It’s been a… different… couple of weeks.

First of all, shortly after I posted my last entry here, I learned that my hoped for job with OPS had gone to someone else.  They chose to hire from within… being a bureaucracy, they assign points for various aspects of your application, and one of those is added points if you already work for them.  It was those points that put the other candidate over the top.  So, I’m better qualified, but the other individual got the job by virtue of already being employed in a different position within the district.  And that’s simply life.

I continue to hunt though right now I’m a little nervous because I’m not seeing any SQL jobs open in the area.  What SHALL I do!? 

This past weekend, our church hosted a Regional Cluster conference.  First some background.  MCC Church is a congregationally governed denomination.  Final authority resides with the local congregation.  We elect lay delegates who meet every 3 years (beginning with 2007) in a General Conference.  The General Conference has workshops and opportunities to gather and meet with representatives of our churches worldwide.  In business meetings, we meet to discuss and vote on issues confronting our denomination.  When we are not meeting in General Conference, our Board of Elders and Board of Administration run the day to day business of the denomination.  The denomination is divided into 7 Regions, each of which is, at least in theory, guided by an Elder.  During the years that General Conference is not held, Regional Conferences are held.  But, I’ll share a little secret… there’s somewhat of a financial crisis facing the world, and as hard as it may be to understand, the denomination is feeling some of that crisis.  Because of this, it became impractical from a financial perspective to expect local churches to finance sending their people to expensive conference sites (the 2009 conference for my region was originally expected to be held in Puerto Vallarta.)

In addition, due to cost cutting efforts by the denomination, specifically by the Board of Elders, there are currently only 4 Elders to provide coverage for the 7 regions, and so their duties have multiplied while they took significant pay cuts and budgetary cuts.  So, our Elder, a bright young woman (so, she’s older than I… I’m young, so she is too!) developed a clustered core system.  She broke the churches in her region into I believe 7 clusters with a representative from each appointed by her to form a sort of committee to assist her in maintaining contact with all the churches in her region.  Now, all churches in each cluster were invited to a “Regional cluster conference”.  Our cluster is all churches in Colorado and Nebraska.  The conference was held here in Omaha.

As a Lay Delegate for my own congregation, MCC Omaha, I have been involved with the planning and coordination efforts surrounding our conference.  This conference concluded yesterday afternoon, following our 1100 worship service.  After months of planning (more than I think we anticipated) and then meeting weekly for the past 2 weeks, Friday morning, I was at church performing my assigned tasks.  One of the “gifts” I can provide the church is, I’m willing to clean the bathrooms!  Bathroom cleaning seems to be a chore that folks really don’t like. I don’t mind it.  There are two reasons for this.  The first one is something my mother told me years ago.  She acknowledged that cleaning toilets is not a very glamorous job, but she reminded herself that when you love your family, cleaning up after them is not a problem.  I think she put it more eloquently than that, but it always stuck with me!  The other reason has to do with Travis, my White German Shepherd dog.  Travis had epilepsy.  When he was having a seizure, he’d inadvertently pee or poop or vomit or expel his anal glands.  Quite frequently, these would occur while I was holding him, so after his seizure was over, I’d need to clean up after him and then shower because so much would get on me.  One quickly becomes immune to the “ickiness” of that.

My congregation, my church, is my family, and I love them dearly.  That love extends beyond the confines of my local congregation.  Fortunately, this job is rarely “gross”!  But even when it is, I remember the lessons taught me by Travis, and the lesson from Mom.  And I recall the love I have for my congregation and for my denomination.  I remember an experience I had several years ago when I was called upon to preach.  Here, let me digress for a little bit.  During a time when we had no pastor, it fell upon many of us in leadership to take on the role of Pastor… to preach, to care, to guide.  My gift, if anything, at that time was to be in charge of Worship, and to preach occasionally.  On one occasion, I spent several weeks preparing a sermon… I don’t even recall what it was about.  But just 2 days before the day I was to preach, I threw out the entire sermon.  I knew that was not what I was to preach on.  God wanted me to preach about God’s love.  Part of the sermon went like this:

