jvoorhees's blog

The Case for Six-Year Appointments
I would propose a 4 + 2 system that is similar to the above to achieve six-year appointments.

1. Appoint a clergyperson to a parish for four years.
2. At the four-year mark, when ministry and visioning is truly beginning, evaluate their ministry by the DS and the congregation.
3. If there are seeds of missional context that need further growth by the pastor, then the pastor serves another two years.
4. After those two years, the pastor is moved to another church or given another two-year extension based on ministry viability.

So, 4 + 2 = 6 year appointments.

This is a good starting place for conversation on the tenure of clergy appointments, even though I disagree with the notion of 6 year appointments (it's too short). I will reserve my critique for the comments, but I hope all will chime in with their thoughts on this great post.

I’m back in country after two wonderful weeks in Israel. While all of you have been slaving and crying over the future of our church during this last gathering of the General Conference, I’ve been seeing holy places and experiencing God in new ways. It’s been a good couple of weeks, but it is also good to be home.

I want to thank all of you who blogged from General Conference. The General Conference is an amazing and exhausting event and it was a gift to the world that you took the time and energy to share what was happening. Thanks for all you did to help others understand a little better what General Conference is all about.

I also want to say a special word of thanks to my bud Gavin, who held things together while I was gone. For your effort, you get to be the featured blogger.

I apologize to all who submitted their blogs for inclusion and haven’t gotten on. I think that we are up to date, but if you have wanted your blog added and haven’t seen any movement, please drop me another e-mail and let me know.

As of today, The MethoBlog currently aggregates information from 176 blogs throughout the world. We average around 1,000 unique visitors by day, which doesn’t include those who participate via an RSS reader. I thank all of you for participating in this community and hope that you will encourage your friends to join us in talking about life in the Methodist fold.

In Christ,

Jay

Greetings all from the holy city of Jerusalem. While you have been agonizing over life in the UMC, I have been wandering along the Sea of Galilee connecting with God and nature, and generally having a good ole time.

 

I haven't been following the proceedings closely, but all indications suggest to me that perhaps the most important thing done at the General Conference was the election of a slate of Judicial Council members that slid the Judicial Council back to the center of our political spectrum. This, in my opinion, is where the Judicial Council should be, and I am excited for Susan Henry Crowe in her election as the first female chairperson.

 

What are your thoughts about the Judicial Council elections and what does this bode for the future?

 

By the way, I will not be changing things on the site until after I return next week, so don't freak out that we are keeping General Conference stuff on after the event is over.

 

Peace,

Jay

 

Don’t forget that opening worship for the General Conference starts at 6 p.m. CDT and will be streamed on the net. I have put a link to the stream on our General Conference resources page for your convenience. While I don’t think I can do it (I’m packing!) I do encourage whoever feels led to chat away in our chat space while watching the video. Think of it as live blogging in the extreme!

 

The chat box that was on the front page was kind of buggy and didn't work very well. I've setup a separate real-time chat system. Be watching the sidebar for a link to our own chat space.

Well it's that time again . . . the two weeks when United Methodists hold their breath to see what sort of weak legislation will arise out of some hotel room at 2 a.m. The General Conference is upon us, meaning that some 3,000 of our brothers and sisters will get too little sleep, rear ends that become attached to chairs, and more calories from restaurant food than any human should be forced to endure. It is the time when we come together to re-write the Book of Discipline, and in spite of our best efforts to screw things up, we sometimes actually succeed in hearing God speak.

As I have shared earlier, I am choosing to bail on General Conference this year, taking the time to make a spiritual pilgrimage to the Holy Lands. For the first time in twenty years I will not be a part of the festivities in Ft. Worth, and I confess that I sleep better at night knowing that I will be out of the fray.

However, that means that The MethoBlog will be on autopilot for the next couple of weeks while I am in Israel. It will be up to you, the subscriber and reader, to keep this site up to date with the latest commentary and conversation on what is happening in our communion, as well as bringing up-to-date reports from General Conference.

What I have tried to do is to highlight some of our brothers and sisters who are attending the "Rodeo in Ft. Worth" and allow them to offer us insights into the process of discernment that is the source of our life together. These featured bloggers have their own spot on the front page, and their feeds have been set tp update every 15 minutes (unlike the hourly updates for the rest of us). Likewise we are also featuring the United Methodist News Service feed from General Conference, and I expect we will see some good reporting from them as well.

I have also added a chat block on the front page for registered users of The Methoblog to talk about the latest from Ft. Worth. This is an unmoderated chat, so we take no responsibility for what is said here, but I hope that it might be another place for you to rant or wail about what is happening in Texas.

May all of you who are going to Ft. Worth experience a special measure of God's grace while you are there, and may all of the rest of us keep them in our prayers as they do their best to hear God speak to our church.

Are you going to General Conference, either as a delegate, staff member, or visitor? Will you be blogging during General Conference? We would love to maintain a listing of General Conference bloggers and feature those bloggers on the front page. Please let us know in the comments if you will be blogging at General Conference. Be sure to let us have your blog title and url to make the listing easier.

 

Sorry for the downtime earlier today. Apparently a couple of our databases crashed which shut down the site. All seems to be fixed now.

 

Every now and then we get a rash of e-mail of folks wanting to be added to the MethoBlog roll. We are happy to add you as quickly as we can, but you have to help us make that possible.

To be added to the list, you must first of all have a blog the generates a valid RSS feed. All of the major blogging services (Typepad, Wordpress, Blogger) do this relatively automatically, but occasionally someone will submit a simple web site with no RSS feed which we can’t list. While we add each blog by hand, the list itself is generated automatically be the feeds that are aggregated here. Put simply: no RSS (or Atom) feed, no inclusion on the MethoBlogRoll.

One word about having a valid feed. There are lots of programmers out there who claim to set up sites with valid feeds, but trust me, there continue to be non-compliant feeds that are sent to us, which drives our aggregator wild. If your feed doesn’t conform to the RSS standard, then be prepared for odd things in your listing.

Secondly, we only include blogs that have some connection to the Methodist world. That connection is sometimes slim at best, but we will not include business sites that are attempting to directly sell products or sites that have no connection to faith or our tradition.

Finally, we have well over 100 sites now compiled on this site and Gavin and I can’t remember them all, so if you e-mail us for inclusion on the Blogroll or with technical problems, PLEASE include the URL for your blog site AND the URL for the RSS feed. This will save us a bunch of time in fixing the problem.

Again, we want to add as many people as we can (at least until it breaks the site) so feel free to submit your blog. Just make sure we have the information we need so that our time isn’t wasted.

Thanks!

jv