by Steve | Jul 21, 1990 | Archive - 1990
Archive: Wisdom’s Feast or Gospel’s Famine?
The brewing storm over Sophia Worship
By Randy Petersen
For Eric Umile it started with the Sunday paper. The Philadelphia Inquirer had a front-page story February 19, 1989, on feminist religion. “Women,” the paper said, “were creating new rituals to fill a religious void.”
The article went on to describe a communion-like service involving milk and fruit along with bread and wine. As lay leader of Emmanuel United Methodist Church in the Roxborough section of Philadelphia, Umile could pass it off as just another modem heresy—until he turned the page. There, pictured with these worshipers, was his own pastor, Susan Cady. In fact, the group was meeting in her home.
Umile would never have guessed his pastor was involved in such a thing.
He felt shocked and betrayed. For Susan Cady it started seven years earlier. As a young minister at Calvary United Methodist Church in west Philadelphia, she was struggling with the church’s overemphasis on maleness. She was a student of the Bible embracing its teachings, but she was beginning to feel somewhat distanced from it.
One day she was celebrating communion—something she loved to do—and suddenly asked herself, “What am I doing? Celebrating the experience of some man? What does He have to do with me?” Later that week, she says, she was preparing a worship service when she had a vision of Sophia. Sophia was peering through the window of a door and calling to her, “What are you afraid of anyway? Do you think I care about your old theology? Do you think I care what name you name me? Do you think I care if people think I’m legitimate or not? Haven’t people always refused to listen to me? But that doesn’t make me any less real, and that doesn’t make you any less faithful.”
The vision continued with laughing, dancing, and singing.
For Hal Taussig it started in the mid-1970s. As pastor of Calvary United Methodist Church, he found that growing numbers of women in his congregation were dissatisfied with the predominance of male images of God. They felt that his message was a male one, not applicable to the female experience. He went “scurrying,” he says, for resources that would help these parishioners. From his biblical studies—he was working toward a doctorate at Cincinnati’s Union Graduate School—he knew of the character of Sophia. He began to study her more intently.
Sophia is the Greek word for wisdom. In the book of Proverbs and in several apocryphal writings, wisdom is personified as a female:
“Wisdom calls aloud in the street, she raises her voice in the public squares” (Prov.1:20, NIV).
This text and others like it present wisdom as a being—someone who was with God, working with God, and an expression of God’s identity—similar to the way the Word (logos) is presented in John 1. The question remains: Do these texts refer to wisdom (Sophia) as a being—an expression of God? Or do they merely mean the human quality of wisdom? To put it simply, should we capitalize wisdom in these passages? (The original texts do not capitalize anything.)
As Taussig and Cady investigated they found more and more references to Sophia in Scripture. It was exciting. Here was a divine image which was thoroughly feminine—and not just thrown in on the side. Sophia appeared to be woven through the Scriptures. Clearly Sophia would revolutionize the Church’s ways of thinking about God; this would pull disgruntled feminists back into the Church.
Taussig and Cady began to teach and preach about Sophia. They formed study groups to explore further. They experimented with new forms of worship. Eventually they teamed up with Catholic writer Marian Ronan, an old friend of Taussig, and wrote Sophia: The Future of Feminist Spirituality. It was published in 1986.
About this time Cady was appointed to Emmanuel United Methodist Church in Roxborough. Cady maintained her involvement with certain Sophia study groups but downplayed the worship of Sophia in her church services.
So it surprised Umile when he read of Cady’s involvement with the Sophia group. He did his homework, reading the Sophia book that Cady had co-authored. It seemed heretical to him: “It’s not Christianity. It ignores Jesus Christ. These people are making a goddess the focus of their religious worship.” Umile had several long talks with Cady and called for a meeting of the pastor parish relations committee to discuss his concerns. He also complained to the district superintendent.
What had begun as an attempt to deal honestly with differences in a spirit of love resulted in frustration for Umile. The committee would do nothing. Cady explained her views but did not retract them. In the meantime, Cady, Taussig, and Ronan had published Wisdom’s Feast, an expanded version of their earlier book. The theology seemed just as scandalous as ever, but this book included suggestions for liturgies, litanies, and sermons for Sophia worship services.
In protest Umile wrote to the bishop of the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference, Susan Morrison. He received a short reply. Morrison had not read the book, but she briefly affirmed Cady’s pastoral record. Umile also wrote to Jack M. Tuell, president of the Council of Bishops. Another short reply indicated that Tuell had no jurisdiction to deal with Eastern Pennsylvania problems.
Umile wrote a letter to the United Methodist Reporter, which was printed in the October 6, 1989 “Here I Stand” column. The letter charged that this Sophia theology—recently presented in Wisdom’s Feast—was heresy. “Should [we] sit passively by, while self-seeking, special-interest groups infiltrate our churches and play fast and loose with the religious beliefs and symbols we hold sacred?” he asked.
Three weeks later a reply was printed from Sandra Forrester Dufresne, chairperson of the Board of Ordained Ministry of the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference. (It was also signed by nine other members of the conference.) This letter affirmed the exploratory spirit of Wisdom’s Feast and the previous book. “The authors … probe the scriptures and the Judeo-Christian tradition to enhance our understanding of God’s presence, will, and work for these times. We affirm that the church’s faithfulness to the Gospel is not undermined but enhanced by their efforts and others’ efforts to describe God’s presence.” Dufresne acknowledged different opinions of the book and welcomed ongoing discussion.
The reply did not sit well with Umile. He fired off a letter to Dufresne charging that Wisdom’s Feast was not a “search for theological clarity” but “an attempt to provide the feminist movement with an energizing symbol. … It confuses more than it clarifies.”
Frustrated by what he saw as an unresponsive hierarchy, Umile sent a letter to the lay leaders of the conference. Pulling quotes from Wisdom’s Feast, he presented his case: “The book clearly says that Sophia is separate and distinct from God and not simply a part of God or an aspect of God.” He accused the authors of “erasing the name of Jesus” from Gospel texts and replacing it with “Sophia.” He invited lay leaders to gather signatures on a petition, calling Bishop Morrison to state the official position of the conference on this book.
In the midst of this controversy the Umiles withdrew from Emmanuel Church. Cady met with them to dissuade them, to no avail. As Umile put it later, “It was very difficult for me to sit in church on Sunday and to be led in worship by the Rev. Susan Cady. True, she did not overtly preach her goddess-centered theology to the congregation of Emmanuel UM Church. … However, the Rev. Cady did preach her beliefs to the congregation in a subtle, somewhat veiled manner. … I had read Wisdom’s Feast and was fully aware of where she was coming from.” (The Umiles have recently joined another United Methodist church in the area.)
While several others also left Emmanuel Church, the majority of the church continues to support Cady. The pastor parish committee wrote to Bishop Morrison, giving high praise to Cady’s ministry. “She’s an excellent pastor,” Olive Boone, head of the committee, told us. “She has never preached anything but the Gospel to us.”
