Elaine Heath on “Alien Priorities” in the Church

Elaine Heath and Scott Kisker have recently written a book in defense of a movement that, they say, is gaining ground.  The movement consists of an increasing number of new Christian communities, which are an amalgamation of the house church and new monastic models.  Though written for a UM audience, their comments will resound with anyone suffering the Mainline blues.

After the death of a dear friend and spiritual mentor, Heath tells us that she decided “to quit the club.”

“I do not mean I am leaving the United Methodist Church, although the thought has occurred to me at times.  But there are alien priorities in our midst, anomalies that contradict the soul of our tradition.”

She then tells the following story, which is instructive for the ailments of not only the local church (in many places) but also, by extrapolation, to the larger denomination:

“When I went to meet the pastor parish relations committee prior to being appointed to one of the churches I served, I came away with the strange knowledge that what that church wanted from their next pastor more than good preaching, pastoral care, the development of children’s ministry or just someone who could write a decent bulletin, was a pastor who would live in their parsonage.  That was really and truly their top priority.  The last pastor, for a number of reasons, hadn’t been able to live in the parsonage.  If a pastor would live in the parsonage, they reasoned, giving would increase, the kids who had graduated from high school and left church would come back, and everyone would contribute more stuff to the annual rummage sale.  Life would be good.  All manner of thing would be well.  I left the meeting and wondered what I was getting myself into.”

Such myopic priorities are a major contributing factor to the decline in not only our local churches but also, in an analogous fashion, to the larger denomination as well.  The “alien priorities” of security over risk, maintenance over ministry, and club over mission have become Mainline staples.  This “club” mentality is what Heath and Kisker warn against:

“It is the club of Denominationalism Posing as the Church.  Denominationalism is dead.  Self-serving institutionalism is dead.  The notion that the church is a bureaucracy that should look and act like the federal government of the United States is dead.  That which John Wesley greatly feared has come upon us.”

A note indicates that the fear being referenced is Wesley’s famous quote from “Thoughts Upon Methodism”:

“I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid, lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power. And this undoubtedly will be the case, unless they hold fast both to the doctrine, spirit, and discipline with which they first set out.”

Alien priorities make for a dead sect.  Can new – really, re-discovered – priorities revive this part of the Body?  One thing is certain: the question is not “How do we save the denomination?”  The question is, how do we offer Christ? How do we lovingly serve our neighbors?  As Heath and Kisker conclude,

“The real question is, ‘What is the Spirit saying to the church?’”

The (Other) Hole in Our Gospel

Evangelicals are getting hammered from every quarter these days.  Mark Noll wrote of “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.”  (The scandal: there isn’t much of an evangelical mind.)  Richard Stearns has written of “The Hole in Our Gospel.”  (The hole: Jesus’ call to live radically, doing justice and loving the least.)

Here’s one more for the list, perhaps not as scandalous but perhaps overlooked: tradition.  Too many evangelicals, for various reasons, have spiritual, liturgical, and theological amnesia.  One evangelical who can serve as a corrective to this tendency is Methodist Grand Poobah John Wesley.  Thus sayeth Ted Campbell:

Wesley was, it should be argued, a very unique Evangelical who had an unusual commitment to Christian tradition (especially ancient tradition), and he therefore remains as a challenge (and hopefully a resource) to Evangelicals, who too often in the past have jettisoned Christian tradition as irrelevant to the on-going lives of individual Christians and to the life of the Christian community. (John Wesley and Christian Antiquity, [Nashville: Kingswood Books 1991], 114)

 

John Wesley Lays the Smackdown on Predestination

 

Granted, it is doubtful that Wesley would be a WWE fan, but it seems like an adequate description of the argument I am about to share.

 
Came across this gem as I began to reread Randy Maddox’s modern classic Responsible Grace in hopes that it will spark ideas as I begin to write my ordination papers.  For Methodists, there is probably no better broad interpretation of Wesley’s whole project than this monograph.  For non-Methodists, it is important for its contributions to practical theology and for its suggestions (via Wesleyan soteriology) toward healing the Orthodox-Catholic rift.

This particular passage comes during a discussion of Wesley’s view of Scripture.  For Papa John, it was important that any text be interpreted within the structure and thrust of the whole Bible.  To defend a devilish doctrine – like predestination – on Scriptural grounds was, for Wesley, an affront to the whole testimony of the Bible.  Predestination, he says,

destroys all His attributes at once.  It overturns both his justice, mercy and truth.  Yea, it represents the most Holy God as worse than the devil…. But you say you will ‘prove it by Scripture’.  Hold!  What will you prove by Scripture?  That God is worse than the devil?  It cannot be.  Whatever that Scripture proves, it never can prove this….There are many Scriptures the true sense whereof neither you or I shall know till death is swallowed up in victory.  But this I know, better it were such say it had no sense at all than to say it had such a sense as this….No Scripture can mean that God is not love, or that his mercy is not over all this works. (“Free Grace,” quoted in Maddox, 39.)

Calvinism has been resurgent lately (and not the friendly, graceful Barthian version).  I’m not sure why, except perhaps that in an age of sloganeering and polarization, there are folks attracted to strong convictions of whatever sort, regardless of theological merit.  Of course, hardcore Calvinists will say that we Arminians lean towards works righteousness or universalism.  But, with Wesley, I would affirm that double predestination turns the God of the Bible into an unrecognizable tyrant.

