Our deepest need?

This post is about what I think Christians' greatest need is in the present. I am writing it in connection with my new column in the United Methodist Reporter.

I've been reading a lot the past couple of months about the Great Awakening and the birth of the modern evangelical movement in the 1730s and 40s. When you look at what people like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and John Wesley were focused on, there are differences related to each leader's personality and ministry setting. But there's one thing with which they were all concerned: the New Birth.

In "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Edwards warned about the dangers facing "unconverted persons" in the congregation. Whitefield practically willed others to experience the New Birth in his impassioned sermons. And Wesley was convinced that the revival in England was occurring because evangelical ministers were preaching a strong doctrine of justification by faith alone.

I mention this because I think that a strong message about the New Birth was exactly what the church needed at that time. The church had been under assault by Enlightenment rationalism for decades, and the latitudinarian attitude of many in the Church of England hierarchy didn't do much for nurturing a vibrant faith.

And us? My strong view is that the deepest need in the church at present is real community. Everything about our culture teaches us to be individualist consumers. When we go to church, we do it with the mindset of customers. When we engage in discipleship, we often do it as religious consumers looking for a return on our investment. The market mentality of American society pervades everything we do. It is so pervasive, in fact, that we often don't realize it is there.

Without the church, we have no hope. The church is the body of Christ. That means no church, no Jesus. And no Jesus, no salvation. Unless we learn how to overcome the fragmentation that plagues us at present, I fear for our future. I have no plan to offer, no easy solution for overcoming the whole freakin' culture. I do think it has something to do with re-learning what it means to be friends with one another. But that isn't as easy as it sounds.

"Restoring Methodism" ...

... That's the title of a book written in 2006 by Jim and Molly Scott. Actually, the full title is Restoring Methodism: 10 Decisions for United Methodist Churches in America. The book is an attempt to help Methodist churches grapple with the realities of the denomination's situation at present and start to think about a way forward that would allow for the renewal of the church as a whole.

The Scotts are clergy members of the Arkansas Annual Conference who have had a long and diverse career in ministry. Since moving back to the state and settling in Eureka Springs, they have devoted themselves to study and writing, as well as in the training of pastors and congregations, on how the United Methodist Church might better embody the doctrine, discipline, and spirit that drove the movement back in Wesley's day.

I read the Scotts' book recently for their interest in the class meeting and its role (in the past and, potentially, in the present) as a central feature of Methodism. I think one of the best parts of their project in Restoring Methodism is in the way they clearly distinguished the renewal of the church-as-institution and the renewal of the church-as-Holy-Spirit-led-movement. All their interest is in the latter.

For instance, they write, "The purpose [of the church's restoration] is not to save an institution but rather to use all the gifts and graces given to us to fulfill our love and obedience in the Kingdom of God. It is the salvation of people that is at stake here. It is people experiencing the justifying grace of Jesus Christ that forgives and frees us from sin. It continues with the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in us" (p.30).

Likewise, the Scotts are not interested in latching on to John Wesley as some mythic, founder-figure who defines the church simply because of a compelling life story. Rather, they write, "It is not that Wesley himself changes us; it is that he continually points away from himself to the Trinity - God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost; to basic Christianity; to the early Church. Wesley is not the answer, but he takes us to the answers" (p.xiii).

Those statements are a pretty good summary of why I study Wesley and early Methodism. The answers they provide are not contained within themselves; they rather come from where they point us. They demonstrate a form of disciplined holy living that can still help us respond to the Spirit's call in our own day.

[If you'd like to check out more about the ministry of Jim and Molly Scott, you can visit their Christian Connexion website.]

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.

Into the wilderness

My friend Eric Van Meter, campus minister at Arkansas State University, continues his series on the church in this week's United Methodist Reporter.

In his current column, Eric says that he has always had a desire to work along "the borders of the church." He uses the image of an old, rusty barbed wire fence that is meant to mark off territory but stands largely forgotten. Those familiar with the UMC's recent wrangling over the meaning of church membership will not fail to catch Eric's meaning: the dry description of boundaries off the page of a Book of Discipline are no match for the identity given to us in a living faith with Christ through the church.

