by Steve | May 1, 1986 | Archive - 1986
Archive: Meeting of the Minds
By Michael Sigler
Evangelical scholars training to teach at UM seminaries gather at historic Shakertown
He went off to seminary and lost his faith.” Does it really happen the way this statement suggests? In most cases, probably not. But how about this statement: “When he went off to seminary he believed in Biblical Christianity … but not anymore!”
To many United Methodists, the second statement has a painfully familiar ring of truth about it. For in spite of signs of evangelical renewal in other sectors of our denomination, UM seminaries have for the most part remained bastions of theological liberalism. In spite of our church’s avowed commitment to theological pluralism, scholars with orthodox-evangelical beliefs have been largely frozen out of the teaching posts of our seminaries.
That may be changing though, thanks in part to a program that is helping train a supply of evangelical scholars to teach in UM seminaries and colleges. Since beginning in 1976, A Foundation for Theological Education (AFTE) has helped 12 evangelical UM students get their doctoral degrees. And 15 more candidates are now in the Ph.D. pipeline.
The financial support of such students represents the main way that AFTE is pursuing its goal: “to encourage United Methodist seminaries to be open and responsive to evangelical Christianity.”
AFTE funds 15 Ph.D. students at a time, at an annual cost of over $100,000. These “John Wesley Fellows” study in such prestigious schools as Yale, Cambridge, Oxford, Duke, Boston, and Princeton.
The results are beginning to be felt by United Methodism. AFTE scholars and students met last December at Shakertown, Kentucky for their annual “Christmas Conference,” a time of mutual encouragement and theological reflection. On hand were the presidents or deans of four United Methodist seminaries: Candler, St. Paul, Wesley, and Claremont. Said one dean at the conclusion of the conference: “This is one of the greatest things taking place in theological education in the United Methodist Church today.”
One of the other seminary chiefs told the John Wesley Fellows: “Something that excites me is the depth of your religious faith. I hope you will hold on to that.”
AFTE is an unusual approach to church renewal, but it makes sense, strategically. After all, its supporters point out, almost all the significant changes in Church history have been led by scholars and theologians—John Knox, Martin Luther, and John Wesley, to name a few.
The AFTE board, by the way, includes members of United Methodist “officialdom” such as Bishops Finis Crutchfield and Earl Hunt; the eminent Wesley scholar, Albert Outler; as well as long-time evangelical spokesman, Ed Robb. Outler has called AFTE “a grace-full sign of hope” for the church.
In addition to supporting the training of evangelical scholars, the foundation is working for renewal on several other fronts. AFTE teamed up with the Texas Annual Conference to endow a Chair of Wesley Studies at Perkins School of Theology. And AFTE has sponsored two public events at Notre Dame which brought together some of the outstanding minds of the Church to pool their thinking on critical issues facing Christianity today.
These two events have drawn together such leaders as church historians Martin Marty and Richard Lovelace, and theologians Carl F. H. Henry and Thomas Langford. AFTE is planning a third gathering of the minds, tentatively scheduled for 1987 on the subject, “What Constitutes the Essential United Methodist Doctrines?”
Still, grooming young evangelical scholars for tomorrow’s United Methodist Church remains at the top of AFTE’s agenda. Of the 12 John Wesley Fellows who have received doctorates, 9 now have teaching positions. So far, only two are teaching in official UM institutions, including one AFTE scholar at Duke Divinity School and another at the denomination’s Westmar College. Others are teaching at non-UM seminaries such as Yale, Ashland, and Asbury, and at colleges that include Houghton and New College, Berkeley.
Placing AFTE scholars in the UM schools has been slow going. But insiders see signs of accelerated progress ahead.
They note that at least two other UM seminaries are currently considering AFTE graduates for teaching posts. And the soon-to-come retirement of a generation of UM seminary professors, as well as a reinvigorated emphasis on Wesley studies in the seminaries, both bode well for future AFTE appointments.
Meanwhile, United Methodists across the church long for the day when they can send their ministerial candidates to UM seminaries and know they will receive something other than a one-sidedly liberal theological education.
by Steve | Mar 30, 1986 | Archive - 1986
Archive: How To Do Your Own Theology
Any layperson can
By Mathias Zahniser
Theology is a word that intimidates some people. It should not, for theology is little more than talking about, thinking about, considering or even discussing God. It is sustained thinking about God and about everything in relation to God and His purposes.
Consider the following conversation between John and Carol as an example of theology:
“Carol, what do you believe about God?”
“I believe God is a spiritual being who is everywhere, who knows and cares about me and has a plan for my life. I don’t always cooperate with Him, but He works persistently at making me the person I ought to be.”
“Where did you come upon this information about God?”
“I don’t know where I first heard about God, but I assume that my parents started talking to me about God so early that I can no longer remember when it was.”
“Now wait a minute, no young child would be told that ‘God is a spiritual being who works persistently to make you a complete person,’ or whatever it was you said.”
“Well, I have gone to church all my life. I read the Bible and hear it read. I especially like the parables and stories of Jesus. They all seem to say that God knows and cares about everyone.”
“That makes sense. But you don’t talk like a person who has only heard and read about God. You obviously have thought about Him too.”
“Yes, John, I have done a lot of thinking too. I remember when my father died it was hard at first to believe that God cared about me. One whole night I could not sleep. I don’t know whether it was my sister Connie’s uninterrupted sobbing or the questions that occupied my mind, but I didn’t sleep at all. I just kept thinking:
Is Daddy happy or sad? Since he is with the Lord, he must be happy. But how can he be happy if he knows how unhappy we are, especially Connie, who is so devastated? Maybe he does not know that we are suffering, but can the price of happiness be ignorance?
“I had gotten out of bed and was sitting at the kitchen table when the idea hit me: Maybe being with the Lord means Daddy knows so much more than we do that he sees even our sorrow as fitting into a larger pattern of joy. I can’t prove it, but I really think our sorrow was a sort of proof of how much our father meant to us. Because it hurt so much, we knew that he was very precious to us. It has somehow helped me to value my relationship with other members of my family more.”
“But what does that experience have to do with your belief that God cares about you?”
“Well, I guess what I’ve been trying to tell you is that when things didn’t make sense, my belief in God was threatened. But as God helped me put things back together, my belief in Him was strengthened. I can’t really know for sure that it was God directing my thoughts, but I felt as if I was being guided to understand our suffering. This restored my conviction that God cares.”
Carol has been doing her own theology. To be sure, circumstances pushed her to think about God, but her thinking about God helped in those circumstances.
What were the sources of her knowledge of God?
