Clergy called to spiritual renewal By Dean Snyder
UMConnection Staff Shallow spirituality results in timid preaching and status quo churches. This warning was part of the Rev. Rodney T. Smothers message to 250 Baltimore-Washington Conference pastors during a Feb. 12 Clergy Day Apart. Smothers, pastor of Gibbons-Resurrection UMC in Brandywine, challenged pastors to remember who it is they are called to serve. For whom do we preach? he asked. Are you preaching for the SPRC (Staff-Parish Relations Committee) as they contemplate giving you a raise? Are you preaching for your seminary homiletics professor sitting on your shoulder? Are you preaching for your bishop, district superintendent or clergy colleagues? Smothers, who transferred back home to the Baltimore-Washington Conference from a successful ministry in Georgia to take on a congregation experiencing financial disaster, said his own experience caused him to remember the sacred center of his ministry. When you dont know if youre going to have a building from Sunday to Sunday, it gives you a whole new understanding of being a shepherd, he said. Smothers thanked conference pastors for the financial support their churches have provided Gibbons-Resurrection UMC.We are alive and well. But the tenuous financial situation faced by the congregation after being left with a $6 million debt and an unfinished building when a previous pastor withdrew from the denomination taking most of the members with him, caused Smothers to dig deeply to find the spiritual center of his ministry. Just let the bishop appoint you to a church scheduled to close the Sunday you come, he said. As pastor of Gibbons-Resurrection UMC he faced issues that his seminary training never remotely addressed. But the authenticity of our call prepares us for these situations when they come, he said. I can hear my friend Vance Ross saying, Doc, the problem with our church is that we are still trying to communicate with film strip projectors in a DVD world, Smothers said. Were the only denomination I know whose publishing house has as its symbol a man riding a horse. Even in Brandywine, we drive cars. Smothers said that pastors who know where their sacred center is and who know the authenticity of their calling will risk radically new things for the cause of Christ. While we are waiting for permission from the very folk we are called to lead, he said, ministry opportunities are passing us by. Most of the pastors attending the annual event, hosted by Bishop Felton Edwin May, responded to an altar call and participated in an extended time of prayer for renewal. The Day Apart is one of the most important gatherings of the year for conference clergy, according to the Rev. Mark A. Derby, superintendent of the Baltimore-Harford District, who helped organize the first such experience in the mid-1980s. I personally look forward to them because it is the one day of the year that we congregate as clergy colleagues and dont have any business agenda, he said. | 
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