Dear friends,

It had been a long week, and I was driving home from my fourth out-of-town disaffiliation meeting in four nights, meetings attended by members from seven small congregations on the Valley Ridge District. My next presentation would be three days later for a circuit of three churches located two hours from my home. As I drove, the smoke from the Canadian wildfires mingled with the quickly approaching dusk to transform the typically serene, pastoral vistas into something resembling a dystopian landscape. I felt like I had eaten every meal for a week in my car.

When a District Superintendent gives the one of the presentations which are necessary to begin the disaffiliation process in the Virginia Conference, we explain to those gathered that the congregation must begin their work with thirty days of prayer and discernment. There are no exceptions to this rule, no matter what objections we hear: We’ve been praying about this for years, preacher! Why do we have to do it some more? 

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Each time I pray at the end of a disaffiliation presentation or a disaffiliation church conference, I end the prayer with the lyric quoted above. I try to remind those gathered together that by the power of the Holy Spirit working in and through the body of Christ, come what may, we are still somehow one. And then, during the drive home, hollow but hopeful, I think about what all of this means, and what it means for Christians around the world and throughout history, to be one as Jesus prays for us to be in his Farewell Discourse in the Gospel of John. 

I have, quite literally, driven thousands of miles alone, mulling this over, trying to discern how history and generations yet unborn will regard us. I remember, as a young twenty-something sitting beneath the florescent lights of seminary classrooms hearing lectures about the schisms of centuries past. I remember studying in the musty stacks of the Duke Divinity School library, reading about the Christians of ages past who died a martyr’s death rather than compromise their principles, and I think about future students of theology, decades or centuries from now, studying for their final exam in church history, looking back at us.   

And so, we prepare for the upcoming special Annual Conference on May 6, where 64 churches will come seeking ratification of their discernment to disaffiliate from the United Methodist Church over matters of conscience related to human sexuality. These churches have prayed, discerned, organized, worked, and prepared for this moment, as they embark on a new mission to be and make disciples of Jesus Christ without the familiar network of support they have heretofore relied upon as they depart the connection that they helped to create and maintain.

I have been a pastor since I was twenty-five years old. Pastoral ministry is the only job I have ever had that was not minimum wage, where the interview questions were more difficult than “Do you think you can operate the register?” and “Are you available nights and weekends?” My time on this earth will be marked by my children and my churches, and I have to admit, it is very difficult to watch individuals and congregations regard what has been my life’s work and turn away from it. It never gets any easier.

And still, Christ is with us, in our midst, preparing us with a future with hope.

           Following this May 6, 2023 special Annual Conference, there will be one more opportunity for ratifications of disaffiliations under Paragraph 2553. Paragraph 2553.2 (approved in 2019) states:

“2. Time Limits—The choice by a local church to disaffiliate with The United Methodist Church under this paragraph shall be made in sufficient time for the process for exiting the denomination to be complete prior to December 31, 2023. The provisions of ¶2553 expire on December 31, 2023 and shall not be used after that date.”

The Virginia Conference’s final ratifying Annual Conference will be held on Saturday, October 7, 2023(virtually).  All process, documents and deposits must be received 30 days prior, by September 7, 2023.  In order for a local church to complete the disaffiliation process by the timeframe established by the Book of Discipline and the VAUMC Disaffiliation Process, a local church will need to have had their Congregational Information meeting with me no later than July 7, 2023.  

After Paragraph 2553 sunsets on December 31, 2023, we will have a pause on disaffiliations until after General Conference meets (April 23-May 3, 2024 in Charlotte, NC). It is important to remember that the General Conference is the only body that can amend our Book of Discipline, including ¶2553. 

At this point, we cannot say or predict that the outcome of the 2024 General Conference will be. However, as I tell congregations on the Valley Ridge District, “while we do not know what the future holds, we know who holds the future.” God will continue to work in and through us. The United Methodist Church will continue to proclaim the gospel, to make disciples of Jesus Christ, and transform the world, abiding with the broken hearted and binding the wounds of the suffering. As Dr. Thomas Langford was fond of saying to his students at Duke Divinity School, “When it seems to you that the church is too human to succeed, remember it is also too divine to fail.” 

