by Steve | Sep 28, 1989 | Archive - 1989
Archive: Solzhenitsyn And the United Methodist Church
By James S. Robb
In the dog days of August 1989, I have been spending my evenings reading Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn stands as perhaps the world’s greatest living author. In my mind he is the outstanding Christian writer of this century.
His excellence is all the more amazing when you consider Solzhenitsyn is Russian. For nearly 30 years he has enthralled the world with his illuminating novels of Soviet reality and, especially, his horrifying account of Stalin’s labor camps, The Gulag Archipelago.
I’ve been hooked on Solzhenitsyn since high school. But I’ve just now gotten to August 1914, his historical novel covering the Russian army’s disastrous first battle against the Germans at the outbreak of World War I.
I was hoping to be lost in literary bliss and historical reflection, but the events described in the book jarred me back to my everyday preoccupation—the United Methodist Church. In fact, as I read, it became clearer and clearer that the state of the Russian army in 1914 and the state of the UM Church today are remarkably similar.
In 1914 the Tsars still ruled Russia. The Bolshevik takeover was still three years off. However, the empire was teetering mightily.
Nowhere did that feebleness manifest itself better than in the army. For one thing, the army was equipped magnificently—to fight a 19th-century war. Whereas the Germans had airplanes and automobiles for reconnaissance, the Russians still relied upon Cossack cavalry troops to find the enemy.
Yes, the Russians had obtained radios to send orders back and forth across the battle field. Unfortunately it had not occurred to them to code their transmissions. Consequently the Germans knew Russian battle plans as soon as the Russians did. The fact is by that time the Russians were so calcified in their thinking they could not even see the need for a modem army.
That reminds me of the United Methodist Church’s deployment of buildings and personnel. Like the Russian army, the church is really well positioned to minister to last century’s America. A vigorous 19th-century Methodism put its churches right where the people were—in the rural areas and county seat towns.
But today’s Americans tend to live in big cities. The population of rural regions has actually declined, while the population of cities has boomed.
So what have we United Methodists done about it? Nearly nothing. The majority of our churches are still in farm country, while we plant relatively few new congregations in urban areas. The need’s obvious enough, but we haven’t enough vitality to do anything about it.
Another interesting thing about the 1914 Russian army was its lack of ideological unity. As I’ve stated, the Tsars and their imperial system still held sway. Yet fewer and fewer people had confidence in the old ways, even in the army.
For example, young officers tended to be university-trained members of the middle class. Like their non-army fellow intellectuals, they hated the Tsar and the Tsarist system. That was fine, except such attitudes could hardly aid the war effort. When the heat was on there was a tendency to think, “Who cares if it’s all swept away?”
Our situation in Methodism seems similar. A couple of generations of Methodist preachers have been educated to doubt (to a lesser or greater extent) the very essentials of the faith. So when the chips are down should we trust the future of our church to those who are unsure about the validity of the Apostle’s Creed?
Most interesting of all, the Russian army of World War I was led by the most inept generals imaginable. These officers were well-connected flatterers, mostly, rather than fighting men. Indeed, some of the top Russian generals of 1914 had never seen combat. They had been promoted mostly because they had friends in court and hadn’t rocked the imperial boat.
Because they were self-seekers instead of leaders these officers proved much more interested in their reputations and well-being than in the army’s actual success. They were all appearance and no action. Some were actually physical cowards. Nearly all refused to listen to good advice, relying instead on ill-tuned instinct and inadequate experience.
Solzhenitsyn describes the hapless General Artomonov, who sends his men into murderous battle, pulls them back just when their bloody sacrifices begin to pay off then lies brazenly to the army commander, saying, “All attacks beaten off. Am standing firm as a rock.” This man, the author explains, is really just a private in general’s clothing.
