This is the antler mount from the deer I harvested two years ago. I decided not to have a taxidermist do the honors. I have two really nice full head mounts on the wall in our home, but I could not justify another $500+ expenditure for this one although something told me I should do something to honor and remember this buck. I did this myself which explains the amateurish result. I am not the most handicrafty person.

Why did I do this? I’ll tie it all together in a little bit.

I enjoy hunting. I don’t know why I started. I was not introduced to hunting by my father or any older male relative. In fact, my parents had no guns in the house. My folks did not allow me to even have a bb gun although my brother and I did have cap guns. I learned to shoot at Boy Scout summer camp. The rifle range at Camp Big Island was an awe-inspiring and somewhat intimidating place for me. The range officer was a no-nonsense sort and we were firing .22 caliber rifles at paper targets 50 feet away. When everyone on the firing line was done with their block of 5 bullets we were instructed to replace our targets with unperforated ones.

Turns out I did not need to replace the target as there were no holes in the one I thought I was aiming at. I later learned I had been closing the wrong eye when sighting on the target. As a right-handed shooter I needed to close my left eye. Once I started doing that my accuracy was vastly improved. Years later I was the archery instructor and eventually the rifle range officer at Boy Scout summer camps. This required me to complete training offered under the seal of approval of the National Rifle Association, but this was back in the day when the organization was still focused on its original mission of improving marksmanship and firearms safety as opposed to lobbying against common sense public safety measures. Part of my certification was in the area of hunter safety. Perhaps this kindled a spark in me for hunting. Certainly the love of the outdoors and the ability to survive and thrive in that environment developed in Scouting played a part.

When I knew I was going to law school there were two areas of personal and professional development I thought I needed to focus on – learning to drink Scotch and play golf because that’s what lawyers do. Eventually I learned to like Scotch, but I learned to detest golf. I read somewhere that John Wesley realized he needed to avoid higher mathematics because it moved him backwards on the path toward sanctification. With me it was golf.

I started hunting for squirrels with a shotgun. That got too easy so I moved on to a .22 rifle with a 4X scope. The challenge continued to wane, however, exacerbated by the reality that my family did not like to eat squirrel meat and I had no interest in simply killing. So I moved up to deer hunting.

Suffice it to say I made a lot of mistakes at the beginning – such as smoking cigarettes in the woods and wondering why I wasn’t seeing any deer. I am so thankful for the men in various churches I served who taught me the right way by word and example – Bill Seay, Clay Harvey, Charlie Brown, Don Castrup, Al Dennis, James Shade, Woodie Williams. I got a lot better and began to have some success on a regular basis. I am most grateful to Stephen Allen who is a brother in Christ, but was not a parishioner.

When I agreed to move from the Ohio River to the Michigan border, I mentioned to a small group of fellow United Methodist clergy that I needed to find somewhere to hunt. One of them connected me with Steve who graciously invited me to hunt some property he had access to. Rarely did I fail to harvest at least one deer and occasionally more than one in a season using a crossbow, a muzzleloader or a rifle. It was great! On top of that, Steve is a solid Christ-follower, a generous man with his time, a mentor to younger men and a marvelous trumpeter and band leader.

Why did I enjoy deer hunting so much? First, it is something not everybody does. It allowed me to get away from the church and office for a while and hear a heartbeat that was not my own, to watch the woods come to life, to hear the sound of a single leaf falling from a tree and hitting the forest floor, to hear the cannonball-like thud of a nut hitting the ground, all amidst the silence. I marveled at how deer can move almost silently through the woods and at the same time how the sound of a squirrel rustling through the leaves could sound so loud. Sitting stock-still, barely breathing when a deer looked in my direction, waiting for the moment I could move my weapon to shoot was a test of patience and discipline. Staying put in a treestand for hours in very cold weather served as a sort of measure of my stamina and fortitude.

When I retired and moved back along the Ohio River, it became harder to get into the woods and up in a treestand on the spur of the moment. Before that, I could enjoy taking my day off from work and just getting up early, driving to the deer woods and hunting by myself. Over the past five years, a 6+ hour drive north really necessitated the expense of a hotel room and it became harder to hoist a field-dressed deer onto the back of my Jeep by myself and then hightail it to a processor. Finally, my wife, Barbara, made the reasonable request that I cease solo hunting for safety reasons. I did not and do not like acknowledging that I can no longer do things I want to do in the ways I used to do them. I suppose I’m not alone in this. But she was right.

