The Question of Revitalizing our Older Churches

As I wrote last week, as I go about the North Alabama Conference, I repeatedly hear a couple of questions that I would like to attempt to give an answer.  These questions which I fear are based on misinformation or a lack of information.  Last week, I responded to the question, "Why do we start new communities of faith mostly in all white, affluent suburbs? This week,  I'll attempt to answer the question: Why are we starting new churches when we ought to be revitalizing our existing congregations?  I hope my responses will be helpful in better understanding our North Alabama Conference Priorities.

Will Willimon

2. Why do we start new communities of faith rather than revitalizing our older churches?

The answer is WE DO REVITALIZE our existing churches that are willing to move into a new future.  We are now able to provide revitalization help (Natural Church Development) to EVERY church that wants to be part of the program.  Natural Church Development is a Conference Priority and is changing the future for many of our congregations.  To date, we have NO existing, older congregations that have undertaken Natural Church Development, followed the program, and been committed to the process that have not reaped positive results.

Most of our Connectional Ministries staff spend most of their time in congregational revitalization.  And we have had some dramatic results.  A few specific revitalizations projects come to mind.  We have been successful with revitalization projects at:  Calera First, Pelham First (Lakeview), Gadsden Central (Christ Central), University Church Huntsville (Grace UMC Huntsville), Genesis (the relocation of Grace UMC in B'ham).  All of these are relocations.  If some of our older churches will consider relocation they too may achieve new life.  Other revitalizations that come to mind are:  Jasper First, Huntsville First, Tuscaloosa First, Friendship Athens, Guntersville First, Trussville First, Gardendale-Mt. Vernon, Bluff Park.  These are thirteen older churches that have new life.  There are other smaller churches as well.

Warning: Dick Freeman, Thomas Muhumba, and Dale Cohen would have me add: No existing, older churches can be revitalized without risk, commitment, and a determination to be faithful to the mission of Christ no matter what. 

If your church is in decline and not growing, it is because your congregation has decided to die rather than to live (alas, there is no in between when it comes to churches).  The majority of our churches are not growing, thus we have a huge challenge before us.  Still, our major challenge is not to find good resources for helping a church grow and live into the future; our challenge is to have pastors and churches who want to do what is necessary to live into Christ's future.

While new communities of faith do evangelize more people, tend to be more multicultural, multiracial, and welcoming to new members than existing congregations, and while we are not beginning as many congregations as we are losing congregations (over half of our congregations failed to make ONE new Christian in the past two years!  These are clearly churches that are dying), we are showing good, solid progress in congregational revitalization.

The good news is that we now have a proven, reliable, theologically based program (NCD) for church revitalization and growth and we now have a group of pastors and lay leaders who know how to utilize NCD for the benefit of our older congregations.

Log into our Conference website, look at your congregation's recent record under"Church Stats" and decide if your congregation should be participating in NCD now.

God is blessing our efforts for revitalization.  Thanks be to God!

Will Willimon

The Question of Planting Churches in Non - "Upper-Class White Suburbs"

As I go about the Conference, I've repeatedly heard a couple of questions that I would like to attempt to give an answer. The questions are: Why do we start new communities of faith mostly in all white, affluent suburbs? And, Why are we starting new churches when we ought to be revitalizing our existing congregations?

For the next two weeks, I'll be attempting to answer both of these questions, questions which I fear are based on misinformation or a lack of information. I hope my responses will be helpful in better understanding our Conference Priorities.

1."Why do we plant new communities of faith ONLY in upper-class white suburbs?"

This is a common misconception about our new communities of faith. The simple answer is that we DO NOT plant ONLY in upper-class white suburbs!

Under the leadership of Dick Freeman, in the past two decades we have planted: House of Restoration, Glenn Addy, IMANI, Church Without Walls, Church Across the Street, Tabernacle, Genesis (Guntersville), The Summit (Hwy 431 in Albertville), New Life (on Sand Mountain at Grant, AL), Church of the Reconciler, Albertville Hispanic, Cullman Hispanic, Decatur Hispanic, Riverchase Hispanic, Florence Hispanic, Huffman Hispanic, Big Sandy in rural Tuscaloosa County, Jordan Crossings, Brandon in East Florence. These are 19 that ARE NOT in "upper class white suburbs." Not all of these new communities of faith root. For instance, we worked at IMANI for nearly a decade before we finally decided that we were not going to succeed. However, most of our communities of faith that have been multicultural, multiracial, and are in or near marginalized neighborhoods have succeeded far beyond the national average for new church starts.

