by Steve | Mar 17, 2020 | Magazine, Magazine Articles, March/April 2020
By Chris Ritter –
The opening of the 2019 United Methodist General Conference in St. Louis. Photo by Kathleen Barry, UM News.
There is good reason to believe that the United Methodist Separation Protocol will be approved early at the 2020 General Conference and today’s United Methodist denomination will give way to two separate churches, each different from anything we have previously known. While it is possible additional options may surface, I believe most congregations and conferences will choose between one of two oxymorons: A New Traditional Methodist Church and a Post-Separation United Methodist Church. We will all take part in fleshing out what these curious descriptions will ultimately mean.
There is ample evidence accumulated over the years about the shape of a United Methodist Church no longer frustrated with organized Traditionalist interference. The Post-Separation UM Church in America aspires to be connected globally but governed separately as a U.S. mainline denomination. It will be open, permissive, and institutional. It will embrace theological pluralism on a scale the UM Church never could and will take the quest for social justice and diversity as its unifying paradigm.
There are things that I would love about continuing to serve in the institutional UM Church. But my First Love calls me alongside those who will begin figuring out what “new traditional” means. Glimpses of the future have surfaced here and there, including the draft Book of Doctrines and Discipline offered by the Wesleyan Covenant Association. But more voices must come to the table to give this task the justice it deserves. What we shall be has not yet been revealed. For now I can only share my hopes.
I hope the new church is all about Jesus: His lordship, his gospel, his message, his cross, his resurrection, his transforming power, and his coming kingdom. I hope it is never about anything else. I hope we proclaim the Jesus prophesied in the Old Testament, revealed in the New Testament, and proclaimed in the classic creeds.
I hope we are charismatic in the highest and best definition of that word. I hope the Holy Spirit fills us with a fresh Pentecost so that our gospel consists not only in words but in power. I hope our sons and daughters prophesy and our seasoned saints continue to dream dreams.
I hope we are a praying church, not just a church that prays. I hope we are a worthy of the great heritage of prayer left to us by folks like Susannah Wesley, E. Stanley Jones, and E.M. Bounds.
I hope we always find ourselves in humble awe as we gather at the table of the Lord. I hope we never lose the joy and calling of our baptism. I hope we worship deeply, richly, joyfully, and sacrificially.
I hope we are a singing and song-writing church. I hope Charles Wesley and Fanny Crosby smile down from Heaven on a whole generation of artists inspired by and inspiring the work of God happening around them.
I hope we confess our sins to one another and hold one another accountable in love. I hope we recover small groups such as bands, class meetings, and other forms of intentional discipleship. I hope we break free of the gravity of shallow consumer Christianity.
I hope we are global. I hope we are African, European, Asian, and North American. I hope autonomous churches in Puerto Rico, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, and South America help us comprise something completely new. I hope elements of Evangelical British Methodism will find their way to a place of close fellowship.
I hope we are conspicuously multi-ethnic here in the U.S. I hope it happens inevitably as we lift up Jesus together. I hope the new traditional church is a home for African Americans, Koreans, Hispanics, Pacific Islanders, and newer immigrants communities coming to the U.S. I hope we creatively conference together so as to maximize our impact in diverse communities and prosper our collective witness.
I hope there is no Board of Missions because the whole church is mission. I hope there is no Board of Evangelism because the whole church is evangelism. I hope there is no Social Witness Board because the church itself is the living embodiment of social holiness.
I hope the church embraces education and life-long learning. I hope we have the best minds in Wesleyan theological scholarship and do not make a golden calf of institutional education as the sum of the preparation needed by our clergy.
I hope we have a strong “culture of call” and that the clergy union gives way to pure servant leadership. I hope the best and the brightest of our young people answer Jesus by giving themselves away in ministry. I hope our current gifted young evangelical clergy are filled with holy boldness to lead.
I hope we produce pastors from shift workers, Ivy League faculties, the recovery community, second career people, and former prostitutes.
I hope we are the church of bishops who are apostolic shepherds, prophetic and scholarly with missionary hearts. We need bishops who are truth-tellers and ministry strategists. I hope all our bishops maintain laser-like focus on equipping healthy local churches to aim them outward toward their communities.
I hope local pastors and bi-vocational pastors are fully recognized and empowered for ministry. I hope the hard categories of laity and clergy become more and more blurred as we are all in ministry together.
I hope we plant three new churches a day to make up for the losses we have experienced since we planted two a day in a different era. I hope we are worthy heirs in evangelism to Phoebe Palmer, Harry Denman, Francis Asbury, Martin Boehm, and Peter Cartwright.
I hope our conference meetings are like revivals. I hope our iron sharpens iron. I hope we quickly abandon habits that do not produce fruit. I hope we fast and lay prostrate before the Lord when we don’t know what to do. I hope matters of structure and strategy are always kept as secondary concerns.