First, Carol is a link in a long chain of believers. Her parents and members of her church talked to her about God. They too had heard about God from others. Carol could have traced her knowledge of God back to the founder of her denomination—or even farther. This source of knowledge about God we call tradition, that which is handed down to us.
Second, Carol found great help in the parables and stories of Jesus. She knew that the writers of the New Testament were people close to Jesus Himself. Carol also knew that the Old Testament is necessary too because the apostle Paul said that all Scripture is inspired by God and able to instruct, guide, train, and equip believers for salvation and service (II Timothy 3:16).
Third, there was something about the natural way in which Carol talked about God that impressed John. He discerned that somehow she had experienced God for herself.
She might have put it something like this: There were things I truly believed about God, but after Daddy’s death I knew they would stand the test of real life. Before my beliefs were tested in my own experience, I held them; afterward, they held me.
Before her father’s death, Carol had made a decision to live by the truths which she had learned in Scripture and which had been handed down to her by her family and in her church. She committed her life to Christ in a decision that was personally meaningful to her. But at the time of her father’s death, God became real to her in a new and powerful way.
All these experiences represented important sources of knowledge for Carol. For all of us, experience is an important source of knowledge of God.
Scripture, tradition, and experience provided Carol with resources for knowing God.
Also, Carol was a thinker. Reflecting on her father’s death and her family’s suffering led her to doubt what she had been taught about heaven being a happy place.
She had been told that Christians who die go to be with the Lord. Her reading of Scripture confirmed this belief. She assumed that, in heaven, her father knew more than she, not less. But how could her father be happy if he knew of his family’s suffering? Did he know? Was he happy? How could the answer to both questions be yes? Doubt was at work, moving her to question her beliefs.
However, she pressed on in her thinking. Her doubts led her to a new insight which was really her own: Ignorance is not the price of happiness; rather, more knowledge—much more—will show sorrow to be a part of a greater joy. This was hard to explain and impossible for her to prove, but it made sense to Carol and was a key factor in her faith becoming really her own.
In short, Carol was doing her own theology. Her conversation with John described the process of her growing knowledge of God. Experience had forced her to think through what she believed, and John’s question gave her a chance to clarify her faith in words.
But what about you? Doing your own theology means reflecting on Scripture, tradition, and experience in such a way that your knowledge of God and everything else in relation to Him grows. As the conversation with Carol reveals, we do theology almost without realizing it. But we have a choice: We can shy away from it, or we can take it up deliberately. Here are some suggestions on how to do theology.
1. Do not be afraid of questioning or even of being wrong.
We are not saved by being right in what we believe; we are saved through faith (read “trust”) in Jesus by the free gift of God (Ephesians 2:8). What you believe about God will be strengthened, not weakened, by sincere questioning and thinking. You will come to some conclusions which you will later realize have been incomplete or incorrect, but for the most part you will discover that your basic beliefs make good sense.
2. Start with beliefs you can most confidently affirm.
You may have noticed that Carol’s theology was not complete. There is much more to Christian theology than a belief that God is a spiritual being who cares and works for the full growth of persons. But Carol started her answer to John’s question with what she could most confidently affirm.
There are many things which you believe because they are Scriptural or because the Church has affirmed them through the ages or because your family affirms them. Go on believing them. But start your sustained thinking with those convictions which you personally affirm most confidently.
3. Think of doing theology as conversation with God.
Two convictions which you might very well affirm confidently are, one, that God is personal and, two, that God is spiritually present everywhere. Now think about this: If God is personal and everywhere, then we are always in His presence. To talk about a person in his or her presence would be impolite. Similarly, it seems most appropriate to talk to God when thinking about Him.
For this reason I find myself addressing God in the written journal I keep. Doing my own theology is mostly prayer.
4. Search the Scriptures.
When I began doing my own theology, I discovered the embarrassing limits of my knowledge of Scripture. You too will find yourself searching the Scriptures for insights on a topic or question that comes up. I have found it helpful to read the Bible systematically so that I can get a whole picture of what God wishes to reveal to us.
5. Examine yourself regularly.
Are you living in a way that is compatible with those convictions which you can most confidently affirm? William Hordern has said that theology is the attempt to shape the way people think so that they will act as Christians (A Layman s Guide to Protestant Theology, 1968, p. xv). Thinking must never become detached from feeling and doing.
6. Finally, share your results.
If you are fortunate, you will discover someone else who wants to engage in doing theology. You can compare results and give each other encouragement. In your church school class, Bible study, or prayer circle, opportunities will arise to share your faith. Here is an opportunity to let other people you love and trust respond to some of your discoveries. Take their reactions seriously, reflect on them, but do not be defensive.
One of my students recently lamented to me, “My church taught me what to believe, but not how to think.” You can learn to think through your own faith, to do your own theology, by reflecting on Scripture, tradition, and experience.
Do so in conversation with God, and record the process in a journal. Start with the truths you can most confidently affirm, and test your results by the living of your life in the love of God and your neighbor.
Dr. A. H. Mathias Zahniser is the associate professor of world religions at Asbury Theological Seminary.
by Steve | Mar 2, 1986 | Archive - 1986
Archive: Escape From Cambodia
They prayed that God would help them flee the terrors of Pol Pot
During most of the 1970s, the Southeast Asian nation of Cambodia was terrorized by a blood-thirsty Communist regime known as the Khmer Rouge. Headed by the dreaded Pol Pot, Khmer Rouge troops killed more than a million Cambodians, most in cold blood.
During this nightmare, a flood of terrorized Cambodians fled their country for the safety of non-Communist Thailand. Many thousands were eventually admitted to the U.S., where churches from nearly all denominations helped in their resettlement. This is the story of one such Cambodian family.
Huy clutched the side of the oxcart as the buffalo pulled it into the stream. The children sat quietly on top of the vehicle. Huy’s husband, Bun (Bun) Meng, and the others—ten in all—walked beside it, struggling to keep their footing in the stump-strewn mud and swirling water.
Suddenly gunshots broke the pre-dawn stillness. Khmer Rouge troops had discovered the escape attempt. Panic hit as the shots drew nearer, and everyone seemed to run in a different direction.
Huy got lost from her family as she struggled onto the opposite bank of the stream and started running across an open field. Moments later the soldiers had forded the stream and were only a few hundred yards behind her. Huy managed to reach the woods and hide in some brush till the gunmen passed, then she came out to search in wild desperation for her loved ones.
Everyone had disappeared into the darkness and, for all Huy knew, they might be dead. Not knowing which direction to go, she followed the stream. What am I going to do? she wondered, rubbing her swollen stomach. This baby will come anytime now!
