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Author: Greater NW Communications

Greater Northwest Area Cabinet begins 2020 with pledge to Resist Harm as it continues to seed a vital, more inclusive church

By Patrick Scriven

Even as members of the Greater Northwest (GNW) Area Cabinet absorbed the implications of the proposed Protocol of Reconciliation & Grace Through Separation, they recommitted themselves to resisting elements of the Traditional Plan that took effect January 1. Meeting for the first time in 2020 last week, they joyfully reaffirmed their baptisms, pledging together to resist harm as they provide leadership to the Area.

Last November, the bishops of the Western Jurisdiction issued their Safe Harbor Declaration, explicitly refusing to implement the new provisions and prohibitions of the Traditional Plan. The GNW Area Cabinet welcomed this statement at the time and continues its move forward with the clear guidance it provides. 

While the Protocol mentioned above includes a moratorium against the filing of charges against LGBTQ+ clergy, and those performing same-gender weddings, if passed, it would only create a pathway down which full inclusion could be reached. Stopping the harm is only one step down the path.

Both the Cabinet and the GNW Guiding Coalition are continuing to plan for a future of United Methodism in the Northwest that fully includes LGBTQ+ persons in the life of the Church. Additionally, they are continuing to learn and to foster practices, each time they meet, that will help the Area to center voices that are younger and more diverse, recognizing that there is both wisdom and vitality around a table with distinct perspectives. 

The GNW’s Innovation Vitality Team offered the Cabinet an update on projects that are underway across the Area, work that includes both New projects (new church starts or new campus/multisite) and Vitality projects (existing church where an identified planter/innovator is appointed). Of the 37 supported projects, 20 (54%) are led by leaders of color.

Rev. Kathy Neary provided an update on her work with smaller congregations in the PNW Conference, sharing one of her insights this week on the PNW News Blog. The GNW Cabinet also discussed the promising work happening in rural areas through the Rural Church Engagement Initiative. Lynn Egli provides a short progress report you can read here.

Continuing its work of assessing and preparing for the leadership needs of GNW Area churches and ministries, the Cabinet finalized its initial list of Clear Appointment Openings. The practice of sharing Clear Openings allows clergy the opportunity to express an interest in a particular appointment while also allowing them to share their gifts and calling with the Cabinet as the discernment process begins. 

Bishop Elaine Stanovsky and members of the GNW Area Cabinet spent time with participants of the UMC LEAD Conference.

Plans were also finalized at the meeting for the calling of a Special Session of the Alaska United Methodist Conference on February 22 in Anchorage to ask the 2020 General Conference to discontinue its status as a missionary conference. The Alaska Conference will also vote to petition the Western Jurisdictional Conference to provide affiliation and oversight, possibly as a mission district of another annual conference. 

The Conference Treasurers provided the Cabinet with an end of year report on the apportionment giving of the Area’s three conferences. Apportionment receipts for the Alaska Conference reached 84.7% in 2019, down 2.03% from 2018; Oregon-Idaho Conference receipts reached 77.9% in 2019, down 5.4% from 2018; Pacific Northwest Conference receipts reached 93%, up .21% from 2018.

With the Cabinet meeting concluding late on Saturday, Cabinet members visited area churches for worship the following day. Twelve members were also able to attend parts of the UMC LEAD event that began later that day in Seattle, Washington. Bishop Stanovsky offered a greeting to attendees of the LEAD event, offering a word of encouragement and appreciation for The United Methodist leaders, many of whom had traveled across the country to participate.

Patrick Scriven serves as Director of Communications and Young People’s Ministries for the Pacific Northwest Conference of The United Methodist Church.

A Christmas Message from Bishop Stanovsky – 2019

Please enjoy this Christmas message for United Methodists across the Greater Northwest Episcopal Area from Bishop Elaine JW Stanovsky. She invites us to step outside to see what God is up to beneath the surface.

TRANSCRIPT

When I was a little girl and it was just about Christmastime, we’d go out as a family in the station wagon and we’d get a Christmas tree at a lot. We’d bring it home and we’d get out the boxes of decorations to hang on the tree, and when we came to the tinsel, the shiny tinsel; in my family we called it rain.