Taussig is currently teaching part time at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania and Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. He will begin a part-time ministry at Chestnut Hill United Methodist Church this fall.
Bob Grow, Umile’s associate, has submitted a resolution to the Eastern Pennsylvania Annual Conference, calling on Bishop Morrison to make a statement on the book (see update on this page). Morrison says, “It is not for me to rule on. It’s for the Board of Ordained Ministry to evaluate.” As of this writing she has not yet read the books but was relying on the opinions of several others who had. She plans to read the books this summer. “My understanding of the books is that they’re speculative, not doctrinaire. No one is saying that this is the way it is,” Morrison said.
Unraveling The Controversy
The controversy has developed amid numerous misunderstandings. Some might see Umile as a right-wing zealot who is intentionally twisting Wisdom’s Feasts statements to make the book seem worse than it really is, yet this does not seem to be the case. One might assume that Umile is strongly anti-feminist, yet he is presenting this as far more than a feminist issue—it is an issue of doctrinal orthodoxy. How far can United Methodists let pluralism go? Umile’s grievances go beyond knee-jerk conservatism; he is deeply concerned about the future of the denomination. “Ultimately I’d like to see the clergy of our conference remain faithful to the doctrines of our church and not veer off into these liberal directions where anything goes theologically, ” he says.
Yet Umile paints Cady and Taussig as arch feminists who are trying to force their questionable new theology on unsuspecting church folks. This is also a misunderstanding.
Cady and Taussig say their involvement with Sophia arises from their own personal devotional lives and from their desire to minister effectively to others. They have exercised some sensitivity and restraint in dealing with their churches on this matter. After all, it did take a newspaper article to make Umile aware of Cady’s Sophia theology. “I am primarily interested in giving others the good news that there are ways to approach God that allow us a broader expanse of our own experience,” says Cady. “It’s more than scholarship to me,” says Taussig. “It’s very important for me devotionally.”
The authors maintain that they are merely exploring—and leaders such as Dufresne are upholding their freedom to do so. “The authors have no pretensions that this is doctrine,” says Dufresne. “It’s theological exploration, scholarly inquiry.”
And yet this latest book, Wisdom’s Feast, a paperback, includes practical steps for bringing Sophia theology into church practice. This seems to remove it from the level of academic discussion and puts it on the level of church instruction. The intention may be nondogmatic exploration, but the effect is doctrinal.
Umile says he is not trying to stifle academic inquiry; he is not some backwoods book burner. He merely wants reassurance that his church is not scuttling the basics of his faith. “I encourage theological inquiry and discussion,” he says. “But I feel there are limitations that should be recognized, and when we cross those lines, we should realize we are outside acceptable Christian doctrine. I feel they have crossed those lines.”
It is unfortunate that Cady has borne the brunt of most of this controversy. She is actually the most conservative of the three authors. Although her name is listed first on the book, she is not the primary author; the three shared equally in its writing. “Some feel that we are trying to usurp God as Father, God in the male Jesus, that we are trying to wipe those out,” says Cady. ‘I’m not interested in that. God as Father has been important to me. God in Jesus has been crucial in my life—absolutely—and will continue to be, so that sense that we are taking them out and replacing them with something else is not the case. What we are saying is, ‘Hey, look what’s here. Look what’s always been here. Look how Jesus understood this. Look at how the Hebrews pictured God. Look at how we can appropriate these images for ourselves and grow with them.”‘
Umile depicts the denomination’s officials as unresponsive. They did reply to Umile, but in a very brief manner.
Officials complain that Umile is not going through the proper channels. “People have a right to be concerned about what’s written,” says Morrison. “We’re a diverse church, but I have been somewhat concerned by the process they’ve used.”
Another church leader says, “There is a grievance procedure. There is a way to air differences. They have not followed that. They have written letters and stirred up controversy in churches among those who have not even read the book.”
But what are the proper channels, and how is this done? Are people aware of these procedures, and what should they do if these procedures don’t work? Imagine a disgruntled shopper who returns to a department store and goes from clerk to clerk complaining that the lawn mower he bought there doesn’t work. Naturally the clerks brush him off— “Sorry to hear about your problem, but I have other customers to care for.” Someone needs to direct the complainer to the customer service office. If not, he’ll park himself at the entrance and announce his problem wildly to all the shoppers there. That’s sort of what’s happening here. Umile is raising a serious issue. It should be considered honestly and seriously.
A Deeper Look at Sophia Theology
Sophia theology is not new. Cady, Ronan, and Taussig did not make it up. There is a body of ancient writing—Wisdom Literature—they are using as source material. Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are part of this collection, as are several books of the Apocrypha and other writings. In the last two decades much scholarly attention has focused on this “wisdom” tradition. So the splash of these books by Cady and others is not in the newness of their thoughts but in the newness of the presentation. These books synthesize Sophia scholarship and offer it to the common person. Suddenly it’s not just speculation at some seminary; it’s something you can try in a church Bible study. That’s exciting to some, threatening to others.
The problem with the book is that it lends itself to misunderstanding. For instance, the crucial question is, “Who is Sophia?” Are we talking about another name for God, a name that reflects God’s “feminine side”? Or is she a separate goddess?
Very early the book states, “Sophia is a female, goddess-like figure appearing clearly in the Scriptures of the Hebrew tradition” (page 10). Later it adds, “In the biblical mentality there exists a whole range of intermediary figures who are not quite God, but who are definitely not human. Sophia is one example of such a figure.”
As Taussig explains it, “The tentativeness of our book has to do with the unclearness of the biblical texts.” Cady speaks much more clearly to the oneness of God. She’s not interested in presenting Sophia as some sort of separate goddess or sub-god. With regard to Proverbs 8, she says, “There are a couple different aspects of God playing together in that passage, but it’s all one God.”
Yet this murky issue essentially presents us with a choice between monotheism and polytheism. If Sophia is a separate deity, then Sophia worship is idolatry and a radical divergence from traditional Christianity. But if Sophia is another name for the one true God, then it might be possible to celebrate Sophia within traditional orthodoxy.
Author Gretchen Gaebelein Hull notes some potential problems with feminist theology in general: “There are overarching dangers because they [radical feminist theologians] do not have a high view of Scripture, and they basically do not have a high Christology. I have a problem with those who set up this counter divinity. In trying to deal with these things and reclaim what indeed often has been ignored and lost, the way they do that often opens them up to a pantheon.”
In a way we are dealing here with the danger of graven images. In the Ten Commandments God forbade such presentations of divinity, not because God did not like to be worshiped but because He knew the images would take on identities of their own, resulting in false worship. Hull adds, “I don’t want to deny the valid scriptural images for God: ‘Christ is made wisdom for us,’ and so forth. But if we take every one of those images and turn that into an expression of divinity, that then somehow suddenly itself becomes divinity; then we have this pantheon going.”
A second crucial question for this (or any other) theology is, “Who is Jesus?” Wisdom’s Feast clearly identifies Jesus with Sophia, but this throws us back to our first problem: If Sophia is a separate goddess, then Jesus is either a separate God, a half-God, or a human messenger.
