Some Impossible Dreams for Church Leadership in the UMC

If we could start a blank slate, church leadership structures and leader development in the UMC should look very different. It should be more organic. Here's my pipe dream.

Leadership for the church should emerge organically from the ranks of disciples actively connected to Christ through the church. Congregations should nurture a culture of call among its members, identify those called to various ministries and nurture their growth in Christian leadership. Ideally, churches should grow their own pastors.

The church - and not the academy - should have the largest role in shaping the pastoral identity of those called to this kind of ministry. Those called to pastoral leadership should receive education in biblical studies, languages, church history and theology in an academic setting, culminating in an academic master’s degree for some, a certificate of completion for others. The ministerial formation of clergy, however, should belong completely to the church. Shaping pastoral identity is the church’s responsibility, not the academy’s. The pulpit, the table, and the font all belong to the church. The same goes for pastoral care for individuals and the community. The church needs to develop its own organic pastoral formation and training processes and not rely so much on the university and the professional associations that dictate so much now.

Bishops should shepherd groups of churches that are small enough for them to know their pastors well and for them to visit their churches regularly. Annual conferences are too large for that. Districts in the UMC are larger than most dioceses in TEC or the ACNA and are still sometimes too large for this to happen. If district superintendents are too busy to visit every church in the district or preside over individual charge conferences, they are too busy. Organize the connection into relatively small dioceses, so that superintendency does not degrade into mere administrative regulation.

Bishops are pastors of dioceses. Bishops should generally be elected from the diocese they lead and serve the diocese that elected them for the duration of the tenure. I have mixed feelings on whether that should be for life.

Obviously, turning district-sized groups into dioceses would create vastly more bishops. We could not support or use them in the same way that we do our current bishops, A larger congregation within the diocese should be designated as the episcopal see, with the bishop nominally serving as the chief pastor. Keep the majority of the bishop's focus down toward the people. Vastly reduce the connectional bureaucracy that consumes so much of the bishops' time and energy (and tempts the bishops with dreams of power and influence on the world stage).

Many of the administrative and ministry-support functions now provided by annual conferences could be assumed by units of organization that serve multiple dioceses (but don't make the administrative head a bishop!).

Eliminate the geographic monopoly built into higher church structures. Allow congregations to align (or realign) naturally with dioceses that share similar visions of doctrine, practice and mission. Create a diocese for chaplains and others in similar ministries.

Churches should emphasize planting and shepherding new churches over growing into megachurches. New congregations should aspire to grow into sending churches. New church development is a congregational mission at least as much as it is a diocesan mission. What we now call multipoint charges should think of themself as one church in a united mission, not little independent kingdoms that can do their own thing. The chief pastors of multisite churches are effectively sub-bishops, even if they don't use that title.

And while we're at it …

• What the UMC now calls local pastors should be ordained as local elders, not merely appointed.
• Return to the historic ecumenical pattern of ordaining those who will become elders first as deacons.
• Clergy should not use honorific titles.

Finally, the itineracy no longer fulfills the function for which it was created. It is not essential to a connectional polity or to the Wesleyan approach to holiness. Drop it. That's not to say that clergy never move from one congregation to another, but some form of hybrid call system with episcopal involvement would serve the church better.

Obviously, all of this would completely overturn not only our current administrative structures, but the nature of the connection itself. You probably don't agree with much of what I've proposed, but don't worry, it is never going to happen. Nothing like it is ever going to happen. Ever. Institutional inertia and bureaucratic self-interests are just too strong. It would be easier to start from scratch than to make radical changes in the nature of the connection. We've had annual conferences of traveling preachers for over 200 years. That's not going to change.

It is ironic that our denominational leaders, in the United States at least, are pushing "fresh expressions" at the congregational level, radically re-envisioning the nature of the local church (and perhaps, sometimes, throwing out the baby with the bathwater), but not touching the basic structure of the connectional church. I've not heard any proposals to radically re-envision the connection itself.