Worth getting excited about

Do you get frustrated with the church?

Do you wish we could all focus on those things Jesus calls us to care about more fully?

There's good news. This can happen.

Read on for an example worth getting excited about...

When you read John Wesley's Journal, you get the overwhelming sense that the man never stopped moving. He traveled from London to Bristol to Newcastle, again and again. He'd take time out to go on preaching tours in Cornwall and Wales. By the late 1740s, he had added Ireland to his list of regular destinations. And all the while, he was building Methodist Societies, overseeing his lay preachers, and writing sermons, essays, & letters.

The vision of early Methodism was simple and yet profound: Offer the free grace of Jesus Christ, which can save men and women from the sin and brokenness that keep them from God. Unite them in communities where they can watch over one another in love and travel the path of sanctification. Nurture holiness of heart & life in people, and they will carry it out into the world. Find the hurting and help them to heal. Seek out the lost: those who are poor in either body or spirit (or both).

And above all, show others how the grace of Jesus reshape their lives inside and out.

I'm a big believer in Wesley's vision for Christian life together and for church reform, so I always get excited about encountering people and ministries that are trying to pursue a genuinely Wesleyan mission. My current column in the United Methodist Reporter focuses on one example of that, in both a person and an organization: the Rev. Arthur Jones and the North Carolina-based ZOE Ministry.

ZOE's mission is to "Share Christ and give hope to orphans and vulnerable children in Africa." That takes place through activities as diverse as getting food to hungry children, providing crucial medical care, and training in essential life skills through the Giving Hope Empowerment Project.

Arthur recently graduated from Duke Divinity School and currently serves as the Interim Director for Church Relations at ZOE. I focus on him in the column because he's a young adult, newly commissioned into the clergy, and he offers a compelling example of how exciting ministry in the church can be. ZOE Ministry itself is headed by the Rev. Greg Jenks, an elder in the North Carolina Conference who launched ZOE in 2004 and has since expanded it to the four African countries of Zimbabwe, Zambia, Rwanda, and Kenya.

While ZOE's mission efforts started with simply providing food relief for orphans who had been victimized by the AIDS pandemic and war, it took a leap forward with the development of the Giving Hope Empowerment Project, a program that brings orphans together to train them in vital life skills and job development. The program, conceived by a survivor of the 1994 Rwanda genocide named Epiphanie Mujawimana, offers a glimpse into the reason ZOE is effective:

While the ministry's American operation provides essential resources and coordination, the actual method and implementation of the mission work is almost all led by African leaders who are members of the communities they are serving. This is responsible mission, which cooperates with what God is doing on the ground and treats American and African Christians as true partners who can learn from one another.

From my column writing and blog work, I get all kinds of e-mails from people who are frustrated with the status quo in their local churches. They know deep down that the practice of their faith should be compelling - to themselves and to others. But they live in congregations that have fallen spiritually asleep.

It doesn't have to be this way. Local churches need a missional mindset. And it's high time for all of us to answer God's call faithfully. Check out how ZOE Ministry does it. Consider partnering with them, or with some other organization that is truly committed to walking the way of Jesus.

Together let's answer the Holy Spirit's call to be transformed, so that we might go out and offer the good news of God's transforming grace to the world!

Bonus: Read Arthur's blog from his recent trip to Kenya here.

What the What???

That Liz Lemon catchphrase popped into my head when I got up yesterday morning and realized it was the first day of the fall semester here at Duke Divinity School. What the heck happened to the summer, anyway??

Ok nerds, it's time to hit the books again. And what better way to get ready for that than Opening Convocation, a service at Duke that is so medieval it makes me giddy. (That is, because the awesomeness of most anything increases in direct proportion to how medieval it is. Except the bubonic plague, of course, which is just the opposite.)

Our processional hymn for the convocation was the great hymn of St. Francis of Assisi, "All Creatures of Our God and King" (#62 in the United Methodist Hymnal). The final verse is so powerful that I wanted to share it with you as a fitting way to praise our Creator at the beginning of a new academic year:

Let all things their Creator bless,
and worship him in humbleness,
O praise ye! Alleluia!
Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son,
and praise the Spirit, Three in One!
O praise ye! O praise ye!
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

For those of you young and old who are trekking back into the halls of academe during this time, may you go with a song of praise to the triune God on your lips and in your heart.

