Guest-Blogging: Wade Griffith

As part of our Conference-wide celebration of United Methodist believing, I've asked some of our pastors to contribute their thoughts on the joy of the Wesleyan way of Christianity. Today Wade Griffith, Sr. Pastor at Trinity United Methodist Church in Tuscaloosa, evaluates the recent movie, The Golden Compass based on Phillip Pullman's book, as he reflects on the hallmarks of Methodism.

Hallmarks of Methodism:
We are Free to Think and Engage the Culture as Ambassadors of Christ

Two weeks ago I preached a sermon that focused on the response we as Methodist Christians should have to elements of popular culture that appear to be attacking our faith. Having recently gotten an email insisting that all faithful Christians must boycott a film entitled, The Golden Compass, I was led to reconsider my position on how we relate and respond to the culture at large. To be honest, the email I received only succeeded in raising my curiosity about the movie. Shortly after getting it, I went and purchased the books so that I could find out what all the fuss was about. Turns out, the movie, The Golden Compass (TGC), was based on a book by the same name & that book is part of a trilogy of books by Phillip Pullman. The trilogy is ominously titled, His Dark Materials.

Over the Christmas holidays, I read the trilogy and found it to be an imaginative, page-turner of a tale, full of magic, adventure, love, loyalty, and of course, good versus evil. There are even talking animals in this story, which begins, oddly enough, with a girl in a wardrobe. Sound familiar? It is almost as if Pullman’s tale was designed to be a foil to Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. Like Lewis’ Chronicles, Pullman’s story is a fantasy tale about the struggle between good and evil. However, unlike Lewis’ work, in Pullman’s world the church is the villain. The church in HDM is a caricature of the medieval church. It is more political than spiritual, and in it, the Gospel of Jesus Christ has been replaced by the Machiavellian ethics of institutional survival & the accumulation of power. Finally, the church in the trilogy exists only to control the lives of all people.

After reading the books, I was eager to share my thoughts with the congregation. In HDM, I saw what the church would be like without the Holy Spirit. I saw what the church would be like without Christ as its head, exemplar and Lord. I was also prodded by my reading to look at our church anew to see if we have strayed from the path of Christ. Where are we working to accumulate our own power and influence? Where have we forgotten to wash feet, to live as servants and to carry our own cross? Finally, I was given an insight into the head of a non-believer…not something we get very often! Be honest, how many conversations per year do you have with strident, well-educated and articulate atheists. Clearly, Christianity doesn’t always look from the outside like it does to us from the inside!

In the final analysis, the church I know is absent from the book! There is nothing in the book about compassion or helping the poor. There is nothing about grace, forgiveness or reconciliation. There is nothing about protecting human dignity and freedom. There is nothing about a life-changing relationship with a Lord who gave His only Son for us. There is certainly nothing about treating all people as children of God! Rather, the church in the book is a reactionary and power-hungry institution that ruthlessly attacks anything that challenges its power and influence. Hmmm, and my response to this portrait of the church (and our faith) is that I should angrily boycott it? (I wonder…did Pullman or the movie studio send out that email.) Seems like it encourages the kind of response that would only confirm Pullman’s picture of the church.

Surprisingly, the books left me feeling thankful. I am thankful to serve in a church where I can read what I like and have the freedom to make up my own mind! I am thankful that I worship in a church where I can disagree with the pastor and not get kicked out of the church. I am thankful to be in a denomination whose founder valued learning, dialogue and critical engagement with the culture. Most of all, I am thankful to love, serve and follow the God who created the multiverse. That being the case, why would some work of fiction or any work of fiction scare me or rattle my cage? Do we forget that we serve the CREATOR. Yahweh! The Lord of Lords! When we engage the culture from a posture of suspicion and hostility, the culture reads it as anxiety and fear. Maybe they are right. On some subconscious level, are we afraid that the right book, question, idea or discovery will pop the balloon that is God? If not, why are we so scared. Do we really think God needs our defense and protection?

Despite the atheistic views it subtly and not so subtly espouses, I am thankful for TGC. It has reminded me to be a spiritual leader, not a CEO. It has reminded me to appreciate my denomination and faith. It has reminded me to show the world what we as a church are really about. We are “about” sharing the love that God has so richly given us in Jesus Christ. We are about helping people meet God through a relationship with Christ. We are about working for a world that conforms to God’s loving will--a world where the last truly are first and where no one lives in despair. We are about responding with love to friend and foe alike. We are about loving care. We are about hope.

Thanks be to God not only for this faith, but for a faith tradition that allows me to, “reunite [ing] the two so long disjoined: knowledge and vital piety.” Thanks be to God for a founder who believed, “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity.” As Methodists, we have the freedom to read what we will and to think as we will. Mr. Pullman, if you are listening, I guess the church isn’t all about control after all.

Guest-Blogging: Bill Brunson

As part of our Conference-wide celebration of United Methodist believing, I've asked some of our pastors to contribute their thoughts on the joy of the Wesleyan way of Christianity. Today Bill Brunson, pastor of our active and growing church at Trussville, testifies to one of his favorite aspects of United Methodist theology.

Thoughts on United Methodist Theology

I am one of those people who was raised as a United Methodist. My parents were in leadership roles in their local church. My paternal grandmother thought that there were two kinds of people in the world - those who are Methodist and those who wish they were. So my life has always been shaped by the preaching, teaching, theology and doctrine of our church. However, when asked to write about a part of Methodism that I deeply cherish - I have to say the first thing that came to mind is our belief in Christian Perfection.

For me, the idea of “going onto perfection” is a reminder that our relationship with God is a living thing. As Christians we are to be growing up in our love of God and our love of neighbor. That type of counter cultural transformation doesn’t happen over night or instantaneously. Instead, the process of maturing in our faith, and going onto perfection is one that happens every day for those of us who are being saved.

When I was in 6th grade and attending Confirmation Class, we typically closed each class session with questions and answers. I don’t remember who asked the question that day, or what the exact question happened to be, but I distinctly remember the answer that was given. The minister said, “Throughout our lives, as we live as faithful Christians, God never stops working in us, working on us, or working through us.” For me, that process and the depth of the relationship with God that he was describing have always been comforting, challenging, sometimes terrifying, and always exciting.

In his journal, John Wesley wrote, “By Christian Perfection, I mean, 1. Loving God with all our heart. Do you object to this? I mean, 2. A heart and life all devoted to God. Do you desire less? I mean, 3. Regaining the whole image of God. What objection to this? I mean, 4. Having all the mind that was in Christ. Is this going too far? I mean, 5. Walking uniformly as Christ walked. And this surely no Christian will object to. If anyone means any thing more, or anything else by Perfection, I have no concern with it.” Journal, Vol. 3, p.369

The Christian faith and discipleship are not defined solely by the work of Justifying Grace. The work of Sanctifying Grace and the process of Christian Perfection are the means by which we become the people that God called and created us to be. It is where we lay aside the old ways for the ways of God. It is where we learn to look at each other and see Christ rather than our prejudices and biases. It is where we learn to “seek first the kingdom of God” instead of our preferences, wishes and wants. It is leaning to think like Christ, act like Christ, and love like Christ. It doesn’t happen over night, but day by day and prayer by prayer we learn to love God and love our neighbor and follow Christ with all that we are.

The message of Christian Perfection is something that is central to who we are as United Methodist because it pulls together Wesley’s hope that Methodists would exhibit holiness of heart and life. That what we believe would transform how we live, and how we live would call others to believe. Lovett Weems, in his Pocket Guide to John Wesley’s Message Today, said that for Wesley the doctrine of Christian Perfection is “the grand depositum which God has lodged with the people called Methodists; and for the sake of propagating this chiefly He appeared to have raised us up.” For me, it is one of our doctrines that I cherish most, and it is the doctrine I hope we will preach, teach and share with each new generation.

Charles Wesley’s Hymn: Savior, the Worlds and Mine

To love is all my wish,
I only live for this:
Grant me, Lord, my heart’s
desire,
There by faith forever dwell.
This I always will require,
Thee, and only thee to feel.
Ah! Give me this to know,
With all thy
saints below;
Swells my soul to compass thee;
Gasps in thee to live and
move;
Filled with all the Deity,
All immersed and lost in love!

Guest-Blogging: Julie Holly

Our Conference-wide celebration of United Methodist believing continues with some of our pastors contributing their thoughts on the joy of the Wesleyan way of Christian believing. This week we have thoughts by Julie Holly, Associate Pastor at Huffman United Methodist Church. Julie focuses upon the joy of United Methodist worship, particularly our stress upon the sacraments.

