The programmatic language that was used does not adequately speak to the strength and depth of the Christian witness of the congregations of the district. Though church growth language has disappeared, it has been absorbed implicitly into the language of the district. The underlying language about the church seems to imply that congregations are institutions that mediate certain “faith” or “experiences” to others and seek to sustain these relationships in configurations that keep institutional vitality to the churches. The assembly was ultimately about promoting a new method – of course, placed in line with the Methodists and then apostles and Jesus – “The Masters Plan” drawn from the largest Nazarene congregation in the world from Columbia. The Masters Plan takes small group sociological dynamics to provide coherent social support in an increasingly individualized world to sustain and multiple certain type of “personal experiences”. Jesus’ calling of the twelve is taken out of the context of God’s restoration of Israel and placed into a method for sustaining involvement in the congregation and recruiting new members into it. It shows how strongly present in the Church of the Nazarene Charles Finney’s Lectures on Revival still rules; we were repeatedly told that if we had a “more effective method,” to share it, but if not, try “The Masters Plan.” The language of the Assembly was orchestrated then to market this “new/old” method for congregational health, growth, and church multiplication.

I’m not against such programs – the church needs way of coordinating its witness that are culturally appropriate. The concerted effort of the District and General Superintendent provides a unifying focus throughout the district in ways that we experience as significant. Besides, what type of pastor could ever object to more intentional prayer of a congregation and finding creative means of planting new congregations and, particularly in the Methodist/Nazarene tradition, accountable discipleship? I do worry, however, that these “programs” become overlays that become more important than the practices to shape congregation’s unique witness in the world as directly recorded in Scripture. Discipleship then becomes a cipher for therapeutic social support rather than receiving the fruits of the Spirit through engaging in the works of mercy; “sharing my faith,” a privatized experience, becomes more important than proclamation of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. One wonders whether the Masters Plan “works” in a South American context undergoing its own form of individuating modernity based in a Christendom model rather than the post-Christendom society that is become Southern California.

I recognized this in the role of the ordination service. District Assembly finds its historical origins and rationale in the Annual Conferences begun by Wesley and his Methodists to keep his renewal movement within the church catholic faithful to its mission. This origin has long been forgotten; though the fact that the old structure still governs its discourse is more than is apparent. It just can’t quite be reduced to a motivational seminar (which is often less motivational than the Annual Conference structures were meant to be!). As American Methodism moved from a “movement” to a “church-type movement,” the Annual Conference/then District Assembly became the appropriate gathering of the church/renewal movement to ordain elders for sacramental responsibility, authorized preaching, and overseeing specific congregations – even as we have transformed the reason for ordination, these basic practices still keep the Church of the Nazarene tied to the historic Christian tradition as a renewal holiness movement within it. It is the district who authorizes ordination, on the recommendation of the elected elders to the Board of Credentials. This is not theologically insignificant; ordination rises out of the context of a local congregation and is finally granted, not by a select body of clergy (though not without them), but out of the election of the wider church. According to Stan Ingersol, this would be part of our polity that moves us back into the early Christian practices of apostolicity for our polity.

The service recognized “retirement” of an elder, our own Bill Zumwalt, for his years of service of the church. One does not “retire” one’s credentials in the Church of the Nazarene – Bill still is an elder; “retirement” is the name we give to kicking in a small church pension system by which we share as a community of goods for the care of those who have served the church without being able to build equity to sustain them as their “youthful vigor” diminishes and full time service of the church becomes physically difficult – though I think Bill and Nancy still have sufficient vigor to move back to San Diego to help us! It was wonderful hearing the long standing ovation for Bill and Nancy for their service, hearing the summary of their life in the church.

Then, appropriately, the new district licensed persons were given their first license. I think this was wonderful -- if only God would give us persons who would emulate Bill Zumwalt as elders of the church! Then the ordination service itself began.

The big surprise was that the sharing of the Word. We did not receive an ordination sermon, but a sermon/exhortation on the discipleship portion of the Master’s plan. Several times it was mentioned that survey results told the GS that Nazarenes on the region pray, but few are involved in “discipleship” – networked, hierarchical small support groups within a congregation. I had been surprised that the GS never preached during the day. My guess is that he withheld his sermon because he thought, correctly, that he would have a larger representation from the whole district at the ordination service. The ordination service therefore provided the context for the implementation of the programmatic concerns of the General Superintendent – as responsible business executive over his group of franchised small businesses for the growth of their market share.

This is not to take a cheap shot at the GS – our bishop is an amazing person, deeply concerned for the Christian witness of the church, a person who upholds his office with dignity and humility, wonderfully reflective. What it does say is that under such an ecclesiological model of the post-church growth, business administration model of general and local congregations, ordination becomes increasingly unintelligible as a practice internal to the ongoing life of the church. Sandwiched into an already begun ordination service, the sermon stuck out as unrelated. As I listened in the sermon where baptism was exhorted as significant, it was apparent that Christ’s ordained sacraments were secondary to the practices of Kali, Columbia’s Church of the Nazarene’s development of a transferrable discipleship program to our So Cal context. The “sacraments” become reduced to a “measure” for the transference of God’s grace (a means of grace) that are secondary to the “discipleship” program that can keep people involved in the local congregation to compensate for the fact that for every ten new members that come into the Church of the Nazarene, four leave and go elsewhere, either out of the faith or to new congregations. My response is that we have to stop privatizing grace to subjective “experiences” so that the gathering of the congregation becomes merely incubation rituals for inner experiences of “faith” or “Christ”; we need to let our individual bodies in faith be taken up into the body and blood of Christ so that we, by Word and Sacrament, might be made the body of Christ in the world to engage in the works of mercy and devotion. Of course to do this, we will need to recover the significance of ordination.