Tips for New Bloggers

I was recently contacted by a friend who said she was going to start a blog. She has never blogged before, and she also happens to be a pastor. She asked for any advice I had to share for novice bloggers. My completely unscientific response is below, divided into two main sections: What to be careful about and How to build and maintain readership.

If you have anything to add, gentle reader, then feel free! Here goes:

I. What to be careful about:
First, realize that a blog is just about the most public forum possible in which to present yourself, your ideas, your pictures of the last family reunion, etc. It is accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. You should always realize that stuff you write will inevitably be read by people you never would have imagined beforehand. Blog because you find this idea strangely fascinating. On the other hand, if what you are really looking for is a personal journal, then go to Wal-Mart and buy a 99-cent spiral bound notebook. Remember that. It will serve you well. And in a related point...

Second, remember that blogging is not anonymous. Even if you don't blog under your own name, you can easily be discovered. Whether it is through the simple tracing of an IP address or through the more complicated process of figuring out context clues by what you write, you can be discovered. People have lost their jobs over ill-considered e-mails, and they have lost their jobs over blogs they thought were anonymous. My advice is to just blog as yourself. That way you won't be tempted to write something that you wouldn't post under your own name because you've fooled yourself into thinking you're the Wizard of Oz. The curtain can always be drawn back, and sometimes by something as simple as a little black dog. But hey, speaking of writing something you wouldn't post under your own name...

Third, never blog angry. Sure, you can always delete the post. But often not before the damage is done. So if you read something or hear something that really sets you off and you feel like you've got to blog about it RIGHT THEN ... well, just take some time and cool down a little bit. If you need to, write the post and hit 'save as draft' instead of publishing it. Wait a day and come back to it. Chances are, you'll want to change it. And you'll be glad you did. But no matter how careful you are...

Fourth, accept that every once in awhile, you are going to blog about something that blows up in your face. Usually this happens because you are just being honest about an issue or an experience that you care about, and you write something that you consider to be fair and well-intentioned. But you never know who is reading you (see above), and you just might encounter people who disagree. Very strongly. The next thing you know, you've got 20 or 30 comments and some of 'em just ain't nice. When that happens you've got to do damage control, but you've got to do it in a charitable way that doesn't drive off readers. For instance, getting the last word in and then shutting off your comment box is tacky. A better option is pointing out the merits of all points of view expressed and then politely asking the main interlocutors to consider the issue closed. When this has happened to me, the polite approach has always worked fairly well (especially if it is clear you didn't mean any harm in the first place). But speaking of harm...

Fifth, if you are a pastor - and I only include this tip because I am one as well - never write anything about your congregation that could even remotely be considered damaging or disrespectful or insensitive to your church members (either individually or as a group). Your congregation is your flock, and as the pastor you are its shepherd. That relationship is built on trust. Anything you write in a blog that can be construed as breaking pastor-parishioner confidentiality can hurt those you are called to nurture in the way of salvation, and it might well render your whole ministry ineffective to boot.

II. How to build and maintain readership:
First, make sure you are being realistic. Let's assume you are only going to be blogging for fun. That means you are not looking to make a living doing it. It's just a hobby. And that means that blogging for blogging's sake is reason enough to do it and have fun in the process! But hey, even hobbies can be done well, right? Golfers like to work on lowering their score, and kite flyers always want to build a better kite. Bloggers tend to measure success by the activity their blog attracts, which can be measured in any number of ways. For instance, I get a monthly report e-mailed to me by my hosting company that reports my aggregate number of unique hits, number of page views, most popular pages, etc. And I also have a Feed Burner account that tracks the stats on my RSS activity (i.e., the folks who tend to be the more dedicated readers). The most direct way of measuring response is by the actual comments that you get in response to your posts, but I wouldn't focus too heavily on this. Sometimes your best posts will draw few if any comments, while more mediocre fare will attract a veritable swarm of reader responses. In the long run, blog because you enjoy it. If a sizable readership develops, that's just gravy. But to get started on at least a core group of readers, you should...

Second, let your friends and family know about your blog! Sometimes your most faithful readers will be the people who know you best. You might be surprised at the way your blog goes mini-viral, just from a few e-mails at the outset to the folks you keep in your address book. There are other ways to help yourself out as well, such as...