Alone, Huy stumbled along in the darkness until, up ahead, she spotted an overturned oxcart. It was their oxcart! Everyone was there, struggling to right the vehicle—everyone, that is except Huy’s father, Kim Khauv.
With Huy’s help, the family managed to set the cart upright. “What shall we do now?” someone asked. There was nothing to do but go on. As the oxcart crept forward, everyone peered nervously into the darkness.
Meanwhile Kim Khauv had become so distraught at losing his beloved family that he thought, I’ll kill myself if I can’t find them! As he groped along, weeping, the oxcart overtook him. Again, all were reunited!
Huy was riding in the cart now, her discomfort increasing. Just ahead Viet Cong troops, who also occupied parts of Cambodia, had set up a guard station. But under shelter of the waning night, the family saw them first and turned aside. After awhile, in a field outside a small village, the travelers decided to make camp.
“Let’s stay under that tree. I am ready to have my baby,” Huy announced. It was not long before a baby girl, Bun Ly (“Lee”) was born. Miraculously, the family had escaped recapture. This was their second escape attempt, and it would not be their last.
The first escape try had been four years earlier, when the reign of terror had begun, forcing the Kims and Buns to flee from their home. Before the Communist takeover, Huy and Bun Meng and their two young sons lived with Huy’s parents, the Kims, and their six children. The family restaurant business was prospering. And in spite of a growing Communist threat, the presence of American troops in Viet Nam had given some hope that Cambodia’s peace might last.
Then the Americans left South Viet Nam, the North Vietnamese swept that country, and the Chinese-backed Cambodian Communists led by Pol Pot made their move. The wave of murder and destruction swept Cambodia like an avalanche.
Huy’s father, Kim Khauv, had called the family together to prepare a hasty departure. Some neighbors were loading furniture. Kim Khauv warned, “What can you do with that? It may be too late even to save our own lives!”
Gathering the family members, they walked away from a newly built home and everything else they had labored a lifetime to attain—everything except each other. Soon even that would be taken away.
This first attempt to escape Pol Pot came too late. The Khmer Rouge troops arrived just hours after the family left their home. The Communists held “planning meetings” for community leaders and murdered those who attended, then captured and enslaved others. When the Kims and Buns were captured, the family was separated.
The girls were to spend months in the forest with no shelter except plastic coverings to blanket rough hammocks when it rained. Children of six and older were sent into the hills to chop grass that would be plowed under as fertilizer. Two of the Kim daughters would never leave these camps. Kim Keung would die at age 23 and Kim Thaeng at age 4, from malnutrition and exposure.
Bun Meng was sent to a men’s camp to do field work. Huy was allowed to keep with her both Bun Chay, age 3, and Bun Houk, then 13 months old.
Huy had to leave the two children alone during daylight hours and walk miles to work in the fields. She gave careful instructions to Bun Chay: “When the mealtime bell rings, take Bun Houk by the hand and lead him to get rice. He must not grab more than is offered, or cry.”
Huy sewed little pockets inside the children’s trousers and into these she fastened plastic bags. “They won’t let you bring home rice from your bowl, so be careful nobody sees when you put some of it into your pocket.” Huy taught little Bun Chay how to boil the rice in water to provide food for the evening. With plenty of water, stomachs would not feel quite so empty.
As Huy left the children each day she prayed, “God, keep me safe. Who can care for my babies if I am killed?”
She tried to do her work and avoid the Khmer Rouge troops whenever possible. One evening she was walking back to camp with some other women when they spotted soldiers waiting for them. The women scattered in different directions. Huy was running across an open field when she made a horrifying discovery. Under her feet were the corpses of people murdered by the new regime and lightly covered with dirt and leaves. Unwittingly, Huy had stumbled onto one of Cambodia’s “killing fields.”
“Every day, about everything I did, I prayed,” Huy recalls. At this time she knew little about God. Her father had never read a Bible, yet he had always taught her, “Believe in God and do good things for others. If you only believe in God, that is not enough. If you only do good and do not believe in God, that is not enough. Do both,” Huy believed, did whatever she could for other people, and she prayed.
Meanwhile Huy’s husband, Bun Meng, also had opportunities to pray.
The men’s camp was set up in an open field, with no shelter at all. Guns ready, guards patrolled the area seeking an excuse to execute “uncooperative” individuals. Meng was assigned to raise vegetables for his group of ten. A committee of Khmer Rouge officials carefully monitored all activities, assigning spies to report any “aberrations.”
One day someone reported, “Bun Meng is secretly taking extra food. He should be shot.” An informer was assigned to observe him closely and return a recommendation. “Meng is not taking more than his share,” the spy said later. And Meng’s life was spared.
Another time, the usually unobtrusive Meng refused to eat his bowl of rice. “It is spoiled,” he explained.
The leader heard of Meng’s objection and decided to kill him in two days. When a friend heard of the plan, he reported it to the unsuspecting Meng.
“It is impossible to escape,” Meng said. “I am not afraid to die, but I don’t want to.” As usual, he prayed.
Shortly afterward, the leader called together Meng’s group of ten. “Was the food spoiled?” each man was asked. When everyone admitted, “Yes it was,” the charge against Meng was dropped.
Though separated, the Kims and Buns lived in camps less than a mile apart. Family members managed to stay in contact with each other. And in 1979, after four years of enslavement, they joined about 500 other prisoners in an escape attempt.
That is when Huy had gotten separated from, and later was reunited with, the rest of her family. They camped near the village where Huy’s baby, Bun Ly, was born and then, several weeks later, they managed to reach Battabomba, their earlier home. They were allowed to live underneath the house of a relative there. But they knew Cambodia no longer held any hope for them.
Since the Communist takeover, two Kim daughters had died, Huy’s parents had nearly succumbed to illness, and Huy’s grandmother had been shot in 1975 during the early days of Pol Pot’s uprising. Plans were carefully made for a third escape attempt. Fifty miles through jungle, past Pol Pot and Viet Cong troops to peaceful Thailand was “an impossibility.” But the Kims and Buns decided to make a try for freedom.
On November 27, 1979 the family had completed final preparations and with 200 others were ready to leave. They had heard that bombs were hidden as booby traps, that pits had been dug concealing spikes of bamboo covered with branches and leaves. The family knew of the many Communist outposts and sharpshooters. But freedom would be worth the risk.
