CD Connection

Steve Manskar has sent out the first edition of the Covenant Discipleship Connection newsletter this week. The Connection replaces the old Covenant Discipleship Quarterly, which was the main publication of the Office of Accountable Discipleship at the General Board of Discipleship. Whereas the CDQ was a print-based quarterly, the Connection will be distributed via e-mail and will be published monthly.

If you have an interest in small group accountability in your own discipleship or (if you are a pastor) in your ministry, I'd encourage you to sign up to receive the Connection. It's free and you can register for it here. You can also continue to access the old issues of the CDQ at the main Covenant Discipleship website.

Covenant Discipleship itself is a contemporary expression of the early Methodist class meeting, and it seeks to nurture faith through mutual witness, support, and accountability. I have written a column on Covenant Discipleship, which you can find here.

The saints among us

In my study of John Wesley, one thing that has really stuck out at me is the way that Wesley was so drawn to individual examples of holy living. I write about this in my newest column in the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. In a number of different genres of writing - sermons, journaling, and essays - Wesley consistently highlighted examples of sanctified lives as a public witness to others.

The reason Wesley pointed to these living saints was because of the good that viewing their lives could do for others. By seeing the living witness of a holy man or woman, others might be moved by the Spirit to receive God's grace for themselves and be similarly transformed.

Another interesting thing about Wesley's focus on sanctified lives is the diversity of those he focused upon: Henry Lascelles, an immigrant to the colony of Georgia in the 1730s; Jane Cooper and Jane Muncy, both women active in the Methodist revival; the Rev. John Fletcher, an articulate theologian and one of Wesley's ablest allies among the Anglican clergy.

I think Wesley's tendency to look at holy lives can offer us something today. The messages we get are confused, because the sources are so scattered. From friends, to media sources, to so-called "authority" figures, it can be unclear what we can trust and what should be discarded. But what does not fail is the testimony that is offered through demonstrated, holy lives. Their witness to us can be a means of grace in and of themselves.

That which comes before

I cover the Wesleyan doctrine of prevenient grace in a recent column in the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. If you are not a predestinarian - and I am not - then any account of salvation that does not slide into works righteousness has got to take the doctrine of prevenient grace seriously.

I bring this up because of the post I wrote a few days ago about social holiness. In that post, I mentioned an article I was writing for the United Methodist Reporter about the common misinterpretation of Wesley's teaching on social holiness. The article is finished, and I'll post on it tomorrow. But first I wanted to say something about prevenient grace, so that I didn't get ahead of myself with the sanctification stuff.

We clearly live in a 'pull yourself up by your own bootstraps' culture. This is debilitating on the church, particularly in the way it causes preachers to slip into a self-help style of preaching as opposed to preaching a strong doctrine of salvation. It's not that predestination has fallen out of style. It's actually more popular than ever, except that most predestinarians today are soft universalists. That is, they just assume that salvation comes to all in the end. And the logic of universalism means that the best thing the church can do (and by implication the best thing that preachers can preach) is to help people muddle through until modern medicine fails them and they die.

A common corollary belief that goes along with this train of thought is that we are not really all that messed up by sin. And we're certainly not depraved by it! We make mistakes, sure, but when we're thinking in a clear-headed manner, we can pretty much choose the good in a given situation. Sin is an occasional problem. But basically, I'm okay, and you're okay. Let's go buy more stuff and be happy.

Well, this is all a bunch of cultural hooey and a sign of the anemic state of the American church. Sin is real, and we are absolutely broken by it to the point that we aren't just making sinful choices. We are debilitated. It is a state and we are born into it.

(Hell is real, too - a real, metaphysical, possibly permanent separation from God for all eternity - but that's a complicated topic I'll save for another time. If you want a window into one interesting, traditionally evangelical debate about hell, check out Gordon Atkinson's recent post at Real Live Preacher.)

So salvation is important, and it starts not with sanctification but with prevenient grace. It is a sign of God's gratuitous love for us that, "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). The realization of this fact and the power that it conveys are a gift given to us through God's prevenience. This is the substance of our justification. And through it the door is opened to our new birth and sanctification.

These words are not just high falutin' theological concepts. They are descriptive words about the way of salvation, the via salutis, that God invites us to travel. What becomes crucial is that the manner of our traveling is never alone, but rather always in community.

That's where social holiness comes in. Which I will look at tomorrow.

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.

Esther's Choice

[The following commentary is intended as a companion piece to my latest article in the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly, which is available here.]

