What is salvation?

Wesley said that there are three grand doctrines in Scripture: Original Sin, Justification by Faith, and the Holiness consequent upon that justification.

When was the last time you really heard salvation preached in your church? When was the last time you preached it?

A few weeks ago the lectionary gospel reading was from John 3, and I was the guest-preacher in a little Presbyterian church here in Durham. Preparing the sermon, I found myself gravitating to John 3:3 and Jesus' command that all must be born again. This is not typical Methodist or Presbyterian fare, although once upon a time Methodists were very concerned with the new birth. So I preached on it, and I ended up realizing that my very uncomfortability with the doctrine of the new birth probably says a lot about both the church in which I minister and the theological formation I recevid as a child and later as a divinity student.

I've actually been thinking a lot about salvation and why it doesn't seem to be the focus of mainline preaching these days. Is it because at heart we are all soft universalists? That's my guess. But Scripture suggests that universalism is wishful thinking. Is it because we only equate salvation with "going to heaven after you die"? Probably so, but that's only because we have allowed a certain kind of shallow, antinomian Calvinism to become the standard account of savlation in the church and abandoned our own tradition's understanding of it.

My new column in the United Methodist Reporter wrestles with this very issue. The church's primary mission should be to proclaim and embody the gospel in such a way that souls are being saved. I don't know why we need a church that is primarily (or only) a social/civic organization dressed up in spiritual language. And I am afraid that that is largely what we have become.

Staying open to grace

My blogging has slowed down a little bit. That is mainly due to the time of the semester that we have reached, when it seems like you need a few extra hours in the day just to get everything done. I'll try to keep up a pace of 1-2 posts per week, but please forgive me if I slack off here and there.

On a good note, there are going to be some upgrades to the blog in the next few days. Nothing big, but I am adding some extra content that will help fill out what I am trying to do with the blog in general - i.e., combine articles I write in other publications with original writing here in an effort to address relevant issues confronting Gen X'ers in the church. I'll highlight those changes to the blog when they are finished.

I do want to briefly highlight my latest column in the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly, which is on staying open to new avenues of grace. In it, I tell the story of joining a new CD group last fall (which, by the way, has been a tremendous blessing). When the five of us started writing our covenant after much prayer and conversation, we discovered that we had some pretty different ideas about specific acts of discipleship to include. But instead of watering the covenant down and just going with generalized statements, we decided to contribute something of everybody in the group. That means that I am now being held accountable for acts of discipleship I might not have chosen for myself. But at the same time, I am being opened to new avenues of grace I wouldn't have known, either!

Because of our sinfulness, I take it as a given that, when we have the chance to choose for ourselves, we often choose badly. In that sense, having my brothers in the CD group choose for me is not just going out on faith - it is accepting that they might know better for me than I know for myself. Such, I believe, is the true nature of Christian community.

Bart Ehrman: A wolf in sheep's clothing?

I live in the same part of the same state as Dr. Bart Ehrman, though I've never met him. He is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, about 10 miles from where I live. He's also one of the nation's most prominent and well-known New Testament scholars, and his books sell like hotcakes.

In the newest issue of The Christian Century, I noticed that Dr. Ehrman has been invited to serve as the "theologian-in-residence" for Ecumenical Christian Ministries (or ECM), a consortium of student ministries at Kansas University and churches in the Lawrence, KS, area. As a part of his duties, Dr. Ehrman will travel to Lawrence to deliver a series of lectures this coming April.

Now in some ways, Dr. Ehrman's selection makes sense. As I mentioned, he is the author of numerous books on the New Testament, and he is a widely sought-after speaker. He has received teaching awards during his time as a professor at UNC. He is also well-known for his published courses through The Teaching Company. And, while as a biblical scholar Ehrman is not technically a "theologian," I'm sure ECM uses its "theologian-in-residence" label generously.

But in another way, Dr. Ehrman's selection makes no sense at all.

Why? Because he's an avowed agnostic who regularly proclaims that he does not believe in the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

Case in point: Dr. Ehrman is Terry Gross' most recent guest on NPR's Fresh Air. He appeared to be interviewed about his newest book, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer. On Fresh Air's website, an excerpt from Dr. Ehrman's book is printed along with a promo about the interview, wherein he admits his agnosticism and says that, if there is a God, he does not believe it is the God proclaimed in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

This raises a question. I assume that the purpose of having a "theologian-in-residence" for your church-related organization is to invite someone in to speak who will, in some way, help to form your members in the Christian faith. If that is so, then why would you bring in a self-described agnostic who does not believe that Jesus is who he claims to be in the New Testament? I understand the desire to be edgy and provocative, but isn't it counterproductive to go in that direction if you end up encouraging agnosticism in those who are affected by his teaching?

