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Revs. Elizabeth Winger Young and Wes Young (Kansas) Interview · What You Have Seen and Heard

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Well, hello again,
0:01
SPEAKER_01: and welcome back to another conversation in the series of What You Have Seen
0:04
SPEAKER_01: and Heard.
0:05
SPEAKER_01: One of the things that happened recently was I was at General Conference
0:09
SPEAKER_01: in Johannesburg,
0:09
SPEAKER_01: South Africa,
0:10
SPEAKER_01: and I met a whole bunch of people,
0:11
SPEAKER_01: and I wanted to be able to continue the conversation with them after coming home.
0:15
SPEAKER_01: And so though this...
0:17
SPEAKER_01: The conversation began as a strictly Upper Midwest Conference thing.
0:20
SPEAKER_01: I'm kind of expanding it and having a separate but related set of conversations.
0:25
SPEAKER_01: And I'm calling it What You Have Seen and Heard Across the Connection.
0:28
SPEAKER_01: And the name comes from when John the Baptist sent a delegation to Jesus.
0:31
SPEAKER_01: So today, we have a new experience.
0:33
SPEAKER_01: Not only is it new in as much as it is still new to be talking to folks outside of
0:36
SPEAKER_01: the Upper Midwest, but also I'm interviewing
0:48
SPEAKER_01: So, I'd like to invite you to meet two pastors,
0:53
SPEAKER_01: Reverend Elizabeth Winger Young and her husband, Reverend Wes Young.
0:58
SPEAKER_01: Elizabeth is a pastor at Laken Methodist Church in Laken, Kansas,
1:02
SPEAKER_01: and is also the presiding elder for the Southwest Kansas District of
1:05
SPEAKER_01: the Heartland Conference,
1:06
SPEAKER_01: and Wes is the pastor of Faith Community in Garden City, Kansas.
1:11
SPEAKER_01: I met Elizabeth at General Conference.
1:13
SPEAKER_01: I am meeting Wes for the first time,
1:15
SPEAKER_01: but thank you for agreeing to come on and have this conversation with me.
1:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, definitely.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: So the first question, the conversation.
1:24
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
1:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:25
SPEAKER_01: So the first question I ask everybody,
1:27
SPEAKER_01: you guys can figure out who wants to talk first,
1:30
SPEAKER_01: is how is it you came to become a Christian in the first place?
1:33
SPEAKER_01: Or if you've been a Christian your whole life,
1:35
SPEAKER_01: how did it come that you began to take your faith seriously?
1:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'll go first just because I think the flow works better.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: So I went to church my whole life,
1:47
SPEAKER_00: started in the United Methodist Church, went with my grandparents, my parents.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: And then the really changing point was when I was seven years old.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: I arrived home and I had been on a 4-H trip and there were a bunch of cars in front
2:04
SPEAKER_00: of my house and I had no clue why.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: And I got out and immediately was carried to the house and found out
2:10
SPEAKER_00: that my father had passed away.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: And all the cars at my house were, of course, my church family.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: And it was at that point that it sank in how much your church family is important
2:23
SPEAKER_00: for you during those times of tragedy,
2:27
SPEAKER_00: during those times of...
2:29
SPEAKER_00: And this is the moment in which I don't think I would have said this as a kid.
2:32
SPEAKER_00: But it sank in that this is the body of Christ.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: This is how the body of Christ is to work.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's especially interesting,
2:41
SPEAKER_00: a small town that in rural communities,
2:43
SPEAKER_00: the whole church just dives in and is there for you during tragedy.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: And then again, so my dad's sister, my aunt, helped my mom then raise me.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: And then I was 13 years old and my aunt had gotten me ready for a birthday party
3:02
SPEAKER_00: and was supposed to pick me up.
3:04
SPEAKER_00: She didn't pick me up.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: My pastor came and picked me up and took me to the scene of a car accident
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SPEAKER_00: where we found out that my aunt had then passed away.
3:15
SPEAKER_00: And in the midst of that tragedy, I had confirmation
3:23
SPEAKER_00: and went to church camp.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: And I remember at church camp,
3:28
SPEAKER_00: Taking communion and leaving and going off on the side of a hill and just kind
3:34
SPEAKER_00: of questioning God and feeling the Holy Spirit just come upon me.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: And I would say through those two events was my calling from Jesus,
3:48
SPEAKER_00: the Holy Spirit coming upon me, me solidifying my faith.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: My walk with Jesus.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: So I would say that I always feel like I was a Christian,
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SPEAKER_00: but those things just really made it deep and impactful in those moments.
4:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
4:07
SPEAKER_00: Wes?
4:11
SPEAKER_02: So I was, we were talking, I was a little boy in Iowa.
4:16
SPEAKER_02: I spent most of my growing up years in Oklahoma and We lived in Ponca City,
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SPEAKER_02: Oklahoma, and my dad was a counselor and my mom was a nurse there.
4:29
SPEAKER_02: I was laying in bed one night,
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SPEAKER_02: I was six years old,
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SPEAKER_02: and my parents were arguing across the hall as they did about every night.
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SPEAKER_02: And I don't know, that was just normal.
4:39
SPEAKER_02: I didn't know anything else.
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SPEAKER_02: And I heard a voice in my room say, Wes, get out of bed and pray.
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SPEAKER_02: So I did.
4:49
SPEAKER_02: Um, I think it's interesting in hindsight, I was not scared.
4:52
SPEAKER_02: Normally I would have been quite scared of a voice in my room in the middle of the night.
4:55
SPEAKER_01: Right.
4:55
SPEAKER_02: But I got out of bed and laid down,
4:57
SPEAKER_02: uh, or laid, knelt down there next to that mattress that I slept on.
5:00
SPEAKER_02: And I said, uh, God, please don't let my parents get divorced.
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SPEAKER_02: And I wasn't thinking about divorce.
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SPEAKER_02: That wasn't something I had any experience with.
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SPEAKER_02: It wasn't part of my life at all, but that's what popped out.
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SPEAKER_02: You know, sometimes the spirit gives us the words.
5:14
SPEAKER_02: Then I got back in bed and forgot all about it.
5:16
SPEAKER_02: And, um, That was six, so it's been a few years.
5:21
SPEAKER_02: Probably several months later, my mom took my brother and sister and I out to Panko Lake.
5:26
SPEAKER_02: We'd sit on the docks and feed corn to the fish.
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SPEAKER_02: That was poor people entertainment.
5:33
SPEAKER_02: She proceeded to tell us while we were out there that sometime back
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SPEAKER_02: that my dad had told her he wanted a divorce.
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SPEAKER_02: And that just the other night he had brought her back out there and said he wanted
5:43
SPEAKER_02: to keep trying to save their marriage.
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SPEAKER_02: And I don't remember what the detail was,
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SPEAKER_02: but there was something about the telling of that to us that made me think that was
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SPEAKER_02: the night that I got out of bed and prayed.
5:56
SPEAKER_02: And so with probably within the next year,
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SPEAKER_02: I gave my life to Christ with my dad praying with me in our living room.
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SPEAKER_02: And six-year-olds are not the most sophisticated thinkers,
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SPEAKER_02: although they might surprise you sometimes.
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SPEAKER_02: But as I've reflected on that experience, I learned three things.
6:13
SPEAKER_02: I learned there's a God.
6:15
SPEAKER_02: I heard his voice.
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SPEAKER_02: He knows my name.
6:17
SPEAKER_02: I heard him say it.
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SPEAKER_02: And he wants to be in a conversation, a relationship with me.
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SPEAKER_02: He told me to talk to him.
6:23
SPEAKER_02: And so that's just been the foundation of everything.
6:26
SPEAKER_02: I had plenty of...
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SPEAKER_02: Journeys and struggles in life, but I've just never had any room to doubt.
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SPEAKER_02: There must be a God.
6:32
SPEAKER_02: I was there.
6:33
SPEAKER_02: I saw it for myself.
6:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
6:37
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to get into this next question in a minute,
6:40
SPEAKER_01: but related to that,
6:42
SPEAKER_01: Elizabeth was participating here and there in our legislative committee
6:46
SPEAKER_01: in general conference.
6:47
SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if you had the same experience that I did,
6:50
SPEAKER_01: but I've had some folks kind of after the fact,
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SPEAKER_01: some of them are running on the internet saying, well,
6:54
SPEAKER_01: I wish the articles of faith were a little more this way or a little more that way.
6:58
SPEAKER_01: And I was really struck by I said, that's great.
7:00
SPEAKER_01: But if you were in the room and you saw what I saw and you heard what I heard
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SPEAKER_01: and you felt what I felt,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: you would not,
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SPEAKER_01: you would not say that you would,
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SPEAKER_01: because to you, it might feel like it's just not quite exactly right.
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SPEAKER_01: To me, it feels like a miracle, you know?
7:13
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
7:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: I preached on it this week.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
7:17
SPEAKER_01: Right.
7:17
SPEAKER_01: So I think it's,
7:18
SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: it's one of those things where To the outside observer,
7:21
SPEAKER_01: you're like, well, that's ridiculous.
7:22
SPEAKER_01: It may or may not seem ridiculous to you.
7:25
SPEAKER_01: But again, if you were there and you had the experience that I had, you would not say that.
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SPEAKER_01: So I think that that is a fascinating thing where
7:34
SPEAKER_01: the idea of, well, how do you know God's real?
7:36
SPEAKER_01: How do you know you're alive?
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SPEAKER_01: I live it and I breathe it and I've encountered it.
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SPEAKER_01: I just think it's fascinating.
7:42
SPEAKER_01: So you are both pastors.
7:44
SPEAKER_01: So I would love to hear a bit about how God called you into pastoral ministry.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: So for me,
7:53
SPEAKER_00: it's hard to untangle my becoming a Christian to my call to ministry
7:59
SPEAKER_00: because they happened very much at the same time when I was 13.
8:03
SPEAKER_00: So I was going through confirmation right about the time that my aunt had passed away.
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SPEAKER_00: And I was asking so many deep questions in confirmation.
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SPEAKER_00: Confirmation for me, you know, some kids are like, can't sit still, don't want to be there.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: And for me, that was my hotspot.
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SPEAKER_00: Like I was in my element.
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SPEAKER_00: And people started to notice that I was asking deep theological questions
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SPEAKER_00: that most kids don't ask.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: One of the things that we were asked to do was to go ask somebody
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SPEAKER_00: about what they knew about John Wesley.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: So my grandfather was a trustee for St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: And so we were really good friends with the president at the time, Lovett Weems.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: And so he was out visiting and I thought, you know what?
8:56
SPEAKER_00: You know, this 13 year old girl is going to drill the president of St. Paul School of Theology.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: So that's what I decided to do.
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SPEAKER_00: And I don't remember how he answered my questions,
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SPEAKER_00: but his reply was,
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SPEAKER_00: I always knew that Melvin Winger's granddaughter was going to be a pastor.
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SPEAKER_00: And so That just settled in on me for like the rest of my life.
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SPEAKER_00: I will never forget those words.
9:24
SPEAKER_00: And so it just was something that never let go.
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SPEAKER_00: You know, some kids are wishy-washy about, you know, well, maybe I'll be a pastor.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'll be an artist.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'll be a doctor.
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SPEAKER_00: And it never let go.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: So that was my call to ministry.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: And I did my first sermon, I think when I was 15.
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SPEAKER_00: And I started having lunches with my pastor.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: He would take me out.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: We had open lunch on Friday and he would take me out to lunch and we would just talk theology.
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SPEAKER_00: And then St. Paul School of Theology had a youth theology program that did a Wesley pilgrimage.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: And so I went into classes there and it was just onward from there.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
10:08
SPEAKER_01: All right.
10:10
SPEAKER_02: I'm trying to decide where to start.
10:13
SPEAKER_01: So I always have,
10:15
SPEAKER_01: when people come,
10:15
SPEAKER_01: they're going to have kids baptized,
10:17
SPEAKER_01: or they're going to be baptized, or they're going to come and join the church.