Eric writes, "Regardless of how much time we spend trying to identify our target market, or how many assimilation classes we hold to help people transform from outsiders to one of us, the fact remains that the land between the United Methodist Church and the world at large is frontier territory. It's chaotic, disorderly, untamed ... And interesting."

He uses his own ministry group as an example - college students. They show a deep desire for relationship with Christ but are often skittish about the formal aspects of church membership. But there are plenty of them out there, in the wilderness areas, waiting to be found. (Note, for instance, my post earlier this week about the 48 million religiously unaffiliated people in the United States alone.)

Eric admits that boundary issues are important, but he insists that we pay a disproportionate amount of time dealing with them. He suggests that moving out into the wilderness - a call to evangelism if ever I've heard one - would help us refocus on the true meaning of the gospel.

The subtext here definitely touches on issues of sexuality in the church, and Eric is offering one way forward (even if it is implied rather than explicit). There are other ways of approaching that particular topic, of course, and some would suggest that a greater emphasis on discipline and accountability in membership is the way the church should move. Regardless, with General Conference looming ever closer, it is certainly a timely subject matter.

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.

Wish list for 2008

My New Year's resolution for this year is to live more into a life of holiness. I'm in a Covenant Discipleship Group with four other guys, and I know that will be a great source of strength for me. I'm trying to look more at holiness in an integrated way, encompassing my mind, body, and spirit. After all, God wants to transform all of me, not just one part!

But beyond that resolution, I also spent some time a few days ago thinking about what I would like for our church in the coming year. I put those thoughts to paper and shaped them into a my first United Methodist Reporter column for the new year. You can find that column here. Here's a short version:

1) One of the most pressing concerns, I believe, is in helping our young hear the voice of God - and this goes for both laity and clergy. We have declining numbers of both, and the reasons why are complex. My suspicion is that the greatest reason is that families no longer see the church as the center of their lives, but rather one among a laundry list of extracurricular activities. And if that's the case, it is not just a failure of the church reaching the young, but of the failure of the church to nurture God's people overall. That will only change when we once again understand the church as the only community where we can know true life.

2) My greatest hope in the area of worship is that the church experiences a renewal of the celebration of the Lord's Supper. I believe that Holy Communion is the chief means of grace available to us, and if that's the case, we ought to put it at the center of worship! That doesn't mean we have to shortchange preaching, but we should rather understand preaching as a proclamation which finds its fullest embodiment in the sacrament. If the church is about sharing the word of God, we should be eating the sacred meal together at every opportunity.

3) General Conference needs to be clothed in prayer. If you have any questions about that, see General Conference of 2004, General Conference of 2000, etc.

4) I hope that a part of our growing reclamation of our Wesleyan heritage will be a greater understanding of the unity of holiness and compassion. There can finally be no separation between works of piety and works of mercy. We are called to love God and neighbor, and focusing only on one to the neglect of the other produces a thin faith. Lord, give us both!

Three options for the UMC

The United Methodist Church is full of potential. It is a truly international church, with membership in the United States at 8 million, and membership worldwide at something over 10 million. It relates to other Methodist bodies both in the U.S. and abroad through a wide sense of connectional identity. Even though it is autonomous from these bodies, it shares a sense of history and identity with them as arising out of a small movement that originated almost 300 years ago in England. The UMC's theological heritage is strong, rooted as it is in personal piety, social holiness, and a commitment to pursuing justice and compassion in the world through evangelistic outreach. Its capacity to reach countless souls through zealous witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ is huge.

But like any such body with great positive potential, the flipside of that potential is the potential to fail in its mission. And in that sense the UMC is like so many mainline churches in our culture. It stands at a pivotal point in its history, when it must make a decision about whether it wants to accept the Holy Spirit's desire for renewal or else fade slowly into obscurity.

I see three possibilities for where we might head from the present, and I mean today: April 2, 2007. They are:

1) A Slow Death: We could continue the decline that has occurred in our denomination for over three decades. We could continue to practice that lukewarm faith that has resulted in a diminuation in the successful pursuit of the mission given to us by the Holy Spirit through Wesley himself: to save souls, to make disciples for Jesus Christ, to spread scriptural holiness, and to reform the nation (or, you might say, the nations). Continuing to decline in this way doesn't require a single thing from us. We just have to keep doing what we're doing. And what we are doing is acting like 'being the church' is just living comfortable, consumerist lives that assume that God's work in the world will happen apart from the committed discipleship embodied in Scripture's call. Pastors can keep going about lukewarm ministries, concerned more about the state of the pension system than about the radical call of the gospel. Laity can keep going about their nominal participation in the life of discipleship, treating their membership in the church as nothing more than the socially respectable thing to do. In short, we can keep ignoring the principle call of Christ, which is the salvation of the world (with the holistic sense in which Wesley understood that term).