Third, realize that we are all creatures of habit. Even in our online reading. So if you go three weeks (or three months) between posts, don't expect people to keep checking in. I decided early on that I was going to post twice a week, once early (Sunday-Monday) and once late (Wednesday-Friday). I don't always keep to that schedule, but I think my discipline of posting twice weekly on fairly substantive issues has definitely helped my readership levels. I am a decidedly amateur blogger: I don't advertise on my site, nobody pays me to maintain it, and I do it for the sheer love of blogging. So I don't have any of the advantages of bloggers who have commercial interests and market themselves accordingly. And yet, I've added well over 5000 unique hits per month this year alone (from January to July). I don't know how to explain that other than to say that twice weekly blogging, about issues that matter (in my case, to people with an interest Wesleyan theology, the United Methodist Church, or Generation X) will attract readers. The regularity really helps, because it makes people think that visiting my site will be worth their time. And speaking of regularity...

Fourth, develop a blogging style and stick to it. Like I said above, for me that means relatively long posts on substantive issues related to a fairly particular genre (And in the blogging medium, I consider anything more than a couple of paragraphs 'long'). I mix it up once or twice a month with stuff different in either form or content from my usual fare. But by and large, people who stop by my blog know what to expect. There's no "right" way to do this, by the way. Some people post short and some post long; some riff off of other online material and some stick to original content. The main thing is to figure out where you fit and stick to it. Readers want to know what to expect. And hey, speaking of attracting readers...

Fifth, if you want to figure out ways to attract readers besides just word-of-mouth, get your blog linked on other sites. Yes, it is generally considered tacky to hawk your blog in other bloggers' comment boxes. (This can be done tastefully on occasion, but ONLY when the link you are providing bears directly on the post that you're commenting on.) But there are plenty of other ways to get links to your blog on the web. I have got links in places as diverse as the Christian Century's "CCblogs network," the Durham District (North Carolina Conference) of the UMC homepage, my own Facebook profile page, and the Methoblog network. If you inhabit online spaces regularly, you kind of figure this stuff out. Finally, for spreading news of your blog to other potentially interested bloggers, there is no substitute for this...

Sixth, if you really want to attract readers who will return and possibly spread your name to others, you've got to take the time to visit other blogs, read their stuff, and leave thoughtful comments. The blogosphere is like New York City in some ways. It's huge, but the people there tend to live and move and have their being in fairly localized neighborhoods. So figure out the neighborhood of blogs where you fit, spend regular time reading the really good content, and leave thoughtful comments. Chances are, people will click on your name and follow the yellow brick road to your own blog. And then - voila! - you've got a new reader. I think sometimes new bloggers underestimate how important this practice is for attracting a readership. People will spend time reading your stuff if you take time to do it well, but they will do so much more readily if they notice that you are out and about reading other people's stuff and taking it seriously.

That's all I got. With two Wizard of Oz references thrown in to boot. All of the above is really just anecdotal, related to things I've thought about or encountered in my own blogging experience over the past three years. So if there are other regular bloggers with different ideas, please do share.

Check out Methodist Review

A new online journal featuring articles on Wesleyan theology and Methodist history is just out. Its title is Methodist Review. And I think its presence in the world of Methodism is really important.

This journal just went online a few weeks ago - check it out here - but it already promises to occupy a very important place in the space between the halls of academia and the pews of the church. Methodist Review (or what I'll call MR) is the successor to a journal called Quarterly Review, which ran in print format from 1980-2005. Quarterly Review (or QR) was published by the UMC, and you can access its archives free of charge at this site.

My understanding of the passing of QR and the birth of MR is from conversations I've had with people over the past few years, so I may not be right on every detail. But I think QR was shuttered due to the combination of cost (i.e., printing and distribution) and declining readership. Its demise was seen as a real loss by the groups that read and wrote for QR: clergy with a more academic bent and scholars with a commitment to the church. The search soon began for a way to provide the kind of church-oriented theological reflection that QR offered but in a way that could be sustained over the long term. The result - a few years later - is MR, which will exist entirely in an online format.

Why am I telling you this? For two reasons.