10:20
SPEAKER_01: I always just say, tell your story from whenever and wherever to here and now.
10:23
SPEAKER_01: So I mean, I'm open to however you want to frame that.
10:27
SPEAKER_02: So my dad is a Nazarene pastor, and I grew up in the Wesleyan and the Nazarene churches.
10:31
SPEAKER_02: Actually, he planted a Wesleyan church in Sioux City, Iowa.
10:33
SPEAKER_02: That's why we were there.
10:34
SPEAKER_01: Oh, sure.
10:38
SPEAKER_02: Probably from about the age of four,
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SPEAKER_02: I remember people saying, are you going to be a pastor like your dad?
10:42
SPEAKER_02: And me being like, no, no way.
10:47
SPEAKER_02: I don't know what a pastor is.
10:48
SPEAKER_02: I don't know what they do.
10:50
SPEAKER_02: But what I do know is I am not called to that.
10:52
SPEAKER_02: And so I did try to do everything else.
10:57
SPEAKER_02: And I was in the army.
10:59
SPEAKER_02: I retired from the army.
11:01
SPEAKER_02: And about two thirds of the way through my career, I was getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan.
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SPEAKER_02: And I felt like God putting a burden on my heart.
11:10
SPEAKER_02: I had a bunch of young soldiers.
11:12
SPEAKER_02: They'd never been in combat before.
11:14
SPEAKER_02: And God was saying, you know what it's like, because I had been.
11:18
SPEAKER_02: And you need to be there for them.
11:20
SPEAKER_02: And you need to be a spiritual leader to them.
11:22
SPEAKER_02: I remember those words.
11:24
SPEAKER_02: And I was like, I don't know, Lord.
11:26
SPEAKER_02: I kind of joined the army so I could run around in the woods and blow stuff up.
11:32
SPEAKER_02: And God gave me enough time to talk myself out of it.
11:34
SPEAKER_02: So I did.
11:35
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
11:36
SPEAKER_02: And then we were at a church camp and,
11:40
SPEAKER_02: um, and God just really put the burden on my heart again.
11:42
SPEAKER_02: I was like, okay, Lord,
11:43
SPEAKER_02: I don't know what to do or how to do it,
11:46
SPEAKER_02: but, um, if you'll, if you'll make the connections, I'll say yes.
11:50
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and so that was it.
11:52
SPEAKER_02: And I got to Afghanistan,
11:54
SPEAKER_02: got to this little postage stamp size base that we were going to live on for
11:57
SPEAKER_02: the next year there in the suburbs of Kandahar.
12:01
SPEAKER_02: And, um, I heard over the loudspeaker in the Zumba room, which is a tent.
12:09
SPEAKER_02: They were having a Bible study.
12:11
SPEAKER_02: I thought that might be a thing to go to.
12:13
SPEAKER_02: So I popped in there.
12:14
SPEAKER_02: I was there for 10, 15 seconds.
12:16
SPEAKER_02: And the loudspeaker called me away to go to a meeting.
12:20
SPEAKER_02: So I go to my meeting.
12:21
SPEAKER_02: I'm in there for way too long.
12:22
SPEAKER_02: It's one of those meetings that could have been an email.
12:26
SPEAKER_02: And as we're coming out, there's a guy.
12:29
SPEAKER_02: Walking into the tent,
12:30
SPEAKER_02: walking through this swarm of soldiers that are all trying to escape this meeting.
12:33
SPEAKER_02: And he just walks up to me and puts his hand in mine and says
12:36
SPEAKER_02: in this deep South African voice,
12:39
SPEAKER_02: my name is Altus Meering and I want you to be my partner in ministry.
12:43
SPEAKER_02: And my first thought was, this guy's crazy.
12:46
SPEAKER_02: Sure, yeah.
12:47
SPEAKER_01: Like ministries are precious things.
12:49
SPEAKER_02: Why would you share it with a complete stranger?
12:52
SPEAKER_02: And my second thought,
12:53
SPEAKER_02: you know,
12:54
SPEAKER_02: like a good second or so later was, well, maybe this is God's Connecting some dots.
13:00
SPEAKER_02: And so Altus and I proceeded to just become fast brothers in the Lord.
13:06
SPEAKER_02: He was from South Africa, and he was going through the same thing I was in Kansas.
13:10
SPEAKER_02: And God put us together in that two or three square acres in Afghanistan,
13:16
SPEAKER_02: and we started a church together.
13:18
SPEAKER_02: And we had people from a half dozen countries coming to it.
13:25
SPEAKER_02: We had people that were getting saved and we had people that were coming back to the Lord.
13:31
SPEAKER_02: We had a marriage that was saved.
13:32
SPEAKER_02: We had three people called into full-time ministry and one into the mission field in Africa.
13:38
SPEAKER_02: And then in 10 months, they closed our base and it was gone.
13:42
SPEAKER_02: But it was just an incredible experience.
13:46
SPEAKER_02: And then I thought it was done.
13:47
SPEAKER_02: I'm like, okay, I did it.
13:48
SPEAKER_02: I went home and I was a military police officer and was pursuing a career in law enforcement.
13:54
SPEAKER_02: And just could not get in the door.
13:56
SPEAKER_02: There was always some reason,
13:58
SPEAKER_02: despite being just a superb candidate with all the references and education,
14:01
SPEAKER_02: there was always something that closed the door in front of my face.
14:06
SPEAKER_02: And one day we're driving, she and I are, through North Kansas City.
14:10
SPEAKER_02: I could almost pick the spot.
14:12
SPEAKER_02: And she was going to St.
14:14
SPEAKER_02: Paul School of Theology at the time and struggling with it because of
14:17
SPEAKER_02: the environment there.
14:18
SPEAKER_02: And I'm never short of opinions.
14:21
SPEAKER_02: And so I was opining forth about what was going on there.
14:24
SPEAKER_02: And she yelled at me.
14:26
SPEAKER_02: And I always say,
14:27
SPEAKER_02: I really,
14:28
SPEAKER_02: I appreciate the voice of God, but I wish it didn't always sound like my wife.
14:32
SPEAKER_02: And she...
14:33
SPEAKER_02: He proceeds to yell at me and goes,
14:35
SPEAKER_02: if you're looking for a call to ministry, which I was not, this is it.
14:40
SPEAKER_02: You need to go to seminary.
14:41
SPEAKER_02: And I was like, fine, I'll go to seminary.
14:46
SPEAKER_02: And so I started looking for a seminary.
14:48
SPEAKER_02: And a few days later, I was on my way back from Omaha, Nebraska, where my unit was.
14:55
SPEAKER_02: I was an Army Reservist at the time.
14:57
SPEAKER_02: And...
14:58
SPEAKER_02: Spent some time with the Lord and heard it from him, too.
15:02
SPEAKER_02: So that was good that, yes, he wanted me to pursue the ministry.
15:07
SPEAKER_00: And I'll just add, Travis, that,
15:09
SPEAKER_00: you know,
15:09
SPEAKER_00: from the time we were dating,
15:11
SPEAKER_00: I would say we've never been what I would call a normal couple.
15:13
SPEAKER_00: But every conversation has been theological.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: You know,
15:16
SPEAKER_00: like there's not,
15:18
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what kind of conversations normal couples have, but,
15:22
SPEAKER_00: you know,
15:24
SPEAKER_00: I would say there's no time that we've never been talking about the church
15:27
SPEAKER_00: or ministry or theology.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: And so it just felt normal for him.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: Like, I know he has a deep theological heart and it felt like you need to go into ministry.
15:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
15:39
SPEAKER_02: I'm glad you didn't describe this as a normal couple.
15:42
SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
15:43
SPEAKER_01: So I'm assuming,
15:44
SPEAKER_01: I'm assuming,
15:44
SPEAKER_01: given what you shared already, that you did not consider going to St. Paul.
15:49
SPEAKER_02: No.
15:51
SPEAKER_01: So where did you end up then?
15:54
SPEAKER_02: So I had,
15:55
SPEAKER_02: I think I would say this is probably a God thing too,
15:57
SPEAKER_02: but as I never really considered anywhere but Asbury Theological Seminary.
16:02
SPEAKER_02: It was, some were sort of in the periphery of my consciousness,
16:05
SPEAKER_02: but I didn't have any connection to it.
16:07
SPEAKER_02: But I had three conversations in rapid succession with presiding elders,
16:12
SPEAKER_02: and all of them said a variation of this line.
16:14
SPEAKER_02: They said, I went to-
16:16
SPEAKER_00: DSs at the time.
16:17
SPEAKER_02: Sorry.
16:17
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
16:18
SPEAKER_02: DSs, district superintendents.
16:19
SPEAKER_02: One said, I went to Candler.
16:21
SPEAKER_02: But you should consider going to Asbury.
16:24
SPEAKER_02: Another one said, I went to Gordon Conwell, but you should consider going to Asbury.
16:29
SPEAKER_02: One said, I went to Perkins, but you should consider going to Asbury.
16:33
SPEAKER_02: And they all said, go to chapel there.
16:35
SPEAKER_02: There's something interesting going on there.
16:39
SPEAKER_02: And they were right.
16:41
SPEAKER_02: They were right.
16:42
SPEAKER_02: It was just a great Orthodox education.
16:47
SPEAKER_02: And I appreciate so much about the place,
16:49
SPEAKER_02: but I would just say it's a powerfully spiritual place.
16:52
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
16:53
SPEAKER_01: It is interesting how,
16:55
SPEAKER_01: so these are me interviewing other people,
16:57
SPEAKER_01: but it is interesting because some of my autobiography comes out in these things
17:00
SPEAKER_01: in little bits and pieces.
17:02
SPEAKER_01: I had a similar, well, I didn't go to Asbury though.
17:04
SPEAKER_01: So, but every, every pastor I knew went to either Asbury or went to the University of Dubuque.
17:11
SPEAKER_01: And so I applied to Asbury.
17:14
SPEAKER_01: I visited Asbury.
17:15
SPEAKER_01: I was accepted to Asbury.
17:16
SPEAKER_01: And right before I got the acceptance letter,
17:18
SPEAKER_01: it became very clear God was calling me not to go to Asbury, but to go to Dubuque.
17:22
SPEAKER_01: So that's where I ended up.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: So it's interesting that,
17:24
SPEAKER_01: you know,
17:24
SPEAKER_01: those little moments where,
17:25
SPEAKER_01: you know,
17:26
SPEAKER_01: you hear those different things and,
17:27
SPEAKER_01: you know, God's shaping us and guiding us one way or the other.
17:31
SPEAKER_01: I find that to be very interesting.
17:33
SPEAKER_01: So Elizabeth, did you remain at St. Paul or did you also go to Asbury at that point?
17:37
SPEAKER_00: So I always say that I knew where I wanted to go to seminary before I knew
17:42
SPEAKER_00: where I wanted to go to college.
17:44
SPEAKER_00: St. Paul was always where I was supposed to end up.
17:47
SPEAKER_00: And because my grandfather had been a trustee there for so long, I had a full ride.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: So here's the thing.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: So when I started, they were at the old campus in the middle of nowhere, Kansas City.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: And three years into it, he was deployed.
18:05
SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: And St. Paul was moving to Church of the Resurrection.
18:09
SPEAKER_00: So at that time,
18:11
SPEAKER_00: they lost all their professors that had any,
18:18
SPEAKER_00: I would just say,
18:19
SPEAKER_00: ethical boundaries about not calling out students for being Orthodox.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: After we moved to Church of the Resurrection,
18:30
SPEAKER_00: It was just let's persecute all the Orthodox students.
18:34
SPEAKER_00: And I struggled really hard and he was gone.
18:39
SPEAKER_00: And at that time I went to my DS and I said, I can't do this anymore.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: I was depressed and not doing well.
18:48
SPEAKER_00: And so at that time,
18:50
SPEAKER_00: my DS said,
18:51
SPEAKER_00: you know,
18:51
SPEAKER_00: they just changed the rule because the rule for course of study It used to be
18:55
SPEAKER_00: that you had to be so old to do course of study.
