“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
—Frodo, quoting Bilbo to Pippin, The Fellowship of the Ring
Standing on the path outside the front door of his cozy hole at Bag End, having been out on a long walk, Bilbo would often repeat this saying to young Frodo. He would remind his nephew that this familiar, well-worn path continued well beyond the reaches of the Shire. That very path, he said, ran through the forest of Mirkwood, all the way to the Lonely Mountain, or “even further and to worse places.” If you’re not careful, “if you don’t keep your feet,” you never know where you might end up.
Sounds like life to me. Sounds like faith to me. Abraham left home without a map. Peter stepped out onto water. Paul tried to head to Asia and ended up in Macedonia. The Spirit drives us places we never planned to go. The road is risky, but that’s right where the wonder lives. One day you’re walking down a familiar, well-worn path, fully expecting to end up back at your front door, only to find yourself caught up in an adventure you never asked for, swept off to a far-off destination you never dreamed of visiting.
No matter how determined you may be to “keep your feet,” sometimes life still throws you off balance. Sometimes the the Good Shepherd has a more adventurous path than you expected. But, because he is in fact good, he leads to “even further and to better places.”
Last week, the unexpected adventure that Angela and I have been on led us to the Annual Conference of the Global Methodist Church of North Georgia. The Methodist world is, in many ways, dramatically different than the Vineyard world we are used to. They are a tribe that does things quite differently than the tribe in which we were trained as pastors. As foreign to us as Mirkwood or the Lonely Mountain was to Bilbo.
Nevertheless, there is surprising beauty to be had on such adventures. Here are a few snippets of the beauty I saw last week:
Wesleyan and Charismatic
The very first official item on the agenda for us was a workshop called “Restoring A Hijacked Heritage.” As a Vineyard pastor serving in a Methodist church, I’ve been eager to soak up all that I can about Wesleyan faith, so this seemed like a no-brainer. Context and history? Please and thank you!
We walked into the room a few minutes late, quickly grabbed the handouts set near the door, and found two of the last remaining seats in the packed room. My jaw dropped as I read the actual title of the presentation on my handout: “Holy Spirit Baptism Workshop”. As the presenter, Rev. Dr. Chris Laskey began to speak, I leaned over to Angela at one point and said “Where are we?!” He was connecting our personal history (which was rooted in the Charismatic Movement and Renewal of the 60’s and 70’s) all the way back to decades before Azuza Street when the Wesleys and their contemporaries regularly experienced dramatic manifestations of the Holy Spirit.
He was speaking our language. He was inviting people into the waters we’re used to swimming in. He was describing signposts to the future of the Global Methodist Church that looked surprisingly a lot like the land we had called “home.” He talked about being a people of both Word and Spirit, both Wesleyan and Charismatic. I half expected him to use the phrase “the radical middle.”
I still can’t shake the wonderful surprise that this was our first hour at a Global Methodist conference.
Transparency in Business
TBH, business meetings are not that exciting to me. I’ve always taken them seriously, but they’re certainly not what gets me up on the morning or energizes me for ministry.
So why then, in the middle of a giant business meeting, with hundreds of pastors and lay delegates voting on things like budgets and proposed referendums, was I moved to tears? For reals. I was fighting back tears as people discussed numbers and read through paragraphs of legalese.
Why?
Here’s why: transparency. Everything—I mean everything—was out in the light.
At first it felt foreign. Strange. A completely different world than I had ever been in. For a moment I began to wish I was somewhere else, and entertained the thought of stepping out to go work on my sermon. But I stayed. I listened and watched. And eventually the magnitude of what I was witnessing sunk in: Some church people actually conduct business out in the open.
No secret meetings. No cloistered leadership meetings. No decisions made by the few at the top. No pleas of, “Trust us! It will all be good!”
No. Everything up front. Above board. Open. Displayed on giant screens. Anyone could walk up to a mic and ask a question or voice their opinion. Everyone else would listen. Every eligible person in the room had a vote.
As I write, this feels like a pretty lame attempt to make a banal business meeting sound like a liminal moment of epiphany. But it was. Coming from a denomination where no one really had a voice, where no votes were ever taken, where decisions at both local and national levels were made by the powerful—well—I could literally see the light driving out the darkness.
Collegiality and Graciousness in Public Discourse
Not only was business conducted out in the open, with full transparency, but people with differing opinions were collegial and gracious.
First, no questions were ever dismissed, shut down, or talked around. Lord knows I’ve had my fill of asking questions only to have leaders talk in circles! I wanna be in a room full pastors, not politicians, after all. When questions were posed to whichever denominational leader happened to be presenting or leading the voting process from the stage, they always listened. When someone from the crowd came up to the mic with a question, the leader responded to them with as much compassion and clarity as they could, even if the question came with some push-back. If anyone took something personally, they didn’t show it. In fact they responded personally. At one point, in fact, when a pastor with a rather thick accent was asking a question, and the crazy acoustics in the room made it extra challenging, the leader came down from the stage to speak to the pastor face-to-face, ensuring that he heard everything. Awesome.
Second, each referendums being proposed (which, BTW, it seems as though any pastor cam make—there’s a process for that?!?!), was out on the floor for anyone to speak for or against. And people did! Many opposing viewpoints were given—again, openly, in front of everyone. The discussion flowed back and for between for / against, for / against, for / against… until no one else came up to speak. And always in that order. Another “for” was not allowed to follow a “for” until a further “against” was shared. Even Steven.
God help us all to engage in such public discourse! In our homes. In our churches. In our denominations. In our politics. **
“It’s a dangerous business”
Following the Spirit off into the wilderness is dangerous business. Straying too far from your front door can be terrifying. But as John Wimber himself taught us to say, “Faith is spelled R-I-S-K.” I may have left the Vineyard, but I’m taking that with me.