From the District Moderator

This will be the last comment as moderator for our district, as district conference is about on month away. Next year’s moderator will be Lisa Fike from the Freeport Church of the Brethren. I have enjoyed working with her and commend her to your prayers as she prepares our district for its next phase of common life.

This year’s conference theme is “Get in line with Jesus.” “Get in line with Jesus” refers to Jesus not only as Lord and Savior but also the source and norm for our life, our ethics, our private and our public life.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life recently published several interesting surveys, two of which surprised me. One said that Christians tend to use the Bible as normative for personal issues of morality such as abortion and sexuality, but then apparently abandon it on questions such as immigration and the environment. That strikes me as selective ethics, selective morality. It certainly does not fit in—as I understood it—with this year’s Annual Conference theme of taking Jesus seriously. It suggests, to my way of thinking, as taking Jesus selectively.

The other study that caught my attention was one that said that “atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings” of their faith. Especially interesting is that atheists and agnostics generally know more about our faith than we do. In my estimation, this is quite an indictment.

At First Church we are through our third session on the Annual Conference-recommended Controversial Issues discussion. How many congregations are engaging in this? My observation from our experience is that this process pushes us to think about how maturely and seriously we get in line with Jesus. And it pushes us to reflect seriously on how much work we are doing on understanding our faith.

I teach a class at First Church on biblical literacy, and my model for interpretation is Jesus. Jesus is the lens or frame through which we evaluate and live out all other issues of morality and ethics. Jesus guides our understanding and evaluating of life. Jesus is not absent or exempt from our living. Jesus is not a savior reserved for another time and place. Rather, here, on our planet and in our churches and communities, Jesus’ commandment to love God and our neighbor still trumps all other policies, mandates or rules.

I look forward to district conference as a time to get in line with Jesus.