As you read this, Julie and I are headed to Jacksonville, Florida, for the second annual gathering of pastor of the 100 largest United Methodist Churches in the USA.

I posted about last year's event here and here.

There are more than 35,000 United Methodist congregations in the U.S., so it is obviously a great honor that Good Shepherd is one of the top 100 in terms of average Sunday worship attendance. I'll be surrounded by a lot of pastoral leaders who know what they are doing. And still others, like me, who have some measure of success in spite of themselves.

You might want to check some of the largest and most innovative churches in our denomination. Here are just a few:

Church Of The Resurrection, Leawood, Kansas. Started the same year as Good Shepherd, it hosts over 8,000 people per week in worship. The Jacksonville gathering is the brainchild of Adam Hamilton, Resurrection's founding and lead pastor.

Granger Community Church, Granger, Indiana. We've learned so much from this highly innovative yet streamlined church in the Michiana area. They have influenced our approach to technology, media, small groups, and missions.

Faithbridge United Methodist Church, Houston, Texas. Started by a friend of mine from Asbury Seminary, this church averages about 3,000 people per weekend.

Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church, Tipp City, Ohio. Of all the churches represented, this one might be the most miraculous. In 1979, Michael Slaughter (also an Asbury grad) was sent to GUMC, a rural congregation with an average attendance of 90. Within six months, he had "grown" that to 60. Then the turnaround started. Thirty years later, with Slaughter still at the helm, they average close to 5,000 people per weekend. Known for "aggressive" music and a passionate commitment to missions, Ginghamsburg has been teaching other churches how to do it for many years.

I'll let you know more about the gathering in the coming days.

Below is the recently adopted "Statement Of Mission, Vision, and Values" for The School Of Theology At Claremont, one of the 13 official United Methodist-related seminaries in the U.S.:

STATEMENT OF MISSION, VISION AND VALUES

At its March 2008 meeting, the Board of Trustees set in motion the Claremont University Project. This statement of Mission, Vision, and Values were adopted to shape the character of the multi-year project.


MISSION
As an ecumenical and inter-religious institution, Claremont School of Theology seeks to instill students with the ethical integrity, religious intelligence, and intercultural understanding necessary to become effective in thought and action as leaders in the increasingly diverse, multireligious world of the 21st century.

VISION
In addition to being a leading school of theology training exemplary ministers for service to their specific religious organizations, Claremont has a vision of being a leading theological university where scholars and practitioners of the world's religions can come together, learning and practicing how to treat others as they would like to be treated. This will enable religious organizations, leaders, and individuals, regardless of their matters of perspective on faith, to work collectively to bring about harmony and understanding at all levels - individual, organizational, and governmental.

VALUES
With a free and liberating spirit, Claremont nurtures a diverse international community that passionately pursues intellectual rigor, vocational formation, and responsible social engagement. We commit ourselves to think deeply, act ethically, embrace diversity, work for justice and peace, and care for the earth, its people, and its resources so that all life may flourish.

Notably absent from this statement are words such as Jesus, Christ, or Christianity.

At an institution supported by dollars from local United Methodist congregations. And United Methodism is, after all, a self-avowed Christian denomination.

I am no fundamentalist. But Jesus is decisive, and our churches long for pastors who believe as much. Syncretism is a grave danger, not a friend.

If one of our denomination-related schools of theology cannot claim in its Mission, Vision, and Values that is in any way Christian, then perhaps we should “re-think” what it means to be a United Methodist seminary.

I have been in Methodist-preacher-gatherings in which the subject of our denomination's stand on homosexuality was the elephant in the room -- a topic which, for the sake of holding on to the congenial vibe in the meeting, no one wanted to address.

Yet this week, I recognize that we Methodists have another issue that's not an elephant in the room but a dinosaur. You see, elephants are at least still alive and viable and active. Dinosaurs, of course, are extinct -- species that could only survive in another era.

We have just such a species in the Methodist system -- something that was designed for and could only survive in another era.

Our dinosaur? The itineracy.

It's on my mind because last Sunday all the new appointments in the Western North Carolina Conference went "public." Throughout our Conference, 15-20% of churches will be receiving new pastors and, obviously, pastors will be sent to new churches. The new assignments will begin on July 1.

Why is our system such a dinosaur?

• It was designed for a world that no longer exists. The process of moving pastors frequently from church to church to church worked when people traveled by horse and buggy and when individual Methodist churches were pretty much indistinguishable from one another. It does not work when people travel by car and when individual congregations within the same denomination are vastly different.


• In earlier generations there was not such a direct link between pastoral longevity and congregational health. Today there is -- with relatively few exceptions, the largest and strongest churches inside Methodism and outside of it have senior pastors with long tenures.


• In the 21st Century, local pastors are not interchangeable parts, easily moved from one church to another. For example, there are many churches in our Conference for whom I would be a terrible match; by the same token, there are some UM pastors who would not fit at a church like Good Shepherd.
• The best advice I ever received in seminary was this: "Don't always try to get a promotion by going to your next appointment. Instead, grow the church you serve into your next appointment." I have tried to live by that. So Good Shepherd is not the same church it was in 1999. And I am definitely not the same pastor I was then. So I have changed appointments by not changing appointments. It hasn't been easy or perfect or smooth, but I believe it has been in the long-term interests of the church.

Grow the church you serve into your "next appointment." Maybe that's one way for dinosaurs to live after all.

The word "Pentecostal" conjures up all sorts of unsettling images for many of us: weird preachers who wear white suits and drive luxury cars, "staged" healing and deliverance services, people "falling out" in the spirit, or, worse, handling snakes. And then a sneaking suspicion that there is a whole lot of avarice and immorality going on behind the scenes.

Think Robert Duvall in The Apostle.

But what if we could reclaim that word pentecostal?

What if we in Methodism could wear it proudly as a banner?

Because Mr. Wesley himself was one of the great teachers on the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian.

He says this in his sermon "On The Holy Spirit":

The Holy Spirit has enabled men to speak with tongues, and to prophesy; but the light that most necessarily attends it is a light to discern the fallacies of flesh and blood, to reject the irreligious maxims of the world, and to practice those degrees of trust in God and love to men, whose foundation is not so much in the present appearances of things, as in some that are yet to come.

And this in the same sermon:

But I think the true notion of the Spirit is, that it is some portion of, as well as preparation for, a life in God, which we are to enjoy hereafter. The gift of the Holy Spirit looks full to the resurrection; for then is the life of God completed in us.

And Wesley's focus on holiness is a focus on the Holy Spirit: if salvation is what Christ does for us by faith, then sanctification is what the Spirt does in us by that same faith.

So the heart and soul of Wesley's preaching and teaching -- our heritage as Methodists! -- is deeply, profoundly pentecostal. Minus all the 20th and 21st Century baggage the term carries with it.

So when Good Shepherd does messages series like Without Limit or Without Limit 2.0 in which we talk openly about praying in tongues, divine healing, and expressive worship, we're not trying to break the mold of Methodist churches.

We're trying to fit back into it.