I hope the Methodist social witness will find a fresh flowering as we give voice and flesh to Wesleyan faith and practice in the larger marketplace of ideas and values.
I hope we repent when we mess things up. I hope we never hit the snooze button when the Holy Spirit tries to awaken us to new opportunities. I hope we resist the trappings and comfort of nationalism. I hope prophetic voices are not kept out in the wilderness.
I hope our large church pastors are honored as ministry pioneers and not looked upon with suspicion. I hope micro and mega churches alike successfully reproduce healthy DNA in new locations.
I hope we sell what we have and give to the poor. I hope we adopt and foster kids who need a home. I hope warm-hearted pro-life beliefs are matched with practical assistance to those who are struggling. I hope we welcome the sojourner and stranger. I hope we are a place of welcome and healing for the broken, the outcast, and the afflicted.
And I hope we engage more deeply with the LGBTQ community. I hope we stop arguing over what we believe and begin serious missiological reflection and action based on those beliefs. I hope the battered and broken refugees of the sexual revolution find a home with us.
I hope we don’t react so strongly against what was wrong with the UM Church that we lose what was right. I hope we don’t try so hard to prove what we are not that we miss claiming who God is calling us now to be. I hope we don’t succumb to the temptation of replacing all the comfortable structures we are leaving behind.
I hope we can forgive and bless our brothers and sisters in the post-separation UM Church so they, too, can move forward with their own hopes and dreams. To borrow from President Abraham Lincoln, who said in a different historical context, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right…”
As we are the ones that will be separating, I hope we leave well – and not look back. And I hope we begin well, too. It is time to build and that’s kind of exciting.
Chris Ritter is the directing Pastor of Geneseo First United Methodist Church in Illinois and the author of Seven Things John Wesley Expected Us to do for Kids (Abingdon 2016). This article first appeared on Dr. Ritter’s blog peopleneedjesus.net.
![Spiritual Warfare and Tying up the Strong Man]()
by Steve | Mar 17, 2020 | Magazine, Magazine Articles, March/April 2020
By David F. Watson –
“Saint Anthony Abbot Tempted by a Heap of Gold,” Tempera on panel painting by the Master of the Osservanza Triptych, ca. 1435, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wikipedia Commons.
Several years ago a student stopped me in the seminary hallway. “Brother, will you pray for me?” he asked. “I’m under spiritual attack.”
I now look back on that day with regret. I didn’t take him seriously. I said something to appease him and went on my way. Spiritual attack? Well… okay… sure. I’ll pray for you. I wish I had laid hands on him, prayed in that moment, and continued in prayer for him thereafter. Indeed, this student was under spiritual attack. At the time, however, I didn’t have the theological framework to take seriously what he was asking.
In short, I blew it, and I should have known better. After all, I’d spent the previous ten years working on the Gospel of Mark.
Plundering Satan’s house. Mark is very clear about the purpose of Jesus’ ministry: he has come to defeat Satan. In chapter 3, the scribes accuse Jesus of performing his great deeds by the power of Satan. “He has Beelzebul,” they say, “and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons” (3:22). “Beelzebul” was originally a Philistine deity (derived from Baal), which Jews associated with Satan. Jesus points out the obvious flaw in their argument: “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come (3:23-26).” In other words, he asks, why would someone empowered by Satan cast out Satan’s minions? To use a modern idiom, why would Satan shoot himself in the foot?
Jesus then describes his own work as follows: “No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered” (3:27). Jesus has come to plunder what Satan – the “strong man” – has taken. The work of Jesus’ ministry is effectively to bind up Satan and his demons, and then to recover the lives that Satan has claimed. This will happen first by exorcism, healing, teaching, and the gathering of a movement around him. The ultimate victory, however, will come through the cross and resurrection. From start to finish, Jesus’ ministry involves tying up the strong man and plundering his house.
Cosmic powers of this present darkness. Scripture teaches us that Jesus has dealt Satan a death blow, but Satan continues to fight in the lead up to his inevitable demise. Our reality, then, is one of spiritual warfare. Mainline Protestants don’t talk very much about spiritual warfare. It has to it the ring of words that belong to a Christian dialect not quite our own. Yet if the mission of the church is a continuation of the mission of Jesus, then spiritual warfare should be a part of our life. Like Jesus, we are engaged in a battle with the spiritual forces of wickedness. The Letter to the Ephesians is quite clear about this: “Our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (6:12). There are spiritual realities, says Paul, that lie behind the evil that we encounter in this world.
This is the reality disclosed to us in the Revelation to John. Yes, John inists, there are forces in this world that oppose the kingdom of God, but behind their worldly power lies another power. The two beasts in Revelation 13 allude to the Roman Empire and the imperial cult. They seem overwhelmingly powerful. “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?” (13:4). Yet the power they exert against the church is not their own. It comes from the dragon, whom John identifies as Satan (12:9; 13:2,4). They draw upon a transcendent reality, the “cosmic powers of this present darkness,” “spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places.”