18:57
SPEAKER_00: It was made for like a second career person and they changed the rule
19:01
SPEAKER_00: that you could do it if you were younger.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: And he goes,
19:03
SPEAKER_00: you know,
19:03
SPEAKER_00: if you just finished course of study real quick,
19:06
SPEAKER_00: you only have like two classes and then you wouldn't only be done with course
19:09
SPEAKER_00: of study.
19:09
SPEAKER_00: You'd be done with advanced course of study.
19:12
SPEAKER_00: So you'd be an associate member.
19:13
SPEAKER_01: Right.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: So that's what I did is after three years of seminary,
19:17
SPEAKER_00: I just finished advanced course of study and was
19:22
SPEAKER_00: I did, and I still have the hangup that I don't have a master's.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: I have as much master's time as most people have in master's, but I don't have my master's.
19:32
SPEAKER_00: I tried to go to Asbury and finish, and I'm just not an online person.
19:37
SPEAKER_00: I need to be in the classroom and dialoguing.
19:40
SPEAKER_00: That's how I learn.
19:44
SPEAKER_00: And then after that, he came home and went to seminary.
19:47
SPEAKER_00: And so there was the question of, do both of us want to be in seminary at the same time?
19:52
SPEAKER_00: Right.
19:53
SPEAKER_00: So he's done now.
19:54
SPEAKER_00: I'm still struggling with the going back and getting my master's,
20:00
SPEAKER_00: even if it's in business,
20:01
SPEAKER_00: even if it's in something else,
20:04
SPEAKER_00: just because I think I'm smart and I feel like I should have a master's.
20:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but here's the thing though.
20:11
SPEAKER_01: I mean, have you not met people with master's degrees who don't have
20:14
SPEAKER_01: a clue what they're talking about?
20:16
SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
20:17
SPEAKER_01: So I've been,
20:18
SPEAKER_01: I'm not assuming you're going to necessarily agree with me on this,
20:20
SPEAKER_01: but there's at least, there is a voice Yes, yes.
20:41
SPEAKER_01: Um, but one of the things that,
20:42
SPEAKER_01: that just keeps living in the back of my mind is if you could point to me,
20:45
SPEAKER_01: if you could point to me to the numbers and the statistics and all the rest
20:47
SPEAKER_01: to show me that people who have masters divinity are on average more effective
20:51
SPEAKER_01: than those without them.
20:53
SPEAKER_01: Um, I might,
20:54
SPEAKER_01: I might be looking on board with it,
20:55
SPEAKER_01: but I've known too many people with masters divinities who are terribly ineffective.
20:58
SPEAKER_01: I've known too many people who do not have massive divinities
21:00
SPEAKER_01: who are extraordinarily effective for me to,
21:02
SPEAKER_01: and I don't just mean, I don't just mean church growth.
21:05
SPEAKER_01: Like we,
21:05
SPEAKER_01: I had a friend who was on,
21:07
SPEAKER_01: um, The IONEO Conference Board of Ordain Ministry in the United Methodist Church.
21:11
SPEAKER_01: And there was somebody who they were interviewing who was just theologically,
21:15
SPEAKER_01: you know, just nowhere near where they were supposed to be.
21:18
SPEAKER_01: And someone said, well, we should still ordain them because they're really effective.
21:20
SPEAKER_01: Like, what do you mean they're effective?
21:21
SPEAKER_01: Well, they get a lot of people to come to their church.
21:23
SPEAKER_01: They're like, oh, so they're really effective at spreading really bad theology.
21:26
SPEAKER_01: Like, that's not necessarily a good thing.
21:28
SPEAKER_01: Right.
21:29
SPEAKER_01: So I want to,
21:30
SPEAKER_01: as somebody,
21:32
SPEAKER_01: to whatever degree my voice can matter at all,
21:34
SPEAKER_01: you know,
21:34
SPEAKER_01: at least,
21:34
SPEAKER_01: you know,
21:35
SPEAKER_01: I'm not telling you what God's calling you to do,
21:37
SPEAKER_01: but be at peace because anybody who wants to look down on you
21:41
SPEAKER_01: because you don't actually technically have your master's degree,
21:44
SPEAKER_01: I would love to have a conversation with them, you know, about that.
21:47
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
21:47
SPEAKER_01: But for what that's worth.
21:50
SPEAKER_00: And I agree on the rule.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: So that was why I applied to go to general conference or why I put my name in the hat.
21:57
SPEAKER_00: Um, was because at least in our conference, it tends to be the megachurch pastors.
22:02
SPEAKER_00: It tends to be the city pastors.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: And so often I've seen legislation that came back that affected rural ministry negatively.
22:10
SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean,
22:11
SPEAKER_00: we just talking about supply pastors,
22:13
SPEAKER_00: licensed local pastors,
22:14
SPEAKER_00: you know, like wanting to do away with, with those and you have to be an elder.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: Well, what would that do to our rural churches?
22:21
SPEAKER_00: We have pastors of a megachurch here who wants to do away with parsonages and two point charges.
22:27
SPEAKER_00: And I'm just like, you don't understand the situation that I'm in.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: I'm the only elder in my district.
22:33
SPEAKER_00: And so then am I serving all these churches?
22:37
SPEAKER_01: Yes, that would be the answer to that question.
22:40
SPEAKER_01: I did a survey of our presiding elders before we went because I said,
22:42
SPEAKER_01: look, you guys are all on board with some of these changes.
22:44
SPEAKER_01: Like I can be convinced,
22:46
SPEAKER_01: you know,
22:46
SPEAKER_01: and one of them was saying, well,
22:47
SPEAKER_01: I have 15 churches and there are three elders and they're not geographically close
22:51
SPEAKER_01: to each other.
22:52
SPEAKER_01: So that was one of those things where,
22:54
SPEAKER_01: and we had one of our members of our delegation, and God bless this person.
22:57
SPEAKER_01: Like I'm not,
22:58
SPEAKER_01: I'm not,
22:59
SPEAKER_01: I'm making a critical comment, but I'm not trying to be critical of the person.
23:02
SPEAKER_01: You know,
23:04
SPEAKER_01: they just,
23:04
SPEAKER_01: every once in a while,
23:05
SPEAKER_01: I would keep piping up saying,
23:06
SPEAKER_01: you know, we need to stand up and we need to make sure that our voices are heard.
23:10
SPEAKER_01: And they would always say, well, do you not trust these people?
23:13
SPEAKER_01: It's not a question of trust.
23:14
SPEAKER_01: I think they literally never think about people like in our situation.
23:17
SPEAKER_01: And if we don't speak up, who's going to?
23:18
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
23:20
SPEAKER_02: Right.
23:21
SPEAKER_01: Right.
23:22
SPEAKER_02: We're blessed.
23:25
SPEAKER_02: I think we're blessed with that first generation, what our Bishop Greenewald was.
23:29
SPEAKER_00: Greenway.
23:31
SPEAKER_02: Would have called founders.
23:32
SPEAKER_02: I think that our founding generation of church leaders are phenomenal.
23:36
SPEAKER_02: And they've lived a long life in the public, like they're above reproach.
23:41
SPEAKER_02: And they all tend to come from the same sorts of places.
23:44
SPEAKER_02: They've all always been pastors in big settings with big numbers.
23:50
SPEAKER_02: Bishop Greenway's first church is bigger than all
23:52
SPEAKER_02: the churches I've pastored combined the moment he got there.
23:56
SPEAKER_02: And he's phenomenal.
23:57
SPEAKER_02: I really appreciate him.
23:59
SPEAKER_02: And so they just,
24:01
SPEAKER_02: the world they come from is nothing like the world that many
24:05
SPEAKER_02: of us will pastor our whole lives in.
24:09
SPEAKER_02: And they have all sorts of presuppositions and biases about it,
24:14
SPEAKER_02: which is fine, but they're not always founded in reality.
24:17
SPEAKER_02: Right.
24:19
SPEAKER_02: I appreciate Bishop Moore,
24:20
SPEAKER_02: who's coming in to be our bishop,
24:21
SPEAKER_02: has talked about when she started being a leader for churches,
24:26
SPEAKER_02: I think as a presiding elder,
24:27
SPEAKER_02: she started visiting these churches and realizing,
24:29
SPEAKER_02: actually, they're faithful churches.
24:33
SPEAKER_02: And there are other reasons maybe why they're not growing and flourishing.
24:35
SPEAKER_02: They have nothing to do with the quality of their faith.
24:38
SPEAKER_02: But I think that that experience is just limited.
24:41
SPEAKER_02: And it's the nature of the beast.
24:42
SPEAKER_02: We select successful people.
24:44
SPEAKER_02: Successful people have platforms.
24:47
SPEAKER_02: And, and that's fine.
24:48
SPEAKER_02: They're phenomenal folks,
24:49
SPEAKER_02: but they don't have the experience of living in a town of one to 2000 people
24:55
SPEAKER_02: that is aging out and changing demographics and doesn't have an economic foundation
25:01
SPEAKER_02: and doesn't have an educational future and has a talent drain.
25:05
SPEAKER_02: And yet we still need a church there and we need to be doing vital ministry there.
25:08
SPEAKER_02: And so, yeah, absolutely.
25:10
SPEAKER_02: If we will not speak up and if we will not find people who will speak up
25:15
SPEAKER_02: for our perspective and our concerns, then they'll never be addressed.
25:18
SPEAKER_01: Well, and I think that it would be greatly...
25:20
SPEAKER_01: It's important to have somebody who has had a background in rural ministry,
25:23
SPEAKER_01: especially a recent background in rural ministry,
25:25
SPEAKER_01: eventually be elected to the Episcopacy.
25:26
SPEAKER_01: Because I think that that is a majority of our congregations, at least in America anyway.
25:32
SPEAKER_01: And I imagine worldwide,
25:33
SPEAKER_01: the majority of them are in rural contexts and are relatively small numbers.
25:38
SPEAKER_01: And if we don't have anybody who's got experience,
25:41
SPEAKER_01: in fact,
25:41
SPEAKER_01: we had a conference superintendent in Great Lakes,
25:43
SPEAKER_01: Scott Patterson, came, was doing an ILI training with us.
25:47
SPEAKER_01: And he was talking about Being in a really, really small town of 8,000 people.
25:50
SPEAKER_01: And the whole room laughed at him.
25:52
SPEAKER_01: And he tells that story.
25:54
SPEAKER_01: And he says, we have counties that are smaller than that.
25:59
SPEAKER_01: And again, we only know what we know.
26:01
SPEAKER_01: And we don't know what we don't know.
26:02
SPEAKER_01: Again, I want to be clear.
26:04
SPEAKER_01: By saying someone doesn't have that experience,
26:05
SPEAKER_01: I don't mean anything negative about them in a character perspective.
26:08
SPEAKER_01: But they also don't...
26:10
SPEAKER_01: If you've never had to serve...
26:12
SPEAKER_01: If you've never served in a situation where...
26:16
SPEAKER_01: It's one of those things where I've got about 120 people on an average Sunday.
26:19
SPEAKER_01: That's over 10% of the population here.
26:23
SPEAKER_01: I don't care how big their church is.
26:25
SPEAKER_01: That's a higher percentage of the community than many of these large churches are.
26:30
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
26:31
SPEAKER_01: We don't see the world that way.
26:32
SPEAKER_01: And so one of the things that Zach and I, we shared a room together at General Conference.
26:36
SPEAKER_01: I'm assuming you both know Zach.
26:37
SPEAKER_01: I know that Elizabeth does.
26:39
SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.
26:41
SPEAKER_00: We were friends with him when he was still in the Wesleyan Church.
26:43
SPEAKER_01: Sure, right, right, because he was from Kansas too, right.
26:45
SPEAKER_01: So we talked a lot about the nature of Christian celebrity.
26:49
SPEAKER_01: And the question is,
26:52
SPEAKER_01: you know,
26:53
SPEAKER_01: how do we have voices,
26:55
SPEAKER_01: you know,
26:56
SPEAKER_01: We say we want people who are effective in ministry,
26:58
SPEAKER_01: but we act as though what we want are people who are megachurch pastors
27:02
SPEAKER_01: to be brought into leadership.
