Archive: If morning is to come

By Earl G. Hunt Jr. (1918-2005)

Good News
May/June 1979

The Tennessee Annual Conference, after careful review and evaluation of statistics submitted from the six districts, will show a very substantial membership loss for last conference year, continuing a tragic trend which began at least 14 years ago and has projected itself across two episcopal administrations…. We have now shown a net loss, since 1964, of enough people to compose four congregations the size of the largest United Methodist church in the state of Tennessee. No annual conference can stand such very long. … What is the explanation of our predicament?

We may have allowed the deep, historic meaning of most of our big words in religion to become so tragically eroded that they are little more than what William James used to call “bloated absolutes.” One of these, by our own deliberate willfulness, is “evangelism.” Others – more important – are its components: “sin,” “salvation,” “faith,” etc.

Our allusions to these fundamental terms of the gospel, at best, are usually abstractly theological or innocently literary – rarely probingly personal. This is surely one reason why the eleven o’clock worship service, as the late Samuel Miller put it, is almost supremely “a place where the bankruptcy of modern ecclesiasticism is apparent.” One can scarcely imagine any individual receiving what Paul Tillich called an “ontological shock” in a church service. Oftentimes its content and impact are more akin to what Soren Kierkegaard once described as “twaddle.” The raw naked power of a gospel, so revolutionary that its transcendent force is unpredictable and uncontrollable, is simply absent at the eleven o’clock hour on Sunday morning in most of our churches. It is a tragic thing when a man or woman can be more deeply moved spiritually by an occasional book or motion picture than by a service of worship.

When Time magazine, a few years ago, commented upon the nomination of Dr. Donald Coggan, famous preacher and evangelical, to be the 101st Archbishop of Canterbury, it reminded readers that Dr. Michael Ramsey, the incumbent Primate who was soon to retire, had been an ecumenist and theologian but never, under any circumstances, an evangelist. My only contact with Archbishop Ramsey was an accidental conversation in the Westminster Abbey bookshop in London two years ago, and I would not judge him. But, my God, how could a responsible minister fail to compel himself to be an evangelist in a land where the whole of society seems to be moving persistently and proudly away from God and Christianity?

In an address which I was privileged to deliver some time ago at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., I undertook to gather up the present situation in the Christian community under four headings: pendulum trouble, charismatic confusion, principalities and powers, and apocalyptic apoplexy.

I do not mean to revise my thought about these problem areas when I insist that there may be an overarching prior difficulty in the Christian Church today. I refer to the devastating possibility that many of us, ordained and unordained, have been unable to retain enough of the gospel in our own secularized minds and spirits to have anything significant to share with others in a world of lost human beings.

Neither humanism nor a humanistic view of Jesus Christ and the gospel will save a sinful person. Careful theological footwork designed to skirt the rational perils of unabashed supernaturalism can result only in the proclamation of philosophical and ethical platitudes instead of the preaching of the Everlasting Mercy.

The real reason why people do not find God in our churches may well be that those of us who lead in the congregations, both from the pulpit and the pew, have not ourselves surrendered wholly to the redemptive wonder of the Christian message and the control of the Holy Spirit!

It may be time for us to recognize again, as Dr. George Docherty pointed out in his book One Way of Living, that “The Bible itself becomes immediately meaningful to committed people however untutored and unlettered, while the uncommitted who are wise in their wisdom tragically fail to understand God’s Word.” The Scriptures and the mysteries of the gospel are intelligible only to those who know God, for these matters have to do with believers, and only believers can comprehend them.

What I am saying is blunt and elemental – and perhaps certain to arouse the ire of those who do not wish to hear it: for God’s sake, get your own life and heart right with your Redeemer! Go back to the springs of your faith and drink deeply of their refreshing and renewing waters. Review the fundamentals; preach and testify about them. Then will something thrilling happen in your Sunday morning church service. Then will troubled, frightened, lost people – faltering and stumbling in the sophisticated darkness of the 70s – see a great Light and know the salvation of their Lord!

I dare to ask it again: do you really have a gospel to share? Getting one is the only effective answer to the evangelistic problem.

Regarding preaching, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, writing in the July, 1928 issue of Harper’s Magazine, said a basic thing in a manner which the passing of the years has not changed: “Preaching is wrestling with individuals over questions of life and death, and until that idea of it commands a preacher’s mind and method, eloquence will avail him little and theology not at all. I suggest five prerequisites to effective preaching in pulpits large or small:

1. A personal knowledge of the living God and his gospel.
2. Love for human beings – even the unlovely.
3. Hard, grueling work.
4. A terrible, frightening urgency.
5. Believing prayer.”

More than anything else, lay people in this annual conference have said to me that they want preachers. I have observed that where I have been able to send a person with an exciting spiritual message into a local situation, there the people still attend church with remarkable fidelity. And, as Bishop Armstrong likes to say, they “pay the rent” with gladness and generosity.

The late great Yale historian, Dr. Kenneth Scott Latourette, one of the authentic Christian saints of the 20th century, used to speak of the manner in which God “sent his whisper” through him. This sums up, for me at least, much of the thrill of the call I felt from my Lord more than three-and-a-half decades ago. And I am confident that most of the ministers here would share the same sensitive response to Dr. Latourette’s poetic clause.