Over the thirty years I’ve hunted deer, I’ve been reasonably successful. Our family freezer and local church food pantries have been stocked. In only 3, maybe 4 years have I been reduced to eating tag soup, the deer hunter’s phrase for being skunked. Unfortunately 2 of those years have been 2022 and 2023. Are the deer telling me something?

After harvesting the buck whose antlers are pictured above, I noticed it had some years. There was a fair amount of gray on its muzzle, the antlers looked old and two of the twelve tines were broken – one at the tip, the other at nearly the base. I wondered if they had been broken in jousting with a younger, stronger deer for breeding prominence. That same season my friend and hunting buddy Steve had harvested a much bigger buck that is now hanging on his wall. In my imagination his deer deposed mine for dominance when it learned the hard way that it no longer was the boss buck in the woods. I began to identify with the old deer, especially when I learned that a deer’s antlers can shrink with old age, having personally grown even shorter in the last decade or so. So I wanted to honor the old deer in the way I have in addition to savoring the venison.

I think I may be done deer hunting. We’ll see when next fall rolls around. Barbara won’t let me dispose of any hunting clothing or gear just yet. She said something similar when I threatened to take all of my Cubs attire into the backyard and burn it when the Cubs choked against the Marlins in the 2003 National League Championship Series. She knew when Spring Training started the next year I’d want to start accumulating replacements. Wise woman. And I was well equipped when the Cubs finally won the World Series in 2016.

So, we’ll see.

If you have even intermittently followed my writings and rantings, you can sense I am often critical of The United Methodist Church and especially its Indiana Conference. Someone even had the temerity to comment that it looked like I was a recruiter for the breakaway Global Methodist Church. I hope he was firing a humorous barb. A member of the Annual Conference Inner Circle challenged me to proffer suggestions.

You probably won’t like it, but you asked for it. Although the recent announcements that the staff bureaucrat formerly known as Executive Assistant to the Bishop shall henceforth be known as Chief of Staff (should we now salute when in his presence?) and the reminder that there will be a solitary district-wide Charge Conference for all congregations in the district wherein I reside and worship (the attendance at which I predict could be held in a compact car) have reawakened my regrets for what they have done to my church, I will avoid detailed criticism of what has been done and instead direct readers to my previous blogpost Voter’s Remorse (Or When The Connection Goes Bad).

The process of disaffiliations offers an opportunity for my denomination in my State to make some changes if it really wants to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Although the “leaders” in our annual conference inner circle have demonstrated a reluctance to release the statistical information regarding the total number of members and the aggregate funds given to the larger church by those congregations that have disaffiliated, there can be no doubt that the budget supporting the annual conference and its bureaucrats will need to shrink significantly. Business as usual will no longer do. Significant changes must be made.

First, admit and repent of the fact that annual conference leadership has misled the church to abandon connectionalism for corporate models (that even corporations have in many respects abandoned). This will require truly radical changes, humility and surrender of perks and privileges, especially by those who have been eating very well from the connectional money trough. I realize this is the church equivalent of asking Congress to change and the United States Supreme Court to have ethics, but hope springs eternal.

Second, dramatically increase the number of districts and superintendents. Each superintendent’s district should include no more than 40 (a rather biblical number) congregations. Superintendents should serve as senior pastor of a congregation within the district and have an associate pastor to free the superintendent for the connectional duties. The annual conference would supplement the local church budget to cover the cost of the associate which would still save considerable money compared to the current salaries and other costs of care and feeding of superintendents. This would allow the superintendent to develop real relationships with congregations and clergy under their care and supervision.

Third, superintendents would be elected by the vote of clergy and laity at district conferences. The term of office would be four years and superintendents could serve only two consecutive terms. If the church wants to really restore a sense of connection, it must do smaller and local. This will, of course, require the surrender of episcopal perquisites and power to anoint/appoint and acknowledge that people on the local level know who to trust with leadership and responsibility.

Fourth, bishops would be elected by the annual conference and would no longer serve life tenure, but instead for a limited number of years. Bishops in The United Methodist Church are consecrated for special service, they are not ordained to some “higher” status. The problem with lifetime tenure often is when clergy are elected to the episcopacy in a process that emphasizes other factors beyond leadership and administrative competence and time reveals how poor a choice was made there is nothing that can be done to remedy the situation until the purple-clad person reaches mandatory retirement age.

Fifth, consign the guaranteed annual appointment for clergy and the itinerant system of appointing and deploying clergy to the dustbin of history. Both have not only outlived their usefulness, they have contributed to the present situation and rarely positively. If life tenure for bishops goes, so should the guaranteed appointment for clergy. Clergy and congregations should be incentivized to make ministry work better. Surely, the connectional hive can figure out a system of deploying/employing clergy that does not devolve into a purely congregational form of polity.