27:04
SPEAKER_01: And now again,
27:05
SPEAKER_01: I don't want to make a blanket statement about megachurch pastors,
27:08
SPEAKER_01: but I know that a lot of us came from the Ida Methodist Church.
27:11
SPEAKER_01: And I know a couple of people,
27:13
SPEAKER_01: at least in my former annual conference,
27:15
SPEAKER_01: who at an early age, they were appointed to an important congregation.
27:20
SPEAKER_01: Well,
27:21
SPEAKER_01: now I know that whenever the time comes for them to be appointed somewhere else,
27:24
SPEAKER_01: They're going to be,
27:25
SPEAKER_01: you know,
27:25
SPEAKER_01: they'll say, well,
27:25
SPEAKER_01: look how they must be effective because look at what
27:28
SPEAKER_01: an important position they were given when they were earlier in their career.
27:30
SPEAKER_01: So now they're going to be put into another situation,
27:32
SPEAKER_01: regardless of whether they're being effective where they are.
27:35
SPEAKER_01: And so I think that it's easy.
27:37
SPEAKER_01: You know, some of our megachurch pastors are serving churches that grew under their leadership.
27:42
SPEAKER_01: It thanks be to God.
27:43
SPEAKER_01: Some of them have been appointed to churches that were already big.
27:47
SPEAKER_01: So that's one of those things where I think that It's one of those things where,
27:52
SPEAKER_01: and also I think about, well, so-and-so, they're writing a book.
27:54
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, well, that's fantastic.
27:56
SPEAKER_01: Do you have any idea how long it takes to write a book?
27:58
SPEAKER_01: Because if they're writing a book,
28:00
SPEAKER_01: that's certainly if it's any good,
28:01
SPEAKER_01: it means they spend a lot of time not doing day-to-day ministry that we all have
28:05
SPEAKER_01: to do.
28:07
SPEAKER_01: So again, I'm not trying to point fingers.
28:08
SPEAKER_01: I'm just trying to say that as I think we're generally agreeing here is that there's
28:12
SPEAKER_01: a context that if you haven't really lived it, you don't really know.
28:16
SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
28:18
SPEAKER_01: So I guess there's another part of my conversation
28:20
SPEAKER_01: with folks around my new conference and talking to some folks like you guys is
28:24
SPEAKER_01: to raise that awareness of just
28:26
SPEAKER_01: because it's relatively small doesn't mean it's not doing fantastic ministry.
28:30
SPEAKER_01: We just need to begin to learn to see things the way Jesus sees them
28:33
SPEAKER_01: and not be entranced by a large number.
28:38
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, that got me preaching a little bit here.
28:42
SPEAKER_02: It's a friendly audience for that one.
28:43
SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah.
28:45
SPEAKER_01: Um, so anyway, that's, that's,
28:46
SPEAKER_01: that's a big deal that I talk about,
28:47
SPEAKER_01: you know, we,
28:48
SPEAKER_01: I talk about to folks who are even in reasonably rural
28:50
SPEAKER_01: or reasonably urban situations here and,
28:52
SPEAKER_01: and talk about how do they, things are different and all the rest.
28:54
SPEAKER_01: And it's just an ongoing,
28:56
SPEAKER_01: I did not grow up in a rural situation,
28:58
SPEAKER_01: but I had become captivated by the dynamics of rural life and rural ministry and,
29:03
SPEAKER_01: uh,
29:03
SPEAKER_01: looking forward to getting out in combines either in harvest,
29:06
SPEAKER_01: you know, cause it's a fascinating experience.
29:07
SPEAKER_00: Good for you.
29:08
SPEAKER_00: Good for you.
29:09
SPEAKER_00: Have those theological conversations on the combines.
29:12
SPEAKER_01: Right.
29:12
SPEAKER_00: Right.
29:13
SPEAKER_01: Um, So again, I'm from the upper Midwest.
29:16
SPEAKER_01: That's kind of where my background is.
29:17
SPEAKER_01: That's mostly what I know.
29:19
SPEAKER_01: Would you be willing to share anything about what is life and ministry like
29:22
SPEAKER_01: in either Kansas in particular or in the Heartland Conference in general?
29:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
29:28
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean,
29:29
SPEAKER_00: rural ministry for me is being not just the pastor of this church,
29:34
SPEAKER_00: but of the whole community being out.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: So I was a pastor at Church of the Resurrection and then at Leawood.
29:40
SPEAKER_00: So in major Kansas City area.
29:43
SPEAKER_00: And so when I was a pastor there, I was in my office and people came to me.
29:48
SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't really expected to go out and be a part of the community because
29:51
SPEAKER_00: when you're in the community in Kansas City area,
29:54
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're not running into your parishioners.
29:57
SPEAKER_00: So in rural area,
30:00
SPEAKER_00: it's better if I am at the convenience store,
30:04
SPEAKER_00: if I'm at the local coffee shop,
30:06
SPEAKER_00: being in ministry with the people where they are and say,
30:12
SPEAKER_00: I am the Ministerial Alliance president and everybody calls me because they know
30:18
SPEAKER_00: whether I'm their pastor or not, I'm their pastor and I will figure it out for them.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: So that's ministry in my context is being with them in the trenches.
30:29
SPEAKER_00: Ministry in the Heartland in general,
30:32
SPEAKER_00: it's right now a lot about trying to find connection when every town is 30 miles,
30:39
SPEAKER_00: every community is 30 miles apart.
30:43
SPEAKER_00: And we're also,
30:45
SPEAKER_00: you know,
30:46
SPEAKER_00: probably like every other conference,
30:47
SPEAKER_00: figuring out how to multiply, how to make disciples.
30:51
SPEAKER_00: I have, you know,
30:53
SPEAKER_00: two churches in my,
30:54
SPEAKER_00: or I have two towns in my head that I think need global Methodist churches,
30:58
SPEAKER_00: but I'm one pastor.
31:00
SPEAKER_00: So how do I spur my district,
31:03
SPEAKER_00: spur my congregation to want to multiply churches and get out of,
31:08
SPEAKER_00: this is our church though.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: How do we want to multiply in other communities and make them realize that it's good
31:17
SPEAKER_00: for them and it's good for the kingdom of God?
31:19
SPEAKER_00: And that's what we're really called to.
31:23
SPEAKER_00: And so that's a lot of ministry in the Heartland right now,
31:26
SPEAKER_00: I would say, is getting these churches.
31:30
SPEAKER_00: So every church in the Heartland,
31:32
SPEAKER_00: so 90% of our churches are rural and 90% of them are struggling.
31:37
SPEAKER_00: And they're asking the question,
31:39
SPEAKER_00: if we're not growing, how can we be multiplying and making other churches?
31:45
SPEAKER_00: And I mean, it's a legit concern, but also I think that every church can multiply.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: And it's not about a growth mindset as far as numbers.
31:57
SPEAKER_00: It's about, are you doing, are you growing in your discipleship?
32:01
SPEAKER_00: Are you growing in your relationship with God?
32:04
SPEAKER_00: And that a lot of our towns are shrinking.
32:07
SPEAKER_00: And we have to rethink about, like, what does it mean to grow?
32:14
SPEAKER_02: That's an interesting question, and I could go a lot of ways.
32:16
SPEAKER_02: But I think the two things that kind of rise up
32:18
SPEAKER_02: to me are two experiences I've had pretty uniformly since I became a pastor.
32:25
SPEAKER_02: One is that the old kind of Methodist stereotype of the successful,
32:30
SPEAKER_02: respectable Main Street Church has been everywhere I've been.
32:34
SPEAKER_02: Even in the most aged and dying settings.
32:37
SPEAKER_02: I've pastored two churches in towns of 200 people that were on their way out.
32:42
SPEAKER_02: There's just this sense of we're these respectable stalwarts in the community,
32:47
SPEAKER_02: and they are, to be fair and clear.
32:51
SPEAKER_02: And there's a certain way we do things,
32:53
SPEAKER_02: and there has been a There's a reluctance or an unwillingness,
33:00
SPEAKER_02: I think,
33:01
SPEAKER_02: to really become vulnerable and intimate in this,
33:04
SPEAKER_02: I always call it this family of God here on earth.
33:08
SPEAKER_02: Like there's these barriers.
33:09
SPEAKER_02: There's something I read from John Wesley where he's talking about his practice
33:13
SPEAKER_02: of visiting people.
33:14
SPEAKER_02: And then he's got this paragraph long diatribe about these dang Methodists
33:19
SPEAKER_02: who will never tell you when they're sick and never tell you when they're hurt
33:22
SPEAKER_02: and never tell you when they're going through hard times.
33:25
SPEAKER_02: So you can't go visit them.
33:28
SPEAKER_02: And so they deny us the opportunity to draw closer together and to experience joy
33:34
SPEAKER_02: and sorrow together.
33:35
SPEAKER_02: And I've certainly found that to be the case.
33:38
SPEAKER_02: The other thing is that,
33:39
SPEAKER_02: and so it's just been challenging to really press in and create deeper bonds within
33:44
SPEAKER_02: the church.
33:46
SPEAKER_02: It's been challenging for me as a person who,
33:49
SPEAKER_02: I always say I'm not a counselor, but I am a spiritual counselor.
33:52
SPEAKER_02: And is that something I can bring to the table?
33:54
SPEAKER_02: That's something I can do and want to do to help enrich people's lives of faith.
33:58
SPEAKER_02: But there's a reluctance to go into that space and acknowledge I've got questions,
34:03
SPEAKER_02: I've got doubts, I've got challenges, I've got problems.
34:07
SPEAKER_02: Can you walk through this with me?
34:09
SPEAKER_02: And oftentimes the answer is no.
34:11
SPEAKER_02: No, you can't.
34:12
SPEAKER_02: So that's been a challenge.
34:13
SPEAKER_02: The other thing,
34:14
SPEAKER_02: and it's very much related to this,
34:15
SPEAKER_02: is that The United Methodist Church was the last of the Main Street churches
34:21
SPEAKER_02: to fall.
34:22
SPEAKER_02: And so we collected the refugees from all the other churches,
34:27
SPEAKER_02: the Episcopals, the Lutherans, the Presbyterians, a lot of Baptists.
34:31
SPEAKER_02: And sometimes they've been there for a lifetime in our churches.
34:36
SPEAKER_02: I'm thinking of some specific people.
34:38
SPEAKER_02: And so they're not really Methodist by conviction or by culture.
34:44
SPEAKER_02: But they often are very influential leaders in our churches.
34:48
SPEAKER_02: And so I certainly wouldn't say they're bad people, although I got one person in mind.
34:55
SPEAKER_02: But in general,
34:55
SPEAKER_02: that's been challenging to have a very Wesleyan or Methodist conviction and try
35:01
SPEAKER_02: to have that sort of ministry when the leaders
35:03
SPEAKER_02: in your church don't share those convictions.
35:06
SPEAKER_02: And also they're not that open to being discipled into them because
35:10
SPEAKER_02: of those boundaries that we throw up.
35:13
SPEAKER_02: And so I've certainly not had a bad time as a pastor.
35:16
SPEAKER_02: I've enjoyed it and I've At least in most cases, I've enjoyed it.
35:20
SPEAKER_02: But there's been some invisible barriers that I've worked very hard to push through
35:25
SPEAKER_02: and just found a reluctance to be allowed to push through.
35:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
35:31
SPEAKER_01: I wonder if some of our issues,
35:32
SPEAKER_01: because I think I got the impression talking to several folks,
35:34
SPEAKER_01: there are several annual conferences that I think are culturally have a lot
35:38
SPEAKER_01: of shared DNA.
35:39
SPEAKER_01: You know, I think that Heartland and Upper Midwest share a lot in that.
35:42
SPEAKER_01: I think that there's, oh, it's like a, It's like West Tennessee and Mississippi.
35:50
SPEAKER_01: I think one of those, it's somewhere a little there.