What I am really pleading for is a recovery of faith among those of us who are ordained. For I believe that the renewal of the church and its ministry has to begin with you and me. We have to know the living Lord in the freshness of a new experience and assurance before we possess the fundamental credential for preaching.

Peter, the simple fisherman, cried out: “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke 5:8). As Dr Leslie Weatherhead said in his book Time For God, “When that strange, awesome sense of the numinous does fall upon the spirit, it is far more compelling and convincing about the reality of God’s existence than are any intellectual arguments, valuable though these may be. It is as though one glimpsed on a Swiss holiday, for only a few moments, the shining, snowclad peaks. Days of rain and mist may follow and the weather make the view as depressing as Bloomsbury in a November fog. But one knows the peaks are there!”

God help this indispensable inner certainty to come to us again and afresh. And then God help us to share it excitingly. George Ade, the famous humorist, said one time, ‘‘The music teacher came twice each week to bridge the awful gap between Dorothy and Chopin!” So the whole event of preaching is designed to be a vehicle through which the Spirit of God may bridge a greater gap between the natural person and the spiritual person.

If the content of our faith is flimsy and unsure, then we have little to preach and it is mockery to ask the Holy Spirit to bless our shallow homilies. If we allow ourselves to be lured away from safe harbors by every new and novel wind of doctrine, then surely we are unfit to serve as spiritual guides for others.

To preach in this age calls for discriminating and discerning knowledgeableness: the will to grasp the meaning of new theological thought and to comprehend what the consequences of such thought may prove to be. It means sorting out a little wheat from a lot of chaff in today’s funny-looking theological granary, and being willing to rephrase the Church’s gospel and restyle its strategy without abandoning its message or compromising its mission.

To preach today means constructing with persistent sensitivity an image of the minister which can survive the ruthless scrutiny of a new and cynical age – an image based on impeccable integrity instead of superficial piety, on candid awareness rather than what someone has called naive “nincompoopery,” on sureness of God and not clever intellectual gymnastics.

The minister who needlessly violates hospital visiting regulations, who invades a family rather than visits it, who feels an audible prayer coming on at some terribly inappropriate moment, who asks for a discount and hints for poundings [a voluntary shower of food gifts traditionally offered to parsonage families in some parts of the country], who faces his daily task with a frockcoated pomposity which is little more than ordained hypocrisy, who tries with conspicuous indirection to inflate his own salary, who has the flagrant dishonesty to parade his personal peeves across the sacred terrain of a pulpit and under the banner of a biblical text – his name is anathema! He is one eloquent reason why the Church perishes for want of renewal in our time!

My challenge to all of us who break “the bread of life” is that we shall be willing, next conference year, to pay the terrible price involved in becoming better preachers than we have ever been before! Then will our churches be filled to overflowing with hungry people; then will the Holy Spirit visit our preaching with redeeming power; then will “Heaven come down our souls to greet, And glory crown the mercy seat.”

“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead and Christ shall give thee light!” As a boy preacher, I used this thrilling text from Ephesians the first time I ever spoke before a district conference. My dreams were young and my visions fresh in those days. The Church was not an earthly organization to me, but the far-flung fellowship of the Lord’s Redeemed. I had known the pardon of my own sin, and the gospel held my soul in enraptured wonder. Everything, everything was to know God’s will – and I doubted not that my frail human effort to do that will would be touched with heaven’s power and so become a modern miracle in the world where I was a pilgrim.

My faith was childlike, and some will say altogether too simplistic. But the lengthening trail of the years with its educational opportunity and exciting ministries has never revealed an adequate motivational substitute for the spiritual ecstasy of that sunrise period of my life. If morning is to come, perhaps you and I need to approach again the altars of our hearts and ask for the restoration of the “blessedness we knew when first we saw the Lord.”

The future of the Tennessee Conference, under God, is as bright as the dawning and as hopeful as the message of Jesus Christ. The gospel is inexhaustible. Arthur John Gossip was constantly reminding young ministers that the Christian faith is not a little pond around which they may stroll for half an hour and then say, ‘‘There it is, you see.” Instead, it is a tremendous shoreless sea, reaching far beyond our poor human capacity ever to search it all out.

God forgive us that we enter so hesitantly into the mystery and glory of the Christian promises, and thus fail to appropriate the limitless power which the Lord God Almighty has placed at the disposal of those who will believe in him and accept his son as Savior.

Someone asked a preacher, “Which way is progress?” The preacher replied, “Sometimes it is backwards.” The man persisted, “When is progress backwards?” He received the answer, “Progress is backwards when you have wandered away from home.”

I invite you, my brothers and sisters in Christ, to join me in a pilgrimage back to our spiritual hearthside and then into the morning of new labors in God’s vineyard, remembering the relationship to which Charles Wesley referred long ago:

Arise, my soul, arise;

Shake off thy guilty fears;

The bleeding sacrifice

In my behalf appears;

Before the throne my surety stands,

Before the throne my surety stands,

My name is written on His hands.

Earl G. Hunt (1918-2005) was a United Methodist bishop for 245 years before retiring in 1988. He was the keynote speaker at the 1976 World Methodist Conference in Dublin, Ireland in 1976. In retirement, Hunt served as president of the Foundation for Evangelism.

This sermon was preached to the Tennessee Annual Conference and is published here with permission.