Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: United Methodist Church

  • What Holds us Together?

    I was reading this story about American Episcopal bishops and their response to the Anglican communion, and it struck a cord in me because of my own experiences. Here we have a conservative Episcopal bishop providing a response to a challenge that primarily resulted from the actions of liberal bishops.

    What is making the Episcopal Church USA hang together? I could, however, just as well ask the same thing about the United Methodist Church, of which I’m a member. Why do we all hang around and duke it out year after year and General Conference after General Conference?

    I recall a study that suggested that there were really four camps in the UMC on the issue of homosexuality. There are those who believe homosexuality is a sin, and who do not believe we can remain as a unified church with disagreement on this issue, there are those who believe homosexuality is sin and yet think we can get along. On the other hand those who believe homosexuality is not a sin are similarly divided between those who think we can co-exist in a denomination that with those who believe the opposite, and those who think we can’t. Yet year after year the debate goes on.

    But I’m wondering again just what keeps us working together. How many of the goals of my local church here in Pensacola match those of more liberal churches in the Northwest, for example? Are we really in community or is it just on paper? Those who know me may be surprised to realize that the congregation of which I’m a member is really quite conservative, for a United Methodist Church. It’s not at the hard right, but it’s right of center. I think I’m somewhere in the center range of United Methodist belief right now myself, and I feel that I could work together with some reservations in most of the churches I know. I’m afraid I would have to make an exception for the one church that I know of that removed the cross as a symbol of death.

    I’m thinking that a great deal of the glue is simply tradition, whether for the Episcopal Church, with a somewhat longer tradition, or the United Methodist Church, which has certainly had enough history to become respectable. Denominational loyalty goes a long way for people who have lived in a community and gone to a particular church for years and years, or been multigenerational members of the same denomination.

    But the current generation isn’t buying that, whether they are liberal or conservative. They want a church community that is going where they are going and in which they can be wholehearted, active, members if they want any church at all. “We’ve always been Methodists” or “We’ve done it that way for years” doesn’t really work for them.

    I know I keep revisiting this topic, but it seems still to be a very live one. The membership of the United Methodist Church seems to indicate that we’re not finding the popular answer to these questions whether or not we are finding the right answer. The Episcopal Church has a similar problem.

    I think we need to find the glue, on a personal, congregational, and denominational level. If we can deal with the glue, we should be able to deal with the rest. For me, the central message of the love of Jesus who came and died for me is a driving force. I’m interested in social activism because I think Jesus called us through the incarnation to the ministry of reconciliation. Simply being redeemed drives me to want to be with others who feel the same way. That drives other issues into the background.

    But I think the question of whether even Jesus and his mission are the central position of our faith is subject to serious debate in many places. I find people both to my right and to my left who, redeemed by the blood of the lamb want to go out and share the gospel through word, deed, and sign as led by the Holy Spirit. Others, well, not so much. I’m not referring to different theories of the atonement. I’m referring to various views that make the atonement less than a central topic.

    If it weren’t for the atonement, I’d be carrying out whatever social action I have through a civic organization. I wouldn’t need a church. A church doesn’t just need to serve the community; they need to serve the community driven by Jesus Christ and filled with his Spirit.

    When I first thought of writing this I was thinking of a kind of moderate split–let’s take everyone who can exist together out of the center instead of continuing to head toward a left-right split. But I don’t think even that would put together the right combination. I’m looking for a community that wants to carry out the “royal law” and do so driven by and in the name of the royal person–Jesus Christ. So far, in spite of disagreements I have found that I can do that in three different United Methodist congregations. The denomination as a whole? Well, not so much.

  • Should a Pedophile be Welcome at Church?

    I’m not sure how to react to this story, but I think it’s a good one for discussion. On MSNBC I found the following story: Sex offender can worship – with conditions. I find the story troubling. As a grandparent of 5, I have to ask whether I would regard it as safe to have my grandchildren at church with him. At the same time, I would also have to ask what alternative I would propose to minister to such a person.

    The church made a covenant of restrictions on his activity, monitoring, and accountability. But one church member expressed the question quite well:

    Mary Carlson, a single mother of an 8-year-old girl, has fears despite the covenant. “He is a pedophile, and this pedophile might be fantasizing about this little girl across the aisle,” she said.

    As a United Methodist, I uphold “Open hearts, Open minds, Open doors,” at least insofar as I can make any real meaning of the slogan. But this open?

    Any thoughts?

