I'm interrupting my normal "Top Five Tuesday" routine -- and I love my routines -- because an article in Monday's Charlotte Observer revealed that this past Sunday (October 28) was one of the saddest days for the church in this area in a long, long time.

I don't know if Jesus wept reading it, but I did.

The piece told of two different worship services in two different churches located just minutes from each other in center city Charlotte.

In the first, held at predominantly African-American St. Paul Baptist Church, pastor Greg Moss initially invited his congregation to join him for a caravan that would commence immediately after the service ended.  The destination?  An uptown polling place. 

After that, Rev. Moss let the people know who would be getting his vote that day, as he unbuttoned his jacket to reveal a T-shirt underneath with the initials OMG:  Obama's My Guy.

Two miles away, mostly white First Baptist Church also offered Sunday afternoon transportation to area polling places. 

And while its pastor, Mark Harris, did not wear a T-shirt indicating who has his vote, the church's lobby was full of voter guides encouraging believers to make their electoral choices based on a candidate's values on a slew of issues ranging from abortion to federal debt to same-sex marriage.  All the recommended values & positions on the voter guide are those held by Mitt Romney.

In other words, what First Baptist thinly veils, St. Paul Baptist fully reveals: God is on the side of our candidate.

You can read the article here.

What to make of Sunday's happenings in Charlotte?  Some thoughts:

• Having a church support a political or governmental authority would have been a completely alien concept to our New Testament ancestors.  The Caesars in charge wanted to kill them, not solicit their endorsement, and in turn their message of Jesus' kingdom was fully subversive to the powers-that-be.
• Church history since that time shows us that whenever the church enters into an alliance with a politician or governmental power, the power advances and the church retreats.  Ask the Russian Orthodox hierarchy how their complicity with the Czars turned out.
• The Religious Right has long been justifiably criticized for being too closely aligned with the Republican Party.  In fact, many people who are otherwise evangelical in their theology -- like me -- have often lamented the national perception that bible believing Christians vote Straight Party "R."  Well, turnabout must be fair play.  The Religious Left in general and many African-American churches in particular are just as guilty of an unholy alliance with the Democrats.  It's time they receive the same amount of criticism.
• In our setting at Good Shepherd -- blessedly made up of Anglos, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians,  and continental Africans -- we're doing our best to live by the words of Philippians 3:21:  our citizenship is in heaven.  Which around here means the government may have your cooperation but it can never have your citizenship.  We keep politicians and governments at arm's length because our identity comes from our Savior, not our State; from the Cross and not from our candidate; from the resurrection and not from our race.

Because what really happened with all the T-shirt wearing, caravan organizing and flyer distributing in Charlotte on Sunday was this: 

Two different churches got wrapped up in two different candidates and one common Savior got forgotten.

Here's one of the questions I recently asked each of our staff to consider:

How can my schedule be as full of face-to-face interactions with people as it is full of nose-to-screen interactions with my computer?

Answering that question well is one of the great challenges of ministry in the digital age.

Yes, we want to multiply our impact through Facebook.  And yes, we're glad that you can watch Good Shepherd worship services at our website. 

And yes, I'm glad you're reading this particular blog post online.

But virtual ministry can never replace personal ministry; it can only augment it.

So our staff and our volunteers will invite people to lunch, counsel people in person, and pray with people at the altar.

Because nose-to-screen will only go so far.

But face meeting face is a little bit like . . . Word becoming flesh.

The position of District Superintendent (usually called "DS" by insiders) within the United Methodist Church is something to which I have never aspired and for which I am ill-qualified.

And yet on Tuesday night that's exactly what I was.

Here's how and here's why:  Superintendents in our denomination have for years led approximately 65 pastors and churches at a time.   In Western North Carolina, for example, we had 15 DSs giving supervision to about 1100 churches.

Well, as Don Henley said, "those days are gone forever; we should just let 'em go."

Because of budget constraints and the lingering recession, our Conference can no longer afford to pay 15 superintendents to lead churches and manage pastors.  So starting this past July, what had been 15 districts was reduced to eight.

Fewer districts means fewer DSs . . .  means budgetary savings  . . . means each DS now superintends many more churches.

And what was the Charlotte District made up of 52 churches in Mecklenburg County became the Metro District with 133 churches in Mecklenburg, Cabarrus, Union, and Iredell Counties.

What had been a challenging job task now becomes a near impossible one. I say that because each DS is expected to visit each church in his or her district every year and conduct its annual business meeting, labeled a Charge Conference in Methodist parlance.  No single individual can do that 133 times in one year.

So instead of doing all the work himself, our DS invited a number of pastors who have been ordained as elders to play the role of Superintendent at the charge conferences of churches who are served by pastors not yet ordained.

Are you keeping all the Methodist systems and lingo straight yet?

All that to say that I "superintended" the annual Charge Conference for Zoar United Methodist Church, located about two miles from my house and six miles from Good Shepherd.

It's actually a full circle story -- back in the early 1990s, a group of Zoar faithful volunteered to serve as the pioneers for this newfangled kind of Methodist church starting up in Steele Creek.  That new church is now called Good Shepherd.

So we started by singing "Blessed Assurance" and I let them know that although the hymn writer Fanny Crosby wasn't Methodist she should have been because "Assurance" is a core doctrine of our church.

Following that word and a brief devotion from I John 5:13, the church approved its slate of officers, authorized its pastor's salary, and agreed to its Methodist apportionment.  I signed the relevant papers and that was that.  All by the book and all very Methodist.

And then the best news of all: after that brief foray into the world of management and administration, I get to  re-enter the much more comfortable realm of pastoral ministry on Wednesday.