Those same powers are at work today, only in different guises. There are Romes beyond Rome. There are idols beyond the emperor and his cult. We cannot defeat these in our own strength. To win a spiritual battle, we must use spiritual weapons. The people of God have always faced enticements to idolatry. We will do so until Christ returns. The names and faces of our idols may change, but the power behind them does not.
The “immanent frame.” Over time, we in the West have largely lost sight of the fact that there is a transcendent world that comes to bear on our lives. Philosopher Charles Taylor describes the modern Western perspective as the “immanent frame.” This is a very complex idea, but, to summarize briefly, Taylor argues that our primary means of engaging the world today is one of “immanence,” rather than “transcendence.” Put more simply, we function on the basis of what we can see and touch. We understand ourselves and the world around us as something we make. We don’t really see ourselves as being under the influence of spiritual beings. Instead, we emphasize our own skill and understanding.
Moreover, Taylor argues, we might actually be quite religious and still function according to the immanent frame. In other words, we might profess belief in supernatural powers, and we might even believe we believe these things. Yet our basic decisions are not affected by them. We go about our days with expectations and decisions that take no account of what might be happening in a spiritual realm. The beliefs we profess have not sunk deeply enough into our thinking to have any real power in our lives. If we really want to move beyond the immanent frame, we have to retrain our minds.
Biblical scholar Michael S. Heiser talks in his book The Unseen Realm (Lexham Press, 2015) about the importance of reading biblical texts as if the transcendent realities they disclose are actually true. Speaking personally, he writes, “The realization that I needed to read the Bible like a premodern person who embraced the supernatural, unseen world has illumined its content more than anything else in my academic life.” One of the key principles for biblical interpretation that Heiser suggests is, “Let the Bible be what it is, and be open to the notion that what is says about the unseen realm might just be real.”
I would take things a step further. We should not only be open to the notion that what the Bible says about the unseen realm is real, but actively imagine our own lives in light of the supernatural reality the Bible portrays. For a good part of my life, I read the biblical texts not with an attitude of overt rejection of its supernatural worldview, but simply with a kind of unconscious detachment from the cosmos it envisions. Angels? Demons? Satan? Sure… I supposed they were real, but my world was really within an immanent frame. These concepts did no heavy lifting for me. My expectations were almost entirely this-worldly. As I began to imagine an unseen realm coming to bear on my life, however, my expectations began to change. I began to see the goings-on in my life from a different perspective.
Discernment matters. Of course it is possible to take the idea of spiritual warfare too far. We need not abandon our critical faculties as we begin to take seriously the spiritual realities of the unseen realm. Our problem may not be unbelief or a lack of expectation, but an unreasoned fanaticism. Have you ever known someone for whom it seemed like everything happened because of the devil? Sometimes the reasons for things are quite mundane. If I forget to set my alarm and miss a meeting, it’s probably because I was careless, distracted, or tired, rather than because of some spiritual attack. To be wise in spiritual matters is to exercise discernment, a trait that comes from spiritual maturity. Spiritual maturity, in turn, comes from a life of prayer, accountability to other believers, receiving the sacrament, and engagement with other means of grace. As we grow up in our faith we become more discerning with regard to the spiritual goings-on around us.
The weapons of our warfare. In Ephesians 6:10-17, Paul describes what we must do in order to “stand firm” on behalf of Christ. In speaking of the “whole armor of God,” he draws upon military imagery to speak of spiritual realities. “Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” Truth, righteousness, the gospel of peace, faith, salvation, and the word of God empower the Christian to do battle against the spiritual forces of evil. To the extent that we neglect these, we become ever more vulnerable. To the extent that we nurture them, we grow in the power of God.
Learning from an ancient master. Athanasius’s Life of St. Antony is a classic Christian text on spiritual warfare. Antony was a monk of the third and fourth centuries who is sometimes credited as the first of the desert fathers and mothers. If he was not actually the first, he was at least quite early. A key theme of the Life is that Antony has withdrawn, but he has not retreated. He is no longer subject to the temptations of life in society, such as sensual pleasures. These simply aren’t available in the desert. Yet he is nonetheless tempted because the desert is the haunt of Satan and his demons, and thus his engagement with the demonic is much more direct than it would have been had he remained in town.
On the reality of the demonic, Antony reiterates the teaching of Ephesians 6:12: “[W]e have terrible and villainous enemies – the evil demons, and our contending is against these, as the Apostle said – not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. So the mob of them is great in the air around us, and they are not far from us.” Antony’s life of extreme asceticism and total devotion to God allows him to perceive spiritual realities that others cannot.