The significance of ordination was there for us to see – and was the missing piece of language that would help us to account for what it going on. It was the most remarkable testimony to a lack of careerism. The best word in the Christian tradition that captures the continual Spirit that elders possessed was voluntary poverty, the social displacement from material and social security for love of Christ and the mission of the church. One cannot place “voluntary poverty” into the language of an franchise not-for-profit business program, but only of the gospel.

Just a brief list of those who so evinced this practice. Perhaps most dramatically was Larry Ross, who gave up a stable congregation as a mid-career pastor to take on a “new start” in a desert location for a small church without funding to help it become viable again. Rev. Ross dipped into retirement money himself to do this – a bold move given the financial drops and the pittance of the “worn-out preachers” pension in the Church of the Nazarene. Then there was Tom Taylor. Rev. Taylor has labored hard to oversee one of the most stable, but not ingrown, congregations on the district during the past decade. To take the time and energy and transfer members of his congregation to start a church 50 minutes away in the mountains at Big Bear when he could stay fulfilled and busy overseeing and growing his congregation and responding to its demands risks more than is apparent. Robyn Hyde, who oversees an inner-city congregation in San Bernadino, has taken on another charge as well for a near-by struggling congregation. Rev. Hyde’s San Berndino Cornerstone is very much as sister congregation to us in the poverty stricken area and social problems that are now San Bernadino; his staff is absolutely wonderful. To extend himself into more responsibilities with the energy, compassion, and devotion to Christ is amazing, given the high needs he faces at Cornerstone. It is also a witness to his growing up of wonderful persons like Tim Isser, traveling himself the path towards ordination. I love these folk.

It is the pastor at Escondido Church of the Nazarene, Tom Fry, whom I haven’t gotten to know. Escondido has become the location of anti-Spanish language overt economic, structural racism in San Diego County. Yet a declining Anglo congregation has opened a tutoring program in their building for Spanish-first-language children. Rev. Fry was visibly moved by the devotion of the mothers of these children to their children, and is actively searching out a way to embrace them in Christ. Plans are underway for a joint Spanish-language congregation to join the English-congregation there – very much aware of that this could boomerang back upon the Anglo congregation because of the anti-latino/a sentiment of the surrounding white population.

It is the witness of the pastors who have joined us from Kali, Columbia. They were recruited to initiate the Masters Plan here. And so they have, though with radical modifications because of the new cultural environment and an underlying love for Christ and the people. There is Diego Forero who was an upper middle class executive in Kali, who took a charge in Hesperia of all places to start a small church; Rev. David Penn welcomed and supported in amazing ways. The voluntary loss of social support and finances to reach those Spanish-language persons eeking out a life in Hesperia (the only way to live in Hesperia is to eek); Rev. Penn’s infectious enthusiasm to support across linguistic and cultural boundaries is amazing. Yordan Mitrovitch, a young man who left Kali to pastor in Southern California is likewise amazing. He and his wife are stranded here, unable to return home because of Visa issues. As I inquired about their situation with her after the ordination service, her eyes misted over in pain for the inability to visit her family. Yet on they serve Christ here, voluntarily dislocated, enfolding their sufferings into Christ’s.

Finally, we ordained Loyda Ruiz Vicencia. She has come to us from Chiapas, Mexico and been assigned to one of the most out of the way, poor areas in the district. Her husband held her beautiful three-year old daughter; the cultural and gender shift was remarkable and beautiful to behold. She has engaged the area in witness to Christ, and the results are humbling.

Here is the strength of the witness of the Church of the Nazarene. Not in our slickness or the ability to implement smoothly programs established for suburban congregations. Not in sophistication of theological language or even immersion in the historic Christian tradition. Not in the ability to mediate the tradition into a language of historicism or process ontology or even Tillichian existentialism. The strength is our tradition as a holiness movement for renewal within the larger church catholic that often occurs despite our selves. It is persons participating in the love of God the Father through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit that leads to an unassuming, even inarticulate living out of the gospel because what else is life for?

When I hear “sophisticated” academics rip on elders of the church for clerical arrogance or bloated bureaucracy or authoritarian control or philosophical/scientific ignorance or moral malfeasance – those words that come much too easily from the mouth of academics formed by their guilds into people who think that they can “make a difference” in the world if only people would listen to them, I want to point them to such as these that God has given the Church of the Nazarene – people who still exist, though we don’t have the language to recognize the depth of their witness and service to Christ and the church, even at our “Annual Conferences.” But again, that is the way the kingdom of God is – like yeast. To such as these belong the kingdom of God.