reading the obituaries

I, like you who listen to the news, have been hearing continual updates about the health of American car companies, or ill-health, as it were. Chrysler might go into bankruptcy this afternoon. GM's deadline is a month away. Although I have, in my life, owned a GM ('77 Chevy Malibu), a Chrysler ('94 Jeep Cherokee) and a GM ('04 Pontiac Vibe). I think overall this intense pressue to change or die is a good thing. These companies have had a flawed business model for a long time and, it seems to me as a very uneducated outsider, have been ignoring it. They can ignore no longer. They will emerge, or not, from this crisis ready for business today and in the future. Necessary growing pains, that's what this looks like to me.

I really have little stake in the car companies, someone will keep making cars for me to buy. But the thought keeps occurring to me that the United Methodist Church is GM. We are a bloated and inflexible institution with too many stakeholders and too many reasons to keep the status quo instead of doing the hard work of change. I'm not saying anything new here. I, like you, can read the same analysis the denomination over. My question is...what will be our bankruptcy filing? What will be our recession? What will be the cataclysmic event that forces the change we cannot manage to create on our own? I don't know. Perhaps I should pray for that. For the United Methodist Church's bankruptcy filing. Would that be a heretical prayer?

Or maybe we are better understood as the newspaper industry. United Methodists are print newspapers who are struggling so mightily to figure out how to package our important content (the news) in a world of new media. People are not subscribing like they used to. Nor will they ever again to the same old delivery system. Our revenue model (print ads) is headed down a dead end road. Other people are innovating around us, but we are staring institutional death in the face. What will be our digital revolution?

This morning I was reading Paul Nixon's "I Refuse to Lead a Dying Church" which includes this paragraph about choosing to be a bold church over a mild church...

The milder the vision expressed [by a church], the more [their] energy is
diverted to fellowship, childcare, and building renovation, to entertainment
activities, parties and trips. The mild church is a religious Elk's Lodge except
for about an hour a week, when we sit quietly in a room decorated to my
grandmother's tastes and try to think (and even sing) nice thoughts about Jesus
and loving others, as our leaders run around down front in sixteenth century
costumes. Indeed there is a place in the world (and a market) for fraternal
organizations such as the Elks. But the Elks total membership is headed in the
same direction as the Episcopalians.

Or the United Methodists. He could have said, as the United Methodists. That paragraph stings, because it fairly accurately describes my work life.

This seems like a problem to me.

I do not want to be GM.

I do not want to be a print newspaper. (no offense to my many friends in the newspaper business).

I don't need to be the new "hotness" full of all things cutting edge either.

I just don't want to lead a dying church.