Amendment 1 (without the baggage)

Annual conferences of the United Methodist Church from all over the world will be voting on the 32 proposed amendments to the church's Constitution in the coming weeks.

The amendments have already generated a great deal of discussion. News articles and blog posts have appeared in print and online. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the whole thing has been the YouTube appeals from figures both prominent and obscure in the church.

I personally approach these kinds of moments at annual conference with fear and trembling. The parliamentary procedure that we use does not allow for the kind of holy conferencing needed to discuss matters of importance to the church. And yet, we do not seem capable of finding another way. That means that we will be forced to decided whether, and to what extent, we should amend the Constitution of the church based off of a flawed system and an impoverished discussion.

As I have reflected on the various amendments, I've come to have deep reservations about many of them. And my reservations are often for reasons that do not seem to show up in the discussions going on elsewhere. So over the past few weeks I've been organizing my thoughts. Below you'll find a link to a commentary on Amendment 1, the amendment that would change the "membership article" in the Book of Discipline:

"Amendment 1 (without the baggage)"

If you care about the coherence of how we understand ourselves as a church, please read this short essay. And feel free to pass it along to others.

I'll also follow this post up with another one in a few days, when I will share a commentary on the "Worldwide Church" amendments that make up 23 of the 32 total amendments.

A Blueprint for Discipleship

Jesus' call to us is to a whole new way of life. That new way of life is called sanctification, and by grace it can become a reality for each of us.

As Christian men and women in the Wesleyan tradition, if we aren't serious about sanctification we might as well find something else to do. John Wesley always believed that the peculiar Methodist understanding of justifying grace expressed through the new birth together with a lifelong pursuit of sanctification through the means of grace was the main reason God had raised up the Methodist movement in the first place.

All this is why I'm glad to see A Blueprint for Discipleship: Wesley's General Rules as a Guide for Christian Living, just out from Methodist pastor and blogger Kevin Watson.

Kevin takes Wesley's General Rules and presents them as the best way to understand God's call on our lives to be deeply committed followers of Jesus. This is a particularly good book for those in the church who would like to understand why the Wesleyan approach to faith is still the best way to open our hearts and lives to be transformed by God's grace. If you are a pastor or small group leader looking for a resource to use in your congregation, I highly recommend this book (available through either Cokesbury or Amazon).

In my review of the book in the United Methodist Reporter, I point out particular strengths of Kevin's approach. Some of these include his emphasis on the central role of grace in our ability to be transformed into holy people, his lucid explanation of the three rules as practical ways to embody the biblical command to love God and neighbor, and his later chapters on the way the rules help us balance our faith lives and call us into relationships of mutual accountability in our discipleship.

I've gotten to know Kevin over the past couple of years as we have both entered doctoral programs to pursue Wesley Studies. (He blogs over at Deeply Committed, by the way.) It's exciting to me to see an aspiring scholar who also cares about the church and wants to 'equip the saints for ministry.' That's why A Blueprint for Discipleship is an important book, and I commend it to you for reading and study.

How we think about abortion

A few days ago I posted on the trouble with the phrase 'Christian America.' In that post I argued that the goods offered to us in following Christ and the goods offered to us as citizens of a liberal democracy are often (if not always) at odds. And because the secular values of the nation are so pervasive in society, that can mean that we find it difficult to see many important aspects of our lives through as Christians rather than as Americans.

Perhaps no social reality demonstrates this dilemma better than abortion.

Pro-choice arguments around abortion are almost never made from a Christian point of view. The language of 'rights' that is employed is largely derived from John Locke, not the Bible or Christian tradition. And the arguments that do pose as Christian - such as the idea that "no unwanted child should have to be born" is an article of compassion - are deeply misguided.

And yet, many Christians in this culture have no problem whatsoever with the standard pro-choice position. Sure, they typically salve their own consciences by saying that, while they wouldn't personally have an abortion, they do not believe others should be compelled to see things the way they do. But that view itself is a non-Christian one that is rooted in a secular notion of individual liberty. (And besides, we don't have a problem compelling one another to do all sorts of others things that don't command universal agreement, do we? Beware the tendency toward opportunistic libertarianism.) Moreover, it causes our churches to have confused and inconsistent official views on abortion. Though the UMC's position has improved greatly in the past few years, it is still something of a mess.