A look at ECM's website triggered the knee-jerk reaction to just chalk it up to the character of the organization - ECM's mission statement says that it represents "a stream of the Christian faith tradition that tries to be intellectually honest, liberating, and sensitive to how we know mystery in our lives." Such nebulous statements are typical of Christian churches and organizations that are so wedded to the Protestant liberal narrative that they don't even realize they are in a state of slow suicide. But I don't really know anything about ECM, and it's not fair of me to jump to those conclusions.

So if this ministry cares about both the present spiritual well-being and the eternal salvation of its members, why would it invite a wolf in sheep's clothing into its midst? And as one with the authority of a teacher of Scripture, no less?

General Conference fear & trembling

General Conference will take place in Fort Worth, TX, from April 23rd to May 2nd of this year. Our church's website begins its description of GC by stating, "General Conference is the top policy-making body of the United Methodist Church." The second sentence invokes the makeup of GC according to "church law".

Now, if I were a non-Methodist and I saw a statement like that about our church's largest gathering, it would send me screaming in the other direction. Heck, if I were a typical, relatively uninformed Methodist it would send me running away. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why church bureaucrats think that the rest of the church wants to conceive of, read about, and proclaim the church in bureaucratic terms. If all General Conference is going to be is a "policy-making body," then we ought not to spend the millions of dollars it takes to put it on and give that money for hunger relief.

The church does not "make policy". The church interprets Scripture, and from that interpretation, gives doctrine to the faithful. There has been a lot of talk over the past year about how everyone wants the General Conference to be a more prayerful, worshipful time - a time where the delegates can truly engage in holy conferencing together. The prospects of that happening are not helped when our official website uses such impoverished language to prepare us for what to expect.

If whoever it is that writes and posts information on umc.org wants to find out what Wesleyan conferencing is supposed to be about, that person ought to go to the sources and read a little bit about our tradition. Ignorance of it is a large reason why our church is in a state of slow dissolution. And if Methodists are truly more interested in policy-making than in holy conferencing, Washington D.C. is a much better place to do it than the General Conference.

I started this post with the intention of talking a little bit about my own hopes for General Conference, which I outline in an open letter to the delegates in The United Methodist Reporter. And now I don't think I can do that.

A wonderful evening

Yesterday evening, Emily and I had a few seminary students over to our home for an informal dinner conversation with Bishop Ken Carder about issues in ministry. Bishop Carder (pictured above with second year M.Div students Ben Johnson and Lynn Cross) previously served as bishop of the Tennessee and Mississippi Annual Conferences before his retirement from the active episcopacy. He is now the Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke.

In everyday ministry, bishops are pretty inaccessible people. You might see them a few times a year, but rarely in a situation where you can sit down at dinner and just have informal table talk. Even in a seminary, you are most likely to engage a bishop-professor in a seminar or a structured advisory session. That made last night especially memorable, as we were able to just let the conversation flow where it wanted as we scarfed down great pizza from a local eatery.

What was most interesting about the conversation to me was the way that it centered mostly on the importance of peer and mentoring relationships once a new pastor arrives in his or her first appointment. Bishop Carder spoke firsthand about this, relating his experiences in discovering just how important it was to have relationships of support and accountability in his own time as a local church pastor and later as a bishop. He is a big advocate of Covenant Discipleship Groups, and he even participated in one as a bishop when he was in Nashville.

Bishop Carder said two things that particularly stuck out to me. One was that a pastor absolutely has to carve out the time and space for sustaining relationships himself. A congregation almost always wants to be supportive, but congregations also have endless needs and - as large bodies of people - are not suited to setting healthy boundaries for their pastors. So the pastor has to take the responsibility, and this is an absolutely necessary task if the pastor is going to remain physically, emotionally, and spiritually healthy.

The second thing that stuck out to me was in Bishop Carder's emphasis on friendships with exactly the kind of people Wesley would want us to seek out - those who are poor and on the margins of society. He described a friendship with a custodian in a church he served, who was poor but who would always point out to someone she thought was taking her for granted that she was a child of God and expected to be treated as such! He also described his close friendship with a man serving a life sentence in prison, with whom he has remained close despite moving around several times the past few years. Bishop Carder certainly stressed peer and mentoring relationships with other clergy, but he indicated that we can learn just as much, in different ways, from friendships with those who on the surface are not like us.

You can find an article on Bishop Carder's selection to his endowed professorship here.

Too much to live for

In an earlier post, I wrote about my shock over hearing the news of Heath Ledger's death back in January. I have to admit that I have thought a whole lot about that situation in the weeks since. At the risk of sounding like a cliche, it is just so hard to understand how someone who seemingly had so much could be so empty on the inside.

I tried to put together my thoughts on the deaths of both Ledger and fellow Gen-X actor Brad Renfro in my latest Reporter column. I don't think there's any magic answer here. People get bored, they get sick, or they get curious. When they dive too far into very unhealthy lifestyles, tragic consequences can result. I think that's what happened in this case.

