Episode 594: Dr. Will Willimon - Voices in my Head (the Rick Lee James Podcast)

Well, welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I am your host, Rick Lee James, and I am so glad that you are here with us again for another great episode. My guest today on Voices in My Head is one of the most recognized and influential voices in contemporary preaching and church leadership, Dr. William H. Willimon. He's a retired bishop in the United Methodist Church, and he has served as dean of the chapel of Duke University, authored more than 70 books, and inspired generations of pastors with his wit, candor, and deep theological insight. His newest book, The Church We Carry: Lost Leadership and the Future of Our Church, is part memoir, part prophetic critique, and part call to action in the wake of the United Methodist Church's massive wave Disaffiliations. In it, he revisits his own home congregation, Buncombe Street United Methodist Church, exploring the forces—cultural, theological, and personal—that led to its departure from the denomination. Along the way, he reflects on what it means to tell the truth about our past, to navigate conflict with integrity, and to imagine a faithful future for the church we bear forward. So we're looking forward to talking about this today. Dr. Willemot, welcome back to Voices in My Head.

Rick Lee James, it's great to be back with you on Voices in My Head.

Well, I really appreciate you reaching out again. And I feel like you are so prolific. I feel like every time I turn around, you have another new book out. And I'm glad to say I was actually able to give one of your books to my father for his birthday about a week ago, and he was thrilled. Oh, I'm flattered. Yeah. So it's a, it's a great birthday gift, actually. So, but we want to get into your new book today. And I'm excited to get to to talk to you about it. So thanks for taking a few moments to do this tonight. So I want to just start early in the prelude of the book, and you describe being warned by church leaders, and it sounds like you were even threatened with litigation to an extent, that if you publish this book, there was going to be trouble. And I'd just love to hear a little bit from you about that and why people felt so strongly that, you know, like, you can't write this book.

Well, I think from two sides. One is the so-called disaffiliates, the schismatics, those who were attempting to take this historic congregation out of the denomination that birthed it and sustained it. They— one of their chief weapons, modus operandi, was secrecy. They began in secret, sending out messages to the congregation, unsigned, anonymous. They worked with secret meetings and things. It turns out that's very typical for churches, for congregations, where you have a group attempting to remove the congregation from the denomination or attempting to do it. Secrecy is a big thing. So I think they saw me asking questions, attempting to bring things to light, attempting to tell the story as a threat. I sort of humorously said, hey, I'm a preacher. We're against secrecy. Our Lord says, I have come to make things, to reveal things, to open up things. Everything that is hidden is going to be brought to light, etc. And, um, I think what it says to me is, uh, in a congregation, uh, whenever a pastor or congregational leaders encounter secret meetings, anonymous unsigned communication, it is a big warning sign. On the other hand, sad to say, I think among my loyal United Methodist friends, bishops, etc., there is that feeling, hey, we've been through a very traumatic, painful time of separation. In our church. Let's, let's move on. Let's not talk about it anymore. Let's— we'd rather you not bring it up. Problem with that is a lot of great, wonderful Christians were hurt deeply in the process of church division and separation. And part of their hurt was they felt the people who should have defended us as loyal United Methodists, wanting to stay United Methodist and keep our membership vows, the people who should have been defending us didn't. They didn't speak up. They didn't speak out. And I, in part, wrote the book to tell their story and found that they were eager to have somebody speak for them and tell this, what they experience. So I've said somewhat jokingly to some of my fellow bishops, you know, when I mess up in my own ministry, when I don't do the right thing, when I mess up, I always want you not to talk about it. I don't want you to bring it up. I want it to be ancient history, you know. Well, preacher in me, I hope kind of the Christian in me says, uh, secrecy bad, conversation, openness, candor good.

Yeah, that's the book. Yeah, well, and I do appreciate that because I, I feel like one emphasis that you often have is on truth-telling and even difficult truths. And I also appreciate even just your emphasis right now on telling the story. The hospital chaplain in me resonates a little bit with that too, not just from churches, but we have found that in our work with people who are grieving, that telling the story of their loved one, of the loss that they went through— Absolutely. —is so important.

