Learning to die

Eric Van Meter concludes his remarkable series of 'imaginatve therapy sessions' in the current issue of the UM Reporter. His articles have all been based on the idea that he has a dysfunctional relationship with his church - the UMC. The same spiritual fire and theological depth that drew him to find his pastoral home as a United Methodist minister is sometimes hard to see in the regular machinary of the church's bureaucracy. Systems, processes, and the inertia of old habits get ingrained into a denomination's culture in such a way that they are hard to root out.

Out of step with the gospel? Who cares. This is the way we've always done things.

In this last installment, Eric's therapy sessions conclude with the realization that Jesus' call on him (and on the church) is a call to die. We can soft pedal the idea of death as a "death to the world" or a "death to the old self" but the reality of the gospel's call is that we are buried with Christ through our baptism, so that we might have the hope of being raised with him through resurrection (Romans 6). And this means pursuing God's call on our lives with reckless abandon, including a faithfulness unto real, actual death if that is what is required of us.

All of this means that we can't try to save the United Methodist Church.

As Eric rightly points out, trying to "restore the church" is a wrong-headed mission. It's not the institution of the UMC that Jesus wants to preserve. The UMC can be a faithful ecclesial community insofar as it is reflective of the church Jesus does want to preserve. But the right response to Jesus' call is not in trying to prop up a structure that has only dubious claims to faithfulness in the first place. It is rather to live the kind of lives befitting of Jesus' disciples, in the community he has established.

That may kill us. And it certainly may kill the United Methodist Church. But it won't kill the Church, which has been built upon a rock and will endure until Christ comes in final victory and we feast at his heavenly banquet.

I'm a Wesleyan, by the way. And it's worth pointing out that Wesley would never want us to focus on him in some kind of fetishizing way, nor would he want us to try to restore the UMC-as-institution to some former glory when we were The Largest Church in America (the memory of which haunts our every move). He would rather want us to practice what he called "primitive Christianity", which is a form of disciplined, faithful living that embodies the gospel and witnesses to the watching world.