by Steve | Jul 1, 1979 | Archive - 1979
Archive: The Deeper Joy
by Jean Clarkson, Montrose, Michigan
Joy had always been just another word for happiness until Papa came to live with us. Papa had always been the strong one in our family but now he was weak. Illness had put him in the hospital and he needed someone to take care of him when he was discharged.
When we moved Papa’s hospital bed into our son’s bedroom, we rearranged more than the furniture. The very texture of our lives changed. Our active teen-agers still enjoyed traveling and going out to dinner with us, but our spontaneous trips ended when Papa came to live with us. Someone always had to stay with him. Our son took in his elderly roommate with grace. “I don’t want Papa to have to go to a convalescent home,” he told us earnestly.
Our daughter willingly waited on her grandfather and talked with him. When he was stronger, she pushed his wheelchair to the supper table.
We all made adjustments and none of them were easy. There was the night we all decided to go to a movie. One of our son’s friends knew Papa well and he agreed to keep him company. But when we told our patient the plan, he became upset.
“I don’t want to stay with some kid,” he protested.
Papa-sitters were harder to locate than babysitters, but finally my sister-in-law said she and her daughter would come. We all piled into the car, giddy with freedom, and drove off together. After the first show we discovered that the movie we wanted most to see was the third feature. We realized that we could not ask our grandpa-sitters to stay that late, so· reluctantly, we returned home. The four walls seemed to be closing in on us because of grandpa.
Every morning I rolled out of bed, hoping Papa would sleep in. But very often he woke up and precious minutes would be spent waiting on him before I could get myself dressed. I would leave instructions for the lady who came to care for him and then I drove off to work.
The rest of my household duties were crowded into the evening hours. Often there was unexpected company dropping in to see Papa. As his appetite improved, he expected me to fix the special foods he liked best.
I could feel irritation building up gradually in each of us. Every night I fell into bed exhausted, knowing I would be wakened several times by Papa’s call bell. Day and night were alike to him.
When my friend Sally invited me to a bridal shower, I accepted gratefully. It was a pleasure to sit in her lovely home, eating food someone else had prepared. Slowly I began to unwind in the pleasant social noise that swirled around me.
Sally’s aunt saw me and called across the room, “How are you, Jean? You look happy!”
Happy!
I was stunned. How could I be happy with all the problems I had? And yet, as I began to tell her about our situation, I realized that I was feeling a deep satisfaction in spite of the stress. I certainly was not happy. What I was discovering was the enduring quality of joy.
When we took Papa into our home, we knew it was what God wanted us to do. We had found the daytime help we needed almost before we had asked for it, far more readily than we had ever found babysitters when our children were small.
Papa was getting better. We could see little changes from week to week. And I had a new sense of my own worth. I could see we were being knit together in our labor of love, caring for Papa.
Finally the day came when he was well enough to move back home. On his last evening with us, he asked me for a pen and some paper. He pushed his supper plate away, refusing to eat until he had finished writing.
“You sure have blessed Papa,” he wrote.
But he blessed us more. Through caring for him, we all learned to give. Our children’s lives were enriched. They still recall the stories their grandfather told during his stay with us.
Through this experience, I learned a deeper meaning of joy. In new ways Psalm 63:7 came alive for me: “In the shadow of Thy wings, I sing for joy.”
I am grateful for every sunny day, but more grateful to know joy which can brighten even the dismal ones. It is lit within us by the Holy Spirit; it is not dependent on pleasant circumstances around us. I have learned that true joy is a flame which burns even brighter in the dark.
“There is much that I cannot give you,” wrote Fra Giovanni in the 1600s, “but much that you can take. The gloom of this world is but for a moment. Behind it lies joy. Take joy.”
by Steve | May 21, 1979 | Archive - 1979
Archive: If morning is to come
By Earl G. Hunt Jr. (1918-2005)
Good News
May/June 1979
The Tennessee Annual Conference, after careful review and evaluation of statistics submitted from the six districts, will show a very substantial membership loss for last conference year, continuing a tragic trend which began at least 14 years ago and has projected itself across two episcopal administrations…. We have now shown a net loss, since 1964, of enough people to compose four congregations the size of the largest United Methodist church in the state of Tennessee. No annual conference can stand such very long. … What is the explanation of our predicament?
We may have allowed the deep, historic meaning of most of our big words in religion to become so tragically eroded that they are little more than what William James used to call “bloated absolutes.” One of these, by our own deliberate willfulness, is “evangelism.” Others – more important – are its components: “sin,” “salvation,” “faith,” etc.
Our allusions to these fundamental terms of the gospel, at best, are usually abstractly theological or innocently literary – rarely probingly personal. This is surely one reason why the eleven o’clock worship service, as the late Samuel Miller put it, is almost supremely “a place where the bankruptcy of modern ecclesiasticism is apparent.” One can scarcely imagine any individual receiving what Paul Tillich called an “ontological shock” in a church service. Oftentimes its content and impact are more akin to what Soren Kierkegaard once described as “twaddle.” The raw naked power of a gospel, so revolutionary that its transcendent force is unpredictable and uncontrollable, is simply absent at the eleven o’clock hour on Sunday morning in most of our churches. It is a tragic thing when a man or woman can be more deeply moved spiritually by an occasional book or motion picture than by a service of worship.