On November 28, 1979, children and some rice were loaded onto a cart to be towed by Meng on a bicycle. Huy carried four-month-old Bun Ly. The boys Kim Tri (age 9), Kim Ah (7), Bun Chay (5), and Bun Houk (3); the girls Kim Chu (16) and Kim Kieu (20); and their parents walked into the jungle. Only two miles out, rapid shooting punctuated the silence and all found cover in some tall grass. When the shooting stopped, the group went on, sometimes retracing steps, hiding in the hills, sleeping some during the days, and walking interminably at night.
The 50-mile trip took three days and nights. Finally up ahead, the travelers saw lights but no guns or troops. It was a Cambodian border tradepost. Safe at last!
A bus carried the escapees to the Thai refugee camps where American Red Cross personnel provided vegetables, chicken, pork, and salt fish along with rice. Christians from the United States provided opportunity to hear more about the God who had brought the family to safety. For the Kims and Buns, it was the beginning of a growing involvement with Christian people and understanding of the Christian faith.
The family applied for a permit to go to the United States and was accepted. In a resettlement house in Houston, Texas, the family joined about 30 other such escapees being provided for by the International Rescue Committee. However, social workers were almost non-existent due to fund limitations. There was nobody to keep up with the needs for clothing, language, schooling, or medical care beyond the barest essentials.
A few days following the family’s arrival, Huy wakened in the night knowing that her fourth child was due immediately. It was on this very morning that two young American women had agreed to meet and take Huy for a prenatal checkup. Unaware of the nearness of her delivery, they arrived at the house at 6 a.m. to discover that Huy was ready to have her baby. Shortly after arrival at the hospital, baby Catherine was born.
Huy had prayed before leaving Thailand, “God, send us friends we can trust. We don’t know what to do about anything in a strange country with different people and customs. ”
With the reassurance of God’s exact timing in answering her prayers, the dauntless Huy tackled the English language, traffic, and customs. She got jobs housekeeping, babysitting, and sewing. And she purchased a car and learned to drive it. Bun Meng and the Kims gathered freeway trash to earn extra money, and the children enrolled in school. Within a short time the children had learned English well enough to be placed in regular classes where they soon excelled and qualified for accelerated course work. This year Bun Chay, now 11, is making straight A’s in the advanced curriculum.
Shepherd Drive United Methodist Church in Houston is one of ten churches involved in ministry with the Kim/Bun family and other refugees. The churches care for spiritual as well as physical needs—not only helping children get started in school, helping adults get driver’s licenses, and helping with other social and medical needs; but also providing a Bible study class for the refugees.
Through the ministry of such Christians, the Kim/Bun family has embraced the Christian faith. Huy had attended evangelistic meetings at the Thai refugee camp and, while there, placed her faith in Jesus Christ. Other family members have followed her lead since coming to the States.
Huy’s sister, Kim Chu, was only 15 when her family escaped from Cambodia. She is 21 now, and has started a Cambodian Bible study to teach her countrymen the Gospel and how to be born again.
For this Cambodian family, new life in a new country has meant many changes, but not all of them have been happy.
A year ago, on the last day of the Chinese year, Kim Chu cooked a special dinner for her family and friends. The mood was one of celebration, for no one knew it was to be a farewell occasion-unless perhaps Bun Meng sensed it.
Before the guests arrived, he presented a gift to every member of the family and said to each one, “God bless you.” Then he reminded the children, “Listen to your Sunday school teachers. I can’t teach you the Bible but they can. ”
A night or so earlier the young man had confided to his wife, “Huy, I had a strange dream. I was standing on the shore of a wide sea with all of you gathered around me. Then I found myself on the opposite side of the sea, but none of you were with me over there.”
“Don’t talk like that!” Huy protested.
“I’m only telling you what I dreamed. Huy, I was facing a place brighter and more beautiful than anything you can imagine!”
The morning following the New Year celebration, Meng was reluctant to leave Huy. On the way to her job, a while later, Huy passed Meng as he worked on the freeway. Each waved and smiled at the other, for the last time. Less than an hour had elapsed when a trailer came unhooked from a passing truck and struck Meng, wounding him fatally.
Bun Meng’s journey on earth had been a difficult one, but during it he met Jesus Christ, who said “I am the Way … I go to prepare a place for you … and will come and receive you unto Myself. ” Because Christians cared for strangers and in love pointed them to the Way, Bun’s journey ended in that beautiful, bright eternal land. He is Home.
Catherine Weinaug is a free-lance writer and author of three children’s books. She serves as a volunteer social worker for resettlement homes for Cambodian refugees.
by Steve | Mar 1, 1986 | Archive - 1986
Archive: Healing Our Feelings About God
Why people feel bad about a God who is good
The young theological student was having a difficult time describing his relationship with God. So, I asked the young man to draw a picture that would illustrate how he viewed God. The student said he couldn’t draw very well but, next time we met, he would bring a picture.
It happened to be the Christmas season and, when the young man returned, he brought a magazine with an artist’s drawing of an extra-large, angry, and demanding Scrooge. He was sitting behind a desk, quill pen in hand, with his debit-credit ledger before him.
Standing in front of the desk, facing Scrooge, was a small, terror-stricken Bob Cratchett. Pointing to Scrooge, the young seminarian explained, “That’s God,” and then to Cratchett, “That’s me.”
And just think, the young man made A’s in theology!
Inside every one of us is a mental picture of God. We often speak of this as our concept of God and talk about it as if it were something solely in our minds. We forget that, along with what we have been taught about God, our experiences, memories, and feelings also play a large part in forming this picture. In fact, the most determinative factor is our ‘feltness” of who God is and what He is really like.
It is surprising the number of genuine Christians who are caught in an inner conflict between what they think about God and what they feel about God (and how He feels toward them). Their head theology is excellent but their gut-level knee-ology (what they feel when they pray) is terrible. This is the source of many emotional hangups in Christians. Years of experience have taught me that regardless of how much correct doctrine Christians may know, until they have a true picture of God and a felt sense that He is really good and gracious, there can be no lasting spiritual victory in their lives.
The Good News and the Bad News
How is it that the Gospel which we proclaim as Good News so often becomes bad news at the level of our feelings?
To understand this, let’s borrow a concept from foreign missions—cross-cultural evangelism. In a short time, a missionary becomes aware of the fact that what the people hear him say can be very different from what he has actually said. He proclaims (encodes) something, but the listener hears (decodes) something else.
While working in India, I soon learned to be very careful about preaching on the text “You must be born again” (John 3:7). The Hindu decodes those words through his belief system of reincarnation and a cycle of rebirths. So he hears it as, “You must be born again and again,” going through many reincarnations until one finds salvation (release) from the cycle.