If you follow me on social media, you will have noticed that from time to time I share items written by Sheila Kennedy. I hope not too many of you have scrolled right past them. Sheila is worth reading. I won’t detail her resume, but will say it is both impressive and extensive. I don’t remember when or how I first encountered her daily writings, but I immediately recognized the name.

Many years ago, she and I were young lawyers in Indianapolis. Sheila was a Reagan Republican and I was a Democrat precinct committeeman. For those unfamiliar with Indianapolis politics in the 1980s, it was a one-party city and county and that party was hers, not mine, although the State was much more competitive at the time before Republicans in the Statehouse perfected gerrymandering. My wife commented I was the sort of person who would have volunteered for Custer’s Seventh Cavalry a century earlier.

I don’t recall the exact context, but Sheila did her best to convince me of the merits of trickle-down economics, still the holy grail of Republicans. I had paid attention during my college economics classes, so I understood the theory. I just knew it wouldn’t work in real life because I knew the wealthy would not let much trickle down to the lesser classes, but instead would buy luxury goods and hide money from the taxing authorities. Let them eat cake!

A few short years later I left the practice of law and finally answered the call to ministry that was nearly twenty years old. Though now retired from active ministry, it was my vocation for 32 years and the way I interacted with people from the Ohio River to the Michigan border and points in between. While I often viewed and responded to things going on in our culture through a lawyer’s lens, it was primarily through theological, biblical and moral lenses. I still do. For example, the failure of trickle-down economics is inescapably due to the sin of greed.

I also knew and exhorted that morality, kindness, generosity and grace mattered. Very regrettably, there are too many (one is too many) who exhort for power and extort for money. The “Trump evangelicals”, particularly the clergy who have publicly excused the man’s immoral behavior since 2016, have done more damage to the cause of Christ than can be calculated.

But I want Sheila and you to be encouraged. There are lots of Christian pastors and Christian people who are proclaiming and practicing the true gospel of Jesus Christ. May of them are being attacked by parishioners and even some institutional bureaucrats, but they are standing firm. Those who have sold out to MAGA extremism and white Christian nationalism may look like they are winning, but they are actually waning, especially among the younger generations.

The Indiana House of Representatives, half of the state legislature under the know-nothing thrall of effectively one-party rule, has passed House Bill 1134 with a largely party line vote (surprise!) limiting what teachers can say regarding race, history and politics in Indiana classrooms with the penalties of fines and potential revocation of teachers’ licenses.

There is the possibility that saner heads in the Indiana Senate (if they are not unicorns and actually exist) will neuter the bill while still pandering to their slobbering and panting base or even better let it die for lack of attention. But I’m not holding my breath.

This legislative attempt to sanitize (if not literally whitewash) teaching has brought howls of dismay and dire predictions of intellectual disaster from many teachers and those whose politics are more liberal than the supermajority in the Best Legislature$$Can Buy.

This has been a long time coming and I cannot avoid seeing this as another example when human beings are living the Shakespearean line where Hamlet decided to hoist Claudius who was plotting against him with his own petard (for those who are not up on Shakespeare a petard is a bomb). It is a wonderful description of irony.

Early in my ministry, I realized that I and many pastors faced the Sisyphean task of countering the rising relativism in children, youth and adults in the classrooms and culture of our nation. Truth became fungible. There was your truth and there was my truth. I could dismiss your truth simply because it did not match my truth. You could not challenge my truth simply because I believed my truth was unassailable and you were a bad person if you had the audacity to question it.

Then those largely on the liberal side of the philosophical and political spectrum upped the ante. It was no longer possible to question another’s truth because that might hit the other’s emotional triggers or (gasp!) rise to the level of micro-aggression.

Rather than participants in a vigorous and civil struggle in the marketplace of ideas for truth who still showed a modicum of respect for those who did not share our understanding of the truth, we became tribal true believers who brooked no information contrary to our position and demonized those who believed and behaved differently. The marketplace of ideas was monetized and weaponized by those who saw the opportunity to gain financially and politically by reinforcing tribal loyalties at the expense and detriment of other tribes.

Now we find ourselves with a ripening crop of denial of science, whether manifested in belief or disbelief in climate change caused by human activity, if viruses are dangerous or merely inconvenient and vaccines are safe and effective, and prophylactic measures should be used by everyone, or whether children and youth should be taught the truth and nothing but the truth or protected against any ideas that might make them feel bad about themselves or their parents.

The irony that the mantras and tactics of those on the left of the political spectrum are now being employed very effectively by those on the right would be deliciously ironic to me if where we are and what it means for our body politic, our culture and even the church were not so disturbing.