Well, you know, as a chaplain, I remember as a young pastor, I would go into a grief situation. And I would say, oh my goodness, how did this happen? And the person would respond, well, let us say I got up about 8 o'clock. Harold was still, I thought he was still sleeping. I got up and I made breakfast, and Harold always liked French toast, so I thought I was going to surprise him. I was going to make French toast, and then, um, but I didn't have but 2 eggs, and, you know, and, uh, so when I got everything together, I walked in and I said, Harold, it's time for you to get up, and I realized Harold was gone, and I'm sitting there thinking, get on with it, get— when did he die? How did he— well, My theory for that is grieving people need to do a lot of talking, and they go into a lot of detail because they're trying to say, "Am I living a dream? Did this nightmare really happen to me? Is it real?" And in talking about it, it's important. Also, as you know as a chaplain, if you're going through grief, it's never helpful to tell a grieving person, Uh, hey, just don't talk about it. Just move on. Don't talk about it. No pastor would do that. And yet I feel like a lot of people have said that to me about the year that the United Methodist Church went through, uh, the couple of years that this congregation went through. And so I think it's better Talk about it.

Yeah, it's true. And I, it is a form of loss, and that, that loss is important to be acknowledged in the midst of all that has gone on. So I do appreciate that. And you're exactly right about those stories. I hear so many of them every day where the smallest details, you wonder why they matter, but it was a part of that person's life. It was so important. Their story was important and needs to be told. So, uh, that's really wonderful. And it kind of leads me into the next question I had, actually, because I love the way, not just in this book, but I feel like there's a lot of emphasis in your writing where you talk about salvation being a group phenomenon, um, something that we, we don't do on our own. And that's part of this process too, is I think you're enabling, um, by telling this story. And, and especially at the end of the book when I read about all the interviews that you did and the research that you did and the, the, the time that you took to tell the story correctly, um, it really was a group endeavor even though your name is on the book cover and you did a lot of, you know, you did the writing part. I feel like you did this with a group of people who was also telling that story, um, which is also, as, as you often point out, is one of the hardest things about following Jesus is he doesn't let us do it alone.

Uh, yeah, yeah, that's— I'm glad you picked that up because I think that's the theme in the book, uh, uh, from the beginning Read the New Testament, particularly read the letters of Paul. From the beginning, uh, Jesus chooses to save us as a group. The hope in Revelation is, uh, that eventually when God gets what God wants, there'll be a great multitude surrounding the throne, a huge crowd making a beautiful music I'm sure you as a musician noted that. And, but from the beginning, that's been hard. It's been hard. And a major reason it's been hard is that other people's experience of Jesus Christ are inevitably different from mine. And therefore, when I make my own relationship with Jesus, my own experience of the risen Christ as he has come to me, uh, when I make that normative, when I set that as a bar for you to reach, I really have violated the kind of group salvation that Jesus practices. And, um, I fear at my home church this was done. People said, if our denomination says— if anybody in our denomination says these things— it was interesting, the group really didn't rebel against any official pronouncement of the denomination. They rebelled against stories of individuals in the denomination that maybe said or did outrageous things. That they found offensive, that became the reason, hey, we got to leave the denomination. And, um, I think in— I think it very, very sad in the denomination, in the congregation that I study, my home congregation, there were some Christians who eventually got to the point of saying, you know, here's the way our church should be. 'And if that excludes you, we're glad to be church without you. Sorry to see you go.' I found that deeply offensive biblically, and in effect, about 150 or more people were voted out of the church they were happily members of, because a group said, we, we're determined to take this church in a different direction. And, um, I just think that really violates kind of the, the salvation as we have it in Jesus Christ, which says, you know, how did Jesus begin his ministry? I mentioned that in a sermon I preached in this church at the 175th anniversary. How does he begin his ministry? By assembling a group, by calling together 12 people who presumably never— didn't know each other. We find out as the story unfolds in the Gospels, these first 12 disciples, they did not only didn't know each other, they didn't agree with each other. They found it difficult to live with each other. One of them dramatically veers from the group in his betrayal of Jesus, but in a way, all of them betrayed Jesus. In one way or another. And yet, to whom did the risen Christ return in his resurrection? To that group, to the same group that so disappointed him the first time, this contentious, divisive group. He comes to them and he blesses them and says, go make other disciples, and, and don't just limit yourself to people who look like you. Go into all the world, Matthew 28. And, um, that— therefore, I think that a group at my home church led their church to, um, veer from the, the, the, the way that Christ has set out for us.