35:52
SPEAKER_01: I think they've got a similar situation.
35:53
SPEAKER_01: I was talking to their conference superintendent and they were talking
35:55
SPEAKER_01: about how they're dealing with some of the same issues here,
35:58
SPEAKER_01: which is we've got so many churches that don't have pastors at all
36:01
SPEAKER_01: or certainly don't have elders and are just trying to work
36:04
SPEAKER_01: on how do you even maintain.
36:06
SPEAKER_01: And I know that in a situation where...
36:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
36:25
SPEAKER_01: Which is not, I don't mean to say that's evil by any means.
36:28
SPEAKER_01: You know,
36:29
SPEAKER_01: like I'm not trying to,
36:29
SPEAKER_01: you know,
36:30
SPEAKER_01: like especially if that's the only voice that you've got that's talking about,
36:33
SPEAKER_01: you know, the scripture and the theological tradition.
36:36
SPEAKER_01: But what that means is to a certain degree,
36:39
SPEAKER_01: we have a battle to fight,
36:41
SPEAKER_01: which is if we actually believe that our Wesleyan Methodist heritage is really
36:47
SPEAKER_01: an excellent.
36:47
SPEAKER_01: And if we believe it to be the more accurate understanding of the gospel,
36:52
SPEAKER_01: then we got a lot of work to do.
36:54
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
36:57
SPEAKER_01: So anyway, I think that there's a lot of that that's faced around that.
36:59
SPEAKER_01: I think that especially in the rural communities, we almost have more of that.
37:01
SPEAKER_01: But I also think, I'm curious about your guys' experience.
37:04
SPEAKER_01: There's...
37:06
SPEAKER_01: We've been hearing a whole bunch about various leaders
37:08
SPEAKER_01: in large churches around America,
37:10
SPEAKER_01: at least,
37:10
SPEAKER_01: where their leaders are having these catastrophic moral failings that are coming
37:15
SPEAKER_01: to light.
37:16
SPEAKER_01: And I'm not trying to say that people
37:18
SPEAKER_01: in rural ministry don't have their own problems,
37:20
SPEAKER_01: but there's a certain sense where because of the nature of the rural environment,
37:25
SPEAKER_01: I would imagine it's harder to hide something like that over the long time
37:28
SPEAKER_01: because everybody kind of knows everybody else's business,
37:31
SPEAKER_01: at least in the big picture.
37:33
SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
37:34
SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
37:34
SPEAKER_01: And so I think it forces a different kind of,
37:36
SPEAKER_01: it's a forced integrity,
37:38
SPEAKER_01: like, which is not always a good thing to force the exposure.
37:41
SPEAKER_01: But I think there's something to at least take into account from that.
37:46
SPEAKER_01: So again, I'm preaching again.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I would say like,
37:51
SPEAKER_00: so the integrity issues that,
37:53
SPEAKER_00: you know, I think of, well, I was at Church of the Resurrection.
37:55
SPEAKER_00: We had two pastors that had an affair.
37:57
SPEAKER_00: Adam did a sermon about it.
37:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
38:00
SPEAKER_00: Those pastors both,
38:01
SPEAKER_00: one left ministry,
38:02
SPEAKER_00: one was sent to a small church, and actually I followed him, which was interesting.
38:07
SPEAKER_00: So I would say those come to light more for me in mega churches because they're
38:13
SPEAKER_00: in places where they can hide a little bit more, I would say.
38:17
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
38:19
SPEAKER_00: He follows all of those situations much closer than I do.
38:23
SPEAKER_00: But I rarely hear about it in small churches as much.
38:28
SPEAKER_00: Wes, you talked to us because you're very good.
38:32
SPEAKER_02: I think there's a couple problems,
38:35
SPEAKER_02: but maybe the biggest one is that there is a tendency,
38:39
SPEAKER_02: you were talking about how we select our leaders.
38:42
SPEAKER_02: We have a tendency to elevate gifts,
38:46
SPEAKER_02: and oftentimes way beyond the spiritual maturity necessary for
38:49
SPEAKER_02: the success those gifts come with.
38:51
SPEAKER_02: And so I would imagine that in most cases,
38:53
SPEAKER_02: the pastors and church leaders were thinking about did not begin their journey
39:00
SPEAKER_02: with gifts.
39:01
SPEAKER_02: You know,
39:02
SPEAKER_02: severe moral failings,
39:03
SPEAKER_02: probably some shortcomings,
39:05
SPEAKER_02: but that because of their charisma,
39:08
SPEAKER_02: because their ability to communicate,
39:10
SPEAKER_02: because their ability to speak,
39:12
SPEAKER_02: because their ability to organize,
39:13
SPEAKER_02: because their ability to write,
39:14
SPEAKER_02: how they look on TV or a podcast,
39:16
SPEAKER_02: whatever it is,
39:19
SPEAKER_02: that they continue to get a bigger and bigger platform and more and more platitudes
39:23
SPEAKER_02: and more and more people saying you're great and more and more people say,
39:25
SPEAKER_02: can you come speak at our conference?
39:27
SPEAKER_02: And we'd like to publish your next book and on and on and on.
39:30
SPEAKER_02: And that stuff's Challenging.
39:32
SPEAKER_02: It's spiritually challenging.
39:35
SPEAKER_02: And everybody who's got a platform and any amount of power or influence has to deal with that.
39:40
SPEAKER_02: We do as local pastors in towns nobody heard of.
39:45
SPEAKER_02: But when you're just constantly getting bombarded with that
39:49
SPEAKER_02: and you've got spiritual immaturity, then it's going to be exposed.
39:54
SPEAKER_02: And of course, as I remind people, we do have an enemy.
39:58
SPEAKER_00: That's what I was going to say.
39:59
SPEAKER_00: Spiritual warfare.
39:59
SPEAKER_02: We have somebody who is trying to get us.
40:02
SPEAKER_02: There is somebody out there trying to get us.
40:06
SPEAKER_02: And those church leaders are our prime target.
40:08
SPEAKER_02: So I think that we have a mistake we make within the church of elevating gifts over maturity.
40:16
SPEAKER_02: For me, Paul says, what is the greatest spiritual gift?
40:20
SPEAKER_02: It's a divine love.
40:21
SPEAKER_02: It's a perfect love.
40:23
SPEAKER_02: We're like, that's cool.
40:24
SPEAKER_02: But what about prophecy, Paul?
40:25
SPEAKER_02: Right.
40:26
SPEAKER_02: Right.
40:26
SPEAKER_02: I want to see some profits, man.
40:28
SPEAKER_02: Give me a great teacher up here.
40:30
SPEAKER_02: That's what I want to see.
40:32
SPEAKER_02: And so that's what we get is we routinely elevate people
40:35
SPEAKER_02: who have celebrity gifts instead of maturity gifts.
40:39
SPEAKER_00: Right.
40:40
SPEAKER_00: And I would say what
40:41
SPEAKER_02: we pay for.
40:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:42
SPEAKER_00: I would say the more celebrity you have,
40:45
SPEAKER_00: the more the devil is going to be there ready to attack.
40:48
SPEAKER_00: And too often we succumb to that spiritual warfare.
40:53
SPEAKER_00: Say we were Just talking in my Bible study last night about a mega pastor
40:57
SPEAKER_00: who it's like, where did he go down the track, go down the wrong track?
41:01
SPEAKER_00: And it seems that it was from the beginning, you know, spiritual warfare was there.
41:06
SPEAKER_00: And at some point, they let it take over.
41:10
SPEAKER_02: I think there's another dynamic at play too.
41:12
SPEAKER_02: Sorry.
41:14
SPEAKER_02: In small towns, it's, there's only so many people.
41:18
SPEAKER_02: And in a big town,
41:19
SPEAKER_02: you can go find your crowd,
41:20
SPEAKER_02: especially if you're a person that has the sort of gifts we're talking about.
41:23
SPEAKER_02: And so you draw them in.
41:25
SPEAKER_02: They're acolytes.
41:26
SPEAKER_02: They're followers.
41:26
SPEAKER_02: They're people who are invested in you.
41:28
SPEAKER_02: I think a lot of times,
41:30
SPEAKER_02: although they wouldn't articulate this, I feel closer to God through this person.
41:34
SPEAKER_02: And so those people are not likely to be the people to say, wait a minute, you're crazy.
41:41
SPEAKER_02: Or that's not okay.
41:44
SPEAKER_02: The nature of the audience is it's already got a bit of a buffer built in
41:47
SPEAKER_02: to tolerate your baloney.
41:49
SPEAKER_02: And in a small town, those crowds of people don't exist.
41:53
SPEAKER_01: Right.
41:53
SPEAKER_02: You got the people you got and you've got the level of investment in your gifts that you've got.
41:57
SPEAKER_02: And so the sort of environment and the sort of people
42:01
SPEAKER_02: that will tolerate your wrongdoings are in much shorter supply.
42:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
42:07
SPEAKER_01: I know that there's over the past 20 years or so,
42:08
SPEAKER_01: there were a handful of really high profile people who kind of were raised up in
42:13
SPEAKER_01: a generally evangelical perspective who then starts asking some questions
42:16
SPEAKER_01: that probably should have been asked.
42:18
SPEAKER_01: But then what is happening is people who are more or less grounded in I'm going
42:24
SPEAKER_01: to focus on trying to still be in this world where people who are telling me I'm
42:27
SPEAKER_01: a heretic are.
42:48
SPEAKER_01: Because it's like, what a surprise.
42:51
SPEAKER_01: No surprise at all that they end up departing pretty dramatically
42:54
SPEAKER_01: from anything resembling the historic Christian faith.
42:56
SPEAKER_01: Because everybody who stood there yelled at them for even asking a question.
43:00
SPEAKER_01: And so anyway, I think there are so many systems at play here.
43:04
SPEAKER_01: And again, the idea is we are affirming what we're applauding.
43:10
SPEAKER_01: And we don't necessarily know what we're applauding.
43:12
SPEAKER_01: There was one person, so we,
43:13
SPEAKER_01: as our delegation,
43:14
SPEAKER_01: we Every delegation had the opportunity to nominate somebody from
43:17
SPEAKER_01: within their conference and someone from without their conference for
43:19
SPEAKER_01: the Episcopacy.
43:20
SPEAKER_01: And we had somebody from our delegation who suggested somebody from outside of our conference.
43:23
SPEAKER_01: And they said, well,
43:25
SPEAKER_01: you know,
43:25
SPEAKER_01: this person does this and this and this and this and this and all the rest.
43:27
SPEAKER_01: Like, well, great.
43:27
SPEAKER_01: Well, why don't you ask them to see if they're open to the nomination?
43:32
SPEAKER_01: And they said, oh, I don't know them.
43:33
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, well, if you don't know them, why are you nominating them?
43:36
SPEAKER_01: You know, like it's – but because – Because what they can see, they liked.
43:42
SPEAKER_01: And to be clear,
43:43
SPEAKER_01: I've met the person that they were recommending, and they would probably be fine.
43:46
SPEAKER_01: But that's not my point.
43:47
SPEAKER_01: My point is just simply to say,
43:48
SPEAKER_01: you know,
43:48
SPEAKER_01: we don't,
43:50
SPEAKER_01: we have so deeply imbibed this idea of,
43:52
SPEAKER_01: well, I've heard their name, and they're from way over there.
43:55
SPEAKER_01: You know, they've got to be great.
43:56
SPEAKER_01: Because if they weren't great, I wouldn't have heard about them.
44:00
SPEAKER_01: And I think that that,
44:01
SPEAKER_01: and you have that general,
44:03
SPEAKER_01: I'm sure it's true across the board,
44:04
SPEAKER_01: but I know that there's a joke in the rural communities where it was an expert.
44:06
SPEAKER_01: Well, an expert is anyone from 60 miles away, you know.
44:09
SPEAKER_01: Because nobody from around here has got anything good to say.
44:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
44:13
SPEAKER_00: Well, in general, so I had someone message me and say,
44:17
SPEAKER_00: would you raise this name up as Bishop while I was there?