Or, let’s bring it closer to home—literally. Imagine how two different groups of people might respond when I say the word “home.” To some the word means heaven, and their mental images and feelings correspond to that. To others it means hell, and they see and feel correspondingly.
Likewise in our concept of God, what we have been taught is extremely important, but what we have caught is equally so. In fact, our feelings about God can drastically affect our ideas of God. This is because those feelings are part of the dynamics which determine the way we perceive the teachings given to us.
This crucial fact is overlooked by so many Christians, including pastors and Christian leaders. They assume that if Biblically correct doctrines and ideas are preached and taught, they will automatically clear up a person’s concept of God and enable him to believe in God and trust Him. They imagine that the Holy Spirit, as it were, somehow drills a hole in the top of the hearer’s head and pours the pure truth into him.
With many people, however, such an approach is guaranteed to fail. For although the Holy Spirit is the One who reveals the truth, what the listener hears and pictures and feels still has to be filtered through the listener. The Holy Spirit Himself does not bypass the personality equipment by which a person perceives things. And when those perceiving receptors have been severely damaged, the Biblical truths get distorted.
In this sense the facetious remark, “Man creates God in his own image,’ contains an element of truth. Even for the most healthy and normal Christians, clarifying their concept of God is a lifelong task and a central part of reaching maturity in Christ.
“Will the Real God Please Stand Up” is the title of an exceptionally helpful article on clarifying our concepts/feelings about God (Joseph Sica, Marriage and Family Living, August 1983). Mr. Sica lists some of the faulty concepts/feelings about God which can develop:
- The Legal God “keeps an accounting of what we do. He waits for us to step out of line, to trip up, to falter, so He can marks us as losers.”
- The Gotcha God resembles Sherlock Holmes and wears a detective’s trench coat and dark glasses. Like a disguised private investigator, He is always following at a short distance. The moment we step out of line, He jumps out of the bushes and yells, “Gotcha!” He is much like the “corner policeman” God that J. B. Phillips writes about in his excellent book, Your God Is Too Small.
- The Sitting Bull God “relaxes in a yoga position on cotton candy clouds, expecting burnt offerings and homage all day.”
- The Philosopher’s God, Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” of the universe, is withdrawn, cold and distant. He is much too busy running the galaxies to get involved in our petty problems. As one man described Him, He is silently sitting in his office, studying the encyclopedia, His door closed with a “Do Not Disturb” sign on it.
- I have added another, The Pharaoh God. He is an unpleasable taskmaster who is ever increasing His demands, always upping the ante. Like Pharaoh of old, His commands move from “Make bricks” to “Make more bricks” to “Make bricks without straw.” He is the very opposite of the heavenly Father God whom Jesus revealed. He is more like the horrible godfather of the mafia who always says, “Measure up or else!”
This tendency to remake God in any number of distorted images is one of the main reasons why the Incarnation was so necessary. The Word had to become flesh. God had gone as far as He could in revealing Himself through words. For at their very best-as in the greatest prophets of the Old Testament—words are subject to the distortions of sinful and damaged hearers. Only when the Word became a human life was it possible for us to see a true picture of God, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
Even so, the problem of distortion is still partially with us. For the content of the words we read in the Bible which describe Jesus and the character of God is greatly influenced by our memories and relationships.
Wrong concepts/feelings about God lead to various kinds of spiritual problems. Some of the most common are: the inability to feel forgiven, the inability to trust and surrender to God, chronic doubt, and problems with neurotic perfectionism.
How the Good News Becomes Bad News
Because it is so important for us to understand the connection between what we hear about God and what we feel about Him, I have illustrated the process on the chart on page 12. Beginning at the top, you will see represented the Good News about God as revealed to us in Jesus Christ. If you have seen Jesus, you have seen the Father (John 14).
While this list of God’s characteristics is not complete, it is sufficient to give a true picture of the goodness of God. You will note that the lines coming down are straight. This represents their truthfulness—the truth and grace revealed in Christ.
As you continue reading downward, you will notice that the lines become jagged and twisted. This means something is happening to the Good News about God as it passes through unhealthy interpersonal relationships. In every case now, the Good News has become distorted into the Bad News, and the person perceives God as the opposite of who He really is.
Still looking at the chart, compare each truth about God with its distortion. As you’ll see, the loving, caring God has become hateful, or at least unconcerned.
Many times I ask counselees, who have already given me a theologically “correct” description of a loving God, how they think God feels about them? All too often they say, “I don’t think He really cares for me; I’m not sure He knows I exist. If He does, I’m not sure He’s concerned.” In contradiction to their theoretical ideas about God, they feel that God is mean and unforgiving, holds grudges against them, keeps accounts on them, and constantly reminds them of past sins. As in the song about Santa Claus, “He’s making a list and checking it twice!”
Sometimes I ask people who are having a difficult time describing their view of God to draw a picture of Him. As you might imagine, I have an interesting collection of drawings. Several depict a huge eye which covers a whole page—God watching everything the person does, waiting to catch him at some failure or wrongdoing. Others have drawn angry human faces, or birds of prey with sharp beaks and talons. And then there was the theological student’s portrait of God as Scrooge, mentioned earlier.
As the chart illustrates, instead of trusting a God who is predictable in His steadfastness and reliable in His faithfulness, many Christians are filled with fears and anxiety because, at a deep, gut level, they sense God to be untrustworthy. They sing about “amazing grace,” talk about it in Sunday school, and even witness about it to others. But on a performance level, they live fearful of a God who accepts and loves them only when they measure up.
They do not see God as a nurturing and affirming parent who is always encouraging His children in their development; or as a good father or mother, pleased with every step of growth. Instead, His face seems critical and unpleasable. He is indeed the inner voice that always says, “That’s not quite good enough.”
So, they feel rejected by God, unaccepted by Him, and thus caught in the vicious circle of trying to please an unpleasable God. They become POWs—not prisoners of war but Performance Oriented Workers.
The final distortion is yet to come, for these Christians usually have hidden anger against God. Therefore, they come to feel He is unfair and partial in His judgments. He is an unjust God to them, but treats everyone else fairly. That is why they may freely tell others about a loving God and explain the plan of salvation by grace, but are unable to apply it to themselves.
I can understand—I’ve been there. I had been a missionary in India for ten years when, at age 34, the Holy Spirit began to deal with me about some deeply buried resentments against my mother. They were specifics I had not dealt with. In fact, I had not even really remembered them for years.
