I am a young person. By going to the Rethink Church website, I am suppose to feel more engaged and more welcome to the church. To speak plainly, I feel like it’s an irrelevant, unimaginitive ploy that is condescending to young people, both churched and unchurched. I’ll give it to the people who created the campaign: the color scheme and the edgy doors on the website and the Mustafa from the Lion King narration on the commercials is initially sort of catchy, but it lacks the depth that my analytical, contemplative, and inquisitive generation starves for.
Rethink Church uses a series of cliches like “what if we were a 1000 doors” and my favorite, “What if church was not just about Sunday but be about the rest of the days of the week.” The UNC Wesley Foundation has weekly worship and eucharist on Sunday evenings and Eucharist, dinner and a program on Thursday evenings. We have Bible studies and small groups throughout the week, we eat together at the Old Well on Mondays, we have intramural teams, mission teams that do local, national, and global ministry and we are a community that supports each other and glorifies God with our gifts, time, presence, and prayers. Church is a everyday thing at Wesley. We are a community of faith that is relevant and is still clinging to its Wesleyan roots. Yes, we are what the general church always says it desires to be. We sing hymns (yeah, like legit hymns), discuss theology, doctrine, and scripture and then reason out the implications that they have in our lives as Disciples of Jesus Christ as well as in our roles as academics, citizens, future parents, future spouses, room mates, teammates, and friends. We aren’t rethinking the church. We are progressively thinking and exploring what it could and what it will be. The UNC Wesley Foundation facilitates a safe space for students to grow. I like to think of it as a hotbed of hope.
This is my fourth annual conference, and I have learned in my short experience that the idea of apportionments kinda freak people out. Apportionments pay for ministry and we pay these apportionments hoping that the individuals chosen to determine how these monies are spent make good decisions. The Rethink campaign has spent MILLIONS of apportionment dollars in web, tv, and print advertising. All the while, the Methodist campus ministries at universities across North Carolina receive meager funds for programming from our Annual Conference. You want me to rethink about church? How about we rethink the way we value our ministries that are radically transforming and reforming young people? How about we rethink who we consult (or don’t consult) when we’re spending money?
excellent, emily! good points all.
what ever happened to BEING church!!!! what’s useful about thinking church? aren’t we supposed to be church? and wesley IS doing that – being that. thanks for your good words.
Amen! make that two amens!
Emily – great points, good words and fabulous insight! I hope that you are sharing your ideas and thoughts with those in your Conference as well as the web!
blessings,
Stacy Anzick
Texas Conference Clergy
Family Leave living in Bahrain
(previous campus minister whose campus ministry funding was “discontinued”).
You hit the nail on the head! “We” spent 20 MILLION on this campaign. The campaign is geared toward reaching out to those people and generations who turned on the church because of the way the church systematically disenfranchises people. We should be changing our policies and actions before spending 20 million to lie about who we are as stated by our policies. We can’t even seem to say that church is a place for all people, so why are we trying to imply that it is a place for everyone all the time? Even our basic actions, such as our recently disbanded hymnal revision committee (thank goodness) that was trying to represent the voices of the next generation of Methodists but all but refusing to include the voices of those of the next generation of church leaders and members – they said the committee reflected the make up of the church – but we weren’t looking at who is NOT in our pews and certainly not listening to their voices – that that is the whole problem with many church, especially the UMC.
Until the people in the church realize that being a Christian means loving and embracing ALL people, they will continue to dump money into these add campaigns to no avail.
I encourage you, like myself, to quit giving money to the UMC until they say ALL means ALL. Keep give to the work of God, but don’t support an organization that not only makes arbitrary rules about who can be a part of the church but throws money away on this contrived pack of misrepresentations of itself.
BTW My favorite line from the video is something about “What if the church was a place where people came for healing”…the irony is that the UMC is the one who keeps systematically damaging our GLBT Sisters and Brothers – they are the ones causing people to need healing.
Sincerely
Future Clergy
These comments are very helpful and I’ll share them with the rest of the Conference Communications Committee. Perhaps one reason that the messages of the ads do not “connect” with my good friend Emily and others here might be because we are not the “target audience.” For us, church is already relevant so we’re offended by an ad that tries to convince us that it is. Hopefully, the program will tell the story of the UNC Wesley Foundation and other groups and churches so folks will realize that we really aren’t Christians only for one hour on Sunday.
Taylor Mills