Archive: Redeeming Our Witness

…We have not been faithful stewards of the legacy entrusted to us, and the United Methodist witness is at risk.

By John Leith

The following article is adapted from an address by Dr. John H. Leith given June 9, 1989, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a gathering of Presbyterians, sponsored by the Covenant Fellowship of Presbyterians and Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns. The content is amazingly relevant for United Methodists.

Many of us here this morning could as easily change our names as we could our church identities. We have devoted much of our lives to the work of the Presbyterian Church. Within our Christian or catholic identities, and within our Protestant identities, we are convinced that the Presbyterian way of being Christian has its own validity and, in the providence of God, has enriched both human society and the one holy catholic Church.

The negative side of these positive convictions is our concern that the decline or loss of the Presbyterian way of being Christian will greatly impoverish the catholic Church and will put at risk some of the most precious qualities of American society.

Today we seem to be faltering in our capacity to hand on the faith which has been entrusted to us. And there is considerable evidence we have not been faithful stewards of the institutions, endowments, programs, and congregations which have been entrusted to us.

In a few minutes this morning, let us review at least some of the dimensions of a recovery of our Presbyterian (read “United Methodist”) witness in American society today.

The Presbyterian witness in the world today is at risk on many fronts. The centers of danger which require our attention include, in my judgment, the following concerns:

First, the church is at risk because of heresy. Heresy is an ugly word. The fundamentalist-liberal battles, theological acrimony, have been in many instances personally repulsive and counter-productive in the work of the church. The consequence is a culture in which faith and doctrine are subordinate to civility, with its implicit assumption that doctrinal differences do not matter.

In the church, too, we hesitate to raise the question of personal commitment on basic Christian doctrines when calling a pastor, executive, or seminary professor. The assumption of civility is that these beliefs can be taken for granted. Perhaps this was once the case. But times have changed, and basic Christian doctrines are at risk in our society.

There has never been a lively church which did not firmly believe that the Bible is the Word of God written, that Jesus Christ is the Word of God incarnate, and that what God did in Jesus Christ in bearing our sins on the cross and in raising Him from the dead is of crucial significance, not only for Christians but for all people in the world.

More specifically, the doctrines which are at risk in the life of the Church, theological education, and our society today are at least the following:

The first is the reality of God as personal, One Who acts purposefully in the created order.

The second is the knowledge of God. Has God really made Himself known? Is Jesus Christ really the disclosure of God? Is Jesus Christ of the same substance, the same reality as God? The Nicene Creed, it seems to me, is very much at risk today.

The third doctrine which is at risk is the significance of what God did in Jesus Christ. The Christian community has believed that the forgiveness of sins was not simple, and neither was the renewal of life. The church has always affirmed that what happened in Jesus Christ is God’s decisive act for human salvation. This has been the reason for world missions—not primarily to provide medical doctors, to educate people, or to teach new methods of agriculture, but to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Having proclaimed the Gospel, Christians then sent forth doctors, nutritionists, agriculturalists, teachers.

The fourth doctrine that is at risk is the resurrection of Jesus Christ as a historical fact. The Resurrection is not historical in the sense that it arises out of history but in the sense that the disciples, using the language of human experience to describe an event that transcends ordinary existence, saw, recognized, and heard the crucified Christ risen from the dead Who commissioned them to go forth to teach and to baptize in His name. The Resurrection is the basis for the disciples’ faith, not the result of their faith.

A fifth doctrine which is at risk is eternal life. Long ago Ambassador Bohlen and Ambassador George Kennan suggested that communism would have a limited history because it did not adequately answer the question of death. There is, Kennan once said, nothing more dreary in all the world than a communist funeral, where the meaninglessness of life is expounded by the meaninglessness of death. Yet in recent years the theological community and even the church have spoken on this doctrine with muted voices.

The renewal of the church, on the human level, depends on hearing the Word of God. This means that what is believed, taught, and confessed takes priority over everything else in the historical life of the church. When belief is corrupted there is no possibility of renewal. The preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is the greatest service the church renders the world.

Second, the church is at risk because it has given priority to derivative, secondary activities. Church people have lost the awareness that the reality and the unity of the church are established by hearing the Word of God. The one thing that is essential for the church we must give priority to those activities by which the church lives—namely, preaching the Gospel, teaching the Gospel, and exercising pastoral care (by which I do not mean therapy but the incorporation of people into the life of the community of faith). The church engages in many other useful activities (such as its social witness), but these are derivative and secondary to the Gospel. They are not the activities by which the church lives.

The issue is not personal piety versus a public agenda. The issue is the integrity of the church as a worshiping, believing fellowship which lives by the preaching and teaching of the Word of God and the exercise of pastoral care in the light of it. Out of the hearing of the Word, out of the worshiping community, good deeds flow. As Herbert Butterfield observed, the church has influenced the world the most when its first concern was the salvation of souls.

The crucial problem in the life of the church today is the priority it gives to church activities which are derivative, and the secondary importance the church ascribes to those activities by which the church lives.

Third, the church is at risk because of its lost awareness of its nature as the people of God, the priesthood of believers. The place where the church is most present is the gathering of a congregation to hear the Word of God and to receive the sacraments. The church is the people.

The church as the people is put at risk by the rise of a church bureaucracy, largely the development of the last century in Protestantism, and even more of the past three or four decades. As Martin Luther declared in the 16th century, the church is not the curia. Today we must equally say the church is not the organization. The church is the community which hears the Word of God, which gathers for worship, baptizes children, and teaches the faith. Out of this community many good things flow into political, cultural, and social life. A church bureaucracy exists to enable the people who are the church to do the work of the church.

