Dare to take risks to move church forward, pastor says

Key Points:

• The Rev. Stephen Handy in Nashville is helping 20 urban congregations between Nashville and Memphis get out in their neighborhoods.
• Partnerships with nonprofits offer a way to revitalize underused church space and bring people into the church building who wouldn’t otherwise be interested, Handy says.
• He also believes it’s time that churches were measured more by the effectiveness of their ministries and less by financial or membership statistics

Much has changed in The United Methodist Church in the past several years.

At the 2024 General Conference, discriminatory language affecting LGBTQ persons was removed from the Book of Discipline, clearing the way for gay pastors and weddings. Last year, United Methodist voters approved regionalization, which allows each regional conference to adapt parts of the Book of Discipline, the denomination’s policy book, to its own legal and missional contexts.

The church also is recovering from a season of disaffiliations that saw about a quarter of the denomination’s U.S. churches leave after decades of internal division about the role of LGBTQ people in church life.

Although that’s a lot of change, at least one United Methodist pastor thinks more evolution is needed.

“I think the Methodist church is in the best position to reshape the values and culture of our world if we’re willing to take risks,” said the Rev. Stephen Handy, lead pastor of McKendree United Methodist Church in downtown Nashville. He also supervises about 20 urban churches between Nashville and Memphis as an urban cohort district superintendent.

Handy has been pastor at McKendree since 2009. He studied at Dillard University, Tennessee State University and Vanderbilt Divinity School, and earned his doctorate in ministry at Wesley Theological Seminary. Over the years, he has been a supporter of restorative justice, reconciliation across cultural and socio-economic lines and service to the poor, unhoused and marginalized.

He is the coauthor of “Dare to Shift: Challenging Leaders to a New Way of Thinking,” with the Rev. Michael L. Bowie Jr., national executive director of Strengthening the Black Church for the 21st Century, an initiative in The United Methodist Church dedicated to empowering predominantly Black congregations.

In an interview with United Methodist News, Handy explained why he considers himself the pastor of downtown Nashville, not just his church. He also believes it’s time that churches were measured more by the effectiveness of their ministries and less by financial or membership statistics.

“If we’re willing to be open to hearing conversations that we’ve never had before, if we’re willing to walk with people we’ve never walked with before, I think what we will realize is God is doing a new thing,” Handy said.

UM News: You’ve talked about new metrics for measuring the progress of churches, emphasizing mission instead of finances. Does that amount to changing the rules of the game because you’re losing?

Handy: We’re not throwing out the rules. We’re expanding the metrics. … We have developed this philosophy that the church is a place of experimentation. We learn from the experiments, and we share those experiments. … I think it’s been a displaced value that we measure money and attendance and our relationships are shallow. Most of us don’t know each other beyond Sunday morning.

If you’re not feeding the hungry, if you’re not clothing the naked, if you’re not interacting with people unlike yourself, I would say you’re not growing. Although your attendance may be good, your money may be good, there’s a culture that lacks discipleship. I think most of our churches lack discipleship culture.

You say you are not only the pastor of McKendree but also of downtown Nashville. Is that an official title?

It’s not official, but in the Tennessee-Western Kentucky Conference, our bishop (David Graves) has gravitated to that language, and we’re going to start hearing more around being appointed to communities, as opposed to just being appointed to a church.

When I was appointed to McKendree, I realized that I was really appointed to downtown Nashville to build relationships that matter to the heart of God. If I would have stayed focused on just the internal workings of the church, I would have missed a lot of people and a ton of relationships. And so by the idea of being appointed to the community, my definition would suggest that I have to know the community and have to be known by the community. I’ve got to leverage relationships beyond the boundaries of this thing called the church.

What does that look like?

I try to schedule an appointment with one or two influential people a week. That could be a bank president, or could be a leader of an unhoused group of people who hang out together week in, week out. I don’t base that on how much money you make. I base that on your level of influence.

We have two feeding programs in our church on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and so I get to interact with 150-plus people every Tuesday, and 150-plus people every Thursday. We not only serve them, but we sit with them. Many of our churches just serve people and say goodbye. We serve and we sit because we want to know the names, we want to hear the stories, we want to understand the testimonies, the struggles, the celebrations. The best time to do that is over a meal, which is what Jesus did, right? Jesus spent more time around tables than he did in the temple.

I’ve got two or three places where I meet people for coffee. I’m the type of person that I believe if I invest in you, you invest in me. … I love diversity, and I know I cannot just hang out with my tribe, because if Jesus only hangs out with his tribe called the Jewish people, then the gentiles don’t get in. They don’t get invited to the table.

So you establish these relationships. Where does it go next?

We have 13 missional partners in our building.

(The United Methodist Church) is probably one of the few entities that have more space than we ever use. Most of our churches have underutilized space. So 15 years ago, we experimented with Monroe Harding’s foster care division. They said they would love to have space in downtown Nashville, because that’s where the bus hub is. And we said, “Why not?” So 15 years into this relationship, we’ve got 25 to 40 kids between the ages of probably 17 and 21 who are in our building Monday through Friday.

Now, what the beauty of that is, they do GED, they do graduations, they do receptions, they do birthday parties, and we get to mentor these kids who are looking for something more than they have, but they don’t know what it is, and they wouldn’t call it church. What they would call it is an encounter with a group of people who claim “I have a faith” and they want to know more about them.

So we have set up our church with nonprofits to be in relationship with us so that we can advance both missional aspects, right? Ours is relational, and theirs for the most part is instructing and equipping these young people to be more respectable citizens and to find adequate and sustainable jobs.

One of the other relationships that I’m excited about in this season is the Judge Dinkins Education Center. They do vocational training to kids who are coming out of the juvenile court system, and so they’re in our building, 9 to 3, Monday through Friday. I get to interact with them. I get to understand what they’re needing.

Is it your intention to lead those 20 urban churches between Nashville and Memphis that you supervise where you’ve taken McKendree?

Oh, absolutely. I am developing an urban incubator to help churches live into this reality in a “practice” way. We have become so scholarly with discipleship. We don’t practice it, and so we have sermons about it, we do Bible studies, but there’s no practice of discipleship. Because if there were 300,000 churches in America, you would think that we would be better off, right? But there’s a decline, because people have slowly disengaged from local congregations, because they have felt we don’t address needs well, because we’re embedded in a culture called the church, and it’s “just us” as opposed to “justice.”

We’re called to be justice-seeking people. … We don’t stay in the building. We use the building for the needs of the people that we’re serving beyond the local structure, and so now we’re at 95% occupancy of our building because we believed that our building could be used to help serve and service people.

I was just gifted that a bishop would allow this model, which we’ve never done before, to become a reality, and Bishop (Bill) McAlilly was the one who did that. Bishop (David) Graves has endorsed that.  

I have 20 churches, right? That’s all I can handle. I can’t handle 60. But those 20 are creating cultures of discipleship, right? I’m trying to teach what I’m learning, because I’m always learning, and I’m never away from the people who I’m supervising, because I can relate to their daily experiences.

Patterson is a UM News reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. Contact him at 615-742-5470 or newsdesk@umnews.org. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digests.