When Time magazine, a few years ago, commented upon the nomination of Dr. Donald Coggan, famous preacher and evangelical, to be the 101st Archbishop of Canterbury, it reminded readers that Dr. Michael Ramsey, the incumbent Primate who was soon to retire, had been an ecumenist and theologian but never, under any circumstances, an evangelist. My only contact with Archbishop Ramsey was an accidental conversation in the Westminster Abbey bookshop in London two years ago, and I would not judge him. But, my God, how could a responsible minister fail to compel himself to be an evangelist in a land where the whole of society seems to be moving persistently and proudly away from God and Christianity?
In an address which I was privileged to deliver some time ago at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., I undertook to gather up the present situation in the Christian community under four headings: pendulum trouble, charismatic confusion, principalities and powers, and apocalyptic apoplexy.
I do not mean to revise my thought about these problem areas when I insist that there may be an overarching prior difficulty in the Christian Church today. I refer to the devastating possibility that many of us, ordained and unordained, have been unable to retain enough of the gospel in our own secularized minds and spirits to have anything significant to share with others in a world of lost human beings.
Neither humanism nor a humanistic view of Jesus Christ and the gospel will save a sinful person. Careful theological footwork designed to skirt the rational perils of unabashed supernaturalism can result only in the proclamation of philosophical and ethical platitudes instead of the preaching of the Everlasting Mercy.
The real reason why people do not find God in our churches may well be that those of us who lead in the congregations, both from the pulpit and the pew, have not ourselves surrendered wholly to the redemptive wonder of the Christian message and the control of the Holy Spirit!
It may be time for us to recognize again, as Dr. George Docherty pointed out in his book One Way of Living, that “The Bible itself becomes immediately meaningful to committed people however untutored and unlettered, while the uncommitted who are wise in their wisdom tragically fail to understand God’s Word.” The Scriptures and the mysteries of the gospel are intelligible only to those who know God, for these matters have to do with believers, and only believers can comprehend them.
What I am saying is blunt and elemental – and perhaps certain to arouse the ire of those who do not wish to hear it: for God’s sake, get your own life and heart right with your Redeemer! Go back to the springs of your faith and drink deeply of their refreshing and renewing waters. Review the fundamentals; preach and testify about them. Then will something thrilling happen in your Sunday morning church service. Then will troubled, frightened, lost people – faltering and stumbling in the sophisticated darkness of the 70s – see a great Light and know the salvation of their Lord!
I dare to ask it again: do you really have a gospel to share? Getting one is the only effective answer to the evangelistic problem.
Regarding preaching, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, writing in the July, 1928 issue of Harper’s Magazine, said a basic thing in a manner which the passing of the years has not changed: “Preaching is wrestling with individuals over questions of life and death, and until that idea of it commands a preacher’s mind and method, eloquence will avail him little and theology not at all. I suggest five prerequisites to effective preaching in pulpits large or small:
- A personal knowledge of the living God and his gospel.
- Love for human beings – even the unlovely.
- Hard, grueling work.
- A terrible, frightening urgency.
- Believing prayer.”
More than anything else, lay people in this annual conference have said to me that they want preachers. I have observed that where I have been able to send a person with an exciting spiritual message into a local situation, there the people still attend church with remarkable fidelity. And, as Bishop Armstrong likes to say, they “pay the rent” with gladness and generosity.
The late great Yale historian, Dr. Kenneth Scott Latourette, one of the authentic Christian saints of the 20th century, used to speak of the manner in which God “sent his whisper” through him. This sums up, for me at least, much of the thrill of the call I felt from my Lord more than three-and-a-half decades ago. And I am confident that most of the ministers here would share the same sensitive response to Dr. Latourette’s poetic clause.
What I am really pleading for is a recovery of faith among those of us who are ordained. For I believe that the renewal of the church and its ministry has to begin with you and me. We have to know the living Lord in the freshness of a new experience and assurance before we possess the fundamental credential for preaching.
Peter, the simple fisherman, cried out: “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke 5:8). As Dr Leslie Weatherhead said in his book Time For God, “When that strange, awesome sense of the numinous does fall upon the spirit, it is far more compelling and convincing about the reality of God’s existence than are any intellectual arguments, valuable though these may be. It is as though one glimpsed on a Swiss holiday, for only a few moments, the shining, snowclad peaks. Days of rain and mist may follow and the weather make the view as depressing as Bloomsbury in a November fog. But one knows the peaks are there!”
God help this indispensable inner certainty to come to us again and afresh. And then God help us to share it excitingly. George Ade, the famous humorist, said one time, ‘‘The music teacher came twice each week to bridge the awful gap between Dorothy and Chopin!” So the whole event of preaching is designed to be a vehicle through which the Spirit of God may bridge a greater gap between the natural person and the spiritual person.
If the content of our faith is flimsy and unsure, then we have little to preach and it is mockery to ask the Holy Spirit to bless our shallow homilies. If we allow ourselves to be lured away from safe harbors by every new and novel wind of doctrine, then surely we are unfit to serve as spiritual guides for others.
To preach in this age calls for discriminating and discerning knowledgeableness: the will to grasp the meaning of new theological thought and to comprehend what the consequences of such thought may prove to be. It means sorting out a little wheat from a lot of chaff in today’s funny-looking theological granary, and being willing to rephrase the Church’s gospel and restyle its strategy without abandoning its message or compromising its mission.
To preach today means constructing with persistent sensitivity an image of the minister which can survive the ruthless scrutiny of a new and cynical age – an image based on impeccable integrity instead of superficial piety, on candid awareness rather than what someone has called naive “nincompoopery,” on sureness of God and not clever intellectual gymnastics.