The Spirit also showed me that I had not faced some of my true feelings toward God. You see, I had been separated from my parents when they got stuck in India during the early years of World War II. They had left me at age 12 and I did not see them again until the morning of my 20th birthday. And after all, it was God who had called them to be missionaries in the first place.
Oh, I had spiritualized it all, basking in the glow when people would say, “Isn’t it wonderful, your parents are missionaries!” But the gut-level truth was that I felt angry about those years of separation. All my friends had their parents with them and places to go on holidays. But God had taken my mom and dad away!
Like so many people I would counsel in later years, my theology of God and my feelings about Him were at odds.
Now we’ve come to the crux of the whole matter. Notice on the chart what brings about the twisting of the lines and the distorting of God’s character—unhealthy interpersonal relationships, especially those which occurred during the early developmental years of childhood and adolescence. More than any other factor, these faulty relationships cause the emotional damages which distort spiritual perceptions.
You will notice on the chart that the twisted lines actually go in both directions. They proceed down from the bad experiences and relationships and also come up out of the person. This means that what began from outside sources gradually has become internalized, affecting the way the person actually perceives other people, himself, and God. It has become a way of life.
We could liken such a condition to a kind of spiritual paranoia. Paranoid persons can take the most loving, affirming statements and twist them into insults, rejections, and even threats. In the same way, Christians with damaged love receptors can take the Good News and turn it into Bad News. This is why so many of them have an uncanny knack of missing the wonderful promises of God’s mercy, love, and grace, and consistently dwelling on Bible passages which emphasize wrath, punishment, judgment, and “the unpardonable sin.”
Finally, look at the columns on either side of the person in the drawing. The fact that we may have been victims of painful experiences and hurtful relationships does not excuse us from responsibility. Yet, there are many unchosen factors of life, including our fallen natures, which in themselves tend to produce distorted pictures of God.
There are also other factors over which we have neither choice nor control: our biological and psychological inheritance; our geographical and cultural environment; and the accidents, tragedies, and traumas of life. These make up our unchosens which, in many cases, have caused what Scripture would term our infirmities.
Infirmities are the weaknesses, the cripplings, the inborn and ingrown defects of body, mind, or spirit. They are not in themselves sins but are, rather, those aspects of our personalities which predispose us and incline us toward certain sins. They are the weakened places in our defenses which undermine our resistance to temptation and sin.
On the opposite side of the figure are the Chosens—the points at which we are responsible. We have chosen to make wrong responses to God and to other people. We have held onto our resentments and bitterness and have deliberately decided to disobey God. This has brought us fear and guilt, and has further reinforced our warped perceptions and feelings about God.
So, however much we have been victims of the sins and evil of others, we have also sinned, and we must accept our share of responsibility for our problems.
Yes, it is a complex picture; but its purpose is not to confuse but to clarify, to help us discover and be healed of those images and feelings which distort our concepts of God. For in spite of all our commitment to the most rigorous Christian disciplines, we will never find lasting “righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17) until we find a Christlike God.
Most of our failure to love and trust God stems from our pictures of God as unlovable and untrustworthy. And most of our anger against Him is not really against the true God but against our unchristian or subchristian concepts of God.
The encouraging thing about all this is that God knows and understand us. He is not angry with us for our lack of trust or our anger toward Him. Rather, He is saddened that our false pictures of Him keep us from getting to know Him as He truly is. He is far more brokenhearted about it than we are. That’s why He longs to help us find healing from the hurts which have contributed to the distorted concepts/feelings about Him.
Some time ago a lady named Carrie came to counsel with me following a sermon I had preached on the need some Christians have for inner healing. She was a very intelligent, attractive, Spirit-filled Christian, and highly successful in her profession. During the sermon, the Holy Spirit had pulled back a veil, so that she became aware of a deep anger against God. Since Carrie was in her 50s and had been a diligent Christian almost all her life, this came as a great shock to her.
We counseled regularly for several months, slowly working through many layers of repressed emotions, until finally the Spirit led us to the place which needed healing. The memories returned slowly, going all the way back to when Carrie was about ten.
It was during World War II, and her favorite brother was in the army. One day an army officer came to the door and delivered the terrible news of the death of her brother.
Carrie’s parents were devastated, her mother retreating to her room to shut herself up for days. Carrie literally had to take over. She had to be the strong one and shoulder many of the household responsibilities. She never had a chance to express her grief over the loss. She loved that brother more than anyone else in the world, and although she was hurting no one cared enough to listen to her sorrow.
Into her crushed and overloaded heart crept an anger against her family for never allowing her to express her tears. She had been forced to become a ten-year-old superwoman whose own needs were totally unmet.
Now, with these painful memories, came a chance to express her grief. But there also came the realization that because of what had happened, she had become a closed person, perfectionistic and overly demanding in her outlook.
The core of her anger and pain was this: “I’ve always been forced to do and be some- one I’m really not.” And this had carried over to the way she perceived her superiors and God, who always seemed to be pressuring her into being more than she really was.
With Carrie’s permission, let me share her letter which describes the turning point in her healing:
“After talking with you yesterday, I came home for lunch and, as I usually do, reached for a book. I’ve been reading in Rabboni (by W. Phillip Keller) and had come to the chapter, “The Forgiveness of God.” Without really thinking, I started to read. Suddenly, it was not just a book, but God was using it to say, ‘You’re forgiven.’
“It seems incredible, but for the first time in my life the reality of being forgiven came home to me. I haven’t words to express the song that began inside—the wonder of feeling forgiven and free.
“The realization of forgiveness came as a result of thinking on your answer to my question, ‘What do I do now?’ Your reply, ‘Do nothing,’ seemed too simple; yet finally the truth came home that this was the exact answer I needed, for God had already done it. There may be lots of reprogramming ahead, but today I believe it will happen, for I’m finally on the road.’
This was indeed the beginning of a new road of grace and freedom in Carrie’s life. Like Mary in the greatest recognition story of the Bible (John 20:1-16), Carrie had found her Rabboni, her Master, in a new relationship, free from the distorted concepts/feelings about Him that had plagued her for years.
Perhaps it would be fitting to close this article with a prayer of St. Augustine, who early in his Christian life faced the problem of a wrong concept of God (from The Confessions of Augustine in Modern English by Sherwood E. Wirt):
“Should I call on You for help or should I praise You? Is it important to know You first before I call on You? If I don’t know who You are, how can I call? In my ignorance, I might be calling on some other object of worship. Do I call on You, then, in order to know You? … It’s settled: let me seek You, Lord, by asking for Your help in my life.”
