The pastor of Martin United Methodist Church in the Horizon Texas Conference says he leads a “purple church,” where people are prioritized over political views. In “Signs of Life,” a new podcast from UM News, Ben Ward talks with the Rev. Daniel Hawkins about bringing diverse church members to the table and having sometimes hard conversations to be in community together. He says the congregation, which is one-third Tongan, is “unified without being uniform.”
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LINKS
UM News: Pastors walk a political tightrope
Daniel's podcast "Pod Strangely Warmed"
Martin United Methodist Church
TRANSCRIPT
Ben: From United Methodist News, I’m Ben Ward and this is Signs of Life.
Take a moment and imagine all the noise, shouts, posts, soundbites, podcasts, and viral videos that have filled the last few years of the cultural moment.
In the nation and world.
[News clips]
In the United Methodist connection.
[News clip]
And in individual information streams.
[News clip]
Ben: The world was promised that the dawn of the internet and social media would flatten the playing field for public discourse. And in many ways, this has happened. But at what cost? Politics is broken with divisions across the board. Misinformation has taken its place in the marketplace of ideas and modern town squares; siloed by marketers and manipulative forces that seek to use the people to further their agendas.
And this is reflected in churches. Committee meetings can turn into full-on arguments unrelated to the issue at hand. People say and repeat things full of accusation and misunderstanding.
What is the way forward? Has anyone found a sliver of light that might lead to a way out of the tunnel and into the sunlight?
Are there churches that have found out how to live and worship together, even with seemingly opposed views on politics, culture, theology, class, and so much more? Can the story be told of hope and understanding and forgiveness in the future?
These are those stories, stories and signs of life.
Ben: I guess we should start with maybe you can introduce yourself, you know, what your position is at the church, all those kinds of things.
Daniel: I'm Reverend Daniel Hawkins, the lead pastor at Martin United Methodist Church in Bedford, Texas. That's a part of Dallas, Fort Worth. I am also the podcast host of “Pod Strangely Warmed,” the official podcast of the Horizon Texas Annual Conference.
Ben: Daniel has been under appointment for 16 years and this is his fourth year at Martin.
[Church clip] We are a community of faith that is politically conservative, politically progressive, and politically confused. In that kind of reality, we live in a world where it's easy to define ourselves by what we're against rather than what we're for.
Daniel: Martin United Methodist Church is a mid-size United Methodist Church in Bedford, Texas. We find ourselves kind of at, we're an intersectional community, quite literally, on one side of our church property is an area that is in the process of being redeveloped, large kind of post-World War II lots, the houses are being knocked down and million-dollar houses are being built on top of it. Across the street the other way are income-controlled apartment complexes, and we live kind of at that intersection.
And I think in some ways our geography is a powerful metaphor for the spirit of the church. We are neither million-dollar house people nor overwhelmingly income-controlled apartment complex folks. We represent a breadth of diversity within our neighborhood, and we get to be one of those intersection spaces.
[Church clip] Good morning church and welcome to worship this beautiful day as we gather to worship God and I have a couple of announcements this morning.
Daniel: Martin is a community that is now one-third Tongan. The Kingdom of Tonga is one of the or is a community within the Pacific Islands. And when Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport began to kind of expand in the ’70s, they recruited the Pacific Islands hard. And so now Euless and Bedford, which are two communities that our church serves, represent the largest community of Tongan expats outside of the Kingdom of Tonga in the world.
[Church clip] Let us stand as you are able, call to worship.
Beloved, you are God's own people, called out of darkness into light.
Ben: Daniel arrived at Martin in 2022 in the height of the disaffiliation anxiety within the United Methodist system. They were located in the Central Texas Conference, which experienced a 45% loss within that timeframe.
Daniel: But at Martin, there never was a conversation about disaffiliation. And I don't mean that in the we buried our head in the sand kind of way, but our leadership met and said, we're not even gonna have this conversation because it's not who we are.
One of the things that Martin has done for the last 15 years is worked the muscle of being uniform, or being unified without being uniform. We are a church that is led by the spirit of our Tongan community, our Palangi community, which is kind of the Tongan phrase for kind of more Caucasian folks, and led in large part by members of our LGBTQ-plus community and that kind of breadth and diversity shapes who we are.
[Church clip]
Ben: In 2022, Martin was coming out of a season of struggle. With COVID and anxiety within the broader United Methodist system, worship attendance had dropped to its lowest point in years. At the end of 2021, the church's average attendance was 171 people. Martin had memories of high attendance, seven and 800 in the late ’90s and early 2000s. They were at a crossroads, looking for a way forward.
Daniel: And what we've seen over the last four years is we're now just shy of 300 in average weekly attendance and worship. The community has bounced back. The community has continued to grow in its breadth and its diversity, and it's continued to grow and thrive in that understanding of who it is.
