AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH

CONVO XV

December 13-14, 2011

GOD’S ABUNDANCE IN THE MIDST OF TOUGH TIMES

Bringing it all together: Spirituality, Service and Stewardship

It is in the bailiwick of the spiritually appraised to attend to the matters of the right now, to be acutely aware of our situatedness and yet to transcend our present circumstance in an effort to know how we got here, what our being here might portend and how we may live into the reality God intends for us.

And so, while we gather in 145th Session of the Tennesee Annual Conference, we note with excitement and hopeful anticipation, that we are situated at the beginning of a new quadriennial and hastening to the celebration of the Bicentennial of the AME Church.

It is imperative, too, that we discipline ourselves to ensure we are aware of less obvious circumstances that surround us and in which we are embedded:

Just a couple miles down Briley Parkway, you will find I-440, a connector of sort for Interstates 24, 40 and 65.  I-65 will take you from Mobile, Alabama through Tennessee and Kentucky to Gary, Indiana. I-24 will take you from Illinois through Kentucky and Tennessee and passes through a smidgen of North Georgia before terminating in Chattanooga.  I-40 will take you from California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, pret near through the heart of downtown Nashville, Tennessee passing right beneath Lee Chapel and a couple blocks from St. John will take you all the way to Wilmington, North Carolina.  So we are sitting in a crossroads and everything that is true about crossroads is true about where you are sitting.

North Nashville is fraught with challenges.  It is, in fact, a food desert and one of the most dangerous places in the city.  Every Sundaymorning at St. John and Lee Chapel when Pastors Sinkfield and Thompson stand to preach the Gospel they are trusting God (while we are praying with them in our supposedly safer places), that someone will not enter and do violence as they have in other parts of the country.

In a community where shootings of black men and boys seem to take place daily, Rev. Thompson, our Pastor at Lee Chapel and our members there continue to mentor, educate, train young boys and girls in rites of passage and music programs reversing the negative projections made about our young people.

In this Crossroads, more and more cases of human trafficking are being reported in Davidson County.
South Nashville is a hotbed of prostitution.  On I-24 there is a proliferation of inexpensive hotels where immigrants, the young, the poor are victimized and forced into prostitution.

Housing the Homeless in middle Tennessee continues to be a great challenge in Tennessee as more families become homeless and transients due to loss of homes and jobs.  We are finding that more and more children are eating their only meals during the school day and are left hungry on the weekends.

For over 20 years, our sisters and brothers at Greater Bethel led by Pastor Michael Broadnax and St. John led by Pastor W. Antoni Sinkfield have sought to minister to the homeless population by opening their doors to offer people a place to sleep and eat through their participation in an ecumenical organization called Room in the Inn.  Pastor Sidney Bryant and the anointed people of Payne Chapel have been feeding the hungry in East Nashville and the larger community consistently and in times of crises.

We are a city rich with the cultural contributions of people from all over the world. We are a stones-throw from Little Kurdistan, areas of the city so-named because Middle Tennessee has the largest number of Kurds in the country.  Little Kurdistan in emblematic of the diversity of the city of Nashville.
We have welcomed our sisters and brothers from the Sudan, there is a burgeoning community of Egyptian Christians who are struggling to enjoy religious freedom here.
Our Somali and Bhutanese (who began to arrive in 2008) brothers and sisters have taken refuge here and there is a very strong Hispanic community in Middle Tennessee.

And as I stand and celebrate God’s distributed abundance amid and amongst the various communities of Middle Tennessee, there are those who are unwelcoming and inhospitable.  Yet, African Methodist pastors have been standing with other clergy and faith leaders to declare that we are a community of hospitality and that similar legislation to that which passed in Alabama is not acceptable here in Tennessee.

Nashville enjoys religious diversity.  Still, our Muslim brothers and sisters face the challenges of the ignorant and afraid who have stood in protest of their building of mosques in Murfreesboro and Brentwood.

And in our congregations, challenges of ministry about.  Being consistent and effective in pastoral care among them.  Pastor Lisa Hammonds models for us excellence in discipleship ministry and in tender care to the least of these.  She is a champion of the ministry of compassion, teaching us not to be afraid and to embrace the power of touch.

During the epic flood of 2010, Pastor Harold Love, Jr. picked up the gauntlet and, leading the people at St. Paul Hamilton Road became the main point person in North Nashville that City, state and federal officials called upon to develop their response.  Pastor Sidney Bryant and the people of Payne Chapel stepped up to the plate in that grave our and have continued to feed the hungry in their community and the larger Nashville community.

But at this moment, you are seated in the environs of the Tennessee Annual Conference comprised of about 60 congregations of passionate, living, breathing, loving people who are committed to God and the mission of the African Methodist Episcopal Church as we understand it.  We are mostly rural and very rural.  Many are family churches.  We are doing ministry and we are paying our budget! The greatness of our history is only eclipsed by glory of the future God has promised to us.

The members of the Tennessee annual conference are not basking in the light of an awesome past nor sitting saucer-eyed waiting for the revealing of a brighter future, we are right here and in the right now with our sleeves rolled up, our collars loosened and our preaching shoes on.  We have determined to answer the call of God to participate with Christ in the ongoing renewal of creation.

I beg your attention to these notes in an effort create a lens through which to see and understand that everywhere we are as African Methodists there are challenges to be met, problems to be solved, questions to be answered, sicknesses to be healed, injustices to undo and oppressed persons to be delivered.

And so it is to a prophetic ministry that we have been called.  Called to unfurl a vision of the glorious future God intends into a world that has all but given up hope.
Called to preach the gospel to people who know the sound of preaching but who have been disappointed so many times they are often unable to believe the content of it.

It is into this site of our interpretive enterprise that we have been called by God to cast a vision of God’s love in action.  God calls the prophet to cast a vision of a brighter and more glorious future.  As this vision unfolds into a world that runs counter to it, a great tension is created.  There is an unavoidable tension between what is and what God desires to be.  It is in this tension that miracles are made.  It is in this tension that a lowdown world is pulled up into the shape and contour of the creation God intended from the beginning.

It is ours, African Methodists who seize onto the prophetic ministry, who live out the prophetic calling to stand and deliver, to paint a vivid picture of the reality God intends.

And so, the question is asked, “Are you willing to be prophetic?”
Are you willing to speak truth to power?
Are you willing to to set aside the pursuit of comfort
Are you willing to expose yourself to the scrutiny of  a hostile public
Are you willing to stand in opposition to those with more money, more resources, more time and often more hate than you?
Are you willing to go even if you have to go by yourself?
Are you willing to disclipline yourself?
Are you willing to spend a great deal of time in prayer?
Are you willing to lose sleep?
to study, to read, to write, to study, to read, to write, to study, to read, to write
Are you willing to allow the Word of God to work on you?  Are you willing to allow the Word of God to work on you?  Are you willing to allow the Word of God to work on you?
Are you willing to give up long held beliefs, practices and even prejudices?
to allow the Word of God to cut you and heal you? Are you willing to expose your heart to this two-edged sword?
to give up your druthers and preferences
to stop knowing and begin listening and learning
to confront your own stuff
Are you willing to let the Word of God shape YOU?
Are you willing to live a life of sacrifice
to be lonely
to be judged, maligned, misunderstood, dreaded, unappreciated, feared
to practice the Presence of God
are you willing to lay your head in the bosom of the Father and learn the beating of His heart?
Are you then willing to speak it when the world is out of step with the Father’s heartbeat?

And so it our right, privilege and responsibility to preach prophetically

The voice of God IS summoning us:
To rediscover our voices, cultivate a prophetic vocabulary and preach with power,
To situate ourselves in the history of our people with the abolitionist Frederick Douglass echoing in our hearts,  and then, without equivocation or excuse, use the severest language we can command to preach with power.
To envision high ideals, render them into poetry and speak with power
To “dream in league with God” and
To lose ourselves in the ecstasy of heavenly visions and have the courage and the audacity to translate what we see into what we say
To risk the ire and disdain of the dim, dull and benighted majority and speak light into dark places
To shun, to eschew distractions that are as delightful as they are deadly and maintain the determination to speak with power
To slay lazy thinking, banish unrefined thoughts, open a worthy and challenging book, go down into it by yourself and wrestle with the content until you are blessed with new and fresh ideas of your own

Are you willing to pray?

