I believe it was Craig Groeschel who wrote in a blog post that the United Methodist Church might have been better off spending the 20 million or so on planting new churches rather than this ReThink church ad campaign.
I, for one, have stated that I was never a big fan of this whole ReThink church campaign. Don’t get me wrong. I love the whole concept and idea and the whole “what if  Church was a verb?”
I guess for me, I just couldn’t reconcile the 20 million dollars spent on the whole advertisement that, at least from my experience, no one outside of the UM circle has heard about. And maybe that’s just in my small, closed, bubble of a world.

But I did like what Groeschel said. That money might have been better off in trying to plant churches that will do church differently rather than having existing churches change their way of ‘doing’ (being) church.

I still believe that rather than spending 20 million dollars on the advertising campaign, that 20 million dollars might’ve been better invested in getting already existing pastors trained to rethink church.
I ran across a story about Starbucks in 2008. About 7000 Starbucks closed their doors for 3 hours and during those 3 hours about 175,000 employees were RETRAINED in making coffee. Sort of like ReTHINK BARISTA!
Why?
Because Howard Schultz (head honcho) saw that the Baristas were losing their edge in coffee making. The quality experience of Starbucks was declining because the Baristas attention were no longer on coffee alone. Their attention was also divided by music selections and emergence of food items. So Schultz felt that they needed to retrain the baristas so that their coffee making abilities were back on the excellence level.
Schultz also decided to cutdown on variety of pastry/food/sandwiches Starbucks made because the smell of food was competing with the smell of coffee.
Schultz saw the necessity (over the risk) of closing 7000 Starbucks for three hours. The benefits outweighed the costs.
He did what he felt was necessary for Starbucks to start making great coffee again.

After reading this story, something like this, I feel, would benefit the United Methodist Church greatly.
Of course, I have no idea how to implement such a thing.

My friend, and also fellow Wesley grad, Andrew had two recent posts about effective clergy and getting rid of guaranteed appointments.

Perhaps investing money and time to retrain/refresh/renew/reenergize/re-whatever ALL UMC clergy and help us to rethink church would only benefit our Body all the more and make us more effective (or as Perry Noble wrote, make us a difference maker rather than just a paycheck taker.)