We have invested, as a Conference, close to ten million dollars in these new church starts, nearly half of our total investment in new church starts. Our main limitation is pastoral leadership. We simply do not have enough pastors (yet!) who are multilingual or who have gifts for ministry in these settings.

However, some of these churches like "Genesis" in Guntersville are amazing places that are national leaders in ministry in settings where there are many people in need. Jesus has assigned us this mission and, with God's help, in places throughout our Conference, we are stepping up to the task!

Will Willimon

He Came Back...To Us!

And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb…. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe,…he said to them, ‘Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.  He has been raised;… he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you." Mark 16:2-7

Mark says that on that first Easter, women went to the tomb to pay their last respects to poor, dead Jesus.  To their alarm, the body of Jesus was not there.  A "young man, dressed in a white robe" told them, "You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified?  Well, he isn't here.  He is raised.  He is going ahead of you to Galilee."

Here's my Easter question for you:  Why Galilee? 

Galilee?  Galilee is a forlorn, out of the way sort of place.  It's where Jesus came from (which in itself was a shock -- "Can anything good come out of Galilee?").  Jesus is Galilee's only claim to fame.  Jesus spent most of his ministry out in Galilee, the bucolic out back of Judea.  He expended most of his teaching trying to prepare his forlorn disciples for their trip up to Jerusalem where the real action was.  All of Jesus' disciples seem to have hailed from out in Galilee.  Jesus' ultimate goal seems not to focus on Galilee but rather on the Capital City, Jerusalem.  In Jerusalem he was crucified and in Jerusalem he rose.  Pious believers in Jesus' day expected a restoration of Jerusalem in which Messiah would again make the Holy City the power-center that it deserved to be, the capital city of the world.  Which makes all the more odd that the moment he rose from the dead, says tod ay's gospel, Jesus left the big city and headed back to Galilee.  Why?

One might have thought that the first day of his resurrected life, the risen Christ might have made straight for the palace, the seat of Roman power, appear there and say,  

"Pilate, you made a big mistake.  Now, it's payback time!"

One might have thought that Jesus would do something effective.  If you want to have maximum results, don't waste your time talking to the first person whom you meet on the street, figure out a way to get to the movers and the shakers, the influential and the newsmakers, those who have some power and prestige.  If you really want to promote change, go to the top. 

I recall an official of the National Council of Churches who, when asked why the Council had fallen on hard times and appeared to have so little influence, replied, "The Bush Administration has refused to welcome us to the White House."  How on earth can we get anything done if the most powerful person on earth won't receive us at the White House?

But Jesus?  He didn't go up to the palace, the White House, the Kremlin, or Downing Street.   (Jesus never got on well with politicians.)  Jesus went outback, back to Galilee. 

Why Galilee?   Nobody special lived in Galilee, nobody except the followers of Jesus.  Us.

The resurrected Christ comes back to, appears before the very same rag tag group of failures who so disappointed him, misunderstood him, forsook him and fled into the darkness.  He returns to his betrayers.  He returns to us. 

It would have been news enough that Christ had died, but the good news was that he died for us.  As Paul said elsewhere, one of us might be willing to die for a really good person but Christ shows that he is not one of us by his willingness to die for sinners like us.  His response to our sinful antics was not to punish or judge us.  Rather, he came back to us, flooding our flat world not with the wrath that we deserved but with his vivid presence that we did not deserve.   

It would have been news enough that Christ rose from the dead, but the good news was that he rose for us.

That first Easter, nobody actually saw Jesus rise from the dead.  They saw him afterwards.  They didn't appear to him; he appeared to them.  Us.  In the Bible, the "proof" of the resurrection is not the absence of Jesus' body from the tomb; it's the presence of Jesus to his followers.  The gospel message of the resurrection is not first, "Though we die, we shall one day return to life," it is, "Though we were dead, Jesus returned to us." 

If it was difficult to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, it must have been almost impossible to believe that he was raised and returned to us.  The result of Easter, the product of the Resurrection of Christ is the church -- a community of people with nothing more to convene us than that the risen Christ came back to us.  That's our only claim, our only hope.  He came back to Galilee.  He came back to us.

In life, in death, in any life beyond death, this is our great hope and our great commission.  Hallelujah!  Go!  Tell!  The risen Christ came back to Birmingham, uh I mean Galilee.