The rise of a bureaucracy and a committee and process system that consume enormous resources of the church creates a very different situation in the church; for in the church, productivity, measured in terms of new members, new congregations, and contributions, has gone down. In the church as well as in life generally, you cannot consume what you do not produce, at least not indefinitely.

The church as the people of God has also been put at risk, strangely enough, by the passionate commitment of the leaders of the church to the so-called representational principle, or to inclusivism. Inclusivism cannot be exempted from careful scrutiny. First, inclusivism seems to be selectively practiced. Even among advocates of inclusivism, there has been no apparent zeal to apply the doctrine to the over-representation of nuclear families on boards or to the long-term membership on committees of advocates of inclusivism. The place where inclusivism ought to begin, one would think, is the limitation of one person in a family on a church board and considerable modesty about how long one should serve on boards. Inclusivism is not applied to political, economic, social, and theological views. It gives scant attention to older people and to those who do the actual work of maintaining local congregations.

Second, inclusivism is not the only virtue, and certainly not the supreme virtue, in the life of the church. There is nothing I know in the New Testament that justifies the doctrine of inclusivism as currently practiced in the Presbyterian (United Methodist) Church. In selecting persons for church committees, there is better New Testament and theological wisdom in ordering the priorities, perhaps something like this:

First, a member of a church committee or a staff person must be one who is personally committed to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. The second qualification is a documentable record of building up the church—in the gathering of congregations, the enhancement of the communion of saints, and leadership in and the practice of stewardship. The third qualification for membership on a board is the highest competence available in the church to perform the work of that committee.

After these qualifications have been met the church rightly should be concerned about geography, gender, race, ethnicity, economics, and social representation.

The simple fact is the church does not adequately utilize its ablest lawyers, medical doctors, business people, and politicians who are also very active in the work of the local church. In the church, as in society, mediocrity breeds mediocrity.

Third, the church as the people of God is at risk from the new attempt of the church organization to be coercive. This takes three forms. The first is the changed character of the Book of Order (same as our Book of Discipline) from principles and minimal requirements to a manual of operations. The Reformation repudiated canon law as a violation of the gospel and the nature of the church, but the new Book of Order and the Directory of Worship (Book of Worship) have the appearance of canon law, which is coming to have a more pervasive role in the church than the confessions and, more importantly, the gospel.

The second form of coerciveness is a proliferation of committee structures and a new emphasis on processes. This complicates what used to be relatively simple actions, from organizing a church, to candidacy for the ministry, to calling a pastor. There is no convincing evidence that the new processes have organized more churches, produced better candidates for the ministry, or increased the effectiveness of calling pastors.

Coerciveness is, in the third place, exacerbated by inattention to the experience, competence, and wisdom of persons who are placed on committees or given authority in the organization over other people and congregations. You could be sure 30 years ago that the committee on the work of the minister had the most experienced and wisest persons in the presbytery (annual conference), but it appears to me that this is far from the situation today.

The church is a voluntary organization and it lives, humanly speaking, by moral suasion. The church does not have an IRS or a marine corp. Until those who have organizational authority and who serve on committees, until church governing bodies, take the voluntary nature of the church seriously, the church will continue to decline. A fundamentalism of the Book of Order will not be any more effective than fundamentalism in theology was.

Fourth, the church is at risk by the decline of witness and work in education. One documentable fact is the decline of the church, or the Sunday school. A second documentable fact is the secularization of public education. But the point which I wish to emphasize is the tragic loss of our church colleges.

Presbyterians and Reformed people pioneered in establishing the institutions which are now the elite of American education. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other such institutions, which were once dominated by Christian—even Reformed—leadership, and which had as one of their purposes the establishment of a Christian ministry and the training of Christian people for life in society, are now among the most secular and secularizing institutions in our society. The rapid increase in the secularization of these institutions in the last 30 years is frightening. This secularization becomes all the more significant in the light of the arrogance of educational institutions which are as relentless in restricting, even with violence, dissenting views as the medieval church ever was.

More to our purpose is the loss of the church character of church colleges which, three or four colleges less and less make this witness or render this service. The church commitments of these colleges increasingly seem to be an embarrassment, and many of these colleges now are simply secular liberal arts institutions which make a vague commitment to Judeo-Christian values. These values are difficult to identify or define apart from faith.

The educational institution most crucial to the church is the seminary. Every seminary appointment influences for better or worse the number of people who worship God in local congregations. The church has the responsibility to insist that seminaries produce graduates who can preach, teach, and exercise pastoral care so as to gather congregations and nurture them in the faith of the church.

Seminaries have a built-in tendency to become institutes for the advanced study of religion, social action, or therapy. There is evidence of an increasing tendency for seminary faculties to be determined more by the graduate schools of secular universities than by the community of faith which they serve.

The church must keep the seminaries honest by insisting that their first responsibility is preparing persons who can gather congregations and build up the communion of saints in the small towns, rural areas, and cities of America.

In answering the challenge, it is crucial that we take our stand in the classic commitments of our faith.

There is no way from pluralism to the Christian conviction that the Word became flesh, from the Enlightenment notion that we cannot know God to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, from political action or therapy to the saving work of Jesus Christ. If we allow the pluralists, the humanists, the political activists, and the therapists to entice us to work on their turf, we shall lose—that is, we shall not build churches.

We have been bequeathed a great heritage. During the last three centuries, in the midst of their poverty, Presbyterians built congregations, colleges, and seminaries and provided the basic means to preach the gospel at home and abroad.

Some of them knew in literal truth the meaning of Luther’s hymn, “Let goods and kindred go, This mortal life also; The body they may kill; God’s truth abideth still; His kingdom is forever.”

John Leith is a professor at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia.