Worth reading, part III

The next periodical I'd like to highlight is a print-based journal entitled Methodist History. This journal - which I'll abbreviate as MH - is the official historical journal of the United Methodist Church and is published by the General Commission on Archives and History. As such, it is an important publication for articles covering the historical interpretation of Methodism.

I've been a subscriber of MH for several years, and I've always been impressed at the breadth of its subject matter. It's common to see articles in a given year that look at aspects of the life of John Wesley, the history of 18th-century Methodism in England, the development of Methodism in America in the 19th century, and any number of biographical studies of Methodist figures both well-known and obscure from the past 250 years.

MH is printed four times per year and has a discount rate for current students.

I'd highly encourage subscribing to MH for those who care about the history of Methodism and want to learn more about it. Like Methodist Review - which I surveyed in my last post - Methodist History is a peer-reviewed journal. But because it is an academic journal published by the church, MH also tries, to a significant extent, to publish articles that are relevant to more than just a narrow slice of academic historians.

MH is solely print-based, so subscribing will get four bound issues per year delivered to your mailbox. But while you're at it, I'd actually recommend joining the Historical Society of the United Methodist Church. A Historical Society membership is only $30 per year ($20 for students) and it gets you an MH subscription plus other benefits. (You can find out more information here.) I think that our participation in such organizations (and their publications) is key to the continued vitality of the Wesleyan tradition.

So sign up, read, and enjoy!

Worth reading, part II

Earlier this week I explained that I am going to spend the next few posts looking at a number of great resources - both in print and online - that specialize in the Wesleyan tradition and contemporary Methodism.

I want to point first to an interesting new online journal by the name of Methodist Review. I highlighted MR back in August in this post. MR is the successor to Quarterly Review, which was published for about 25 years by the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the UMC as a journal of theological resources for ministry.

Basically, that meant that its articles tried to bridge the gap between the academy and the church. Its authors included scholars as well as pastors and laity within the church. And its articles represented a wide variety of topics in theology and ministry. By the way, the entire QR archive is available for free online at this link.

I'm excited about Methodist Review for a number of reasons. First, it fills a need that was created by the demise of QR after it ceased publication five years ago. We need a journal that is committed to publishing broadly in the area of Wesleyan and Methodist Studies, particularly around issues of practical theology and ministry that find purchase in both academy and church.

Second, MR is free! All that is required is a quick and easy online registration. After that, subscribers have access to all of MR's content, which can be read from your computer or printed out in pdf format.

Third, MR is a "peer-reviewed" journal, which means that submissions are read and judged in a blind review process to determine suitability and fitness for publication. So while MR, as a journal, wants to fit a niche not occupied by most scholarly journals, it is committed to maintaining a high level of quality in the articles it accepts because of the peer-review process. That also means it can serve as an outlet for publication for those of us who write essay-length works in Wesleyan theology or Methodist history - both because it helps to distribute our ideas to an audience and because it can help in securing teaching positions and tenure status.

Fourth and finally, as an online journal, MR is at the front end of a trend in academic publishing in general, which is moving away from expensive print formats and going to online publishing. Some people see that as lamentable, and it may well be. But academic journals are expensive to print and have to rely on notoriously small subscriber bases. So going online is really about developing a model that is sustainable for the future. In that sense, MR is helping to give shape in an area of academic publishing that, no doubt, many other journals will be moving into in the coming years.

One reason I started with Methodist Review in this blog series is that I think it could be of significant interest to a wide variety of committed Wesleyan Christians. Look, for instance, at the table of contents for Volume 1, which was published last year. The articles range from a consideration of the nature of Wesleyan theology, to a retrospective look at the UMC's first 40 years, to an analysis of certain aspects of John Wesley's thought.

Those are all topics with relevance both to academic theological reflection and grounded Christian practice!