William Willimon

Thinking Resurrection

Gerhard Manley Hopkins has a poem in which he inserts the prayer, “Easter in us.” He uses the noun Easter as a verb. “Easter in us.” Let Easter get in to us, come where we live, permeate our souls.

Which sounds not only grammatically, but also theologically strange. But perhaps that’s how the resurrection feels to us - as an active verb, not a passive noun. Luke has a fast paced account of the startling events of Easter. The women arrive at the tomb and in amazement discover he is not here, he has risen. Then Luke turns to what happens later in the day.

“Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmau, talking with each other about all these things that had happened. As they were talking and discussing Jesus himself came near but their eyes were kept from recognizing him….”

They didn’t know Jesus. Two of his closest disciples didn’t know him! It had only been three days since they had dinner with him. Now, on Sunday afternoon, they didn’t know him.

Here is our question for today, class. Why didn’t they know him? Luke says, “Their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” Yes. But why?

Every now and then some sweet person will say something to me like, “I just don’t get it. God has never spoken to me. When I tried prayer, I was just talking to myself. This whole religion thing just seems like so much hooey.”

Perhaps their “I just don’t get it” may not be a testimonial to lack of intelligence but rather to their possession of a particular kind of intelligence.

There is among us a sort of intelligence that has been wonderfully productive of all sorts of things - bridges, penicillin, fax machines, quantum physics, Britney Spears. And yet that same intelligence - so enamored with empiricism, facts and figures, and common sense - has its limits.

As Douglas Sloane, in his book on higher education puts it, in American universities, at least since the early 1900’s quantifiable thinking (statistics, matter, money) has reigned supreme while qualifiable thinking (thoughts of beauty, right and wrong, good and bad) has had a rough go of it.
Augustine, as a bright young man with a superior classical education, confessed to Bishop Ambrose that he had tried to read the Bible but frankly, he was unimpressed. To him the Bible seemed like woefully inferior literature, crudely written, poorly edited.

“You young fool,” replied Ambrose. “You can’t get it because when you read in the Bible about ‘fish,’ you think ‘fish.’ When you read ‘bread,’ you think ‘bread.’”

Ambrose explained to him the spiritual depth of scripture, showed young Augustine levels of meaning beyond the surface appearance of things.

Thus, years later, after entering this strange new world of the Bible, Augustine is sitting under a tree in a garden. He hears a child singing, “Take up and read, take up and read.” Is it the voice of a child or an angel? By this time his imagination is so excited, his consciousness so heightened that he can’t tell the difference. He does what the voice says, takes up the Bible, flops it open to an obscure passage from Romans, and his life is changed forever. After that, we call him “St. Augustine.”

This week I’m speaking at Wake Forest University. When I was a college chaplain I realized that the students with whom I worked were quite smart but were also those on whom we had spent years of education, and a fortune in tuition, beating into him the notion that the world is flat. A tree is a tree. A mystery is to be explained. A miracle is to be disproved. Everything going on out there is the result of some easily discovered material cause and everything going on in here is due to something your mother did to you when you were three.

It’s the modern world - closed, fixed, flat, demystified, disenchanted and dull. Don’t expect surprises and, if by God grace a surprise really occurred, don’t expect to get it because you’ve lost the means even to know a surprise if you got one.

Why didn’t they recognize Jesus when they walked along the road with them? We get defeated by the limited, officially sanctioned, governmentally subsidized world view. Death blinds us, tells us that the world is closed shut and, if there is an intrusion, an invasion not of our own devising, we don’t get it.

Two followers of Jesus are trudging along the dusty road seven miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus when suddenly the risen Christ joins them incognito on their journey. The Risen Christ is to them a stranger. By the time they reach the end of their journey, they have moved from discouragement and despair to hope and faith. That’s the road each of us, if Sunday is half true to its promise, gets to walk.

The Road to Emmaus is the way. That was the first name for the church - The Way. The church, when it is half true to its promise, is a group of people on a road where, wonder of wonders, the Risen Christ meets us.

If you want to experience the resurrection of Jesus Christ, in your life, where you live, just get up in the morning and put one foot in the front of the other and head down the road. Follow the way. But please, go with a bit of imagination. Walk with the expectation of the possibility of surprise.

John Dominic Crossian says that there are three different places in the Holy Land which claim to be the Village of Emmaus. Three places! Furthermore, says that there is no record of any village called “Emmaus” in any ancient source. The only place in all of the writings in the New Testament where we hear of the Village of Emmaus is here in Luke’s Gospel.