Are there parallels with our leaders—the bishops, superintendents and agency officials? Unfortunately, a number of them seem to have been chosen mostly because of their high visibility and good public relations. Alas, they have obtained high office only to find their church besieged on all sides. And too many are absolutely unprepared to lead in the situation.
I can think of five or ten of our leaders who have strategic insight on what to do about our collapsing membership. A few more have shown real leadership in restoring our spiritual vision. But considering the gravity of our situation, that’s not nearly enough. My main impression after reading August 1914 is that a system can falter and collapse while millions passively watch, understanding exactly what is happening.
Yet few are willing any longer to risk their lives to save the failing cause.
by Steve | Sep 28, 1989 | Archive - 1989
Archive: Lausanne II: What Happened and Where Were The UMs?
Analysis By George G. Hunter III
More than 4,300 participants and observers from denominations and movements in nearly 190 countries assembled in Manila’s Philippine International Convention Center for the Lausanne II Congress on Evangelization, which met in July. Involvement in this first full conclave since the historic 1974 congress in Lausanne was intense due to the participants’ earnestness and the convention center’s welcome refuge from the city’s monsoon, humid heat. This congress called “The Whole Church” to take “The Whole Gospel” to “The Whole World.”
At the most serious level this congress was anticlimactic compared to the 1974 congress. For instance, the most influential 1974 paper and address came from Dr. Ralph Winter, who defined different levels of evangelism and challenged evangelicals across the earth to identify and reach the world’s approximately “16,750 unreached peoples.” The 1989 congress, by comparison, celebrated the influence of the first congress; its pageantry, stories, testimonies, speakers, music and dance from many Third World movements were moving, at times marvelous.
Still, some themes from this 1989 congress will probably influence world Christianity in the years ahead. First, Thomas Wang, the Lausanne Committee’s outgoing international director, is leading a movement to mobilize the world’s churches to reach all the earth’s unreached people groups by 2000 A.D. Several years ago Southern Baptists defined this convenient and visible goal; it now appears that many of the world’s churches and mission agencies will rally around it.
Second, Ray Bakke and others rang the bell for urban ministry, reminding the congress that by 2000 A.D. more than half of the earth’s population will be urban. The Christian mission faces an increasingly urban world and must redeploy much of its attention, prayer and human resources to serve and reach the struggling populations of cities.
Third, Jim Montgomery’s DAWN (Discipling A Whole Nation) strategy, pioneered in the Philippines, is now being implemented in several other nations. This congress in Manila stimulated much conversation, at least, between denominational leaders of a dozen or more nations.
Fourth, Os Guinness delineated the shape and impact of modernization upon the West and emphasized the need to re-evangelize the neo-pagan populations of Europe and North America. Although mission to the “post-Christian West” has been a topic of some conversation and advocacy since the early 1960s with interest amplified in the late 1980s by Lesslie Newbigin’s Foolishness to the Greeks, this congress should advance this cause.
So Lausanne II in Manila will undoubtedly influence the future of world mission and evangelism. However, none of these themes were launched as movements in the 1989 congress, and none are as innovative and mind-changing as several 1974 themes.
The 1989 congress was significant for who was there and perhaps for who was not. The congress’ daily newspaper reported that participants came from several Protestant denominational traditions as follows: Baptist, 25 percent; Anglican, 20 percent; Reformed, 15 percent; Lutheran, 10 percent; Pentecostal, 10 percent; Methodist, 5 percent and other denominations, 15 percent.
World Methodism: It would be difficult to argue from that data that World Methodism is once again a serious apostolic movement, though Joe Hale, Maxie Dunnam and Eddie Fox were present representing The World Methodist Council’s evangelism concern.
Representation from United Methodism in the United States was scarce—no American UM bishops were present. However, four American Episcopal bishops came, and they reported signs of evangelical renewal in many churches and in their denomination’s world mission. Establishment leaders from other mainline American denominations, notably Presbyterians, Baptists and Lutherans, were present in significant numbers.