We have sown the wind. Are we reaping the whirlwind?

When I was in my final year of law school a two-lawyer partnership in a small Virginia county seat community made an earnest attempt to encourage me to join them in their practice. I had done some legal research for one of the attorneys on a fascinating and unusual case and had made a good impression. They told me they could not guarantee me a salary, but they could get me appointed as the attorney to various boards and councils in the county and community which would provide a stable financial base while I built a practice. I was told it would in effect be easy money because all I would have to do is advise the boards and councils not to do anything thereby avoiding everything.

I ended up being offered a clerkship with an appellate court judge in Indiana, so I declined their offer and returned to Indiana.

I was reflecting on this after a couple of contacts with persons regarding the relationship between churches and pastors of my denomination and the Boy Scouts of America in light of the latter’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy made tragically necessary by claims of sexual abuse of minors dating back several decades.

Advice from denominational officials is eerily similar to what the Virginia attorneys said a young, hungry attorney ought to do – tell ’em not to do anything thereby avoiding everything. Churches are encouraged to consult with their attorney – counsel is not being provided them nor sufficient funds to cover the cost of sound advice – and here I will let you in on a professional secret. Attorneys will, in an excess of caution born perhaps of a fear of malpractice, spend much more time advising on what could possibly happen and be very careful to the point of evasive on what will probably happen.

A lawyer or litigant who can put the right words on paper in the right order and has enough money to pay the filing fee can file a lawsuit whether meritorious or not. So it is possible that a church could be sued for abuse that happened years ago connected with a Scouting unit it chartered. What is not probable is that the lawsuit would succeed. The overwhelming majority of claims in the bankruptcy proceeding predate 1987. Under Indiana law, the statute of limitations has run and, therefore, bars such claims. People who know me know I am not a fan of our one-party state legislature, but given its track record and the makeup of the majority I would be gob-smacked if Indiana reopened that legal window.

Throughout Scripture, God’s angelic messengers and Christ himself are quoted again and again and again to fear not. God who created humanity knew and continues to know how prone to fear we mere mortals can be when we face the new, the different and the unknown. That is sage and timely advice for churches and pastors today regarding Scouting. Don’t be afraid to continue Scouting as an integral part of your ministry to children, youth and their parents in your community. If you have a nursery, a preschool, Sunday School, youth group, your risk at chartering a Cub Scout Pack, a Scouts BSA Troop or a Venture Crew is no greater. Ministry and mission have risks. Risks can be reduced and insured against.

Pastors, if you’ve treated Scouting units chartered by your church as if they are your tenant in the building and you are the landlord (this is precisely the relationship the “don’t do anything” advice to enter into “facilities use agreements” is promoting), quite frankly you’ve been doing it wrong.

But you have the chance now to take corrective action. You have the right and responsibility to approve the adult leadership of the units you charter. Meet them. Ask them about their faith and their religious practice. If they’ll be camping over a Sunday morning, you can insist they hold simple “Scouts Own” chapel times. Offer to provide resources and guidance to your troop’s Chaplain’s Aide. That is an official leadership position for youth in Scouts BSA. Make sure your church’s Charter Representative on the Scouting unit committee is an active member of your church who believes in the mission. Then make that person a regular participant in your church’s governing circles and tables.

The attorneys in the bankruptcy are very good and will continue to make news. The attorneys for the denomination are also very good and will advise from an excess of caution. That’s how our legal system works.

But fear not. Continue the mission.

I am very thankful to all of you who have extended congratulations to me on receiving the Silver Beaver Award from the Buffalo Trace Council, Boy Scouts of America down here in the southwest corner of Indiana. I am deeply thankful to David Groff who nominated me and my beautiful and supportive wife who assisted him. For those who may not be familiar with the particulars of Scouting, the Silver Beaver is the highest honor a local Boy Scout Council can award to a volunteer and in some ways is akin to a lifetime achievement award. Scouting has been a significant part of my life and it still is, but my deepest thanks are due someone who is not present to receive them.

My dad.

I came upon Dad’s old Boy Scout Handbook on the bookshelves in his office in the parsonage in tiny Warren, Indiana. I believe I was in the second grade. I don’t believe I had known he had been a Boy Scout prior to that, but I was an avid reader and the book looked much more interesting that all of the preacher books on Dad’s shelves.

It was the stuff of this boy’s dreams – hiking, camping, building fires, using knives and axes, canoeing, tying different knots and making towers and bridges by lashing pieces of wood together. Even the uniforms looked good to me. I was hooked. I wanted to be a Boy Scout, but I was too young. At the time the minimum age for Boy Scouts was 11.