And as an added bonus related to MR's online format, I was glad to find out that it is not limited either in page length or publishing date. That means it can feature articles both longer and shorter than that which would be standard in a print-based journal. And articles can also be added to a given volume throughout the year by simply continuing with sequential pagination. Those two innovations, in and of themselves, show immediate benefits to having a specifically online journal in the world of Wesleyan theology and Methodist history.

So read and enjoy!

Worth reading, part I

I'd like to spend a few posts pointing my readers to excellent resources for reading in the Wesleyan & Methodist tradition. Here's why:

-- While there are a lot of good Methodist-related blogs these days (see Shane Raynor's Wesley Report for a regular rundown of solid content), it's important to read deeper than what you can get in a blog post. Christians identify with a particular tradition because of the understanding that it offers of the Christian faith. The Wesleyan tradition, I believe, offers a compelling account of certain key parts of the Christian life: the doctrine of salvation; the understanding of grace; the nature and work of the Holy Spirit; the evangelistic calling of Christian ministry; the nature of sanctification; and the importance of participation in the means of grace. Learning to grow as a disciple of Jesus Christ within such a tradition means immersing oneself in that tradition's resources.

-- I often get requests about where to go to find information on this or that topic. While you can and should look for guidance on specific topics when they arise, I think a better way to come to a mature understanding of Wesleyan theology and Methodist history is to read regularly out of the best resources available. That will often come through new books that are written by pastors and theologians in the Wesleyan tradition. But it can also come through regularly engaging top periodicals and journals.

-- There are good resources available to us on both an academic and popular level - and I'll be recommending resources from both categories. Increasingly, these resources are available in both print and online editions. I have no doubt that most (if not all) will eventually be available primarily in online formats. The cost of printing and distribution is simply so high that it is driving print-based publications out of business. (And the move for academic journals, which have very small circulations, to go online has already started.) But the problem is that nobody has figured out how to make money with web-based publishing yet - and after all, making money is essential if a publication is going to survive. So in the resources I am going to recommend, I'm going to advocate not just free online reading, but actual subscriptions. That may sound a bit controversial, but I think it's important. If we want these publications to keep on going, we need to support them as they continue to evolve and develop publishing models that are sustainable for the future. For the sake of full disclosure, I'll let you know the ones for which I have subscriptions myself.

-- Many of us see the potential for revival of the Wesleyan tradition these days. In fact, in some ways a revival has been going on since the development of modern critical Wesley Studies in the 1960s. But for that revival to have a wide impact, it needs to be engaged by a breadth of interested laity, committed pastors, and dedicated scholars. So I'm going to be an advocate for that, here and in the posts to come.

Questions? Comments? I hope you'll stay tuned.

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!).

Language matters: social holiness

In my new column in the Reporter, I focus approaching the Wesleyan meaning of 'social holiness' with reference to our use of language. My sense is that 'social holiness' is usually used in the church to describe the kind of outreach ministries that involve extending Christian love and aid to the poor and disadvantaged. Less often, the term is used to describe social justice efforts that involve changing unjust systems (whether of a legal or a societal/cultural nature).

I am a big supporter of both outreach ministries and social justice efforts, but the point I made in a recent blog post is that, when we use 'social justice' to describe such ministries, we are mis-using the term. Wesley's use of social holiness was in the context of how God sanctifies us; it was his firm belief that sanctification happens in the context of Christian community.

The reason it is important to attend to the language of our tradition is exactly because our Wesleyan understanding of salvation is wrapped up in it. As I write in my column, Practicing discipline in the use of our historical language is important. It could even help the church fulfill its stated mission - to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Because in a Wesleyan sense we have to realize that we won't do any good transforming the world until we ourselves have been transformed from within ... That can happen to each of us through God's grace, and it always happens in community."

Here is Wesley on social holiness:

In the Preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems published by the Wesley brothers in 1739, Wesley criticizes writers among the "Mystic Divines" who recommend "an entire seclusion from men, (perhaps for months or years,) in order to purify the soul." He goes on, "For the religion these authors would edify us in, is solitary religion."

