lets you send a blog post directly from within Firefox. And I thought that would be pretty cool. So I’m testing it out. If it works out pretty well, I might just start ScribeFireing a lot.

….but I’m done.

What is it about Annual Conference that makes me depressed? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s the overdone worship services, that seldom seem substantive. Or the mediocre preaching, that leaves me wondering if this represents the best we can do. Or the endless reports and debates that display one reason our denomination is in decline.

I do enjoy seeing my pastor friends and sharing a few laughs. There is value in the friendship and camaraderie. There are a few reports here and there that report some interesting tidbit. Like the update on the Village Church, or the recognition of the new Executive Director of the City Society. But then, those are both events that I feel a special attachment to for personal reasons. They might seem meaningless to someone else.

All of this makes me wonder: what do we do conference for anymore? I remember reading the opening chapter of The Damnation of Theron Ware are thinking – damn, I guess it’s always been like this. The novel, written sometime in the 1890s, describes a session of Annual Conference, at which pastors are doing all kinds of rather trivial and certainly unholy things. There is much pretension and rhetoric, but little substance.

What I want is to encounter God. I don’t care where I do it. I don’t care what mechanism brings God to me. I just want to know God and be with God. I want to live in a deep relationship with the strange, passionate, loving God I find in the Bible. That’s what I want. And a part of me expects Annual Conference to have something to do with that.

I suspect that most people who go to church on Sunday morning also want their church to have something to do with that. And I also suspect that most of the time in the church we disappoint them. Why is that? Why is it that church – and annual conference – seems to have so little to do with a real experience of God? Where did we get off making church all about institutional preservation?

A better question is: how do we create an environment where people do experience God? What kinds of community foster deep relationships with the God of the Bible? How do we empower people to live out of the fundamental fact that God truly, completely loves them? And what kind of annual conference might actually foster that kind of community and empowerment?

Annual Conference in the United Methodist Church is required to cover a lot of rather trivial terrain. My hope is that somehow Bishops and other leaders can find creative and meaningful ways to break out of the “business-as-usual” model of Annual Conference, and create instead a powerful moment when God’s people recognize the Holy One in each others’ faces and are energized for transformative ministries in the various local communities that we strive to serve.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Then in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

From “The Stare’s Nest by My Window” in Meditations in Time of Civil War