General Conference elections

Friends, colleagues, and church family, in anticipation of this year’s Annual Conference and elections for the 2016 General Conference, I felt compelled to share the following message with clergy in South Carolina.  I want to share it with you as well and ask you to start praying, or to continue to pray, for all of our delegates and for our whole Connection.

Friends,

I have had a lot of folks ask me if I want to be elected as a delegate to General Conference. I understand the reason for the questions. After coming so close to being elected bishop in 2012, I told our jurisdictional delegation that I was “done,” and it was a good reflection of my feelings in the moment. But I have also never ceased to try to discern God’s call and to offer faithful service at all levels of the Connection. God willing, I have 13 more years to serve and I plan on doing it! I look older than I am!

After much prayer, I am not ready to give up the hard fought efforts that I think are necessary to preserve and renew the UMC. With so many people trying to push the denomination into intractable corners, we must be extra vigilant to maintain our identity. One of the issues coming up in 2016 is a subtle approach to split us into a regional polity that would allow UM’s in one region or another to have their own separate Book of Discipline. It is a circuitous method to move towards local options that are the antithesis of our connectionalism.

On hot-button issues this brand of congregationalism, in my opinion, would make lawyers extremely happy and could ultimately cause a mass exodus of faithful United Methodists who would rather stay together.  This was evident during the four years I spent as a member of the Worldwide UMC Study Committee, which was established by the 2008 General Conference to engage these very issues throughout the global church, and it remains so today.  I want to keep working for our denomination to find fresh ways to serve new, younger, and more diverse people without compromising the core values of our beliefs. I firmly believe in a mission statement that makes disciples for Jesus, and affirms through the Connection that “Together We Can Do More!”

So, as you vote for clergy delegates, please prayerfully consider voting for me. I love being back in the local church as the pastor of St. John’s in Aiken, but I still feel gifted and called to serve on the larger stage of our denomination. I need your help to speak up prophetically. I agree with Wesley: “In essentials, let there be unity; in non-essentials, let there be liberty; in all things, charity.” We are at a critical juncture of discernment in the UMC as we carefully define the essentials and the peripheral. Thanks!

Tim McClendon

Involvement in the United Methodist Connection

Effective local church pastor; Delegate to 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012 General Conferences; District Superintendent (8 years); Conference Parliamentarian (21 years); Chair, Annual Conference Restructuring; Denman Evangelism Award recipient; Exec. Comm. Bd. of Ordained Ministry; Member of General Council on Ministries; Native American Forum; GBHEM Native American Scholarship Committee, SC AC Comm. on Native American Ministry

Connectional Table (8 years); World Wide Nature of the UMC Study Committee, Taught “Theology in the Wesleyan Spirit” and “UM Discipline and Polity” at Candler (12 years), and UM History at Lutheran Seminary; Chair, SEJ Rules Committee, and two quadrennia on SEJ Episcopacy Committee (second longest tenure on the comm.); 2011 Candler Distinguished Alumni Award; current member of General Commission on Religion and Race (GCORR)

General Conference and BOD legislation writer for 4 General Agencies of the UMC; published in Circuit Rider numerous times; and author of “A Potter’s View” Blog which has been frequently cited on UMC.org

Jurisdictional – Fear, Trembling, & Leadership!

In preparation for Jurisdictional Conference and the episcopal election process, I have been reading a lot of N.T. Wright, novels, and Rabbi Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. Friedman, famous for his work on Family Systems in his book Generation to Generation, attempts to tackle universal and especially American dysfunction about leadership. He says that we are overwhelmed by anxiety in our culture and that a key to overcoming this toxic state is “clear, decisive, well-defined leadership.” His assumption is that when a system, be it family, religion, or state, is driven by anxiety, there will often be a failure of nerve among its leaders.

He states that a belief that having the right data or technique has been valued over personal responsibility and leadership. His diagnosis of our current state of anxiety and chronic tension is perpetuated when systems sabotage the initiative of leaders. Friedman suggests that we need to ponder the emotional processes that focus on “issues” or “identified patients,” rather than on the challenging self-differentiation of leaders. Often in counseling situations it seems appropriate to “fix” the problem child, adult, or issue, when what one really needs to do is coach the strongest element of the emotional field to differentiate. Sounds a bit like Gil Rendle saying a problem without a solution isn’t really a problem.