In an article in the Reformed Journal (December 1988), Rebecca Pentz, formerly of Scripps College, makes a helpful distinction between Sophia Christology and Sophialogy. Sophia Christology, she says, works within the traditional faith, identifying Sophia as the second person of the Trinity, one who became incarnate in Jesus. (You may still have problems with this view, but at least it does not have to shape the orthodox view of the Trinity.) Sophialogy, on the other hand, presents Sophia as a separate goddess and Jesus as her prophet. This fits nicely with many world religions, but it flies in the face of orthodox Christianity.
Both Sophialogy and Sophia-Christology are happening among scholars these days. From her comments to us, Cady is clearly following Sophia-Christology—she is attempting to work within the original doctrine of the Trinity. But the book is fuzzy in this regard.
Wisdom’s Feast offers several texts from the Gospels, replacing Jesus’ name with Sophia’s. For instance, Sophia walks on the water toward her disciples. This is shocking to see, but Cady maintains that this is only experimental. “That is a spiritual exercise,” she says. “It’s not doctrine. It’s a way of using our religious imaginations in order to grow.”
Cady even suggests that this creative exercise has had some evangelistic effects. “There were women that I worked with who were very alienated from the Christian tradition. They were addressed by these stories and became excited because, for the first time, it spoke to them. It was a spiritual exercise, but it ended up being a bit of evangelism.”
As an experiment this may help certain women identify more with Jesus, but there is great danger here too. The implication of such an experiment is that Jesus can be replaced. The physical, historical Jesus seems unimportant. It’s the spiritual lesson that needs to come through, it seems. Who cares if we change the character? Other exercises in the book follow the “passion” of Sophia, tracing suffering and “resurrection” in the experience of women. Cady asserts that this is meant to be used alongside a study of Jesus’ passion. “For me it’s a matter of wanting to expand our images and our access to the divine, rather than putting one set in and taking another set out.” But the danger is that the physical death and Resurrection of Christ gives way to the spiritual idea of death and resurrection. Suddenly our faith has no historical grounding.
The Underlying Issues
Why do we need Sophia? What’s wrong with worshiping God in the traditional fashion? Father, Son and Holy Spirit have ruled well for centuries—why tinker with them?
Many Methodists may be asking these questions, but we must recognize that the impetus for Sophia theology arises from a deep sense of need. “There has been within the church a tradition of lack of emphasis on women’s experience and a lack of emphasis on legitimate access to images of God which are feminine,” says Cady. “Most theology and doctrine have been formulated on the basis of men’s experience. I think there’s room within our doctrine for new ways of expressing what’s always been there.”
Gretchen Hull adds, “Feminist theology doesn’t come out of a vacuum. It’s responding to something. It’s responding to theological violence. If you repress people too long, eventually they’re going to fight back. Yes, these radical feminists may do theological violence to the Trinity, but there has been other theological violence that we slide over. If we say, to bolster a traditional position, that the Trinity is a male pantheon, then we’re doing violence too.”
One must be cautious here. It is not all right to play fast and loose with theological truth. One error does not justify another. At the same time as we seek to evaluate feminist theology, we must measure our own theological assumptions with the same yardstick.
Feminist Christians have a valid concern. With the predominance of male images of God, we can begin to assume that God is male, that women are somehow secondary, further away from God’s image. Feminists maintain that this does not fit with the general sense of Scripture; thus, they may conduct a legitimate search for feminine images of the God who is beyond gender.
On the other hand, it is assumed that the opponents of Wisdom’s Feast are anti-feminist—that they don’t care about the spiritual needs of women. This may be true of some, but many are deeply concerned about another issue: How far does pluralism go?
Priding themselves on openness, many United Methodists point to the balance of the famed quadrilateral: Scripture, Reason, Tradition, and Experience. But that can become a kind of grab bag—what does it matter if your system is weak on Scripture and tradition as long as it is reasonable?
Taussig claims that Wisdom’s Feast is built squarely on all four corners of the quadrilateral, but what does this mean? He cites certain writers and thinkers within Christian tradition that have considered Sophia, yet much of the theologizing in Wisdom’s Feast seems to ignore the basic creeds on which Christianity and the United Methodist Church have been built.
Taussig claims that Wisdom’s Feast is based on scriptural study, and this is true. But many Christians would be unhappy with the kind of assumption that Taussig makes about Scripture in the process. He tells us that he is “much more liberal on the historical Jesus” than Cady is and adds, “I think that most of the New Testament is not a historical account.” Sadly, this attitude is all too common in modern theological scholarship. But it clearly violates both the letter and the spirit of Wesleyan tradition.
And the question remains, “How far will this all take us?” At Perkins School of Theology ‘s Women’s Week Celebration recently, a seminar was held by one who practices Dianic witchcraft. Was this a learning experience, or was this neopagan religion being presented as a legitimate option?
Here again, arguments between pro-feminists and anti-feminists can quickly obscure the crucial theological issues: Do we worship one God or many? Who is Jesus? What do Jesus’ death and resurrection mean? Surely these are central issues in the life of the church.
Billy Abraham, who teaches philosophy, theology, and evangelism at Perkins School of Theology, complains that most of the discussion about witchcraft at Perkins has been political rather than theological. “This is an issue that has to be addressed by the appropriate councils in the church. If you look at the United Methodist Church over the last generation, it has been a free-for-all. The church has no boundaries whatsoever.” He notes that the General Conference has attempted to make Scripture more prominent, but he adds, “The church itself has not worked through its own legislation properly. … There is really no mechanism for dealing with discipline. There is no real heart and will to move this way.”
Umile agrees: “I see the United Methodist Church as a breeding ground for this type of thing. The theological climate of the church must change. Up until now these types of ideas have flourished and continue to flourish. I feel this issue should be addressed and discussed.”
The authors of Wisdom’s Feast maintain that their book is academic speculation, not doctrine, and so far, Methodist leaders have defended the authors’ rights to speculate. However, as we have seen, this book is intended for instructional use in church groups; thus, it is legitimate to worry about the effect of such questionable theology on those who are learning it Methodist leaders may be understandably reluctant to pass judgment on the book as heretical since it does claim to be biblical, but just because a book claims to be biblical does not mean it is “rightly dividing the word of truth.” It would be helpful if these leaders would recognize the need for certain theological standards for the teachings in the local churches. Perhaps it would give us the groundings we need if they would take the opportunity to reaffirm the basics of the faith:
WE BELIEVE in one God—Whose identity transcends gender and includes both male and female characteristics.
WE BELIEVE that Jesus is God incarnate.
WE BELIEVE that we are brought into peace with God through Jesus’ death and Resurrection.
Randy Petersen is a freelance writer from Westville, New Jersey, and author of Giving It to The Giver, to be released by Tyndale House this fall.
