Branches, Not Franchises - John 15:1-8; May 6, 2012

Easter 5B
John 15:1-8

May 6, 2012

Branches, Not Franchises

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

It was one of the moments of my life that haunt me. I remember it like it was yesterday. It happened during a session of the Iowa Annual Conference. To be specific it was during the ordination service.

The preacher for the day was Rev. Peter Storey. Peter Storey is a former bishop of the South African Methodist Church. I listened very carefully to what he had to say as he addressed those about to be ordained and those, like me, who were reflecting on their own ordinations.

He spoke about the temptation to avoid hard questions in the quest for what our culture calls success. He spoke about the need for prophetic ministry. Bishop Storey had served the church during the bad old days of apartheid. In fact he had been Nelson Mandela’s chaplain when Mandela was in prison. He has some authority to speak of these things.

He said to the ordinands, “You are not being ordained today to be the managers of the local franchise of the United Methodist Church, Inc.” God, he told them, had something more significant in mind for them than to become a successful part of a large denomination of the institutionalized church. God had called them to speak God’s liberating truth regardless of what it meant for their careers.

It was powerful stuff, coming at a time when I desperately needed to hear it: I had not been ordained to be “the manager of the local franchise of the United Methodist Church, Inc.” Wonderful!

Too bad it isn’t true. In the first place The United Methodist Church is in fact organized very much like McDonald’s or Target or any other institution with a recognizable brand name. We do have local franchises and we have local managers. We call them pastors. We have district managers that we call superintendents. We even have regional managers that we call bishops.

There are many people who are quick to say that “the church is a business and it should be run like a business.” We have a product and we have customers. We have revenue streams and they must at least equal our expenditures, at least over the long haul, or we cannot continue to operate.

I was ordained to be the manager of the local franchise of the United Methodist Church, Inc. Of course bishops will deny this. They will point to the fact that I was ordained to ministries of word, sacrament and order. I am to proclaim the word of God. I am to preside at baptism and at the table. I am to order the people of God for ministry in this place.

Yes, it’s true that this is not the sort of language spoken at Harvard Business School. But our theological language is often little more than an attempt to hide from ourselves the meaning of what we’re saying. We often say “evangelism” when what we mean is “member recruiting.” We say “stewardship” when what we mean is “fund-raising.” We say “servant ministry” when what we mean is our plausibly deniable ways of gaining and exercising power. We are past masters at taking the language of the empire and sprinkling a little holy water on it for use in the church. The imperial language of our day is the language of business and there are many in the church who believe that the values and practices of the business world could be the salvation of the church.

In any event, my supervisors are looking for profits, whether they measure that in terms of ever-increasing membership and attendance or in terms of ever-larger budgets with apportionments fully paid each year. It is simply untrue that I have not been ordained to be the manager of the local franchise of the United Methodist Church, Inc.

I should just say that it’s untrue. But it’s not quite simply untrue. There is something at work here that complicates things, making them unsimple. Or rather, there is someone at work here who makes them unsimple.

The language that Jesus uses to describe us is not organizational or entrepreneurial. His language is drawn from horticulture and the images are drawn from the vineyards that were cultivated on hillsides everywhere in Roman Palestine. We could say that Jesus was as captivated by the language of his day as we are by the language of ours. But he could have chosen language drawn from government or the military or the household, all of them organizations of his day. He chose not to. Instead, he chose images that were organic, if not natural. “You are branches,” he said. “I am the vine.”

Remember that John’s Jesus was speaking to a traumatized community. They had left the synagogues (or had been thrown out) and separated from their Jewish co-religionists. Who started it? Who was to blame? We don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that John’s community was in deep, deep pain, the pain only those who have gone through a church split, a divorce, or a civil war can fully appreciate.

John’s community had been forced to leave; they could not remain where they had been. They had no obvious alternative, though. They had no obvious place to call their spiritual home. John’s Jesus says to them, “You are branches. I am the vine. Remain in me, just like branches remain in the vine.”

What a wonderful word to hear in the midst of such deep suffering! “We have no home,” we cry. “I am your home,” comes Jesus’ answer.

This was a community that was deeply traumatized. It was an organizational mess. It was threatened with loss of identity and even its existence as a group.

I don’t know how they reacted to what they were facing. I do know how we typically react to similar circumstances. I know this because we in the church are not strangers to some of these things. Our disaster is moving in slow motion compared to the one that John’s folk were going through, but we can still see where this is headed. The United Methodist Church in North America has been shrinking ever since the sixties. As a percentage of the population of the United States, the United Methodist Churches peaked in the early 1880s. We grew in total numbers in the early part of the last century for the same reason that we have been shrinking ever since: birth rates. They used to be high and now they are not.

We haven’t converted significant numbers of adults for a century and a half. And lately we haven’t been doing very well even among our own children, who typically graduate from church in their early teens.

We’re responding to this slow-motion disaster in the United Methodist Church in a number of ways. Some of us panic and wail about the death of our church. Some of us ignore the obvious and hope that by doing what doesn’t work,only doing it harder, we will somehow obtain different results.

The General Conference commissions studies to find out what makes growing churches grow, hoping to be about to bottle the formula and sell it across the denomination. We mutter darkly about accountability for pastors. We throw around jargon drawn from the business world and talk about “measurable outcomes” and “being nimble” and “congregational vitality.”

And Jesus? What does Jesus have to say? What language does he toss around? “I am the vine. You are the branches. Remain in me.” In fact, the word being translated “remain” occurs seven times in the nine verses of our reading: “Remain in me, and I in you...”, “...a branch...must remain in the vine...”, “...unless you remain...”, “...if you remain in me...you will produce much fruit...”, “...if you don’t remain...”, “...if you remain in me...”, “...if my words remain in you...”

John’s community is in exile and Jesus says, “Remain.” We are dashing around with commissions and restructuring (when we aren’t panicking or hiding our heads under our pillows) and Jesus says, “Remain. Stay where you are. God is in charge and is doing what needs to be done. You’re feeling sliced and diced? That’s God at work pruning and trimming. What is your part? Stay in me. Let my words sink down deeply in you and there let them stay. Stay.”

We want to be successful franchises, but Jesus is offering us a way to live and grow as his branches. We are looking for a way of salvaging success, and Jesus is calling us to faithfulness. We are looking for a way to hang on to the life that we have made for ourselves, and Jesus is calling us to die and be raised to new life. We are looking for a way out of our predicament and Jesus is offering us a way through it. We are looking for a direction to go, and Jesus is telling us to stay. 

 

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.