The minister who needlessly violates hospital visiting regulations, who invades a family rather than visits it, who feels an audible prayer coming on at some terribly inappropriate moment, who asks for a discount and hints for poundings [a voluntary shower of food gifts traditionally offered to parsonage families in some parts of the country], who faces his daily task with a frockcoated pomposity which is little more than ordained hypocrisy, who tries with conspicuous indirection to inflate his own salary, who has the flagrant dishonesty to parade his personal peeves across the sacred terrain of a pulpit and under the banner of a biblical text – his name is anathema! He is one eloquent reason why the Church perishes for want of renewal in our time!
My challenge to all of us who break “the bread of life” is that we shall be willing, next conference year, to pay the terrible price involved in becoming better preachers than we have ever been before! Then will our churches be filled to overflowing with hungry people; then will the Holy Spirit visit our preaching with redeeming power; then will “Heaven come down our souls to greet, And glory crown the mercy seat.”
“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead and Christ shall give thee light!” As a boy preacher, I used this thrilling text from Ephesians the first time I ever spoke before a district conference. My dreams were young and my visions fresh in those days. The Church was not an earthly organization to me, but the far-flung fellowship of the Lord’s Redeemed. I had known the pardon of my own sin, and the gospel held my soul in enraptured wonder. Everything, everything was to know God’s will – and I doubted not that my frail human effort to do that will would be touched with heaven’s power and so become a modern miracle in the world where I was a pilgrim.
My faith was childlike, and some will say altogether too simplistic. But the lengthening trail of the years with its educational opportunity and exciting ministries has never revealed an adequate motivational substitute for the spiritual ecstasy of that sunrise period of my life. If morning is to come, perhaps you and I need to approach again the altars of our hearts and ask for the restoration of the “blessedness we knew when first we saw the Lord.”
The future of the Tennessee Conference, under God, is as bright as the dawning and as hopeful as the message of Jesus Christ. The gospel is inexhaustible. Arthur John Gossip was constantly reminding young ministers that the Christian faith is not a little pond around which they may stroll for half an hour and then say, ‘‘There it is, you see.” Instead, it is a tremendous shoreless sea, reaching far beyond our poor human capacity ever to search it all out.
God forgive us that we enter so hesitantly into the mystery and glory of the Christian promises, and thus fail to appropriate the limitless power which the Lord God Almighty has placed at the disposal of those who will believe in him and accept his son as Savior.
Someone asked a preacher, “Which way is progress?” The preacher replied, “Sometimes it is backwards.” The man persisted, “When is progress backwards?” He received the answer, “Progress is backwards when you have wandered away from home.”
I invite you, my brothers and sisters in Christ, to join me in a pilgrimage back to our spiritual hearthside and then into the morning of new labors in God’s vineyard, remembering the relationship to which Charles Wesley referred long ago:
Arise, my soul, arise;
Shake off thy guilty fears;
The bleeding sacrifice
In my behalf appears;
Before the throne my surety stands,
Before the throne my surety stands,
My name is written on His hands.
Earl G. Hunt (1918-2005) was a United Methodist bishop for 245 years before retiring in 1988. He was the keynote speaker at the 1976 World Methodist Conference in Dublin, Ireland in 1976. In retirement, Hunt served as president of the Foundation for Evangelism.
This sermon was preached to the Tennessee Annual Conference and is published here with permission.
by Steve | May 5, 1979 | Archive - 1979
Archive: Resurrection in Paradise Hills
by Diane Knippers, Associate Editor, Good News Magazine
“If I had known everything that lay ahead when I graduated from seminary in 1974 and was appointed here, I might have declined the appointment and looked for a way to remain in seminary another year!”
That’s the kind of honest, straight-from-the-shoulder comment one gets from Ron Brown, pastor of Paradise Hills United Methodist Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico, concerning his first months there.
Paradise Hills—what an inappropriate name! The little church was established in 1963; Ron was the eighth pastor in 11 years. The original church plant consisted of a sanctuary-period. There were no church school rooms, no church office, not even a drinking fountain.
Average worship attendance had grown in 11 years from 25 to 70, but the lack of classrooms kept Sunday school attendance from rising above 30.
There was no evangelistic or visitation program. At one time the church had helped conduct evangelistic services at the Albuquerque Rescue Mission on the city’s “skid row.” But even that effort had ended when the couple who had been in charge of the church’s evangelism work area moved away.
As you might expect, the financial picture was just as dismal as the rest of the church outlook. In the early years, the annual conference had to help in making mortgage payments on the sanctuary. None of the seven previous pastors had ever received a salary increase, other than when the conference raised its minimum salary requirements. Apportionments had never been paid in full. A building fund had been started for an education unit, but in 1974 this fund was used to pay some of the mandatory apportionments. This angered some people so much that they quit attending! The only bright spot on the church ledger was that the mortgage had been paid off in March 1974.
On Ron Brown’s first Sunday in the Paradise Hills pulpit, he faced 74 people—mostly elderly, with a few teenagers. Ron admits, “To come out of seminary into probationary membership in the conference to the defeated people here was frightening.”
What did it take to turn this church—rumored to be near closing in the early 70s if its decline continued- into the second fastest growing congregation in the conference in ’75-’76? Nothing short of a resurrection. God blessed this church with a dedicated, God-directed pastor and through him gave the congregation a vision of its mission. Christian nurture, fellowship, and outreach supplanted mere survival as the goal of the church.
The first thing new Pastor Brown did was to throw himself into the task of getting to know his people. He talked with them about his beliefs—and he solicited feedback “to determine where they were hurting.” After a summer of visiting, visiting, and more visiting, sufficient foundation had been laid to get things moving in the church program. When public school started, the church had a “Kick-Off-Week,” beginning with the first work day they ever had to get building and grounds spruced up for winter. A special mid-week prayer service was held to pray for the church. Invitations to attend Sunday school went out to all the members and friends of the church.
