Imagine Ministry team seeks help in imagining conference’s future

Heather Hahn
Editor

Since late August, members of the Imagine Ministry team have been working to capture a snapshot of the current state of United Methodism in Arkansas.

This month, the team plans to present a picture of what they’ve found to pastors and laity at four regional meetings around the state. And they hope these get-togethers will mark the start of similar discussions in all the state’s United Methodist congregations.

“The purpose of the regional meetings is to take the conversation that we’ve been charged to be part of, to take that back to the local church level,” said Kurt Boggan, the team’s project manager and Northeast District superintendent.

“We’ll be proposing some questions that each local church will be taking back and answering in their local church context and share at Annual Conference.”

Those questions, broadly, will deal with such topics as the church’s identity, purpose and action.

At last year’s Annual Conference, Bishop Charles Crutchfield announced the formation of the Imagine Ministry team to examine how the Arkansas Conference does church. He appointed to the team four members of the clergy and four members of the laity.

He named Boggan as project manager, giving him the assignment of keeping the group on task and helping with the group’s communications. Crutchfield also hired Gil Rendle, a senior consultant with the Institute of Clergy and Congregational Excellence of the Texas Methodist Foundation in Austin as well as an independent consultant.

Over the past six months, the group has been examining different measures of church effectiveness — statistics like church attendance, professions of faith, baptism, membership, financial resources and mission outreach.

Team members also have talked with leaders of other United Methodist  conferences that have undergone similar processes of self-examination including the Indiana, Texas and Baltimore Washington conference.

“They’ve negotiated some areas  of doing change,” said team member Susan Ledbetter, associate pastor at First UMC in Bentonville. “They looked at some different ways to do coaching. It should be noted they still see themselves as work in progress, but they report having a new common language. The language influences the action.”

She said Rendle pointed out to the team that there’s a big difference between talking about attracting members and making disciples. 

Over the past four decades, the United Methodist Church — like other mainline Protestant churches — has seen its American membership rolls plummet and the denomination’s influence on wider American culture has declined accordingly. The denomination currently has less than 8 million members in the United States.

Mackey Yokem, the team’s convenor and Northwest District superintendent, said too often United Methodists focus on maintaining bureaucracy and not transforming the world.

He said the Imagine Ministry team’s work is changing the way he and other team members think about the ministries of the church.

“I think it’s going to increase the participation of the person in the pew in the ministry of the church,” he said. “It’s going to be an invitation to broaden participation in real ministry so we don’t just come to worship, but we come to be challenged to think outwardly.”

Ledbetter said serving on the team has renewed her sense of calling to the ministry. She first discerned God’s call while at a young adult conference in Denver. A student at Iliff School of Theology told those gathered that in 10 years, half of the United Methodist pastors would either be dead or retired.

“I thought, ‘That’s a horrible thing to say,’” Ledbetter said. “In that moment, I heard God’s voice say ‘That’s what I want you to do.’ I wasn’t thinking in terms of guaranteed appointment. I wasn’t thinking in terms of job security. It took me months to unpack that and realize what that meant in my life. Only now does that moment make sense.”

It’s now a decade later, and while the Iliff student’s dire prediction hasn’t yet materialized, Ledbetter still discerns God’s calling on her life.

In going through the Imagine Ministry process, she said she “has been awakened.”

Likewise, she hopes others will discern God’s call as they examine where the United Methodist Church is and where it should be heading.

The group is just barely a quarter way through what the bishop anticipates to be a two-year process.

The group will give a progress report at Annual Conference in 2010. Any proposals that grow out of these conversations will be taken up at the 2011 conference.

Yokem said: “We want to begin a conversation out of which will grow in time a new sense and direction for ministry.”

The Imagine Ministry team will have four regional meetings. Bishop Charles Crutchfield requests that every pastor attends along with two laity. The bishop also requests that at least one of those laypeople be under the age of 40.

The meetings will be at the following locations:

• Central Region — 3-5 p.m. March 7 at Pulaski Heights UMC, 4823 Woodlawn Drive.
• Northwestern Region — 3-5 p.m. March 14 at Central UMC in Fayetteville, 6 West Dickson St.
• Northeastern Region — 3-5 p.m. March 21 at First UMC in Wynne, 800 N. Falls Blvd.
• Southern Region — 9-11 a.m. March 27 at First UMC in Camden, 121 Harrison Ave. S.W.