I, I, I love that explanation. I really appreciate it. I think especially in a time where I have to be careful sometimes, even in the work I do as a chaplain, because it can feel like a one-man job sometimes. But it really is something that I can't do on my own. You know, I even have to find other people like me as to lean on and, you know, to grieve with and to walk through things. And I just think it's true in every part of life.

Oh, essential.

We're never our complete selves without other people, for sure. I just think God made us that way, for sure.

And I was going to say, I think that's the way God has set things up. That's the way God has created us. Uh, it is not good that we should be alone. Yeah, God puts us together.

Well, some of the things we've been talking about— we, we've talked about truth-telling and we've talked about walking together as a group. And then there's a— there's actually a story that you relay in the book that I'm trying to look at my digital copy here. I don't know what page it is. It's because it says like percentages on my phone instead of wherever. But I'm sure you'll know the story. It's one I found to be very moving and poignant about something that happened in Buncombe Street Church when Billy Graham Crusade was coming to town. And as we've been talking about telling the truth about our difficult things in our church and in the lives, and especially this church that's, that's seated in the South, um, in a time when, when racial segregation and things were very much issues that churches were dealing with. You tell this, this really powerful story, um, about the board gathering together, uh, for, uh, talking about, I guess, whether they're going to participate or not in this Billy Graham Crusade because he's going to allow people who are not white to, to come and be a part of it. Would you be able to relay maybe some of that story just for our listeners today? I feel like it's so powerful and the things that maybe it taught you as, as an early person learning to preach.

Well, my, my book is cast as a kind of memoir, uh, where I'm shocked at what I hear at my home church, of my home church, um, and I I kind of go back to my home church, talk to people, and I bring with it all my memories of my home church. And part of me says, wait a minute, my Buckham Street Church was a church where I felt, as a teenager from a single-parent family, I felt embraced and welcome. My Buckham Street would have never excluded a group because they thought differently about the Bible than many of the people at the church. Well, the more I thought about it, the more I read, the more I reminisced, I remembered certain events. And one event I remembered when I was the Methodist Youth Fellowship representative to the administrative board. All Greenville was excited because we were going to be— we'd been selected after a lot of hard work, as the city for a Billy Graham Crusade. And everybody, all Greenville was a-twitter with, "We're going to be at the Billy Graham Crusade. It's going to be at the Textile Hall in Greenville." Well, the board, I was there the night as a youth representative to the board when the board discussed it. And people, the pastor said, "This is just a wonderful opportunity for all the churches to come together and great opportunity for Billy Graham to share his message with the people of Greenville. But then someone said, well, I understood that Graham has ordered there's going to be no separation of the races at his crusade. Uh, and it was confirmed, yes, his crusades are racially integrated, period. And They basically, the board said, well, that's it. We're not participating in the Billy Graham Crusade. And I was shocked. And one of the board members said, this is a Baptist plot. Graham is a Baptist trying to, Baptist trying to get one up on us. But anyway, the main reason was racial. But that night, as I slipped out of church, out of the building to go catch the bus back home, I heard down a darkened hall weeping. And I looked down the hall and the door to our pastor's study was open. And our pastor was weeping that his congregation was refusing to participate in the Billy Graham Crusade. Because of the racial mixing. And I was about 14 years old. And this I will never get out of my— I hope I'll never get out of my memory, the image of a pastor weeping. I've said, I didn't know I was going to end up being a pastor myself. It was kind of good to see early on what makes pastors weep. And, um, it was a moment, uh, I think a very important moment in my own ministerial Christian development, but also a reminder that my home church had been disappointing before and was capable of being very disappointing again.

