Jesus Gave us a Mission, not an Org Chart

The structure of the church derives from its mission, and is subordinate to the demands of that mission.

The problem with our United Methodist understanding of our history is that it begins with the question: how did we get here from there? When we ask this question the “here“ dictates what we see in our history. We are engaged in creating anachronisms as we read our present back into our past in order to discover some kind of process of continuing evolution, or to authorize our existing institutions. 

Further, when we look at our history under the influence of the theological idea of God‘s providence, or the work of the Holy Spirit, our history becomes idealized. Everything that doesn’t belong to the providential evolution that we have identified falls away from our consciousness and is no longer seen. And this includes, almost inevitably, the actual human forces that really drive the generation by generation creation of the Church. And this in turn of skews out understanding of the ways in which God is actually at work in human history.

I'll give a couple of examples.

In a recent facebook discussion I questioned the assertion that the United Methodist Church was conciliar. I was referred to Acts chapter 15 and the "council" at Jerusalem. Now it is certainly the case that when what became the Roman Catholic Church began to organize itself gatherings of leaders who claimed to be successors to the apostles sought to authorize their decision making councils by reference to that meeting of the apostles in Jerusalem. In the same way that their personal authority depended on the claim of apostolic succession, so their claim to conciliar authority was based on the idea of a succession of church councils.

But neither of these claims is supported by scripture, or for that matter documented history. Each is based on creating an anachronistic reading of history that reads the present into the past to establish what appears to be an authorizing precedent.

Another example is the way in which Methodists and related groups that identify as Wesleyans typically understand their distinctive origin to be in the work of the Wesley brothers, preeminently John. Here the historical succession is readily established, but the ideological succession is highly contested, as current UM debates amply demonstrate.

But the real problem is that these claims to draw identity from historical characters feeds on and feeds the idea that God's providential work in history comes about primarily by raising up great men (and very occasionally women.) And it equally obscures the complex social and cultural environment that makes it possible for the Wesleys to exist, conceptualize their calling in certain ways, and carry it one effectively. God's providence is at once both personified and and greatly limited when a movement identifies itself as Methodist or Wesleyan. And in the process those who call themselves Methodists lose sight of their real origins and subsequent evolution. 

As soon as a group calls itself "Methodist" or "Wesleyan" it has consciously obscured its true origins, and almost always for the purpose of excluding those relatives movements with whom it disagrees on some point of doctrine or church structure. The same is true of movements within United Methodism. Terms like "progressive" and "traditionalist" or (ironically) "inclusivist" all serve to exclude; to draw boundaries that leave some group on the outside. This problem is found widely in religious history. Groups that claim to be inclusive invariable exclude on principle exclusivists, who in any case by their belief in boundaries cannot enter into an inclusivist environment.

Or sometimes, as in the case of Islam in relation to Judaism, Christianity, and other monotheistic faiths inclusion comes at the price of subordination. One revelation graciously acknowledges all others, so long as those other recognize that they are incomplete while it is complete. Likewise with United Methodist inclusivists, they will open the door to exclusivists so long as the latter recognize the inferiority of their theological position.

But to the main point: we quickly forget that every family tree has as many roots as branches, and that pruning off the roots only weakens rather than strengthening the tree. 

So I want to offer another way of looking at Christian, and ultimately United Methodist history.

Let’s begin with what seems to me a solid fact: the Church begins when Jesus Christ sends his apostles out to participate in his work. This happens before his death and resurrection. (Luke 10:1-12, Matthew 10:1 - 8) In taking up Jesus' mission, with the power he has given them, the disciples of Christ effectively become the Body of Christ, the church. 

The Church is further formed after the resurrection when Jesus expands this mission to include being what Mark calls “the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.” (Matthew 28:16-20, Luke 24:44-49, Mark 16:8, and Acts 1:6-11) Paul is a late addition to this group of apostles, and his particular mission further clarifies that to which the Church is a witness. “He is the Son of God." (Acts 9:3-20)

What we do not find is any indication that Jesus has told the disciples how to organize themselves. 

What Jesus has given the Church is a mission, not an organizational chart. 

In the gospels the closest we come to organizational matters are: 1. when Jesus rebukes his disciples for caring about their position in a future hierarchy, 2. When Jesus declares that Peter will have the distinctive role of keeping the keys to the Reign of God, and 3. When we learn that Judas keeps the common purse. 

The third of these should be a warning to all those who want to be the treasurer of a church organization. The second is quickly deconstructed by two facts: 1. that Peter’s leadership role will include dying as a martyr, and 2. by the teaching of scripture that the gates to the Reign of God will be open constantly. Possession of the keys gives Peter no decision making capability at all. He just makes sure the doors stay open. 

The lack of an organizational chart to accompany the mission becomes clearer when we read the book of Acts and the epistles of Paul. Initially the apostles appoint elders (plural in every case) over new congregations, following a Jewish precedent that goes back to Moses and Jethro. 

Table waiters, deacons, are appointed by the apostles after consulting the community to care for the distribution of common property in the communities.

In Paul’s letter to Timothy we have one further clue into the emerging organization of the church; the addition of the office of bishop to those of deacons and elders. But again there is no idea that God appoints bishops. It is a post to which humans can aspire and which, like the offices of deacon and elder, has humanly observable requirements.  Nowhere do we find the idea that these tasks are either God ordained or require the possession of some special charism. Bishops, elders, and deacons are appointed by other humans.

In the meantime we find that the spiritual life of the church is organized by the Holy Spirit through the distribution of gifts. (I Corinthian 12:27 - 31) Only one organizational position overlaps with a spiritual gift, that of the apostle, but there is little evidence that Paul sees the term “apostle” as a continuation of a unique vocation given the Twelve. For Paul an elder may sometimes have one or more of these gifts, but he does not indicate that they must. 