David A. Seamands was born of missionary parents in India. He is professor of pastoral ministries at Asbury Theological Seminary and the author of three books, including the best-selling Healing For Damaged Emotions. This article is excerpted from his latest book Healing of Memories (Victor Books, © 1985, SP Publications, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois).
by Steve | Jan 5, 1986 | Archive - 1986
Archive: Good News Founder Charles Keysor Dies at 60
By James S. Robb with other staff reports
The minister and journalist who almost single-handedly forged an influential evangelical movement within the United Methodist Church has died.
Dr. Charles W. Keysor, founding editor of Good News magazine and chief executive of the Good News movement within the church for 15 years, died October 22 at his home in Clearwater, Florida from complications of cancer. He was 60 years old.
From his position as spokesman for and organizer of UM evangelicals, Keysor played a decisive role in the realignment of United Methodist theology and policy that began after the denomination was created by union in 1968. In many ways he personified the evangelical strain of United Methodism.
From its founding to the early 20th century, the evangelical faith had dominated American Methodism. But in the early 1900s, Methodism underwent a rapid change of direction by embracing theological liberalism. The liberal swing gained such momentum that by the 1960s evangelicals in the denomination were scattered and seldom heard.
By the time of Keysor’s graduation from Garrett seminary as a second-career minister in 1965, evangelicals were essentially unrepresented at the national levels of the church. Some observers were even predicting the death of the orthodox faith, at least among the clergy.
Charles Keysor was not prepared to accept this situation. Just a few years earlier it would not have mattered to him. Though an active Methodist, Keysor had no personal relationship with Christ. He did, however, have an intimate knowledge of the institutional church. He had been the managing editor of Together, the now defunct official Methodist magazine. Then, while managing editor of the David C. Cook Publishing Company, he was profoundly converted in a Billy Graham crusade. Soon he felt called to leave his journalism career to enter seminary.
As a minister with an evangelical faith, he became distressed with the prevailing liberal theology of the denomination. In 1966, at a lunch meeting, Keysor told his concerns to James Wall, who was then the editor of the official Methodist ministers’ magazine, the Christian Advocate. Wall suggested that Keysor put his concerns in an article for the Advocate. The article, “Methodism’s Silent Minority,” clearly explained what an evangelical is. Keysor called upon his fellow evangelicals “to become the unsilent minority.”
The article made a deep impact across the church. Keysor received over 200 letters and phone calls in response, mostly from pastors who shared his concern. Their responses followed two basic themes: “I thought I was the only one left in our church who believes these things”; and “I feel so alone-so cut off from the leadership and organization of my church.”
A number of others asked why the church couldn’t have just one publication that expressed the evangelical faith. Keysor asked himself, “Why, indeed, should a denomination which began with the Bible and the evangelistic thrust of the Wesleys and Francis Asbury be without a voice for orthodoxy?”
Even though he had thought his journalism days were over, Keysor decided he must found such a magazine. It would be a “forum for Scriptural Christianity.” While continuing his responsibilities as pastor of Grace Methodist Church in Elgin, Illinois, Keysor, together with his wife Marge, began to pull the publication together. He planned for it to have a rather austere design and a digest-size format similar to that used by several other magazines he had edited. On Marge’s suggestion he decided to name it Good News. The first quarterly issue appeared in March, 1967 and was mailed to 6,300 Methodists.
Other issues followed, and gradually the mailing list was converted to mostly paid subscribers. In short order Good News became widely read by church officials, who wanted to see what the evangelicals thought about various church policies.
The magazine’s early issues were collections of short articles, mostly written by evangelical UM pastors, on the subjects of evangelism, church growth, Biblical exposition, etc. But the heart of the magazine was the editor’s carefully written and hard-hitting editorials. One of the liberal church leaders reading Good News said, “Charles opened our eyes and made us think again.”
But Keysor’s direct, tell-it-like-it-is style also earned him some antagonists. In his very last Good News editorial (Jan/Feb, 1981), he unloaded a typical volley. “General Conference should stop passing so many vague resolutions,” he wrote. “Why continue providing our bureaucratic elite with carte blanche to manipulate the church?”
Such prose often resulted in counterattack. One enraged editorialist asked, “Has Good News become bad news?”
Keysor’s combative writing contrasted with his personal manner. He was compassionate and jovial with his many friends. He had a quick wit. His many admirers were enthralled by his lightning-fast analysis of events in the church and world.
Though Keysor’s plainspoken journalistic style didn’t appeal to everyone, it managed to alert large numbers of pastors and laypeople to the dangerous drift of the church. Even many moderate church leaders began to listen. And Keysor’s fellow evangelicals began to come forward. Within months of founding the magazine, he appointed an initial board of directors for the new movement. In the summer of 1970 Good News held its first national meeting, called a convocation, in Dallas. To everyone’s surprise 1,600 United Methodists came. The convocations became annual events.
In 1972 Asbury College invited Keysor to teach journalism. So Chuck and Marge, and their children, pulled up stakes from Illinois and moved to Wilmore, Kentucky, where Good News still has its offices.
During the next eight years, Keysor guided the movement into a remarkable series of expansions. He saw Good News grow into a $500,000 budget, 15 full-time employees, a missions council which lobbied for a more evangelical missions program, and a network of loosely confederated evangelical renewal groups within dozens of annual conferences.
Yet, even with the obvious success of the movement he had founded, Keysor eventually grew pessimistic about the likelihood of real reform taking place in the denomination. Frustrated by the continued liberal dominance of the church, and deeply disappointed with the mixed results of the 1980 General Conference in Indianapolis, Keysor began to consider a change of direction. He asked the Good News board how committed it was to working only from within the United Methodist Church. The board voted to keep its original purpose—a forum within the UM church. In January, 1981, Keysor resigned to teach journalism full-time
This step, however, was followed by another change a year later. In the summer of 1982, Keysor informed the church press that he was switching denominations, joining the Evangelical Covenant Church. He indicated his need to belong to a church with an uncontested evangelical perspective. He explained his desire for “a more democratic form of church government in which local congregations own their own property, call their pastors, and determine the best way to invest their money. … ”
In 1983, the Keysors moved to Clearwater, Florida to pastor a new Evangelical Covenant congregation in that city. The church prospered. Then last summer Keysor was admitted to the hospital to clear up a kidney ailment. Surgery revealed an advanced liver cancer. The malignancy evidently was a reoccurrence of one that had been removed by surgery in March, 1978. Within two months he died.
After his death many of his colleagues praised his accomplishments. The present Good News editor, James V. Heidinger II, who succeeded Keysor in 1981, said, “As a young pastor, I found hope for our church through Chuck and the Good News movement. He was a leader of courage and conviction—clearly God’s man to found a national movement for spiritual and theological renewal within Methodism.”