First, the mission of Methodist Review is important. We need a journal that prints articles aiming at scholarly quality (e.g., MR is "peer reviewed," which is an important criterion for academic respect), while still orienting its content at issues that matter to the church. The description on MR's website says it will be publishing "scholarly articles in all areas and eras of Wesleyan and Methodist studies." That may mean that it will lean more toward the academy than the church (as opposed to QR, which often did the opposite). But the articles in its first issue are all about the church - specifically, a number of retrospective views of the first 40 years of UMC history and a critical conversation about the nature of Wesleyan theology. This kind of content occupies a crucial and much-needed space for scholars, pastors, and laity in the Wesleyan tradition.

Second, Methodist Review is online and free. That means that the Methoblogosphere can tap into it with the ease of a mouse click. All you have to do is register and you can have access to pdf's of any article from any issue. With the exception of professors and graduate students, we'll probably never get church folks to subscribe to expensive printed & bound journals again. But if we can direct them to a website, then we can continue the important work of Wesleyan theological reflection as a whole church.

Handing out the kudos: The support for MR comes from the Perkins School of Theology (SMU), the Candler School of Theology (Emory Univ.), and the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry (UMC). Its editors are Prof. Russell Richey and Prof. Rex Matthews of Candler, and Prof. Ted Campbell of Perkins. I imagine that it took a lot of work to get this new venture off the ground, and the people & institutions that have made it possible should be recognized for the service they are doing for both academy and church.

I'm going to add a link to MR in my right-hand sidebar. I hope you'll consider becoming a regular reader (and maybe a contributor, too!).

What is our chief end?

According to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, it is "to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever."

I look at how that affirmation should affect our approach to worship in my new United Methodist Reporter column.

Worship is a funny thing. There are some people who don't feel like they've really been to worship unless the service follows a very formal liturgy, the clergy are wearing vestments, and the Eucharist is celebrated. For others, that bores them to tears.

On the other hand, there are people who don't feel like they've been to worship unless there is a plugged-in praise band, preaching w/ PowerPoint, and a mid-service drama to illustrate the Scripture reading.

The church I currently serve doesn't fit in either of those categories. We follow a recognizable liturgy - either the Service of Word or Service of Word & Table according to the rubrics of the United Methodist Book of Worship. But we also take "liturgical time" twice, at the beginning and middle of the service, to share stories, announcements, prayer concerns, and testimonies. I don't wear clerical vestments, but I do wear a clerical collar (which the congregation thinks is important). We sing hymns out of the hymnal, but we also have church members offer anthems that you might call either praise or gospel music. Sometimes our service lasts an hour, and sometimes it lasts an hour-and-a-half.

So what is the "right" or "best" way to worship?

Some people might offer a theological argument for how worship should be done. But my sense is that most people would say that the best way to worship is the way that "feels right to them."

And that's our problem. We don't do much theology anymore. We mostly do anthropology. We think that the right worship is the worship that inspires awe in us, or gives us a powerful experience.

We should all repeat this phrase before walking in the sanctuary on Sunday morning: "God does not care about my powerful worship experience." I think it would do us a world of good.

If our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, then that means our worship is first and foremost about the praise of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Beyond that, our "enjoyment" of God means being made like God so that we can know him through Jesus Christ. And that means, in turn, that worship should be seen as a means of grace for our transformation.

Sometimes worshiping in ways that glorify God and open ourselves to transformation by God will involve a feeling of awe or a feeling of upwelling power. And sometimes it will feel mundane or even difficult. Learning to run a marathon is not always a bucket of peaches and rainbows; neither is being conformed to Christ always like getting our "felt needs" met through the worship that we always dreamed we'd get to experience.

Ever heard someone say that they left a church because they didn't like the preaching of the new minister, or because the music changed and they just "had' to go somewhere that offered music they liked better? I have. A lot. And I think the fact that such sentiments are common in contemporary Christianity is downright tragic.

You don't want nonna this

Question: Is there anything more glorious than the site of that ferocious Hog on the side of a shiny football helmet?

Answer: No. No, there is nothing more glorious than that. Especially on the first weekend of September.

And it's just around the corner.

My prediction for the season: The addition of Ryan Mallett, the return of an intact defense with a year of SEC play under their belts, the strong running game headed by "Lil' D-Mac" Michael Smith, and the absolute dominance of D.J. Williams are going to lead to an Arkansas Razorbacks team that will surprise a lot of folks. I even think we're gonna beat Georgia (at home) and Ole Miss (on the road). In fact, other than road games at Gainesville and Tuscaloosa, I think we can beat anybody on our schedule.

