by Steve | Jan 13, 2020 | January - February 2020, Magazine, Magazine Articles
Cara Nicklas speaks at the Wesleyan Covenant Association’s Global Gathering in Tulsa. Photo: Mark Moore.
By Cara Nicklas –
Several years ago, I contemplated giving up the practice of law to go into ministry. It’s not that I didn’t like dealing with my clients. I just got frustrated with the judicial system and especially grew weary of dealing with other lawyers. Full-time ministry just seemed like a more noble cause than being cussed out by my opposing counsel.
I spoke with my pastor about my idea. “We need Christian lawyers,” he told me. “I think you are doing what you need to be doing.” That wasn’t the response I expected. Within a couple of months after that conversation, God led me to my present law firm. During the first summer at the firm, the lawyers, along with several law students who clerked with our firm, met each week for a sort of book club. We read the book, Redeeming Law, by Michael Schutt. In his introduction, he writes: “we will explore the potential for law … to be a ministry of good works to those around us, a calling from God to love and serve our neighbors with the skills and opportunities he has given us.” Our book club explored how a career in law could be used to grow in Christ and work for him – how we could be in ministry to our clients and to the world. For the first time in my career, really, I began to think deeper about what it meant to integrate my faith with my calling as a practicing lawyer. That meant thinking deeper about my own theology.
Many people think doing theology is solely the work of pastors and seminary professors – not laity. So, when we hear the word “theologian,” we think of Drs. Billy Abraham, Sandra Richter, or David Watson. The names of laity don’t come to mind.
But as Christians, the question is not whether we should or should not be theologians. If a broad definition of a “theologian” is “one who seeks to know God,” then each of us as Christians must be theologians. The critical question is, “Will we be the best theologians we can be given our circumstances, or will we evade the responsibility, and say, ‘That’s someone else’s job?’”
In a world that is increasingly “unchurched,” where in some quarters of our culture people are dismissive of our faith, and in other quarters people are downright hostile to it, we no longer have the luxury – if we ever did – to completely farm-out the critical work of being good theologians. We do not have nearly enough theologians in our churches. And that shortfall diminishes our effectiveness as disciples and ambassadors for our Lord, Jesus Christ.
Many pastors think if they take a serious dive into theological matters in a sermon, they will lose the laity. In fact, some pastors are convinced laity are not even willing to wade into the theological waters with them. There’s some truth in their supposition. Laity are used to being entertained and amused, and therefore we kind of unwittingly expect our pastors to do the same. And in our consumer oriented culture, we’re not adverse to church shopping until we find the pastor who’s the most entertaining.
But clergy, here’s the hard truth: You do have to find ways to hold our attention in a YouTube, Facebook, Twitter world. More than ever we need you to work hard, very hard, to not only teach us the timeless truths of our faith, but to equip us for sharing them with others. Many of us laity don’t realize it or we’re afraid to admit it, but we are theologically malnourished.
All of us, laity and clergy, have to do more than read and study the Bible; we also have to read and study Christian theology. Theological study better informs our reading of Scripture. Theological study will challenge us to think hard about the nature of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
We will need to ask ourselves difficult questions because our friends, our work colleagues, our family members, and that curious little eight-year old in the Sunday school class we volunteered to teach, will ask us hard questions. Some will ask because they’re trying to challenge our faith, but most will ask because they’re genuinely searching to know more about God and want to be in relationship with Him. It simply will not do to respond to them by saying, “Well the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.”
We should prepare ourselves to give thoughtful answers to the questions that are likely to come our way: What can we know about the Triune nature of God? Why do we believe it took Jesus’ death on the cross to liberate us from our slavery to sin and fear of death? How do we discern the prompting of the Holy Spirit in our lives? Why do good people suffer? Why do some prayers get answered and others don’t?
