Methodist Tsunami

Lovett H. Weems, Jr. - UMC Realities from Lewis Center on Vimeo.

What Lovett Weems says in his presentation on the status of the United Methodist Church is powerful and scary. The statistics are clear. We have been declining and we will decline more with the death rate of older Americans.

Lovett discusses the financial adjustments that need to be made. Certainly, that is powerful and realistic, but the real answer isn’t in financial adjustments; it is in evangelism, enthusiasm, and making disciples of Jesus Christ. It isn’t in a membership campaign or effort to save the institution by recruiting a few more young members.  It is imperative to do what Jesus taught, follow the Great Commission, and make disciples. Somehow evangelism has become a topic that is hard for persons to deal with.

I’m teaching on evangelism all across the United States, speaking in every geographic section, large churches, small churches, districts, other judicatory gatherings. There is probably no American clergy today speaking more on evangelism than I am. What I am finding is encouraging. I am excited about the response of the laity and clergy across the Church. We are ready to do something about this. We are ready to reach people for Christ. But we desperately need more training, understanding and, practical help. I would love to know your response, questions and ideas!

Preaching Conference

We just finished holding a three-day event that we called an Evangelism Conference and Preaching Academy.  It was held in Dallas, and the response to it was fantastic.  Particularly exciting is the response to the preaching part of this event.  We had two of the best-known preachers in the country who spoke to us about preaching, John Ed Mathison and Jim Moore.  We also had the associate pastor at First Church Arlington, Estee Valendy, a 28-year-old clergy in her beginning years of preaching, who spoke to us about preaching to the younger generation.  Alyce McKenzie of Perkins School of Theology, Bill Lawrence, and David Mosser spoke about preaching today in a variety of ways.  We held panel discussions and had numerous workshops.  One of the really helpful aspects was a workshop with noted speech and drama teacher, Diane Stamper, who really provided coaching.  The response by the participants was fantastic, and the evaluations showed how helpful this was. 

I want to do it again, and I’d like your ideas.  We’re currently working on getting a brand new, redesigned website up and running, so check back with us soon here and let’s dialogue about what is needed to help all of us to do a better job of preaching in this highly secular world.  Even better, let us know on our Facebook page or email me.  

Needs-Based Preaching

Too often, our ministry does not relate to the real needs of those we are attempting to minister to.  The power of Jesus Christ is the power to relate to where we are and where we hurt. Jesus said in Luke 4:18, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.”  If this was His ministry, and if He asked us to follow Him, then the Church ought to be doing the same thing.  We need to be responding to the real needs of our society.  Too often, when we prepare sermons, we do it to share the particular ideas that we feel are important but which may have nothing to do with the needs of the people.  We share concepts of doctrines and principles that may be important in a scholarly discussion in seminary, but, for a young mom who is struggling to raise her children, they are irrelevant.  So often, we explain and proclaim as if we were motivating other clergy rather than laity who live in a very secular world where most of the vocabulary of the Church is misunderstood or irrelevant. 

We are called to respond to the needs.  In Matthew 25, Jesus said, “If you have done it for the least of these, you have done it for me.”  The standard of being okay with God is to be a sheep instead of a goat – meet needs.   

What After Easter?

As pastors and church leaders experience the excitement of the seasons of Christianity, there are ups and downs in our emotions. After Easter, we are tired. We have been so busy and it has been so intense. After the Easter pressure, we feel we deserve a break. We do! There is nothing wrong with taking a break. Yet when the local churches program takes a break – we do less ministry or provide fewer opportunities for learning or fellowship – then a people begin to think that it is only worth going to church at Christmas and Easter. We sometimes gripe about having only a Christmas and Easter crowd but one of the reasons is that is when we do our best ministry and programming and so people tend to think that is the time to attend church.

Lots of churches across America have come to realize that Christmas and Easter are an opportune times to launch new programs and new ministries in order to encourage people to return the following Sunday. When Sundays are a letdown with less emphasis, programming, ministry, and care, we tell the congregation that it is less important.

Some simple guidelines that I have learned through trial and error: first, if I am going to be off a Sunday or two after Easter or Christmas make sure you have the best substitute you can find. You need someone as good or better than yourself to preach the Sunday that you are gone. Second, you need a new emphasis: start a new sermon series or ministry, using the excitement of Christmas or Easter to launch it. Use the Lent and Advent season to really plug the new ministry. Third, we need to be sure that the ministry of the church continues every week through the entire year. The work of God is year-round work.