 

 

The full text of the above sermon is available here.

Can a pastor commit adultery with culture?

A British Methodist pastor plans to tweet Holy Communion to his flock.

Social media, as Steve Thorngate points out, has its uses.  But this is ridiculous.

Pastors get defrocked for adultery, theft, and all other manner of crimes against civic order.  What about crimes against Church?  Abuse of the sacrament?  Can culture be considered a mistress?

Says the pastor:

“The perception of church is often that it is rusting away in antiquated buildings and not in touch with the world around us, but this is a statement that we’re prepared to embrace the technological revolution.”

This is offensive on a number of levels, least of all its fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the sacrament itself.  And he’s a Methodist!  Evangelical though he was, John Wesley would not stoop to the level of compromising the dignity and beauty of the sacrament to “reach” people.

May God make us all Catholic or Orthodox if we keep abusing His Church in this manner.

And tell me, would the man who penned these words condone such an abuse of the Eucharist?

As our bodies are strengthened by bread and wine, so are our souls by these tokens of the body and blood of Christ. This is the food of our souls: This gives strength to perform our duty, and leads us on to perfection. If, therefore, we have any regard for the plain command of Christ, if we desire the pardon of our sins, if we wish for strength to believe, to love and obey God, then we should neglect no opportunity of receiving the Lord’s Supper; then we must never turn our backs on the feast which our Lord has prepared for us. We must neglect no occasion which the good providence of God affords us for this purpose. This is the true rule: So often are we to receive as God gives us opportunity. Whoever, therefore, does not receive, but goes from the holy table, when all things are prepared, either does not understand his duty, or does not care for the dying command of his Saviour, the forgiveness of his sins, the strengthening of his soul, and the refreshing it with the hope of glory.

-From “The Duty of Constant Communion,” by John Wesley

Some Help From St. Augustine

But God made you without you.  You didn’t, after all, give any consent to God making you.  How were you to consent, if you didn’t yet exist?  So while he made you without you, he doesn’t justify you without you.  So he made you without your knowing it, he justifies you with your willing consent to it. Yet it’s he that does the justifying… (Augustine, Sermon 169.13)

John Wesley quotes this passage from Augustine in his sermon entitled, “On Working Out Our Own Salvation,” itself based on St. Paul’s admonishion in Phil. 2 to “work out your own salvation in fear and trembling.”  In the he explores the connection between God’s work of salvation and our own effort to make that real in our lived existence; biblically, this comes from the dual convictions (both from Paul) that God works in us towards salvation but that we, too are expected to play a part.

This whole notion, of course, is anathema for the hard-core Reformed folks.  (Incidentally, does anyone know what Calvin said about this verse from Philippians?)  For the double predestination gang, God wills us from the foundation of the world either to damnation or salvation.  We don’t get a hand in it; it is totally and completely a work of God upon us.  As Jonathan Edwards wrote, most terrifyingly, we are all stretched out over the abyss of Hell, the wrath of God raging against us, and only his unmerited grace will save a few of us from this fiery pit.  Awesome.

For Arminians like myself, though, this is problematic.  We see God’s grace, the enactment of His love that works for our salvation, not as “irresistible” (as the Synod of Dort put it) but as a gift.  Certainly, it is a gift that must be received with joy, unwrapped, and used, but an undeserved gift nonetheless.

In some ways, this concept bears a closer family resemblance to the Orthodox spiritual tradition than the Western.  The Eastern notion of theosis, of becoming God-like, is quite akin to the Wesleyan emphasis on holiness/sanctification and our somewhat unique doctrine of Christian perfection.  The East tells us, “God became man so that man might become God.”  This is stronger than, say, John Wesley would put it, but expresses essentially the same activity.

But then I’ve been reading Barth, and Barth, with the Reformed tradition from which he came, emphasizes the initiative of God over the work of humanity.  Known for his rabid christocentrism, Barth, like Bonhoeffer, is not friendly to the pietist tradition (kissing cousins to us Wesleyans) which he sees as a kind of semi-Pelagianism.  I love Barth’s project (though I am an amateur Barthian), but I’ve been concerned over how to gel this with Methodist theology.

Only an intellectually restless recent seminary grad like myself would worry about this, but, well, it drives me crazy when things don’t fit together.  So I’m working on it.  They say “build a bridge and get over it.”  I think this Augustine quote is a step in that direction, a good sized piece of that bridge.  I find it profoundly helpful for Augustine, the (perhaps misused) great-granddaddy of Reformed theology, to be expressing so clearly a sense of grace that works with us rather than arbitrarily on us.

Wesleyans would call this “cooperative grace.”  In other words, grace that must be enacted, lived; it is essentially the act of receiving a gift (the giver of the gift is the prime actor, and the gift cannot come from oneself – but still, the gift can be rejected).  Gifts, afterall, can be abused, forgotten, tossed aside, or trampled upon.

So it is with grace.  God will not save us against our will; He loves us enough to let us have our way, even if it is harmful to us.  (Think of God’s “hardening the hearts” of various characters throughout the Scripture.)  No, “God doesn’t justify you without you.”  Randy Maddox, probably the greatest Methodist theologian working today – and one of my teachers – calls this “Responsible Grace.“  The response matters.  It is a small part – but it is our portion.
Thank you, Augustine.  Bite me, John Piper.  Amen.