There was a program for younger boys called Cub Scouts. I could become a Cub Scout at 8. I was 8 at the time, but there was no Cub Scout Pack in town at the time. I was sorely disappointed. Some months later I learned that Pack 3122 had been organized and would be forming dens and holding pack meetings. So at 9 years of age I became a Cub Scout. I later learned that Dad had been instrumental in getting other pastors and community leaders behind the effort and agreed to serve as a member of the Pack Committee and its Advancement Chairman.

All went according to plan. I earned the Arrow of Light and moved up to Troop 122 which was chartered by the local American Legion Post after I turned 11. Before my first hike or campout, the troop folded when the Scoutmaster resigned. Dad rolled up his sleeves, recruited Jim Bollinger, a young man in his church, as Scoutmaster and reorganized an effective Troop Committee. During the succeeding months I went on my first hike, first campout and learned to trust my swimming ability is deep water. I earned the Tenderfoot rank and was hooked.

Mid-way through my 6th grade, Dad was appointed to Wallen Methodist Church in the greater Fort Wayne, Indiana area. The church chartered Troop 58 and I experienced Camporees, Klondike Derbies, Scout-O-Ramas in the War Memorial Colosseum in Fort Wayne and best of all summer camp at Camp Big Island. When we arrived at the main parking lot we unloaded our gear and waited until the whole troop was assembled. Then we boarded pontoon boats that ferried us across a stretch of Sylvan Lake. You knew you were leaving your parents behind for a defining adventure. Camp Big Island lived up to its name in that respect. I had my first experience firing a rifle at camp, earned several merit badges including Pioneering Merit Badge when my buddy Larry Fogle talked me into building an inverted tripod signal tower with him. Larry and I were both “tapped out” and became Ordeal members of the Order of the Arrow at camp and I earned the Mile Swim badge there.

Dad had to roll up his sleeves a couple of times when the troop needed new leadership and he had to minister to the church and Scouts when the Explorer Post the church chartered lost an adult leader to drowning on a canoe trip. It certainly made me and him more safety conscious, particularly on the water. Dad couldn’t swim. As a result, despite staying active in Boy Scouts through high school, he never advanced beyond Second Class since the requirements for First Class for him (and later for me) had a swimming standard. Dad tried to learn to swim or at least stop sinking in the water to no avail. Dad saved our summer camp week one year when no other adult was able or willing to go with us. Part of the week involved an overnight canoe trip and campout on another part of the camp. Dad did not show any hesitation about going. I made sure I kept an eye on him and that he was wearing a life jacket. Looking back on this and other times Dad willingly travelled in canoes propelled and steered by Boy Scouts, I think Dad was a very brave man.

The summer before my freshman year in high school, we moved to Mishawaka, Indiana. The church Dad was appointed to chartered Troop 120. It was led by two great men, Herb Holland and Arnold Thompson. They would alternate years registering as Scoutmaster and Assistant Scoutmaster and were exemplars of what a Scoutmaster should be, The troop had a large and very active Troop Committee. It seemed like every father of a scout was on the committee and many, many times we had several fathers with us on campouts and other outings. My brother and I earned Eagle Scout as members of this troop.

Dad enjoyed just being one of the fathers, including spending weeks at Camp Tamarack in that capacity, and being very active in the Dragoon Trail District of the Tri-Valley, later Northern Indiana, now LaSalle Council. He was awarded the District Award of Merit during this period. After I earned Eagle Scout, I served on the staff at Camp Tamarack and Dad helped by personally providing chapel services or coordinating with other clergy for those services. During this period Dad completed Wood Badge Training. The staff of that intensive training experience named him the First Class Scout of Troop 1, so my non-swimmer father finally made First Class. His peers also elected him their permanent Patrol Leader of the Owl Patrol.

Dad was then a leader in the movement in the area to provide similar high value leadership training to youth. They created Brownsea Adventure to meet that need and both Dad and my brother were part of the staff for this. This was long before the national Scout powers that be came up with National Youth Leadership Training.

My brother and I were active in the White Beaver Lodge of the Order of the Arrow, so Dad was too. Dad was not eligible when he was a Scout since a threshold requirement was being a First Class Scout, but he was elected as an adult and in 1971 he was recognized as a Vigil Honor Member. I still have the poem he wrote while he was keeping his vigil.

Dad’s next appointment was to the church in Alexandria, Indiana, where the church chartered Troop 381. This was in the newly created Crossroads of America Council which consolidated several smaller Scout Councils in central Indiana. I was in college during those years, but did work summers at Camp Kikthawenund nearby. Once again, Dad either personally led chapel services or coordinated clergy colleagues who did so.

