End of an Era: Disaffiliating from Mainline Denominationalism
At this time last year, this church was still affiliated with The United Methodist Church. A lot has happened since then, but to understand how big a deal this last year has been, we should first look back. The roots of this church go back to 1892 when this was considered Indian Territory, before statehood. At that time, the property owned and the assembled body here was affiliated with the Methodist Episcopal Church, which was the mainline Methodist denomination of that day. As the denomination merged with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and the Methodist Protestant Church in 1939, our congregation followed into the new denomination: The Methodist Church. In 1968, The Methodist Church denomination merged with the Evangelical United Brethren denomination, becoming The United Methodist Church. So, from the beginnings of this church body, it has been affiliated with the largest mainline Methodist entity of its day. The Nowata Methodists had been a mainline people.
The last year ended this part of our church’s identity. Due to long-attested and historically undeniable theological drift within The United Methodist Church’s leadership, our continued membership in that body grew untenable. There had already been many chapters of tension in the past between this church and its denomination because of poor decisions from our former’s conference on what clergy were assigned here, as well as how apportionments were asked and spent. Even so, the final breaking point came amidst the disaffiliations of more than 7,500 other local churches. We were a small part of the largest church schism, numerically, in the US, ever.
This was a remarkably easy decision that was made with only one dissenting vote when the time came. The oldest generation was galvanized alongside the latest and youngest members as we worked our way through the reasons why we needed to consider a realignment. While there was sadness around leaving the only denomination many of us had ever known, it was acknowledged by a broad majority that it was time for our affiliation to end, as the UMC had truly already left us.
A few months later, we joined the membership of the Global Methodist Church, where more than 4,000 former United Methodist local churches have now affiliated. We are not an independent church. We have taken seriously the biblical injunction to pursue unity of faith and accountability under shared doctrine with other believers. We are hopeful about the future of our new covenant body.
New Ministries & Ongoing Vital Ministries
Online Ministry: Live Streaming, Podcasts, and PlainSpoken
When Covid came and church attendance was strained for many, our church was constrained like many others to engage in online ministry. Initial purchases were made to do the bare minimum of reaching out to, not just the community immediately around our building, but to, potentially, a much larger audience.
In 2021, we hired TJ Owens, who has since joined our membership and moved back to Nowata, to be a part time employee to facilitate all things tech. At the close of 2022, he and I renovated a classroom and turned it into a studio. Since then, this studio has been used to conduct dozens of interviews with local people, like Dane Warner, a film producer and Nowata native who produced Full Court Press: The Ken Zacher Story this year. We have also been able to host several in-person interviews with important people in the Global Methodist Church, including our own Bishop Scott Jones.
Over time, we have been able to upgrade our recording gear, such that we are able to create content that looks and sounds better than most large churches. This ministry is employed, not just during our Sunday worship services, when we broadcast our worship to a regular weekly crew of almost a dozen people, but almost every day of the week as we publish our church podcast, as well as my PlainSpoken podcast. On a weekly basis, at this point, our church is touching thousands of lives around the world. For a more detailed report on the PlainSpoken project and its significant growth and influence, consult a year-end report here.
TJ, with consultation help from JC Campbell, has built and maintained a professional infrastructure for the church, not just with a live stream setup in our sanctuary, but building and maintaining our website, keeping an inventory of our church resources (he lends his own quite a bit), maintaining and growing our presence online, and serving as a church photographer.
From the beginning of this ministry, it has been a real question if online engagement results in growing our church, either in faith or in numbers. To grow in faith, TJ has helped our church produce a great deal of content aimed at our current church body growing in knowledge. I send out this content on a weekly basis in the church’s weekly email. All of it is posted in our church’s YouTube page, which is regularly promoted from the pulpit. To grow in numbers because of online activity is more difficult, as the most effective method of growing the church is face-to-face encounters with people. Yet many have come close to our church at least partly because of our regular and approachable presence online. We surely have a lot of room to continue growing in this ministry. It would seem a lacking component is a person responsible for serving as a bridge between real life and the virtual world. TJ is not a real outgoing, social person, nor is that what the church has appointed him to be. We need someone who is willing to correspond with people, help them make a commitment to come in person, send them content and resources to equip them to join us in mission.
As it stands, our church has 590 followers on Facebook and 99 subscribers on YouTube. These numbers will only continue to go up if we continue to be good stewards of the resources entrusted to us. Because of the audience we have grown, in 2023, when we decided to raise funds to support the building of a permanent church structure in Abuja, Nigeria, our church was able to raise more than $4,000 to that effect just by producing a video on the need. It is reasonable to think that future needs will similarly be met by effectively engaging our audience in such a way.
Bountiful Tables
Food is a big part of the Christian faith, whether it be in the necessity of the Lord’s Supper, the importance of regular fellowship meals, or the feeding of the poor and needy. When I moved here, the Dinners With Love and Loaves and Fishes ministries were in full swing. However, leadership for both ministries eventually either died or fell away when Covid came. Loaves and Fishes discontinued when the leadership at the time grew frustrated with the lack of community involvement. Dinners With Love asked the church to transfer all of their funds to the Boys and Girls Club, where they intended to continue preparing free meals for the benefit of Nowata’s poor families on a monthly basis.