Antony teaches us that the primary weapons of demons are deception and evil thoughts. “But we need not fear their suggestions,” he says, “for by prayers and fasting and by faith in the Lord they are brought down immediately.” Christian piety is a strong defense against the wiles of the devil. Demons, he says, are nevertheless persistent in their attempts to mislead the faithful. In the face of their ongoing attacks we must remember that Christ has taken from them any true power. “And, like scorpions and snakes, he and his fellow demons have been put in a position to be trampled underfoot by us Christians. The evidence of this is that we now conduct our lives in opposition to him.”
We are able to stand against the demonic because Christ has empowered us to do so. The authority of the Christian is derivative of the authority of Christ. If we stay close to Christ, we continue to walk in his authority. As we drift away, we are ever more susceptible to schemes of our enemy.
In the last several years I have prayed many times that God would strengthen those who are under spiritual attack. Years ago I dropped the ball. I don’t plan to make the same mistake again. The unseen world is real. Angels are real. Demons are real. The power of Christ to stand against the wiles of the devil is real, and it is ours if we but ask.
David F. Watson is Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. His most recent book is Scripture and the Life of God: Why the Bible Matters Today More than Ever. He blogs at www.davidfwatson.me and is one of the hosts of “Plan Truth: A Holy Spirited Podcast.”
by Steve | Mar 17, 2020 | Magazine, Magazine Articles, March/April 2020
By Beth Felker Jones –
Composite image of southern Africa and the surrounding oceans captured by six orbits of the NASA/NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership spacecraft.
“And he showed me more, a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, on the palm of my hand, round like a ball. I looked at it thoughtfully and wondered, ‘What is this?’ And the answer came, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled that it continued to exist and did not suddenly disintegrate; it was so small. And again my mind supplied the answer, ‘It exists, both now and forever, because God loves it.’ In short, everything owes its existence to the love of God.”
These words are from Julian of Norwich, a medieval Christian who recorded a number of revelations of God’s love. The vision above, in which God shows “all that is made” to Julian in the form of “a little thing, the size of a hazelnut,” is one of the most well-known of Julian’s revelations. In light of this vision of creation’s fragility, of its utter dependence on God, Julian marvels that it exists at all, and she draws three truths from it.
The first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; and the third is that God sustains it.
In these elegant points, Julian sums up the Christian doctrine of creation, and she does so in a way that gets at both head and heart. The doctrine of creation is not first about the obvious trigger points in the contemporary North American conversation, and this means that we may require some retraining in order to practice the doctrine well. When we hear the word creation, we have been primed to expect either a tribute to nature or a scientific account of the origins of the universe.
We think of majestic wilderness and towering pines, or we think of evolution or dinosaurs or carbon dating. Christians may well have something to say about those things, but if we get hung up there, we miss the sweetness at the heart of the doctrine. Philosopher Janet Martin Soskice notes that “the biblical discussions of creation” are “concerned not so much with where the world came from as with who it came from, not so much with what kind of creation it was in the first place as with what kind of creation it was and is now.” The doctrine of creation is about the dependence of all things on God the Creator and, as Julian saw, the love the Creator bears for all that he has made.
This means that the doctrine of creation cannot begin with appreciation for natural beauty. Nor can it begin as a conversation with science. It must begin with the character of the God who is Creator, who made and loves and sustains all that is.
In relationship to creation, Christians tend to notice two things about the Triune God. First, God is not one of the things in this world, and so our doctrine about this world will have to take account of the unfathomable difference between it and God. God is utterly distinct from creation; that distinctiveness is behind the psalmist’s cry, “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Ps. 90:2).
Second, the same God who is not of this world is nonetheless intimately involved in it. Indeed, creation depends on God for its ongoing existence at every moment. The doctrine of creation is about God, and so our education about it should begin not with creation itself but with God’s revealing Word. It is not by studying butterflies or stars but “by faith [that] we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God” (Heb. 11:3). The Triune God is not some generic god, and our doctrine of creation will have to be about the relationship between creation and this Creator, the Creator who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “All things came into being through” the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, “and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:3).
This is the personal God who lives in personal relationship with creation. The doctrine of creation points us to faithful practice as creatures of a creator God, creatures who live in a world that exists for God’s loving purposes: “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (Eph. 2:10). We are created in Christ Jesus, and we are created for Christ Jesus: “For in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him” (Col. 1:16). Jesus is both the source and the purpose of creation. We live in a world that has a point, a world that matters. The good news that “all things” are “for him” has enormous implications for the Christian life.
