With [Will] Willimon set to retire as bishop in 2012 (he plans to return to teaching at Duke Divinity School), it is appropriate to consider how the Willimon experiment in the episcopacy has turned out. As one might expect, it has not been business as usual.
Willimon has used his authority to “decimate the career ladder,” as one pastor told me. In the process he has alienated many pastors in the North Alabama Conference. He has promoted younger clergy deemed to be more talented over those with more seniority. He has streamlined some meetings and eliminated others. “I got annual conference down to two days,” he boasts (it had previously lasted four and a half days). And he has made accountability a hallmark term.
Accountability, in this case, mainly means that every congregation’s weekly numbers for giving, attendance, hours of service, and professions of faith are posted online for all the world””and the rest of the conference””to see. They appear on a page on the conference website called the North Alabama Dashboard. These statistics become one source of input for decisions on pastoral appointments. What looks to some like a call for public accountability looks to others like an act of public shaming. For critics, the Dashboard seems to treat the dynamics of church life like so many hamburgers sold.
— Jason Byassee, “The bishop’s dashboard,” in a recent Christian Century
[blockquote]he has alienated many pastors in the North Alabama Conference.[/blockquote]
He’s alienated quite a few lay people as well from what I hear. I have several Methodist friends in North Alabama, and the general consensus I hear is that they will be glad to see him go. He hasn’t done much but create ongoing turmoil.
Actually, he’s been one of the first Methodist leaders in recent memory willing to take on a church structure that has little interest in the needs of its parishes. The current structure of the UMC takes every effort to care for the needs of its clergy, regardless of their abilities or character. Willimon is willing to challenge the “way things are done” by taking the work of the church seriously. Byassee’s article is a celebration of Willimon’s ministry and rightly so!
Another name for it that I’ve heard from good Methodist folks in North Alabama is “cronyism.” If you are on his good list, you get the plumb jobs, if not, you get the junk assignments. Productivity has little to do with it if you look at the numbers of the “in crowd.”
More generally, it raises the question of what counts as success in Christian ministry. It would be unrealistic to ignore money issues. A good pastor presumably has to balance the budget, encourage giving, raise capital where necessary for big projects, and be accountable. But you might do all these things and yet never visit a sick or dying person, or win back to the faith a lapsed Christian. So ministry ‘success’ has to include the difficult-to-measure aspect of pastoral relationships. Some of this, presumably, will show up in membership figures, baptisms and the like. What I am trying to say is rather predictable: that you can neither reduce ministerial success to numbers, nor fail to take them into account. But if this sounds predictable I can say that I have from time to time been astonished to hear Anglican confreres say that increased numbers are not significant in themselves. The mantra I have heard on such occasions is: ‘Surely mission about more than bums on seats.’ Well, yes. But surely Christians are more than, err, derrieres, and anyway if the seats are being filled, Sunday by Sunday, surely we can look for positive factors that indicate a pastor trying to live his call, God being his helper?