Sophia Worship Update
The Lay Coalition for Doctrinal Integrity submitted a resolution to the Eastern Pennsylvania Annual Conference held at Annville, Pennsylvania June 8-10. The resolution stated that Wisdom’s Feast is “Incompatible with the doctrines of orthodox Christianity and with the beliefs and practices of the United Methodist Church.” It called for Bishop Susan Morrison to “state the official position of the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference concerning Wisdom’s Feast and Its authors … within the next three months.”
Bishop Morrison ruled the resolution out of order, saying that she could not speak for the annual conference.
A substitute motion was then made by the Rev. Charles Yrigoyen. This motion called for the conference to organize a task force to give the issues raised In Wisdom’s Feast further study.
This resolution was adopted.
The Lay Coalition for Doctrinal Integrity is a group begun by Eric Umile and consisting of himself and a few of his fellow parishioners. Its purpose is to educate the entire conference about the issue of Sophia worship as presented in the book Wisdom’s Feast. Prior to annual conference the coalition sent two mass mailings to all the lay leaders in the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference, informing them about Wisdom’s Feast. Umile writes, “Judging by the recent events at conference, we obviously achieved our purpose.”
by Steve | Jul 20, 1990 | Archive - 1990
Archive: Whose Ethics?
Our Society cannot agree on common values on which common ethical standards must be based.
By Charles Colson
Last summer everything seemed to fall to pieces on Capitol Hill. The speaker of the House of Representatives resigned in the face of 69 counts of ethical violations; the House Whip quit rather than endure an investigation into his alleged wrongdoings; and an Ohio congressman was convicted of having sex with a minor. Volleys of ethical accusations and counteraccusations reverberated throughout the Capitol, holding government business hostage in the process.
One business Congress did handle, however, was the bailout of the savings and loan industry, which had been looted by hundreds of unscrupulous operators—a “$150 billion calamity,” according to the Washington Post. And in testimony before congressional committees came the news that Housing and Urban Development agents had for years skimmed millions from HUD real estate sales—as Time put it, a massive giveaway not to the needy but the greedy.
Meanwhile, out on the street—Wall Street, that is—junk bond king Michael Milken, who made more than one billion dollars in salary, was indicted for securities fraud.
The scandal epidemic has led everyone from fundamentalist preachers to Norman Lear, who has established a foundation to study business ethics, to agree that the nation is floundering in an ethical swampland. Stand on any soapbox today and passionately cry, “What our nation needs is ethics!” and you will be heartily cheered.
But what no one seems to realize is that while we all want ethics, ethics are meaningless unless based on some value system. And the problem is, our society cannot agree on common objective values on which common ethical standards must be based.
The dilemma was illustrated at one of our great academic institutions, where John Shad, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, donated $35 million to the Harvard Business School to establish an ethics department.
That was two years ago. And while we assume Harvard as given it the old college try, at this writing it seems that the university has only come up with one rather flimsy sounding “values” course; otherwise, Harvard is still sitting on the Shad grant, unable to find an ethicist to head up the department.
The quandary was well expressed by Harvard President Derek Bok in an article in Harvard Magazine (May/June 1988). Bok describes Harvard’s origins: After the school was expanded from a training ground for ministers to include other students, Massachusetts law mandated that “the president [and] the professors … shall exert their best endeavors to impress on the minds of youth committed to their care and instruction the principles of piety and justice and a sacred regard for truth.”
Bok speaks almost wistfully of returning to such absolutes by which to formulate ethical decisions. But he hastens to note that faculty members react “with tepid interest and outright skepticism” to the idea of teaching any kind of ethics.
So, concludes Bok, an ethics course today “seeks not to convey a set of moral truths but tries to encourage students to think carefully about complex moral issues … not to impart ‘right answers,’ but to make students more perceptive to ethical problems when they arise.”
In the absence of “moral truths,” Bok reaches the only conclusion he can: He outlines an idea of ethics but leaves the question of whose ethics will be adopted wholly unanswered. He tries to raise an ethical standard, but he has no flag to fly upon it.
Harvard’s problem parallels that of our society at large. Our nation demands ethics but abandons the objective moral base on which any real standard of ethics must logically rest. Our society deplores the proliferation of scandals yet rejects the basis for an ethical code designed to restrain the human passions that cause those scandals.
The life and death truth of the matter is this: Ethics cannot exist in a vacuum. If ethics are relative—the ’80s version of the ’60s pop “situational ethics”—then who is to assert one ethical standard as superior to another? In an age that celebrates tolerance as its supreme virtue, no absolute standard of right and wrong—which by definition excludes other standards—can be adopted. Nor can any satisfactory code of ethics.
If a consensus in our society really wants ethics on Capitol Hill, on Wall Street, in the worlds of business and academia, we must be willing to base those ethics on a firm foundation. And in Western civilization that foundation has been 23 centuries of accumulated wisdom, natural law, and the Judea-Christian tradition based on biblical revelation.
Until we look again to these classic sources, Harvard will continue to waste both its $35 million and the hearts and minds of its students; Capitol Hill will continue to be a playground for opportunists rather than a place of service for statesmen; and our culture at large, loosed from any absolute foundations of morality, will continue to drift helplessly in a moral quagmire, all the while pitifully pontificating about the loss of ethics.
Reprinted from Jubilee, October 1989. Copyright 1989. Reprinted with permission of Prison Fellowship Ministries, P.O. Box 17500, Washington, D.C. 20041.
by Steve | May 29, 1990 | Archive - 1990
Archive: Redeeming Our Witness
…We have not been faithful stewards of the legacy entrusted to us, and the United Methodist witness is at risk.
By John Leith
The following article is adapted from an address by Dr. John H. Leith given June 9, 1989, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a gathering of Presbyterians, sponsored by the Covenant Fellowship of Presbyterians and Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns. The content is amazingly relevant for United Methodists.
Many of us here this morning could as easily change our names as we could our church identities. We have devoted much of our lives to the work of the Presbyterian Church. Within our Christian or catholic identities, and within our Protestant identities, we are convinced that the Presbyterian way of being Christian has its own validity and, in the providence of God, has enriched both human society and the one holy catholic Church.
The negative side of these positive convictions is our concern that the decline or loss of the Presbyterian way of being Christian will greatly impoverish the catholic Church and will put at risk some of the most precious qualities of American society.
Today we seem to be faltering in our capacity to hand on the faith which has been entrusted to us. And there is considerable evidence we have not been faithful stewards of the institutions, endowments, programs, and congregations which have been entrusted to us.
In a few minutes this morning, let us review at least some of the dimensions of a recovery of our Presbyterian (read “United Methodist”) witness in American society today.
The Presbyterian witness in the world today is at risk on many fronts. The centers of danger which require our attention include, in my judgment, the following concerns:
First, the church is at risk because of heresy. Heresy is an ugly word. The fundamentalist-liberal battles, theological acrimony, have been in many instances personally repulsive and counter-productive in the work of the church. The consequence is a culture in which faith and doctrine are subordinate to civility, with its implicit assumption that doctrinal differences do not matter.