To be sure, all the theological study in the world won’t provide us with definitive answers to all hard questions. We do ultimately live by faith. However, we need to demonstrate to people that we take their questions seriously, very seriously. We have to help them see that many Christians – from St. Augustine to our favorite Sunday school teachers – have wrestled with them. And while we might not have definitive answers to all their questions, we have very good partial answers that are drawn from the treasure house of rich resources that our faithful ancestors have handed down to us. And answers that give us an assurance that our faith is not built on sand, but upon a sure foundation that fills us with hope and trust that God is good, and is working his good will for us and for all creation.
Responding to sincere questions in helpful and effective ways is predicated on our having done some serious thinking about them ourselves. We cannot simply be “Bible quoters” who post or “like” an occasional Bible verse to make a point. Bible quoters are given to tossing off a verse, or sometimes even less than a verse, as an answer to a person’s genuine good theological question. And consequently, Bible quoters run the risk of doing more harm than good. For example, Bible quoters are given to quoting the Scripture out of context, and so in an awkward attempt to console someone they’ll say, “For everything there is a season,” or “God never gives you more than you can handle.” Their grieving friend is left to wonder, “Does God cause bad things to happen to me?” Or their work colleague is left thinking, “My twenty-one-year old son’s drug addiction is killing him, and it’s breaking my heart. What I’m confronted with right now feels like far more than I can handle.”
And then there are some Bible quoters who recite Scripture as a way of absolving themselves and others of any responsibility to act with Christian maturity and integrity. They’re the ones quick to remind us we are to “love our neighbors,” and to “judge not, lest we be judged.” They toss these verses off as if Jesus intended the church to be a community without good order and proper boundaries for how we love one another, and how we hold one another accountable for our actions.
Bible quoters can turn Scripture into simplistic clichés. They use it in a way that fails to speak a true word of grace and comfort, or as a license to do as we please. Life is far more complicated than that, and life in the church, in the community of faith, is far richer and deeper than tossing off Bible verses as self-help clichés.
In a post-modern world where “the truth” is malleable, where some people are cynical, where information (good and bad) is found by a few clicks on a keyboard, and where people are lost and genuinely seeking, we need to be better theologians. When we think theologically about whether truth is relative, it impacts whether we view the Bible as just another inspirational book among other books on the shelf or a collection of writings that reveals who God is and what he wants for us as his children. If you know truth is found in the Bible, it impacts your daily walk with God and your witness in the world.
It is hard work, and yet also rewarding and faith building work, to think theologically. For the sake of the church and the church’s work in the world, we must do it. And yet many of us, particularly we laity who are often on the front lines every day, can feel conflicted between the clear biblical mandate to share the Gospel and the cultural pressure not to offend, to keep our faith private, and out of the public square. We can perpetuate much of the misguided theology we hear in today’s culture and in our own churches either through silence or by espousing a gospel message we think might be more attractive to the next generation.
We Christians must be a light in the world. We must proclaim the truth. We cannot keep the Gospel private. Discerning the truth is hard. Being a Christian theologian is inherently an endless and humbling task. We will never know all there is to know about God. But the wonderful, marvelous, and awesome thing is that God invites us to know about him. He has graciously revealed himself to us in Scripture as our Father, in the Word made flesh, and through the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit.
Many people – from our bishops, to church officials, and to leaders of various advocacy groups – are coming to the painful realization that there will be some kind of separation of The United Methodist Church next year. In the near future, we who are called Traditionalists will no longer be able to tell ourselves other people are keeping us from being a healthy, vibrant branch of the church catholic. It will all be on us. We live in a time when there is heightened skeptism, cultural influence, and distrust and criticism of the church. We must become fully equipped to be ambassadors of Christ in these changing times and that necessarily requires us to think deeper theologically.