It is hope for us, and the best hope for the world today.

The church succeeds, not because of the glory of our architecture, the beauty of our music, or the purity of our preaching. It succeeds because it is the place where Christ has graciously decided to locate himself for nothing less than the salvation of planet Earth. 

Grace and peace, 

Doug

7^th Sunday After the Epiphany – February 20, 2022

1 Samuel 3:1-18

There is a situation in which I would like for you imagine yourself this morning: corruption is rampant, and everything seems to be falling apart. Your leader is an ever-weakening, failure of a man with two astonishingly sinful and repugnant sons who always seem to do whatever they please, regardless of how abhorrent it is, and they never suffer any consequences for it. Also, no one is hearing from God anymore, and when God finally does speak, God speaks to you and informs you that God’s punishment will rain down upon this leader and his morally bereft household. You quickly learn that it is your responsibility to deliver this difficult news directly to the leader, who while not your father, happens to be the man who raised you. 

And by the way, you are eleven years old, a fifth grader. 

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Shouting at the Sky

Warwick Memorial United Methodist Church

16 September 2001

Luke 23:13-34

On September 11, 2001, I was serving as the associate pastor of my first pastoral appointment. Tracy was pregnant with our first child Ellen, but we were not telling people yet. The day before, on September 10, our church’s beloved lay leader J.T. Johnson had died suddenly. I had already been scheduled to preach, and the Rev. Larry Adams, our senior pastor, graciously allowed me to preach. What follows is what I said that Sunday.

We have all lived through one of those days where we will always remember where we were and what we were doing. We will always remember how old we were and to whom we were talking and what we were going to do when we heard the news. We will live the remainder of our days remembering how when we heard the news we quickly scanned our mental Rolodexes, trying to remember which loved ones were where. Did anyone have a reason to fly today? Was anyone in Manhattan or in northern Virginia? Maybe I should call, just to be sure.

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It was only my second day in the parsonage of my rural, three-point circuit of churches when the phone rang and a voice on the other end of the line informed me that John Ben Varga had died. John Ben was, in many ways, a patriarch of that small community, and his death in the middle of the week meant that my first sermon in my new pastoral appointment would be a funeral sermon for someone known across the county, just not by me.

Almost immediately after I received the phone call regarding John Ben, I received another call from the pastor who was my predecessor in that appointment, offering to return and help in any way I needed, or to allow me to handle things myself. I told him I appreciated his generous offer but felt comfortable handling things myself.

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When I was in divinity school, the twenty-one-year-old singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette released an album titled Jagged Little Pill. It was a tremendous hit, yielding six singles, charting at number one in the United States for twelve weeks, and selling 33 million copies worldwide. If you remember those days, you have probably heard at least one song from the album. In the days before YouTube and streaming music services, Jagged Little Pill was played on practically every radio station, it seemed, all day long.

One of the best-known songs from the album is titled “Ironic” and it is known for, among other things, the lyric “It’s like ten-thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.” In many ways, this lyric succinctly describes how church life and pastoral ministry feel in a postmodern age.

Allow me to explain: For centuries, the cultural landscape in this nation was like a seemingly infinite field of bowls of soup that stretched all the way to the horizon and the church possessed a seemingly endless supply of serving spoons. When I was a young person, like so many of my colleagues in ministry, I felt a calling to serve soup. I graduated from college and enrolled in seminary. I was ordained, graduated, and received my spoon, just as I expected based on what I witnessed in the lives of those who led me to the soup in the first place. I was a soup-server, and I anxiously awaited a lifetime of service to the people and communities to which I was sent; communities I believed would be hungry for soup for as long as anyone dared imagine. The soup line seemed to stretch forever. Besides, you basically had to eat soup in order to fit into most places.

And then, it seemed, the world lost its taste for soup.

It did not happen overnight. Sometimes people simply grew tired of soup and sought other forms of sustenance. Other times we only served the soup to people who looked and lived like us, and not like our communities. Still other times, we simply served bad soup that made people so ill they were done with soup forever, no matter how we changed the recipe.

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