CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter
Now is the time to work on how we are going to restart when the virus and masks and isolation are gone. Yes, it seems a bit early. They are not gone quite yet. Maybe they won’t be gone entirely forever. But a restart of some sort will come, and we need to make decisions about it rather than just letting it happen any old way. “Any old way” is not a restart; it’s just chaos.
If there is anything good about this covid-induced shutdown and isolation, it’s the chance to reboot, individually as well as socially. We have a better idea now, if we’re paying any attention at all, about what is really necessary to have a whole life.
I once tried to get my conference to restart, but that did not work, for a lot of reasons. The main one, though, I think, was that the underbrush had not been burned off far enough for people to see the need. The covid19 virus has burned off a whole lot of underbrush.
A conference, in Methodist terms, is a geographical area. All the preachers, congregations and other ministries [hospitals, retirement homes, children’s homes, colleges, etc] belong to the conference. My membership was in The Central IL Conference, now part of The IL Great Rivers Conference.
It was almost 40 years ago now. As always, everybody had been moaning and groaning about the dearth of new people joining our congregations. I figured that the reason for that was simple: nobody ever invited anybody to come. We had lots of meetings to figure out what to do about it, but that was all we did—meet and talk.
So I made a motion at annual conference [the annual meeting of all the preachers and lay members, same number of both clergy and lay voting members] that we have no meetings for a year and instead spend the time we used for meetings for inviting people to join the church and come back at the next annual conference and see if we were better or worse off as a church.
Somebody got up and acknowledged that my motion was a fun way to bring attention to the problem… but Bishop Hodapp said, “No, we have a legitimate motion before us and we have to treat it as such. We can’t talk about it until it gets a second.” It immediately got a whole lot of seconds.
Nobody wanted to admit that they thought meetings were a better use of time than asking people to join the church, so they began to drag their heels in little ways…
Well, the conference trustees had to meet, in case we were sued because some preacher was a pedophile, or to deal with the insurance company in case the conference office building blew up. So I accepted an amendment to my motion to allow the trustees to meet.
Well, the Episcopacy [bishop] Committee had to meet, in case the bishop died and we got a new one. I accepted the amendment.
Well, there might be an emergency with the broom committee, or the rearview committee or… you get the idea. Even with all the amendments, the motion lost, but not by much. They just could not take a chance on change.
A few years ago, a conference administrator said to me, “To show how bad things have gotten, we’re beginning to take seriously ideas you suggested twenty years ago.”
That’s fine. It makes me feel affirmed. But my ideas were all about re-starting a church that no longer exists. We all had ideas before covid about how we should reform our lives. Those ideas are irrelevant now.
Yes, old people don’t have many years left, but we need to start working on how to live those years in a post-covid world. As Barbara Sher says, “It’s not too late unless you don’t start now.”
John Robert McFarland
Like most thing in life, there are good meetings and there are bad meetings...and a few in-between. I loved good meetings. Meetings where everyone joined in the conversation and the energy level was high. You learn stuff about other people and yourself in a good meeting. Bad meetings are not like that. Bad meetings are boring...like most annual conferences. Bad meetings bring people together to do stuff they are not really fired up to do. When I was a Bracken United Methodist Church, we would have Trustees meetings to do the business of taking care of the property. A lot of time was spent discussing what needed to be done, but we seldom got around to actually doing anything. A lot of time was spent reading the minutes of the last meeting and discussing why nothing had been done that the minutes recorded we had decided to do. The minutes were kept in a big accordion folder. They went back seventy-five years. Out of curiosity I read through the minutes of meeting held by the grandparents of some of my current trustee friends. For five years the ancestors discussed the building of a tool shed on the property of the church's cemetery. Hours were spent deciding who would make the plans for the building, who would buy the lumber, who would show up to work, how it would be paid for. The shed never got built. If the trustees had spent the time actually building the shed that they spent talking about building the shed, could have built a building the size of a hay barn. A learned, in time, to change my point of expectation of a church trustee meeting. They were not really meant to be meetings to care for the property and build for the future, they were just meetings for a bunch of guys (I seldom had women trustees) sitting round sharing what they knew about building maintenance, insurance, and construction. They were actually fellowship meetings. Once I got that straight in my mind, I sort of enjoyed the meetings. Learned some stuff about carpentry, plumbing, and floor cleaning, but best of all I learned a lot of stories of my fellow trustee's own home improvement adventures and got to share a few of my own. As far as getting anything done about building maintenance or expansion of facilities, I worked hard at finding people who actually wanted to get it done and gave them permission to do it. The cemetery shed finally got built by a building contractor (Speedy Shed) with memorial donations in honor of one of the trustees who died. We had enough money left over to buy a riding lawn mower to mow the cemetery. It only took the trustees six months to decide what kind of riding mower to buy.
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