To be more specific, one staff person attended from the Board of Global Ministries, one from The Mission Society for United Methodists, and no one attended from the Board of Discipleship’s section on evangelism. From seminaries that essentially serve United Methodism, five were present from Asbury and one from United. In fairness, the delegate selection process may have overlooked many qualified United Methodists (though the leaders of other denominations found a way to make known their interest in attending).
However, the small number of United Methodist leaders in Manila fueled this writer’s anxiety that, when the history of this period is written, the United Methodist Church will be the last mainline American denomination to be set free from the wave of the immediate past to recover its apostolic heritage, vision and power.
Moving beyond those who attended to those who led, the totality of Lausanne II, from the makeup of Lausanne movement committees to the choices for plenary speakers and seminar leaders, presupposed that parachurch organization leaders have much more to contribute than denomination leaders. Lausanne II also relied much less on committees and on insight from theology and mission professors than had Lausanne I. This is the major reason why this congress produced fewer influential ideas than the first.
Hijacking the agenda: As one attends or reads about major international meetings on mission and evangelization (the World Council of Churches’ (WCC) May event in San Antonio, Lausanne II and other major international events of the 1970s and 1980s), a trio of special causes—social justice, universalism, and signs and wonders—is often introduced from the floor by people who sometimes seem bent on “hijacking” the meeting’s main agenda. In San Antonio the WCC decided by a narrow vote against a version of universalism, and its Commission on Mission and Evangelism remains at least as passionately involved in justice issues as in evangelism. Perhaps 25 percent of the Lausanne II agenda, discussion and energy was focused on signs and wonders. And justice was such a formidable concern that a Manila Manifesto evolved which forthrightly called for social justice while, in the full spirit of the 1974 Lausanne Covenant, reasserting the primacy of evangelism within the Church’s total mission.
At one level it would be hard to identify three more dissimilar causes than universalism, social justice, and signs and wonders. But as ideological movements one can observe similarities: (1) Each cause has zealous advocates within its ranks who introduce their interest into any forum; (2) Each cause is intrinsically interesting and engaging; many Christians are primed at any moment to hear about any of the three and are favorably disposed to one or two; (3) The advocates for each cause frequently demand a hearing because they assume they speak from “higher ground” than the masses, though the place of the higher ground varies with the cause. The signs and wonders advocates are thought to speak from an inside spiritual track, the social justice advocates from a compassion ethic and the universalist advocates from an enlightenment idea, deeply ingrained in Western culture, about a universal religious consciousness in the hearts of all humans.
The persistent character of each of these causes, like the more perennial church renewal cause, is to negotiate being added to the evangelization agenda and then, once added, to co-opt the evangelization agenda. So evangelicals will often have to make the case for evangelization, even in “evangelism” gatherings!
Perhaps evangelicals are called to accept, consciously and cheerfully, this responsibility to champion the main business of the Church within the total business of the Church. The revealed Lord of the Scriptures, Who promised that through Abraham’s lineage all the peoples of the earth would one day be blessed and did entrust to the Church the Great Commission, does also desire peace upon the earth, justice for the poor and the renewal of His people.
Evangelicals are called to be full-team players who persistently and winsomely remind the whole Church of the indispensable role of evangelization within “holistic mission” and, when necessary, to insist on it.
by Steve | Sep 26, 1989 | Archive - 1989
Archive: What Dorothy Sayers might say to the United Methodist Church
By Ruth Zimmer
Ask Dorothy Sayers a question, and you might not like her answer. She was not given to supplying comfortable or expected answers. A scientist found this out when he asked Dorothy Sayers to set down in a letter to his scientific organization “her reasons for believing in the Christian faith.”[1] Her response was unsettling, even startling, as she forthrightly began her letter by raising a series of straightforward, challenging questions to the scientist and his colleagues:
“Why do you want a letter from me? Why don’t you take the trouble to find out for yourselves what Christianity is? You take the time to learn technical terms about electricity. Why don’t you do as much for theology? Why do you never read the great writings on the subject, but take your information from the secular ‘experts’ who have picked it up as accurately as you? Why don’t you learn the facts in this field as honestly as in your own field? Why do you accept mildewed old heresies as the language of the church, when any handbook of church history will tell you where they came from?