  • Being United Methodist: Identity and Purpose

    One of the problems with having a sign in front of your church, and particularly a denominational identity, is that it produces certain expectations in people who may considering entering your property and visiting your church for an event or a worship service. Now some of you may not think this is a problem–you want an identity. That’s good! But consider these question: Is the expectation created by your label realistic? Is it what people will find when they enter? Are you willing to stand by that purpose even if they choose another church?

    This discussion could apply to any denomination, I think, and also to many non-denominational congregations. But my experience is with entering a United Methodist local church. I’ve discussed parts of this experience several times before, but rather than link to a scattered set of sources, let me just highlight the relevant points of my own experience.

    I was raised Seventh-day Adventist, and completed my MA degree in Biblical Languages at the Andrews University Graduate School in conjunction with the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary. Then I left the SDA church and all churches for 12 years. I started my path back into the church at a United Methodist congregation. One of the first things I asked for was a definitive statement of United Methodist doctrine. I wanted to know what I was getting into. So the pastor of that church gave me a copy of the United Methodist discipline. Don’t groan! Considering the way I presented my question to him, he had no choice.

    I read the early pages of the discipline, the doctrinal standards and the explanations. I questioned elements of the social principles, but based on that reading I thought I could get along in a United Methodist congregation. I was naive enough to believe that Methodists actually had some idea of what was contained in their own doctrinal statement, but more on that in a moment.

    I attended two different United Methodist congregations off and on, and also went to small group Bible studies in both. When I had decided to rejoin the church, and specifically one of those two congregations I went to the pastors and discussed it. The first pastor told me that I would be welcome in his church no matter what. I explained that while I had been baptized, I had been out of the church for some years and wanted to acknowledge that. “We don’t care about that,” he said. “We just want you to enjoy our fellowship.” There was no discussion of my beliefs in any way. I’m not sure he had ever heard me affirm that I believed in God, though he knew I read Greek. I can testify that the two are not equivalent.

    The second pastor sat down and asked me what I believed about Jesus. What a difference! We had a serious conversation. I even contested points with him. But at the end he knew that I did, in fact, believe in Jesus and was ready to accept me into membership. I joined the second congregation.

    I suspect that the first pastor did not want to offend me by suggesting anything in particular I had to do. But by doing so he made me ask myself why I would join his congregation. What was the purpose? If it was merely to “enjoy fellowship” that wasn’t sufficient to me. By being open to all, I think he made the church seem to be unimportant and of little use.

    Even in the church I did join, however, there was disappointment. I read about the doctrine of Christian perfection, one of those Wesleyan doctrines with which I have a certain amount of trouble. I read Wesley’s A Plain Account of Christian Perfection amongst other things in order to clarify what Wesley taught on the matter. When I discussed that with the pastor he asked me to teach a class for the entire church on the topic. Now I had grown up in the SDA church and heard about John Wesley all my life. Imagine my amazement when I found that not one single member in that class was even aware that there was a doctrine of Christian perfection and that it was listed in the doctrinal standards of their denomination.

    I can’t really speak of what goes on in the broader denomination. I’m a small picture man. But I do see this in congregations. If you try to be all things to all people, you can easily wind up being nothing at all. Those who know me and read any of what I write will know that I’m not calling for tense, lengthy, doctrinal standards. But I am calling for knowing our identity and purpose at the congregational level. United Methodists should go out to that cross and flame symbol and ask themselves whether it is false labeling. Are people going to experience the the incaranational love and revelation of Jesus Christ and the fire of the Holy Spirit in your church? Is it an expectation of all or most of the members? Don’t suspect me of forcing a particular definition of each of these elements. I’m not. What I’m wondering is whether you could answer that question, whether you’re church member or pastor, in an intelligible way. If I was joining your church, would you say that you just wanted me to enjoy your fellowship, or would there be expectations of service, an identity to assume, and a purpose to support?

    My pastor (Gonzalez UMC) when he arrived at the beginning of a building program for a “family life center,” made certain that the name was changed to “community life center.” The name makes a difference, he told me. We need to be a church that reaches out to our community and makes a difference. There’s one piece of the identity. If you don’t want to reach the community, you’re going to have many moments of discomfort at our church. It gets more detailed than that, but I’m not writing to tell you what your purpose should be in detail.

    What I’m trying to say here is that when we get so open that we lose identity, we also give up any reason for anyone to enthusiastically support us. People don’t support an organization with any enthusiasm because of what it’s not. They support it for what it is. If you don’t know the purpose of your church, whether you’re church leader, member, or pastor, you will find it difficult to grow.

    As a final note, I think this is an area in which Christian liberals and moderates have failed in particular. We too often either define ourselves, or fail to define ourselves by what we are not, and then try to keep from offending anyone on any side.

