{"id":7032,"date":"2014-04-14T17:16:38","date_gmt":"2014-04-15T00:16:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/?p=7032"},"modified":"2014-04-14T17:16:21","modified_gmt":"2014-04-15T00:16:21","slug":"why-the-united-methodist-church-should-invest-in-shovels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/why-the-united-methodist-church-should-invest-in-shovels\/","title":{"rendered":"Why The United Methodist Church should invest in shovels"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Patrick Scriven, Director of Communications and Young People’s Ministry<\/h4>\n
\n

Last night, my wife and I were talking about some of our colleagues. You see, we are a part of a denomination, The United Methodist Church, that is hell-bent on its own destruction. Schism is the trending topic of the day with each week bringing news of yet another partisan group slinging accusations and\/or demands that must be met, or else.<\/span><\/p>\n

We were talking about our colleagues because we have both had opportunities to work with people with whom we strongly disagree. We have grown from these experiences, and felt our collective work was better for it. In contrast, we also know individuals, with whom we share much on the surface, but whose mere proximity yields anxiety and frustration rather than than the synergy one might presume.<\/p>\n

It makes me wonder if we aren\u2019t heading in exactly the wrong direction<\/strong> when we talk about dividing the church along stark ideological lines.<\/p>\n

\"depth-small\"<\/a>Imagine for a moment that beliefs are like different parts of our big planet Earth. If we were to ask someone who never travelled beyond the arctic region what the Earth was like, we might expect to hear something about snow and polar bears. Ask another person, this one having grown up on a tropical island, and we would get a very different answer. Context, experience, and location make up so much of what we think we know on the surface.<\/p>\n

But what if we were to give both individuals the machinery to dig a half-mile beneath their feet? If we were to ask them to describe their immediate surroundings now, we might be surprised to discover how similar their descriptions become.<\/p>\n

Let me suggest for a moment that the problems we are encountering as a United Methodist Church are poorly framed when they are so tightly focused on having the right beliefs or social positions. Many of us already know that the Earth isn’t just cold, and that it isn’t just tropical. That knowledge doesn’t seem to keep us from picking our favorite places to live and declaring other areas as undesirable or even uninhabitable (despite the fact that people often live there).<\/p>\n

Our United Methodist problem is better understood as a byproduct of our myriad discipleship issues. The loudest voices in the room speak only to what they know (the surface) and show no obvious concern for the wellbeing of those they declare to be wrong. Our fights are relegated to debates about weather and fauna with too few displaying the capacity to understand the terra firm <\/i>upon <\/i>which they tread.<\/p>\n

I’m friends with a variety of people on Facebook. Because of my biases, I\u2019m sometimes given pause when a conservative friend posts a wise saying by the Dalai Lama or Mahatma Gandhi. I shouldn’t be so shocked though. My conservative friends are just as capable, as some of my progressives ones, of arriving at the spiritual maturity necessary to appreciate wisdom whatever it source. And I know that the correlative is also true. My progressive friends who love posting Gandhi quotes sometimes lack the spiritual depth to acknowledge similar truth when it is uttered by voices they are predisposed to ignore or despise.<\/p>\n

[quote_box_left]…or will we settle for a faith that fears diversity and demands uniformity?[\/quote_box_left]The active choice before The United Methodist Church is one between the comforts of spiritual conformity and the challenges of a discipleship that demands that we go deeper, down underneath to a place where our experiences can (re)create a common vocabulary that can lead to new growth. Will we choose to be in such a covenant with sisters and brothers with whom we disagree, despite the discomfort that can occur, or will we settle for a faith that fears diversity and demands uniformity? Can we recognize how such relationships help us all to develop deeper understandings of the God who will always lie beyond our comprehension?<\/p>\n

Jesus calls us to follow him and leave our nets behind. For many of his earlier followers, this was a call away from the ordinary life to an extraordinary one filled with personal risk, uncertainty, and also great purpose. Perhaps God is calling us today in a similar way.<\/p>\n

May we each find the strength to leave behind our nets filled with our preferences, certainty, and pride. And when we do, let\u2019s take up shovels to search again for that ever elusive treasure of great worth (Matthew 13:44-46).<\/p>\n

\n

Image Credit: Featured image sourced from Flickr user image “Rake & Shovel<\/a>” by tanakawho.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Patrick Scriven, Director of Communications and Young People’s Ministry Last night, my wife and I were talking about some of our colleagues. You see, we are a part of a denomination, The United Methodist Church, that is hell-bent on its own destruction. Schism is the trending topic of the day with each week bringing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7033,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[113],"tags":[361,362,363,12],"class_list":{"0":"post-7032","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-opinioneditorial","8":"tag-schism","9":"tag-spiritual-depth","10":"tag-theological-diversity","11":"tag-umc"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/shovels.jpg?fit=700%2C357&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2l75j-1Pq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7032"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7048,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7032\/revisions\/7048"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}