44:21
SPEAKER_00: And he was someone who hadn't had very many interviews.
44:23
SPEAKER_00: But like when I read his resume, oh my gosh, that person should be Bishop.
44:28
SPEAKER_00: And I had to, like, she was asking me why that person hadn't been raised up more.
44:32
SPEAKER_00: And I would just, and I had to be honest with her.
44:34
SPEAKER_00: And I said, name recognition.
44:36
SPEAKER_00: I said, just You know, that's what it is.
44:39
SPEAKER_00: Even though I think he is great Bishop material,
44:42
SPEAKER_00: it's just name recognition, which makes me so sad.
44:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
44:46
SPEAKER_01: Well, especially because I think that this is one of the things where I think
44:50
SPEAKER_01: that there's unintended consequences.
44:51
SPEAKER_01: So I know the Global Episcopacy Committee had kind of laid down rules
44:54
SPEAKER_01: about doing interviews and things like that.
44:57
SPEAKER_01: And on the one hand,
44:58
SPEAKER_01: I understand the idea we want to distance ourselves from anything
45:00
SPEAKER_01: that looks like political running of a race.
45:04
SPEAKER_01: On the other hand,
45:04
SPEAKER_01: if you curtail conversations,
45:07
SPEAKER_01: all you do is tilt the scale in favor of those we already know,
45:10
SPEAKER_01: or at least already think we know.
45:11
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
45:13
SPEAKER_01: So I guess I find it very unlikely that anybody from
45:15
SPEAKER_01: the Global Episcopacy Committee is ever going to watch this.
45:18
SPEAKER_01: But if you are watching this and you're part of the Global Episcopacy Committee,
45:21
SPEAKER_01: try to think about ways that you can have a more equitable thing for those
45:25
SPEAKER_01: who might not already have name recognition,
45:26
SPEAKER_01: because I think that'll be a
45:27
SPEAKER_01: crucial thing going into our next six years from now.
45:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, 100% agree.
45:34
SPEAKER_02: 100% agree.
45:34
SPEAKER_01: We'd be kind of dancing around this topic just in general,
45:36
SPEAKER_01: but I want to direct our attention to it.
45:39
SPEAKER_01: I always ask everybody to talk to you to try to identify a sickness that they see in
45:43
SPEAKER_01: the church.
45:43
SPEAKER_01: And I always want to be really clear in case anybody stumbles upon this out of the blue.
45:47
SPEAKER_01: When I say sickness, I'm not talking about pointing fingers and judgment.
45:50
SPEAKER_01: If someone's sick, they don't need judgment.
45:52
SPEAKER_01: They need diagnosis.
45:53
SPEAKER_01: They need Treatment,
45:54
SPEAKER_01: they need therapy,
45:54
SPEAKER_01: they need medicine,
45:55
SPEAKER_01: you know, whatever it is because they need healing and wholeness and restoration.
45:59
SPEAKER_01: So when I ask about a sickness,
46:00
SPEAKER_01: you know,
46:01
SPEAKER_01: I am asking about something that's wrong in the church,
46:04
SPEAKER_01: but I want to make sure that everyone's understanding.
46:06
SPEAKER_01: My goal is not to say here's something wrong in the church and all those people are bad.
46:10
SPEAKER_01: What I mean to say is here's something that's wrong in the church that we need
46:13
SPEAKER_01: to address and seek healing and wholeness.
46:15
SPEAKER_01: So that's, I want to make sure I'm clear about that.
46:18
SPEAKER_01: So people don't just think that we're like,
46:19
SPEAKER_01: you know,
46:20
SPEAKER_01: pointing fingers at other people out there because we've all got our problems.
46:24
SPEAKER_00: Do you want me to go first?
46:27
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
46:28
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
46:30
SPEAKER_00: So what I've been thinking about on this is just lukewarm Christianity and
46:37
SPEAKER_00: the societal norm of just thinking busy is successful.
46:42
SPEAKER_00: And so our faith gets put on the back burner and we as a church say that's okay.
46:50
SPEAKER_00: I would say that's the sickness in the church is not calling out the fact
46:53
SPEAKER_00: that we need to put 100% into our faith and find accountability in the church.
46:59
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I'm guilty of it as a pastor.
47:02
SPEAKER_00: You know, they say, I have a ballgame.
47:04
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to be gone.
47:05
SPEAKER_00: Okay, what can I do about it?
47:06
SPEAKER_00: What can I say?
47:07
SPEAKER_00: Because if I say,
47:08
SPEAKER_00: if I call you out and say, hey,
47:10
SPEAKER_00: you know,
47:10
SPEAKER_00: you need to be here and put your faith first,
47:13
SPEAKER_00: then I'm the bad guy and I feel like I'm running him off, you know.
47:17
SPEAKER_00: But I say, I have, I have, Rodeo teams, that's a third of my church.
47:22
SPEAKER_00: So a third of my church will be gone rodeoing for a third of the year.
47:26
SPEAKER_00: And what do I do about it?
47:28
SPEAKER_00: I just don't know.
47:31
SPEAKER_00: As a family,
47:32
SPEAKER_00: I've tried to make it a priority for us to model being at church
47:39
SPEAKER_00: and saying my kids will not rodeo, my kids will not be gone on Sunday.
47:44
SPEAKER_00: But how do you make that a priority for other people and make it stick in your church culture?
47:50
SPEAKER_00: Because as a church, we're saying it's okay.
47:52
SPEAKER_00: Right.
47:58
SPEAKER_02: I said this to my discipleship group a couple weeks ago.
48:02
SPEAKER_02: We don't recreate what we know.
48:04
SPEAKER_02: We recreate what we are.
48:06
SPEAKER_02: Right.
48:07
SPEAKER_02: And I think that is writ large a problem for us.
48:12
SPEAKER_02: Maybe it is in just the church in the West,
48:14
SPEAKER_02: but certainly in my experience as a pastor is I've run into plenty of people
48:19
SPEAKER_02: that want more,
48:20
SPEAKER_02: that take their faith seriously,
48:21
SPEAKER_02: that really believe in Jesus and love him,
48:24
SPEAKER_02: but they only know how to be the sort of Christian and the sort of church
48:29
SPEAKER_02: that they were raised with.
48:33
SPEAKER_02: It wasn't a bad church.
48:34
SPEAKER_02: In many ways, it was a highly successful church, but it had some deltas too.
48:39
SPEAKER_02: One of the biggest is I don't know that I've ever been around a church environment
48:43
SPEAKER_02: in my entire life of 44 years in the church that had a serious practice
48:48
SPEAKER_02: of discipleship.
48:50
SPEAKER_02: It was just assumed.
48:52
SPEAKER_02: If you go to Sunday school and you go to children's church and you go to youth group
48:56
SPEAKER_02: and maybe join a Bible study or a small group at some point,
48:59
SPEAKER_02: I guess that's what a disciple is.
49:02
SPEAKER_02: And so they're now adults and leaders in the church, and there's a desire for more.
49:09
SPEAKER_02: But I've got no idea what it looks like.
49:11
SPEAKER_02: And I'm a product of that church.
49:13
SPEAKER_02: I would absolutely say I was never discipled.
49:16
SPEAKER_02: I was raised in a Christian home, and I came out pretty well formed.
49:20
SPEAKER_02: But I hate to say something like this,
49:24
SPEAKER_02: but I would say the 10 years I was in seminary,
49:26
SPEAKER_02: yes, 10 years, was when I was discipled.
49:29
SPEAKER_02: You know,
49:30
SPEAKER_02: an ongoing sustained effort of pressing into the faith and thought of our faith
49:35
SPEAKER_02: and trying to come to grips with it.
49:37
SPEAKER_02: And so we have to, I think we have to recreate that culture of discipleship.
49:43
SPEAKER_02: First,
49:43
SPEAKER_02: we have to define it and paint a picture of it that people can see themselves in,
49:47
SPEAKER_02: and then we have to help connect them to getting there.
49:49
SPEAKER_02: And the challenge is it's really hard to be something you're not.
49:52
SPEAKER_02: And we all are what we are.
49:54
SPEAKER_02: I don't know that this is the case, and it's certainly not the case church to church.
49:58
SPEAKER_02: But the last church I was in had pretty robust children and youth ministries.
50:02
SPEAKER_02: And I felt like,
50:02
SPEAKER_02: at least in that setting, we're probably raising the people who will be that church.
50:08
SPEAKER_02: Because it's going to be pretty hard for us to change.
50:11
SPEAKER_02: But I would say that that's probably...
50:12
SPEAKER_02: Probably a writ large diagnosis is there's a desire to be the church.
50:18
SPEAKER_02: There's a desire to be faithful Christians, well done faithful servant people.
50:23
SPEAKER_02: It's just nobody knows what it looks like.
50:25
SPEAKER_02: Nobody knows how to get there.
50:27
SPEAKER_02: And so I think that we have a tremendous need to cast a vision of what
50:35
SPEAKER_02: a church that's full of disciples and disciple makers looks like and
50:39
SPEAKER_02: to help people Find that path and follow it.
50:44
SPEAKER_02: What are the steps?
50:45
SPEAKER_02: What are the efforts?
50:46
SPEAKER_02: What does it look like?
50:47
SPEAKER_02: Discipleship is a condition of the heart,
50:50
SPEAKER_02: but disciple making is a peculiarly developed set of skills that many
50:55
SPEAKER_02: of us don't have.
50:56
SPEAKER_00: I will say that along those lines,
50:58
SPEAKER_00: I pastored a church that seemed very healthy and
51:01
SPEAKER_00: that everybody had their small group that they were going to every week,
51:06
SPEAKER_00: but then we had this need for a new group, a new thing, For people to be discipled.
51:12
SPEAKER_00: And no one was willing to leave their group to go disciple those others.
51:18
SPEAKER_00: And we've got to get people to be willing to step out of their thing to go make disciples.
51:24
SPEAKER_00: I tell my congregation all the time that Jesus didn't say, go be disciples.
51:28
SPEAKER_00: He said, go make disciples.
51:32
SPEAKER_00: And that didn't start.
51:33
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't say, oh, 50-year-olds, go make disciples.
51:36
SPEAKER_00: He said to everybody, go make disciples.
51:39
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
51:40
SPEAKER_02: I've been for the last six years now leading a discipleship group in my last church
51:45
SPEAKER_02: and now the one that I've just come to in the last year.
51:48
SPEAKER_02: And the fascinating thing has been a lot of the people that have come
51:52
SPEAKER_02: to it didn't come from Methodist churches at all.
51:55
SPEAKER_02: They were not people that attended my church.
51:57
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes they weren't even in my community.
51:59
SPEAKER_02: There were people that were craving discipleship.
52:02
SPEAKER_02: But I think that going back to that problem of there's a certain vision
52:06
SPEAKER_02: of what Christianity looks like to us that didn't involve being that vulnerable
52:11
SPEAKER_02: and didn't involve being that urgent in our faith.
52:14
SPEAKER_02: And so it's been really hard.
52:16
SPEAKER_02: I think it's been really hard for people to come to, even though they want it.
52:19
SPEAKER_02: There's a clear hunger for it.
52:21
SPEAKER_02: I pastor a church plant right now,
52:23
SPEAKER_02: and we're a three-year-old church,
52:25
SPEAKER_02: and I've found that Just orders of magnitude more openness to this in
52:32
SPEAKER_02: that environment.
52:33
SPEAKER_02: And I suspect it has to do with all the loss that they've gone through and
52:39
SPEAKER_02: the shifting self-image that they've gone through from that thing I'm describing to
52:45
SPEAKER_02: where they are today.
52:47
SPEAKER_01: I think about one thing that both discouraged me but also gave me more compassion.
52:53
SPEAKER_01: I had a couple of folks in a church I'd served once before who were,
52:57
SPEAKER_01: they were in there, certainly in their 80s.
52:59
SPEAKER_01: And it became fascinating that whenever you talked about outreach,
53:05
SPEAKER_01: it inevitably came back to, well, they should just know that they should be here.
53:10
SPEAKER_01: Like we shouldn't have to tell them anything.