Now, my friends when I grew up made fun of me for that. They thought hanging rain on a tree was a pretty dismal thing to do. But as a child, it was the rain that reflected the light and that reflected symbolically the love of God in our lives, and so that taught me that at Christmas time it isn’t so much about what’s really going on on the surface of things. It’s really about what’s going on in here that matters.

That amazing couple, Joseph and Mary, traveled to a distant town. It’d be like my family going to the mountains of western Virginia where my family first migrated to this nation.
They were in a place they didn’t know.
They were not among family.
They were about to have a baby out of wedlock.
They were homeless.
They were displaced.
They were alone.

And it was there that they experienced this amazing miracle as this tiny baby was born to them. God’s miracle that life can come with joy, and anticipation, and incredible blessing even in the worst of circumstances. And so, we all these years later, we celebrate what happened that night and we do it by lighting lights and listening to music, making music, singing music. We do it by eating great food and inviting people over to our homes and saying, “Oh, let’s get together and celebrate this amazing thing that happened to Joseph and Mary when the tiny baby Jesus was born.”

You know you can get lost in all of that. You can make it about the food and the song and the lights.

I invite you this Christmas to step outside.
Step outside of your home.
Step outside of your preparation.
Step outside of your expectations, your anxiety.
Step outside of your sorrow to see what God’s up to this year this Christmas. What’s being born?

Step outside to see the goodness, the kindness, how merciful God is, and take a deep breath.

The heavens will dance. Peace will settle gently. Hope will shine again and anew for us. God is faithful. God is steadfast.

May it be to us according to God’s promises for this day, for our lives, for our church, for our nation, for the whole beautiful world. A blessing to you. Amen.

Video by Rev. David Valera, Exec. Dir. of Connectional Ministries (PNW)

Conferences of the Greater Northwest Area commit to 100% payment of General Church apportionments in 2019

The Greater Northwest Area's three conferences have each committed to paying 100% of their General Church apportionments for 2019. The news was delivered as the area's Cabinet met in Des Moines, Wash., last week.

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The Close of a Year of Collapse and CrossOver

CrossOver reflection for Week 52 • Beginning December 1, 2019
We Make the Road by Walking, Chapter 13 

Bishop Elaine JW Stanovsky

Long ago and far away, my walk with Jesus took me to Russia, just as the Soviet Union broke up in the early 1990s. Russia was crossing over in 1992 from the secularism, suppression and social control of the Soviet Union. Churches, whose property had been seized and had operated largely underground for 75 years – Orthodox, Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist – were all emerging, from the long winter of repression and confinement.    

  • Imagine crossing through security at a prison furniture factory in St. Petersburg, Russia. Your guide is a Russian Orthodox priest, in long black robes, newly recognized as chaplain to the prison. He has convinced prison administrators to allow Christian prisoners to produce small icons of the faith instead of furniture to sell to fund the prison. In a small upper room, it is like a tiny workshop of believers. Those believer prisoners lead you to a far corner of the prison to show you the chapel with a shiny copper onion dome they are building in their free time.  
  • Sit with the Admiral of the Russian Fleet, in the ornate Russian Admiralty, as a U.S. Navy Chaplain tells how he gives spiritual care to sailors and they discuss what military chaplaincy might look like in a post-Soviet Russia.
  • Now walk to a sagging two-story brick building, held upright only with the help of salvaged railroad rails driven crudely through exterior walls to provide cross bracing. Older women love and tend shunned teenaged girls, who are learning to love and tend their babies. They sew dolls that they sell to support their children in an honorable way.  
  • Visit the women’s ward of a stone-cold, drafty 150-year old prison hospital, where a post-operative woman climbs a rattly ladder unaided to her upper bunk every time she has her bandages changed or uses the bathroom.  
  • Notice as one of your traveling companions, a substance abuse counselor, sneaks away from our church hosts to meet surreptitiously with underground advocates for treatment of alcohol and drug dependency in a country that brands alcoholics criminal.

It took the collapse of the Soviet Union for churches in Russia to have the freedom to step outside the tight restrictions on freedom of religion to re-engage in the fabric of community life and to bring the life-giving good news of Jesus Christ to people and a nation who had sat so long in darkness. In 1992 the Christian faith felt fresh and robust, shiny and new. Everything seemed possible. It was a CrossOver season, with plenty of uncertainty, but an irresistible tug toward living faith with every breath, every word, every human encounter.

