Making Our Ministry Safe

There are a lot of things I like about having Rev. Kay Ash on staff. Since she started as our full-time Director of Christian Education, we have been blessed by so many of her gifts and graces for ministry.

One important gift that she brings is a wealth of experience related to child safety, particularly as it relates to our requirements and obligations as a United Methodist Church in the North Texas Conference.

I learned a lot about safety when she got here and started asking questions about whether or not the church is in conformity with conference standards. I assumed we were since we ask volunteers with children and youth to get a background check and undergo some online training.

Unfortunately, I discovered quickly that not all our volunteers have met those requirements. I assumed too much.

But I also discovered that this was not all that was needed by the conference. Kay informed me that being fully accredited by Ministry Safe requires a number of other documents and protocols, which I didn’t know.

Unbeknownst to me, under my pastoral leadership, KPUMC has not met the standards that are required by the North Texas Conference. I apologize for my part in not knowing the appropriate actions that needed to be taken, and I have authorized Kay to lead the process whereby we enter into full compliance.

It’s not just a background check and online video anymore; other things that need to be completed for ALL volunteers with children and youth include a Safety Application form, an interview, and a reference check. Compliance renewal must be completed via online training every two years, and background checks must be renewed every two to three years.

All of this is important because the conference looks at our compliance statistics and uses the information when evaluating our ministries. And if, God forbid, there were to be an incident of abuse here on our campus, the conference and our insurers would want to know what we had done to prevent it.

In the end, this isn’t about insurance rates or money. This is about the safety of the children and youth on our campus.

According to Ministry Safe, 1 of 3 girls and 1 of 6 boys will be sexually molested before reaching age 18. Additionally, 90% of sexual abuse victims are abused by someone they know and trust.

This means that a church campus is a particularly vulnerable location for sexual predators. If we are serious about making sure that this kind of abuse does not occur on our church grounds, then we must do everything we can to prevent it. That includes following the direction of Ministry Safe, which can help us provide a comprehensive program to ensure all children and youth have a safe haven, and that all of our churches are a place of sacred trust and security..

Kay and I are in the process of moving our church into compliance. If you are asked to fill out new paperwork or undergo training, please understand that this is not because we are suspicious about your behavior or have done anything wrong! The things we may ask from you have nothing to do with you personally. This is about doing the right thing for our church and our children.

Thank you for your cooperation and understanding. As always, the goal is that KPUMC remain a safe, warm, loving and caring place for all people. Especially kids.

Turning the Head of Christ

A feature story in last Sunday’s Dallas Morning News brought back a flood of nostalgic memories. The article was about the famous painting of Jesus by a graphic designer named Warner Sallman in 1940.

I’m sure you’ve seen it. It was ubiquitous in the second half of the twentieth century; I remember it hanging a number of places in family members’ homes, as well as a few churches I visited. It’s a … shall we say, “pretty picture” of Jesus.

Jesus has flowing brown hair, a full beard, and blue eyes gazing off into the distance. His lips are slightly pursed, as if he’s about to say something calm and soothing.

The article speaks of the picture’s enormous popularity and quotes Billy Graham as saying about the work that it was “probably more satisfying to Americans than the more ancient conceptions which portrayed Christ as weak and emaciated.”

If by “weak and emaciated” Graham meant non-white, then he would have been spot on. Because this famous painting is nothing like the historical Jesus, of that we can be sure. The real Jesus was born in Palestine and was certainly darker than the famous picture, no matter that Sallman claims that he was inspired by a dream in which he saw Jesus.

Since we don’t have a clue as to what Jesus really looked like, the truth is that any drawing, painting, or sketch of Jesus tells us more about the artist and the person viewing the art than it does about Jesus.

Thus, this artwork and its subsequent popularity tells us a great deal about 20th-century American Protestant Christianity and all that was right — and wrong — about it. Sallman’s Jesus is a docile, submissive, and entirely-too-nice Savior of the World. He would have likely made a very good church member in 1950s Methodist churches. He might have even been a very good Methodist pastor, except for that long hair. The long hair is Sallman’s only acquiescence to Jesus’ essential strangeness. But the rest of this Jesus is entirely domesticated. This Jesus would never have turned over the tables of moneychangers, or challenged the High Priest, or told Peter to “Get behind me, Satan!”