He says, “Emmaus is nowhere. Emmaus is everywhere.”

Emmaus is wherever in your life journey, as you are on the way, either at church, or in a dormitory, at a family dinner table, where by the grace of God your eyes are opened and you see the Risen Christ present. Easter in you.

William Willimon

Going Deeper Spiritually

During a great workshop with Tom Bandy at Friendship United Methodist Church (thanks to Mike Stonbraker and Hal Noble for making this happen.), a layperson asked, “What do you do when you want your church to grow but your pastor just won’t lead in evangelism?”
I thought Bandy would respond to the question with, “you need a different pastor,” or “you and the Board get together and insist that your pastor get busy.” Bandy said none of that. He responded, “If you want to change your church or your pastor, you need to go deeper spiritually, you will need to pray more and go deeper in Scripture.”

Wow. An organizational/management guru like Tom Bandy telling us we’ll never grow organizationally without growing spiritually? Lord help us if we think we can be faithful to Christ and achieve our priorities as a church on our own. Nothing Jesus commands us to do, does he command us to do by ourselves? This is Christ’s Church, not ours. Christ’s mission, not our program.

We ought to set our Conference priorities so high, ought to hold ourselves accountable to such lofty expectations, ought to demand such dramatic results, that if we do not go deeper spiritually, we will utterly fail.

Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a church move from maintenance to ministry, from decline to growth, from the chaplain to the church members, to a mission mover to the word where someone in leadership had not explained a new dimension of spiritual depth. It’s a God thing.
When I was made bishop, that day Bishop Marion Edwards hugged me and noted, “Friend, you are just about to experience a new dimension in your prayer life.”

I found this to be true.

William H. Willimon

The Practical, Organizational Relevance of Resurrection

In a workshop with Paul Borden last year, someone asked him, “You are a natural leader in starting new churches. What is the main thing you look for in selecting new pastors?” Borden responded, “An Orthodox faith, a vivid belief in the Trinity, and of course, a sure faith in the resurrection.”

Don’t you find that an amazing response? I thought Borden would say something managerial, “an entrepreneurial spirit,” something like that. Or, I thought he might cite some psychological configuration or organizational expertise in the pastor. No. Borden demands theology, faith in resurrection.

It really makes a huge difference as we go about reaching a new generation of Christians, starting new churches, energizing established congregations, making disciples (our Conference priorities), if Jesus Christ has risen from the dead. If Easter is not true, then why bother?
Since Jesus Christ is raised, let loose, invading a world, returning to the very people who betrayed him, then we work not alone. The risen Christ goes before us. We serve a God who lives to raise the dead--even us. Therefore, we work with hope--not hope in ourselves and our efforts, but with hope in Christ.

A couple of years ago, a District Superintendent paid me one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received. He had told a pastor of our interest to move him to a different church. “I can’t do this,” responded the pastor. “That church is dead. It’s been dying for years and now I hear it’s really dead.” The DS replied, “I’ll tell the Bishop but let me warn you, this guy really believes that Easter is true. To tell him a pastor or a church is dead means nothing to him. He just sees death as an opportunity to see what Jesus can do.”

Will Willimon

Concerning the Death Penalty

On Monday, March 31, come hear Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, speak at Highlands United Methodist Church, Birmingham at 7 p.m.

There may be sound arguments in favor of the Death Penalty. Unfortunately for us Christians, none of these arguments can be made on biblical or Christian theological grounds. The Social Principles of the United Methodist Church oppose capital punishment. That provision states as follows:

The Death Penalty
We believe the death penalty denies the power of Christ to
redeem, restore and transform all human beings. The United Methodist Church
is deeply concerned about crime throughout the world and the value of any
life taken by a murder or homicide. We believe all human life is sacred and
created by God and therefore, we must see all human life as significant and
valuable. When governments implement the death penalty (capital
punishment), then the life of the convicted person is devalued and all
possibility of change in that person’s life ends. We believe in the
resurrection of Jesus Christ and that the possibility of
reconciliation with Christ comes through repentance. This gift of
reconciliation is offered to all individuals without exception and gives
all life new dignity and sacredness. For this reason, we oppose the death
penalty (capital punishment) and urge its elimination from all criminal
codes.

- From The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church--2004.

Based on statistics from the Bureau of Justice, Alabama leads the nation in the rate of new death sentences for the past five years. With a population of 4.5 million people, Alabama imposed 13 new death sentences, greater than the 11 imposed in Texas with a population of 23.5 million.