Why do you want a letter from me telling you about God? You will never bother to check on it or find out whether I’m giving you personal opinions or Christian doctrines. Don’t bother with me. Go away and do some work and let me get on with mine.”
This is a tough answer and not the one expected by the scientist or his colleagues, we can be sure. Dorothy Sayers challenged them to do for themselves what they were well able to do.
Sayers is here calling for intellectual toughness and integrity—a theme found in many of her essays. In re-reading this letter recently I discovered to my chagrin that many times this same challenge could apply to me, to you, to many in our Methodist churches. Why is this so? We avidly read books on child rearing and training when we learn we are going to be parents; we take seriously the responsibility to read and learn the terms, the history, the great writings and the facts in our own fields of daily work (and even related fields), yet we do not approach our spiritual training, growth and development with this same intellectual honesty and directness. We too often accept secular and secondhand opinions on Christianity, not bothering to check them out with Christian doctrine or with the fount of Christian truth—the Scriptures. Others have risked their careers, and some have risked their lives so we could have the Scriptures to read for ourselves. Yet how many of us who call ourselves Christians read the Scriptures daily, seeking answers for our spiritual questions and guidance in our daily Christian walks? We are not doing for ourselves, spiritually, what we are well able to do. As a result many in our churches today have become biblically illiterate. Dorothy Sayers would not accept this kind of intellectual laziness. She would maintain that God clearly expects, even requires of us, intellectual honesty and integrity in our search for spiritual truth and guidance in our daily lives as well as in our daily work.
To our preachers, teachers, seminaries and other leaders in the UM Church, Dorothy Sayers might say, “Stop watering down the Gospel of Christ. Stress the essentials of the faith, and continually reinforce them. Believers need the strong meat of the Gospel; instead, you offer pablum,” and “The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama”[2] (“The Greatest Drama Ever Staged”). “You do Christ no honor ‘by watering down His personality’ so He will not offend. If the mystery of the ‘divine drama’ of God enfleshed in Christ shocks and offends believers, ‘let them be offended’” (“The Dogma is The Drama”). Many of Sayers’ most representative essays express this conviction that Christian truths must be stated dramatically and lived courageously.
Dorothy Sayers was just as direct and uncompromising in her statements on women’s rights. She was not an aggressive feminist, but she consistently pointed out that “male and female are adjectives qualifying the noun ‘human beings’”[3] (Are Women Human?); and, as human beings, women are just as varied in tastes, abilities and preferences as other human beings (men). Sayers believed one of the primary tasks “for any human being [was] … to [discover] and do [sacramentally and joyfully] the work for which he or she was created” (Are Women Human?). However, Sayers just as emphatically stressed that “it is ridiculous to take on a man’s job just in order to be able to say that ‘a woman has done it—Yah!’ The only decent reason for tackling a job is that it is your job and you want to do it.” [4]
Dorothy Sayers took the Church in general to task for failing to follow the example of Christ in His consistent treatment of women as genuinely unique human beings. He “never nagged … flattered … coaxed or patronized them,” she points out, “never mapped out their sphere for them [Mary and Martha], never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female …” (“The Human-Not-Quite-Human “). There is nothing more repugnant to a human being, Sayers reminds us, as “to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person” (A Matter Of Eternity).
Dorothy Sayers would feel the UM Church has done well in being at the forefront in the Church’s acceptance of women in roles of leadership.
Finally, I must acknowledge now what you have probably already guessed. Dorothy Sayers would not like the title of this article. She hated generalizations of all kinds (not just those made about women). She would immediately question, “To which UMC am I speaking? Which is the real UMC? The traditional, faithful followers of the Christ of Scripture or the heretical few who are destroying the Church?”