53:11
SPEAKER_01: We shouldn't have to reach out to them.
53:12
SPEAKER_01: They should just know.
53:13
SPEAKER_01: They should know this is where they belong.
53:14
SPEAKER_01: This is where they're
53:15
SPEAKER_00: supposed to be.
53:16
SPEAKER_01: And I just got so frustrated about that.
53:17
SPEAKER_01: And I started to realize,
53:19
SPEAKER_01: if you look at American Methodist history,
53:22
SPEAKER_01: And realistically, American Methodism stopped growing in the 30s, the 1930s.
53:28
SPEAKER_01: And so what that means is for this person's entire lifetime,
53:32
SPEAKER_01: when things were growing, I mean,
53:34
SPEAKER_01: when I said that we stopped growing,
53:35
SPEAKER_01: I said it stopped growing because the actual,
53:38
SPEAKER_01: it grew because we were being born into the faith.
53:41
SPEAKER_01: And then because this is the place where you go if you want to be a business person
53:45
SPEAKER_01: and you want to make connections.
53:46
SPEAKER_01: But it wasn't really because of real discipleship.
53:50
SPEAKER_01: And so he's this person who's,
53:51
SPEAKER_01: you know, for 80 some years has been a part of this Methodist church in America.
53:55
SPEAKER_01: And at no point in time did they ever have to reach out to people to come in.
53:59
SPEAKER_01: People just came, you know, for 80 years, you know, however long it was, that was the routine.
54:05
SPEAKER_01: And now, now it definitely doesn't work that way.
54:08
SPEAKER_01: And they,
54:09
SPEAKER_01: it's not that it's not necessarily just that they might be,
54:11
SPEAKER_01: they might be a little bit stubborn, but it's, it's, they were trained.
54:14
SPEAKER_01: They were trained over decades to not.
54:18
SPEAKER_01: And I'm increasingly,
54:19
SPEAKER_01: one of the things that you hear from my congregation a lot is that
54:24
SPEAKER_01: if we are not practicing being disciples,
54:27
SPEAKER_01: we're not just failing to practice being disciples.
54:29
SPEAKER_01: We're practicing not being disciples.
54:31
SPEAKER_01: And we get really good at whatever it is we practice.
54:34
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
54:36
SPEAKER_02: That's right.
54:37
SPEAKER_01: Go ahead.
54:37
SPEAKER_01: Well, I was just
54:40
SPEAKER_02: going to say,
54:41
SPEAKER_02: many of the people in my experience in ministry over the last 10 years
54:45
SPEAKER_02: that have been the hungriest for discipleship Are those people you're talking about.
54:49
SPEAKER_02: They're in their late 70s and 80s and they're theologically curious and they're devout.
54:55
SPEAKER_02: And I think it's fascinating.
54:56
SPEAKER_02: They've been going to church and maybe even been leaders in the church for 50,
55:00
SPEAKER_02: 60 years and not gotten anything out of it.
55:04
SPEAKER_02: But they just knew that there was something here and they kept coming back to
55:07
SPEAKER_02: the well and they were just so excited to ask their questions to somebody
55:11
SPEAKER_02: and be told, no, there is more.
55:12
SPEAKER_02: There is holiness.
55:13
SPEAKER_02: There is sanctification.
55:15
SPEAKER_02: There is living life in the presence of God.
55:17
SPEAKER_02: It's all there.
55:18
SPEAKER_02: And I'm ashamed that nobody in all the years of your life,
55:22
SPEAKER_02: nobody was provided to you to tell you that and encourage you in that
55:25
SPEAKER_02: and help you find it because it's the very gift of God.
55:30
SPEAKER_02: And so it's been really interesting to me.
55:31
SPEAKER_02: I've had several people who obviously had calls to ministry that came to me after the age of 75.
55:38
SPEAKER_02: And I just thought, what a waste.
55:41
SPEAKER_02: And one of them, by the way, we got in a pulpit for three years.
55:44
SPEAKER_00: With oxygen on.
55:45
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, with oxygen on.
55:46
SPEAKER_02: And he did great.
55:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
55:48
SPEAKER_00: So when people come to me and say, oh, I can't go into ministry, I'm too old.
55:51
SPEAKER_00: I always say, well,
55:52
SPEAKER_00: you know,
55:52
SPEAKER_00: I've got this pastor with oxygen and he's 75 years old and his wife has cancer.
55:57
SPEAKER_00: And so...
55:59
SPEAKER_00: I don't, you got no excuses.
56:00
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
56:01
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
56:02
SPEAKER_01: Thank God, David.
56:02
SPEAKER_01: Well, and I love,
56:04
SPEAKER_01: and I love,
56:05
SPEAKER_01: and that's one of the reasons why I'm reluctant to support anything that is going
56:08
SPEAKER_01: to require the MDiv and require those things because,
56:11
SPEAKER_01: because we need,
56:12
SPEAKER_01: we need the voices of folks who,
56:14
SPEAKER_01: it just doesn't make any sense, you know, for them to do the MDiv.
56:17
SPEAKER_01: If we, if we said to this guy, he said his name was David, like you're 75 years old.
56:21
SPEAKER_01: You got to go.
56:22
SPEAKER_01: If you haven't gotten your bachelor's degree,
56:23
SPEAKER_01: you got to go back and get that,
56:24
SPEAKER_01: you know, and then you have to go get your master's degree.
56:26
SPEAKER_01: And only then will we consider that.
56:28
SPEAKER_01: You're worthy of being in a pulpit.
56:31
SPEAKER_01: I've got a problem with that.
56:33
SPEAKER_01: I don't think anybody who's advocating – I should make sure I'm being clear.
56:36
SPEAKER_01: Those who are advocating for higher educational standards are not intending,
56:40
SPEAKER_01: I don't think, that side of things.
56:42
SPEAKER_01: But it is a necessary consequence if we were to make that decision.
56:45
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's worth – We don't – Please.
56:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think – so there's a phrase that is thrown around that a – Calling to ministry is
56:57
SPEAKER_00: a call to higher education.
56:59
SPEAKER_02: Right.
57:01
SPEAKER_00: And I agree that a call to ministry is a call to continuing education,
57:07
SPEAKER_00: that it's a call to continue to continue learning,
57:11
SPEAKER_00: but to higher education, not necessarily.
57:15
SPEAKER_00: I do.
57:15
SPEAKER_00: I have a pastor who jokes around about how he won't pick up a book,
57:20
SPEAKER_00: how he hates to read,
57:21
SPEAKER_00: and he And that pastor,
57:24
SPEAKER_00: I just want to kick him in the butt and say, you know, there's a reason.
57:29
SPEAKER_00: Right.
57:29
SPEAKER_00: Like there's a reason you're teaching rapture.
57:32
SPEAKER_00: You're teaching things that I, but we need, so we do need standards.
57:38
SPEAKER_00: We do need to have a calling to,
57:40
SPEAKER_00: to continued education into a criteria of education,
57:45
SPEAKER_00: but to a higher education as far as masters, not necessarily.
57:50
SPEAKER_00: Right.
57:50
SPEAKER_00: Right.
57:52
SPEAKER_02: We're in an organizational dilemma.
57:55
SPEAKER_02: If we want to have highly educated people who have good formation and preparation
58:00
SPEAKER_02: to answer the deep questions of life from a perspective of faith,
58:03
SPEAKER_02: we should want that.
58:04
SPEAKER_02: And I want that.
58:06
SPEAKER_02: And we also have situations like where we're in,
58:09
SPEAKER_02: where it's very hard to find a pastor of any sort,
58:12
SPEAKER_02: much less one qualified within the boundaries that we've established as
58:15
SPEAKER_02: a denomination.
58:17
SPEAKER_02: So we say, well, we'll make an exception, but then the exception becomes the rule.
58:22
SPEAKER_02: No matter what decision we make,
58:23
SPEAKER_02: it's going to be consequential,
58:25
SPEAKER_02: but I certainly hope we can find one that we can live with that doesn't just say,
58:31
SPEAKER_02: sorry to whole swaths of rural America.
58:34
SPEAKER_02: There's no Global Methodist Church for you,
58:35
SPEAKER_02: because that's what ultimately I think it will come to over time.
58:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
58:43
SPEAKER_01: So we've had a wonderful conversation.
58:44
SPEAKER_01: This is already longer than all the other conversations.
58:46
SPEAKER_01: I'm not trying to cut anything real short.
58:48
SPEAKER_01: But do you have anything else in particular that you're itching to share
58:51
SPEAKER_01: with my gigantic audience out there?
58:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
58:57
SPEAKER_00: The one thing that really triggered me, you said outreach, and I immediately went, ugh.
59:01
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
59:02
SPEAKER_00: Because I thought where you were going was definitely outreach.
59:06
SPEAKER_00: And I would say this is one of those sicknesses in the church is outreach tends
59:09
SPEAKER_00: to be, so let's throw something in the church.
59:12
SPEAKER_00: For people to come to, you know, so like just reminding people that that's not outreach.
59:17
SPEAKER_00: Outreach is being out in the community, reaching people for Jesus.
59:22
SPEAKER_00: And that's another reason I love rural ministry is it's easier to do that.
59:25
SPEAKER_00: It's easier to sit at a coffee shop and overhear conversations and just say,
59:30
SPEAKER_00: hey, by the way, I'm a pastor.
59:32
SPEAKER_00: Can I pray with you?
59:34
SPEAKER_00: Can I, you know, and I don't know what that looks like in a city.
59:37
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you can do that in a city, I guess, too.
59:40
SPEAKER_00: But yeah.
59:42
SPEAKER_00: But that's a bigger calling to me since becoming Global Methodist
59:50
SPEAKER_00: is talking
59:51
SPEAKER_00: to people about their faith in the moment,
59:53
SPEAKER_00: praying for people about their faith in the moment.
59:55
SPEAKER_00: I feel like previously it was so taboo about asking people out on the streets about their faith.
1:00:01
SPEAKER_00: But it's really something that we need to take a hold of.
1:00:04
SPEAKER_02: I just want to say I'm really happy.
1:00:12
SPEAKER_02: So I spent 22 years in the Army,
1:00:15
SPEAKER_02: and I wouldn't have described myself for much of that as an institutionalist.
1:00:21
SPEAKER_02: I liked the Army.
1:00:21
SPEAKER_02: I liked the Army system.
1:00:23
SPEAKER_02: It made sense to me, even though it wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination.
1:00:26
SPEAKER_02: But 22 years is a long time in any organization.
1:00:29
SPEAKER_02: And by the end,
1:00:30
SPEAKER_02: I was kind of done with it,
1:00:31
SPEAKER_02: a little bit of an independent and a skeptic of institutions.
1:00:36
SPEAKER_02: And so that is where I started as a pastor, and that fit pretty well in the UMC.
1:00:42
SPEAKER_02: Independent and a little skeptical of the system.
1:00:46
SPEAKER_02: And I just convicted of my own journey, my own path.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_02: And coming to the Global Methodist Church, I came with some reservations.
1:01:01
SPEAKER_02: I liked the people involved.
1:01:03
SPEAKER_02: I trusted them as far as their integrity and their faith went.
1:01:07
SPEAKER_02: I liked everything I was saying, but I've just, you know, we've...
1:01:12
SPEAKER_02: I've seen how organizations are across the span of my life.
1:01:16
SPEAKER_02: And so actually going to my first annual conference with
1:01:20
SPEAKER_02: the Global Methodist Church,
1:01:21
SPEAKER_02: our inaugural conference here in the heartland, was very tough for me.
1:01:24
SPEAKER_02: And it has been a couple of times.
1:01:27
SPEAKER_02: And it took me a couple of days to figure out why,
1:01:30
SPEAKER_02: but it's like, oh, I came here ready to fight.
1:01:33
SPEAKER_02: I came here with my guard up.
1:01:36
SPEAKER_02: My favorite parts about annual conference were finding a couple of friends
1:01:39
SPEAKER_02: and figuring out where we were going to eat.