The OT Book of Esther has always fascinated me. For one, it has no direct mention of God anywhere in the text. The closest it ever comes to mentioning God is Mordecai's cryptic statement that, should Esther fail to act on the Jews' behalf, "deliverance will come to the Jews from another quarter."

Beyond that odd fact, Esther is also interesting in the portrayal it gives of the Jews living in exile. So many peoples in history (including the Israelites of the Northern Kingdom) have disappeared from history after suffering conquest and/or exile. But not the Judahites. Their identity as a people did just the opposite - it persisted and actually became stronger. The Jews of exile undoubtedly began codifying their sacred texts into the Old Testament scriptures that we have today. Of course, God's providential care sustained them throughout the Babylonian captivity until they could return to the Promised Land. But practically, they had to take the steps that would allow them to maintain their corporate existence in the absence of a land or a Temple cult. The fact that they succeeded remains one of the great marvels of history.

Then there's the figure of Esther herself. Young, ethnically different from the people who surrounded her in the court of Xerxes, and faced with a powerful adversary in the court official Haman, Esther makes a compelling heroine. Early in the book, her chief assets seem to be her beauty and a very capable uncle in the person of Mordecai. But when crisis strikes and Haman's plots threaten the destruction of all the Jews in Persian lands, Esther risks her own life - first by seeking an audience with the king uninvited, and then by baldly exposing Haman's plot to the king.

Now, the Babylonian Empire is gone by the time of the events described in Esther, and the Persians have allowed the Jewish elite in exile to return to their land. But many Jews have stayed in Persia, and after all, Judah itself is now incorporated into the massive Persian Empire. If Haman's plots had been carried out, it mostly probably would have meant the extermination of the Jews as a distinct people. The actions of one young woman were thus crucial to the survival of God's chosen people.

We might ask the question, "Why did Esther act at all?" Mordecai issues his famous challenge ("Who knows? Perhaps you have come to the throne for just such a time as this.") and simultaneously threatens Esther that she will not escape Haman's wrath just because she is the queen. But that must have seemed like a desperate threat from a man who - because he was one of Haman's chief enemies - must have been at the top of the proscription list.

Nevertheless, Esther acts. Faced with a choice, she chooses to risk her own life and position in what must have seemed like a desperate gamble. And that choice proved salvific for God's people. I look at this story in my current article in the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. I believe there are a number of reasons why Esther found the courage to do what she did. Foremost among these is the way she was nurtured and formed by the practices of a close-knit religious community. Esther could act because of who she was raised to be. If she did not know how to pray, or how to fast, or how to identify with her faith, Mordecai's appeals to her would undoubtedly have fallen on deaf ears.

Is there a lesson in this for us? Sure there is. Formation in the faith is key to our identity as Christians. People are almost never sanctified in an instant. It is a long, slow process that extends over one's entire life. But when we are shaped in faithful ways, we can be assured that, when He comes to us, we will recognize Him for Who He Is.

What is a Methodist?

That's a good question these days. Is there anything distinctive anymore about claiming the name "Methodist" as a part of your Christian identity? Should there be?

I ask the "what is a Methodist" question in my most recent column in the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. And let me be clear: I don't think this is just a fun exercise to go through. It is of dire importance.

There are large segments of the United Methodist Church that don't want there to be anything at all distinctive about Methodist identity. In fact, they don't want there to be anything much distinctive about being a Christian at all. The 'inclusivity crowd' takes the open invitation of Jesus and turns it into the defining mark of the church. These are the same folks who howl with protest when anyone dares to question the wisdom of, I don't know, a church marketing slogan that aims at the lowest common denominator in trying to stop the slide in church membership numbers. (Whether the church's membership slide might be a direct result of our pathetically weak sense of discipleship is a question for their open hearts and open minds to consider.) To them, the church is all about open acceptance and not at all about those other things that have always been bedrock parts of our faith: repentance, the new birth, sanctification, and sacrificial discipleship.

It is not clear right now which direction the UMC will ultimately head. It may well continue down the path of lukewarm, milquetoast faith. But we should never mistake such an easygoing, worldly Christianity with the Methodism of John Wesley. For Wesley, Methodists were those who took the commands to love God and love neighbor and actually put them into practice. All day. Everyday.

The point is this: Jesus doesn't just want you in the church. Jesus wants you in the church so he can literally, physically, spiritually, and actually change your life. And if all you are doing is showing up for worship occasionally, and you are not allowing God to transform your life, then church is a bad place for you. Your salvation is in jeopardy. People in that position should leave the church, so they do not get lulled into the false sense of security that they are actually walking the way of salvation.