Dr. Ruth Zimmer is an English professor at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Christianity Today (December 11, 1981), p. 13.
[2] Many of these essays can be found in The Whimsical Christian (New York: Macmillan, 1978) such as “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged” and “The Dogma Is the Drama.”
[3] Sayers’ commentary on the usual slanted pulpit interpretation of the biblical account of Mary and Martha is a classic. (See “The Human-Not-Quite-Human” in Are Women Human? Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1971, pp. 46-47.)
[4] Sprague, Rosamond Kent, ed. A Matter of Eternity: Selections from … Dorothy L. Sayers. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1973.
by Steve | Sep 25, 1989 | Archive - 1989
Archive: Miracle on Bailey Ave.
By David Hampton
When all other churches were moving away from the increasingly impoverished downtown Jackson, Mississippi area, Wells UMC stayed. Now a miracle is happening among the drugs, gangs, and poverty.
Ask the Rev. Keith Tonkel about Wells United Methodist Church, and he will tell you about people, not programs or membership numbers. “We had a Sunday school class at one time that had a psychiatrist and two physicians in it and about eight or ten others being taught by a black man with a second-grade education, but who had so much street knowledge that he just kept the class spellbound,” he said. He will describe the two women who helped one another to the communion altar—one blind who needed guidance and one injured who needed the blind woman’s help to walk. “Boy, if that’s not a memorable, touching illustration of what ministry is about!” Tonkel said.
Ask any of its people about Wells, and they will tell you about their pastor, Keith Tonkel, who nurtured the dying church in Jackson, Mississippi, into a strong family of Christian believers that ministers to an inner-city community. Wells Church stands in the same place it has stood for 63 years, sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with a hurting world. That world is just hurting a little more and a little closer to Wells these days. The problems of poverty, gang activity and drugs plague the area. Once a thriving, middle-class neighborhood, the Bailey Avenue area of Jackson is now mostly made up of poor black and elderly white families. But while other churches in the inner-city areas in Jackson have closed or moved to the suburbs, Wells has decided to stay.
The city’s changes had taken their toll when Tonkel arrived in 1969. There were 11 in the congregation when he first stood behind the pulpit.
He recalls how the congregation was challenged, and he rose to the call of staying and ministering to the neighborhood even though that decision was controversial during the civil rights struggles of the time.
“I remember one of the older members saying, ‘Well, if it’s scriptural and if it’s of God we dare not stand against it; we need to do it,’” Tonkel said.
There are about 450 active members now, most of whom commute from other parts of the city and the suburbs. In addition to its long-time members, Wells attracts students, young professionals and a diverse group of individuals from various denominational backgrounds who are drawn to its openness and evangelical fervor.
Tonkel plays down his part and even the “inner-city magnet” label.
“A church must have vitality whether it is inner-city or not,” he says. “A lot of people are just looking for a church that is alive.” Tonkel calls the most significant ministry of the church a “ministry of being.”
“That’s the toughest thing to communicate,” he says. “Because what our congregation is, both first and foremost, is a being. It’s a creature; it’s a personality; it’s a spirit. It has to do directly with the Holy Spirit’s creation of the Spirit of Christ in the church. You’ll have people who are not Christians walk into this place and say, ‘What is it about this place?’
“What it is, is what I call the overflow of the Spirit’s presence. I call it that because I don’t have anything better to call it, and I don’t even understand it myself except to say, ‘Thank you Lord.’ But the being of the church creates that kind of thing.”
Tonkel says the “doing of the church follows the being.”
The “doing” of Wells Church includes traditional educational and support roles for its members as well as several social-outreach ministries aimed at meeting human needs in the community.