Are we willing to set prayer as priority rather than having it relegated to very early mornings and out of the way sites. Prioritizing prayer is to give preminence to hearing from God rather than giving (first place / honor) to our own human devisings

It is a reality that churches of every size and description are suffering as the members of our congregations suffer through this economic malaise.  But it is sophomoric to just blame the economy and then set about to find new revenue streams.  We must take the time, discipline ourselves and climb up into the bosom of the Father and rest our heads long enough to discern the beats of His heart.  The heart beat of God is, in fact, the cadence to which we must march our entire lives.  Time must be taken to discern, not to figure out, but to discern how it is that we find ourselves in our current financial predicament.  Perhaps a good place to start would be close, prayerful readings of Biblical famine narratives.  How did they end up in a famine and how did they make it out?

Maybe it is that we are going to have to do less thinking and strategizing and figuring and more praying and fasting, listening and obeying.

Maybe it is time that we have to admit that we are not as smart nor as strong as we believe and purport ourselves to be and

Maybe it is time to humble ourselves, and pray, recognizing that the Bible says that God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble.

Maybe it is time to “come down where we ought to be” and from our position at the  Master’s feet moistened with our tears to cry out

Father, I Stretch my hands to Thee
No other help I know
If Thou withdraw Thyself from me
Ah wither shall I go?

Maybe it is time to have less of all these other meetings and start holding some sho nuff prayer meeting.

Author of Faith to Thee I lift
My weary longing eyes
O my I now receive that gift
My soul without it dies

Maybe, just maybe it is time to confront our decline not with marketing strategies and church growth gimmickry but by talking to the only one who can give the increase….

Surely, Thou canst not let me die
O Speak and I shall live
and here will I unwearied lie
Till Thou Thy Spirit give.

Bringing it all together: Spirituality, Service and Stewardship

It is in the bailiwick of the spiritually appraised to attend to the matters of the right now, to be acutely aware of our situatedness and yet to transcend our present circumstance in an effort to know how we got here, what our being here might portend and how we may live into the reality God intends for us.

And so, while we gather in 145th Session of the Tennesee Annual Conference, we note with excitement and hopeful anticipation, that we are situated at the beginning of a new quadriennial and hastening to the celebration of the Bicentennial of the AME Church.

It is imperative, too, that we discipline ourselves to ensure we are aware of less obvious circumstances that surround us and in which we are embedded:

Just a couple miles down Briley Parkway, you will find I-440, a connector of sort for Interstates 24, 40 and 65.  I-65 will take you from Mobile, Alabama through Tennessee and Kentucky to Gary, Indiana. I-24 will take you from Illinois through Kentucky and Tennessee and passes through a smidgen of North Georgia before terminating in Chattanooga.  I-40 will take you from California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, pret near through the heart of downtown Nashville, Tennessee passing right beneath Lee Chapel and a couple blocks from St. John will take you all the way to Wilmington, North Carolina.  So we are sitting in a crossroads and everything that is true about crossroads is true about where you are sitting.

North Nashville is fraught with challenges.  It is, in fact, a food desert and one of the most dangerous places in the city.  Every Sundaymorning at St. John and Lee Chapel when Pastors Sinkfield and Thompson stand to preach the Gospel they are trusting God (while we are praying with them in our supposedly safer places), that someone will not enter and do violence as they have in other parts of the country.

In a community where shootings of black men and boys seem to take place daily, Rev. Thompson, our Pastor at Lee Chapel and our members there continue to mentor, educate, train young boys and girls in rites of passage and music programs reversing the negative projections made about our young people.

In this Crossroads, more and more cases of human trafficking are being reported in Davidson County.
South Nashville is a hotbed of prostitution.  On I-24 there is a proliferation of inexpensive hotels where immigrants, the young, the poor are victimized and forced into prostitution.