However, our church’s job to feed the poor and needy did not disappear. Even so, I was unclear on how we were to go about it. I have not felt good about the model that delivers food to people’s homes without building relationship, nor a model that does not effectively work households towards wholeness.
At the start of this year, an idea of a mothers’ ministry, aimed at feeding their families, the local poor, and the needy took root in me. I eventually convinced the board to put aside some money, alongside some other money I was able to raise, to create temporary part-time employment for a local Christian sister named Cori Davis, who would coordinate this ministry.
In that time, a solid group of almost a dozen women has been formed, which meets weekly on Mondays to cook several meals for their families in that space. The building is filled with children’s laughter all day while their mothers cook, pray, laugh, and clean together. It has been a long time since the space was used in such a way. Each day is concluded with a large shared meal, at which it is normal to have at least 40 people in attendance. The ministry has produced more than 3,000 meals in this time, which is always healthier than the prepared meals one finds at the grocery store. Bountiful Tables meals are often locally-sourced, ethically grown or butchered, and significantly cheaper than other options like Hello Fresh. The mothers who work in the kitchen pay a little money for food. Members of the community who order meals pay a little more. The ministry also gives meals away to local needy when tragedy strikes. Even so, this is not a program in which everything is free. Folks are able to maintain their dignity by paying a fair price and doing fair work. The long term hope is that this restores a sense of self-worth to many women, in particular, who had forgotten how to do useful things.
In these almost-nine months of ministry, the cost of labor, food, and materials has been over $23,000. At the close of this year, the ministry has been able to recoup over $20,000 of that from the support of this community. The church is operating at a loss, but as this ministry continues to grow and to impact more lives, it is reasonable to expect that it will eventually break even while simultaneously bringing people closer to Christ through food. The current leadership is very comfortable talking about Jesus and making him the center of everything they do. This ministry has a huge, obvious potential for bringing people closer to Christ through the local church and repairing broken households and lives. God has been active here.
I would also be a bad pastor and friend if I failed to acknowledge that Cori Davis has been a fantastic coordinator. She has worked harder to make this ministry succeed than anybody knows. She has done a better job than, honestly, I think anyone else could have. As this current small break ends and the Bountiful Tables crew again convenes in the church kitchen on Monday, they will be well-positioned because of their excellent leader. For her part, she has drafted a report on this ministry to supporters, which you can find here.
Children’s Ministry
Our church’s children’s ministry fell apart in 2017 because it was unsustainable. In that time, we have had children in our church, but no organized ministry for teaching them good doctrine or socializing them in the faith. That changed this year as we have resumed a weekly midweek children’s ministry. We have a solid group of children who meet every Thursday evening in our fellowship hall to memorize a catechism, study the bible, sing, and play together. These children all attend Sunday morning worship with the assembled body, they participate in worship, prayer, and praise with us. They minister to us. It is a joyful and holy thing that few churches do right.
For a fuller report on what God has been doing in the lives of our children, I wrote an article here.
Adult Small Group Discipleship
Our adult discipleship groups did not begin in 2023. I hope they are remembered as a vital feature of my ministry here. Like all early Methodists, I (and now many here) know that Christian identity is most effectively formed in the midst of an intimate community of faith. The Christian faith is not meant to be done with a group for one hour a week on Sunday mornings, followed by a whole week on one’s lonesome. Rather, believers are required by Christ to walk in faith alongside other believers, carrying their burdens, rejoicing in their victories. If a church is not facilitating these sorts of groups, it is not doing its job.
Our church is doing its job. We have three women’s groups and one men’s group that meet midweek on a weekly basis to do the work of true discipleship. These folks are growing in love and faithfulness. Remember it was these groups that upheld our church through Covid. It is these groups that now compose the strongest fabric of our church. The bonds are real and lasting, and Christ is in the midst of us.
This level of intimate small group ministry is difficult, as individuals regularly struggle, fail, and sometimes fall away or die. There is great capacity for harm. Even so, there is also infinite capacity for grace, forbearance, and the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. Despite the culture of our area being alienated and closed off to intimacy in that way, over time we find our people converting to the culture of Christ. Men and women are learning to trust one another, to share honestly and earnestly, to hold themselves and one another accountable lovingly. This is the heart of ministry. I feel great about the other things I have written about, but this is at the center of what we are called to do. It is this work that most effectively brings Christ into the lives of the people involved. I have nothing against worship, bible study, or any other groups, but these sorts of small groups I’m talking about here are where the difficult work of discipleship is actually done.
My prayer is that we continue to see growth and flourishing in such groups, and that this becomes the actual entry point of new people into the church, rather than Sunday morning worship. I would love nothing more than for the ministry of our church to be synonymous with accountable small group discipleship.