My husband and I raised our sons in a small community on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. Our friends in the community often refer to it as Mayberry – the fictional location of of the old Andy Griffith TV show. My younger son, Evan, especially had an incredible group of core friends who were believers with parents whose values lined up with ours. Throughout his upbringing, Evan and his friends held each other accountable. His friends and their parents living in Mayberry helped Evan grow and become confident as a disciple of Jesus Christ. Then Evan went to college. He no longer lived in Mayberry. As a biology major, Evan had friends who did not share his beliefs. He began to engage in lots of conversations about Christianity which required that he start thinking much deeper about why he believed what he believed. He would discuss with me the points being made by his new friends and he would ask how he might best respond. He might call and ask, “What do I say to those who suggest the Old Testament laws no longer apply?” or “How do I respond to someone who says it isn’t necessary to go to church to be a good Christian?” That required that I think deeply about how to respond to the particular questions raised by his friends. These were thoughtful, highly intelligent people who had been raised in the church but had come to reject it. Trite answers to their questions would not suffice.
That is the world we live in. Are we prepared for the Next Methodism where we will encounter more and more young people who question the need to attend church? Who question the teachings they heard growing up in the church? Are we as a church allowing and even encouraging our children and youth to ask challenging questions before they go off to college where they will surely begin to question their faith? It will take each and every one of us to prepare ourselves to respond to such questions.
A good theologian is one who seeks to know God more intimately. We don’t become theologians to merely win debates with atheists; we want to be good theologians so we can lead people to Christ.
When you and I practice theology together, we consider the wonder, the mystery, and the love of the One who Created us, who Redeemed us, and who empowers us to be his joyful and obedient disciples – proclaiming the Good News to a lost and hurting world.
Cara Nicklas is a United Methodist layperson, a General Conference delegate, and an attorney. This article is adapted from her address to the Wesleyan Covenant Association gathering in Tulsa in November.
by Steve | Jan 13, 2020 | January - February 2020, Magazine, Magazine Articles
By Shane Bishop –
I believe it happened in the springtime, sometime after Christmas and before Easter. 1999. I don’t remember the specifics of the “when” but I will never forget the “what” of this story. I arrived at church about 9:30 through the front glass doors only to see a woman in a wheel chair out the corner of my eye. I did not recognize her so I went to my office to get things ready for the service. When I emerged about thirty minutes later, she was in the same spot.
A quick glance verified that she was not in the chair to convalesce, but would probably be in that chair for the rest of her life. As I approached to introduce myself, something welled up within me. Something in my spirit said, “Reach out your hand and command her to walk in the name of Jesus.” This is the whole problem with reading the Bible. It puts ideas in your head and gets you in situations like this. In a split second I was right in front of her. Would I obey God and possibly set a miracle into motion, or would I miss God and make a scene? At the moment of truth, I held out my hand and said, “I’m Shane. I’m glad you are here today.”
It is a moment I will never forget. What if I really heard the voice of God? What if she would have reached for my hand, received healing and went, “Running and leaping and praising God?” Perhaps I did the right thing. A vain imagination. Perhaps I established that such a prompting was a waste of God’s time. I will never know. But I did make a decision; it would never happen again. From that moment on, when I feel the Holy Spirit “prompts” I err on the side of boldness. Sometimes it feels risky, but nothing feels riskier to me these days than quenching the Holy Spirit.
A failure to embrace the ministry of the Holy Spirit has produced a disconnect and a lack of firepower in the church today. The disconnect is that our current standard practice in church life does not even remotely resemble standard practice in the early church. The disciples didn’t refer people to medical professionals; they were healing the sick, raising the dead, curing those with leprosy, and casting out demons.
The firepower has to do with orthodox theology. If we don’t believe God can actually change people and we are not willing to boldly pray for and celebrate such transformations, we are open to every single criticism the culture hurls at us.
Paul writes from prison to people who are being relentlessly persecuted: “This is why I remind you to fan into flames the spiritual gift God gave you when I laid my hands on you. For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline. So never be ashamed to tell others about our Lord. And don’t be ashamed of me, either, even though I’m in prison for him. With the strength God gives you, be ready to suffer with me for the sake of the Good News” (II Timothy 1:6-8, NLT).
To my way of thinking, The United Methodist Church has a problem – and that problem is me. Revival never begins when “they” change; it begins when I change. The question is not where I stand on the issues but whether I am standing on holy ground. And if I am standing on holy ground, why are my shoes always on?