From Russia with Love

Could we learn from the Churches in Russia? What if The United Methodist Church woke up to discover that our buildings were gone, our websites and Facebook pages shut down, and bank accounts were closed? What would be left of the Church? What difference would it make to the woman in her bunk? A hopeless sailor in the Navy? An alcoholic trapped in his addiction? What would the church be, without all of its institutional forms, habits, schedules?

What if we viewed this season of breakdown or break-up in The United Methodist Church as offering a rare opportunity to think anew and afresh about what the church is for, and how it can best share the blessings of God with the world?  

Crossing Over as a Way of Life

Thank you, for reading, praying, discussing, pondering, imagining new ways to be lovers of God, neighbor, and self.

A year ago I invited you to join me on a year-long CrossOver journey to become “Alive in the adventure of Jesus.” In small groups or alone, for the whole year, or just for a season, many of you read wondered with Brian McLaren in his book, We Make the Road by Walking. A remarkable number of you wrote brilliant, touching, wise blog posts for each chapter of the book. We asked ourselves, how do we understand the Bible? What was Jesus up to? What does it mean for the Church to be Christ’s living presence on earth? How must I live to serve?

Here we are a year later – at the end of our book – realizing that we have not reached the other side. Yet, we are not stalled. We are making the road by walking and we are stronger and bolder as we continue the adventure of Jesus. What I know more clearly now than I did a year ago is that most United Methodists in the Greater Northwest are firmly committed to the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in the life of the Church, but that a significant minority understands the Bible to prohibit full inclusion. 

So, what’s next? Though we may not all think alike, may we not love alike?  

I don’t know today if The United Methodist Church will stay together as a world-wide connection, if it will split into two or three separate incompatible entities, or if some “amicable separation” will be negotiated between parties that do not choose to live together anymore. What I think I do know is that God is using this time of uncertainty to invite us to deeper connections with each other. And that deepening our connections with each other will make it easier to walk the way that will unfold before us without hurting each other. 

I am working with a team of leaders from across the Greater Northwest to offer a season of deeper, broader, authentic relationships across the divisions among us from January through May of 2020. John Wesley saw the church as a great life-giving connection. For Wesley, connection was personal, relational. I’m calling for growing a new, personal, gracious Grassroots Connections among church participants, between our churches, and between people inside and outside our churches. This is where Jesus shows up — when we are in relationship. Watch for more.

With a thankful heart,

Bishop Elaine JW Stanovsky | Greater NW Area

Words Make Worlds

CrossOver reflection for Week 51 • Beginning November 24, 2019
We Make the Road by Walking, Chapter 12 

Rev. Katie Ladd

Words make worlds. They are the DNA of meaning. Did someone you deeply admired ever highly praise you? How did you feel? Were you ever called a — as a child or as an adult — that left you feeling ashamed or like you were nothing? Words make worlds. Words make worlds beautiful, and they make them unbearable. It is genius that our origin story begins with God speaking creation into being. It is no coincidence in John’s Gospel that we have a new creation story that says, “In the beginning was the Word….” Words make worlds. String words together into stories and that is where we find deep and transformational meaning.

Sadly, too many Christians spend too much time worrying about the facts in the Bible. While there are most certainly facts in the Bible, they aren’t the purpose of the Bible. This is an important distinction. The Bible is a story about meaning that creates meaning; it is an inquiry into why; it is not primarily a report of what. Again, in Genesis, Christians often focus on the fall, and we argue about the creation story. When we do, we miss a key component — the why. Why did God create? The story tells us, but we miss it. God creates us for communion — to reside in God’s good garden in peace and covenant community together and with the Divine. Sabbath is the purpose of creation. In our squabbles about the what and the how we miss the meaning in the words.

The Bible invites us into new worlds created by our spiritual ancestors that tell us about God’s faithful acts to and for creation. It invites us to explore hard things like war, power, greed, loss, and tragedy. It also offers us glimpses of what God’s good world might include. It is a love letter to God and from God being worked out in the mess of human frailty.