So with all of that in mind, it is truly refreshing to see the church's episcopal leadership speak clearly and persuasively on abortion. The following excerpt is from an essay by Bishop Timothy Whitaker that appeared in the current issue of Lifewatch. You can also access the entire essay online. Bishop Whitaker does a wonderful job drawing the distinction between viewing abortion as a Christian and as an American:

"Abortion is a vexing issue for Christians in America because it strains the capacity of our culture and political system to find a way to protect the life of the unborn in a social environment shaped by the value of individual freedom. We Americans cherish this cultural value of being free to make our own decisions without interference from government. Yet the freedom we exercise in the case of an abortion is more than the liberty to live where we desire or to hold whatever religious or political opinions we choose, since the exercise of this freedom results in the extermination of another human being...

"The Christian community distinguished itself in its very beginning by opposing infanticide and abortion, both of which were commonplace in the Roman Empire. The Christian worship of God as the creator of all life and Jesus' teaching, which generates values of the worth of every human being, and our responsibility to take care of those who cannot care for themselves made the Church's position inevitable. For Christians in the American context, finding our way to this historic Christian perspective has not been easy.

"I suspect Christians who are citizens of the United States will always have somewhat different political judgments - as citizens - about what is possible and acceptable regarding the legal solution to the moral problem of abortion. Yet, as Christians, we should continue to move toward a distinctly Christian perspective and practice in the context of a culture that may have different values and a government whose basis of individual rights may limit its capacity to encompass fully a moral position."

Bishop Whitaker in this essay does exactly what a bishop should do: exercise the teaching office of the episcopacy, provide solid moral guidance to the church, and act as a shepherd to Christ's flock. I hope the church has the ears to hear his message!

[Note: Lifewatch is the publication of the Taskforce of United Methodists on Abortion and Sexuality. You can find its website here.]

Practice makes perfect

Nature or nurture?

That always seems to be the question.

Well, actually, sometimes it doesn't seem to be a question at all. Like for instance, I know that no amount of nurture would have made me a great basketball player. Nature (and the flat feet and limited coordination that nature provided) doomed me to enjoying basketball from the stands instead of on the court.

But apparently for many things, nurture plays the bigger role. David Brooks has an interesting column in the New York Times recently, where he looks at the qualities needed to possess an ability that we would commonly call "genius." Common views see genius as created by a divine spark or, in our contemporary parlance, by nature. When we see a Mozart or a Tiger Woods, we assume that such men were born with something the rest of us were not.

That ain't necessarily so, Brooks argues. "In the [scientific] view that is now dominant," Brooks writes, "even Mozart's early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people's work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today's top child-performers."

So what made Mozart special, then? According to Brooks, it "was the same thing Tiger Woods had - the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills."

Citing researchers into the way talent is expressed in the abilities and accomplishments of people, Brooks concludes, "The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It's not I.Q., a generally gad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it's deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft."

I'll leave off Brooks' use of the term "innate spiritual gift" for now. Christians do believe in spiritual gifts that may give certain abilities within the body of Christ, though we do not believe such gifts are innate (because they come not from us, but from the Holy Spirit). But Brooks isn't making a theological argument anyway. His usage of "divine spark" is really a stand-in for "nature," and he seems to prefer the former term only because it points to the somewhat superstitious way we tend to look at how the unusually accomplished among us get that way.

The overarching point is extremely significant: Geniuses are not born. They are made, through deliberate practice.

And though Brooks favors modern sociological research, he could have come to the same conclusion by reading a a scholar just a bit older. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle ascribes only the barest human abilities to the realm of nature (e.g., our sense perceptions). When it comes to human excellences, he asserts, "Virtues, by contrast, we acquire, just as we acquire crafts, by having first activated them. For we learn a craft by producing the same product that we must produce when we have learned it; we become builders, for instance, by building, and we become harpists by playing the harp. Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions" (2.1.4).