Worship and Sunday school attendance began to rise. The need for education space became acute, so the church applied to the UM Board of Global Ministries for a loan to build. When the bad news came that their application had been turned down because of the church’s too-weak financial position, someone suggested a day of prayer. On the designated Saturday, people came to the sanctuary from before dawn until after midnight—seeking God’s leadership and asking for His provision for the new building.
That day and that experience was a real turning point. God’s blessing soon became apparent. The building fund grew over a nine-month period from $1,600 to $19,450. Also in 1975 they paid all their apportionments for the first time. In August church officials met again with a representative from the Board of Global Ministries, who this time approved a $50,000 loan. In November they broke ground and held opening ceremonies the following June the new building was filled to overflowing by that September.
The new building and the financial improvement of the church were great advances. But these were merely outward indications of a deeper spiritual renewal going on inside Paradise Hills.
For example, in March of 1975 (about the time the congregation was wondering how it would ever get the additional education space it needed) Billy Graham held a crusade in Albuquerque. Although this brought no new members into the Paradise Hills Church, several church members made full commitments of themselves to the Lord.
One such couple, Dick and Rita Linderg, had been nominal United Methodists for years, until the Billy Graham Crusade. Their worship attendance had been spasmodic and they did not participate in Sunday school. A real commitment to Jesus Christ led both to teach Sunday school. Dick now also sings in the choir, and they don’t miss church more than two or three Sundays a year. Both Dick and Rita have become avid Bible students. Dick is a milk wholesaler, which means he must begin his day about 4:30 in the morning. But about 7:00 he stops and has a time of prayer and Bible study right in his truck.
The Paradise Hills’ Sunday evening service, the only such service held in a United Methodist church in Albuquerque, grew out of the Graham Crusade. On the last Sunday of the meetings, about 15 people met together to pray and thank God for those who had accepted Christ during the week. This informal gathering evolved into regular weekly services.
Paradise Hills also led the way as the first United Methodist Church in New Mexico to use the Evangelism Explosion[1] method of lay witnessing and visitation. Concerning his first Evangelism Explosion clinic, Ron recalls, “There I caught a vision of what an evangelical, Spirit-filled, missions and outreach-concerned United Methodist Church can be.” He goes on to say, “Each Sunday it is a recurring thrill to watch the people who have been led to Christ through our evangelism program come into the sanctuary. The encouraging thing to me is that they are now studying the Bible themselves, teaching, singing in the choir, and helping wherever they can.”
One such person is Eunice Frost, who was reared in a UM church in Michigan and came to New Mexico for her husband’s health. She made a commitment to Christ in her living room as a result of the Evangelism Explosion program. Now she and her high school daughter Cindy work in the Sunday school.
The congregation’s turn-around is evident, also, when one compares the 1974 and 1978 statistics. Worship attendance has jumped from 79 to 186 each Sunday. Sunday school attendance has grown from 38 to 113. The 1974 income of $17,250 looks small next to the 1978 income of 64,391. A little church that couldn’t afford to pay its apportionments has learned the joy of second-mile giving. Last year they undertook three extra mission projects. Two Advance Specials, one a heifer project in Bolivia, and the other a building project for the 4-Corners Ministry on the Navajo Indian Reservation which straddles the New Mexico-Utah-Colorado-Arizona borders. They also help support Wycliffe Bible translators on a brand-new mission project in Juba, Sudan, Africa. To be able to continue such “second mile” mission support, Paradise Hills has taken a new step of faith in 1979. They are planning to tithe (give ten percent) of all church income to mission projects (above apportionments).
Mission is also a local concept for Paradise Hills. The United Methodist Men coordinate a “ministry of helps” for elderly people. They survey skills needed for electrical work, plumbing, general repair, etc., and offer the specific help of their men who are able to meet these needs.
Church members also operate a Happy Days Christian Day Care Center at the church. About 35 children, many from non-church families, receive responsible care and Christian nurture each day.
One of the biggest challenges of the Paradise Hills church is its multi-racial character. Black, white, Indian, and Hispanic—they serve together and work together. At the close of both morning worship services, the congregation sings as a benediction:
We are one in the bond of love.
We have joined our spirits with the Spirit of God.
We are one in the bond of love.
Karen Jurgens, a former missionary who team-teaches one of the Sunday school classes, is the mother of four adopted Indian children-all four from different tribes. She moved from Iowa to New Mexico because of the large Spanish and Indian population and culture in New Mexico. “Iowa is 99.9 percent white,” she declares, “and I wanted my kids exposed to more than just white middle-class culture.” The exposure she seeks for her children is a part of their church life at Paradise Hills UM Church.
The pastor notes, “We have worked to create an open, accepting, Christ-centered atmosphere in which people of all economic strata and races will feel welcome. We feel this is the pluralism which the UM Church should strive for, not some kind of theological or doctrinal pluralism which blandly states that ‘doctrine doesn’t matter’ or ‘theology isn’t important’ or ‘beliefs are not relevant.'”
Of course Paradise Hills still isn’t a perfect church. (Is there one anywhere?) Located in a transient area, it loses two members for every three it takes in. Many folks move to New Mexico and Albuquerque to “get away from it all.” They want to avoid any social contact including church.
Every new member, even transfers from other UM churches, must participate in an orientation program. While some don’t like it and decide not to join, most react favorably. Many appreciate the review of the basics of the faith and learning about mission projects and UM activities in New Mexico.