The church should be the place where people can go to find out how to adjudicate between competing goods. At its best, I think it is exactly that place. The church is not just a place to worship, or receive the Eucharist, or drop your kids off at daycare. It is a culture, a community of people who are bonded by the common confession in Jesus as Lord. And its message is one of life - a hopeful alternative for those who find themselves ensnared by the ways of death.

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.

Happy Ash Wednesday

Holy God,
as we enter into
this season of preparation
let us be mindful of the path
your Son walked
on our behalf.

Grant us the clarity to see
our own mortality
and face with courage
the reality of death.

Give us the strength also
to meditate
on the mortality of Jesus,
and on his willingness to die
so that we might live.

Bring us through these forty days
to the time of rejoicing and celebration,
when we stand again and marvel
at the empty tomb.

And so, let this season be a season of purpose
for the faith that defines us
and the church that sustains us
and the promise that gives us hope.

Amen.

Can't we all just get along?

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof typically writes on the intersection of poverty, economics, disease, and war in Africa. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 (his second, in fact) for his reporting of the Darfur genocide in the Sudan. I find his reporting on various crises in Africa to be compelling, and I think Christians in particular can benefit from the way in which he raises awareness of issues such as the AIDS crisis and endemic poverty.

Mr. Kristof's column in the Times today, entitled, "Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love," is an interesting one, because he is arguing that liberals ought to realize how much they hold in common with Christian evangelicals. Recent surveys show that - surprise, surprise - evangelicals care about issues like poverty, malaria, AIDS, and climate change. It is as if Kristof opened up the paper one day and discovered that evangelical Christianity is not some monolithic politico-religious movement that slavishly follows commands from Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. And what is more, Mr. Kristof seems to believe that this is a brand new development.

If I knew Mr. Kristof, I'd give him a copy of Richard Heitzenrater's excellent study of a certain little evangelical movement known as Methodism, entitled, Wesley and the People Called Methodists. In that book, he'd see how an evangelical Anglican minister named John Wesley was caring for issues such as poverty, addiction, disease, and slavery long before Jim Wallis made evangelical social activism fashionable.

Many people today would argue that the United Methodist Church is far from evangelical, but that's not entirely true. Large, long-standing institutions like the UMC go through phases, and at least for most of its history, the UMC (and its predecessor bodies) has been thoroughly evangelical - in the best sense of the term. There are large swaths of the church that embrace a Wesleyan evangelicalism today, and if anything, that portion is on the increase. But then again, to understand what that means (and why it is much different than the evangelicalism of a Robertson or a Falwell), one has to treat evangelicalism as a nuanced phenomenon. And that, friends, is something that neither Mr. Kristof nor many other secular liberals do very well.

There is one aspect to Mr. Kristof's column that is particularly revealing. He criticizes the intolerance that tolerance-loving liberals often show toward religious people, particularly in that such intolerance often obscures the commonalities that do exist. But the whole point of his article is to say, "Hey, we can like evangelicals. They're more like us than we thought!" Such a sentiment is not actually demonstrating the tolerance Mr. Kristof advocates. It is only arguing for the acceptance of those parts of the Christian faith that happen to look similar to liberal politics. My guess is that if the topic were to turn to an issue such as abortion, for instance, his tone would change markedly. The acceptance Mr. Kristof is wanting is not based on a shared conception of the good for human beings; it is rather based only on the belief that people of faith have finally "come around" to the point of view that was "right" all along. And who said evangelicals were the only ones interested in conversion?

Christians who are truly serious about their faith, meanwhile, will continue holding views they believe are in conformity with the gospel we have been given, whether or not those views meet the approval of the liberal or conservative intelligentsia of the land.

A strained love

My friend and fellow pastor Eric Van Meter has got a remarkable article in the United Methodist Reporter this week, where he tells the imaginative story of being in "therapy" for a troubled relationship with his true love - the church. The church he's talking about is the UMC, and he relates how he was attracted to it by the warmly evangelistic outreach of the Wesley Foundation where he went to college. His love of the church grew throughout his college career as he saw a Wesleyan expression of faith at its best, from heartfelt worship, to weekly Holy Communion, to outreach ministry to children and the elderly.

Eric then describes how his idyllic view of the church came crashing down around him during the ordination process, particularly when he started meeting with the Board of Ordained Ministry. There he saw how particulars of polity certain structures or traditions of the church (though he doesn't say which ones) caused him to become frustrated, because it seemed that they stood in the way of the church's full flourishing. These experiences caused him to begin seeing the church as having a "split personality."

This article is worth a read, both for its creativity and for the way so much of it will ring true in the experiences of young clergy. This is only the first installment in a series of articles continuing the same story. I'll post them all as they appear online.