Conference Table

So I spent part of Friday and most of Saturday @ Claremont School of Theology with about 50 leaders and the Bishop. The "Table" was called together because of an action of the Annual Conference Session this past June. The action tasked the Conference Leadership Team (I'm am a part of that) and various leaders to sit together and come up with a plan to help steer "C-EFFIN-A" (every time it was said, I giggled, I admit it!), our conference committee on Finance, about how to spend our money according to the mission of the Annual Conference. The problem, we discovered, is multivalent. We don't speak a common language, we bring baggage, and as Gil Rendle said in an article we read for the event, the Annual Conference is better at managing than leading. We are good at keeping the status quo-- if things are running smoothly, hooray! It's part of our tradition, our identity.
You can imagine, then, that it was hard for us to break away from that and try to look at the Conference and its mission from a different angle, perspective. Our facilitator, John Fanestil, was tasked with the difficult job of trying to navigate us in the process. He did a fine job, all things considered-- he kept us to task, he reminded us of our objectives, and we ended early. Got to love that! I also very much appreciated the Bishop's participation-- she clearly pushed the group to do something bold with her. But she did not meddle in the process to change it to her words or understanding!
There were some things we were of one Spirit on: We want, in Lovett Weem's terms, to reach more people, younger people and more diverse people." You can read more about what he said to the Council of Bishops by clicking on the name link above. We also were of one mind about wanting to create new faith communities. The part that was most exciting for everyone in the room, I believe was that we want to do this, not to preserve the institution, rather to transform the world. If we create new faith communities, we want to do this to care for the poor and needy, to help people grow spiritually, to encourage people to fight for justice, to make the Kingdom of God real.
It took a loooong time to get to this point. Much discussion happened. We even heard words of warning from Pensions about the possible retirement wave and how that might (deeply) impact our budget. (Of course, I kept wondering how the few young pastors were going to be able to care for all these retirees considering the state of things....) Which leads to another important warning Pensions shared-- clergy are in pretty bad shape. They gave us graphs to illustrate the fact that Cal-Pac clergy are not well-- physically and mentally. That certainly impacts effectiveness!
While we have offered up a bold mission possibility for the people called Methodists in this area, the proof will be whether we are able to be take risks, disassemble the mechanism of entitlement and egalitarianism that says groups should receive what they expect and everyone should get some, and focus on doing what it is we feel most clearly called to do: the HARD WORK of interrupting a management system that wants to keep on doing...
It will be a shift, in Gil Rendle's terms, from asking the question, "Are we doing things right?" to "Are we doing the right things?"