Many new residents immediately respond to the church. Jim Mogford, an Evangelism Explosion trainer who works as a physicist with Sandia Corporation, and his wife, Ann, share their impressions:
When we moved back to Albuquerque after living in California we had given up on Methodism. We visited a lot of other churches, and one Sunday we decided to visit the Paradise Hills Church just because it was close to our home and we didn’t feel like driving across town that day. We came to only one service when we knew we had found our church!
Paradise Hills is still undergoing a transition from a cold, liberal, and dying congregation to a warm, Spirit-filled, evangelical one. “Naturally we are having to deal with the repercussion and backlash which inevitably follow the moving of God’s Spirit,” Ron reports. “We have moved slowly and have explained what we hope to accomplish as we have brought about the changes. Nearly all of our people have been understanding and supportive.”
One such enthusiastic member is John Price, the lay delegate to annual conference, who explains:
There’s a new wind blowing through our church. I travel quite a bit and see how other churches are dying on the vine. For a long time my wife, Barbara, and I struggled with this thing of leaving the United Methodist Church and going elsewhere because we were literally starving to death. We wanted to go somewhere we could be fed spiritually, but the Lord told us to stay with the Paradise Hills Church just a little longer, and I’m thankful now that we did.
Not content to keep its exciting spiritual growth to itself, the church has reached out in its conference by beginning an evangelical renewal group affiliated with Good News. Although Good News is still in its “infant stage” in New Mexico, Ron confidently declares, “I’m convinced the future is with the evangelicals in the UM Church. I believe God is moving and setting the stage for a spiritual awakening In the UM Church. I look for it to spread like wildfire. Increasing numbers of people are aware of a growing spiritual hunger within themselves, and that need is not being met by the old, bankrupt, empty liberalism. I hope Paradise Hills is on the cutting edge of the evangelical resurgence.”
The folks there know that God has done a mighty work in their church. But they aren’t about to relax their efforts. As they look to the future they confidently affirm their mission: “We look to the non-Christian, unchurched multitudes around us, and we realize we have a lot of work to do.”
[1] Evangelism Explosion is an effective church-based evangelism program developed by Dr. James Kennedy.
by Steve | May 3, 1979 | Archive - 1979
Archive: The Progress of a Theological Pilgrim
By Charles W Keysor, Editor, Good News Magazine
Please read carefully “What is Theology Coming To?” . This article is condensed from an exciting and important new book, Agenda for Theology. It indicates that historic Christianity, long in eclipse in “mainline” churches, may be being born again. Also, this book reveals with clarity and utter frankness the terrible price theological education (and the church) has paid for its addiction to faddism, particularly in the last 20 years.
Much credit is due the author of this daring new book! Dr. Thomas C. Oden, Professor of Theology and Ethics at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey, identifies himself as a reformed “movement theologian.” He admits that he, like so many seminary professors, has climbed aboard just about every bandwagon rumbling down seminary road. Radical feminism … Bultmanian existentialism … tarot cards … neo-orthodoxy … free choice abortion. You name it and Dr. Oden has been there. His 30-year pilgrimage through this wasteland of faddism and modernity has been sometimes exhilarating, but also largely empty of ultimate meaning. That is why this pilgrim professor has been rediscovering his roots in historic Christianity. Praise God! Brilliantly and with eloquence he affirms the central importance of that traditional, mainstream faith of the Church—that faith rising from the wellsprings of Holy Scripture and illuminated by 1,700 years of Christian thought and devotion.
It is exciting to read about his spiritual/intellectual journey. And it is equally exciting to learn that others, like Dr. Oden, grow weary of modernity’s vacuity and are lifting their eyes to the higher ground of historic Christianity. The number is small, Dr. Oden says. But he thinks this may be the tiny seed that will grow, eventually, into a significant theological climate—change in our churches and seminaries. May God speed the day!
Dr. Oden writes from outside the Good News camp. In fact, he had no contact with us until after this book, his 17th, was published. So here is another voice questioning the soundness of seminary education today. More and more people are joining the chorus and perhaps the most creditable criticism now comes from one who speaks out of three decades of experience inside the system. Such a voice will be hard to discount.
A full review of Dr. Oden’s important new book will appear in the next issue of Good News. This is being written by Rev. John Collier, Chairman of the Good News Task Force on Seminary Life. Meanwhile, I urge you to rush out and buy a copy of Agenda for Theology. It belongs in your mind and on your bookshelf, along with What New Creation? by Drs. Paul Mickey and Robert Wilson. Together, these two books provide a deeper, fuller understanding of why our church is the way it is—and how we can survive without compromise, even as we work for constructive changes in our church and its seminaries.
by Steve | May 2, 1979 | Archive - 1979
Archive: Jesus, with Thy Church Abide
A meditation presented during the 1979 meeting of the Good News Board of Directors
by Robert D. Wood, Associate Editor
Associate Executive Secretary, Good News
Administrator, Evangelical Missions Council Task Force
I grew up in the Methodist Episcopal Church in a small village of Central Michigan, distinguished primarily for serving as the state capital for 24 hours in the 1830s. The church itself still stands, a faded yellow brick with a certain elegance. My pals and I took turns ringing the bell in the tower because its great weight was enough to give us a thrilling lift off the floor as we clung to the thick rope. Of the many memories stippled on my childish mind, most memorable of all was a lovely painting on the rear wall of the chancel (though we had no acquaintance with so highfalutin a word).
Fleecy and devoted sheep crowded around the red-and-white robed Good Shepherd. But He seemed to give all His attention to a wee lamb resting safely on His arm.