The takeaway is simple: The work of organizing the church is done by humans as they seek to fulfill the mission given by Christ. Only the original twelve apostles have the unique status of having been called by Jesus. They don't appoint successors, they appoint groups of elders to manage congregations. Then those who come after are called by successive generations of human leaders. God gives gifts for worship and spiritual life of the church.  Humans invent organizational structures and roles to further its mission, and they do so always in constant interaction with their socio-cultural environment. The first century Mediterranean world is as much an origin of Christianity as the apostles and their successors. And if we are looking for God's providence we must also look to the features of that world.  

So how, given the witness of scripture, do we get to the structures we have today? Faithful humans made human decisions, in particular situations, seeking God’s guidance, about how to best continue the mission Christ gave his church.  There is nothing wrong with the threefold ministry of the United Methodist Church so long as we recognize that it is a human creation based on a long series of human judgments about how to do the best job in serving God in emerging social and cultural contexts. And the same is of course true of presbyterian and other systems of church governance. They are human inventions hopefully shaped by a commitment to the mission given to the Church by Christ.

This said, the three fold ministry in United Methodism is particularly misleading, indeed ingenuous, because even after the creation of "orders" in the 1990's it is hard to see a precedent in scripture and certainly not in tradition. The orders were created for the purely political (and usefully practical) purpose of acknowledging the rising power of the diaconate. As a member of the theological commission of the South Central European Central Conference I recall our despair at these changes, which were ultimately rejected and the Central Conference level, because they drove us even further from the ecumenical consensus. 

Where we have been misled about the human role in organizing the church is by the rapidity with which the emerging organization of the Roman church in the 1st century began to justify itself by conflating human choices with divine calling and special charisms associated with the three offices. This was necessary as increasing power accumulated in the episcopal sees and Rome. It is always politically expedient for church leaders to claim that they were appointed by God, although there is often little evidence in their behavior and less in scripture that this claim is true. 

And this is quite relevant as the UMC seeks a way forward out of the political morass that has become our General Conferences. 

The structure of our church is the product of human choices in particular times and places. It's origins, if providential, are also like all things providential by definition temporal. God provides for new situations in new ways. There is a parable about wine and wineskins for those who have forgotten. All things that have a beginning have an end, and that includes things like the Book of Discipline.

Our structure is no longer effective in carrying out the mission of Jesus Christ. Indeed it is becoming an abject failure. This has little or nothing to do with questions around sexuality or even obedience. The Traditional Plan and its increased enforcement of the demands for obedience may or may not shut down overt dissension in the church. It will certainly not make the overall structure more effective for mission in the 21st century. The One Church plan may remove the overt conflicts over obedience in this particular realm, but it will not make the overall structure more effective for mission in the 21st century. 

John Wesley recognized that the structure of Anglicanism in the 18th century was not capable of undertaking the mission given the church by Jesus Christ. He, like many other disaffected Anglicans therefore started something new; a movement with a different structure that drew on neo-monastic ideas of discipline and purposefulness. And like every movement of its time it was equally created by the circumstances in which it found itself. Wesley's movement worked.

For a while. Then it began to evolve to meet the missional needs of the American frontier and later a worldwide mission. We shouldn’t kid ourselves that the first Christmas Conference resembled in any way the conferences of Wesley with his pastors in earlier years; nor that subsequent books of Discipline reiterated even that early structure. Americans were, as Wesley had done, making it up as they went along, then back-filling to give themselves legitimacy with a legacy called “tradition.”  Even Wesley himself was reinvented a thousand times to give legitimacy to the organizations created by successive generations. 

Still, the various forms that Methodism took for the most part worked. Methodism in the United States enjoyed unparalleled growth right through the 1950’s.

But from the middle of the 20th century onward Methodism in the United States declined, as it already had in Great Britain. The 1968 formulation of the United Methodist Church created a new structure but did nothing to stop the decline. The changes in American culture in the 20th century simply outstripped the ability of a large, increasingly bureaucratized church to meet the demands of mission. By the 1990’s United Methodists were desperately creating connectional tables and new orders of ministry as they tried to find a way to contain the damage and division caused by debates over human sexuality and adapt to the emerging culture. The structure of United Methodism rapidly failing.

This failure cannot be hidden or overcome by the unparalleled growth of Methodism in Africa, which not only operates under different structures allowed central conferences, but also operates in a completely different socio-cultural environment. Nothing about the structure of the church in Africa is faintly relevant to the structures needed in the United States, or for that matter other cultures in which United Methodism is found. 

If we are to return to a vital engagement with the mission that Christ has entrusted the church we need to begin at the beginning by asking: what is the structure that in this time and place will best enable us to witness that the Reign of God is near, that Jesus is the Ruler of that Reign, and that through his death on the cross eternal salvation has come to all humanity?

To answer that question we’ll need to put aside our naive attachment to the idea that our church structures emerge from scripture. Casting out words like "conciliar" and "episcopal" is simply a smokescreen of anachronisms. We’ll need to let go our nostalgia for the structures that have served us well in the past, as well as their dubious claims to somehow reiterate a universal church structure created by God. 

Instead of looking to scripture as a talisman that will magically provide us the organizational wisdom we need, we must take the responsibility God has entrusted to every generation of disciples since the twelve apostles. For a church to be truly apostolic it must take on the responsibilities that the apostles embraced: listening to the command of Christ and then organizing to act in faithful obedience to it. We need to create according to the best of our human ability the structures needed for the years ahead in the times and places where we live. And we must do so knowing that in a future we may live to see that the structures we create will also be overthrown by rising generations out of faithfulness to Christ's command.