God's Grace through the Sacrament

Every time someone inquires about my interest in and love for United Methodist beliefs and practices, which for us Methodists go hand-in-hand, I immediately think of my experiences of God’s grace through the sacraments. 

My parents raised my sister and me outside the UMC for the first eleven or so years of my life, and those early experiences of church instilled in me a powerful fear of God and the punishment that surely awaited me and everyone else who had yet to decide to submit to the waters of baptism. I had been told in Sunday school that I was a child of God and was loved by Jesus, so I believed myself to be a Christian. As I grew older and started listening to some of what the preacher said in worship, I heard a different story. I heard that I was destined to suffer eternal punishment when I died because I had not been baptized. I learned of my further exclusion from the people of God—also due to my decision to post-pone baptism—when the plates carrying the wafers and tiny cups of grape juice were passed over me during The Lord’s Supper. I was an outsider and the only way for me to get in was to be baptized. As a ten-year-old girl, I wasn’t ready to face the potential risks of getting water up my nose when dunked and being humiliated when the congregation saw me soaking wet afterwards. 

My understanding and experience of God changed when my parents started taking us to the United Methodist Church down the road. There I was introduced in worship and Sunday school to the God of invitational grace. I learned that God is constantly working in me through the power of the Holy Spirit to grow me in love and discipleship. I was shocked and excited at the first Communion Service to hear the open invitation to the Lord’s Table. I finally got a taste of the wafers and juice, and though it didn’t taste nearly as good as I had imagined, it was a delicious experience of inclusion in the Body of Christ. After attending confirmation classes, I was baptized and confirmed in the UMC; and only a few years later as a teenager I was invited by the minister to help serve Communion. I couldn’t believe my ears! Me, a lowly, unworthy teenager allowed to serve the Lord’s Supper? I wondered to myself if this sort of thing was really permitted, but aloud I answered the minister, “Yes!” As I timidly handed out the tiny cups of juice to the kneeling people, I was so full of joy—and so thankful that no one stood up to protest my role in the service—that I couldn’t wait to do it again. I couldn’t wait to experience again the grace of a God who uses even me to share the gift of salvation through Christ!

It wasn’t long after we began attending the UMC that I witnessed my first infant baptism and I was struck by how much sense it made to me. I had believed and felt that I was a child of God long before my baptism so it was interesting to me to be in a church where babies were claimed by God and baptized into the church just a few months after being born. Instead of making children wait to grow up and decide to be baptized, the church claimed them for God first thing. For me, now serving in a local church as a probationary elder in the UMC, participating in the baptism of infants is one of the most powerful and grace-filled experiences of ministry. I love celebrating with the congregation the gift of God’s transforming grace that is at work in all of us as I sprinkle the waters of baptism over the precious head of a new life. Infant baptism reminds us all that life is a gift from God and that we completely belong to God even before we can say, “God”, let alone begin to understand anything about God. That is what I call amazing grace.

Julie Holly

Duke Divinity School

On Tuesday, February 12th, three 2004 alumni of Duke Divinity School will be on campus to talk to current divinity students about ministry opportunities in North Alabama. You can Facebook the event here: Coffee and Conversation

Guest-Blogging: Michael Stewart

As part of our Conference-wide celebration of United Methodist believing, I've asked some of our pastors to contribute their thoughts on the joy of the Wesleyan way of Christianity. This week we begin with thoughts on United Methodist "specialness" by Dr. Michael Stewart. Michael is known as one of our outstanding preachers. He formerly directed our Connectional Ministries and is currently pastor of our Hazel Green United Methodist Church.

NOT ALL THAT SPECIAL

Perhaps what makes us Methodists special is that we do not believe we are all that special.

The Roman Catholic Church is older and bigger. Episcopalians and Eastern Orthodox do liturgy with more flair. Presbyterians are more focused on doctrine and scholarship. Quakers are the folks we go to for instruction in prayer. Disciples of Christ are more ecumenically minded. Pentecostals are more exuberant. Baptists are more democratic. The Salvation Army is better with the poor. The Amish are greener. Lutherans are better at pipe organs. The Assemblies of God are more adept at raising up large congregations. Mormons are uniquely American; holding that Jesus’ return will take place in Missouri.

We Methodists do not claim to have invented Christianity. With St. Paul, we simply pass along to others what we first received (I Cor.15: 3).

John Wesley said the Methodist way is nothing new. It is simply the old religion of the Bible: “the love of God and all mankind” and “loving God with all our heart, and soul and strength”.

While every third barbeque joint in the South claims to have “The World’s Best BBQ”, and every touchdown ignites the fans to chant, “We’re number one”; we Methodists are just happy to be here. We have neither an inferiority complex nor an exaggerated view of ourselves as the one true tribe of Christians. We are not offended by Jesus’ saying that he has other sheep not of our fold (John 10:16).

We do not believe for a minute God has to go through us to accomplish every godly thing done in the world. There is not a sectarian bone in our bodies. We are not offended that God’s love can be active in Syrian, Lebanese, or Samaritan pagans (Luke 4:25-27; 10:33). We believe that God can work through the Scouts, public schools, secular universities, politics, the United Way, the Red Cross, country music, and our enemies. Methodists do not retreat to a religious subculture; but take seriously the incarnation and immanence of God in the world, calling it prevenient grace.

At our best we are not anxious or fearful, but trust God. We believe as a denomination that we will be fine as long as we keep aiming to love God more, and extend concrete acts of mercy to more neighbors. John Wesley even gave us our own Serenity Prayer:

Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.

Eugene Peterson, translator of The Message and author of The Jesus Way notes that America is a nation of consumers. Consequently, the quickest way to get Americans into congregations is to identify what people want, and offer it to them. He writes that the winning strategy is to “satisfy their fancies, promise them the moon, recast the gospel in consumer terms: entertainment, satisfaction, excitement, adventure, problem-solving, whatever.” The only problem is that this is not the way of Jesus.” (The Jesus Way, pg.6.)

Is it a coincidence that Methodists stopped growing numerically in the 1960’s when our national church leaders went against the grain of America and challenged racism and war? Telling people what they do not want to hear is probably not a great strategy for church growth in a consumer culture.

The good news is that our decline may finally put us in a place God can do something with us. As long as we imagined we must have been serving God because we were so special (“More Methodists serving in Congress than any other denomination!”) or because our success could be measured in our membership numbers or the height of our steeples, God could not do much with us. But perhaps in our weakness, and in the need to depend on God’s grace rather than our own performance, God can work with us. As it becomes less about us, it can become more about Jesus.

Consider the African-American Church in the mid 1960’s. It was not wealthy. Most of it buildings were modest. Its membership contained few corporate CEO’s, bank presidents, mayors, governors, or captains of industry. Nonetheless, in spite of statistical weakness, the Black church was the most faithful part of Christ’s church in America in that day. The little cinderblock and wood-frame Black churches rose higher than the big steepled churches, and made an astonishing kingdom witness. God can do mighty things through what the world counts as weakness. After all, God did his best work with some slaves in Egypt led by a tongue-tied shepherd, and with some fishermen in Galilee led by a tortured and executed criminal.

Perhaps the best way to serve a crucified and risen leader in an America addicted to Super-sizing and Superpower-ing is not to bemoan or resist diminishment, or frantically embrace every technique that works in selling products, making money, managing people, winning wars, or manipulating emotions. (Peterson, p. 8.). Rather, in following the way of the cross - being generous and forgiving even in our weakness - we might hear the dying cross-bearer say, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." And therefore, “we can boast all the more gladly about our weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on us.” (2 Corinthians 12:9)

Our neighbors across town and across the world are dying for a genuine, authentic, honest, humble, non-gimmicky, servant church that is in the process of giving itself away, just like its Lord. The world is dying for a church that knows it is not all that special, but that its Lord is the real deal.

And, who knows? God may then have in us something that is indeed special, and worth resurrecting.

Michael Stewart
michael.stewart@hazelgreen.org
January, 2008

On Wesleyan Commitment

As you know our Lay Ministry Team sponsored a Conference-wide celebration of United Methodist theology. This is an excerpt on Wesleyan commitment to Scripture from my book United Methodist Beliefs (available from Cokesbury).

On Wesleyan Commitment

In our Discipline the first source of theology is Scripture. Scripture is primary in Wesleyanism:

We share with many Christian communions a recognition of the authority of Scripture in matters of faith, the confession that our justification as sinners is by grace through faith, and the sober realization that the church is in need of continual reformation and renewal.