After a few years, Dad was appointed to Auburn First United Methodist Church in Auburn, Indiana. That church chartered Troop 165 in the Anthony Wayne Area Council. I do not know the specifics of what Dad’s Scouting service was, but two significant things happened. First, Troop 165 and Troop 381 and Troop 120 held a joint camporee in 1977 and named it in Dad’s honor. Second, Dad was awarded the Silver Beaver, the highest award a Boy Scout Council can bestow on adult volunteers. Dad certainly deserved such recognition, but for various good and understandable reasons it tends to be given to people who have served many years in the same council and Dad had, thanks to the itinerant nature of United Methodist ministry, served in several councils, but not for years and years in any one.

After Auburn, Dad served six years as Superintendent of the Kokomo District and then finished his active ministry back in Fort Wayne at Waynedale United Methodist Church. He remained an active and enthusiastic supporter of Scouting to the end.

Dad left a great legacy of Scouting. My brother and I are both Eagle Scouts. Our sister earned the Silver Award in Girl Scouts. Three of his grandsons are Eagle Scouts. He left all of us, especially me, quite a legacy to live up to.

A decade or so ago, United Methodists in Indiana were encouraged to “Imagine Indiana,” a plan to unite the two annual conferences in the State into one. For years, Indiana shared one bishop between two annual conferences that were defined roughly along an east-west division of the northern and southern halves of the State.

I grew up in the North Indiana Conference as my family followed my father, an Elder in that annual conference, to his various appointments. When I returned to The United Methodist Church after a ten year hiatus I lived in the South Indiana Conference. I answered my call to ministry which had been felt nearly twenty years earlier and my appointments to churches all were within the South Indiana Conference with the exception of the two years with the General Board of Global Ministries as a missionary in West Africa. Even then my sense of connection was strongly with the South Indiana Conference. Then came the call to “Imagine Indiana.”

“Imagine Indiana” was greatly influenced by well-connected and influential laypersons who were well-known in both church and corporate circles and clergy appointed to influential churches that had been complaining about the amount of apportionments their congregations were expected to pay to support the shared bishop and the two annual conference operations. We were assured that the proposal was not based on financial reasons.

The proposal we were urged to imagine, however, did call for a drastic reduction in the number of districts in the new structure. In fact, the entire length and breadth of Indiana would have only the same number of districts as the South Indiana Conference alone had at the time. This would result in halving the amount required to support district superintendents, the mid-level managers in our connectional structure, and district offices and secretaries. The proponents of the imagined Indiana Conference dangled the carrot of video conferencing capacity in the new “district resource centers” which would reduce the need to travel several hours for meetings. We were also enticed with the assurance of the “inverted initiative” in which the local church would be the most important part of our connection rather than the top-down hierarchical corporate model in which the annual conference staff and leadership would offer or impose its one-size fits all programs and policies that had become the norm whether they worked or not. A carrot dangled before the clergy in the South Indiana Conference was the availability of more larger churches for appointments with presumably higher levels of compensation up north.

I arrived at the Annual Conference Session where we would vote on whether to unite the annual conferences with the intention of voting against the union. I do not know if I was naive, hypnotized or caught up in the moment, but I ended up voting for the union. While I doubt that it would have made a difference in what has resulted, I now wish I had stuck to my original intention.

I majored in political science as an undergraduate. Among the topics I studied was bureaucracy. While I plead guilty to over-simplification, bureaucracy arose to carry out necessary tasks of government, but was subject to sinful human nature in the form of bribery, favoritism, patronage and nepotism. So systems were developed which, among other things, were designed to curb the bureaucrats’ ability to abuse their authority and discretion. Since human systems rarely remain in some semblance of moderation and sanity, this led to further circumscription of the bureaucrats’ opportunities to abuse discretion to the point that regulations prevented bureaucrats’ ability to exercise any discretion no matter how sound or compassionate. In addition, bureaucrats, who do provide valued service to the entity which employs and empowers them, make themselves more and more valuable to the entity, gaining more and more authority and power, protecting their positions and influence and isolating and insulating themselves from the rank and file of membership organizations or the public in terms of governmental bureaucracy systems.

While I do not ascribe nefarious or even intentional efforts on the part of the bureaucracy of the Indiana Conference to do so, that is what has happened. The “inverted initiative” has been subverted. “District Superintendents” have now become “Conference Superintendents.” This change in nomenclature is very much reflective of the ongoing trend to centralize authority and importance in the annual conference and its decision-makers, further distancing the annual conference from the districts and especially the local congregations. Directors of the various annual conference program and service units are now members of the “Bishop’s Extended Cabinet.”