Senator Hank Sanders from Selma has regularly introduced a bill in the Alabama Legislature for a number of years seeking to declare a moratorium on the death penalty. It has had no success thus far. It has been introduced again this year.

United Methodist, Bill Clark (member of Highlands UMC) has recently presented a resolution to the Alabama Criminal Defense Lawyers Association which calls for a joint resolution of the Governor and the Legislature to direct a study of the death penalty process with a moratorium being declared during that study.

I invite you to join us on March 31 in thinking about and praying for the issue of the Death Penalty in Alabama.

Will Willimon

Who But The Church Will Tell Such Truth?

Here we are, deep in Lent, Christian season of penitence and introspection, season of admission of sin and confession of our finitude. We are in a mess. We are not gods unto ourselves. We are sinners.

Who but the poor old church will - in this upbeat, feel-good, progressive society - tell such truth about us?

Lent begins with Ash Wednesday. I hope that you celebrated this day in your church. When I was a college chaplain, I loved Ash Wednesday. I got a rather perverse joy in standing before some strapping nineteen year old, smearing ashes on his forehead and proclaiming, “From dust you have come and to dust you shall return.”

Who but the church will tell such truth?

Last year I published Thank God It’s Friday: Jesus’ Words from the Cross (Abingdon). I so much enjoyed discussions about this book in dozens of our churches. How well I remember a man, in one of the discussions, saying, “It’s kind of invigorating to be told the truth about me. I really do need saving. I really do need a Savior who saves sinners.”

“The good news of Jesus Christ is a thing of great comfort,” said C. S. Lewis. “But it doesn’t begin in comfort. It begins in distress and despair and there’s no way to get to the comfort by bypassing the despair.”

Have a Happy Lent.
William H. Willimon

Singapore, Malaysia and Domestic Missions

On Maundy Thursday, March 20, Patsy and I will leave for Singapore and Malaysia on a mission trip.

I have been invited to meet with all the pastors of the Singapore Methodist Church and to give a lecture in the theological college there on Wesleyan Theology.

We are looking forward to learning more about the church in Singapore. Methodism is growing rapidly in this part of the world. They are interested in things that we are doing here in Alabama and I am interested in how we can learn from one another. North America is becoming one of our most challenging ‘mission fields.’ We’ve got to learn how to do mission in our own backyard.

New Young Clergy Blog

If you are interested in more dialogue about the shortage of and the focus upon young clergy in the United Methodist Church (and truly in most Protestant denominations), please view our new young clergy blog where clergy from the North Alabama Conference write about their own perspectives on this issue within the church:

Young Clergy

Manna and Mercy

On a mission trip in Honduras a few years ago, we were all sitting with some of the villagers around a fire in the evening. One of the members of our team said, "Let's all go around and share our favorite Bible verse."

This sort of thing can be tough for us scripturally challenged Methodists! Someone mentioned John 3:16, somebody else said 1 Corinthians 13. A Honduran woman said, through a translator, "I love that passage toward the end of Luke's gospel, where Jesus says that the world is coming to an end, the moon will turn blood red, and everything will be burned and disappear. Such a comfort."

That's her favorite Bible passage? A comfort?

A nurse, sitting next to me whispered, "I talked with that woman in the clinic today. She has had four children, three of whom died in infancy because of hunger."

Then it hit me. Sometimes the difference between bad news and good news (gospel) is where you happen to be when you get the news. What sounded like bad news to me, "This world, which has been so good to you and your family, is ending. God is going to destroy all of it. This isn't the world God wanted; this is the world you built" seen through the eyes of the poor, is good news, gospel.

R.G.Lyons, our pastor in West Birmingham at the Community Church Without Walls, has invited Alan Storey to North Alabama to conduct his famous, Manna and Mercy Workshop. Alan Storey is the inspiring pastor of a multiracial church in South Africa. Manna and Mercy is a worldwide program whereby laity are led through the entire Bible in a study that reads scripture through the eyes of the "least of these." A Manna and Mercy workshop is a fast-paced, life-changing experience that you can use in your church and in your life right now. You will not read the Bible as you read it before after Manna and Mercy.

Join me and Alan Storey at Woodlawn United Methodist Church on Friday night, April 11 through Sunday, April 13 for Manna and Mercy. More details, along with registration information, are available on the Conference Website or by contacting Rev. R.G. Lyons at (205) 532-0907 or by e-mail.

Will Willimon

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