Well 3 out 4 ain't bad.

Have we been helped by social media and the streaming of General Conference?  I honestly don't know so I'm thinking out loud a bit.  Based on Facebook, Tweets and Blogs, it seems like those who are not in Tampa at #gc2012 are filled with angst and participating in a great deal of hand wringing and navel gazing.

For delegates, it maybe a help.  For caucuses (real or imagined) I'm sure it has been an effective way to communicate.  Maybe hearing all of us letting off steam publicly is helpful to those who represent us or maybe even just if our friends are paying attention.

Alas, I doubt it.

My concern from what I keep reading is that worry has replaced worship as central to gathering.  Comments have replaced connection.   The next tweet is more significant than the next talk.  We've gone to Facebook rather than face to face.

I hope that those who are serving as spiritual directors in Tampa and those churches hosting prayers in Annual Conferences will be uplifted so that they might lift up our candidates from around the globe.  The sycophantic selling out to social media as though it will redeem our time at General Conference is tragic.

Scott Ginsberg made his own observation and shared his reflections about conferences (coincidence?).  After years of traveling the country, Scott began to ask regarding these events...

Am I actually creating work that matters, or just distracting myself from what’s really important? Am I spending my time wisely, or am I just inventing things to do to preserve the illusion of productivity? Am I actually growing my business, or just satisfying my bottomless need for validation and approval? Am I actually delivering value to others, or just sitting in a corner trying to perfect myself? Am I actually connecting with my peers, or just playing dress up for the wrong audience? So I stopped. 

I’d rather create than consume. 

And what’s fascinating is, when I make creation my dominant act, I do learn. I do grow my business. I do deliver value to others. I do connect with my peers. I do feel part of a community. I do make meaning. 

I actually think this is more important to those of us NOT at General Conference (though it is valid to ask about our conferencing too) than those representing us.  I pray they will make meaning there while I live and strive to make meaning here - strive to create here.

May I Ask?  How much more creating are you doing through social media?  Is it benefiting the Kingdom of God?
May I Suggest?  Your comments (tweets, updates, etc) like everything you say and do reflect your soul's condition.  What is your social media life telling you about you?

How we grow in our faith has been, is, and will continue to be of a central interest to me.  H/T to The Crooked Mystic for her blog and the link to Kathy Escobar's blog (I really need to update my blog roll now) which of late has been focusing on developmental thought and theology.  It has focused primarily on the work of one of my spiritual directors, Janet Hagberg, and The Critical Journey.

As I am working on my own certification in Spiritual Direction, I have been watching and connecting theories to practice and experiences back to theories.  Because of my own background and work with Donald M. Joy regarding developmental thought and Wesleyan Theology, many of these connections have been amazing to see and observe.  It has taken a long time to get here though.  And the underlying truth I've learned is this:

You simply cannot rush the spiritual process.  

As a Methodist, this shouldn't be surprising and yet it is, when you live it out. John Wesley's own journey to salvation was long, winding and convoluted.  He affirmed as much in others.  From those observations, he then developed his own spiritual developmental theory in his sermon, "On the Spirit of Bondage and Adoption."

For pdf of Donald Joy on John Wesley's Development of Moral Thinking

When we move to measuring numerical growth before we have grown inwardly ourselves, then it is not surprising that fear and anxiety begin to rule the day (as it is seeming to do at General Conference as Morgan Guyton noticed).  If developmentally, we've not grown past an understanding of our imperial self, that is, a need to keep my balance without considering our shared reality (Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self, pg 91), then we cannot hope to understand what others are feeling.

Most certainly, we can't know how someone else is experiencing God in that moment.  And if it is fear, then we need to ask ourselves more pointedly, why?  Paul makes it plain, we "...have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again," (Romans 8:15).  So if fear and anxiety are what is ruling the hearts of others, what has happened?  Or better yet, do we care or are we even concerned we might even be the cause?

Let's get more to the point, what are we learning from the numbers we choose to measure?  Have Sunday mornings and worship experiences become more about helping us understand ourselves in light of God instead of helping us meet God in spite of ourselves?  Are our small groups focused on Spirit or self?  We can use words and concepts beyond our experience and knowledge but we cannot own them.  Our words can sound good but they may also fall on ears not able to comprehend.

May I Ask?  What is the spirit which is dominating your reality?  Where is it coming from?

May I Suggest?  Take time to listen to what is being said around you in conversation.  Listen for Spirit of Adoption NOT fear.

There is always a choice.

We may not like those available.  We may fear the options and the outcomes.  We may worry what they mean for the future.  In this life, we are always dealing with choices.  For many of us who seek to journey a spiritual life, we struggle with the choices of the inner and outer lives (the tragic truth is we all struggle with this - some just admit it).  Parker Palmer calls it the "divided life" and notes, "The divided life may be endemic, but wholeness is always a choice (pg 17, A Hidden Wholeness).