While most churches have small boards and councils, Wells’ Council on Ministries is made up of more than 30 people. In addition to planning and initiating church programs, it encourages individual ministries. Some small ministries launched by individuals have flourished into broader church programs:
- Visiting a local nursing home to play dominoes has resulted in a church-wide ministry to the elderly. The most ambitious program is a community group home called “Wellshouse.” It has been designed to provide support and a family atmosphere for the elderly. It will also be a pilot program to show small churches how to establish services to meet the unique needs of the elderly. Wellshouse, originally a Methodist children’s home for boys, has eight bedrooms, a full kitchen and a garden—perfect for this program. After three years of planning and prayer, it will open this fall.
- A small church festival to raise money for community needs has grown into an annual city event. The festival, called “Wellsfest,” is designed to provide an alcohol-free, outdoor event in which families can enjoy music (secular and gospel) by well-known groups.
Money raised from food booths and children’s games last year went to fund neighborhood programs to combat gang problems. This year’s Wellsfest monies will go to a residential alcohol treatment center for teenagers.
- While Sunday school meets, a Christian fellowship for alcohol and chemically dependent persons gathers in a small building behind the church. The “James Club” ministry provides support, prayer and a 12-step program for alcoholics. Some join in the church life and some prefer to remain anonymous, but all find love and support.
- An independent social service agency, “Operation Shoestring,” was founded by Wells 20 years ago and is now a primary provider of neighborhood human development and child-care programs in the area. Church members serve on the Shoestring board and participate in programs such as tutoring and an annual Bible school educational camp for neighborhood children.
- Other ministries include teaching at local jails, conducting Sunday school at the veterans’ hospitals, writing families listed in the obituary columns and cooking meals for AIDS patients at a local hospice. Individuals carry on numerous other projects, some of which, Tonkel jokes, he doesn’t even know about.
Tonkel sees his role as a teacher and developer of the lay ministry.
“I try to call forth or lift up persons whose gifts represent true ministry, so I can move a little in the background maintaining myself as a resource person, pastor and teacher,” he says.
The church services at Wells celebrate the worship of God in an open and joyous manner. There might be a prayer of healing with laying on of hands or a song to celebrate someone’s birthday, anniversary or even the fact that a chemically dependent member has been sober for a year.
The music can range from Beethoven to Woody Guthrie. The sermon might quote Martin Luther or Martin Luther King Jr. The text is clearly the Bible.
Tonkel says he always tests a sermon by asking himself if it relates to anything real.
“At this particular time I think God speaks through the story, the narrative. I attempt to attach that message to the particular needs of the congregation—not something that is wonderful and memorable, but most of all a message of love that serves the needs of the congregation at that particular time.”
Tonkel has a national reputation and has turned down opportunities to serve larger and more prestigious churches.
“I really believe, in my own heart, that the Spirit of Christ calls us into a lot of situations that don’t measure success in the world’s terms,” Tonkel said. “I think that success is measured most in terms of faithfulness to what you perceive to be His call.”
It is rare for any Methodist minister to be assigned to a church for 20 years, but the church leadership has recognized Tonkel’ s unique talents and considers them necessary in this inner-city magnet church.
The Wells people know this too.
“It would have taken a miracle for this church to survive the way it has survived, and I think Keith Tonkel is a miracle,” says Matt Friedeman, associate pastor and a professor at Wesley Biblical Seminary in Jackson. “He has, in tum, helped the laity work miracles.”
Tonkel stresses that Wells is “inclusive” and has a reputation of openness that is important to its “ministry of presence” in the neighborhood.
“We are open to all, with a strong hospitality spirit, motivated by agape love as we understand it,” he says.
The church is one of a handful of integrated churches in the Jackson area.
“But you know most of the difficult integration is not so much black and white as it is the educated and the uneducated, the persons who have good jobs and the persons who don’t, the persons who are sick and downright obnoxious as well as the persons who are easy to get along with. But the whole point is—and I have a very strong conviction about this—that most churches do not promote growth because everybody thinks alike, looks alike, acts alike, lives life alike. In a church like this you’ve really got to test the spirits to see if they be of God, and let the Gospel speak to a broad range of people.”