Other Important Metrics: Attendance and Giving
Many churches that sustained through Covid were never able to bounce back very strong. Because of the solid people we had in this church, we barely missed a step. Challenges of political division and disaffiliation from the UMC have gutted many churches. Not ours. Our bond is stronger, if anything.
The highest point of attendance in my ministry was in 2018, when we averaged 63 per week in attendance. Since then, many have died or moved away. Today, a few who used to solidly attend are sick at home. Yet many younger folks have come close to take their place. In-person attendance significantly decreased in 2020 for reasons we all remember. In 2022, the average attendance was down to 45. This year it came back up to 53. We are in a good upward trend, which I hope to continue in 2024 despite the many challenges that await us.
It might be worth reporting that the average age of our worshiping body on any given Sunday is 47 years old. That is the youngest it has ever been since I have been the pastor. Many younger and middle-aged couples and families have come in this year. We had our final worship service with another young couple taking great joy in our midst.
With respect to our church’s finances, I remember when I moved here, the church was hemorrhaging $2K per month, and folks were saying we would have to close the church doors if things did not turn around. Today, we sit in a very privileged position because of the faithful giving of our people. All eight years of my service here have been blessed with receiving more than we have spent. It is my intention to stay with that policy, so that we are always spending out of our abundance. We are able to do more today, with two part-time employees that we could not have afforded when I began, because of this general policy. The figures directly below are from January of 2023:
You can see that our church leadership has wisely maintained our Endowment Fund (we can never touch the principle balance, but can live off its investment yields until Christ comes again), and has also begun an Investment Fund. The Building Fund is obviously for renovation and building projects on the parsonage and church building. The Directed Fund has all of our miscellaneous designated giving, including for Bountiful Tables and PlainSpoken. The General Budget is where all money automatically goes when given to the church. When it gets below $10K, we infuse it with money from the Investment Fund to take it back up to $20K.
The latest financials show a net loss of assets from the start of the year by around $23K. December giving is almost always higher, so it is reasonable to imagine the church will get a little closer to breaking even. Even so, it isn’t fun to close out lower than we began. One thing to consider is that we paid around $67K to the Oklahoma Annual Conference to cover final apportionments and unfunded pension liabilities in May when we disaffiliated. Yet we have closed out ahead in years with several unexpected expenses. Hopefully the market will perform well and people will continue to give out of their abundance. Monthly giving has not gone down over the last year, but monthly expenses have gone up with the creation of these new positions.
One might look at the relatively high balances and conclude that our church needs to spend a lot more money because we have a lot. Yet, if the church is going to remain a strong source of gospel truth and activity in Nowata for generations to come, then we need to keep building and investing wisely. If we were to spend more than we are, then quite quickly we could again be giving speeches at the front of the sanctuary saying people need to give more, else the church will need to close its doors.
Planning for the Future, Financially & Otherwise
It is hard to enjoy ministry for anyone in the church when the funds are dropping and folks aren’t sure if the doors can stay open. It has been a long time since our church has had to say or even think anything dramatic like that. We aren’t anywhere close to that today. Even so, we need to make sure to continue growing our financial capacity for the sake of future ministry. As I recently stated in worship, folks at every stage of life need to be considering the establishment of personal trusts and wills so as to bless the church when they pass. Sara Beth and I recorded our recollection of that process here. When we die, our assets will benefit the church. We pray that others will also come to love their church enough to do the same.
It is worth reminding ourselves that money is not entrusted to us by God for us to spend it on ourselves. Rather, it is for God’s glory and the care of the poor. If you didn’t see my presentation a couple of years ago, you should know it is my intention to form intentional communities of men and women in poverty who need to get their lives together. Nowata County needs a benevolent institution like that to affect change in the lives of our many chronically addicted and vulnerable families. Our church needs to build up our ability to eventually host such a ministry.
In the meantime, we need to expand and buttress the ministries we already have. Bountiful Tables has much capacity for growth, as does our video production ministry. There are other children and families that would easily make a firm home in our small groups ministries. We need to maintain what we are doing, with quality, while growing out capacity.
I envision a future in which our church employs many more individuals who interact with the community and world around us, creating a synergy between our various ministries to form authentic disciples of Jesus Christ with staying power. It is depressingly common in today’s America for people who say they are Christians to know very little of doctrine or discipline. We cannot be guilty of enabling that in our sphere of influence.
As the level of commitment to our church continues to deepen, and as we are entrusted with the time and attention, not just of children, but of adults in our midst, we should anticipate seeing an increased knowledge of and zeal for the Lord. As pastor, I will continue to intentionally teach historic Christian doctrine in the Methodist tradition, with the full expectation that people not only learn, but practice, what is taught. Lives will continue to be transformed, and in greater numbers than before.
I want to acknowledge the number of friends we have lost over the years. In 2023, we lost Jim Patton, Nona Harris, and Jill Seale. I considered each of these my friends. They were all three quality people who, at their best, love Jesus and his church.
As we continue forward into the future, we honor the legacies who have gone before, including these three. May God bless their memories in our midst. God willing, we will make a great many more saints before Christ comes again in glory!
2023 Year End Report for Nowata Methodist Church