1:01:41
SPEAKER_02: And that's changed.
1:01:43
SPEAKER_02: We're actually having a spiritual experience.
1:01:47
SPEAKER_02: We say we're engaged in this divine mission of new creation.
1:01:51
SPEAKER_02: What actually appears to be going on here?
1:01:53
SPEAKER_02: And I wasn't ready for that.
1:01:55
SPEAKER_02: And so that's required some reflection on my part and some adjustment on my part.
1:02:01
SPEAKER_02: But I am so delighted by the way that we have successfully continued To follow God
1:02:10
SPEAKER_02: and the vote on the articles of faith was a big deal to me.
1:02:13
SPEAKER_02: I really respect the voices who were,
1:02:16
SPEAKER_02: I've been watching this project go on for a couple of years now.
1:02:19
SPEAKER_02: And some of these people like Dr.
1:02:21
SPEAKER_02: Tennant and Dr.
1:02:22
SPEAKER_02: Watson and Ken Collins and Jason Vickers, some of them have been my professors.
1:02:27
SPEAKER_02: Some have been people that I've been listening to on their podcasts
1:02:30
SPEAKER_02: and their YouTube channels for years, read their books.
1:02:33
SPEAKER_02: They were the people I wanted in the room.
1:02:35
SPEAKER_02: Right.
1:02:36
SPEAKER_02: And I was really happy they were in the room.
1:02:39
SPEAKER_02: And I read the Articles of Faith, the drafts that they put out.
1:02:44
SPEAKER_02: I felt good about it.
1:02:45
SPEAKER_02: I actually kind of liked where we put our flag on some of the more controversial issues.
1:02:51
SPEAKER_02: But I wasn't sure how the whole movement would respond because we are pulling
1:02:57
SPEAKER_02: the remnants of the faithful from the Methodist tribe from not only across
1:03:01
SPEAKER_02: the country, but across the world.
1:03:02
SPEAKER_02: And there's some differences.
1:03:03
SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
1:03:05
SPEAKER_02: And I think it's an open question that ultimately what sort
1:03:09
SPEAKER_02: of denominational character and culture will have.
1:03:12
SPEAKER_02: And I'm interested to see.
1:03:14
SPEAKER_02: But that vote, 370 to 1, was phenomenal.
1:03:17
SPEAKER_02: And that was a miracle.
1:03:19
SPEAKER_02: Let's just be honest.
1:03:21
SPEAKER_02: I'm a product of the modern skeptic world.
1:03:24
SPEAKER_02: I'm reluctant to throw the miracle flag at things.
1:03:26
SPEAKER_02: That was a miracle.
1:03:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:03:28
SPEAKER_02: That was absolutely a miracle.
1:03:31
SPEAKER_02: And praise the Lord.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_02: Another sign of his favor and his leadership.
1:03:36
SPEAKER_02: And I'm excited to be a part of it.
1:03:39
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was in the room when we passed, because I was on that committee.
1:03:42
SPEAKER_01: And I know Elizabeth spent a lot of her time also,
1:03:45
SPEAKER_01: at least either in or observing the committee as an alternate, right?
1:03:49
SPEAKER_01: Correct, correct.
1:03:51
SPEAKER_01: Again,
1:03:51
SPEAKER_01: it was one of those things where I distinctly remember the moment when another way
1:03:57
SPEAKER_01: of articulating our understanding of the scripture was brought up,
1:04:00
SPEAKER_01: and I thought to myself,
1:04:01
SPEAKER_01: that sounds like exactly what we voted down at an earlier session.
1:04:05
SPEAKER_01: And then all of a sudden,
1:04:06
SPEAKER_01: it had a significant majority,
1:04:08
SPEAKER_01: and I went, oh my goodness, did we just find a consensus?
1:04:11
SPEAKER_01: Did we just find a way to be able to work and move forward together?
1:04:16
SPEAKER_01: And it is hard...
1:04:18
SPEAKER_01: When I did a report to my new conference,
1:04:20
SPEAKER_01: part of our delegation we would do, occasionally we would send videos home.
1:04:24
SPEAKER_01: And I said,
1:04:25
SPEAKER_01: on one level,
1:04:25
SPEAKER_01: this is boring administrative stuff,
1:04:28
SPEAKER_01: going through a document line by line, word by word.
1:04:31
SPEAKER_01: I said, on the one hand,
1:04:32
SPEAKER_01: it sounds like the most dry and boring and unspiritual thing you can do.
1:04:35
SPEAKER_01: I said, on the other hand,
1:04:37
SPEAKER_01: in that moment when we pass it on out of the committee,
1:04:39
SPEAKER_01: it genuinely felt like God was moving in our midst.
1:04:43
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
1:04:44
SPEAKER_01: And again, I'm also reluctant, you know, to just throw the word miracle out there.
1:04:47
SPEAKER_01: And yet I've been consistently telling people like,
1:04:50
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:04:50
SPEAKER_01: anybody who's going to Monday morning quarterback about it and say,
1:04:52
SPEAKER_01: well, it should have been more of this.
1:04:53
SPEAKER_01: Like it felt like a miracle,
1:04:55
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:04:55
SPEAKER_01: and I think that everybody who was there, you know, feels a pretty similar way.
1:05:01
SPEAKER_00: I really thought someone was going to ask to table it for another six years.
1:05:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:05:06
SPEAKER_00: And when we were at our, you know, end of the day, we've got five minutes to do this.
1:05:10
SPEAKER_00: I kept saying, well, let's throw it out there so that we'll just pass it.
1:05:12
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:05:12
SPEAKER_00: So that we'll get it done.
1:05:14
SPEAKER_00: Because I really did not want it tabled.
1:05:16
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:05:17
SPEAKER_00: And the fact that everybody was just so behind it, there was zero naysaying, was just a miracle.
1:05:24
SPEAKER_00: And I think it was,
1:05:26
SPEAKER_00: and I think they said it was 455 years in the making between the time
1:05:31
SPEAKER_00: that our first Articles of the Philly, you know, started.
1:05:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because of previous Methodism, yeah.
1:05:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
1:05:39
SPEAKER_00: The fact that in 455 years we had not changed one word of that and we were able
1:05:44
SPEAKER_00: to come around it with such unanimity, it was just fantastic.
1:05:53
SPEAKER_02: I wouldn't conflate these two events as being of the same importance,
1:05:56
SPEAKER_02: but having now seen and experienced that, you kind of wonder, was Nicaea like this?
1:06:02
SPEAKER_02: Was Chalcedon like this?
1:06:05
SPEAKER_02: Why not?
1:06:05
SPEAKER_02: Those things have guided the church for millennia.
1:06:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
1:06:10
SPEAKER_01: And that's the thing that's,
1:06:11
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:06:12
SPEAKER_01: I teach Western theology and one of the things,
1:06:16
SPEAKER_01: one of my assigned readings,
1:06:16
SPEAKER_01: I hope at some point someone will write up the goings on for
1:06:20
SPEAKER_01: the Gold Methodist Church.
1:06:20
SPEAKER_01: But I share,
1:06:21
SPEAKER_01: Richard Heisenreiter shares the story of how they got from the 1972 statement to
1:06:26
SPEAKER_01: the 1988 statement in the United Methodist Church.
1:06:28
SPEAKER_01: And part of why I share that is because,
1:06:30
SPEAKER_01: you know, even if you're Gold Methodist now, it's still part of our background.
1:06:33
SPEAKER_01: And one of the things I try to share is like,
1:06:35
SPEAKER_01: this is, this is kind of all how the sausage gets made.
1:06:37
SPEAKER_01: You know,
1:06:37
SPEAKER_01: it's not necessarily the most elegant,
1:06:39
SPEAKER_01: you see all kinds of different,
1:06:40
SPEAKER_01: you know, like, well,
1:06:41
SPEAKER_01: we'd really rather have said this, but we realized it's not just me and my document.
1:06:44
SPEAKER_01: And, um,
1:06:46
SPEAKER_01: and I can't remember now what,
1:06:47
SPEAKER_01: what he wrote the vote was in 88, you know, but it wasn't 97%, you know?
1:06:53
SPEAKER_01: And, um,
1:06:53
SPEAKER_01: and again,
1:06:54
SPEAKER_01: we walked into that room in the first, on the first day, we didn't all agree.
1:06:57
SPEAKER_01: You know,
1:06:57
SPEAKER_01: we definitely had different perspectives and different,
1:07:00
SPEAKER_01: you know, ways we wanted to phrase things.
1:07:01
SPEAKER_01: And, and, um, I tell it to people, I said, there were moments where it got heated.
1:07:06
SPEAKER_01: Like, never mean,
1:07:08
SPEAKER_01: you know, never uncharitable, never unchristian, but there were some tense moments.
1:07:13
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
1:07:13
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:07:14
SPEAKER_01: And so it's not like we were a group of people who just said,
1:07:16
SPEAKER_01: well, whatever you say, we're going to vote for it.
1:07:17
SPEAKER_01: It was people who cared very deeply and really wanted to do it right
1:07:22
SPEAKER_01: and didn't always have 100% the same idea on what right was.
1:07:25
SPEAKER_00: To see David Watson and Timothy Tennant disagree.
1:07:28
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:07:29
SPEAKER_02: You know, like that was- You're not supposed to say that.
1:07:33
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was fun to watch.
1:07:35
SPEAKER_00: As an alternate in the room who had to come step in,
1:07:37
SPEAKER_00: it was a little intimidating to say,
1:07:39
SPEAKER_00: oh, I'm going to sit in and help form the Articles of Faith.
1:07:43
SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, you're like, you know what?
1:07:45
SPEAKER_00: This place is in good hands.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_00: I don't need to say anything because they have put all their theological integrity
1:07:52
SPEAKER_00: into this, and they don't want to get it wrong.
1:07:55
SPEAKER_00: And they're willing to disagree as theologians who probably love each other.
1:08:00
SPEAKER_00: And it was fun to watch the sausage get made.
1:08:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:08:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:08:06
SPEAKER_01: I think we're probably going to start winding down here.
1:08:08
SPEAKER_01: So would one or both of you be willing to close us in prayer?
1:08:13
SPEAKER_00: I will.
1:08:15
SPEAKER_00: Lord God Almighty, I thank you for the Holy Spirit in this room.
1:08:19
SPEAKER_00: Even across the distance,
1:08:22
SPEAKER_00: we are able to come together through the Through this technology and share
1:08:27
SPEAKER_00: about what you are doing and how you are moving in this amazing movement we call
1:08:31
SPEAKER_00: the Global Methodist Church.
1:08:32
SPEAKER_00: Lord, I thank you for the ministry of Travis and Wes and myself and the fact
1:08:37
SPEAKER_00: that it is centered in you,
1:08:39
SPEAKER_00: that we are doing everything to further your kingdom,
1:08:42
SPEAKER_00: that you are an amazing God who still does miracles.
1:08:47
SPEAKER_00: And Lord, we just praise you for everything you did at General Conference.
1:08:51
SPEAKER_00: And we thank you for the connection across these many states.
1:08:55
SPEAKER_00: And Lord,
1:08:55
SPEAKER_00: we ask that you continue to move across the Global Methodist Church and across
1:09:00
SPEAKER_00: the world.
1:09:01
SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name, amen.
1:09:02
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
1:09:04
SPEAKER_01: So this has been what you've seen and heard across the connection
1:09:08
SPEAKER_01: with two special guests, Reverend Elizabeth Winger-Young and Reverend Wes Young.
1:09:13
SPEAKER_01: So thank you again for coming.
1:09:14
SPEAKER_01: So if you are watching this and you are from somewhere around,
1:09:18
SPEAKER_01: when I first started doing these interviews, it was only kind of upper Midwest.
1:09:21
SPEAKER_01: But if you're somewhere else and you have someone in mind
1:09:23
SPEAKER_01: who you think should be heard from,
1:09:26
SPEAKER_01: please send me an email at pastortravisatmarcusgrace.com and let me know.
1:09:30
SPEAKER_01: So thanks for watching or listening and we'll see you next time.