We may all agree on Biblical authority and theology but did we used to love God more than we do right now? I have no doubt we feel fire in our bellies but is that fire the transforming Holy Spirit or the burning resentment we feel concerning what is going on around us?
Paul writes, “Fan into flames the spiritual gift God gave you!” and “For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity” (v. 7). Uncertainty breeds fear and fear breeds timidity. To fuel our Holy Spirit fire and to counter fear and timidity, God has given us three spiritual weapons:
1. Power is the supernatural ability to do what God asks us to do. God will never ask us to do what God will not empower us to do.
2. Love is the supernatural disposition God gives his children toward the world. We are not going to reach people for Jesus if we think we are better than they are.
3. Self-discipline is supernaturally regulating our lives in God honoring ways. It can also be thought of as a sound or steady mind. This is not time to baptize the Chicken Little in all of us and pretend he is a prophet; it is time to make prayerful and bold decisions that are congruent with our callings, our understanding of Scripture and our mission.
Paul reminds us, “Never be ashamed to tell others about our Lord. And don’t be ashamed of me, either, even though I’m in prison for him. With the strength God gives you, be ready to suffer with me for the sake of the Good News” (v. 8). At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit gifted the church to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ. The Good News of Jesus hasn’t gotten worse just because of the utter disarray of our denomination. Whatever else we may be ashamed of, let us not be ashamed of our Lord!
In the aftermath of General Conference 2019, Christ Church is down 10 percent across the board. Unless we have an incredible last quarter, we will fail to grow for the first time in 23 years. I have lost church members; had friends walk away and have taken social media hits – some of them from people I once considered friends. This has been a discouraging time and I need the strength of Christ every day. Sometimes like Elijah, I get feeling sorry for myself and God simply says, “Stop it! You are embarrassing yourself. Do you have any idea of the price my disciples have paid for their faith over the centuries? Shake off your fear and timidity; tap into power, love, and a sound mind and get out there and proclaim the Gospel.”
When the Holy Spirit came down at Pentecost, the early church began to walk in the realm of signs and wonders. I am sometimes asked why we don’t see more miracles today and my response is most clear: we don’t pray for them, we don’t recognize them, and we don’t celebrate them.
Twelve years ago, I was preaching on a Sunday morning when all of a sudden an older gentleman by the name of Norman clearly went through a horrible physical episode and finally he just stopped breathing. Right there in the sanctuary, he laid stiff. There were two medical doctors in the pew with him. And after walking over they just shook their heads, no. I asked someone in the congregation to call an ambulance. Norman didn’t breathe for about three minutes or so. I asked everyone to extend a hand in prayer. I didn’t really know what to do. So everybody just started praying. You could sense the power of the Holy Spirit.
We were praying three or four minutes – waiting for the ambulance, praying that the ambulance would hurry up – and suddenly Norman loudly gasped and stood up.
How do you really talk about an experience like that? How do you explain it? Norman knew how to talk about that Sunday morning. For ten years of his life he said God raised him from the dead in church. I knew how the people in the New Testament would have talked about it. They would have said it was a testimony to the power of God.
Last year I conducted Norman’s funeral. I felt like the preacher who conducted Lazarus first and second funerals. And it prompted a question in me. Something of biblical proportions almost certainly occurred in the life of this man. How could we expect God to do great things if we’re not prepared to pray for them? If we’re not prepared to recognize them? And if we’re not prepared to give God glory for them? And the answer is, we just can’t. We must shift the narrative.
It is time to walk in the power of the Holy Spirit and not our own strength. It is time to teach good theology rather than disparage bad theology. It is time to tell our story and not have our story told for us. It is time for signs and wonders; not sighs and whiners. It is time to boldly celebrate who we are, where we are going, and what God has called us to be!
The early church didn’t defend their faith to the larger culture, they just proclaimed the Gospel, saw lives utterly transformed, and let the Holy Spirit do the talking.
“We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son,” we affirm with the Nicene Creed. “With the Father and the Son He is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the prophets.”