Many have noted a “crisis in authority” in contemporary life. Once revered sources of authority -- family, elders, science, government - are now under suspicion. Scripture has a privileged place in our thought. The first place that we turn, whenever we have some doctrinal dispute or argument about ethics, is to the Bible, the received, revealed wisdom that is Scripture. And the last word, in any of our debates over faithfulness, is Scripture.

More than that, we believe that Scripture means to have practical authority over our lives as Christians. Think of Christian thinking, in great part, as lifetime training in how to submit, in thought and in action, to the authority of Scripture. I say “lifetime training” because that’s usually how long it takes to take the Bible a little more seriously and ourselves a little less so. Most of us come to the Christian faith already in the grip of other authorities - our peers, our social class, our gender, our nation, our race -- the list of our masters is long.

The ability to say, “The Bible shows us that….” is therefore not as ingrained in us as the tendency first to say, “My best friends believe that….” or “As a loyal American I believe…,” or “Science has proven…..” We dismiss the authority of Scripture as too limiting, too archaic, and too constrained by cultural context -- which proves what a great challenge it is to free ourselves from the authorities that are in charge of our lives in our present cultural context. What we call “freedom of thought” is often a testimonial to how happily enslaved we are in present intellectual constrictions. The restrained, limited “modern world view” has got us. So we open up the Bible and say things like, “It’s so violent!” (an ironic thing for someone who is a member of one of the world’s most violent cultures to say about t he Bible). Or we point with condescension toward the sexism or racism that we suspect in the Bible. (It is so much easier to see the Bible’s cultural limitations than our own.) We have not thereby freed ourselves from the Bible’s limitations so much as we have demonstrated our own cultural blinders.

So one of the most radical, truly countercultural acts that we perform in Sunday worship is when we gather and then open an ancient book -- written in languages quite unlike our own, in cultures very different from ours - and we become silent, and we listen to the word read and proclaimed and thereby we say to ourselves, “These ancient Jews know more than we.”

John Wesley had a vivid sense of Scripture as a talking book. In his first collection of published sermons, Sermons on Several Occasions, Wesley said that he aspired to be “a man of just one book.” With Wesley we believe that through this collection of ancient writings, God has uniquely spoken to the People of God. And even more remarkable, we believe that God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - speaks to us today through Scripture. John Wesley taught that Scripture is “God breathed,” that God continues to show us divine wisdom and guidance through Scripture.

Though a few confused United Methodists may have been “literalists,” or “fundamentalists” in their reading of Scripture, we have never officially been so limited. We have too much respect for our dependence upon the Holy Spirit in our scriptural interpretation, and a healthy acknowledgement of the distance between Scripture’s originating context and our own situations, as well as a too vivid sense of the reality of a living, resurrected and revealing Lord. We have found that the Bible’s word is enlivened through scholarly study rather than muted and that the word the Bible speaks is always multivocal, thick, lively, relevant and rich. The Bible intends to be more for us than just a book of rules, a repository of helpful principles for better living. Attempts to use the Bible like that are bound to be frustrated by the nature of the Bible’s way with the truth. Scripture is an attempt to construct a new world, to stoke, fund and fuel our imaginations. The Bible is an ongoing debate about what is real and who is in charge and where we’re all headed. So the person who emerged from church one Sunday (after one of my most biblical sermons, too!), muttering, “That’s the trouble with you preachers. You just never speak to anything that relates to my world,” makes a good point.

To which the Bible replies, “How on earth did you get the idea that I want to speak to your world? I want to rock, remake, deconstruct and rework your world!”

So when someone says that Scripture, contrary to the way United Methodists see it, is impractical and unrealistic, tell them that what they probably mean is that Scripture is difficult and demanding. When we read Scripture, allowing it to have its authoritative way with us, submitting to its peculiar way of naming the world, we are being changed, transformed, sanctified in the hearing. God is breathing an enlivening Holy Spirit upon us, Jesus is speaking directly to us, and a new world is being created by the Word. It’s Genesis 1 all over again.

Thus when we read Scripture, we’re not simply to ask, “Does this make sense to me?” or “How can I use this to make my life less miserable?” but rather we are to ask in Wesleyan fashion, “How would I have to be changed in order to make this Scripture work?” Every text is a potential invitation to conversion, transformation, and growth in grace. And, as we have noted earlier, we Wesleyans love to get born again, and again. Scripture is God’s appointed and most frequently used means for getting to us and getting at us and thereby changing us in the encounter.

William H. Willimon

Wesleyan Tradition

I continue some reflections on United Methodist believing as part of our Conference-wide celebration of United Methodist theology that is being led by our lay leaders. This is an excerpt on Wesleyan tradition from my book United Methodist Beliefs (available from Cokesbury).

From our Anglican roots United Methodists got the notion that the living core of the Christian faith was revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason. Scripture, tradition, experience, and reason, these are four means of theological reflection (sometimes referred to as the “Wesleyan quadrilateral” because John Wesley employed the four in his thinking[1]) and the criticism of our practice of theology. Note that Scripture is the first of the four, revealing the Word of God ‘so far as it is necessary for our salvation.’ By “tradition” we Methodists mean that which was thought and taught by the church at all times and places before we got here, that rich, bubbling inheritance from the teachers of the church, the creeds, hymns, and prayers that guide us and preserve us from having to reinvent the wheel, spiritually speaking, in each generation. Reason is our active, thoughtful, analytical engagement with this biblical and traditional material, that confirmation of revealed truth within our own thought about the world, since this is, in truth, God’s world. Experience is that personal and communal confirmation of the reality and the work of the Triune God in our lives, the way in which God’s creative, transforming, revealing work is demonstrated and made undeniably real in our own lives.

Tradition reminds us that we are not the first to walk with Jesus as disciples, and we walk not alone. The saints guide us. Christianity did not leap from the New Testament into our hands; twenty centuries of witness guide us in our contemporary appropriation of this faith. We meet no great idea in this faith that our forebears did not think before us and, conversely, we struggle with no heretical bad idea in the contemporary church that did not bedevil the church before we got here. We had tradition before we had Scripture, for Scripture is the faithful expression of the experience of those who were Israel and the first church. Yet with other Protestant Christians we regard Scripture as a judge of the fidelity of the church’s tradition and a constant source of cross examination of tradition.

We therefore find that one of the weaknesses of some forms of contemporary spirituality is that they are, well, contemporary. They are little more than with the times, a merely current expression of present ideas. Superficiality is the inevitable result of a failure to think with the saints.

Early Methodist preachers were accused of fostering dangerous innovation. They responded that they preached the historic faith of the Church of England as found in the Articles of Religion (which are still printed toward the beginning of our Discipline), the Anglican Homilies (a collection of authoritative sermons from great Church of England preachers), and the Book of Common Prayer. Wesley’s followers saw themselves, not as creative innovators, but rather as faithful traditionalists who were recalling the Church of England to its historic affirmations.
Not long ago a woman told me that she had a long struggle becoming close to Jesus. She had meditated, prayed, and read. Then she happened upon a history of the Methodist movement in Britain and from that she concluded, “When a Methodist is apart from the poor, a Methodist is just not much of a Methodist.” That insight, derived from an encounter with tradition, led her to commit to a prison ministry that goes into women’s prisons and prays with and for the inmates. “Those women have made a true disciple of Jesus out of me,” she said. So don’t tell us United Methodists that history is about the dead ideas of dead people!

One blessing of thinking as a United Methodist is that our theology is constantly challenged and enriched by a confluence of various historical traditions - most recently, the marriage of the Evangelical United Brethren Church and the Methodist Church (1964). And we have the blessing of being a worldwide, global movement. Our earlier world mission efforts are bearing fruit in our present interaction with young, vital Methodist-related churches around the world. So when we gather for General Conference in Fort Worth this year to talk doctrine and program, we gather as believers with a wide array of cultures and histories who speak a dozen different languages.

Thank the Lord, we don’t have to invent this faith for ourselves. Tradition empowers our discipleship in a new time and place.

William H. Willimon

Practicing Faith

This week I continue some reflections on United Methodist believing as part of our Conference-wide celebration of United Methodist theology that is being led by our lay leaders. This is an excerpt from my book United Methodist Beliefs (available from Cokesbury).

We think theologically in order that we might live theologically, putting into practice our claims about the world now that the Word has become flesh and moved in with us. Therefore, Our theological task includes the testing, renewal, elaboration, and application of our doctrinal perspective in carrying out our calling ‘to spread scriptural holiness over these lands.’ That’s a quote from Wesley for whom this was a thumbnail definition of Methodist purpose: ‘to spread scriptural holiness over these lands.’ We think theologically in order to have something faithful to say about Jesus and in order to have a faithful way of living for Jesus that is clear, convincing, and effective . I expect that some other church families would be more concerned that their theology was orthodox, or historically valid. Typical of us pragmatic Wesleyans, we want ours to be “effective.”