[Church clip] We believe in God who calls the scattered people into holy community. We follow Jesus Christ who gathers us, sends us, and teaches us to lay down ourselves in…
Daniel: And that in many ways is a story that I hear across our Horizon Texas Conference now. The Horizon Texas Conference is one that formed through the joining, the uniting of the North Texas Conference, the Central Texas Conference, and the Northwest Texas Conference. Two conferences in immediate crisis and one that had about a five-year runway before crisis was going to hit. But together we've come together and become one unified conference across the entire northern swath of the state of Texas.
Ben: Nowhere is the contrast clearer than in the realm of politics. Loyalty to political party has caused fault lines in church after church, community after community. But Daniel and Martin have found a way through, a way to be together, to stay together, to live in community together. He says it's about people.
Daniel: I like to say that at Martin, we are a purple church politically, meaning that we're about half blue and about half red, but we share a commitment to the humans who surround us and the humans who live in our neighborhood that we will prioritize the people over their political point of view, right?
And that shows up in some of our theological spaces as well. We have folks who lean a little more theologically conservative within our Tongan community. There's a good number of folks who lean more theologically conservative. And within our Palangi community, there's both kind of conservative and progressive elements.
[Church clip] … We trust the Holy Spirit who forms us into one body, diverse and united, mission driven and merciful. Family across difference. Committed to Christ. We are not yet who we will be, but by grace we are becoming…
Daniel: You know, our previous SPR (Staff Parish Relations) chair, the one who was here when I came in, we had a couple of phone calls over the first couple of years on Monday mornings where we celebrated “Diversity Is Hard Monday.” Just the breadth of who we were, right, and the ways in which we gave microphones to the breadth of who we are made moments where people were uncomfortable, right? And yet, because of that prioritization of person over point of view, whether it's theological or political, everybody stayed at the table.
Ben: Talking about strength and diversity and difference is one thing, but in the day in and day out of church life together, in situations and circumstances no one envisioned, how do you walk the walk of all those inspiring words?
Daniel: Two summers ago, we had a sermon series, God and the Family Table, I think that was what it was called.
[Church clip] We're in the middle of this series in which we are exploring what it means to live at the family table, using the family table as a metaphor for us, for our understanding of how God invites us to relate to our family. No matter what season of life we are in, no matter what our family dynamic is, no matter how beautiful or broken…
Daniel: At the end of our traditional worship service, throughout that series, we sang the song at the end of each Sunday called “For Everyone Born, a Place at the Table,” right? If you're familiar with that song, you know that it's got about 17 different verses, right? And good Methodists at the end of worship don't want to sing 17 different verses, right? They want to go three and out and be done, right? The Cowboys may be playing football sometime soon, you know, they're just ready to get moving.
So, part of what we did, but each one of those verses was powerful and highlighted a group that often didn't feel like they had a place at the table and yet we're going to explicitly say there's a place at the table, right? During that series, we sang two of the same verses every week and rotated the third, right? And so one week it was for women and men a place at the table, right? The next week was connected to folks with physical or intellectual differences, right? There's a place at the table. And then the one week was for gay or for straight a place at the table.
[Church clip]
When we sang that out loud in church we had one or two people who go you know in a purple church that you know has queer folks on staff, is on our church council and lay leadership, key people within the LGBTQ-plus community in the life of our church. We still have some folks who go, “I struggle singing that.”
And thankfully, this person was somebody I had enough of a relationship with that Monday morning we came and we sat down and we talked through it and we were able to come to an understanding where I heard where they were coming from. But they also clearly understood with and ultimately agreed with why we sang it. So that conflict is real; we're human.
[music enters]
When our Tongan community, our Palangi community come alongside each other and truly share life, not just share a building, we become a whole lot less mysterious to each other, right? And we become more deeply known. When our conservative folks and progressive folks do the same thing, gathered around Scripture, which we all hold as powerful and meaningful and really important, it brings down the barriers and kind of opens up our hearts.
Ben: Daniel and Martin United Methodist Church show what is possible when you're willing to come to the table, to have the hard conversations, to hope and believe in each other because of the love of God and the Gospel.
Daniel: But are we willing to sacrifice to be good ancestors? To plant those, plant the seeds of trees that we will never sit under the shade of, right? That kind of a thing. And I feel like that's locally kind of the season we're in, right? We just launched a new service in August and we're working on like how are we continuing to be invested in the future. And I see bits of that happening across the Horizon Texas Conference as well both in local churches and in the conference. We've made it through. We are living in a mission field that is one of the fastest growing metro areas in the United States.
If we truly are the followers of Jesus seeking after the loving, just and free world that God imagines for all people, we're going to be invested in our neighborhoods. We're going to be equipping the saints for the work of ministry. We're going to get beyond survival and move in to thriving.
Ben: We'd like to thank our guest today, the Rev. Daniel Hawkins of Martin United Methodist Church.
Check out his podcast, “Pod Strangely Warmed.” The links will be in the show notes.
And thank you for listening to our first episode of “Signs of Life” from United Methodist News. We are a part of United Methodist Communications, umnews.org.
I'm your host, Ben Ward, and our music was composed by me. Thanks for listening.
Ward is UM News staff working on digital design and media.
News media contact: Julie Dwyer at newsdesk@umnews.org. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.