Let’s be Holy Spirit filled and not fear filled. In the power of the Holy Spirit, reach out your hand with me to a hemorrhaging world and say with Peter, “Silver and gold have I none but such as I have give I thee. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk!”
Shane Bishop is a United Methodist clergyperson and evangelist. He is the senior pastor of Christ Church in Fairview Heights, Illinois. This article is adapted from the address he delivered at the recent Global Gathering of the Wesleyan Covenant Association.
by Steve | Jan 13, 2020 | January - February 2020, Magazine, Magazine Articles
At the Wesleyan Covenant Association’s Legislative Assembly in November held in Tulsa, delegates affirmed the first draft of the WCA’s proposed Book of Doctrines and Discipline. What follows are highlights of the segment on social witness.
Since God first stirred the hearts of John and Charles Wesley to feed the hungry, visit those in prison, oppose slavery, and care for those in need, Methodists have believed in joining hands and hearts in the service of God and others, following the words of James 1.27 that the religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: “to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” We are convinced that faith if it is not accompanied by action is dead (James 2.17) and that, as Jesus reminded us, when we do not do what is needed to care for the least of our sisters and brothers, we likewise have not done so for Christ either. (Matthew 25.45)
It was in that spirit that the Methodist Episcopal Church became the first denomination in the world to adopt a formal Social Creed in 1908, spurred by the Social Gospel in response to the deplorable working conditions of millions. Though reflective of its own time, the statement is still remarkably relevant even today, calling for, among other things, “equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life, principles of conciliation and arbitration in industrial dissensions, abolition of child labor, the suppression of the ‘sweating system,’ a reduction of the hours of labor to the lowest practical point, a release from employment one day in seven, and for a living wage in every industry.” … Our Social Witness represents a consensus vision of what it means to be faithful disciples in a world that remains in rebellion against its Creator, wracked by violence and unfettered greed. It is a summons to prayerfully consider how to “do good” and “do no harm” to all as we put our faith into practice. …
We believe that the Christian faith calls us to recognize that all persons irrespective of their station or circumstances in life have been made in the image of God and must be treated with dignity, justice, and respect
We believe that life is a holy gift of God whose beginnings and endings are set by God, and that it is the particular duty of believers to protect those who are powerless to protect themselves, including the unborn. We believe human life begins at conception and abortion ends a human life.
We believe that all should have the right to work without grinding toil, in safe conditions, and in situations in which there is no exploitation by others. We respect the right of workers to engage in collective bargaining to protect their welfare. We pray that all should be allowed to freely follow their vocations, especially those who work on the frontiers of truth and knowledge and those who may enrich the lives of others with beauty and joy.
We believe that all have been summoned to care for the earth as our common home, stewarding its resources, sharing in its bounty, and exercising responsible consumption so that there is enough for all.
We believe that human sexuality is a gift of God that is to be affirmed as it is exercised within the legal and spiritual covenant of a loving and monogamous marriage between one man and one woman. …
We believe that children, whether through birth or adoption, are a sacred gift to us from God, and we accept our responsibility to both protect and nurture the youngest among us, particularly against such abuses as enforced child labor, involuntary conscription, human trafficking, and other such practices in the world.
We believe that followers of God have been called to exercise self-control and holiness in their personal lives, generosity and kindness in their relations with others, and grace in all matters of life.
The entire document can be found at WesleyanCovenant.org.
by Steve | Jan 13, 2020 | January - February 2020, Magazine, Magazine Articles
A Sunday school class in 1946 at Community (Methodist) Church in Wheelwright, Kentucky. Photo: Russell Lee, National Archives.
By Donald W. Haynes –
The American Sunday School Union was organized in 1827. By the 1840’s churches across America were beginning to build “wings” of classrooms for children and youth to be taught at the church, replacing the catechism which based Christian nurture in the home – taught mostly by parents but also by the circuit riders when they made pastoral calls and interrogated the children on their mastery of the catechetical questions. In Methodism, Sunday school also replaced the Wesleyan styled “class meeting” as the locus of both fellowship and biblical exhorting.
