Adam Hamilton: Itinerant General Superintendent?

If that title doesn’t grab people from the methoblog front page, I’m not sure what will. Adam Hamilton, senior pastor of Church of the Resurrection (a UMC of 12,000+ members where I am currently interning) made the following announcement on his blog yesterday:

At the end of May I started a project that will not be completed for six or seven years. Over the next six or seven years we hope to provide a leadership, preaching and evangelism training program for all 16,000 United Methodist clergy and at least one layperson from all 32,000+ United Methodist churches. The program consists of three 90 minute sessions: Essentials of Leadership, Improving Preaching and Worship, and Evangelism and Outreach in the United Methodist Tradition.

We’re providing this training exclusively through the sessions of annual conference so that every pastor and a lay member of every annual conference must attend. There are sixty-six annual conferences in the United States and they are all held in late May through mid June, which will require speaking at 8 to 10 a year – two to three a week. To my knowledge this has not been done since the time of Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke – the first two General Superintendents of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America in the late 1700’s.

We’re challenging every United Methodist Church to have a written mission statement that is short but compelling and consistent with our denomination’s mission statement. We’re challenging pastors and church leaders to develop several specific and measurable goals to strengthen their churches in the following year. We’re challenging pastors to develop a preaching plan, to offer sermons that will connect with unchurched people, and to develop follow-up strategies for new visitors. And we’re encouraging lay and clergy leaders to honestly evaluate their strengths and weaknesses in the area of leadership and to focus on at least two areas they will work to improve.

Ambitious, I don’t envy his travel schedule… and gutsy. Generally people don’t tend to offer their services to annual conferences. I’m pretty sure that most people wait to be asked to speak, and then they are often given a direction to go by the bishop or sessions committee. Additionally, it takes a certain amount of audacity to compare yourself by implication to Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke. I say this at some risk, you understand, as Adam is my boss’s boss’s boss currently, although I have had one or two occasions to tell him what to do on the delegation. I also got to drive his Mustang once, but that’s another story. I’ve found Adam to be very humble, so I don’t accuse him of of arrogance, but the comparison that he makes is striking.

What he is proposing is in one sense, episcopal. “The purpose of superintending is to equip the Church in its disciple-making ministry. Those who superintend carry primary responsibility for ordering the life of the Church. It is their task to enable the gather Church to worship and to evangelize faithfully.” (para 401 Discipline 2004). Now, he isn’t really superintending strictly speaking, he doesn’t consult on appointments or supervise clergy, but he is assuming a teaching role that really hasn’t been seen except in bishops (think Robert Schnase or Will Willimon) or seminary professors (think Lovett Weems), and on a scale that, as Adam said, hasn’t been seen since Coke or Asbury.

By offering and ultimately probably doing a training session at most conferences in the country, he will fill a void in our current episcopal leadership. The “general” part of “general superintendent” was greatly diminished as bishops were forced to locate and assigned several and eventually one to two annual conferences to oversee. Additionally, general agencies took over some of the general instructional function of the episcopacy as they ballooned in the late 19th and early 20th century. Also, the administrative responsibilities of the bishop within an annual conference have increased greatly and further diminished their opportunity to offer leadership and training to the whole church.

It is hard to classify what Adam is proposing. Before I stray too far, I recognize that he is ultimately appointed to The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, KS and doing a fine job of it. In the role he is carving out for himself and COR as resource and teacher for the United Methodist Church and in this specific role though he is like a general evangelist, but for annual conferences, a function that is very much indeed like what Asbury and Coke did in the late 18th and early 19th century.

What does everyone think? Incredible asset to the mainline church? Picking up the slack? Remarkably presumptuous?

-Luke