Success comes when leadership is able to stay connected to the rest of the system emotionally while at the same time remain separate. Integrity is the word Friedman uses for this concept. Integrity is an interesting word. Its French roots, in tegere, mean “in touch.” A person with integrity is “in touch” with those with whom community is shared, but more importantly, for leadership and the dissipation of anxiety, persons of integrity are “in touch” with their own self/core. From that core of strength a leader can manage their own anxiety and can maintain challenge and connection with those to whom they relate as leader.

Good leadership doesn’t react to troublemakers or the emotional processes of a group. Leadership offers vision that is an emotional rather than cerebral approach. In other words, leadership depends more on a person’s capacity to deal with his/her own anxiety rather than quick-fix gimmicks that only mask the latent tensions. A leader, according to Friedman’s experience is someone who, “generally turned out to be the one who could express himself or herself with the least amount of blaming and the one who had the greatest capacity to take responsibility for his or her own emotional being and destiny.”

Wow! This is exciting material, thought-provoking and challenging. This is the kind of leadership I want to exhibit as a bishop. Therefore, in preparation for the possibilities of the next two weeks I am trying to avoid reactivity and stay centered in God. I want to continue working on my own self-definition, and practice non-anxious presence. It will be a challenge. These coming days for our denomination demand leaders who are grounded in Christ and able to both still and stir the waters of a tumultuous yet yearning world.

I have been pigeon-holed as a Moderate, a Liberal, and a Conservative, and I can’t be boxed in. Bottom-line, my call to the episcopacy is at the intersection of 4 quadrants: one has been an extremely successful Local Church ministry and Denman Evangelism Award; another has been as a Teacher in two seminaries and Candler Distinguished Alumni Award; yet another has been as Servant of the Annual Conference as Parliamentarian, District Superintendent, and much more; then finally as a Bridge Builder and Worker on the General Church level via the General Council on Ministries, Connectional Table, Worldwide UMC Study Committee, and 5 time delegate to General Conference.

These opportunities have meshed over time into an episcopal call. Now it’s up to the church to confirm it, and I say that with more than a little fear and trembling. I want to do all I can to be an effective leader for Jesus Christ! All the more reason to keep reading Friedman and simply, not so simply, being me – an interesting mixture of leadership opportunities and perspectives – trying always to be faithful to the task.

Mature or Manure

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I don’t know about you but I’ll be happy when Election Day is over. The ads have been so negative and the mudslinging misses the point of leadership. It’s not about what the other person has or hasn’t done. The better questions to ask a candidate are, “What are you going to do?” “What is your vision/plan?” I have heard smatterings of that in the midst of trashing/bashing, but not near enough.

Let me ask you, would you rather work for a negative person or a positive person? Joyce Landorf in her book, Balcony People, says that people are either Balcony or Basement People. Balcony People affirm, lift up, and encourage. Basement People pull down, criticize, and judge. On this All Saints’ Day, I’m thinking about the Balcony People who are in the greatest balcony of all – heaven. As a matter of fact, I’m making a list so that when the Basement People and their negativity are on the prowl, I can remember who and Whose I am. The question then comes, “I wonder whose list of Balcony People I am on?”

Last week there was an awful stench around Columbia, our state’s capitol city. No joke! By the end of the week it had been discovered that it was from a huge amount of chicken manure spread over a farm near the city. How appropriate! I’m ready for the smell of partisanship and its negative stench to dissipate, too. We have to work together. Yesterday I was at a Charge Conference where the devotion was given and the speaker unintentionally mixed up words. Instead of saying we should “mature in our faith,” it came out “We should manure in our faith.” I’m glad it was at a wonderful church and the levity was good for the meeting. Truth be told, one could say that we need to do both, grow in our faith and be good fertilizer for others.

With politics I’m looking for maturity. Unfortunately, with the mid-term elections and all the local races, things have been smelling more like manure than maturity. Good leadership is more mature than manure. Hope you have a good All Saints’ Day and that you avoid all manure-spreaders!