Prior to the union, district superintendents were expected to visit each church within the district annually. Often this was done at annual charge conferences, but diligent superintendents were often known to show up unexpectedly and without announcement at Sunday morning worship. District clergy gatherings and other opportunities gave superintendents the opportunity to know pastors and their families better and vice versa. Presently, the districts are so large “Conference Superintendents” simply cannot do this and have embraced the expedient of holding “cluster” or even district charge conferences. The result is paltry attendance and participation by members and leaders of the local churches within the cluster or district beyond the pastors. Laity have a remarkable ability to discern when something is a poor or unwelcome use of their time. When actively serving a local church I often offered to have such gatherings at my church knowing that would assure me of having most of my church’s leaders and influencers attend. The end result is that superintendents do not and indeed cannot know anything about the strengths and weaknesses, hopes and fears of the churches and pastors ostensibly under their supervision beyond the often inaccurate official reports Methodists are so well known for.

District resource centers with video conferencing capability never appeared. In fact, most districts now do not have offices, much less resources.

The Indiana Conference leadership has been greatly influenced by management consultants and gurus who claim to have the latest silver bullet approach to arresting the decline of local churches and the denomination. The result of this has been an increasingly corporate approach to being the church in which local congregations are treated as franchisees and clergy as fungible employees. Decision-making bodies have been downsized in the name of efficiency, leanness and nimbleness. While decisions made by large groups of people are often painful to achieve and sometimes poor in result, the reverse puts decision-making in the hands of smaller groups that are very susceptible and subject to influence by the annual conference bureaucracy.

Shortly after the union I was elected to chair the annual conference board of trustees, the board of directors of the corporate entity recognized by the State of Indiana. As such I was part of the assembly of committee and board chairs that was empowered to make decisions on behalf of the annual conference between Annual Conference Sessions. At one meeting, a newly hired annual conference staff member made a proposal regarding this person’s portfolio. I pointed out that we had just decided at the previous meeting of this body to approach the matter slightly differently. Another member of the annual conference bureaucracy chastised me and exhorted the rest of the body to support the new staff member’s proposal because the staff member had just been hired and we needed to support the new staff member’s first proposal for annual conference attention, showing our loyalty and welcome. Soon thereafter a proposal was made from the top of the annual conference bureaucratic hierarchy that the decision-making body be reduced in number of decision-makers. Among the positions to be removed was the one I held. At the time, I was not the least upset since this meant there would be fewer expenditures of days spent traveling to and from the conference headquarters for meetings.

In retrospect I realize this was just one more step in the implementation of secular corporate management models and means in the life of our church, further separating annual conference leadership from the rank and file. Recently those chickens came home to roost when this smaller, leaner, less representative and less diverse body made a decision to disenfranchise a constituency from voting for representatives at the Annual Conference Sessions.

The union between the two annual conferences in Indiana would have been difficult under the best of circumstances. The two had distinct differences in the culture particularly of the clergy. The South Conference clergy were much more fractious when it came to relationships between liberals and conservatives. This really reflected the political and social divisions between many communities and churches in the south from those in the north. The southern half of Indiana was and remains more conservative and this was and is reflected in the congregations in those communities. As the conference began the process of cross-pollenization by moving clergy back and forth from north to south, east to west it became apparent that those making such decisions had no effective understanding of many churches and the most effective clergy to lead them. Many decisions since have only made things worse. Corporate methods have replaced community. Connectionalism has been redefined as deference and obedience to hierarchy. Relationships between churches and among clergy have become frayed even when they exist in geography or theory.

Rather than uniting the church in Indiana, it has contributed to the untying of our connection. Stay tuned for the next manifestation of this. Perhaps when The United Methodist Church finally makes the needed decision to dissolve, what remains or what is raised from the ashes will be able to rebuild the connection in smaller settings and structures.

Yesterday was the first day of Advent. During worship, the Candle of Hope was lit on the Advent Wreath.  The Scripture lesson was Jeremiah 23:5-6 which reads:

⁵ The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up a righteous descendant from David’s line, and he will rule as a wise king. He will do what is just and right in the land. ⁶ During his lifetime, Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. And his name will be The Lord Is Our Righteousness.

During her sermon, the pastor pointed out that there were roughly 600 years between Jeremiah’s prophecy for the Lord and the birth of the Messiah. That’s a long time to hold on to hope.

When I was a child it seemed like the longest span of time in the year was between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I certainly resonated with the old Alvin and the Chipmunks song that said, “Hurry Christmas! Don’t be late.” Patience and hope were tough to practice.