In the church, too, we hesitate to raise the question of personal commitment on basic Christian doctrines when calling a pastor, executive, or seminary professor. The assumption of civility is that these beliefs can be taken for granted. Perhaps this was once the case. But times have changed, and basic Christian doctrines are at risk in our society.
There has never been a lively church which did not firmly believe that the Bible is the Word of God written, that Jesus Christ is the Word of God incarnate, and that what God did in Jesus Christ in bearing our sins on the cross and in raising Him from the dead is of crucial significance, not only for Christians but for all people in the world.
More specifically, the doctrines which are at risk in the life of the Church, theological education, and our society today are at least the following:
The first is the reality of God as personal, One Who acts purposefully in the created order.
The second is the knowledge of God. Has God really made Himself known? Is Jesus Christ really the disclosure of God? Is Jesus Christ of the same substance, the same reality as God? The Nicene Creed, it seems to me, is very much at risk today.
The third doctrine which is at risk is the significance of what God did in Jesus Christ. The Christian community has believed that the forgiveness of sins was not simple, and neither was the renewal of life. The church has always affirmed that what happened in Jesus Christ is God’s decisive act for human salvation. This has been the reason for world missions—not primarily to provide medical doctors, to educate people, or to teach new methods of agriculture, but to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Having proclaimed the Gospel, Christians then sent forth doctors, nutritionists, agriculturalists, teachers.
The fourth doctrine that is at risk is the resurrection of Jesus Christ as a historical fact. The Resurrection is not historical in the sense that it arises out of history but in the sense that the disciples, using the language of human experience to describe an event that transcends ordinary existence, saw, recognized, and heard the crucified Christ risen from the dead Who commissioned them to go forth to teach and to baptize in His name. The Resurrection is the basis for the disciples’ faith, not the result of their faith.
A fifth doctrine which is at risk is eternal life. Long ago Ambassador Bohlen and Ambassador George Kennan suggested that communism would have a limited history because it did not adequately answer the question of death. There is, Kennan once said, nothing more dreary in all the world than a communist funeral, where the meaninglessness of life is expounded by the meaninglessness of death. Yet in recent years the theological community and even the church have spoken on this doctrine with muted voices.
The renewal of the church, on the human level, depends on hearing the Word of God. This means that what is believed, taught, and confessed takes priority over everything else in the historical life of the church. When belief is corrupted there is no possibility of renewal. The preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is the greatest service the church renders the world.
Second, the church is at risk because it has given priority to derivative, secondary activities. Church people have lost the awareness that the reality and the unity of the church are established by hearing the Word of God. The one thing that is essential for the church we must give priority to those activities by which the church lives—namely, preaching the Gospel, teaching the Gospel, and exercising pastoral care (by which I do not mean therapy but the incorporation of people into the life of the community of faith). The church engages in many other useful activities (such as its social witness), but these are derivative and secondary to the Gospel. They are not the activities by which the church lives.
The issue is not personal piety versus a public agenda. The issue is the integrity of the church as a worshiping, believing fellowship which lives by the preaching and teaching of the Word of God and the exercise of pastoral care in the light of it. Out of the hearing of the Word, out of the worshiping community, good deeds flow. As Herbert Butterfield observed, the church has influenced the world the most when its first concern was the salvation of souls.
The crucial problem in the life of the church today is the priority it gives to church activities which are derivative, and the secondary importance the church ascribes to those activities by which the church lives.
Third, the church is at risk because of its lost awareness of its nature as the people of God, the priesthood of believers. The place where the church is most present is the gathering of a congregation to hear the Word of God and to receive the sacraments. The church is the people.
The church as the people is put at risk by the rise of a church bureaucracy, largely the development of the last century in Protestantism, and even more of the past three or four decades. As Martin Luther declared in the 16th century, the church is not the curia. Today we must equally say the church is not the organization. The church is the community which hears the Word of God, which gathers for worship, baptizes children, and teaches the faith. Out of this community many good things flow into political, cultural, and social life. A church bureaucracy exists to enable the people who are the church to do the work of the church.
The rise of a bureaucracy and a committee and process system that consume enormous resources of the church creates a very different situation in the church; for in the church, productivity, measured in terms of new members, new congregations, and contributions, has gone down. In the church as well as in life generally, you cannot consume what you do not produce, at least not indefinitely.
The church as the people of God has also been put at risk, strangely enough, by the passionate commitment of the leaders of the church to the so-called representational principle, or to inclusivism. Inclusivism cannot be exempted from careful scrutiny. First, inclusivism seems to be selectively practiced. Even among advocates of inclusivism, there has been no apparent zeal to apply the doctrine to the over-representation of nuclear families on boards or to the long-term membership on committees of advocates of inclusivism. The place where inclusivism ought to begin, one would think, is the limitation of one person in a family on a church board and considerable modesty about how long one should serve on boards. Inclusivism is not applied to political, economic, social, and theological views. It gives scant attention to older people and to those who do the actual work of maintaining local congregations.
Second, inclusivism is not the only virtue, and certainly not the supreme virtue, in the life of the church. There is nothing I know in the New Testament that justifies the doctrine of inclusivism as currently practiced in the Presbyterian (United Methodist) Church. In selecting persons for church committees, there is better New Testament and theological wisdom in ordering the priorities, perhaps something like this:
First, a member of a church committee or a staff person must be one who is personally committed to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. The second qualification is a documentable record of building up the church—in the gathering of congregations, the enhancement of the communion of saints, and leadership in and the practice of stewardship. The third qualification for membership on a board is the highest competence available in the church to perform the work of that committee.
After these qualifications have been met the church rightly should be concerned about geography, gender, race, ethnicity, economics, and social representation.
The simple fact is the church does not adequately utilize its ablest lawyers, medical doctors, business people, and politicians who are also very active in the work of the local church. In the church, as in society, mediocrity breeds mediocrity.
Third, the church as the people of God is at risk from the new attempt of the church organization to be coercive. This takes three forms. The first is the changed character of the Book of Order (same as our Book of Discipline) from principles and minimal requirements to a manual of operations. The Reformation repudiated canon law as a violation of the gospel and the nature of the church, but the new Book of Order and the Directory of Worship (Book of Worship) have the appearance of canon law, which is coming to have a more pervasive role in the church than the confessions and, more importantly, the gospel.
The second form of coerciveness is a proliferation of committee structures and a new emphasis on processes. This complicates what used to be relatively simple actions, from organizing a church, to candidacy for the ministry, to calling a pastor. There is no convincing evidence that the new processes have organized more churches, produced better candidates for the ministry, or increased the effectiveness of calling pastors.
Coerciveness is, in the third place, exacerbated by inattention to the experience, competence, and wisdom of persons who are placed on committees or given authority in the organization over other people and congregations. You could be sure 30 years ago that the committee on the work of the minister had the most experienced and wisest persons in the presbytery (annual conference), but it appears to me that this is far from the situation today.