In His other hand He carried a crook, and His face reflected tenderness and love. Faithful Sunday school teachers taught me to love Him and to regard myself as one of the lambs whom Jesus seeks and for whom He died.
Perhaps these happy memories are why I feel a great emotional attachment to the church. I am still moved whenever I hear one say, “I was converted at a Methodist altar.” Yet I know, of course, that all is not well with the church.
Monroe Rosenfeld penned one of the sentimental ballads of the Gilded Age, the 1890s. It voices my attitude toward United Methodism:
With all her faults I love her still.
And even tho’ the world should scorn
No love like hers my soul can thrill.
Altho’ she made the heart forlorn,
Tho’ other hearts have now her love,
I bear for her no dreams of ill,
Her face to me still dear shall be.
With all her faults I love her still.
This being so, what am I to do? What are all of us to do who look with sadness yet affection upon what was once the most powerful religious and moral influence in the United States? What can we do but continue to remind the church of her divine origins? “Beloved, the Church is of God, and will be preserved to the end of time.” Besides, “The Church’s one foundation/Is Jesus Christ her Lord.”
And we must not let her forget this. Perhaps a pertinent text of Scripture is Jesus’ word to the Twelve, “But you, who do you say I am?” (Matthew 16:15) Today, He asks this of the church that flounders in the outback of theological barrenness: “But you, United Methodism, who do you say I am?”
The nature of the Church’s foundation is our only reason for hope. Nevertheless, I still get dismayed with its continuing drift. The whole thing seems like a lost cause sometimes, and I want to run away and forget it.
But friend Paul jerks me up short when I recall an incredible remark he made to the Corinthians. He refers to himself as a servant of the New Covenant and reminds the Church it was God, after all, who called him. “God in His mercy has given us this work to do, and so we do not become discouraged.” (II Corinthians 4:1, TEV) God stands behind us. “And so.” This makes the difference in all Paul did—and today also, in all we ourselves are called by Him to do. Our problem is that we lose that vision, and our sights are riveted, instead, to all that is wrong with the church. Paul has a corrective for that, too, when he indicates that the “trouble we suffer” is actually “small and temporary.” (v.17) Perspective makes the difference: “For we fix our attention … on things that are unseen.” (v.18)
So it is a matter of seeing beyond boards and agencies that often loom large as destroyers of the church and fixing our attention on Him who is its foundation and Lord, the Unseen, and that truly makes the difference.
Let me take a tack from the letter to the Hebrews, where we are told that Moses fashioned the wilderness tabernacle after a pattern of the heavenly one revealed to him by God (Hebrews 8:5b). We look to the Lord, then, because we believe He has ideas and solutions to the problems in the church. We are not looking for angels’ wings to escape these prison walls, nor for blinders so we won’t have to take note of evil and unpleasantness.
Robert Browning wrote about Karshish, who, on a tour of ancient Palestine, heard about a man who had died and been restored to life by a prophet who had lived 30 or more years earlier. So he sought out the old gentleman. In a report to his teacher, Abib, Karshish wrote, “The man had something in the look of him.” What was it? What did Karshish see in Lazarus that distinguished him from all others living in Palestine at that time?
… oft the man’s soul springs into his face
As if he saw again and heard again
His sage that bade him “Rise” and he did rise.
Something, a word, a tick o’the blood within
Admonishes. …(“An Epistle”).
That’s the way it is with me sometimes. Jesus bursts into my consciousness occasionally when I am most discouraged. I hear His voice in the midst of life and the struggle for the Church:
You did not choose me; I chose you to go and bear much fruit. You are the salt for all mankind. You are the light for the whole world. Feed my sheep.
And I hear the apostles add:
Fight on for this faith which once and for all God has given to His people. The one thing required of a servant is that he be faithful to his master. Be faithful unto death.
That is a summons to radical dedication, like a willingness to give up our lives.
One program of the radio series “Toscanini, the Man Behind the Legend,” told how in 1953 the great maestro was preparing for his last season before retiring at 86. He called for his recording expert to re-play a 1940 performance of a composition he intended to do again. He listened with the total absorption for which he was famous. When the last notes died away, he murmured more or less to himself, “The soloist is good. The orchestra is good. And I am good. But I am afraid; this piece is so difficult.” Exclaiming, “I must study,” he scooped up the music and fled up the steps to his studio.
Toscanini, more than any other conductor, and above all things else, retains the reputation of giving all his energies to ascertain and interpret with exactness the intention of the composer. Pouring over the score with fierce singleness of purpose, he identified with both the composer and the music.
Jesus has given us the score. It speaks of a God who so loved the world that He sent His Son to die for it and to establish His Church. He has chosen us to interpret the score to our age, a world still waiting to hear the song. Let us be faithful to sing it well.
by Steve | May 1, 1979 | Archive - 1979
Archive: What is Theology Coming To?
by Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Oden, Professor of Theology and Ethics Drew University, Madison, New Jersey
Condensed from the new book, Agenda for Theology: Recovering Christian Roots © 1979 by Thomas C. Oden. Reprinted by permission, Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.
… I once had a curious dream that rekindled my deepest theological hopes. The only scene I can remember was in the New Haven cemetery, where I accidently stumbled over my own tombstone only to be confronted by this astonishing epitaph: “He made no new contribution to theology.” I was marvelously pleased by the idea and deeply reassured. Why? Because I have of late been trying in my own way to follow the mandate of lrenaeus “not to invent new doctrine.”
