Friday Miscellanies

Here are a few notes that might interest you. Consider it suggestions for weekend reading! I wanted to highlight a few articles that touch on important issues in faith and discipleship -

Steve Rankin, the university chaplain at Southern Methodist University, has a great article in the United Methodist Reporter looking at the doctrine of Christian perfection, character formation, and contemporary higher education. As Steve rightly points out, higher education that aims only at increasing the knowledge of students and does not nurture formation in moral virtues is both impoverished and un-Wesleyan.

Two articles on leadership have caught my eye recently. One is this interview with Stanley Hauerwas which is available from Faith & Leadership. Hauerwas comments on whether "leadership" can be understood as a theological category, and he also makes some interesting insights into the role of leadership in institutions and the role of institutions in leadership.

The other article on leadership comes from Covenant Discipleship Connection, where Steve Manskar connects Wesleyan leadership with the deep Wesleyan understanding of faith in Jesus Christ and the ongoing process of sanctification. Steve wants to invite folks into an ongoing conversation about the character of Wesleyan leadership, and he has started a new blog to facilitate that.

Finally, after a writing sabbatical of several months, I'm back in the pages of the United Methodist Reporter. My new column - available at this link - starts a series on the means of grace in Christian practice. This is the subject of my academic research at Duke Divinity School. So I'm excited about presenting some material related to it in my regular column. I believe - as John Wesley did - that our growth in holiness of heart & life is impossible apart from disciplined participation in the means of grace. And I'll be explaining that conviction column by column over the coming weeks.

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.

News for Probationary Clergy

If you read this blog, you probably know that I am a big believer in Covenant Discipleship. As a contemporary expression of the early Methodist class meeting, Covenant Discipleship offers the church a small group format where we can learn how to 'watch over one another in love' and pursue holiness of both heart & life.

The real force behind Covenant Discipleship now is Steve Manskar, who is the Director of Accountable Discipleship at the GBOD in Nashville. I mention that because Dr. Manskar, along with Dr. Paul Chilcote of Ashland Theological Seminary, will be leading a Wesleyan Pilgrimage Group made up of Probationary clergy in May of 2010. I mention that for two reasons: first, because if you are a probationary elder or deacon (or if you will be one by then), you should really think about going. From my own experiences in England, visiting Christ Church and Lincoln Colleges at Oxford, the Epworth rectory, the New Room in Bristol, and City Road Chapel in London (where Wesley is buried), I can tell you that 'being there' is quite an experience that can connect you to your heritage.

And the second reason to bring this up is because, as this announcement points out, the GBOD and GBHEM are trying to raise money to subsidize the trip for young clergy through a Wesley Pilgrimage Scholarship Fund. It's an expensive proposition, and if you have extra money, donating some could help your poorer brothers and sisters take a pilgrimage that would be formative for their ministry.

Meaning of Church Membership

There are a number of posts up on several blogs I read having to do with the meaning of membership in the church. I'm not sure if this is all coincidental, or whether there is rather some story or event I have missed. At any rate, I have also just finished a column on the meaning of church membership for the United Methodist Reporter. I'll link to that when it comes out.

In the mean time, here is a summary of several posts that are worth checking out:

On his Accountable Discipleship blog, Steve Manskar posts about the way we often treat church membership as membership in a civic club (and how at odds that is with an understanding of the church as the body of Christ).

Amy Forbus posted on the Methoblog on the way that an 'open door' membership attitude allows for easy exiting as well as easy joining.

Also on the Methoblog, Jay Voorhees has posted on membership as it relates to the deep longing for family, as well as the vows of membership as similar to marriage vows (I agree with him strongly on this count).

(Both Amy's and Jay's posts are drawn from still other blogs, to which they link, and those are worth a look as well.)

Matthew Johnson has an excellent post on pastoral responsibility in helping determine readiness for church membership, something that most pastors are probably to intimidated (and too eager for new members) to do.

And Gavin Richardson quotes himself on the nature of the church: "At its best the church is a family, at its worst the church is a family."

My own column, which I'm tentatively calling, "Cheating on your church," focuses on the implied seriousness of our vows of church membership as well as the poverty of contemporary church life today. It is that deep poverty that keeps people from understanding the meaning of membership in Christ's body. The church's failure to truly be the community of Jesus' friends leads to a situation where people treat church as any other consumer choice. And that causes them to make terrible choices both for the church and for their own discipleship. As I argue in the article, leaving your church for reasons of personal preference is nothing more than a form of ecclesial adultery.

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.