Wesley emphatically rejects this version of sanctification, writing, "Directly opposite to this is the gospel of Christ. Solitary religion is not to be found there. 'Holy solitaries' is a phrase no more consistent with the gospel than holy adulterers. The gospel of Christ knows of no religion, but social; no holiness but social holiness."

Wesley's understanding of social holiness is further fleshed out in the 1748 sermon, "Upon our Lord's Sermon on the Mount (IV)," where he writes, "When I say [Christianity] is essentially a social religion, I mean not only that it cannot subsist so well, but that it cannot subsist at all without society, without living and conversing with other men."

I think what he has in mind here is the kind of prudential means of grace represented in the Methodist society and its attendant sub-structures - the band, class meeting, etc. They are the place where 'iron sharpens iron' (Proverbs 27:17) and where shared testimony, mutual accountability, confession, and exhortation help to nurture holiness of heart and life in Christian believers. That, as I understand it, is the nature of social holiness.

"... no holiness but social holiness"

Are you familiar with that phrase?

If you are a Methodist, you can probably identify it as coming from the pen of John Wesley. But do you know what it means?

If blogs, newsletters, sermons, and periodicals from the Methodist world are any indication, most people assume that, by "social holiness", Wesley meant something along the lines of what we mean by social justice or social outreach ministries.

That's just plain wrong.

A few days ago, as part of a series of posts reviewing Paul Chilcote's Recapturing the Wesleys' Vision, Guy Williams over at Gen-X Missional Wesleyan brought up the issue of social holiness. (Guy uses the term correctly, and you can read his post here.)

I commented on that post, which got my mind buzzing on this subject and particularly on how it is so often misused ... which really stuck in my craw, which connected to a paper I'm writing currently on the practical theology of the class meeting, which led me then to call Dr. Randy Maddox to discuss the issue, which led me finally to start writing a column on it for the United Methodist Reporter that I'm tentatively calling "Language Matters".

Some people might say that I'm splitting hairs - that Wesley really did care about what we would call social justice and that, since he uses the phrase social holiness in other contexts and it seems to fit our purposes, we can just allow it to do double duty.

But that's the kind of undisciplined use of language that just drives me nuts. Look, for instance, in the United Methodist Hymnal from pages 425-450, which are the hymns and prayers under the section, "SOCIAL HOLINESS". These are not social holiness hymns in the Wesleyan sense of the term; they are rather for various forms of social outreach, social justice, and world peace.

So why can't we just reorient the term to the way we see fit? Here's why: If we don't practice and preach a strong doctrine of sanctification, then we tend to fall into the typical Enlightenment mistake that we are born with our reason and will already in good shape, and that all we have to do is employ our reason to see what good needs to be done in the world to make it a better place.

But we Methodists believe in the reality of the depravity that comes from Original Sin, and we believe that it is only through God's grace that our reason and will can be restored enough to the point where we can recognize the good and pursue it in the world. We become healed of the presence and power sin through the process of sanctification.

And that happens through social holiness. Real social holiness.

When we use language loosely, because of the desire to sound Wesleyan (even when we don't know what that means), then we start messing with our entire doctrinal structure. And that's a bad idea. Besides, using Wesley to justify our own ideas because his name has authority is a lazy practice, which can approach intellectual dishonesty. If we want to invoke our founder's name and ideas, we should make sure we know what we are talking about.

By the way, if you are interested in reading about Wesley's understanding of social holiness, the two primary sources are the Preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739), which can be found in volume 14 of the Jackson edition of Wesley's Works, pp. 319-322, and the sermon, "Upon Our Lord's Sermon on the Mount (IV)," which can be found lots of places, including online.

How big is your church?

Church growth strategies are based on the notion that there is something redemptive about the numerical size of a congregation.

The error of church growth strategy is teleological. That is, it aims at an improper end. Church growth talks about discipleship and mission, but it puts these in the service of increasing the size of a congregation. Its logic is ground in the belief that large congregations, by virtue of their success in attracting worshipers, must be faithful churches.

