First-year bishop: dispatch from Birmingham: in my job I get to see moribund churches. I also get blindsided by the undeniable fidelity of God's people

Christian Century, Sept 20, 2005 by William H. Willimon

ON MY LAST Sunday in Duke Chapel, after I'd preached to a full church and received a standing ovation after my sermon, a sophomore came up to me and said, "Thanks for abandoning us. What am I supposed to do for spiritual guidance now?"

I told him that God was calling me to a new ministry in Alabama and that whoever replaced me would be great.

"Say," the student continued, "are you going to be doing much preaching in your new job?"

"Sure will," I reassured him. "I'll be preaching two or three times every Sunday."

"That's good," he said. "I've heard that you are hard to follow and that your sermons are poorly organized, so now you'll be able to work on that."

"Who said that about my sermons?" I demanded.

"Everybody at Duke," he responded.

I said with infinite earnestness, "Look kid, are you open to a move to Birmingham? The Lord is putting me in a morally vulnerable situation, where everyone either respects me or fears me too much to tell me anything. Would you be willing to come to Alabama and every now and then tell me the truth?"

I've just completed my first year as a bishop of the United Methodist Church. I've got 630 pastors to appoint. Our systems of accountability and evaluation are poor, however, so only the Lord knows what they're actually doing for the kingdom. Through my conference lost an average of 2,000 members every year for two decades, no clergy were removed for incompetence. But then, most live just above poverty, in someone else's house, no matter how good they are.

One of the most difficult parts of my job has been to ordain these people--who have promised God to go where I send them, subordinating family, upward mobility, personal choice and home ownership to that one promise. The last day of annual conference, a pastor came up to me with tears in his eyes. "Bishop," he said, "I can't go where you are asking me to go. This move could destroy my marriage. My daughter is a high school senior. I can't do this."

"Were you at the service of ordination Sunday night?" I asked. "Remember, you promised God that you would go where I sent you. It's a heck of a way to run a railroad ... but it's our way and we pray it's God's way too. You promised. Start packing."

I've learned a lot in this first year. First, attend to the local. If United Methodism has a future, it lies in being more local and parochial. I am consecrated to be an officer of the general church, but most of what I've seen of that is not that invigorating. At our last Council of Bishops we spent a great deal of time wrestling to get an appointment with a United Methodist named George Bush. President Bush gave our handful of representatives less than ten minutes before turning them over to Karl Rove. What else has to happen to indicate that we bishops have lost social significance?

The good news is that most of what bishops do is mundane. That's one reason Chrysostom gave for why he ought hot to be a bishop. He enjoyed, as he said, serving a creative God in more interesting ways. More good news is that most of what the Trinity does is mundane too. And local. After all, the Word was made flesh in Bethlehem before it went to Washington, London or Paris.

The great genius of Protestant Christianity is in the living, breathing local communities of faith, congregations that struggle to embody that which they profess in places that only Jesus could love. God is forcing me to take the side roads and attend to the local and the particular, to eat copious barbecue and to lie awake at night worrying about the kingdom of God at Alabaster, Alabama.

I've been led to another, contradictory insight: No church is the fullness of church by itself. Jesus is too demanding, the Trinity too exasperatingly rich for any one church, congregation or denomination to do justice to God. United Methodists call that "connectionalism." When I despair over the condition of a congregation, the Lord reminds me that he never puts all of his theological eggs in one basket. "Take heart," God says. "Enjoy the other 829 congregations while you still have them."

I've relearned the value of the tradition. Scripture requires bishops to uphold what the church has been given, to guard the faith. In many churches on a Sunday morning there is a lot of sinning against the fourth commandment. Our willingness to jettison historic hymns, creeds and commitments of the faith sends me into an episcopal rant. In the fog of contemporary Christian worship, I can't tell the difference between aging "liberals" and bogus "evangelicals," between John Shelby Spong and Rick Warren.

The church is Up against formidable adversaries, I'm reminded of this on my way to work, when I go by an abandoned Methodist church where, in a basement Sunday school room, a group of men planned one of the Birmingham bombings. We cannot do battle with such evil if we have weapons that are merely contemporary, purpose-driven techniques or heart-happy liberal accommodation. We need theological refurbishment.

Alabamians are called by God to testify to the redemptive power of a living Christ. Visiting one of our inner-city missions, a storefront church in the worst part of Birmingham that feeds over a hundred of the city's homeless, I round that the pastor was checking the worshipers for weapons. "Our guiding theology," he said, "is that there is nothing you can bring in here--no addiction, no craziness, screw-up, hate or sin--that Jesus can't handle. He is Lord."