Housing the Homeless in middle Tennessee continues to be a great challenge in Tennessee as more families become homeless and transients due to loss of homes and jobs.  We are finding that more and more children are eating their only meals during the school day and are left hungry on the weekends.

For over 20 years, our sisters and brothers at Greater Bethel led by Pastor Michael Broadnax and St. John led by Pastor W. Antoni Sinkfield have sought to minister to the homeless population by opening their doors to offer people a place to sleep and eat through their participation in an ecumenical organization called Room in the Inn.  Pastor Sidney Bryant and the anointed people of Payne Chapel have been feeding the hungry in East Nashville and the larger community consistently and in times of crises.

We are a city rich with the cultural contributions of people from all over the world. We are a stones-throw from Little Kurdistan, areas of the city so-named because Middle Tennessee has the largest number of Kurds in the country.  Little Kurdistan in emblematic of the diversity of the city of Nashville.
We have welcomed our sisters and brothers from the Sudan, there is a burgeoning community of Egyptian Christians who are struggling to enjoy religious freedom here.
Our Somali and Bhutanese (who began to arrive in 2008) brothers and sisters have taken refuge here and there is a very strong Hispanic community in Middle Tennessee.

And as I stand and celebrate God’s distributed abundance amid and amongst the various communities of Middle Tennessee, there are those who are unwelcoming and inhospitable.  Yet, African Methodist pastors have been standing with other clergy and faith leaders to declare that we are a community of hospitality and that similar legislation to that which passed in Alabama is not acceptable here in Tennessee.

Nashville enjoys religious diversity.  Still, our Muslim brothers and sisters face the challenges of the ignorant and afraid who have stood in protest of their building of mosques in Murfreesboro and Brentwood.

And in our congregations, challenges of ministry about.  Being consistent and effective in pastoral care among them.  Pastor Lisa Hammonds models for us excellence in discipleship ministry and in tender care to the least of these.  She is a champion of the ministry of compassion, teaching us not to be afraid and to embrace the power of touch.

During the epic flood of 2010, Pastor Harold Love, Jr. picked up the gauntlet and, leading the people at St. Paul Hamilton Road became the main point person in North Nashville that City, state and federal officials called upon to develop their response.  Pastor Sidney Bryant and the people of Payne Chapel stepped up to the plate in that grave our and have continued to feed the hungry in their community and the larger Nashville community.

But at this moment, you are seated in the environs of the Tennessee Annual Conference comprised of about 60 congregations of passionate, living, breathing, loving people who are committed to God and the mission of the African Methodist Episcopal Church as we understand it.  We are mostly rural and very rural.  Many are family churches.  We are doing ministry and we are paying our budget! The greatness of our history is only eclipsed by glory of the future God has promised to us.

The members of the Tennessee annual conference are not basking in the light of an awesome past nor sitting saucer-eyed waiting for the revealing of a brighter future, we are right here and in the right now with our sleeves rolled up, our collars loosened and our preaching shoes on.  We have determined to answer the call of God to participate with Christ in the ongoing renewal of creation.

I beg your attention to these notes in an effort create a lens through which to see and understand that everywhere we are as African Methodists there are challenges to be met, problems to be solved, questions to be answered, sicknesses to be healed, injustices to undo and oppressed persons to be delivered.

And so it is to a prophetic ministry that we have been called.  Called to unfurl a vision of the glorious future God intends into a world that has all but given up hope.
Called to preach the gospel to people who know the sound of preaching but who have been disappointed so many times they are often unable to believe the content of it.

It is into this site of our interpretive enterprise that we have been called by God to cast a vision of God’s love in action.  God calls the prophet to cast a vision of a brighter and more glorious future.  As this vision unfolds into a world that runs counter to it, a great tension is created.  There is an unavoidable tension between what is and what God desires to be.  It is in this tension that miracles are made.  It is in this tension that a lowdown world is pulled up into the shape and contour of the creation God intended from the beginning.

