Servant Leadership

Last week I had the opportunity to sit in on the final presentations of students who took part in the Butler (University) Summer Institute.  This year there were 29 young scholars, representing every college on campus and a wide variety of majors, who spent over two months researching under the direction of a member of the faculty.  Many of them will take that summer research and turn it into either a departmental or university honors thesis.  As I have told several people since BSI came to a close, it was by far one of the most enjoyable (and varied) academic "conferences" I have been to in a very long time.

For the purposes of this little blog of mine though, one of the presentations stood out.  It was on servant leadership in the United Methodist Church by Brittney Stephan, a rising senior at Butler.  Brittney has been interning with a local congregation (with the approval of the Indiana annual conference), studying the topic of servant leadership (for more, see the following) and what both laity and clergy mean by the term.

Like the other presentations, it was interesting and well done.  Perhaps it struck a chord with me though because of my work on the Mainline.  While I did not look at servant leadership, the idea that there might be a disconnect between the different levels of a denomination (top level bureaucracy, clergy, laity) over terms, ideas, or pronouncements was hardly surprising.  That there has not been more study of these kinds of issues is surprising.  Perhaps in the future, there will be.

Christmas Connectionalism

In the United Methodist Church there is a concept called "connectionalism."  The idea is that every congregation is connected to each other -- not just as part of the same denomination, or even in a broadly Christian kind of way, but in a deeper way.  It harkens back, in some ways to the circuit rider days on the American frontier (when ordained ministers were in short supply, but congregations were springing up in every new community it seemed).  It also has deeper, Biblical roots (see I Corinthians 12:12, where St. Paul compares the human body to the church/body of Christ).

I thought about this today because, for a variety of reasons, in the past five years, we as a family have attended Christmas Eve services at five different Methodist churches.  For our part, it isn't because we've moved five times in five years, or indulged in something I talk about in The Mainline (church shopping), or had a falling out with minister or congregations, or anything like that.  It is just how it worked out.  One year was at our current home church, one year it was because we were visiting relatives out of town, one year we went back to the church we were married in, and twice it was because friends or family had invited us to worship with them.  All five of those services were fine in their own right, and all added to our family's preparation for celebrating Christmas.

The reason I bring it up on Christmas Eve, is that even within a denomination so devoted (on some level) to this concept of connection, there can be division.  At this time of year, we don't want to dwell on such things of course.  We should want to focus on those things that bind us together in that connection, not that which divides us (even if those issues aren't likely to go away and are very important ones to discuss).  Interestingly enough, one of the other common things that connects my personal Christmas Eves of the recent past (and for several years beyond the last five actually) has been watching the Christmas Mass from St. Peter's Basilica.  This year, was Pope Francis's first, and Time magazine's "Person of the Year" did not disappoint.

And maybe there is something to all that.  Maybe if Christians listened to the Church's various branches (whether Protestant or Catholic, connected within the same denomination or not), it would act more and more like the Body of Christ.  Maybe that would make us more willing to speak out on behalf of our fellow Christians who aren't just seeing some form of secularism or cultural apathetic persecution, but actual life and death persecution.  And perhaps, on a night like tonight, if we aren't able to listen to each other, perhaps we'll listen (in good Methodist fashion) to the angels:

Hark! The herald angels sing,
“Glory to the newborn King;
Peace on earth, and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled!”
Joyful, all ye nations rise,
Join the triumph of the skies;
With th’angelic host proclaim,
“Christ is born in Bethlehem!”