God Made It: Creatio ex nihilo and the Power of God
Julian’s categories show that talk about the doctrine of creation is not limited to the beginning of all things – God’s original creative action in bringing all things into being – but Christian conversation certainly tends to start there. Scripture starts there too, as the familiar first line of Genesis invokes “the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). The first chapters of Genesis show us a world in which God has made all things. Those first chapters set up a way of thinking about the God who created all that is and about God’s relationship with creation. Old Testament scholar Sandra Richter sums up the theological vision of the creation story, highlighting its distinction from ancient Israel’s neighbors.
“Yahweh was a god unlike the others of the ancient Near East, one who stood outside and above his creation, a god for whom there were no rivals and who had created humanity as his children as opposed to his slaves,” she writes. “Thus I think Genesis 1 was intended as a rehearsal of the creation event (where else would you start the story?) with the all-controlling theological agenda of explaining who God is and what his relationship to creation (and specifically humanity) looked like.”
Not just the first chapter of Genesis but also the whole of Scripture points to this creator God. The testimony of Genesis is that of the end of the Bible as well, of the book of Revelation, which praises God with the words, “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created” (Rev. 4:11). God the Creator has no rivals, yet all that is was made to be in loving relationship with the same sovereign God.
In the Christian tradition, the phrase “creation out of nothing” (in Latin, creatio ex nihilo) synthesizes and affirms the biblical testimony pointing to the kind of act with which God first created everything. God created all that is, the summary phrase announces, out of nothing. The phrase invokes the unchallenged majesty of the creator God, without whom nothing exists or ever has existed. The phrase also points, then, to the truth that all that exists, the totality of creation, is God’s work and belongs to God. There are no exceptions. In the words of the Nicene Creed, “all that is, seen and unseen,” is God’s. The implications of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo can be better understood when we compare the doctrine to the false options that it excludes. If God created out of nothing, then God did not create out of something. Nor, if God created out of nothing, did God create out of his own divine being.
It is easy enough for us to think about acts of creation out of something. The sculptor creates from stone or clay, and the gods of Israel’s ancient Near Eastern neighbors were understood to create out of preexisting chaos or even out of the bodies of their slain enemies. Or, on certain understandings, a god might be understood to create from preexisting matter, from stuff that was already there alongside the god, primordial ooze or a hot, dense core of material that would later explode with a bang. The claim that God created, not out of something, but ex nihilo is a claim that nothing has status alongside God. The repeated testimony of Scripture is that only God is eternal; only God has no beginning; there is none like God.
To deny that God created out of preexisting stuff is to deny that anything, in all creation, has godlike status. In some ways, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is simply an implication of monotheism; it is one more way of affirming that “the LORD is our God, the LORD alone” (Deut. 6:4).
And because the doctrine of the Trinity is a deeper understanding of this core Old Testament reality, creatio ex nihilo is an implication of trinitarian theology as well. There is none like the Lord, none alongside him. The doctrine of creation denies that God created out of something – be it chaos or a sea dragon, primordial ooze or a hot, dense core – but it does not deny that God, having already created, then works in and with all sorts of created things. God’s initial act of creation is ex nihilo, but this does not preclude God’s working with and through that which he has created already. Christian thought has no problem with scientific theories about how creation works, but it cannot bear the idolatry of scientism, which would reduce creation to what can be seen and measured. A world that God created from nothing cannot be a world of bare materialism, bereft of divine reality. A world that God created from nothing cannot be the world of deism, in which God holds back, distant and standoffish, from what he has made. A world ex nihilo is, instead, a world full of God’s presence and power.
To deny that God creates out of his own divine being is to recognize the difference between God and creation. This difference is fundamental to Christian thought, and being reminded of it is the ongoing stuff of Christian life. We can imagine acts of creation out of one’s own being. Reproduction works as an analogy. An infant is formed from the stuff of her parents, hydras reproduce new hydras by budding, and both human babies and newly budded hydras are of the same species as their “creators.”
We could envision a god who fashioned creation out of his own being, making a creation that would itself be divine. The whole world as we see it in Scripture, though, which shows us the God who is more than we can conceive and beyond the things of this world, teaches us something else. So, Christian thought consistently rejects all forms of pantheism, the belief that the world is itself divine, and panentheism, the belief that God and the world are so bound together that God could not exist without the world. Christians see, instead, a measureless and qualitative distinction between Creator and creature, between God and all that has been created.
God is God, and we are not. This is another way in which affirmation of God as Creator ex nihilo is a reaffirmation of the biblical proscription against idolatry. Sinful human beings repeatedly confuse creature and Creator, treating the world as divine, exchanging “the truth about God for a lie” and worshiping and serving “the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom. 1:25), but the doctrine of creation trains us in another direction, reminding us that there is no god but God. The doctrine of creation affirms the goodness of what God has made, but it makes no allowance for nature cults and zero room for worshiping human beings and pursuing selfish human ends. The doctrine of creation puts Creator and created in their proper places, insisting that created good things are always dependent, always finite, and always subordinate to the Creator.