To be honest, sometimes our United Methodist pragmatic, practical Christianity slips into mere cultural accommodation, American pragmatism that values what the world thinks now more than what the church has historically taught. In disputes over doctrine or ethics, rather than ask, “Is this faithful to our United Methodist way of thinking?” we settle for, “How will this play in Peoria?”

There once was a time when Methodists had strict stands against divorce, the use and abuse of alcohol, and other issues that we considered to be violations of our call to be a holy people. Did we adjust our thought on these matters because we received new and different revelation or because we decided that our thought was more than the market could bear? Pragmatism, that peculiarly American philosophy, for any of its virtues, tends to begin with the status quo, the world as it is and we as we are, and move from there to make statements about us and the world. Not much transformation and conversionist thinking in that. When “practical” becomes “pragmatic” the faith once delivered to the saints too easily degenerates into “this is about as much of Christian believing as we can take at the moment.”

I don’t know whether or not the next statement in the Discipline is meant as a slam against academic, speculative theologians of the sort who burrow in a college Department of Religion, but the Discipline says, Our theological task is essentially practical. It informs the individual’s daily decisions and serves the Church’s life and work. While highly theoretical constructions of Christian thought make important contributions to theological understanding, we finally measure the truth of such statements in relation to their practical significance. Our interest is to incorporate the promises and demands of the gospel into our daily lives.

So strong a defense of practicality has sometimes made Methodists seem anti-intellectual. How can a church that was born on the Oxford University campus, a people whose father is no less an intellectual than John Wesley, a church so committed to higher education be called anti-intellectual? Sometimes, we haven’t been faithful to our scholarly roots, to be sure. But sometimes the problem is in the world’s limited definition of “intellectual,” or “theological.” We United Methodists like to think that we are committed to a wider, more responsible rationality that sees our theological ideas as practical commitments whose truth is tied to their embodiment.

Wesley took the idea of small accountability groups from the European Pietists and developed them into the engine that drove the Methodist revival in England. He was no revivalist, blowing through town, blowing off, and then blowing out. He said that he was resolved “not to strike the hammer down in any one place where I could not follow up on the blow.” He formed “societies” large groups of smaller groups (“classes,” from 10 to 20 people) and “bands,” small intimate groups (4-6 people) where there was intense accountability and encouragement for these ordinary everyday Eighteenth Century English people to become nothing less than saints. There are some who believe that Wesley’s greatest theological contribution was not his written theology but rather his institutionalized, organizational embodiment of his ideas in these “classes” where people live d the theology that Wesley proclaimed. Today, in your congregation, that legacy continues as we continue to put our theology into practice.

William H. Willimon

Christmas in the Empire

On Christmas Eve we read a story about how a poor couple named Mary and Joseph were forced by imperial political decrees to pack up, to journey across the countryside (even though Mary was expecting a baby), to hold up in a cow stable, all as the result of Caesar’s enrollment. The Romans had the most power, and the biggest army of any Western country ever to conquer the Middle East. How are you going to keep these Jews in their place if you don’t enroll them? So Caesar Augustus decreed, and cruel King Herod enforced, the order that everybody had to go to the city of his or her ancestors and get registered. Mary and Joseph were Jews, under the heel of the vast Roman Empire, the greatest Empire the world has ever known, with the largest army of occupation — that is until us.

When I read the Christmas story, it is unfair for me to read myself into the places of Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, or even the wise men. This was their home. They are under the heel of the Empire, their lives jerked around by imperial decrees.

I live in Rome with Caesar Augustus, or maybe in Jerusalem up at the palace with that King Herod, lackey for the Roman overlords. I’d rather see myself as one of the relatives of Mary and Joseph. I wouldn’t mind being one of the shepherds, out working the night shift, surprised when the heavens filled with angels.

But that is not my place in the story. My place in the story is as a beneficiary of the Empire. I am well fixed. I don’t live up in the palace, but I live in a home which -- with its modern conveniences and security -- the majority of the world’s people would call a palace. I have been the beneficiary of a great classical education, and I am a citizen of a country that has dominated other countries, often without even trying to dominate other countries. We are the Empire.

I don’t like my particular place in the story of the first Christmas.

So when you think about it, in our context, it is odd in a way that so many of us should flock to church on a Christmas Eve. It is a bit strange that we should think that, in Christmas, we hear such unadulteratedly good news, that we should feel such warm feelings, and think that we are closer to God now than at any other time of the year.

I guess we ought to be of the same frame of mind as our cousin, King Herod. When he heard the word about the first Christmas, the Gospels say that he was filled with fear. Give Herod credit. He knew bad news when he heard it. He knew that the songs that the angels sang meant an attack upon his world, God taking sides with those on the margins, the people in the night out in the fields, the oppressed and the lowly.

But for the people up at the palace, the well fixed, the people on top, the masters of the Empire, Christmas was bad news. And many of them were perceptive enough to know it.

So maybe that is why we cover up Christmas with cheap sentimentally, turn it into a saccharine celebration. Maybe, in our heart of hearts, we know that Christmas means that God may not be with the Empire, but rather the Empire may be on a shaky foundation, and that, if we told the story straight, as the Bible tells it, we might have reason, like Herod (when he heard about the first Christmas) to fear.

Let us hear again the song of the angels:

“Do not be afraid; for see—I am brining you good news of great joy for all people: To you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” (Luke 1:10)

The angel did not say good news for some people. The angel was bold to say good news for all people. All. Though the angel was singing to the shepherds, the angel meant the song for everybody. Herod no doubt had difficulty hearing the song, safely fortified as he was with his troops and his thick walled palace. Herod, the old fox, missed it.

But you haven’t missed it. Even though you are a card-carrying member as am I, of the greatest Empire that has ever ruled, you are in the right place to hear the news.
Good news this day. There is born for you a savior. Our flags, government, armies, cannot save. Only that baby saves. One who is born among the lowly and the poor, only that one saves.

He comes not only for the oppressed, not only for Israel, but for the oppressor, that is, for all. O that we in the Empire could hear that song, O that we could turn back to the Lord, change our ways, bow down before the manger, rather than before our power, acknowledge our need, and pledge allegiance to the Prince of Peace.

Because he is our prince too. He comes to form an empire, not the way this world builds empires, called the Kingdom of God. And he shall reign forever and ever, and of his reign there shall be no end.

Good News. For this day in the City of David is born a Savior, Christ the Lord. Good News for all. Amen.
William H. Willimon

In the Darkness, A Voice, Light

John 1:6-9, 19-23.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.

As a child, I was frightened of the dark. I grew up in a rural area and, when it was dark, it was really dark -- no street lamps, no passing automobiles. Dark. How well I remember that long walk, which I would have to make, down our winding drive through the pine trees from the highway to our house. At the end of the drive though, as I came in sight of the house lights, there was often my mother’s reassuring, “Is that you?”

Nothing so tames the terrors of the darkness like a light, a voice.

John’s gospel opens by saying, “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” Israel was in darkness, the dark of political oppression. Judea was occupied by Rome. These are the people upon whom light has shined, says John.

But before there was light, there was a voice. A voice in the darkness. That voice belonged to John, John the Baptist. John the Baptist is the voice who proclaims a light coming into the darkness.

All the gospels tell about John. And yet we get most of our detailed information about John from Matthew and Luke. They tell that he ate insects, lived in the dessert, wore camel hair. Strange. John’s gospel tells us none of this. All John tells us was that John the Baptist was "a voice." We have got to figure out who he is and what he is up to by what John says.

People ask, “Who are you?”

John tells them that he is a mere forerunner. John also waits. He says that this one for whom he is preparing, is one who is great. But John doesn’t seem to know many details. He only knows that his coming will be light in the darkness, that great advent for which people are expecting.

We have song advent hymns of waiting, “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus.” “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” Waiting is not easy for us. Waiting is particularly difficult, when we are waiting in the dark, when we can’t see the way forward, and there is no reassuring light, and we do not know whether we are going forward, or backward.

One feels so vulnerable in the dark. We like to be in control. We like to know that we are taking sure steps forward, meeting our goals, getting somewhere. But in the dark, one is unsure. One stumbles. And I don’t like to stumble.

Odd, sometimes people speak of the Christian life as fulfillment. "Now I have found Jesus." "Now I have gotten my life together." "Now I have turned myself over to God and I am saved." It sounds like it’s all finished, done, complete, fulfilled.