It is ours, African Methodists who seize onto the prophetic ministry, who live out the prophetic calling to stand and deliver, to paint a vivid picture of the reality God intends.

And so, the question is asked, “Are you willing to be prophetic?”
Are you willing to speak truth to power?
Are you willing to to set aside the pursuit of comfort
Are you willing to expose yourself to the scrutiny of  a hostile public
Are you willing to stand in opposition to those with more money, more resources, more time and often more hate than you?
Are you willing to go even if you have to go by yourself?
Are you willing to disclipline yourself?
Are you willing to spend a great deal of time in prayer?
Are you willing to lose sleep?
to study, to read, to write, to study, to read, to write, to study, to read, to write
Are you willing to allow the Word of God to work on you?  Are you willing to allow the Word of God to work on you?  Are you willing to allow the Word of God to work on you?
Are you willing to give up long held beliefs, practices and even prejudices?
to allow the Word of God to cut you and heal you? Are you willing to expose your heart to this two-edged sword?
to give up your druthers and preferences
to stop knowing and begin listening and learning
to confront your own stuff
Are you willing to let the Word of God shape YOU?
Are you willing to live a life of sacrifice
to be lonely
to be judged, maligned, misunderstood, dreaded, unappreciated, feared
to practice the Presence of God
are you willing to lay your head in the bosom of the Father and learn the beating of His heart?
Are you then willing to speak it when the world is out of step with the Father’s heartbeat?

And so it our right, privilege and responsibility to preach prophetically

The voice of God IS summoning us:
To rediscover our voices, cultivate a prophetic vocabulary and preach with power,
To situate ourselves in the history of our people with the abolitionist Frederick Douglass echoing in our hearts,  and then, without equivocation or excuse, use the severest language we can command to preach with power.
To envision high ideals, render them into poetry and speak with power
To “dream in league with God” and
To lose ourselves in the ecstasy of heavenly visions and have the courage and the audacity to translate what we see into what we say
To risk the ire and disdain of the dim, dull and benighted majority and speak light into dark places
To shun, to eschew distractions that are as delightful as they are deadly and maintain the determination to speak with power
To slay lazy thinking, banish unrefined thoughts, open a worthy and challenging book, go down into it by yourself and wrestle with the content until you are blessed with new and fresh ideas of your own

Are you willing to pray?

Are we willing to set prayer as priority rather than having it relegated to very early mornings and out of the way sites. Prioritizing prayer is to give preminence to hearing from God rather than giving (first place / honor) to our own human devisings

It is a reality that churches of every size and description are suffering as the members of our congregations suffer through this economic malaise.  But it is sophomoric to just blame the economy and then set about to find new revenue streams.  We must take the time, discipline ourselves and climb up into the bosom of the Father and rest our heads long enough to discern the beats of His heart.  The heart beat of God is, in fact, the cadence to which we must march our entire lives.  Time must be taken to discern, not to figure out, but to discern how it is that we find ourselves in our current financial predicament.  Perhaps a good place to start would be close, prayerful readings of Biblical famine narratives.  How did they end up in a famine and how did they make it out?

Maybe it is that we are going to have to do less thinking and strategizing and figuring and more praying and fasting, listening and obeying.

Maybe it is time that we have to admit that we are not as smart nor as strong as we believe and purport ourselves to be and

Maybe it is time to humble ourselves, and pray, recognizing that the Bible says that God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble.

Maybe it is time to “come down where we ought to be” and from our position at the  Master’s feet moistened with our tears to cry out

Father, I Stretch my hands to Thee
No other help I know
If Thou withdraw Thyself from me
Ah wither shall I go?

Maybe it is time to have less of all these other meetings and start holding some sho nuff prayer meeting.

Author of Faith to Thee I lift
My weary longing eyes
O my I now receive that gift
My soul without it dies

Maybe, just maybe it is time to confront our decline not with marketing strategies and church growth gimmickry but by talking to the only one who can give the increase….

Surely, Thou canst not let me die
O Speak and I shall live
and here will I unwearied lie
Till Thou Thy Spirit give.