God does not need creation in order to be who God is; God is not lacking in love or goodness or relationship in any way that makes creation necessary. Theologian Stephen Long explicates, “God does not create because God is lonely. God does not create because God needs friends. God is not the lone patriarch, the strong silent type who secretly desires to ‘open up’ to us but cannot do so without our help. God does not create because God has to.” In this, we can appreciate a great gift. God creates, not because God needs us, but because God wants us. So, Rowan Williams asks us “to bend our minds around the admittedly tough notion that we exist because of an utterly unconditional generosity: The love that God shows in making the world, like the love he shows towards the world once it is created, has no shadow or shred of self-directed purpose in it; it is entirely and unreservedly given for our sake. It is not a concealed way for God to get something out of it for himself, because that would make nonsense of what we believe is God’s eternal nature.”
Creation is the overflowing of God’s goodness and love outside of God’s own life. Creation is excessive. Creation has all the characteristics of a good gift: it is freely given, without constraint; it is given in love for the other, without selfishness; it is not a grasping, grudging thing, with so many strings attached. Creation is the free work of an all-sufficient God of abundance, the God whose love and mercy is always more than we can imagine. Athanasius (c. 296-373) rejoices: “For God is good – or rather, of all goodness He is Fountainhead, and it is impossible for one who is good to be mean or grudging about anything. Grudging existence to none therefore, He made all things out of nothing through his own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ.” Creation is made for relationship with this gift-giving God, and “its basis,” says theologian Kathryn Tanner, is “in nothing but God’s free love for us. The proper starting point for considering our created nature is therefore grace.”
The doctrine of creation out of nothing is thus the Christian alternative to other possible ways of understanding the origins of all things. Christian faith is not pantheistic, nor does it subscribe to bare materialism or cold deism. Rather, Christians worship the God who is truly other than the world but, far from disdaining that world, inhabits it powerfully and personally. The God who creates ex nihilo is Lord over and lover of creation. The same God who made the light and the darkness, the waters and the sky, is the one who raised Jesus from the dead, who “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17).
Beth Felker Jones is associate professor of theology at Wheaton College. This essay is adapted from her book, Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically (Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2014, www.bakerpublishinggroup.com). Used by permission.
by Steve | Mar 17, 2020 | Magazine, Magazine Articles, March/April 2020
Lessons from the Wesleyan Revival
By Winfield Bevins –
On a recent trip to England, I visited several of the historic sites of the Wesleyan revival with a friend. One of the places we visited was City Road Chapel in London, founded in 1778 by John Wesley. We toured the chapel and walked around Wesley’s home. Later, we paused and prayed at Wesley’s tomb. Standing there, I was inspired to read these words on his tombstone, an apt description of his enduring legacy:
“To the memory of the venerable John Wesley, A.M., late fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. This great light arose (by the singular providence of God) to enlighten these nations, and to revive, enforce, and defend, the pure apostolic doctrines and practices of the primitive church: which he continued to do, both by his writings and his labours for more than half a century: And to his inexpressible joy, not only, beheld their influence extending, and their efficacy witness’d in the hearts and lives of many thousands, as well in the western world as in these kingdoms: But also, far above all human power of expectation, liv’d to see provision made by the singular grace of God, for their continuance and establishment to the joy of future generations. Reader, if thou art constrain’d to bless the instrument, give God the glory.”
These words remind us that once upon a time, a man named John Wesley helped start a movement that led to the cultural transformation of the English nation, a movement that eventually spread around the world. But how? And why? What made this man and this movement unique? Why did the teachings of Wesley and his practices ignite a wildfire, while other movements began and fizzled out?
Perhaps there is something in what Wesley learned and what he did that we can learn from today. In fact, let me go one step further. Scholars and church historians know the significance of the story of the Wesleyan revival; however, I have discovered that very few people outside Methodism know anything about this movement and its potential impact for the church today. I believe that the life and ministry of John Wesley has something we desperately need today.
John Wesley sought to recover a basic understanding of what it means to be a real Christian. His original vision was to bring spiritual renewal to the Church of England, which was not well received. Yet despite the growing tension between Wesley and the institutional church, both he and his brother, Charles, were ordained in the Church of England.
While it was Wesley’s intention to remain part of the institutional church, the old wineskins of the Church of England could not contain the new wine of the Wesleyan revival. What started off as a spiritual renewal within the Church of England eventually became its own distinct movement.
By the time of John Wesley’s death in 1791, Methodism was an international church movement with more than 70,000 members in England and more than 40,000 in the new United States, with even more among the mission stations scattered around the world. The seeds of the Methodist movement would continue to grow and spread well beyond Wesley’s lifetime. Just a few years after his death, Methodism in North America had grown to 200,000, with more than 4,000 Methodist preachers. By 1830, official membership in the Methodist Church had reached almost half a million people, and attenders numbered six million. From 1880 to 1905, American Methodism planted more than seven hundred churches per year on average.