    On the one hand I can define myself as a person who does not believe in the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, who does not accept a literal seven day creation week, who rejects penal substitutionary atonement as the true meaning of the atonement, and who rejects male only church leadership. But what a dull litany that is!

    I’d prefer to be known as a person who believes that God has gifted us through his Spirit with the testimony of persons and communities of faith who have experienced him in real and special ways, who believes that God works mightily through the reliable fundamental laws of the universe he created to produce near-infinite variety, who sees the atonement as so broad and deep that it requires many metaphors just to scratch the surface, and who believes that God gifts all of his children in wonderful ways for a variety of roles in the church.

    And frankly, I’m happy with that latter identity. If you want to openly discuss those issues, welcome to fun and fellowship. But if you want to put down those who don’t believe the Bible is inerrant, or demand that all recognize just one metaphor of atonement, or make the women of the church feel as if they are not merely different than, but less than–well, go find another fellowship! I will, if I find myself in a congregation that wants to behave in that way.

    It’s not a matter of writing people out of the kingdom of heaven, or refusing to discuss with them or deal with them. It’s a matter of bringing together a congregation that can produce a coherent witness to the love of God in their lives.

    (I wrote some on a related topic on the Pacesetters Bible School news blog.)

  • Is Waking Up Always Good?

    John Meunier (Trouble Enough) has been reading William Abraham’s book Waking From Doctrinal Amnesia and making a few comments. Since the Wesleyan Quadrilateral was one of the things that attracted me to the United Methodist Church in the first place, I’m not sure that this is an amnesia I’d like us to wake up from.

    John has a few interesting comments in two posts: Why Not Divorce and The Incarnation and the Ad Council. Sorry John, I don’t have an answer to your main question in this one. I have heard so many forms of church organization taught as scriptural that I’m beginning to think that the most unscriptural thing to do is to claim that the structure of your congregation or denomination is “scriptural.”

    Both posts are worth reading.

  • Response on United Methodist Apportionments

    Some time ago I posted an entry that dealt broadly with apportionments and accountability in churches. A very good friend of mine, Dr. Bob McKibben, author of Holy Smoke! Unholy Fire!, which I publish, wrote me an impassioned and information filled e-mail in response. Some of the contents of that e-mail were not appropriate to post publicly, but I asked Bob to edit it, and he was willing.

    Bob is pastor of Pine Forest United Methodist Church, in the Pensacola District of the Alabama-West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church.

    I have now persuaded him to become an occasional contributor to the Pacesetters Bible School news blog, and as his first posting we will have Inspired and Empowered – Apportionments and Connectionalism. I’m posting a link here because I’m hooked into the Methodist blogosphere, while Pacesetters Bible School, as an interdenominational organization, is not so linked.

    Head over there and check it out. Please comment there.

  • The Danger of Unchanging Truth

    Recently, I’ve written a bit about the difference between science and theology. One of the key differences is that science expects to change, whereas if theology is not assuming it is founded on bedrock, it is usually looking for some bedrock. Religious people often criticize science on the basis that it changes too often. Its history is one of repeatedly overturned theories.

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  • New Methodist Blogs Weekly Roundup

    Allan Bevere has posted the first edition of his new Methodist Blogs Weekly Roundup, numbered #93 in succession from Locusts and Honey.

    Check it out!

  • Denominational vs Non-Denominational

    My wife and I have had several discussions recently about apportionments in the United Methodist Church. For those of you who are not Methodist, apportionments are funds paid by the local church to their conference or other higher authority to support the work of the broader church. Many of these funds go to administrative functions that are just not very sexy. Others go to agencies whose mission (or lack of it) concerns us.

    But at the same time if one claims membership in an organization, then one ought to support that organization. For us personally, that means tithing. We don’t ask each time we put a check in the offering plate whether we would personally vote for every project to which the money goes. That’s the money we give to the local church, and the church as a whole is responsible at that point for how it is used. Similarly, since our congregation has a sign out from that shows the cross and flame, and reads “United Methodist Church,” we owe something to the organization to which that name and logo belong.

    Sky Lowe-McCracken (Hat Tip: Locusts and Honey MBWR #85) talks about this issue in his post The United Methodist Connection – Plus or Minus?. He weighs various points about the connection, which he says has been very good to him, as a pastor. But what about the laity?

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  • The Most Wasted Piece of Architecture

    As I was driving with my wife yesterday, I made a comment that had been bugging me all day.

    “You know,” I said, “A church sanctuary is the most wasted piece of architecture you’ll see on the landscape.”

