Last week I spent a good part of a day listening and communicating with a number of folks during my UMC’s global Leadership Summit webcast. It was a good time to be a twitter native. Our community of folks were not intentionally courted for the webcast, but we sure did have our own little conference. Jeremy has a great run down of all that fun.

The main focus of the summit was content that is held within this “Call to Action” a document created for the church that tells us stuff we’ve all pretty much known. The United Methodist Church is dying (at least in the USA) & there are some basic tenants of vibrant growing church communities to refract off of.

My problem engaging the Call to Action as I did with the ReThink Church campaign is simple. We are still doing a bunch of talking..

Recently read “Poke the Box” by Seth Godin. Like most Godin books he beats his themes like a roadkill on the interstate. Poke the Box is this.. Get out there, stop talking and do something..

Our church hierarchy needs to stop being a talking head and get out and do something if they expect to bring change to the denomination that has offered a living. Are our bishops actually helping to lead change hands on? Probably not, because that task might seem gigantic. But if you can do that for one or two and find some successes then the credibility and branding of that change agent carries greater than saying the right things.

Agency heads and employees need to stop seeing their work as some given a career but a passionate mission that takes immersion into where they need to be. It is my observation that agency work is about meetings after meetings to know what is the right thing.. Who needs right all the time when constantly worried about being right leads to an eventual death?

I don’t care about people who want to talk change. I want to see and know people who are doing change. That is exciting to me and worth a global conversation.

in my opinion..