Driving around various neighborhoods and churches, like you, I have been struck by the damage done by the storm of this past Tuesday. The branches and leaves litter front yards and streets. Sometimes a whole tree is uprooted or snapped in half, but more often it is branches that have been broken and strewn. When it’s a tree that has been part of your home or other special place for years, it breaks your heart to see the damage. But after the storms have passed and the chain saws have been put away, we witness new growth that we would never have seen otherwise – sometimes more beautiful than the original tree. The cross reminds us to count on that truth. A storm blew Jesus into the hands of angry religious leaders and a frustrated procurator landed him on a cross where criminals legs were sometimes broken in order to speed up the death by asphyxiation. But from that damage, that death at the top of the cross, came the new life we could not imagine through resurrection.
My study group is reading Turning Points by Noll, Komline and Komline. It is a very good primer about the turning points in Christian history that I can recommend for our library as it is not academically stuffy. Speaking about the brokenness of papal leadership within the Catholic Church in the 16th century, the authors state, “Later Protestants would also come to learn from their own experience that failures at the top, however discouraging, are never fatal to a church.”
I think that line is prophetic. It speaks a great truth about the resilience of Christ’s body, the church – you and me. Beyond broken hearts over broken trust at the top, the church rises with new hope and new growth from the strong roots and trunk below. I think we are in such a time as that now in the United States.
This Sunday begins the last Annual Conference of our over 100-year-old North Texas Conference. The pandemic and disaffiliations have broken branches and hearts in our churches and conferences nationwide. It has hurt. Yet out of that comes the opportunity to begin again as we vote whether to unite with the remnants of the Northwest Texas and Central Texas Conferences to form a new Horizon Texas Conference. Your elected Annual Conference members – Jill Stoel, Kevin Clanahan, John Shell, Gavin Cox, Joyce Craig, Gayle Landis, Judith Reedy, and I all have the opportunity to pray, discuss, and vote on this historic decision. We will vote for hope and new life, just as we did as a local church to sell property and right-size FUMC Plano to be nimbler and more sustainable in God’s next chapter for Christ’s church. I am counting on it because I count on God’s saving grace through the brokenness of branches, hearts, and the cross. Amen.
Connecting God and Grace to Self and Community,
P.S. We will have a Town Hall Meeting on June 9 following the 11 a.m. worship service to answer all of your questions about the land sale, next steps, General Conference, Annual Conference, and anything else that is on your mind.