Bloom Where You're Planted

The start of something beautiful - I've been tasked to make a stole - one that will be shared among the Elders in our Annual Conference.

I rounded out my renewal leave this week with an Order of Elders gathering in Hood River, OR. I found myself throughout our time together, sitting in that familiar space between conviction and questioning — that tender tension where God’s Spirit tends to do some of the best work.

For the past few months, I’ve been wrestling with some vocational restlessness — not about whether I’m called, but about how to live out that call in this particular season and place.

Let me be clear: I have never doubted that I am called to ordained ministry in the United Methodist Church. For me, that call has always been about preaching God’s word in a sometimes-weary world, offering the balm of the sacraments — communion and baptism, living a life of service, and helping to order the life of the Church. Not just the local congregation I serve, but the wider connection we share as United Methodists.

Those four movements — Word, Sacrament, Service, and Order — are the rhythm of my vocation as an Ordained Elder in the United Methodist Church. Throughout my ministry I have moved back and forth among them, sometimes all in a single day, sometimes over the course of a season. These four things have kept me grounded. At the same time - they keep me growing.

One truth that kept rising to the surface for me this week is this: these churches we are privileged to serve aren’t ours. They belong to God.

Our task isn’t to preserve the institution for its own sake, but to equip congregations for the work God has given them to do. That means strengthening our connections — not just in name, but in practice. It starts with clergy supporting one another, building networks of mentoring and care, and making sure clergy and churches who are struggling aren’t left to figure it out alone. It means letting go of things that have been holding us back particularly our longing for a time long-gone.

And it means telling the truth — about the ways the system has failed us and continues to do so. When bullying goes unchecked in, when pastors aren’t paid a living wage, when young people become an afterthought — those are not small issues. They cut to the heart of who we are as Elders in the United Methodist Church.

Accountability and order are part of our calling, but they must always be wrapped in grace. When we are ordained, we hear the words, “Take thou authority.” That’s not a command to control — it’s a charge to lead with courage and truth. To name the hard stuff: racism, colonization, transphobia, misogyny, ableism - inequities that are baked deep into our structures and churches. We can’t undo the past, but we can tell the truth about it — and that truth can set us free.

Even in the midst of reckoning, I find myself returning again and again to hope. I am grateful to serve in the Western Jurisdiction — and in particular Oregon-Idaho - a place where the Spirit is leading us toward a more inclusive, courageous, and honest Church. My colleagues are doing amazing and wonderful things at each of their churches! They are listening to the spirits movements in their communities and blooming where God (or the Bishop) have planted them.

I still long for churches that are unabashedly inclusive — places where everyone knows they belong and are called to lead. I crave a transformed Church that doesn’t stand next to my children wishing for “other” children to come, but recognizes that the children of God are already right here — in the building, in our neighborhoods, in our lives every single day.

And yet… even with the imperfections and frustrations, I still say yes. Every day, I say yes.

• Yes to following Jesus.

• Yes to being United Methodist clergy.

• Yes to a faith that is embodied in action and service.

• Yes to a theology that gives us room to breathe — not a checklist of doctrines, but a living, evolving, growing task.

• Yes to covenant life with my fellow clergy, because we are connectional, relational, and grounded in grace.

  
  

I think this is what it means to find joy — not in waiting for the “perfect” place or the “right” system, but in blooming where we are planted. One might even say - perfected through and in love.

Sometimes that bloom looks like a bright flower bursting through a crack in the sidewalk — defiant, beautiful, alive. Sometimes it’s smaller — a quiet bud, growing in the shadow of something old and heavy. Either way, the growth is real. The Spirit is still moving.

So I’m choosing joy right here, in this season and this soil. I’m choosing to trust that even when the ground feels hard, God’s grace still grows things.

Maybe that’s what faithfulness really looks like — not blooming where we wish we were, but blooming right where God has planted us.