People are creatures of habit. The church work does not have a vacation. The need for the Gospel is always there. Members as well as visitors participation oftentimes flow with the excitement of the program and demand of the involvement with the church. Years ago, my friend Lyle Schaller did research about churches that are growing and wrote some significant explanations comparing what he called “high-demand” churches and “voluntary associations”. The high-demand churches were the ones that were growing, people respond positively to the challenge, the demands and opportunity. If we want to reach more people for Christ and have people becoming more fully devoted disciples of Christ, then the church never takes a vacation. The Christian community is always open, responsive, helpful, active, and demanding.

My exhausted friend, after Lent and Easter says “I need to take a break”, and the answer is – you deserve a break today and some time off but our task as a leader is to see that the quality and excitement of the church goes on whether we are in town or on vacation. That is not hard to do at all!

Loyalty and the Last Supper

Churches all around the world will celebrate the sacrament of the Holy Communion this evening. It is the night of the Last Supper. The night when Jesus was so close and clear with his friends. It is also the night that he was captured and they ran away. So much in our world has to do with loyalty. Loyalty to value and purpose. The story of Jesus’ crucifixion is about his loyalty to his calling from God and the response of many of his friends and followers is a story of their struggle with loyalty. I believe the church today needs to reconsider our loyalty. The powerful message of Jesus is a call to loyalty.

Effective

Leadership Nexus has been committed to doing the most effective job of teaching and training possible. My experience as the leader of the Large Church Initiative and Robert Schuler’s Churches United for Growth and Mission, really taught me how important effective teaching and training is for the church. Seminary education provides a portion of our training but not nearly all of what we need to know to be effective. I remember over the years of my ministry going to LCI events, Robert Schuler’s training, or other events and receiving inspiration and insight into doing God’s work better. I would love to have your suggestions about what is needed for training. Business and industry is now finding that doing webinars or online seminars is the way to do training. It is much less expensive and more convenient. I’d love to hear your response on what is the best way to do training today.

Preaching & Communication

I organized the Leadership Nexus ministry with the goal to serve the needs of the Church – to provide the kind of training that we need to be more effective in our task. I have asked a lot of people what kind of training they feel we need, and I get a lot of interesting answers! Most consistently, however, the answer I get from administrators in the Church, like Bishops, superintendents, and lay leaders of various denominations, is that clergy need help with their preaching. Recently, as I have spoken to several of my friends who are Bishops, they have described our preaching as “terrible.” That is a pretty negative commentary.

Today, we research and develop most everything we do in our society. We have learned how to travel faster, fly further, and communicate better. Communication has become the focus of so much research and development. Social networking, movies, television production, theater, and the arts have come to specialize in the science of communication. We have studied learning theory and realized that people learn in different ways. We have studied communication through body language and realized how important our posture, hand movements, and eye movements are in communicating. We have become experts in relationships and learned that the way in which we speak – the language, the pronouns we use – has so much to do with the relationship of communication. We have realized that stories and pictures, movement and sound are important in communicating. Therefore, the communication industry is operating with a new effectiveness by using this research and these techniques. We have realized that music is useful for setting the mood and creating motivation. All of these advancements and extensive research have provided the tools for advertisers, movie and television production and all areas of communication.

So often, the Church has only relied upon the simplest spoken word form of communication. Certainly, very cognitive, logically sequenced ideas communicate, but, all too often, it’s the emotion, the drama, the feeling, and the mood that create the motivation for significant decisions and major learning.

Out of our academic, logical learning experiences in seminary, too often, we have come to see the sermon as an extension of a graduate course and the worship service as nothing more than a lecture. In our high-tech, emotionally-loaded, communication-focused world, the sermon is simply boring. In a world that so desperately needs to hear the Good News, it’s time that we who have taken on the responsibility to be the preachers learn how to communicate effectively, and to lead people to make decisions to follow Christ. It’s time that all of us find the ways, means, styles, systems, and ideas that make our presentation of the Gospel attractive, clear, motivational, and helpful!

I’m committed to finding a way that we can do preaching academies across the United States to preach, share, and learn from each other on how to communicate better and better. The need is so great! The opportunity is now. As church attendance has declined all across the country, one of the reasons may be a direct proportion to our lack of communication abilities. It’s time for us, clergy of all types and styles, to become highly effective communicators of the Gospel of Jesus Christ!

Preaching Academy - May 2-4 Arlington, TX


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