Have fun stormin' the castle!

Eric Van Meter continues his imaginative therapy session in the United Methodist Reporter this week. This stuff is getting really good. He compares the church he came to know as a kind of giant castle, where the walls and towers have been built by successive generations of inhabitants to the point where it is just a monumental structure. We all know the castle has got serious problems. The problem, of course, is that the current inhabitants of the castle (that's right, us) keep trying to figure out how to rearrange the furniture inside without realizing that it may be the very structure itself that is the problem.

Local churches, annual conferences, and aspiring leaders all want to improve the church. But inevitably they just try to work with making what we've already got work a bit better. Eric calls this tendency "tinkering with space." I've also heard it called rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It is usually well-intentioned, but it misses the heart of the problem.

I don't know whether Eric would agree with this or not, but I tend to see the root of the church's problem as mistaking Wesleyan theology for United Methodist polity. The Holy Spirit may not call us to revival, and if so, that will be God's judgment on our faithlessness. But if the prospect of revival exists, I think the key question will be whether we can do something that Wesley essentially could not: respond to the Spirit's invitation by reforming the church without separating from it (or destroying it entirely). Because as Eric points out, being faithful as the church is ultimately not about polishing the castle walls. It is about living as Christian people redeemed by the gospel of Jesus Christ.