Well, I— one of the reason I I think that for me personally, as I'm reading that story again, and I love the idea that you present to us, you know, realizing the things that make preachers cry. I have a dear friend who until very recently, she was one of our chaplains at the hospital, and she was an African American lady. And she would tell us that, you know, things that we could not imagine, even just very recently, you know, she said, you know, people, when they see me on the elevator, they turn around and walk the other way and wait for another elevator because I'm Black. And I said, really, that's happened to you? And she said, it happened 3 times today already. Like, or rooms that she would enter into to be with people and be present, and they would turn her away. And I hear stories like that, and it just broke my heart. I know I know this lady, she's a beautiful person of God, you know, and, and it hurt me very much. And I know it didn't hurt me near as much as it hurt her to have those things happen. And I, and when I read that story again about, I was like, thank God the preacher was crying in that story because we hear those things.

Yeah, it's, it's the kind of things that should. I'm sure You know, my home church would be horrified by the notion that race animus played any role in all of this. But I'm sorry, I grew up in that church. I grew up in Greenville, South Carolina. And race may not be the chief factor, the main factor, but it's a factor. And also, I just think it's uncanny that in my growing up years, people invoked scripture, they invoked their commitment to Christ as a way of justifying their segregationist racial attitudes. Well, forgive me for being suspicious when in our current day people look at issues of gender or sexual orientation and it sounds very familiar to some of the arguments mounted some time ago and the denomination that's being formed out of my denomination, kind of the first denomination in history ever formed on the basis of congregations purloined from one denomination. Anyway, but that new denomination is even more white than my denomination, the UMC, that the denomination is pulled out of. So, race is a factor, and it is part of human sinfulness. And I think it was allowed to play a role in, uh, in this situation.

Yeah, yeah. Well, this, this whole book, I— the story from, from beginning to end, I, I appreciate the way you dwell not only on the good parts of the past, but, but truthfully, you speak to things like that where, as, as you said, the church has been disappointing. Um, and, and yeah, there's always this tone of, but it's still for some reason, God doesn't want to seem to let go of the church. You know, there's this plan in the world that God has set in place.

Yeah. And you look at our churches as they are, and you dig deep, deeper beyond the smiling Sunday morning faces. It really is amazing that we have a Savior who is determined not to rule in heaven without us, that keeps finding a way to pull his, pull his church out of the mire and muck and, uh, be the church. And, um, that, you know, a major criticism of Jesus, certainly the Gospel of Luke, is this man receives sinners and he eats with them. Yeah, well, the church says, thank God he continues to behave in that way. Yeah. And, and that is— therein is our hope.

Yes, yes, amen. Well, you know, our, our time is, is quickly coming to an end here, and, and I hate that because I'm really enjoying the conversation, but I, I wanted to ask you just one or two things that aren't necessarily related to the book and And by the way, everybody listening, just so you know, on the podcast, as you listen, you should be able to go into the notes and we'll have links and things where you can get the book. And I encourage everybody to read it. But I wanted to ask you maybe one or two questions that are just related to your experience as a seasoned minister and the kind of opportunities that you've had to train a lot of people over the years. So this is one thing I'm curious about. You've done a lot of writing, you've done a lot of reading over the years. If you could require every United Methodist pastor to read one non-theology book, what do you think it would be and why?