But so much of the Christian life is spent waiting, yearning, leaning forward to that which we need, but do not yet have.

What are you waiting for? We speak too negatively of waiting. Show me a person who is not waiting, not yearning, not leaning forward, not standing on tiptoes hoping for something better, and I will show you a person who has given up hope for anything better. Someone who has settled down too comfortably in present arrangements.

And that’s part of the message of John the Baptist. His was a voice, a voice speaking into our darkness, telling us that there is dawn. He was a watchman, standing on the starlit hill, looking east, telling others that it was almost day.

Beyond, behind our deepest longing and yearning, that is really what we want. Our times of darkness are vivid reminders that we are, in truth, frail, vulnerable, and needy. We really are those who need deliverance. And our deliverance has got to be something beyond ourselves, someone greater than our own abilities to deliver.

John did not know the complete shape of that hope. John was a voice, a voice into the darkness, telling people not to give up hope, telling people that their yearning was not mere wishful thinking, that their longing was an act of faith, a deep and abiding belief that God cared, that God would come and deliver.

You may have read Victor Frankl’s classic account of his experiences in a Nazi death camp, Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl had been a successful therapist. While in the camp, he spent his time observing himself and his fellow inmates.

Frankl noted that some of the prisoners just wasted away and died quickly, even though they had no discernable physical ailments. He recalls one man who was doing reasonably well, considering the deplorable conditions of the camp. The man often talked of his dream to get out of the camp and to be united with his dear wife. Then the man received word that his wife had died in another prison camp. And in just a couple of days, the man died. Frankl concluded that the man died, not because of some bodily ailment, not because he lacked food or water, but because he lacked hope. He lacked hope that there was anything to be had beyond the darkness of the bleak prison, that there was anything beyond the present anguish of Nazis brutality. We can live, said Frankl, longer without bread than we can live without hope.

Hope that the light shines in the darkness.

We gather on this night as those who yearn, who desire, who are not yet fulfilled, but who are confident that light breaks into the darkness, and we shall see, and we shall know, and we shall be filled.

The light, the world's light, our light, has a face, a name, Emmanuel.
Will Willimon

The Word became flesh

The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” John 1:1-14.

When I was new, people sometimes asked, “What has been your biggest challenge as a baby bishop?” They think I’m going to say, “Moving from an intellectual to a nonintellectual environment,” or “Having to work harder than I did as a professor,” something like that.

I’ve come to say that the most difficult part of being a bishop is to have to live, on a daily basis, in that great gap between who Jesus is (a marginalized, fanatical, Jewish prophet who was the God we didn’t expect) and what the church is (a rather sedate, rule-driven group of people who just want to be left alone so we can be “spiritual”). Jesus’ Body, the church, is the greatest challenge in following Jesus.

“I could believe in Jesus,” declared the poet, Shelley, “if only he did not drag behind him his leprous bride, the church.”

One of last year’s most popular church books was entitled, Leaving Church. Oh to rise above the muck and the mire of the corporeal and the ecclesiastical so that we can be free to descend ever more deeply into the subjective and the personal.

We’re in Advent, that time in the church year when we attempt to prepare for the shock of the Incarnation, the shock that God Almighty refused to stay above us but got down and dirty with us, in the flesh, moved in with us. Jesus Christ, Lord of Lords, has chosen to be a people, a family, this people, this church.

Bonhoeffer, before he went willingly to be hanged by the Nazis was forced by God unwillingly to hang out in the church. There he discovered the power of a God incarnate. Bonhoeffer, put it this way:

A truth, a doctrine, or a religion need no space for themselves. They are disembodied entities. They are heard, learnt, and apprehended, and that is all. But the incarnate son of God needs not only ears or hearts, but living [people] who will follow him. That is why he called his disciples into a literal, bodily following, and thus made his fellowship with them a visible reality… Having been called they could no longer remain in obscurity, they were the light that must shine, the city on the hill which must be seen.

In my own life, the church that previously had been relegated to the margins of the university as a “sometimes helpful spiritual influence,” has now assumed a large place. As a bishop the church has for me, in Bonhoeffer’s words, “taken up room”. It’s a “Treasure in earthen vessels,” (2 Cor. 4:5-7) yes, but it is also for me the sprawling, cracked earthen vessel that takes so much of my time there’s precious little room left for the treasure.

To be a lay or ordained leader of the church is to be called to care for the visibility of the church, the corporeal mass, the machinery. This task is particularly trying in age in the grip of anti-institutionalism and solipsistic spirituality.

Jerome Burce calls our age that of “spiritual agnosticism” (Marcus Borg and the so-called “Progressive Christians”) in which “The Fundamental truth claim of our culture with respect to matters spiritual is that we cannot know about them with anything approaching sufficient certainty to command the allegiance or shape the conduct or, least of all, correct the spiritual and/or moral opinions of another.”

Flee the Body in order to ascend to some disincarnate spiritual realm. Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” last year was, “You” – we have lost interest in anything but us.

Professor Bart Ehrmann, professor at the University of North Carolina, wrote a bestselling book, Misquoting Jesus. Surprise, there are all sort of stenographic errors in scripture, errors of transcription and questionable renderings of what the Jesus Seminar says Jesus said. So Ehrmann ends his book asking present day Christians (Ehrmann was a fundamentalist as a kid and appears not quite to have grown out of it), “Do you really want to put your trust in a flawed, thoroughly human book like the Bible?”

Well Bart, just where on earth would we put our trust? We actually believe that God became flesh, took on our flawed, thoroughly human corporeal nature. So if we’re going to put our trust in God, it will have to be in this God, it will have to be here, now, the same God who has condescended to take up room among us as the United Methodist Church. When we put our trust in the “thoroughly human” we actually believe we’re putting our trust in God who loved us enough to become human.

We can’t love Jesus without loving his body. It is a crucified body, to be sure, in bad shape, statistically speaking, but a body all the more in need of a loving caress.

We are those called, at this time in the history of Christendom, to worry about what constitutes a church, to be a sign of the visible unity of the church, to keep encouraging members of the body to honor one another, and sometimes even to promise a dead, decadent body nothing less than resurrection. An embodied, incarnate Christ sanctifies our mundane ecclesiastical body work as his. The church is Christ’s way of taking up room in his still being redeemed world.

The night I was ordained, a bishop laid hands on my head, repeating the ancient words of the Ordinal, “Never forget that the ones to whom you are called to minister are the ones for whom he died.” There I was, wondering, “Will the church appreciate my superior training? Will I get an all-electric parsonage?”

And there was the church, once again forcing me to be a Chalcedonian Christian, once again forcing me to believe in the blessed Incarnation, once again telling me, “The often disheartening, sometimes disappointing ones I’m making you fortunate enough to serve, are the ones for whom I died. This is my idea of salvation. Don’t mess it up.”

Oh the challenge of believing the Incarnation!
Will Willimon

The Challenge of Advent

After my first Advent/Christmas at the university Chapel where I used to preach, I noted that sermons during this season frequently received negative responses from some in the congregation. What’s the problem? Is not this a prelude to one of the Christian year’s most joyous seasons?

One person emerged after I had preached at the Advent service at another University Chapel and accused me of "promoting irresponsible passivity" in my sermon. "You should remind us," he said, "We are educated, responsible people who have been given the gifts to make the world a better place."

Yet what was I to preach, stuck as I was with the repeated Advent gospel assertion that God really has come in Jesus Christ to do for us what we could not do for ourselves? How could I calibrate the Hebrew scriptures' prophetic announcement that history had again become interesting not because we had at last gotten organized but because God was moving among us. In short, my critic had gotten more than a whiff of eschatology and found its odor distinctly offensive to his activist, educated, progressive sensibilities. He, like most of us, would rather get better than be born again. He like most of us, wants a world improved rather than made new.

Advent is the season of "the last (Greek: eschatos) things," a time of winter death in nature, the ending of another year. Yet it is also the beginning of the church year, a time of birth at Bethlehem, a time when we know not whether to name what is happening among us as "ending" or "beginning" for it feels both as if something old is dying and something new is being born.

Christian eschatology, like Jewish eschatology before it, makes a claim about the future in which the Creator of the world at the beginning is fully revealed as the world's Redeemer at the end. Eschatology is more a matter of Who? than When? "The end" is not so much a matter of chronology (When?) but rather a debate over who, in the end, is in charge. The hope for the coming of Christ in fullness (Christ's Parousia) has nothing to do with the hope engendered by wishful thinking, a positive mental attitude or creative social programming.