At the heart of the Wesleyan revival was the rediscovery of “the pure apostolic doctrines and practices of the early church.” But Wesley did more than read and study the past. He took what he learned and reapplied it, contextualizing it to his own time and place. More than that, he used what he learned to create a disciple-making movement that equipped and empowered thousands of people to join in God’s mission.
Many people want to see the church become a movement again. As much as we want to see a movement today, most of us are unable to envision what that might look like. We are familiar with the status quo, the existing models of church that are largely focused on group gatherings for worship and teaching. To begin to clarify our vision, we can benefit from a closer look at church history. There is no better example of a successful church multiplication movement in the West than the Methodist movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I believe it serves as an indispensable paradigm for how we can multiply today’s church. There are six essential marks of the Wesleyan revival, marks that have some correlation to the marks of other renewal movements.
These six marks provide a genetic structure – much like the DNA in a living organism – mutually working together to create the movement dynamics that led to the Wesleyan revival. It is most helpful to church leaders to think of them as an interconnected ecosystem rather than focusing on the individual parts. Although this list is neither authoritative nor comprehensive, it is designed to offer a simple and accessible snapshot of the key elements that made the Wesleyan revival such a success.
1. Changed Lives. Movements begin as people’s lives are changed by a fresh encounter with the living God. Movements often begin with a catalytic leader like John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, or William Seymour whose life has been touched by God. Sometimes the change is a conversion experience. At other times it is a personal renewal that results in a radical commitment to follow Christ. Movements are not primarily about numbers or slogans, but about changed lives that lead to broader cultural transformation. In renewal movements, there is usually a tipping point where the transformation occurring in the lives of individuals as they embrace a vision for renewal begins to spread like wildfire, leading to broader social and cultural change.
2. Contagious Faith. Movements become contagious when ordinary people share their faith with others. One of the reasons a movement grows and spreads is because it has a simple, life-changing message that ordinary people can easily understand and share with others. Revival can spread as people rediscover the simplicity of the gospel or an essential aspect of the Christian faith that inspires and mobilizes them to action. A common feature of these revival movements is an invitation to commit or join a cause, which is effective in helping recruit others to join the movement. In Christian movements, this growth often results from a renewed passion to share the gospel with others, and this passion spreads from one person to another like a contagion. During the Wesleyan revival, while Wesley and other leaders were effective in preaching to large crowds, it was ordinary men and women who were most effective in spreading the Christian message across England and into North America, resulting in the faith of millions of new believers.
3. The Holy Spirit. Movements emphasize the person and work of the Holy Spirit in peoples’ lives. Fresh encounters with the Holy Spirit create a renewed sense of spiritual vitality among the followers of Christ which leads to personal and corporate renewal. More specifically, the reciprocity of the Word and the Spirit interacting together offers a potent mix that renews peoples’ faith and compels them outward to engage the world in mission. The Word of God becomes the foundational authority and guide for life, while the Holy Spirit fills and empowers people to live holy lives and to share their faith with others.
4. Discipleship Systems. Movements develop systems for discipleship and spiritual growth. This frequently looks like some form of small group structure to facilitate ongoing spiritual growth and commitment. As he preached to large crowds, Wesley quickly discovered that preaching alone was not enough; people needed ongoing support, community, and structure to help them continue on the spiritual journey. To remedy this, he developed a holistic ecosystem designed to help people grow at every stage of their journey. This involved an interlocking discipleship group structure. Each of these structures gathered people into groups of different sizes focused on different aspects of the discipleship process in order to help individuals grow in their faith. There were also spiritual practices that undergirded and reinforced the entire discipleship system.
5. Apostolic Leadership. Movements have an apostolic impulse – drawn from the models and methods of the early church – that empowers and mobilizes all of God’s people for mission. John Wesley and the early Methodists were not trying to be innovative or original. They drew their inspiration from the faith and spirituality of the early church, especially the church of the first two centuries (the pre-Constantine era). Methodism has been referred to as a lay apostolic movement within the Church of England, which alludes to the recovery of ministry for every Christian believer, not just the ordained leadership. The apostolic impulse of the early church to spread the gospel and plant new churches moved the early Methodists to develop ways to empower and release every member of the body of Christ to use their gifts and talents for God. Wesley personally worked to empower thousands of laity, many who later became leaders of the movement. These ordinary, non-ordained Christian men and women became the foundation of the next generation as the movement spread across the Western world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
6. Organic Multiplication. Movements have an outward missional focus that naturally leads to the multiplication of disciples and new communities of faith. Movements don’t become movements by naval gazing, but by looking outward, by inviting people in, and by growing and multiplying its mission and influence. There is a natural dynamism and excitement among the people that makes them contagious, helping the movement spread widely and organically from one person to another. We can describe the growth of movements as organic because it tends to happen naturally, rather than being forced by the leadership at the top level. Movements look outward and grow and multiply as people’s lives are changed, they begin making disciples, and then start new ministries and communities of faith to facilitate the ongoing growth of more individuals.