Back in my lawyer days I was a partner in a law firm, but for those who do not know the ins and outs of partnership law, not all partners are created equally in all partnerships. I was more of a junior partner. I got a percentage of the partnership’s earnings, but not as much as the equity partners and they did not have to guarantee my salary as they had when I was an associate. And I was still at the bottom of the firm’s totem pole. Things flowed downhill and there was no one below me.

I was assigned a case from an older attorney who was sort of a rainmaker. He brought cases, but others handled them and he got a piece of the action in the end. This case was an appeal from a denial of unemployment compensation.

Frank had worked for more than 20 years for a major corporate grocery store chain, the last several as a produce manager. The laws of capitalism dictate that there are times when seniority and tenure make it advisable to discharge employees when younger ones will cost less. Frank was one of those. He got shnookered by his manager into resigning rather than being fired. It would look better on his resume, they said. He fell for it – like a lot of people in this right-to-work state.

When he applied for unemployment benefits, the employer objected saying he voluntarily quit. This was an absolute bar to benefits under Indiana law. Frank came to the rainmaker who filed an appeal and then dropped the file on my desk.

It was a hopeless case. Cut and dried. Just go through the motions. I did my best to be honest and yet hopeful with Frank. But talk about a waste of time…

Then a minor miracle happened. When the appeal hearing occurred, no one for the employer appeared. Frank won by default and received his unemployment benefits. Frank thought he had the best lawyer ever. I knew it was just a fluke.

Fast forward several years, I’m now the associate pastor of the church Frank’s wife Rosie attends very regularly without Frank. She tells Frank about the new associate pastor. He remembers me and starts to attend worship somewhat regularly, at least on the one Sunday a month I preached.

Months later, he tells me he wants to profess faith in Christ and be baptized – by me. The Senior Pastor was a delightfully non-territorial person so she readily agreed.

After worship that Sunday, Rosie came up to me for a hug, tears streaming down her face making her mascara run like a sweaty football player’s eyeblack.

“I’ve been praying for this day for 35 years,” she said.

What persistence!

What patience!

What hope!

How persistent in patience are we as we wait through Advent, waiting for the full realization of the hope we have for the Messiah?

24 days?

35 years?

6 Centuries?

Millennia?

I and my colleagues and fellow Hoosier United Methodists are about to gather in Indianapolis for our Annual Conference. In recent years Annual Conference has been so tightly scripted and streamlined it could have been handled through e-mail. This time will, I suspect, be very different. We are dealing with the results of the Special General Conference in St. Louis in February of this year and electing delegates for the “regularly scheduled” General Conference in May of next year.

The vaunted “connectional system” in our denomination has pretty clearly frayed, if not broken entirely. I’m not even sure Wespath, our pension system, and the Trust Clause,which legally places ownership of property in the ultimate hands of the denomination rather than the local congregation, keeps the “united” in The United Methodist Church any longer.

Recently there has been a fair amount of discussion about how those who disagree with the draconian policies enacted by the conservative segments of the UMC should resist the spiritual and ecclesiastical tyranny by disobeying the prohibitions and mandates of The Book of Discipline they believe unfaithful and abhorrent. While this may be necessary for those who believe so strongly that they find the prospect of nonlethal martyrdom attractive, I would encourage a better approach.

First, resistance will be painful and expensive. It would be possible to bring the UMC to a grinding halt by tying up the system and its resources with a flood of church trials for officiating at same-sex weddings, but that will only increase the pain and division within our denomination further eroding our witness for Christ. We have a hard enough time barely doing church. I can speak from experience that we do a church court even worse.

Instead, I encourage us – and especially those who will be delegates to the next General Conference – to remember John Wesley’s first rule for members of his Methodist societies: First Do No Harm.

We need to stop doing harm to those who disagree with us on the issues surrounding ministry and human sexuality. We need to admit that those with whom we disagree are sisters and brothers in Christ who firmly believe they are being faithful to Christ and led by the Holy Spirit. It is time to stop beating up on each other and re-organize the church to beat the Devil.

It is time to elect delegates who will admit that The United Methodist Church is broken and the time has come to dissolve the denomination. No successor denomination or covenant structure should be allowed to retain the name or symbol of The United Methodist Church. It will be hard, painful work, requiring repentance and humility and grace on all sides, but it can be done. As my colleague Darren Cushman-Wood recently pointed out much can be civilly achieved through mediation and arbitration.

The reality is there are no winners in this fight and there can never be. We are in a lose-lose situation. Let us admit it and stop harming each other.