Advent promises us that, when all has been said and done by God, in us as individuals, in our political/social/economic structures, in the whole cosmos, God will reign. What God is doing among us, for us, often despite us is large, cosmic, political, nothing less than "a new heaven and a new earth" (Revelation 21:1).

Our individual hope is grounded in the promised cosmic dismantling and reconstructive transformation which God is doing in the whole world. John Howard Yoder was pointing to the eschatological nature of our hope when he suggested that the word "revolution" was a bit closer to the root meaning of euangelion than merely "good news" The good news of Advent is that we are being met, reconstructed by a God who intends to make all things new.

President Bush stood before congress and, paraphrasing a beloved old hymn, said, “there is power, wonderworking power in….the good American people.” That’s not what Christians believe.

More than likely, Advent eschatology offends us for more mundane reasons. I am at church seeking personal advice for how to have a happy marriage or how to get along with the boss next week, only to have Advent wrench my gaze in our subjectivity in its insistence that whatever God is about in the Advent of Jesus, it is something quite large, quite cosmic, quite strange and humanly unmanageable, something more significant than me. I am not the master of history.

So let us begin with the honest admission that our real problem with these Advent/Christmas texts is largely political and economic. Tell me, "This world is ending. God has little vested interest in the present order," I shall hear it as bad news.

However, for a mother in a barrio in Mexico City who has lost four of her six children to starvation, to hear, "This present world is not what God had in mind. God is not finished, indeed is now moving, to break down and to rebuild in Jesus," I presume that would sound something like gospel. For her the Advent/Christmas message presages a revolutionary conflagration.

A great deal depends, in regard to our receptivity to these texts, on where we happen to be standing at the time when we get the news, "God is coming."

It’s Advent. Let the revolution begin.
William H. Willimon

Advent Angels

As we begin the Christian season of Advent I am reminded of one of my heroes, Pastor Alfred Depp, courageous Lutheran who was eventually hung by the Nazis. Pastor Depp wrote from his prison cell about the comfort that is to be found, even in the worst of situations, in the promises of Advent. Advent is not a time in which our church celebrates the presence of God, the salvation of the world; it is the time when we focus upon the promises of Incarnation, the promise of the advent of the light that “shines in the darkness.”

I see Advent this year with greater intensity and anticipation than ever before.
Walking up and down in my cell, three paces this way and three paces that way,
with my hands in irons and ahead of me an uncertain fate, I have a new and
different understanding of God’s promise of redemption and release.

This reminds me of the angel that was given to me two years ago for Advent by a kind person. The angel bore the inscription, “Rejoice, for the Lord is near.” The
angel was destroyed by a bomb. A bomb killed the man who gave it to me, and I
often feel he is doing me the service of an angel.

The horror of these times would be unendurable unless we kept being cheered and set upright again by the promises that are spoken. The angels of annunciation, speaking their message of blessing into the midst of anguish, scattering their seed of blessing that will one day spring up amid the night, call us to hope. These are not yet the loud angels of rejoicing and fulfillment that come out into the open, the angels
of Advent. Quiet, inconspicuous, they come into rooms and before hearts as they
did then. Quietly the bring God’s questions and proclaim to us the wonders of
God, for whom nothing is impossible.

For all its earnestness, Advent is a time of inner security, because we have received a message. Oh, if it ever happens that we forget the message and the promises; if all we know is the four walls and the prison windows of our gray days; if we can no longer hear the gentle step of the announcing angels; if our soul no longer is at once shaken and exalted by their whispered word--then it will be all over with us. We are
living wasted time and are dead before they do us any harm.

--Alfred Delp, “The Shaking Reality of Advent,” in When the Time Was Fulfilled, Farmington, PA: Plough, 1965, pg. 16.

William H. Willimon

Reaching Young Adults

In 1994, a commission convened by the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, with Joseph A. Califano, Jr. as chair, issued a rather alarmist report, "Rethinking Rites of Passage: Substance Abuse on America's Campuses." The report invented the phrase “binge drinking.” It noted that one in three college students drinks primarily to get drunk. In a curious perversion of the Women's Movement, the number of women who reported drinking to get drunk more than tripled between 1977 and 1993, a rate now equal to that of men. The Califano report noted that college students spend 5.5 billion dollars a year on alcohol, more than on all other beverages and their books combined. The average student spends $446 per student on alcohol per year, far exceeding the per capita expenditure for the college library. Not surprisingly, the beer industry targets young adults as its best hope for increasing sales. These trends have continued unabated. Thus NCAA basketball is brought to us by Anheuser Busch.

For youth off campus, the picture is equally disturbing. The rate of violent crimes by youth in the United States rose by 25 percent over the past decade. The teen-age suicide rate has tripled over the past three decades. Suicide is the second leading cause of death of 15-to-19-year-olds. The image of our nation's best and brightest, mindlessly consuming large amounts of alcohol, is not an attractive one, yet it is an image which accurately portrays an important aspect of today's young adults.

I have sometimes called today's Twenty-Something crowd "The Abandoned Generation". Today's young adults have the dubious distinction of being our nation's most aborted generation. After scores of interviews with them, Susan Litwin called them "The Postponed Generation," those children of the children of the Sixties who were raised by parents so uncertain of their own values that they dared not attempt to pass on values to their young.

Here is the way in which Yale's Allan Bloom put the problem:

... the souls of young people are in a condition like that of the first men in
the state of nature -- spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no
inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone. They can be
anything they want to be, but they have no particular reason to want to be
anything in particular.

We have therefore made “reaching a new generation of Christians” one of our Conference priorities. The good news is that many of these young people are willing to listen, amazingly willing to sit still and to focus if we are bold enough to speak. For what could a preacher ask but that? My student generation of the Sixties was unable to hear words spoken by anyone over Thirty. Our parents lied to us about Vietnam; they failed to be straight with us about Civil Rights.

I have found that today's "Abandoned Generation" brings a new curiosity and openness to the gospel as well as a willingness to hear what their elders have to say, if we will speak directly to them. Therefore leaders of the church need to revise some of our conventional wisdom about the imperviousness of young adult hearts to the gospel. Thomas G. Long, who led this year’s Bishop’s Convocation, says it well:

...There is a growing recognition that it is not enough for the community of
faith to wait around for the "boomers" to drift back. ....Conventional wisdom
holds that there are three broad phases in religious commitment: There is
childhood, a pliable and receptive age religious instruction can and should be
given; there is mature adulthood, when people, given the right incentives, can
be persuaded to take on the responsibilities of institutional church life. In
between childhood and adulthood, there is the vast wasteland of adolescence and
young adulthood, a time when most people wander, or run away from their
religious roots. The most that a community of faith can do in this middle period
is to wait patiently, to leave people alone in their season of rebellion,
smiling with the knowledge that, by the time these rebels arrive at their
thirties, they will probably be back in the pews and may well be heading up the
Christian education committee.

This conventional wisdom is wrong....

Long feels that the contemporary church must take the religious wanderings of young adults with new seriousness, that the time is ripe for new strategies of evangelization and Christian education of a generation who, having been left to their own devices, religiously speaking, now needs to be addressed by the church.

Can we see the needs and problems of this generation of young adults as an invitation to proclaim the gospel with boldness, to beckon them toward a new world named the Kingdom of God? If we can, we shall discover this generation as a marvelous opportunity for gospel proclamation.

William H. Willimon

On NOT Reaching Our Culture Through Our Preaching

Recently I led a group of pastors in a discussion about our preaching. When I asked the pastors, "What areas would you like help with in your preaching?" most of them responded with, "I want help in making connection with my listeners, relating the gospel to their everyday lives."

"I want to preach sermons which really hit my people where they live."

In sum, these pastors wanted to preach in a way that addressed their culture. There was a time when I would have agreed that this was one of the primary purposes of Christian preaching--to relate the gospel to contemporary culture. However, I have come to question this way of construing the task of Christian preaching.

Sometimes in leaning over to speak to the modern world, I fear that we may have fallen in! When, in our sermons, we sought to use our sermons to build a bridge from the old world of the Bible to the new modern world, the traffic was only moving in one direction on that interpretive bridge. It was always the modern world rummaging about in Scripture, saying things like "This relates to me," or, "I'm sorry, this is really impractical," or, "I really can't make sense out of that." It was always the modern world telling the Bible what's what.

I don't believe that the Bible wants to "speak to the modern world." Rather, I think the Bible wants to change, convert the modern world.

The modern world is not only the realm of the telephone, the telegraph, and allegedly "critical thinking," this world is also the habitat of Auschwitz, two of the bloodiest wars of history, and assorted totalitarian schemes which have consumed the lives of millions. Why would our preaching want to be comprehensible to that world?