Tonkel’s wife, Pat, says the diversity means that Wells’ people grow and depend on one another more.
“Whenever I’ve been weak there has been somebody else who has been strong,” she says.
Others who come to Wells Church apparently feel the same way. A recent church survey asked members if they felt others would be of help in time of trouble, crisis or illness.
The response? 100 percent—yes.
“We represent what we understand to be the biblical ethic,” Tonkel says. “But we believe our ministry is to accept, love and present the Gospel so that any life change is a direct result of Christ’s work. There is no redemption except from Him.”
David Hampton is editorial director for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi.
by Steve | Sep 24, 1989 | Archive - 1989
Archive: The Infant Baptism Controversy
Part II
By Ben Husted
In the July/August issue Dr. Ben Husted examined infant baptism from a historical perspective in order to answer some of today’s controversial questions: Is infant baptism biblical? Is rebaptism wrong? Is infant dedication heresy? In the following article Husted continues his study of infant baptism, asking what is the purpose of baptism in our church today. Is baptism a sacrament of birth or rebirth?
The water of Oolagah Lake was warm as I stepped into it the Sunday afternoon before Labor Day. We were there for a baptism service and had not expected a crowd of vacationers as witnesses.
I had shared from the Bible the meaning of baptism: We are buried with Christ and rise to live a new life; we are washed clean from our sins; it is a witness to our faith in Jesus; it is an act of obedience to Him. The time had come to examine and baptize the candidates.
Tom was the first to follow me into the water. In his mid-thirties, Tom was a draftsman and a fisherman on the pro bass circuit. He had been converted through the witness of friends at work, his children in Vacation Bible School and other influences. He had then led his whole family into the faith, so I had asked him to be the first baptized and then to assist me in baptizing his wife and four daughters.
“Tom, do you have faith in Jesus Christ?” I asked.
His answer was a strong “Yes, I do!”
“Have you asked Him to forgive your sins, to be your Savior and Lord?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Do you intend to live for Jesus from now on, with the help of the Holy Spirit?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Tom, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son, Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
With my left hand under his heavily muscled shoulders and our right hands clasped, I lowered him into the water and then quickly brought him up again. That simple, human act, complete with blowing water out of his nose and mopping it out of his eyes, held such significance; it initiated him into the kingdom of God.
What a time of grace, fun, joy, witness and fellowship for the entire church! Baptism! There is nothing quite like it in all the universe, initiating those who were “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1, KJV) into the life of the kingdom.
As I think back over these exciting times I am shocked, saddened and grieved to read this statement in the semiofficial Companion to the Book of Worship: “While infant baptism is normative for Methodists, it is not exclusive. Baptism of youths and adult is fully acceptable when it is desired.”[1]
The first time I read that statement I wrote in the margin, “Gasp!” That is still my response. The statement indicates that United Methodists expect to baptize infants but do not expect to baptize adult converts.
Clearly, though, the opinion expressed in the above statement is not isolated. Indeed, the Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church (1988) treats baptism almost exclusively as the baptism of infants. One phrase of one sentence of one paragraph (216.1) clearly (though almost parenthetically) refers to the baptism of adults, but the baptism of infants claims paragraphs 221-225 under membership, and in paragraph 439.1, dealing with the duties of the pastor, subparagraph b deals exclusively with infant baptism. The 1988 Discipline, in an improvement over 1984, gives pastors the responsibility to “win persons on profession of faith” (439.1), though nothing is said specifically of baptism there. The Discipline does not seem to expect us to win converts from the world!
I do not intend to denigrate infant baptism. The question we must ask is what is normative? And, prior to that, what does it mean to be normative?