It’s hard to imagine Sallman’s Jesus making too much of a fuss. Instead, he appears as a very loving, personable figure. And that is entirely in keeping with the Christianity of the time; Jesus was consistently preached as a sentimental figure who loved children and animals and would ultimately lay down his life so that those who believe in him would have their sins forgiven and live in heaven with him. This was the version of Christianity that was especially popular in white America at the time.

This was the Jesus that Americans wanted to believe in, and the fact that this Jesus was a Scandanavian-looking white dude made the whole idea palatable to the white church.

However, Sallman’s picture overlooks a vital aspect of the historical Jesus. The man from Nazareth spoke and acted in the tradition of the great Hebrew prophets, the rough-edged proclaimers of justice in the face of the world’s illegitimate powers.

In the midst of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and the subsequent anti-war drift, Protestant Christianity began to fracture between those who continued to think of Jesus in terms of Sallman’s vision and those who … didn’t.

I would argue that Sallman’s picture is sadly dated and largely irrelevant to our world. Not because Jesus’ hair is out of style, or that he is simply too white. But because what the world needs now is not a sanitized, BFF Jesus and pie-in-the-sky Christianity.

What the world needs now is more of the prophet Jesus who would be angry that children are being torn from their parents after fleeing from war-torn homes, who would be incredulous that children don’t have enough to eat in our cities, who would be outraged that we spend so much money on frivolous leisures, dangerous habits, and military hardware.

Now I’m not saying that Jesus wasn’t a loving figure, nor am I saying that we don’t find forgiveness of sins in him. I believe in life after death, too. These are all part of the Christian faith. However, they aren’t the total picture of the faith.

If we are to have a balanced faith, then we have to come to terms with Jesus the prophet, Jesus the troublemaker, Jesus the justice-seeker.

And a picture like that might not be very pretty.

Generosity Will Save Us

Before I became the senior pastor of KPUMC, the Finance Committee recognized that giving declined during the summer months, which caused an unfortunate cash crunch  somewhere around August. As a result, they started a fundraising campaign which asked individuals or families to “pay” $250 for one day in the month of July. 

The church would publish a July calendar with names of people who had “bought” a particular day of the month, and an invitation to buy the days which were still available.

After I got here, the committee agreed to tweak the idea a little, and now we celebrate Generosity July every year. We invite everyone in the church to set aside $5 per day to give to the church, above and beyond the amount people have already pledged. We still publish a calendar, but now each day of the month specifies a generosity challenge.

This has obviously helped church finances over the past couple of years. But even more importantly, it has forced us all to think about generosity every year.

A lot of us have been complaining about the general mood of the country lately. Recent current events and news bulletins have made us all crabby and cranky. We’re all a little on edge.

Unfortunately, when people are angry and distempered, we also tend to close themselves off from others. We end up clinging a little tighter to what is ours, and we get defensive and reactive.

This is precisely the time for us to practice generosity. I think that it might be the only thing that will save us in these perilous times.

For example, I wish we are all a little more generous in our judgments and conclusions of others. What if we gave more benefits of the doubt, and wished more people well?

I wish our government and society operated out of a posture of abundance and generosity rather than a posture of scarcity and austerity. And I wish our institutions and organizations adopted mission statements that had generosity as a core value and virtue.

Generous organizations and people are open-hearted, warm, and easy to get to know. We like them, and we want to be like them.

So why aren’t we generous year-round? What is it that keeps us from being generous all the time? I always ask myself this question in July, because generosity is fun! It’s a blast to give things away to, and on behalf of, others. 

Perhaps it’s because we find ourselves surrounded by a culture that teaches us the opposite. This is one of the downsides of capitalism; a capitalist economy stresses competition, teaches us that there are winners and losers. Advertising teaches us that what’s important is what we buy and acquire, not what we give away.  Even our politics is now a zero-sum game — everything is all or nothing. Compromise is a bad word, and there is hardly any generosity in governance.

The church is one place where generosity continues to be a virtue. In fact, it is one of our most important characteristics: God is generous, and God’s most generous act was the sending of Jesus Christ. Jesus was generous, and left behind disciples and apostles who were generous. Generosity was the primary ethos of the early church, after all. In the Book of Acts, we read that the first Christians ate together frequently and shared their goods freely among one another. 

Generosity July is supposed to be the prototype of all the other months of the year. It’s the time when we intentionally practice those small and random acts of giving that we ought to be doing all the time.

Because when we finally get it right, it’s generosity that will save us.