Too often Christians have treated the modern world as if it is an unalterable fact, a reality to which we were obligated to adjust and adapt, rather than a point of view with which we might argue.

Fortunately, modern ways of knowing and thinking are gradually losing their privileged status in Western thought. We are realizing that modernity is only one way of describing what is going on in the world. Humanity has received many gifts from modern, scientific, technological ways of thinking. However, as we ended the twentieth century, we realized that modernity was not without its loses.

Rather than reaching out to speak to our culture, I think our time as preachers is better spent inculturating Twenty First Century Americans into that culture which is called church. There is no way that I can crank the gospel down to the level where any American can walk in off the street and know what it is all about within fifteen minutes. One can't even do that with baseball! You have to learn the vocabulary, the rules, and the culture in order to understand it. Being in church is something at least as different as baseball.

Forming the church through our speech, laying on contemporary Christians the stories, images, and practices which make us disciples is our most challenging task as preachers.

The point is not to speak to the culture. The point is to change it. God's appointed means of producing change is called church. God's typical way of producing church is called preaching.

William H. Willimon

It's About God

In our Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Abingdon, 1990), Stanley Hauerwas and I said that there was much a-theism in the contemporary church. Atheism? We go about evoking vague spiritual sensibilities in our listeners (preaching), soothing the anxieties of the affluent (pastoral care), keeping the machinery oiled (church administration) as if God didn't matter.

Most of us began worrying about our membership loses with the publication of Dean Kelly's Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (Harper & Row, 1977). Kelly's thesis, as best I remember, was not simply that conservative churches were growing because they were strict and conservative (although their relatively high demands upon their members was a positive growth factor) but rather because these churches kept themselves energetically focused on the main business of religion -- making meaning for their members. When churches become distracted, seeing themselves as just another volunteer service organization, or one more friendly social club, they decline. The business of churches, said Kelly, is meaning in God.

In the succeeding years, we pastors were deluged by studies and books on church growth and decline. Some said Kelly had neglected certain sociological factors; that he had made too much of the intellectual/theological basis for church growth. They pointed out that the mainline protestant birthrates had declined since the 1950's. Most mainline growth comes through births to members, therefore the decline.

Then a book by C. Kirk Hadaway and David A. Roozen, Rerouting the Protestant Mainstream: Sources of Growth and Opportunities for Change (Abingdon, 1995) showed the fruit of decades of studies of church growth and decline. As their title shows, Hadaway and Roozen, two distinguished observers of the mainline church, tried to get beyond analysis and more toward positive prescription.

We live in a buyer's market, as far as religion is concerned, say Hadaway and Roozen. And that's not completely bad. Having had a virtual monopoly on American religious life, today's mainline protestants must now adapt to a consumeristic culture where people shop for a church, where people demand quality, and where people drop their church if it doesn't meet their demands.

Too often those demands are identified as an upbeat worship service, a clean nursery, a big parking lot -- which are important factors. However, Hadaway and Roozen highlight a demand that echoes some of Kelly's earlier claims. They say that, when all the factors are studied, "the key issue for the churches seems to be a compelling religious character...not whether the content of that character is liberal or conservative" (p. 69).

For some time I’ve believed that Mainline Protestantism is in trouble because we provided people with the theological rationale not to go to church. We gave them a theology of secularity. Hadaway and Roozen seem to agree. Church cannot be a sanctified form of Rotary. We must clearly, intentionally, relentlessly be determined to be a place where we meet God and God in Jesus Christ meets us.

Hadaway and Roozen tell the delightful story of a Roman Catholic congregation that opened their worship with a time of friendly community and handshaking. The priest said, "It would be a shame to leave here without knowing those around us."

Then, with a twinkle in his eye he said, "It would be a much greater shame to leave here without knowing God!"

The congregation erupted into applause as if to affirm this is the reason why we are here.

Hadaway and Roozen are explicit:

"To grow and to continue growing, it is necessary for each mainstream church to
become of vital religious institution, vibrant with the presence of God. It must
develop a clear religious identity, a compelling religious purpose, and a
coherent sense of direction that arises from that purpose" (p. 86).

A strong sense of identity and a compelling vision are the two essential characteristics for a vibrant congregation. Hadaway and Roozen are critical of Kelly and others who believe that high demands, conservative theology, or strict expectations are the key.

We desperately need leaders, say Hadaway and Roozen, leaders who are dissatisfied with decline, who refuse to bow to sociological determinism, who emphasize the distinctive, spiritual, God dimensions of church.

Halford Luccock, that great teacher and preacher, told the story of the Methodist congregation, somewhere in the remote Dakotas, who suffered a severe blizzard one winter. The snow was high. Even the mail did not get through for a week. That meant that the pastor and congregation had no clue what was the denominational emphasis for that week. They did not if know this Sunday in February was United Nations Sunday, or the Festival of the Christian Home Sunday, or what. So, said Luccock, the pastor strode embarrassed before the congregation that Sunday and said that, "In the absence of any other reason for gathering today, we'll just worship God."

William H. Willimon

Emerging Church

A comment raised about the emerging church:
"I'm not a minister, but just your ordinary lay Methodist who has just now been made aware of this thing called the emerging church movement -- and I'm not sure how I feel about it, one way or the other. Would you feel comfortable addressing this topic some time?"

Response:
I'm just an ordinary Methodist too! I know little firsthand about the so-called emergent church. Mostly what I know is from the books by Brian MacLauren. However, what I read I like, such as the Emergent church's ability to reach young adults, its stress upon the sacraments, its stress upon a recovery of the tradition of the faith, etc. I have a couple of churches that are exploring some of this emergent material. Sounds interesting to me. Thanks for writing. Wish I had more to share.

Will Willimon

GROWING AS PREACHERS THROUGH LAY FEEDBACK TO OUR SERMONS

A few years ago, John McClure had a good idea for a useful book for us preachers. Professor McClure interviewed a group of master preachers and teachers of preachers, seeking their best advice on various aspects of the homiletical task.

I was particularly struck by his section on sermon feedback from the laity. How do we get reliable, useable feedback from our listeners? How do we move beyond the conventional, “Good sermon, preacher” and toward worthwhile feedback that can be used in our sermon preparation?

Fred Craddock stresses that, in the congregation, we preachers are always receiving feedback, if we will be open and attentive to that lay response:

As to sermon feedback, I have two suggestions: First, if one is approachable and accessible, there will be feedback. At first it will not be profound or critical; the listener will have to test the preacher to see if feedback is welcomed and heard. Increasingly, feedback will be thoughtful and often full of memories, both painful and joyful. A sermon may thus evoke thoughts and feelings more associated with another time and place, and perhaps even another preacher, than with the present sermon. Response to such feedback may be immediate or may call for more extended conversation. Since feedback involves memory of not one but many depressed by any comments from listeners. Secondly, since the sermon grows out of and contributes to the congregational (and sometimes public) conversation, I suggest introducing into conversation with persons present or absent at its delivery portions of the sermon. This keeps the sermon alive and at work; it also removes the awkwardness some people feel about initiating response to the sermon with the one who preached it. (Fred Craddock)

Likewise, Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us that while we are preaching, in the very act of sermon delivery, we are also receiving congregational response:

I am acutely aware of the congregation’s eye contact with me, their stillness or
restlessness, their silence or coughing--even their breathing. While this does
not give me specific information about how my sermon is being heard, it does
tell me whether or not I am being listened to.

John Claypool stresses the need for pastoral habits and practices that encourage sermon feedback from the laity:

I am always very available at the end of the service at the back of the
worship space, and have made it a point to never be rushed here, but to stay t
the church as long as there is anyone who has something that they want to share.
I listen with keen attentiveness to the things that people say about the sermon
as they leave. Many times a person will ask me, “I heard what you said this
morning, but what about this or that?” Their question will often lead me to the
next word in our ongoing pastoral conversation. I work in the southern region of
the United States , which means that people have been conditioned to not be
totally frank in their face-to-face encounters. (John R. Claypool)

Barbara Brown Taylor also stresses the possibility of a systematic attempt to get feedback:

From time to time I ask specific question of my listeners. I preach to one
women’s group twice each week, at an informal service on Thursday and again at a principal service on Sunday. I have asked them to pay attention to the
differences between the sermons (the first delivered from the altar rail without
notes, the second from the pulpit with full manuscript) and to tell me about the
difference in their hearing.

