God's Grace and Church Growth and "Survival"

On January 25, 2013, an article was posted in The United Methodist Reporter by Dr. Stephen Rankin, chaplain of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Tx.  The article was titled "SMU Chaplain: The United Methodist Church is Imploding."

Dr. Rankin is very careful to qualify his statement that this "implosion" is not a quick event as one normally pictures an implosion of a building, per se.  He is also very explicit that he writes this article in love for the Church, and does not want to be a "gloom and doom" person, and that there are "beautiful exceptions," as he quotes.

I do not want to discredit what Dr. Rankin has to say.  The statistics of the UMC show that numbers are down (the same can be said of many, if not all North American Churches, but I will focus on the UMC).  Dr. Rankin makes a very good point that the church needs leadership that MUST involve young people to overcome this decline.

I wish to offer an alternate perspective without denying the realities that Dr. Rankin discussed. We do not worship a God who pays much attention to statistics. Starting int he Hebrew Scriptures, there is no statistical reason that Israel should have survived to the Babylonian Exile, much less very far past it.  But, they did.  Even after their expulsion from Israel, the Jewish people, God's covenant people, maintained their nationhood in exile throughout the world, and though the modern state of Israel exists, There are millions of Jews still living throughout the world, some in areas of high persecution. But they survive.  This defies all statistical analysis.

Dr. Rankin uses a troublesome analogy to me.  He says, "what if we realized that God can, and might, and maybe has – at least for a time – removed the glory from us?"  To his credit, he does not wish to press this analogy very far.  I object to this possibility for several reasons.  First: God cannot be absent from any of his creation.  Second: The glory is not ours to have, the glory belongs to God and God alone.  Third: The solutions belong to God. Through human cooperation and following God's leading through the Holy Spirit, a church cannot "implode."

Continually beating down pastors and other church leaders as not "doing enough" does not inspire - it creates a sense of panic and worry.  That does not mean that I'm not in favor of accountability.  In fact, we need more.  But accountability is not through statistics alone. There are external variables (location, population, preceding factors before a pastor comes to a congregation, the spiritual state of the congregation, etc.) that the pastor alone cannot overcome.  The pastor needs God. Only God can overcome these barriers and the pastor can cooperate with God.    

The UMC can and should adapt, and maybe even change.  The UMC should take ownership of our own problems, but we cannot forget that the answers ONLY lie in God's leading.  We can ONLY cooperate in God's leading.  We cannot lead God.  We cannot be ruled by fear, but rather, we must be ruled by the hope made possible by Christ - the one we worship!