Mainline Protestant church growth in the 20th century was primarily due to the influence and attendance of Sunday school. As the context of evangelizing or bringing youth to affirming Jesus Christ as personal savior, the Sunday school had replaced the revival. In most non-liturgical churches, Sunday school attendance was considerably higher than worship attendance. In churches where pastors had more than one church, primarily in rural areas, only Sunday school met every Lord’s Day. The Sunday School Superintendent was usually the most influential lay leader in the church; he or she presided over the “assembly” that met before and after individual classes went to their respective rooms. In The Methodist Church, by 1958, seven of every eight professions of faith came through the Sunday school.
In 1957, LOOK magazine’s cover headline was “Sunday School: The Most Wasted Hour of the Week?” The response was a firestorm of opposition, but the article was at least partially based on raw data from a survey of people who had attended Sunday school for at least ten years. They were asked a series of basic Bible-content questions and were found to be embarrassingly biblically illiterate. Ten years later, Sunday school in the more theologically liberal denominations began a precipitous free fall. The so called “mainline” denominations made a number of knee-jerk efforts to stop the ebbing tide, but “Humpty Dumpty” could not be “be put together again.”
By 2018, thousands of churches have literally no children in Sunday school. The only attendance left in those churches is in older adult classes. In many, perhaps most, independent church “plants,” there is no Sunday school at all, especially for adults.
First of all, why did this happen? For at least one documented answer, we must look at the largest denominational “combo” in America in the 1880’s – The Methodist Churches, north and south. “John Vincent and his southern counterpart, Atticus Haygood, led Methodism in the post Civil War era to see the Sunday School…effecting the conversion or transformation for which Methodism had looked to revivals,” reported the superlative historian Russell Richey.
John Vincent was the General Agent of the Methodist Episcopal Sunday School Union and “wrote the script” for the replacement of the revival with the Sunday school. J. Lyman Hurlbut’s The Story of the Bible, and Vincent’s “Uniform Sunday School Lesson” shifted the premise of conversion from an identifiable experience of saving grace to an embrace of the insights of the new social sciences – psychology and sociology.
In 1882, Vincent wrote The Revival After the Revival. In it, he interpreted his parents’ evangelical theology as the “morbid, self-centered religion of my childhood.” He saw sin as a “habit that could be bleached out of a person by right associations.” He considered “being saved” as a selfish concept, making one “safe from the world and guaranteed a home in heaven.” Consequently, every piece of Methodist Sunday school curriculum was a bland form of Christianity – Old Testament biographical narratives, a portrait of Jesus as “gentle, meek, and mild”; and the embrace of conventional cultural morality. There was no mention of the atonement, Pentecost, or experiential grace.
Meanwhile in southern Methodism, Atticus Haygood was the counterpart of John Vincent. He was appointed in 1870 as editor in chief of all Methodist Episcopal, South, Sunday school curriculum. The lesson was a benign moralism to teach children to be good boys and girls. The biblical content was a romanticized story of Nativity, no mention of atonement, original sin, or the work of the Holy Spirit, and narrowly selected Epistle passages. His biographer wrote that Haygood “underwent a deconversion” from his inherited Wesleyan, Arminian faith.
Both Vincent and Haygood became bishops and helped shape Methodism for relevance in a changing culture. Their successor was George Albert Coe, a disciple of John Dewey of Columbia University, the “father” of progressive education in the public schools of America. Coe was the virtual “czar” of Methodist Sunday school theology for the first third of the 20th century. He wrote, “The goal of Christian nurture thus becomes the growth of the young toward and into mature and efficient devotion to the democracy of God and happy self realization.”
For decades, professionals trained to be Christian educators were called “Directors of Religious Education,” not “Directors of Christian Education.” H. Shelton Smith, professor at Duke Divinity School, wrote a book in 1940 that should have shocked the Christian Education world, but it was basically ignored. In Faith and Nurture, Smith wrote, “The closing years of the 19th century reveal a marked trend in liberal circles toward a reduced Christology. The Christ of Sunday School became an historic Galilean, the supreme educator, the master teacher.” Dean Inge, professor of divinity at Cambridge and Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, wrote in the 20th century, “Contemporary liberalism as a creed is basically outmoded and must therefore be critically reconsidered and revised.”