Ooh, I'm thinking of books, non-theology books that have meant a great deal to me, novels and all, that that I think probably say more about me and my messed upness than they do about the book. You know, I guess I love my fellow Southerner Flannery O'Connor. Her novellas like Wise Blood. She's a Catholic. I'm not. But I think she is a deeply Christian writer. Her writing turns off a lot of people because her characters are often terrible. And just, she does violence and people at their worst. But I think she writes out of a deep sense that If Jesus Christ does not save sinners, if Jesus Christ is not God's redemption in action, we're damned. There is no hope. And so Flannery O'Connor has been a companion throughout my ministry, and I urge Flannery upon you, even though if you're not a Southerner, I think she has a way of driving us back to the soteriological salvific core of the faith, the scandal that Jesus Christ loves and saves the very ones who crucify him. That's powerful.

I love Flannery O'Connor too, and Parker's Back is one that I go back to a lot.

Oh, thank you for mentioning Parker's Back. Revelation is maybe one of my favorite short stories, but I love Parker's Back. I would say that you being an artist, a musician, it's interesting that you love Parker's Back.

Yeah, there's a lot of imagery there, a lot of imagination that comes to mind. Yeah, yeah, sure, for sure. Well, and so, so I'll say one that I wish people would read. I don't know if I'd say it's the one, but it's one that I come back to and a lot, uh, Jabber Crow by Wendell Berry. Oh, okay. I've read that one before. I love it. Yeah, yeah, that's one of the great ones too that I enjoyed.

So I love the kind of incarnational quality of that in the sense that it's, uh, it feels real earthy. Uh, it also highlights kind of unspectacular faithfulness. Yeah, which is itself kind of spectacular.

Yeah, truly, what a great way to put that. All right, well, you know what, just one more question because it's telling me we have just over 7 minutes left before time runs out on my timer here. So, so if you get 5 minutes alone in a sanctuary with a brand new pastor before their first sermon, what do you say them?

Um, and, and maybe this does rise out of the book, back to loop it around back to By the Book. But, uh, stay close to Jesus. It's about Jesus. We really have nothing interesting to say to the world but Jesus Christ. Uh, we have no great hence for happier living, uh, self-help, none of that. It's the most— the wildest thing we have to say is in, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself. That's the amazing thing we have to offer. I would say though, and this definitely relates to the book, remember Jesus Christ's middle name was Trouble. He started trouble. You know how his ministry ended. You know how his ministry began, Luke 4, in Nazareth. Um, crisis, conflict, disagreement, division is not a sign of your failure as a church or as a pastor, but often the validation that you're actually walking with Jesus. Uh, Jesus started trouble everywhere he went, and he never backed down from an argument. In fact, he initiated most of them. And, um, but just remember that as a pastor, because I think we pastors can do a lot of damage by fearing conflict and running away from conflict and not actively curating arguments and managing conflict. That's one lesson I think that can be learned from my account of what happened at my home church. Great.

Be strong and courageous, to use the Deuteronomistic language there. That's, that's excellent. Yes, yes, very good. Well, uh, Dr. Willemann, thank you so much. I appreciate you coming back. Well, thank you, Rick. And we will make sure that we have web links in all the show notes so everybody can just easily, while they're listening, just go to the notes and click on a link to find the new book. But for everyone listening, one more time, uh, the new book is called The Church We Carry: Lost Leadership and the Future of Our Church, and it is by Dr. William Willimon, who has been my guest today. It's always a pleasure. Great.

Yeah, let me just say that if you get the book, uh, let me know how you like it. I am really— maybe more than any book I've ever written— I am really enjoying the response from pastors and others who've read the book. So let me know what you think, how it applies to your church and ministry.

Very good. Well, all right, everybody, make sure you reach out after you've read the book. So thank you so much. And as we close— thank you— today, I'm just gonna play our little outro music here and thank everyone again. Appreciate you listening to Voices in My Head week after week. Coming up soon, just a few episodes, we're we're going to be to our 600th episode. Unbelievably. So keep listening. Got some fun things in store. I'm grateful for all of you. God bless you and have a wonderful day.