The church is a voluntary organization and it lives, humanly speaking, by moral suasion. The church does not have an IRS or a marine corp. Until those who have organizational authority and who serve on committees, until church governing bodies, take the voluntary nature of the church seriously, the church will continue to decline. A fundamentalism of the Book of Order will not be any more effective than fundamentalism in theology was.
Fourth, the church is at risk by the decline of witness and work in education. One documentable fact is the decline of the church, or the Sunday school. A second documentable fact is the secularization of public education. But the point which I wish to emphasize is the tragic loss of our church colleges.
Presbyterians and Reformed people pioneered in establishing the institutions which are now the elite of American education. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other such institutions, which were once dominated by Christian—even Reformed—leadership, and which had as one of their purposes the establishment of a Christian ministry and the training of Christian people for life in society, are now among the most secular and secularizing institutions in our society. The rapid increase in the secularization of these institutions in the last 30 years is frightening. This secularization becomes all the more significant in the light of the arrogance of educational institutions which are as relentless in restricting, even with violence, dissenting views as the medieval church ever was.
More to our purpose is the loss of the church character of church colleges which, three or four colleges less and less make this witness or render this service. The church commitments of these colleges increasingly seem to be an embarrassment, and many of these colleges now are simply secular liberal arts institutions which make a vague commitment to Judeo-Christian values. These values are difficult to identify or define apart from faith.
The educational institution most crucial to the church is the seminary. Every seminary appointment influences for better or worse the number of people who worship God in local congregations. The church has the responsibility to insist that seminaries produce graduates who can preach, teach, and exercise pastoral care so as to gather congregations and nurture them in the faith of the church.
Seminaries have a built-in tendency to become institutes for the advanced study of religion, social action, or therapy. There is evidence of an increasing tendency for seminary faculties to be determined more by the graduate schools of secular universities than by the community of faith which they serve.
The church must keep the seminaries honest by insisting that their first responsibility is preparing persons who can gather congregations and build up the communion of saints in the small towns, rural areas, and cities of America.
In answering the challenge, it is crucial that we take our stand in the classic commitments of our faith.
There is no way from pluralism to the Christian conviction that the Word became flesh, from the Enlightenment notion that we cannot know God to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, from political action or therapy to the saving work of Jesus Christ. If we allow the pluralists, the humanists, the political activists, and the therapists to entice us to work on their turf, we shall lose—that is, we shall not build churches.
We have been bequeathed a great heritage. During the last three centuries, in the midst of their poverty, Presbyterians built congregations, colleges, and seminaries and provided the basic means to preach the gospel at home and abroad.
Some of them knew in literal truth the meaning of Luther’s hymn, “Let goods and kindred go, This mortal life also; The body they may kill; God’s truth abideth still; His kingdom is forever.”
John Leith is a professor at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia.
by Steve | May 21, 1990 | Archive - 1990
Jesus Hung Out With People Like Me
By Tom Skinner
May/June 1990
I was born and raised in Harlem in New York. Harlem is a two-and-a-half-square-mile area with a population of one million people. Five thousand people lived on my block. It was not uncommon for some mother to wake up in the middle of the night and send a piercing scream through the community as she discovered that her two week-old baby had been gnawed to death by a vicious rat.
There were more than 40,000 drug addicts in Harlem supporting an average habit of more than $100 per person per day. You could set your watch to when the police would drive into the neighborhood and collect their bribes to keep the racketeering going.
It was in the midst of this that I grew up trying to discover who I was and what I was about.
While coming home from school one afternoon I was approached by a member of one of the up-and-coming gangs in the Harlem community named the Harlem Lords. Facetiously, he asked me if I would like to belong to the Harlem Lords. (He knew that I was a preacher’s kid, and everybody knows that preachers’ kids are nice, soft, innocent people who don’t bother anybody.)
But I took him up on it, and I met the fellas that night. I passed the initiation and became a member of the Harlem Lords. After rumbling around with the guys and rioting, looting, and stealing for several months I thought, It is really stupid to be a member of this gang, when with my intelligence I could be the leader. To be leader you had to challenge whoever the leader was, so I defeated the leader in a knife fight. I was challenged by two other fellows, defeated them and became the undisputed leader of the Harlem Lords.
I had come under the influence of a group in Harlem known as the Black Nationalists. Our science teacher at school was a Nationalist. He knew I was captain of the baseball team, co-captain of the football team, president of the young people’s department in my church, and I had the second highest academic average in school. He said to me, “Tom, it’s wonderful that you’re at the top of your class and that you’re a brilliant student. But if you believe that the system is going to allow you to succeed, forget it. They might let you bounce a basketball, play football, be a jazz player or a rock-and-roll singer, but they’re not going to allow you to compete with them to run their companies. Because of the color of your skin they do not believe you have the wherewithal to be their peers.”
As the Nationalists pointed out to me, “The Christian religion is nothing more than a white man’s religion given to black people to keep them in their place. The same people who believe that Jesus saves will move out of the neighborhood when you move in.”
I became very angry. I got to the point where I could take a bottle, jig the glass in a person’s face, twist it and not bat my eye. I ended up with 22 notches on the handle of my knife, which meant that my blade had gone into the bodies of 22 different people. But all that mattered to me was that Tom Skinner got what he wanted; how I got it made absolutely no difference.
To make a long story short, I began mapping out strategy for what was to be the hugest gang fight ever to take place in New York. The Harlem Lords, the Imperials, the Crowns, the Sportsmen, and the Jesters would unite to fight a bunch of gangs on the other side of the city. If I succeeded in this particular fight I would have emerged as the leader of an alliance of gangs that would have made me the most powerful leader in the city.
I had my radio on that night and was listening to my favorite DJ, when an unscheduled program interrupted the broadcast. A man began to speak from a passage written in 2 Corinthians 5:17 which says, “Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.”
He went on to say that every person born into the human race is born without the life of God. And it’s the absence of God’s life in a person that causes that one to be a sinner. That was the first time I’d ever heard that, because I’d always heard from Christians that sinners were the bad people – the crooks and the thieves and the murderers and the adulterers – and that they needed Jesus Christ so they could stop doing bad stuff.
That was the first time I’d heard that separation from God produced a jadedness in me that led to violence and bigotry and prejudice and hate. Then I was told that 1,900 years ago God became a man in Christ, and that Jesus bore in his own body on the cross my separation from God. And when he shed his blood he did so to forgive me, and he rose from the dead to live in me.
I had a problem with Jesus, because all the pictures I ever saw of Jesus didn’t look like he would survive in my neighborhood. He had blonde hair, blue eyes and hands that looked like they’d just been washed in Dove. I thought, if I ever got hooked up with him, I’d have to work full-time saving him from the brothers on the corner. I mean, he wouldn’t survive! But I discovered that the Christ which leaped out of the pages of the New Testament was nobody’s softie. Jesus was a gutsy, contemporary, radical revolutionary with hair on his chest and dirt under his fingernails who hung out with people like me.
I bowed my head next to my radio and prayed a very simple prayer: “Lord, I don’t understand all this. But I do know that I’m separated from you. And if what I’m hearing is true, I now give you the right to take over my life.”