Unique Moment. Every movement and every context is unique. The Methodist movement successfully responded to the unique needs of its time with the timeless gospel of Jesus Christ. In a similar way, we must seek to understand our unique context and culture, to bring God’s timeless Word to a changing culture.
My prayer is that in some small way, reading this article has led you to draw inspiration from the Wesleyan movement. I hope and pray that in learning about John Wesley, the Spirit will spark a similar multiplication movement yet again. May the Sovereign Lord do something powerful again in our day.
Winfield Bevins is director of church planting at Asbury Seminary and author of Marks of a Movement: What the Church Today Can Learn from the Wesleyan Revival (Zondervan,)
Portrait by George Romney (1789), National Portrait Gallery, London.
by Steve | Mar 17, 2020 | Magazine, Magazine Articles, March/April 2020
By Courtney Lott –
Photo by Brett Sayles, Boise, Idaho. Courtesy of Pexels.
“I’m pretty sure there are Bernina 770 sewing machines in heaven. And I’ll be spending some time in the tabernacle with the seamstresses talking about banner making for the King!”
I had to laugh at this comment from my Sunday school teacher. One of the deaconesses of my church and a wonderful friend, this woman is not only a biology professor, but she also sews the banners that hang at the front of our sanctuary. The colors change along with the liturgical calendar, rotating between green, purple, white, and gold. With each new celebration, the artwork in our place of worship changes.
At the center of these beautiful colors are stitched symbols depicting different theological truths. Congregants can find descriptions of the meaning behind them at the back of our bulletin. Sometimes the images are reminiscent of a Celtic cross, while others are more straightforward, like a crown of thorns.
While these banners add a layer of beauty to our place of worship, they mean so much more than mere aesthetics. Though we live in a time and place wherein a great many congregants read, there is much to be said in telling the biblical story through art, in using talents like this to help communicate to those who learn differently.
There is a reason why God told his people to design the tabernacle of the Old Testament the way he did. It’s easy to get caught up in measurements most of us don’t understand, but the artistry described in the pages of Exodus is breath-taking. Curtains of finely twisted linen bursting with color form the walls, gold shines from the dishes and the lamp stand, intricate designs are carved into the wood, and angels spread their wings over the mercy seat.
Within this imagery, he also conveyed deep theological truths to his people. As much as they saw his joy in beauty in the temples designs, they also saw his holiness in the curtain separating them from the most holy place, his mercy in the sacrifices. In the craftsmanship and creativity, God encouraged his people to use their talents to image his character, his heart, his kingship.
The temple is a physical representation of the throne room of God, the true king of Israel. It was meant to remind the people to whom they were meant to bend the knee. No human king or prophet or priest could truly save them, only the Lord their God.
Created to Create. Though we no longer have a temple the same way Israel did, we are still called to reveal the redemption story through our art, both in our churches and in our daily lives. Take a moment to count the colors in a sunset, to differentiate between bird songs, or stand in awe of a clear starry night. Our God is an artist. The ultimate artist. If we are made in his image, then we are called to create as well.
Unfortunately, sometimes Christians get weird about art.
Whether it’s because of the commandment not to make images and worship them – or because we sanitize the authenticity out of artistic expression – our films, music, and the like are often cheesy at best, or low quality at worst. But as representatives of the God who created the universe, we ought to be producing art of the highest quality.
“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving” (Colossians 3:23-24).
It is an honor, an act of worship, part of our witness, to reflect our creator. Like the servants with their talents in Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25, we are to take the abilities God has given us and put them to work to the best of our ability. To shortchange it with laziness or inauthenticity is to bury it in the ground where it will never be seen.
Paint Brushes and Paints. The deaconess at my church who creates the banners does not do it alone. Instead, she works together with another woman who comes up with the designs. The first says that she could never dream up the images on her own, while the other could never bring them to life. These two women are a beautiful example of how the body of Christ ought to work together to advance the kingdom.
“The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’ On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable” (1 Corinthians 12:21-22).
This is true not only for artists, but scientists, mathematicians, mechanics, lawyers, and writers alike.
Our heavenly father didn’t give us all the same gifts. His character is so wide and infinite that no one man or woman could represent him well on their own. Instead, he scatters the beautiful aspects of his personality across his creation, creating unique individuals to shine like different pieces of a mirror.
Separately, we are shards of glass, but together we form a reflective surface that reveals the one in whose image we were made. May we honor God with the talents he has given us, using the gifts to glorify the giver.
Courtney Lott is the editorial assistant at Good News.