Parker's work has been in recent years, working with teachers and the academic world.  As he talks about the divided life in A Hidden Wholeness, the divided life issues are found not just in the teaching profession but in financial and business sectors as well as in the governmental fields.  So I appreciated greatly the issue of trust that John Meunier wrote about regarding the UMC and the Call To Action.

John writes,

Building trust within congregations and the broader connection, I would argue, is the first order of business for our denomination. Without trust everything else we do will be an exercise in raw power and manipulation and public relations.

John also observes, "I think it is no coincidence that the biggest cheerleaders for Vital Congregations are those with power and authority and influence in the system now."  It isn't about pointing blame but it should be noted there IS a neglect that does require us to stop and call a spade a spade.

John of the Cross knew the power and authority others had over him and he experienced it first hand.  Noticeably absent from his experiences was any thought to pastoral care by his "superiors."  If you've read any of the reports and results from the Vital Congregations you may or may not have noticed that the discussion or  practice of pastoral care or soul care is absent.

My own conversations and some observations also coincide with concerns surrounding large membership churches that Jeremy Smith raised.  This isn't so much a condemnation of said large churches, but it is a concern for the model surrounding the UMC and the mega-churches many of our clergy are enamored with. Churches who are looked to as "models" and "experts" also have made very specific choices to not concern themselves with pastoral care and soul care.  These churches do not "do weddings."  They do not "do funerals." They don't "do infant baptism" so new births are not any big deal at all. Hospital visitation is left to small groups.

But the choices of clergy and churches to not do certain things says something theologically.  When push comes to shove, there is a real need people have to spend time with caring clergy in these points of life transition.  Our UM churches DO get these phone calls and we act.  Are these the churches we are looking to model off of as well?  Let us be real - we are listening to them after all.  To work on trust issues, we need to start being honest with ourselves.

 But this issue of trust means all the card have to be put on the table by all involved.  We have to set down at the same table and learn to listen for the Holy in our midst NOT just one another's ideas.  There are ways of doing this.  We have centuries now of Christian practices which can be helpful and effective for us.  Parker Palmer has been doing this work in his "Circles of Trust" with teachers at his Center for Courage and Renewal.

For us as Christian people however, I have to wonder if the trust issue starts with God since it is God who appears to me to be absent from our conversations and our reporting processes.  I mean, there is nothing wrong with changing our reporting methods.  I should HOPE this means charge conference reports and end of the year reports can now be done away with entirely since we're reporting every week.  But reporting and lording said reports will not help build trust or any organization, especially the church.  As Rose Mary Dougherty notes,  "Ordinary ways of evaluating success don't apply. We are...talking about God's work and we don't know enough...to evaluate it".

The last few weeks in preparation for the UMC General Conference it seems talking about the Call to Action is all the rage on blogs like Jeremy Smith and Becca Clark (among many) and Facebook.  In the last few weeks, the news has been dominated by partisan politics and racial divides in our nation from Jeremy Lin to Trayvon Martin.  Soul?

"...in the Protestant traditions there has been an effort to separate theologically the person of the pastor from the  function of one who preaches the Word and administers the sacraments, it has not worked in practice.  There is a symbolic power in the ordained person, no matter what his or her theology.  The ordained person is expected to be a person of prayer that the person in the street cannot be.  Several surveys of lay persons about what they look for in the ordained show this expectation (pg 34, Spirituality for Ministry (Kindle version is available))."

It is not foreign to our Christian heritage but grounded in God’s revelation to us.  Marian Cowan notes that we can find the beginnings of spiritual direction in the Old Testament.  We see there the Queen of Sheba visiting King Solomon to learn from his wisdom.   And it is clear Jesus lived a life offering spiritual direction to others.  He did it with Nicodemus and the woman at the well (John 3:1-21 and 4:7-19).  What is more, this was also patterned in Jesus’ life among the disciples.

We may choose to ignore it.  We may choose to neglect it.  We may even choose to dismiss it.  It may not be rational, psychological or scientifically defensible.  For some, it may be important to dismiss it as not part of their theology.  But if we do so, we do it to our detriment.  It is all about soul.

When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, ‘Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.’  Mark 16:1-7 (NRSV)

It all hinges here: "You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who WAS crucified..."

Can you really get too much of a good thing?  Well, yes, you can over-indulge on McDonald's french fries.  Too many Blizzards at DQ are not going to help.  You can watch some movies way too much as well.

But I'd argue, that when it comes to the week leading up to Easter Sunday, you cannot get too much of what is the Greatest Story in Human History.  I said this past Sunday, in "Marks of Servanthood", 

 "Try if you will to take away how Jesus served others. Try to read the New Testament and skip over every action of Jesus on behalf other people and see what you have left. For in doing so you have to take away the resurrection itself." 

If you do it, strip away all of Jesus' actions on behalf of others, we're left with nothing virtually nothing.  His teachings alone, I'd argue as well, are of little consequence without all that Jesus did for other people.