Chapter 12 of Brian McLaren’s “We Make the World by Walking” is called “Stories that Shape Us.” In it, he says, “…it’s easy to miss the point of ancient stories. Those stories didn’t merely aim, like a modern textbook, to pass on factual information. They sought people’s formation by engaging their interpretive imagination” (52).

As a pastor, I’ve heard many people struggle with their faith because they simply can’t believe (that is, think something is correct) what they’ve read in the Bible. They can’t agree with it. This, people think, means they must walk away from Christianity. However, agreement isn’t the goal of sacred story. The truth of a story is not found in its accuracy to facts. I encourage people struggling with faith to change their definition of belief to trust. Trust in the stories to lead us to someplace new. Trust the stories to transform our hearts and our lives. Trust in the wisdom of the ancients. It will create new worlds.

There is much to know about the Bible, its timeline, archaeology, and history. Such things should not be discounted, but none of those are the locus of salvation and transformation. Jesus did not call us to think better; he invited us to follow him. His primary commandment was to love, and love is all about encounter and meaning and purpose and communion. When I say that my dad was the best dad in the history of all dads, no one wants to fight me for being factually inaccurate. It is a statement of love, and everyone seems to understand that. It is 100% true even if it is not factual (but, let’s face it, it is factual). 

I invite you to let the Bible form rather than inform. Let the words build worlds of meaning inside of you. There is an infinite and sacred trove of wisdom in the Bible, but it is not an easy book. The words do not always settle easily in 21st-century minds. Wrestle with them and let them wrestle with you, as Jacob and the night stranger wrestled together so many years ago. Like him, come away changed, perhaps even limping from the struggle. Like Jacob, be transformed by encounters with the Divine.

Rev. Katie Ladd is the pastor of Queen Anne United Methodist Church in Seattle, Washington. She is also the founder and director of The Well.

Rivalry or Reconciliation

CrossOver reflection for Week 47 • Beginning October 27, 2019
We Make the Road by Walking, Chapter 8

Nancy Tam Davis

Chapter 8 of Brian McLaren’s book We Make the Road by Walking addresses the choice of rivalry or reconciliation. When faced with a loss, or even the fear of loss, we make a choice. Sometimes that choice is conscious; often, it is not. The loss can be something I would consider trivial, like losing a game of checkers. Other losses can be life-threatening. What is a substantial loss for me may be insignificant to you. The issue is that we reach a point of choice, a decision to enter into rivalry, or we find a way to reconcile the loss.

I am reminded of a visit to an aquarium many years ago. I was wandering through a cool, dark, cave-like hallway displaying various sea creatures in dimly lit, glass windows. In one such tank lived the longfish. This tiny fish was about 2 inches long and ¼ of an inch at its widest point. Each fish lived in one of the many parallel trenches on the bottom. It looked as if a careful gardener had passed a fine rake across the bottom of the tank. Only one fish occupied each trench. Each one waited patiently until a tiny pebble rolled down the side of a trench, and the occupying fish would immediately pick the pebble up and spit it into the neighboring trench. The neighbor fish would then gather the stone and spit it back, with what I imagine to be a sense of satisfaction. 

If fish could talk, I believe the dialog would be simple. “Oh no, you don’t, I don’t want your rock.” “Here, take that.” “How do you like them pebbles.” And the game went on all day. Their reason for living seemed simple. Keep your own trench clean, and don’t worry about your neighbors.

I recognize the longfish in me. The impulse I had today when a car passed too close for comfort was to let that driver know they had made a poor choice. I could teach him. Then I could return to my lane (or trench), knowing that I had once again balanced the scales. There have been times when the words of another caused pain, and quickly there arises the impulse to hurt back. That nanosecond of decision-making is almost preconscious and can initiate a chain of rivalry that destroys a relationship. 

Throughout history, rivalries have not ended well. For some, it has caused irreparable divisions in families. In the worst cases, it has sparked never-ending wars until no one remembers or even cares about the igniting issue.

I also remember those times when I did stop and think about the choice ahead of me. I have both received and given the grace that moves into reconciliation. With reconciliation, we can hear one another, understand and learn from one another. The seemingly endless game of rock-spitting can be ended. I believe God calls us to all be people of grace and reconciliation. It is a choice.

Nancy Tam Davis serves as the Conference Lay Leader for the Pacific Northwest Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church.