Many preachers make good use of an official sermon feedback group. Sunday is
not the best day for this, however. It seems easier to give and receive
responses to a sermon after it has had time to cool off

Lutheran preacher, Barbara Lundblad, with whom I have often done preaching workshops, is full of suggestions for preachers who really want feedback from their parishioners:

A weekly text study group within the congregation (we met on Wednesdays);
the first part of the session can be a reflection on last Sunday’s sermon. If a
preacher is open to genuine questions and disagreements, as well as compliments,
the group will begin to be more honest and helpful.

Structured sermon discussion during coffee hour after worship once a month. As two or three people to be reflectors each week; one of them might read the gospel text aloud to the preacher on Monday so the preacher hears the text. It may be helpful to give these reflectors three questions or open-ended statements, such as, “I got lost when...” or “When the sermon was over I was thinking...” Try to vary the reflectors; retired people, teenagers, single people, married people, men,
women, newcomers, and old-timers.

Tape sermons and listen alone or with a colleague.

Trade sermons with a friend or mentor (trade tapes if there’s no manuscript); ask for specific feedback: Did this image work? Where were transitions unclear?

In order to grow as preachers, we must get good feedback to our preaching and then we must integrate that feedback into our work.

(The quotes are from John S. McClure, ed., Best Advice for Preaching, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1998, pp. 135-145.)

William H. Willimon

I'll see you this Friday, October 26, at the North East District, to hear Dr. Peter Steinke lead an important seminar on Congregational Leadership in Anxious Times. You won't want to miss this event.

PREACHING: CHARACTER AND CREDIBILITY

Our Bishop’s Convocation takes place this week when the pastors of our Conference will be focusing on the ministry of Preaching. Dr. Thomas G. Long of Emory will lead us, therefore for the next few weeks, my Bishop’s messages will reflect on the task of preaching.

When Aristotle was offering, in his Rhetoric the “available means of persuasion,” including reason, emotion, and the character of the speaker, Aristotle listed the character of the speaker as the most important. In fact, a later rhetorician would define a good speech as, “a good person speaking well.”

The credibility of the speaker continues to be one of the most powerful aspects of a persuasive speech. Sermons appeal to the emotions, appeal to the reason, cite scripture, and use story. However, both the opinions of classical rhetoric, and contemporary studies of public speaking agree that the personality, the character of the speaker is the key factor in credibility of the speech.

Even though credibility is a gift offered by the audience to the speaker that does not mean that the speaker has no control over credibility.

At least five factors influence the credibility of a speaker:

Character. The speaker must be perceived as trustworthy and true. There must be congruence between the listeners’ assessment of the personality of the speaker and what the speaker is saying. Parish pastors have great opportunity to influence through character. Listeners get to know you intimately in the daily activity of the congregation. Of course this can be a two-edged sword! Because they know you so well, in their daily interaction with you as their pastor, then they are apt to pick up phoniness, artificiality, and incongruent between what you say and who they perceive you to be.

Competence. Your audience must perceive you as a person who has control over the subject.
Composure. Speakers, who are nervous, are less trustworthy than speakers who appear confident and composed.

Likeability. We listen attentively and positively to people for whom we have positive feelings. This can be a great challenge for the Christian communicator. After all, to be faithful to the Gospel, at times we must say things that are not likeable, ideas and beliefs that will challenge our hearers, that our hearers hear as criticism. Nevertheless, if our hearers are positively disposed toward us as people, they will receive even our criticism much better than they would if they were negatively inclined toward us.

Extroversion. Speakers who reach out to their audience, are positively perceived by their audience. The audience perceives that the speaker really cares about them, really wants to be heard by them. However, extroverts in public speaking also note that it is possible to be too extroverted. A speaker who seems too intent on pleasing an audience, in being liked by the audience, can be perceived by the audience as disingenuous and artificial. The audience, feeling that the speaker is putting the make upon them, may resist the speaker. Defenses rise when we feel we are about to be manipulated by another person for that person’s own ends.

Although most preachers do not stand up and enumerate for the congregation all of their academic degrees, and all of the schools where they have studied, we will say things like, “In my study this week of today’s scripture, I had a tough task before me.”

Or we will say, “In my twenty years as a pastor I found that….”

Conversely credibility can be engendered by the speaker admitting to his or her shortcomings. The speaker says, “One of my weaknesses is I tend to judge people by their appearance. I will see someone shabbily dressed, and I think that this person is rather shabby. Have you ever done that?” Preachers who are sometimes perceived by their congregations as people who have solved all spiritual problems for themselves and are now, from their exalted perch of perfectionism, seeking to instruct the congregation. Letting some of our humanity come through in our speech is a means of establishing greater credibility.

“We have this treasure in earthen vessels” says Paul. We preachers are thoroughly human vessels, yet God has given us a treasure to communicate to our people and one way we communicate is through who we are. Character and credibility are thus closely linked.

William H. Willimon

Be sure to join me on October 26 at 9:00 am at the North East District Office to hear Dr. Peter Steinke as he leads a very important seminar on Congregational Leadership in Anxious Times.

Jesus Christ as our way to God

Our thoughts on United Methodist Believing continue with these thoughts about Jesus Christ as our way to God.

The way Scripture tells the story (and nothing we know about Jesus would we know without Scripture - here is a story so wonderfully strange we could have never thought this up ourselves) Jesus is not only God with us but God actively doing something about the problem that exists between us and God. We call that divine work in Christ and on his cross “atonement” - at-one-ment. The atonement names that dramatic process of divine love through which God did something decisive in Jesus Christ about the separation between us and God. Note, in the above thickly packed quote from our Discipline that Jesus’ work is described as “redeeming,” “atoning,” work that is “triumph” as well as that which “judges” us, “summons…, pardons us, receives us” and “gives” us. God doesn’t just sit back and say, “You know, don’t you, how much I love you?”

God acts, moves, works, triumphs and gives and forgives. I note this because it is my impression that many Americans have had our theological imaginations truncated with a flaccid Deism that renders God into an allegedly compassionate, but essentially inactive and uninvolved sort of deity. Deism says that while God may have created the world, God fairly quickly retired and has left us to ourselves.

Deism always sent John Wesley into orbit. Wesley not only thought that, without the Trinity, we cannot follow God, but that without the self-revelation of God in Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit we can know nothing of God. Walk all in the woods, hug a tree or listen to the song of a bird, you will still not know much about God.

Against Deism of any stripe, United Methodists believe God is very, very busy. The name for God’s busyness among us in Christ and the Holy Spirit is atonement. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection demonstrates that any God who would reach out in love to the likes of us has got to be a God who doesn’t mind much blood, sacrifice, and death, for we are murderous toward our would-be saviors. To redeem us, a high cost must be paid. Jesus risked all and got down and dirty with us sinners in order to embrace us and carry us home. He atoned and redeemed.

Who was Jesus? Jesus was a wonderful teacher and preacher. Many found in his words the words of life and words that wisely pointed the way to greater love of God and neighbor. However, when some sincerely tried to follow the way that was cast by this great teacher, they found it virtually impossible. It would have been one thing if the teacher had urged us simply “do not worry about tomorrow” (Mt. 6:34), which might have led us to greater peace of mind. But he went on to say that we should love our enemies (Lk. 6:35), pray for rather than revenge our enemies (Mt. 5:44), and hate our mothers (Lk. 14:26). Such talk forever disturbed our peace. Paul spoke for us all in saying, “I do not do the good that I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Rom. 7:19). That many believe that Christianity is mostly about “trying to live a good life and being kind to your neighbor” suggests that they have never actually listened to or tried to practice the teachings of Jesus!

Who was Jesus? He was not just a great ethical teacher, he was the Redeemer who went to the cross and “died for our sins” as the church said from the first, attempting to account for the significance of Jesus’ death on the cross. We are, as we have admitted, sinners. What’s to be done about our rebellion and estrangement from God? Whatever is to be done, it can’t be done by us. Our debts are too great, our lives too corrupt and deformed. So somehow, in the cross of Christ, God took up our sin, our propensity to serve death rather than life, and redeemed us (bought us back from slavery to sin and death), atoned for us (did something about the great gap between us and God), judged us (our sin is deadly serious), and pardons us (writes off our debts that we have incurred through our sin).

Note that the Discipline doesn’t spend much verbiage in attempting to explain just how this happens. For us, God’s reconciling the world in Christ is a great mystery that we Wesleyans would rather experience and live into rather than explain. All we know is that, from the testimony of Scripture and in our own experience, God in Christ did something decisive at Calvary, wrought a victory that totally rearranged relations between God and humanity.

Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served by to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many. (Mark 10:43-45)

William H. Willimon