Pontificating on the Hogs is a bit outside my regular subject matter, but hey, it's that time of year.

Here are some good posts I've enjoyed reading over the past few days:

Daniel McLain Hixon on John Wesley's view of the Lord's Supper

Kevin Watson providing the reading list for the course in United Methodist history he's teaching

Allan Bevere offering the 200th edition of the Methoblogger Weekly Roundup

John Meunier reflecting on the goods and ills of Methoblogging

Sky McCracken pointing out the poverty of the terms "liberal" and "conservative"

Happy Weekend!

The Concreteness of Community

If you are reading this post then, like me, you probably have at least a moderate interest in the blogosphere.

I think blogging, and social networking, and twittering, and e-mail, all have their virtues. For starters, it has put a lot of us in touch with one another in ways that never could have been possible a few years ago. And for those of us in the church, it has given us avenues to pursue our personal discipleship as well as church renewal through media that weren't available to any previous generation.

But there are downsides. I wrote not long ago about what I believe is the digital age's negative influence on the loss of interpersonal etiquette - the most basic expression of hospitality. And in conversations I had with Shane Raynor in preparation for a column on his reappearance in the blogosphere through the Wesley Report, Shane was careful to point out that these spaces we inhabit in cyberspace should be used "to supplement real community, not replace it."

The limits of online community were shown to me in spades late last year when John the (formerly) Methodist (once of Locusts & Honey and now of the Zeray Gazette) announced to the world that he was renouncing his Christian faith. This came on the heels of a terribly negative experience with the ordination process in his annual conference, so bad in fact that he described his exit from the UMC as an "escape" from a "cult."

I read with regret as John related his disgust with the church and those in it in post after post over the following weeks.

And suddenly I realized how seductive cyberspace could be.

I mean, here was a guy whose blog had been one of my favorites for years. He was funny, he (like me) loved Star Trek, he did this "Art Blogging" thing that I thought was one of the most creative uses of a blog I had ever seen, and he seemed utterly unafraid to raise controversial issues and then invite open discussion of them. Heck, he even featured me on one of his Methodist Blogger Profiles.

But I didn't really know John. And by that I mean that I didn't know him at all. My "relationship" with him was like my relationship with most of you who are reading this post: it existed in the ether, where the Internet fairies carry all of our messages and posts and tweets to one another and we conjure up the fantasy that we are actually a part of each other's lives.

So how do you love your neighbor when you've never met him?

The experiences John went through are deeply personal ones, of course, but he also made them public by sharing them in a blogging medium that is viewable by the whole world. But the ironic thing to me about the blogosphere is simply this: the whole world can have a conversation together here, but not a single one of us can offer the bread of Eucharist to another.

I'm in a mood to write about this because of a post I read by John Meunier last night called, "Methoblogging for good and ill." It is a remarkable piece of writing, and I encourage you to read it. John reminds us that Christian community must always, finally, be concrete.

This thing we do in cyberspace has opened new avenues for connection with one another, but we can't let it delude us into thinking we've got something more than we do.

Our most crucial need...

... is vibrant & faithful campus ministry.

The church as a whole needs to embrace this idea in a big way.

Here are two reasons why:

First, the transition from high school to college is fun & exciting, but also scary & disruptive. You leave a stable environment, where the structures of nurture, authority, and accountability are all very plain. And you move into an environment where nurture is tough to find, authority is in flux, and accountability is often nil. Campus ministry provides a setting where young adult men and women can continue to grow in grace as they navigate the waters of college life.

Second, for many young men and women, the stirrings of a call into ministry that they might have sensed in high school come into full bloom during that crucial period from age 18 to age 22. But in order to really hear that call and begin to respond to it, they need the right environment. When it is resourced well and led capably, campus ministry offers that environment.

A colleague of mine, the Rev. Creighton Alexander, has written an op/ed in the United Methodist Reporter that asks the question, "Does anybody care about UMC's campus ministry?" Creighton offers a compelling argument both about the current neglect of campus ministry in the UMC and about the urgent need to reverse that neglect and embrace the potential that campus ministry represents. Creighton lays it out much better than I could, so go read his column for yourself.

Our campus ministries are a vulnerable part of the church's overall ministry. Wesley Foundations at state universities and Christian Life programs at UM-related colleges typically depend on apportionment dollars (either directly or indirectly) for their funding. And when the economy is bad, it is those programs that often suffer from cutbacks.