One way to understand this use of normative is to say it means “Methodists have always been people who have believed in infant baptism.” While that statement is true of Methodists it is not true of United Methodists. Our denomination arose from the union of the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren (EUB) Church, and neither the EUB Church nor either of its parents, the Evangelical Church and the United Brethren in Christ Church, practiced infant baptism to the exclusion of rebaptism or infant dedication and believer baptism; there was always an option. So infant baptism is not normative for United Methodists in the sense of “always having believed in it.”
This, however, is not the meaning of the word normative in the above quoted statement. Rather, it means “infant baptism is the standard of baptism for Methodists.” This is the assertion from which I recoil in dismay.
To be sure, infant baptism can be said to be normal, widely practiced, most common, a doctrinally sound part of our tradition and many other things, but it is not normative in this sense. Saying it is normative is saying it sets the norm; it determines the standard against which all other practices are measured. Making infant baptism normative makes other types of baptism unusual, though “fully acceptable when desired.”
This is not a trivial point, for it has important implications for evangelism and church growth. Making infant baptism normative is, in church-growth terms, making biological growth normative and conversion growth unusual. “Biological growth is good growth,” points out Donald McGavran, “yet this type of growth will never bring the nations to faith and obedience since the non-Christian part of the world’s population is growing faster than the Christian and seems destined to continue to do so.”[2]
Considering infant baptism and biological growth normative tends to limit evangelism to the annual confirmation class; this is, in fact, what seems to be indicated by the Discipline in the paragraphs noted above. If we were to take the “Number of Persons Baptized” statistic from our conference journals and break it down into “Infants Baptized,” “Church Youth Baptized” and “Formerly Unchurched Baptized,” I expect we would find that, in practice at least, most United Methodist churches and pastors find the last category fully acceptable but very unusual.
To be sure, there are valid historical reasons why infant baptism has been considered normative for Methodists. In Wesley’s England few unbaptized pagans presented themselves as candidates for evangelism. Hundreds of thousands of baptized pagans did, however, and they were added to the kingdom through conversion and discipleship.
This is not true today, however. Millions of unchurched people in America were not baptized as infants. Some of them have never even been inside a church.
Lyle Schaller quotes one survey that states 13 percent of Americans born between 1957 and 1965 claim no religious affiliation.[3] It is probably safe to assume that many of them are unbaptized, along with many of their peers who claim some loose affiliation with a church.
Clearly, something needs to be done, and that something is evangelism. Nothing has yet moved us to seriously evangelize these masses. In fact, nothing has yet moved us beyond our membership list for evangelistic prospects. One reason may be that our theology of baptism tells us that such evangelism is unusual and uncommon.
Even as I write these words I realize that I have not been especially adept at winning converts from the world. But I feel no pressure to do so from my peers, some of whom have never baptized a convert from the world. When we gather at district meetings we talk, appropriately, of our confirmation classes. Sadly, however, we do not talk about winning the unchurched and baptizing them.
If we as pastors and churches come to understand that the baptism of formerly unchurched converts is normative, it may move us to evangelize them. It may put a certain measure of discomfort into our hearts to know that a “normal” church is one which wins people from the world, not just from Christian families, to the kingdom.
I believe, then, it is time to make some clear changes in our Discipline, attitudes and practices. We have allowed baptism to be the sacrament of birth, which may (or may not) have been acceptable in another age. In this age, however, I believe we United Methodists need, for the sake of the kingdom, to reclaim baptism as the sacrament of evangelism.
Dr. Ben Husted is pastor of First United Methodist Church in Coalgate, Oklahoma.
[1] Dunkle. William F. Jr. and Quillian. Joseph D. Jr. Companion to the Book of Worship (Nashville: Abingdon, 1970). p. 48.
[2] McGavran, Donald. Understanding Church Growth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1970), p. 88.
[3] Schaller, Lyle. It’s A New World (Nashville: Abingdon, 1987), p. 82.
