I have become convinced that we need to find ways to express our problems and challenges so that we don’t undercut the energy we need to meet them. This is an art that needs attention.
Personal notebook, November 1, 1998

When I left the Iron Range as a pastor to become a district superintendent in June of 1998, one gift I was given was a blank hardcover notebook. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, but it was a thoughtful gift from pastors in Chisholm. As I moved into my new ministry, I found myself using this notebook to record occasional thoughts – maybe a mini “With Faith and With Feathers” before there were blogs! The thought recorded above comes from this notebook, and emerged early on in my ministry as a district superintendent. Once, when I shared it, I received some push back. Wasn’t I just too afraid to “tell the truth”? That’s the danger, but the other risk is that you tell the truth in such a way that you leave those you are telling fewer options than you might otherwise. It is often less a matter of whether or not you speak the truth than how you speak the truth.

Last week I was in Detroit for a United Methodist conference combining urban and rural ministry concerns. There were times in the course of the three days when I heard some of the familiar hand-wringing about the mainline church, The United Methodist Church in particular. Yes, our numbers are declining. Yes, we need to ask hard questions about how well a M. Div. degree prepares persons for ordained ministry. Yes, we have to ask about our structures and systems. I have no problem asking hard questions and looking difficult truths in the face.

During the week I was also witness to some incredible work being done by United Methodists. Second Grace UMC in Detroit founded a free clinic in their medically underserved neighborhood. Cass Community UMC started a social service ministry during the depression, and in the early part of this century it spun off into a separate social service agency with a current budget of six million dollars.

If we are going to tell the story of our denomination, we need to tell the whole story – the good, the bad and the ugly. We cannot ignore what we don’t like, but how we tell ourselves what is going on matters. If we only talk about our failings, our faults, our decline, and forget to talk about how this “hobbling” denomination still sparks incredible ministry, still touches people’s lives, we undercut the energy needed to change what needs changing.

I am currently reading an updated edition of the book Rabbi Edwin Friedman left unfinished at his death, A Failure of Nerve: leadership in the age of the quick fix. I read an earlier version of this work while I was a district superintendent, but wanted to re-read it now that it has been edited. Friedman is critical of our society’s addiction to data, information, and technique. Not only do we overwhelm ourselves with data, Friedman argues, but the way we present that data often serves to increase anxiety, neglecting the fact that our response to crisis is also an important variable in how things finally turn out in any situation. Friedman uses medical studies as one example. The data themselves are formatted in anxiety-provoking formulas that, precisely because they leave out emotional variables, give a deterministic impression…. They are always phrased in a way that stresses damage (which is so much more easily measured) rather than the chances for survival.

While reading Friedman, I also came across the following in a recent issue of The New York Times Book Review. It is a quote from the book Break Through, a book about environmentalism (a book I have not read and am not endorsing – except insofar as I found this quote illuminating). “We know from extensive psychological research that presenting frightening scenarios provokes fatalism, paralysis and… individualistic thoughts of adaptation, not empowerment, hope, creativity and collective action.”

Maybe how we tell the truth matters. Maybe in the midst of difficult times and challenging circumstances, we need to find where things are also going well, where flowers are finding their way through the cracks of sidewalks, where life is emerging in deadly surroundings. Then we may have the energy needed to nurture life, to foster faith, to grow in love, and to make needed and necessary changes.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David