No concept was more deplored by the early ecumenical councils than the notion that theology’s task was to “innovate” (neoterizein), which to them implied some imagined creative addition to the apostolic teaching, and thus something “other than” (heteros) the received doctrine(doxa), “the baptism into which we have been baptized.” What the church fathers least wished for in a theology was that it would be fresh, self-expressive, or an embellishment of purely private inspirations, as if these might stand as some decisive improvement on the apostolic teaching.
Yet from the first day I ever thought of becoming a theologian I have been earnestly taught that my most urgent task was to “think creatively” and to make “some new contribution” to theology eventually. So you can imagine that it took no small effort to resist the repeated reinforcements of my best education in order to overcome the constant temptation to novelty. And you can understand how relieved I was to see such a lovely epitaph prefigured in a dream. …
Suppose Christian teaching were considered essentially under the category of fashion. That in fact seems to be the way much “media theology” has functioned in the last quarter century, searching breathlessly for the next new mushroom in the meadow. And we in ministry have colluded with it. Much of the energy of Christian teaching recently has gone into the effort, first, to achieve a kind of predictive sociological expertise about what is the “next new cultural wave” coming (politically, psychologically, artistically, philosophically, whatever), and then, having spotted an “emergent movement” cresting in the distance, to see if we might get some small foothold for Christianity on that rolling bandwagon so we can enjoy at least a brief ride as long as it lasts.
Does this describe recent theology fairly? Again and again when I have asked audiences of pastors that question, I have been reassured that the description is not at all unfair. …
Suppose theology were fashion and we were fashion designers. Let us go all the way and imagine that we are in the company of Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Cardin, Givenchy, and Dior, assembled in Paris to discuss possibilities for next year’s theological market. Suppose we, sensing a crisis of boredom, had set our heads on inventing some astonishing novelty in theology. What would be the most novel, unheard-of, and outrageous new possibility for modern theology? It is quite evident: orthodoxy. We would say: Is it not about time for a reappearance of orthodoxy?
Why? Well, because the excesses of rapid change in our industry almost require it, because people are becoming tired of everything that has paraded itself before them for decades as ever more frenetically modern and even more up to date than the last up-to-date thing. It is clear, since all that has become tiresome, that the least modern option is now our best bet, and that, by definition, is orthodoxy. In fact, one might say, with a wink, if theological fashion is to recover, it must turn to orthodoxy.
The point of our analogy is not to show that Christian theology is like fashion or that it should begin with market research, but rather that even if it is conceived only on this lowest level of critical sensitivity, at some point the designers would have to come full circle back to the classical models. But Christian teaching, of course, is least understood when it is conceived as fashion. Fashion appeals to the spirit of novelty; Christianity transmutes the very idea of novelty.
I have been confidentially taken aside and gently warned by worried friends that my recent fixation on ancient ecumenical orthodoxy[1] is really … well, let’s face it, intolerable. Orthodoxy by any other name would smell much sweeter. They have cautioned me that the whole idea is unmarketable, will have no effect, and will be wasted effort. They have anxiously pleaded with me to say whatever curious or crazy thing I have to say but, please, in some language less embarrassing to the modern consensus than that of orthodoxy.
All this is amusing. Whether orthodoxy is high or low on a Nielsen chart strikes me as a subject for a vaudeville act or an extended situation comedy. Classical Christianity has always been far less concerned with high acceptance ratings among its human audiences (even with esteemed academic audiences) than with its single divine Auditor. This does not imply that Christianity should masochistically wish for low ratings or hope desperately to be ignored, as it has on some occasions. But neither can it congratulate itself on the fleeting applause of the majority if that should imply a backdoor sellout of its historical memory.
Rather than prudishly stomping away from this vaudeville show or abruptly switching off this situation comedy, (the popularity rating of orthodoxy), I would prefer to watch it play for a while and see whether it might be unexpectedly entertaining. Suppose we imagine a theologian, fresh out of graduate school, who has determined to begin the construction of a massive new doctrinal system solely on the basis of extensive market research into the needs and hungers of the current cultural audience. (Don’t laugh; it could be done.) The samples are meticulously gathered and calculated, fed into the computer, and the results eagerly awaited. (Yes, I admit the p remise is ridiculous, because it turns theology into something that it decidedly is not—namely, public opinion analysis and salesmanship. But bear with me and see if we can learn something even from a disreputable premise.) Now our focus will be an assessment of the current cultural momentum as the sole basis of doctrinal definition.
Our young genius double-checks his figures to see if they are correct. A surprising readout is beginning to burp out of the computer. It indicates that there apparently exists a deep itch in our society to settle things down, ask how things got this way, recover our identities, and see if we might be able to conserve and renew our more stable moral, political, and religious traditions. Further examination of these data reveals something more than a minor trend to nostalgia or sentimentality, the subtle influence of some incipient fascist trend in politics, or the validation of some backlash theory. They appear to reveal an immense appetite for historical identity and roots in a compulsively mobile society whose magic words are change, now, and breakthrough.
He runs the punch cards back through the computer thinking that it might have made a mistake, perhaps a reversal of key components of the equation. But no, on second run again it is confirmed: The actual audience for our new theological construct is amazingly different from the one we thought was there on the basis of our listening to Bultmann ‘s description of “modern man,” Tillich’s concept of “correlation” with the “kairos” of our times, or the process theologians’ estimates of the Zeitgeist.[2]
All of these standard portrayals render a profile of an audience that is extremely dissatisfied with the encumbrances of tradition, insatiably thirsting for “fundamental change” based on a wholly this-worldly rejection of all super-naturalisms and so on. Our clever young theologian then discovers to his astonishment that other eminent public opinion analysis—Gallup, Harris, Yankelovich—are all coming up with similar conclusions. The actual audience being discovered out there is one that is preeminently characterized by the hunger for continuity, stability, the freedom to sustain and enhance traditional values, historical identifications, and old-fashioned ways. This comes as quite a shock, because we were prepared to construct a quite different theological system.