What is a Methodist? To Wesley, it is someone who is committed to holiness of heart and life. Who loves God and neighbor. Who cares for the poor. Who is inwardly and outwardly conformed to the will of Jesus Christ.

If that's not you, then you're not a Methodist. You may be a member of a United Methodist Church. You may have a cross & flame lapel pin. But you ain't a Methodist. Not according to Mr. Wesley.

Covenant Discipleship and growing in the faith

Out of all the aspects of our Wesleyan heritage that have fallen by the wayside over the years, I think that serious attention to sanctification through holiness of heart & life may be the biggest loss. Thankfully, it's not a total loss.

Covenant Discipleship is a movement in the church that seeks to address that core need. It is simple, very un-programmatic, and focused on the Wesleyan concept of social holiness. That is, Wesley believed that all holiness (the conformity of one's heart, mind, and soul to Christ) had to be done in the company of others who could help to "watch over one another in love." For Wesley, that meant making the bands and class meetings a fundamental part of the Methodism of his day. And it is those Wesleyan forms of small group discipleship that Covenant Discipleship seeks to emulate.

The basic idea is that you gather in a group of 4 to 7 people and give an account of your discipleship over the past week. You go every week, as an absolute priority. And you agee to abide by a covenant document that the whole group writes together, and which includes a number of "acts of discipleship" oriented around works of devotion, worship, compassion, and justice. There is no need to buy the latest, hot new small group study. There is no need to frantically search for ways to make CD Groups "relevant" to "younger people." You don't even need Powerpoint. All you need is a willingness on the part of the group members to really engage in the work of their own sanctification.

CD is especially interesting to me, because I think it represents a willingness by one of our general boards and agencies (the GBOD) to commit to a form of ministry that is really seeking to embody a Wesleyan approach to discipleship. But at the same time, CD Groups are essentially a grass-roots movement in the church. There is no heavy-handed attempt to impose them from the top-down. They seem to spring up wherever a small group of people in a local church is willing to take its commitment to discipleship to the next level.

Steve Manskar at the GBOD is the Director of Accountable Discipleship. Check out his online resources, and I'm sure he'd enjoy hearing from anyone who is interested in finding more out about Covenant Discipleship.

As I reported previously in this post, Steve asked me sometime back to become a regular contributor to the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. My column for the Spring 2007 - "The Pursuit of Happiness" - is online now. I'll highlight future columns as they appear. And FYI, the CDQ is a free publication that Steve would be happy to send you if you drop him a line.

Practicing your faith

I don't believe in a John 3:16 faith.

That is, I don't believe that the Christian faith is summed up perfectly in that particular verse, as so many people do. Now I do think every bit of it is true: God does love the world; he did give his only begotten son; we are called to believe in him and we are promised eternal life.

But the problem with a John 3:16 faith is that so many people both start and stop with it. The transformation of their lives (what we call sanctification) is not important, so long as they believe that Jesus is who he says he is. How they use their time, who they choose to love, how they spend their money, and whether they commit to life in the church don't seem to have much bearing in their lives.

The problem with this, of course, is that it runs against the grain of the entire New Testament witness. The Scriptures want to testify to us how our lives are transformed by Christ as we live in the covenant community known as the church. And that involves a change in our habits. Every one of them.

There are other "3:16s" out there that help to put John 3:16 in its proper perspective. Check out Ephesians 3:16, which speaks of inner transformation through the power of the Spirit (a transformation which, if it is true, must be expressed outwardly as well). Or Philippians 3:16, which enjoins us to hold fast to what we have attained - a statement which, in the light of Paul's previous comments about pressing on toward the goal, is about the importance of how we live out our lives in concrete acts. Then, of course, there is Revelation 3:16, where the Laodiceans are told that they will be spewed out of Christ's mouth for their lukewarmness. If that's not a call to a new way of life, I don't know what is!

About a year and a half ago, Steve Manskar at the General Board of Discipleship asked me to write a couple of short essays for Covenant Discipleship Quarterly about my experience with Covenant Discipleship Groups. I happen to think CD Groups are one of the best tools in helping Christians practice their faith through concrete acts - acts which, in turn, help to facilitate the work of the Spirit in sanctification. So if you are interested in something more than a simple John 3:16 faith, you should check out Steve's work in Covenant Discipleship at the GBOD. The website is here.

Those two essays I wrote for the CDQ are online as well:

Covenant Discipleship and My Journey into Ministry (Part I)

Covenant Discipleship and My Journey into Ministry (Part II)

Steve recently asked me to start contributing regularly to CDQ, so there will be more essays out in the future. I'll post them on the blog as I do with my United Methodist Reporter columns.