2) Leaner and Meaner: Or, we could allow the wheat to be separated from the chaff over the course of time, until the church is small enough that the only people who actually fill the pulpits and pews are the ones who are truly Wesleyan in their appraoch to the faith. This would mean a much smaller church, more like the early Methodist movement than the large denomination of the present. Such a development may seem far off, but it really isn't. At the rate we are going, by some estimates, membership in the UMC will be only 1 or 2 million in the U.S. by 2040. That's 25% or less than what it is right now. And truth be told, that might not be entirely bad. It is possible that a smaller, leaner, and more committed church could be a more effective witness to Christ's salvation than the large, lumbering denomination we know in the present. It would certainly allow for the church to be more committed to its mission and historical identity, but it would also sacrifice the breadth of its reach in favor of a greater depth of discipleship for those who remain. One interesting aspect of this second possibility is that it would make the United Methodist Church more international in its character more quickly, which, again, might not be bad for the church as a whole. Anyone who has experienced the work of the Holy Spirit in the so-called "Third World" knows that Christians in those areas (and here I am thinking specifically in terms of the Global South) tend to be more serious about their faith, on the whole, than Christians in Europe and the U.S.

3) Radically Renewed: The third possibility is that the church could learn to embrace its heritage and historical identity in a way that allows for the Holy Spirit's renewal of the whole of Methodism as it is embodied in the UMC. In this possibility, the church would experience a great increase in all aspects of its witness and mission. Anyone who reads this blog knows that the increase I mean is not primarily about numbers, although I believe that an increase in commitment and understanding of the gospel will surely lead to a reversal in our numerical decline. This third possibility would see a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the People Called Methodists, to the point that men and women, boys and girls, young and old alike would be empowered to pursue their personal discipleship in the context of a renewed community of disciples. We would stop arguing about those doctrinal questions that divide us the most, because we would realize that they are really more about American culture than about Christian discipleship. We would treat the church as the community where we find our identity rather than the place we are obligated to show up for one hour each week (or less). We would come to understand ourselves as Methodists because God called a people known as Methodists into existence for a very specific purpose: to pursue the evangelistic love of God and neighbor in a way that truly represents Christ's saving gospel to the world.

Some might say that options 1 and 2 are much more likely than option 3. Perhaps so, according to the ways of the world. But then again, it is exactly our captivity to the ways of the world that has gotten us into this mess in the first place. I have a friend in the Th.D. program here at Duke who says that the primary work of the Christian in the world is to learn how to pray. I agree with him, as long as we consider that 'learning how to pray' is that work where our entire lives are clothed by the understanding of how to live as this community called the church, constituted by the call and presence of Jesus Christ.

When John Wesley was asked how one defined a "Methodist," he responded by offering a list of qualities that most people would attribute to any Christian of any time or place. But then he added that what distinguished a Methodist from the great mass of Christians was that the Methodist was the one who truly practiced his faith, in all aspects of his life.

We can be such Methodists again. God has not left us. The only question is whether we will repent, recommit, and return to the calling that God has given us from the beginning of our history as a church.

True to our roots

Doctrine, spirit, and discipline.

Those are the three words Wesley used to describe what Methodists need to "hold fast" to in order to keep from becoming "a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power."

Doctrine includes the fundamental tenets of belief that define who we are as a church. Spirit indicates the attitude with which we approach our discipleship and mission. Discipline points toward our character and the seriousness with which we take our faith.

All three of these were essential to Wesley. Without them, the Methodists weren't Methodists at all. And in this strange time in the life of our church - where it is unclear whether the people called Methodists care enough to rescue their sinking ship - these three should be essential to us as well.

I write about this issue in my current column in the Reporter. It is not clear to me that the UMC has the stomach for a truly Wesleyan practice of faith. And we certainly do not live in a culture or a time that is conducive to such a practice. What do you think?