Another friend, the Rev. Eric Van Meter, has written compellingly in the past about the need for us to ask new questions and think unconventionally if we want the church to have a strong future. Eric is a campus minister, of course, at the Wesley Foundation at Arkansas State University.

And Eric, along with many of his colleagues, know how crucial campus ministry is to the health of the church - not because we want to prop up an institution, but because we want that institution to be the kind of community where the gospel of Jesus is proclaimed, broken people are given saving grace, and mature disciples are formed.

Campus ministry has the potential to 'stand in the gap,' as it were, providing a solid faith community for young adults during a vulnerable period in the lives, as well as offering an environment where those whom God is calling can hear and respond to that call into ministry.

Campus ministers and their ministry settings need our help. So be an advocate. Speak out. And pray without ceasing.

What's in a mission statement?

In the Book of Discipline, the United Methodist Church's book of canon law and doctrine, the mission of the Church is described as follows:

"The mission of the Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world" (par.120, p.87).

There are ways in which I think that statement is apt and helpful as local churches seek to focus their ministries to reflect the work of followers of Jesus charged with witnessing to his gospel through word and deed.

But in other ways I'm not such a big fan of the statement. For one, I'm not sure that an ecclesiastical communion like the United Methodist Church needs a mission statement. It seems simplistic and far too indebted to a marketing culture better at selling commodities than spreading the good news. I mean, why can't our mission statement simply be the Apostles' Creed?

Another way that I'm ambivalent about the Church's mission statement is the relatively recent prepositional phrase attached to the end of it: "... for the transformation of the world." This is difficult to explain fully in something the length of a blog post, so let me offer a Stanley Hauerwas aphorism instead: "The first task of the Church is not to make the world more just. It is to make the world, the world."

That is, God the Father has called a people together in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ. This people is known as the Church (1 Peter 2:4-10). And it is the community called Church that is serving as a light to the whole world, beckoning people to follow the way of salvation (Matthew 5:14-16). Through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Church is able to glorify God and mediate the saving grace of Jesus Christ to all those come within her bounds - namely, via the sacrament of baptism (Galatians 3:27-29). From within the covenant community, men and women are able to experience the transformation that brings them from sin to righteousness, from death to life!

The Church is charged with making the world see itself as the world, because only then can the world know a better form of life than the life that worships death. And through that very conviction, those who are lost in the wilderness of the world can be drawn to the salvation known in the Church.

So what does this have to do with the United Methodist statement? Simply put, I don't think we are charged with transforming the world. That's God's job, and God has promised to do it in God's own time (2 Peter 3:8-9).

We are charged with building the Church through the Holy Spirit's guidance, baptizing believers and forming them in holiness of heart and life.

Will those believers go out into the world and do works of justice and mercy, spreading the love of Jesus Christ in the world's institutions and structures? Absolutely! And thank God for it.

The teleological thrust of Christian discipleship, though, is not some kind of Pelagian transformation of the world into the kingdom of God. The belief that we can actually do such a thing is the tragedy of Protestant liberalism, which has led to a watering-down of both doctrine and the lived reality of the Church's life. It is an erroneous belief that still infects the Church, and I fear that our current mission statement doesn't help things in that area.

Colin Williams wrote John Wesley's Theology Today in 1960, at the height of the mid-20th century ecumenical movement. His presentation of Wesley's thought aims at providing Methodists with a theological basis from which to engage in dialogue with Christians of other traditions. The particular ecumenical moment in which people like Williams and Albert C. Outler were prominent Methodist actors has passed, but the heart of Williams' analysis holds up remarkably well.

At the end of a chapter on Wesley's nuanced understanding of justification by faith, Williams offers a passage that can serve as a corrective to our short-and-sweet mission statement:

"Our hope is in Jesus Christ, not in the transformation of the world or even of ourselves. Consequently our hope is not destroyed by the failure of the kingdom of God to become visible or even by our own failure to make visible progress to the goal of Christlikeness. Nevertheless, Wesley laid great stress on the fact that because our faith relation is in Christ, we live under the promise of present transformation and are able to move forward in creative, ethical endeavor because Christ continually offers his transforming presence to believers, and, through the Church, to the world" (p.73).

Williams' quote predates our current mission statement, of course, but it is superior to it in content and articulation.