    Now my wife knows not to go wild when I say things like that. She didn’t ask me if I’d started to hate church, or if I was giving up on Christianity. Some of you may want to do so, but bear with me.

    What is the purpose of our church sanctuaries? What are they designed for? Well, they’re a place where we go to worship. Indeed, I really enjoy church services. I’m one of those folks who will look up a nearby church when I’m traveling and go out of my way to be in worship on Sunday morning. It’s not because I have to, or because someone’s watching me. I simply enjoy worship services. I especially enjoy visiting a church I know nothing about and watching what their service is like. It’s no great merit; it’s just fun! (OK, I’m weird.)

    But picture the standard church sanctuary, steeple, pews, pulpit, altar area, and so forth. The building, the room, and the furniture all serve for a couple of hours per week. Many of you will point out that you have other meetings in that sanctuary–committee meetings, youth meetings, classes, and so forth. But notice that the room isn’t really designed for those things, and you’re actually working around the architecture and interior design in order to use that space for that purpose. It’s true that there are many newer buildings, especially amongst small, non-denominational churches that are much more flexible, and much better designed for multiple uses. Even so, I would ask you to look at the schedule of use for your office building, the conference room at your place of work, and similar structures, and consider the cost involved and the amount of use.

    I don’t have statistics in hand, but in my experience, churches spending as little as 5% of their money on outreach regard themselves as “mission oriented.” Add to that evangelism and budgeting for charitable projects, and you’ll get the total spending for outreach. (Don’t forget the salaries of staff members who are assigned to such tasks.) Look at your own church budget. How much of your money goes to maintaining facilities and paying people to maintain the membership. How much of the spending goes to people in the club?

    I had the privelege of speaking at a church a couple of years ago where the pastor told me their goal was to get to 50% spending for missions/outreach by the time their congregation was 10 years old. I know at the time they were working on acquiring a facility to use to house people coming out of drug rehabilitation to help them transition to the “real” world. They supported the Pacesetters Bible School mission to support orphans in eastern Europe. That was a small new church.

    Very often “spiritual people” don’t want to get involved in budget issues in your church. But when you’re going out and inviting people to church and they don’t seem very interested, you might consider what the appearance of your church and your church budget is telling them about your priorities. The good news of the gospel is not that there’s a church in your neighborhood and you can attend worship. It’s rather that God loves you enough to reach out to you, and according to James chapter 2, we’re supposed to be on the same program. In general, however, our church budgets don’t support that notion. If spiritual people want to be heard, they’re going to have to get involved in the money process and force a change.

    Please don’t hear a liberal vs conservative message here. My problem is not whether you are preaching the gospel or practicing it. I do believe you should be doing both, and that it’s very scriptural to do both. My problem is with the amount of money spent on maintenance, on keeping the members of the club happy vs the amount spent on outreach.

    I think that God has placed sufficient resources in the churches of America’s Christians that we could make a serious dent in the various problems we moan about when we get together and meet. In United Methodist churches (I’m Methodist, I fulfill my membership covenant, I get to complain!), we complain about declining membership while our budgets show pretty clearly that our concern is not with bringing people in, or helping people in general. Our concern is with maintaining the ones inside. It’s not an accident, however, that the gospel commission starts with the word “Go!” (For those who like to nitpick me, yes, I will defend this statement from the Greek.)

    If our budgets, our buildings, our activities, and our lives reflected the gospel, then we wouldn’t have so much trouble getting people to listen. We have the power to turn the world upside down, to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives (physical and spiritual), and to free the prisoners. Given what we have available, the state of our world is nothing short of scandalous.

  • Reasons for Belief

    It seems that this week’s MBWR has produced an excellent crop. Bruce Alderman, whose blog is also in the Moderate Christian Blog Aggregator, wrote a post titled Why I Believe. His approach is strongly but not exclusively experiential, and in many ways resonates with my own.

    It also ties in with the current book discussion I’m hosting here on Threads on Elgin Hushbeck’s Consider Christianity books, which I publish. Elgin’s view is much more evidential, though he admits experience, and I’ve invited Chris Eyre, who is even more experiential than I am to criticize Elgin’s books. (Note that I publish Elgin’s books, so I’m not quite neutral on their value. Regard this as due alert of bias!) Chris has posted first, second, and third. I’ve also indicated that I’m willing to send free copies of the books to a reasonable number of bloggers who’d like to chime in, but that hasn’t proved popular.

    Whether you have an interest in the discussion here or not, you would do well to go and read Bruce’s entry. It should generate some good discussion.