…the Amazon River is the world’s SECOND longest river, but at any one point in time has the highest amount of water flowing down it?  In fact, no other river in the world even comes close.  […]  I know this too.  If a [] gardener decides to water his daisies, then gets called away, leaving the water to run and run and run, the daisies will get too much water, and they’ll drown!  But when God waters us with his love, it’s like the whole of the Amazon River flowing down to water one little daisy. Can you imagine that kind of love?

It was as I was delivering this line in my sermon that I had my experience.  I looked out on my congregation, the friendly faces of my friends looking back with smiles… and the not so friendly faces frowning back at me (our church was in great conflict at this time), faces of those I felt some animosity towards and knew they felt the same regarding me.  I looked out, and I didn’t see these faces from my own eyes.  It was as if I was seeing them from someone else’s eyes, someone who had great love.  I looked out and saw my congregation with the eyes of God… and I could feel my heart being crushed in my chest, as wave after wave of love washed over me.  For one brief moment, I sensed some degree of the love God felt for my congregation… those smiling faces and those frowning faces… and knew as well that if I could look upon all the people of this world, that I’d still feel the same degree of love.  In that brief moment, I could not breathe, my heart could not beat, and I thought, no I knew, that surely if this continued I could not continue to live.  No human is capable of feeling that degree of love, it would kill them!  I wish I could say that I’ve always remembered that experience, but I’m just too flawed.  There are times I look at people, and it isn’t God’ love I feel for them, but something quite different!

Back to our conference…

Then there were the hours of hospitality, manning the registration tables, chatting with our visitors from Colorado, and some from Kansas who came just to be here as a sign of support.  And there was the responsibilities of attending the business meeting, or the various workshops, or taking my roles in worship.  Friday I was at church from before 9 a.m. until after 10 p.m.  Saturday, we were there by 7:30 a.m., and until after 9 p.m.  Sunday we arrived at 8.  The conference ended at 12:30

Saturday, we had a plenary session, during which we heard about "When God Comes to Church: Assessing the Culture of the Local Church for Spiritual Growth".  After lunch, we broke up into workshops.  I attended one about revitalizing the role of Lay Delegate.  One thing we’ve all noticed is that, during the past 15 years, this position has become less and less important, and many churches began to minimize the importance of it.  As a result, lay delegates to conference often were unprepared to address their church’s concerns to the denomination.  Important decisions were made based not on what the local congregation wanted, but on what the Lay Delegate wanted.  This was the result of the local congregation not being well informed.  For instance, in some churches, the Lay Delegate would address the congregation, but before (s)he could inform the congregation about what was going to happen at the conference the church would abrogate it’s responsibility to send an informed delegate by telling him/her “Just vote your conscience”.

After that, we held “Holy Conversations”.  There were 3 of these.  The idea is to enter in to conversations recognizing the diversity of culture, the diversity of opinion and the inherent value of each in discussions of importance to the body meeting.  We discussed diverse theologies present in the denomination, the structure, overall, of the denomination, and certain changes required by our interim structures due to the reduction in Elders.

Finally, we held worship Saturday evening in which we learned what we already knew, namely our church is predominantly made up of 40 – 65 year olds; then we began discussing what it was like for a young person to enter our worship or our congregational life, and how we absolutely MUST reach out to these younger people, incorporate them, and in fact turn over our future to them now, while they are young and vibrant.  The sermon was conversational in nature between our Elder who is over 50, and the youngest clergy in our region, a 28 year old.  What are we doing right?  (very little) and what are we doing wrong?  (a lot)

Many of us left church yesterday very, very tired.

Now, I throw myself in to planning our wedding!  We’ve picked, tentatively, our location… a place called Castle Unicorn.  I have SO much to do!