In order to sharpen our portrayal of theology’s amiable accommodation to modernity, I will describe a particular individual, an ordained theologian whom I have known for a long time, whose career in some sense can only be described as that of a “movement person.” If I appear to go into needless detail about this person, it is nonetheless useful to get some sense of the specifics of what we mean by an addictive accommodationism. In all his pursuit of movements, his overall pattern was diligently to learn from them, to throw himself into them, and then eventually to baptize them as if they were identical with the Christian center.
Now in his mid-forties, our subject took his first plunge into “movement identity” almost 30 years ago when, at 16, he joined the United World Federalists to promote world government through various educational and church groups. From 1953 (when he attended the Evanston Assembly) to 1966 (at the Geneva consultation on Christianity and the Social Order), he was involved in ecumenical debate, promotion, and organization. His deepening involvement in the civil rights movement began at about 17, later intensified by his attendance of the national NAACP convention in 1953 and by subsequent participation in marches, demonstrations, pray-ins, sit-ins, letter campaigns, and other forms of political activism.
More than a decade before the Vietnam War, our “movement theologian” was an active pacifist, struggling to motivate the antiwar. movement during the difficult McCarthy days. The fact that he understood himself as a democratic socialist and theoretical Marxist during the McCarthy period did not make his task any easier. He spearheaded the first Students for Democratic Action group to be organized in his conservative home state in the early 1950s. By the mid-1950s, he was active in the American Civil Liberties Union; in the pre-1960s women’s rights movement, as an advocate of liberalized abortions; and as an opponent of state’s rights, military spending, and bourgeois morality. His movement identity took a new turn in the late 1950s, when he became enamored with the existentialist movement, immersing himself particularly in the demythologization movement, writing his doctoral dissertation on its chief theorist.
The early 1960s found him intimately engaged in the client-centered therapy movement. Later he became engrossed in Transactional Analysis and soon was actively participating in the Gestalt therapy movement, especially through Esalen connections.
His involvement deepened in the “third force” movement in humanistic psychology, struggling to move beyond psychoanalysis and behaviorism, as he contributed to its journals, and experimented with its therapeutic strategies in his theological school classrooms. This was supplemented by a several years involvement in the T-Group movement associated with the National Training Laboratories, which he tried to integrate into his religious views. In the early 1970s, he joined a society for the study of paranormal phenomena, taught a class in parapsychology, and directed controlled research experiments with mung beans, Kirlian photography, biorhythm charts, pyramids, tarot cards, and the correlation of astrological predictions with the daily ups and downs of behavior.
My purpose in reciting this long litany is not to boast, for indeed I am that wandering theologian, less proud than amused by the territory I have covered. Rather, the purpose is to recite a straightforward description of what at least one theologian conceived to be his task in successive phases of the last three decades. So when I am speaking of a diarrhea of religious accommodation, I am not thinking of “the other guys” or speaking in the abstract, but out of my own personal history.
I do not wish contritely to apologize for my 30 years as a movement person, because I learned so much and encountered so many bright and beautiful persons. But I now experience the afterburn of “movement” existence, of messianic pretensions, of self-congratulatory ideal ism. It is understandable after this roller-coaster ride, that I would be drawn to a “post-movement” sociology of continuity, maintenance, and legitimation, hoping to ameliorate the “movement psychology” of immediate change. The very thinkers I once excoriated as “conservative” (the Burkes, the Newmans, the Neo-Thomists) I now find annually increasing in plausibility, depth, and wisdom.
The shocker is not merely that I rode every bandwagon in sight, but that I thought I was doing Christian teaching a marvelous favor by it, and at times considered it the very substance of the Christian teaching office. While Christian teaching must not rule out any investigations of truth or active involvement to embody it, we should be wary lest we reduce Christian doctrine to these movements and should be better prepared to discern which movements are more or less an expression of Christ’s ministry to the world.
It was the abortion movement, more than anything else, that brought me to movement revulsiveness. The climbing abortion statistics made me movement weary, movement demoralized. I now suspect that a fair amount of my own idealistic history of political action was ill conceived by self-deceptive romanticisms, in search of power in the form of prestige, that were from the beginning willing to destroy human traditions in the name of humanity, and at the end willing to extinguish the futures of countless unborn children in the name of individual autonomy. So, reflected in the mirror of my own history, I see my own generation and my children’s generation of movement idealisms as naively proud and sadly misdirected, despite good intentions. If I have grown wary about movement people, it is because I am wary of the consequences of my own good intentions.
Meanwhile, my intellectual dialogue has been embarrassingly constricted to university colleagues and liberal churchmen. When I discover among brilliant Roman Catholic, neo-evangelical, and Jewish brothers and sisters a marvelous depth of historical and moral awareness, I wonder why it has taken me so long to discover them, what was it about my liberal Christian tradition that systematically cut me off from dialogue with them, and why my tradition has been so defensive toward them. All these questions are subjects for further historical and sociological investigation, but they arise out of a vague sense of grief over lost possibilities and out of confusion that a tradition that spoke so often about tolerance and universality could be so intolerant and parochial.
[1] Ancient ecumenical orthodoxy: The historic Christian faith, traditionally held by the church’s mainstream, based on Scripture, as summarized in the confessions of the church, and illuminated by the understandings of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, etc.
[2] Zeitgeist: spirit of the present times.