I still had a problem. I was a gang leader. The following night I told my entire gang I had committed my life to Jesus Christ, and I could no longer responsibly lead that gang.
Two nights later the number two man cornered me and told me that when I got up and walked out he was going to put his blade in my back, but he couldn’t move. He said it was like something or somebody glued him to his seat. I shared with him what Jesus Christ had done in my life, and two days after my own commitment to Christ the number-two man made the same decision. Within a year seven other of the leaders of our gang committed themselves to Christ, and we formed a little band that began to study the Word of God together under some people who had been studying the Scriptures in Harlem for 18 years. They took us under their wing and taught us the Word and how to follow Christ
I stand here to tell you that I’m a new person in Jesus Christ. I still have to battle prejudice and bigotry in the world, but the difference is that I am God’s son. I’ll be seated together with Jesus Christ in heavenly places, and if people don’t want to live next door to royalty like me, that’s their problem.
Jesus is now living his life through my redeemed blackness. To follow Jesus I did not have to give up my Africanism. I am proud of my heritage and where I come from. To be accepted and to be one in the body of Christ does not require that I have to become white.
God’s putting together this tremendous choir that the Bible says is going to stand up one day and sing, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,” and “You have made us of one blood out of every kindred tribe, tongue and nation, hath made us a priest and a kingdom unto our God. You will reign forever and ever.”
That choir is going to put Africans and Asians and Hispanics and African Americans and Chinese together. We will take all of our instruments, languages, and cultures, and we’ll sing together, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain to receive honor and glory and power and majesty forever and ever. Amen.”
This article has been adapted from Tom Skinner’s presentation at Asbury College in February 1990.
Tom Skinner’s legacy is carried on by his widow, Dr. Barbara Williams-Skinner, at the Skinner Leadership Institute. https://www.skinnerleaders.org/about-us
by Steve | May 21, 1990 | Archive - 1990
Tom Skinner and Inner City Tech
May/June 1990
Good News
God has raised up Tom Skinner (1942-1994), former gang leaders of the Harlem Lords, into a dramatic ministry that has reached into the poverty-stricken inner city. His learning center in Newark, New Jersey, is raising up a generation of leaders who are morally and technically excellent.
Good News: Have the mainline churches abandoned the inner city?
Skinner: Yes. The problem is the Church has never viewed the inner city as a mission field. Whenever we’ve said missions it was automatically understood we were saying foreign missons – Africa, Asia, South America, Central America. The assumption has been that we have completed the job here, now we’ve got to get out. But there are whole areas in our own nation where we have not done the job – not even partly. That is crucial now, because our cities are at stake.
Good News: Explain why you say our cities are at stake.
Skinner: Washington D.C. is 72 percent African-American alone. New York City is 25 percent African-American, eight percent Hispanic, five percent Asian. Dallas and Houston are 40 percent Hispanic. San Antonio is 53 percent Hispanic. Minorities dominate the population in Los Angeles, Chicago and in the other 34 major American cities. So what’s happened by not having developed Christian leadership in those cities? We’re stuck with the witness of Christ being of no effect there. By the time we get to the year 2010 whole cities will be 80 percent African-American, Hispanic, and Asian. And the only way to ensure a sound Christian witness is to start developing the leadership now.
Good News: Tell us about your work in the inner city.
Skinner: We started a pilot program four years ago in Newark, New Jersey, by building a high-tech learning center. The object of that project is to help raise up a new generation of Christ-centered leaders that are both technically excellent and spiritually mature.
Our learning center is committed to five types of skills. The first are what we call spiritual and moral skills. We teach the Gospel of John, so our students know who Christ is; and we teach the book of Proverbs, so they learn to think from God’s point of view.
The second skills are basic skills – reading, writing, and functional math. The relationship between poverty and functional illiteracy is overwhelming.
Third are coping skills. That’s the ability to learn how the system functions and who makes the decisions. We take our kids to city council meetings and state legislature meetings. They learn how the banking system functions.
The fourth skills are what we call bread-on-the-table skills. We teach that you will be ultimately responsible for the economic welfare of your own life and your family’s life. We provide our kids with the skills necessary to become income producers, and to take charge of their own economic lives.
The fifth skills are leadership skills. We teach the godly character of leaders and general leadership skills – planning, setting goals, managing time, managing yourself, managing work, etc. We use basic characters in the Bible such as Abraham, Moses, and others.
Good News: Why do you call it a high-tech learning center?
Skinner: The center is high-tech, meaning that we use computer systems, video systems, and audio systems to accelerate the learning process. Seventy percent of all the practice work is done by computers, so that every young person learns at his or her own pace.
Good News: Are you seeing results?
Skinner: For every 20 hours of work in reading and every 25 hours in math we’re seeing a one and a half grade increase. One day the principal and two assistant principals from the 2000-student high school across the street from our learning center came over with a list of names and said, “Do you recognize any of these names?”
We said, “Yes. These kids are part of the learning center. Why?”
The school officials had done a study of the most improved students in their school, and our kids had gone off the graph. They all had one common experience; they had been coming to the learning center. Now the school sends us five classes a day to do the same thing with those kids.
Good News: What age groups do you work with?
Skinner: We deal with three groups of people. The first is students between grades three and 12, eight to 18 years old. They come between three and nine in the evening.
The second group is dropouts from 16 to 25. The third group is adults who are illiterate. We teach them reading, writing, and functional math.
We had a first SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) in the fall, and our students scored 1070, which is 150 points higher than the national average. These kids live in the ghetto, and 95 percent of them live below the poverty level.
Good News: What are the requirements for going to your learning center?
Skinner: First, we want the majority of our kids to come from homes below the poverty level. Second, they have to bring a parent or guardian with them the first time, because we want that parent or guardian to know what we will do, and we make no bones about the fact that we are going to instruct the kids in the Word of God.
Third, they have to bring library cards because we’re going to teach them how to use information. We’ll also teach them how to access information through the library system and card catalog, as well as through computer and electric databases. They learn that part of the way they will overcome poverty is by learning how to use information.
Also, we have made arrangements with three banks in the community to allow our kids to open a bank account with five dollars. We teach them that 10 percent of everything they earn they’ve got to give to helping somebody less fortunate than they.
They learn that they are not recipients only, but givers, and part of whatever they receive, they owe it to God to share it with somebody who’s less fortunate.
If they’re over 18 they also have to come with voter registration cards, because we want them to learn to participate in the leadership of the community.
Good News: How big is your high-tech center?
Skinner: We have 375 kids, and they have to give us a minimum of 12 hours a week. They don’t fight to do the minimum, though, they fight to do the maximum. Sometimes we have to tell the kids that we can’t give them more than 20 hours this week, they’ll have to come back next week. We’re also open all day on Saturday.
Good News: How many staff?
Skinner: We have seven full-time staff people and approximately 20 volunteers that give us four hours a week.
Good News: What about funding?
Skinner: Funding comes from churches and individuals. We do not accept government funds.