The current Good News chairperson, Helen Rhea Coppedge, said, “Chuck was a man of deep conviction who lived what he believed and taught. He was a dear personal friend.” A former chairman, Mike Walker, stated, “I was always encouraged by Chuck’s passion for the Gospel and by his vision for renewal among the people of God, which fueled his writing and all of his church involvement.”
An important part of Keysor’s legacy was the large number of working journalists who studied journalism under him at Asbury College. One of those, Gregg Lewis, senior editor of the award-winning Campus Life magazine, said, “Charles Keysor was not only an inspiring example of quality Christian journalism, he was also a demanding, affirming, and gifted teacher of his craft.”
Keysor is survived by Marge and their five children: Daniel, in Colorado; Joseph, in Chicago; Nancy Koester, in New York City; Charles, Jr., in Elgin, Illinois; and Stephen, in Greenville, Texas.
by Steve | Jan 3, 1986 | Archive - 1986
Archive: Why I Must Evangelize
by Bishop Woodie White
It is sad that the issue of evangelism has become a point of contention in the Church. So often the topic has served more to divide than unite us. We have made it more complicated than it ought to be.
Perhaps part of the problem has arisen because of our tendency to compartmentalize the Gospel. Evangelism belongs to the whole Church, all the people of God. Yet, we have for too long permitted it to become the responsibility of certain segments within the Church. We have functioned in such a way as to say, “Evangelism is what conservatives or evangelicals do, and social ministries are what liberals and social activists do.” This is an unnecessary and unfaithful dichotomy.
All of the Body of Christ must recover its responsibility to be evangelists. Christ’s command is to all. “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20).
Evangelism is the heart of the Church. It is not optional but obligatory. It is not secondary but primary. It is not an action of the few but a ministry of the faithful. Evangelism does not belong to a group with a particular theological persuasion, but rather is a command of Christ to all. Indeed, evangelism is not what preachers do on behalf of the laity, it is what we all are to do in the name of Christ.
To evangelize is to announce the Good News: Jesus is Lord! To evangelize is to invite others to know Him and follow Him. To evangelize is to denounce all that is contrary to the wilt of God. To evangelize is to announce the kingdom of God as present and as coming!
The Christian evangelist always begins with the Story—the Good News that Jesus is Lord. But the evangelist must always end with his or her story—what this reality means in a single life: I was once blind but now I see. I was once selfish but now I share. I was once prejudiced but now I embrace all of God’s children. I was once closed but now I’m opened. I was once captive but now I’m liberated. I was once concerned about my own little community, but now I am concerned about God’s world. The evangelist can authenticate the Story because it has made a difference in his or her own life.
Perhaps we are failing at the task of evangelism because we don’t or can’t tell our stories. If people around us cannot see any evidence that the Good News has made a difference in us, they are not likely to be convinced that we are convinced that the Good News is either true or good. I believe that until the laity of the Church, as well as the clergy, begin to assume their rightful responsibility as evangelists, we will simply be talking about evangelism and not doing it.
Why do we evangelize? We evangelize because it is the nature of the Church to evangelize. It was our Lord’s final command. We evangelize because the Story in our lives is so full, so compelling, that we dare not keep it to ourselves. We evangelize because we believe this Good News will make a difference in a person’s life and will make a difference in its impact on society as well. For the Good News not only changes lives, it changes structures.
I look at my world and I know why I must evangelize, for I see too much brokenness, enmity, aloneness, greed, selfishness, racism, sexism, classism, oppression, social disintegration, family decay, violence, and war—in a word, sin. What the Christian says to all of this is, “Come, let me show you a better way!”
Catching up with the Baptists
We do not evangelize to catch up with the Baptists. We do not evangelize to get more people to pay conference apportionments. We do not evangelize to gain “our” population-percentage share. These are all self-serving, institutional concerns which suggest that we care more for the Church than for people. It was for people that Christ died.
In our evangelism we ought not give the impression that we are more interested in saving our Church than in saving souls. We must be careful about the language we use. We should not sound like corporate America. We are pointing to a Savior, not a slogan.
The church that seeks to take evangelism seriously must not be afraid to use Biblical and theological language. Often we sound like sociologists, not theologians. People don’t want more analysis, they want answers! And while we don’t have all the answers, we do have some. Dare we speak in confidence that which we confidently know, and yet remain open to the leading of the Spirit as we acknowledge that we know only in part?
Relevant evangelism is always contextual. That is, it speaks to people where they are, in their context. Relevant evangelism makes the Gospel understandable in the environment where it is announced and shared.
Evangelism is holistic, like the Good News we announce. It is a word for the whole person—physical, social, spiritual. It is not the task of evangelism to remove people from the world but to help them know how to live in it. “For God so loved the world. … ” Evangelism with integrity is never escapism but engagement, a wrestling with the realities of life utilizing the resources of the Spirit.
I believe the Good News announced and lived out will make a difference. But it is not our task to assure success. It is our task to believe the Good News, announce it, and live it. We can’t guarantee how many numbers will be added to a congregation or a denominational role. But as evangelists, we must keep telling the Story, and pray that men and women and boys and girls will hear it, see it, and respond.
Soda fountain story
In the fall of 1953 I met a young woman at a soda fountain. At the time I was having severe difficulty with organized religion. She was an articulate and dedicated Christian. She knew how to talk about her faith. The more I railed against the Church, the more she talked about Jesus. The more I talked about the hypocrites in the Church, the more she talked about Jesus. The more I pointed to the failure of the Church, the more she talked about Jesus. She won. Praise God!
Maybe we are using our evangelistic witness to talk about the wrong things. Perhaps we are giving answers to questions no one is asking. It may well be that people are looking for bread and we are giving a stone. The Good News is: Jesus is Lord! Whatever else may follow, and there is much, this is where the Story begins.
Every local congregation, every lay person, every clergy person is an evangelist. The Church will not and cannot survive without evangelism. Millions who live in a torn and fractured world need to be made new and whole. The world of strife and demonic forces needs to be reshaped into a place of reconciliation, justice, and compassion. People need to hear the Story, the Good News. But they will not and cannot if those who know it best are too complacent, too timid, or too busy to tell it.
Bishop Woodie W. White was elected to the church’s highest office in 1984. He serves as resident bishop of the Central and Southern Illinois Annual Conferences of the United Methodist Church. Before his election, he was general secretary of the General Commission on Religion and Race, based in Washington, D.C.