For Aristotle, virtue is both a state and an activity, so that the truly virtuous person is one who does the right things for the right reasons. And yet, the states will always follow the activities, meaning that we become virtuous people by engaging in virtuous activities. "That is why," Aristotle writes, "we must perform the right activities, since differences in these imply corresponding differences in the states. It is not unimportant, then, to acquire one sort of habit or another, right from our youth. On the contrary, it is very important, indeed all-important" (2.1.8).

We can have excellence in an endeavor like playing the harp (or playing golf). Or we can have excllence in character, which we see in a brave person or a just person. Or we can have excellence in intellect, such as we see in a person who possess the virtue of prudence (or practical wisdom).

But in all these cases, Aristotle agrees with the research that David Brooks finds so fascinating: Geniuses are not born but made, and in the end, it is practice that makes perfect.

Too good to resist

This is a picture of my good friend Tim Eberhart and his newborn baby daughter, Audrey. I don't post random stuff like this very often, but the 'proud papa' look on his face was just too good to resist. After two boys (Henry and Frederick), Tim's wife Becky will now have somebody to balance out all the males in the Eberhart family. Audrey was born last Friday, May 1st, in Nashville.

Tim and I went to divinity school together at Vanderbilt, and he's also a pastor in the UMC. In addition to playing dad to his three kids and husband to Becky, Tim is finishing a Ph.D in theology at Vandy. He will be a great voice for the church in the years ahead.

Thanks be to God for the blessings of life, friends, and family.

The trouble with 'Christian America'

Jon Meacham wrote a cover story in Newsweek a couple of weeks ago that was titled, "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." A title like that is meant to be a little sensational. And Newsweek probably got just what it wanted when Meacham's piece sent Christians all over the country in a tizzy.

The article itself, though, really wasn't sensational at all. Meacham is a liberal Episcopalian, and he was mostly just relishing the decline of the so-called Religious Right - a catch-all term for the politicized evangelicalism that came to prominence under Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in the 1980s. Meacham is also the editor-in-chief at Newsweek, and under his leadership over the past couple of years the magazine has drifted left noticeably. A part of that comes out in a particularly left-leaning religious view, which shows up in reporting of all types but is best seen on a regular basis through Lisa Miller's BeliefWatch column. So in that sense, Meacham's article was just standard Newsweek fare.

But Meacham did cite statistics that are troubling beyond his connection of them with the decline of a politically muscular Christianity. A recent survey shows that the number of professing Christians as a percentage of the U.S. population has decline from 86% in 1990 to 76% today. Any position piece is strengthened by hard numbers, and those were Meacham's. (For a different take on them, go to Michael Gerson's recent column in the Washington Post.)

So is 'Christian America' really dying? Is it not just the Religious Right that is fading away, but is the generally Christian character of our society fading as well?

With a little fear and trembling, I take this subject up in my current column in the United Methodist Reporter. My editor at the Reporter was gracious to give me more space than usual, and with the complexity of this topic I used every bit of it. I won't repeat my whole argument here but instead invite you to check out the column on the Reporter's site.

The gist of it is this: There never was such a thing as 'Christian America.' And the Christians in America shouldn't worry about that.

There cannot be such a 'Christian America,' in fact, because citizenship and discipleship can never be synonymous terms. Christians owe an allegiance to Jesus Christ above the allegiance to the nation. And that means that a Christian's primary frame of social reference is not society at large but rather the church.

If we, as Christians, are really worried about declining numbers of the faithful in this land, we should practice a more robust form of discipleship. Ultimately, it is not by baptizing secular institutions or passing 'Christian' laws that we practice fidelity to God. It is rather by preaching the word of God, celebrating the sacraments, forming disciples of Jesus Christ, and witnessing to the love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit through our works of piety and mercy in the world.

It is good when Christians exert an influence on the society in which they live. Their participation in the larger world can lead to greater civility in social life and more compassion in the legislation and execution of laws. But the telos of the practice of Christian faith is not to make the world Christian. That makes no Scriptural sense. It is instead to spread the gospel and build up the church. And yes, there is a real difference.

So we shouldn't worry about trying to Christianize America. We should just be concerned with Christianizing the church.