Good News: This idea sounds marketable. Is anybody looking at it?
Skinner: Every week, at least one group from some city comes to look at what we’re doing because they want to reproduce it. We are going to put this project in 20 cities. We believe if we do that we’ll multiply it much faster, because more people will see it in their own environments and copy it.
Good News: Have you had the learning center long enough to begin to see results in the lives of the kids?
Skinner: These kids are bringing kids. I’ve been involved in evangelism for 30 years, and I am convinced the most effective evangelists are kids. If you get kids turned on to Christ and train them, they make the most effective evangelists. They are uninhibited. At evangelism seminars the most frequent question adults ask is, “How do you make the approach?” The kids never ask about the approach. They only ask, “What should I say?”
Good News: You have them a pretty good chunk of time. Are they able to establish their own counter-culture?
Skinner: The majority of the adults who are now a part of the program have been brought by their children. The children have been the greatest propagators of our work in their school system. Numbers of employers in Newark, New Jersey, recruit employees at our center, because not only are they the brightest kids the companies can get, but they are also morally responsible. These are employers like Prudential Life, AT&T, and McDonalds.
Good News: Do most of the kids have any kind of a church relationship or does this community become that for them?
Skinner: At the beginning of their development this community is that but we bring them into relationship with local churches.
Good News: Are any of the kids coming back and becoming a second generation of leaders?
Skinner: Eighty percent of our summer interns are people who have graduated from this program. Because we’ve only been at it for five years, we don’t have much of an adult population. But we’ve gotten these kids into the best colleges in the country, and some schools have told us they will give our best students full scholarships.
Good News: How can the UM Church be of help to the Tom Skinner Association?
Skinner: We’re always looking for additional teachers, people who have unique skills in teaching reading, math, and cultural things.
Because we use high-tech, United Methodists may want to buy computers or video systems for us.
We may be able to have a partnership that will allow us to train people from within the church who could go back and establish a similar program in local communities we’d also be willing to partner with some of the Christian colleges, where students could meet some of their credit needs by working at our center. We’re very open to that.
Tom Skinner’s legacy is carried on by his widow, Dr. Barbara Williams-Skinner, at the Skinner Leadership Institute. https://www.skinnerleaders.org/about-us
by Steve | May 20, 1990 | Archive - 1990
Archive: We Must Surrender Ourselves
By E. Stanley Jones
May/June 1990
Good News
Why is God so cruel? Why does he demand so much of us? In demanding self-surrender, is God being cruel or consistent?
God obeys every law he demands of us. He especially obeys and illustrates the law of finding his life by losing it. This principle is at the very heart of the universe. One verse vividly proclaims that fact “the Lamb who is at the heart of the throne will be their shepherd and will guide them to the springs of the water of life” (Rev. 7:17 NEB). That phrase, “the Lamb who is at the heart of the throne,” is the most important of any verse in Scripture, or in literature anywhere. Show me what you think is at the heart of the universe and I will show you what will be at the heart of your conduct.
Call the roll of the answers of philosophy and religion as to what is at the heart of the throne of the universe, and what answers do we get? Justice, power, law, indifference, question mark, favoritism, something that cannot be wangled, the non-manipulatable, the ground of our being. Nothingness. Not one could rise to, or could dare think of, self-giving, sacrificial love, “the Lamb” being at the heart of the throne. That would be unthinkable; it could only come as revelation. The Word had to become flesh; we had to see it in the Lamb, God on a cross!
The unimaginable revelation is this: God not only redeems in terms of Jesus Christ, he rules in terms of Jesus Christ. The Lamb is at the heart of the throne, not merely the cross! Does God rule from a cross? Then the cross is final power and not only absolute goodness. Is this a stray thought woven into the fabric of Christianity or is it the warp and woof of the whole? This verse lets us see that it is at the very basis of the Christian faith: “Therefore, my brothers, I implore you by God’s mercy to offer your very selves to him: a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1 NEB). The word therefore is the pivot upon which this whole epistle turns from doctrines to duties, from what God has done to what we are to do. And what has he done? The whole of Romans up to the eighth chapter is an exposition of what God has done to redeem us. The following passage lets us see what he has done: “Christ died for us while we were yet sinners, and that is God’s own proof of his love towards us. And so, since we have now been justified by Christ’s sacrificial death, … For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, … now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. But that is not all: We also exult in God through our Lord Jesus, through whom we have now been granted reconciliation” (Rom. 5:8-11 NEB). Also: “He did not spare his own Son, but surrendered him for us all; and with this gift how can he fail to lavish upon us all he has to give?” (Rom. 8:32 NEB). Put with the above this: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5:19 NEB). Put these passages together and they spell out the astonishing news: God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.
So self-surrender is at the very heart of God. When he asks us to surrender ourselves he is asking us to fulfill the deepest thing in himself and the deepest thing in us. It is not only the deepest in God – it is also the highest in God. God was never higher than when he gave himself for us. If there were a cosmic newspaper announcing: “GOD THE CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE GIVES HIMSELF TO REDEEM A PLANET CAILED EARTH,” the universe would gasp in astonishment. That would be news. It would set the standard for life in the universe. We must do what God does, surrender ourselves. If we do that we are in harmony with the universe. If we go against what God does, make ourselves the center of life, then we are running athwart the universe; we have nothing behind us except our lonely wills; we are estranged and out of harmony with the universe and ourselves. We have saved our lives and have lost them.
So Paul says, “Therefore, … I implore you by God’s mercy to offer your very selves to him: a living sacrifice.”
Why by God’s mercy? Is he implying, “God have mercy on you if you don’t?” I think so, for life says so! All the problems of human living come out of self-centered living. Center yourself on yourself and you won’t like yourself. And no one else will like you. A psychologist says, “It’s a million chances to one that the self-centered are unpopular.” With whom? First, with themselves. They do as they like and then don’t like the self they are expressing. But when you try to digest selfcenteredness the stomach turns sour. You are made for outgoing love, not ingrown self-preoccupation. Neither can you as a person digest it, nor can your relationships.
This law of saving your life by losing it is not based on God’s whim, nor even upon God’s will – it is based on God’s character. That is the way God is, and that is the way God acts, and if we act otherwise we are at cross-purposes with God and consequently get hurt. For you cannot be at cross-purposes with reality and get away with it. You don’t break this law, you break yourself upon it. It registers its consequences within you. You are paid in your own person the fitting wage of such perversion, the perversion of making yourself God instead of surrendering to God.
So surrender to God is not merely a religious doctrine, it is a life demand. The rest of Romans 12:1 says that offering “your very selves to him: a living sacrifice” is “the worship offered by mind and heart.” Note “mind,” or as the King James Version says, “your reasonable service.” To surrender to God is “reasonable,” the sensible thing to do. From the moment you surrender to God, life takes on meaning, goal, purpose, a sense of going somewhere worthwhile – life adds up to sense.
The article is excerpted from Victory Through Surrender by E. Stanley Jones, copyright 1966, Abingdon Press. Used by permission.