I believe the church's fixation on church growth is related to our culture's fascination with megachurches. Americans are impressed by size. Ask any Texan. So when we see a Saddleback, or a Willow Creek, we think there must be something great going on there.

Don't get me wrong - I have no doubt that there is powerful ministry that happens everyday in megachurches. But their "success" causes the whole church to believe that its success is dependent on becoming the next megachurch. So we have a whole lot of pastors and congregations who spend all their time trying to increase membership, as if getting 1000 people in worship on Sunday will hasten Jesus' return.

My reading of Wesley lately has convinced me that he would be scathingly critical of church growth strategy. He was interested in bringing people into saving relationships with God, which can only happen in the context of a Christian community that is focused on disciplined participation in the means of grace. That really has nothing to do with size. It has to do with the right intention, followed by right belief and practice.

The other day I came across a quote in Wesley's "Thoughts Upon Methodism," where he distinguished between the essentials of Methodism (holiness of heart and life) and the circumstantials (the disciplined practice that nurtures such holiness).

He writes, "The essence of [Methodism] is holiness of heart and life; the circumstantials all point to this. And as long as they are joined together in the people called Methodists, no weapon formed against them shall prosper. But if even the circumstantial parts are despised, the essential will soon be lost. And if ever the essential parts should evaporate, what remains will be dung and dross."

Clearly, for Wesley the power of the Methodist approach to Christian faith is bound up in practices that allow people to experience the saving grace of Christ. That has every bit to do with the quality of a community, and nothing to do with its size.

We are called Methodists for a reason

Perhaps my column in the Reporter this week is too strongly worded. But I don't think so.

All the so-called "experts" say that denominationalism is dead. They say that people don't want to identify with a denomination anymore. They say that denominations will be much better off pretending like they aren't denominations anymore.

I dismiss all of that "expert" opinion. Every bit of it.

We are part of a story - a history and a tradition that makes us who we are. As I have been reminded myself lately, we don't get to choose our own story. We are born into it, shaped by it, and we find our identities in it.

Our story is the story of Methodism. It is the story of a people who arose out of a response to an extraordinary call of the Holy Spirit. As I write in my column, "Originally intended as an epithet, the name [Methodist] came to be associated with a people who shunned religious pretension, practiced a rigorous discipleship, sought furiously after the way of salvation and relentlessly carried the gospel to the poor and lost."

Frankly, that's not an identity I particularly want to lose, anyway. Our recovery as a church - and by that I mean The United Methodist Church - will only come when we stop trying to follow what the culture identifies as the latest trend and start practicing the kind of discipleship that John Wesley instilled in his early followers.

Don't get me wrong. Christ ultimately desires unity for his church. And I think that is both a physical and a spiritual unity - one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. But that unity is not achieved by forsaking the distinctiveness of our tradition in favor of a bland, happy-go-lucky megachurch. Such a model only serves to imitate the surrounding pagan culture dressed up in religious language.

If we Methodists started acting like the Methodists of 1742, 1784, or 1824, it would be scary what the Holy Spirit could accomplish through us. That calling has never left us. Who will answer it in this day and age?

Glad to be home!

I arrived back in Durham from my trip to Egypt on Monday evening. What an incredible experience! As I have been trying to overcome jet lag these past two days, my head has been swimming with thoughts of all that we saw and did. Four days ago, I was sitting on top of Mt. Sinai, and now I'm sitting at the computer in my living room. It's hard to process it all.

I plan on writing a few blog posts on the experience of traveling to Egypt as a pilgrimage. In the mean time, feel free to check out my most recent column in the United Methodist Reporter. It is concerned with claiming our distinctive witness as Methodist people, something that must begin with a process of learning about our story and heritage.

FYI, the Alex Jackson mentioned in the column is a close friend of mine, going back to divinity school days. We were students together at Vanderbilt and have remained close since then. Back in 1999, he helped me to respond to my call into ministry. And in 2005, he officiated at my wife's and my wedding. He's a great pastor and a great friend.