Sunday school editors continued to write morality maxims, sentimentalized Bible stories, and selected psalms and epistle excerpts. The Sunday school, according to the famous LOOK cover article in 1957 had become “the only school in the world that was not a school.”
Therefore, when the Baby Boomers became adults in the 1960’s, they saw no value in going to Sunday school or taking their children in the way their parents took them. For one thing, they could recall very little that they had learned. For another, what they did learn seemed irrelevant to the generation of a sexual revolution and the Vietnam War. Gradually, slow erosion became a landslide and Sunday school’s Achilles’ Heel infected and affected the whole dimension of Christian nurture.
Donald W. Haynes is a retired United Methodist clergyperson from the Western North Carolina Annual Conference, author, and adjunct professor of United Methodist Studies at Hood Theological Seminary.
by Steve | Jan 13, 2020 | January - February 2020, Magazine, Magazine Articles
By Justus Hunter –
I loved Sunday school. The gray-haired ladies corralled us into small rooms lined with hand-me-down toys. A flannelgraph easel occupied one corner, a sentry threatening our chaos with order. We learned Bible stories and hokey songs and how to keep our hands to ourselves.
My children will never know that Sunday school. I haven’t been in a church with a dedicated Sunday school hour in decades. At some point churches decided kids would stick around easier if you buy new toys every now and then. And if kids stick, parents stick.
Or so we thought. We built the most playful and accommodating spaces in the history of Christianity. And my generation fled.
Methodism’s relationship to Sunday school has always been ambivalent. Many argue the rise of the Sunday schools was a sign of Methodist decline. They prioritized intellect over heart. They fueled our move from revivalism into the mainline. They ripped out the heart of Methodism: discipleship through societies, classes, and bands.
John Wesley’s structured small groups – societies, classes, and bands – were remarkably successful. They spread Scriptural holiness across the land. But Wesley stood in a different position than we do today. He inherited a tradition in fine doctrinal shape. The doctrine of the Church of England was well-established. He worked for spiritual renewal in line with sound doctrine. What about us? Our experiments with doctrinal pluralism have left us doctrinally awash. We will always need spiritual renewal. But now we also need doctrinal renewal.
If my argument holds, then spiritual renewal through classes and bands and reemerging revivalism may be necessary, but they will not be sufficient. We also have to address our doctrinal indifference. We need a thickening of doctrine and tradition. And this will require significant effort at recovery, both of clear and essential teaching and of those methods whereby the church shapes lives by that teaching. We need doctrine and we need to propagate it.
This suggests we may need Sunday school now more than ever. As my generation left the church, those of us who stuck around are more and more concerned that our kids understand the faith we’ve held. Now more than ever, Christians young and old need to learn who they are. Toward that end, here are a few thoughts on what we might do with Sunday school, or whatever Christian education program has replaced it by now.
1. Teach them their history. Many nights I read from Plutarch’s Lives to my sons. Plutarch’s vignettes of the heroes of Greece and Rome have shaped character for centuries, and for good reason. Plutarch is a relentless, perceptive analyst of character. Tales of the people who shaped and sustained our places, help us make sense of who we are. They’re the kinds of stories we turn to when life gets confusing. We were made for heroes. We need examples. And if the church isn’t supplying them, someone else will.
Bible stories have been the backbone of Sunday school classes for all ages. Stories of Abraham and David and Esther and Christ will always work. But so will the stories of Perpetua and Felicity, or John and Charles Wesley. Adding to the Bible stories is important. Stories of the great saints of our faith give a sense of permanence. They remind us that the Spirit remains alive and active in the church. They remind us that our God is with us.
So keep the Bible stories. But find more. Tell them about the great saints of the Christian heritage. Tell them about the great saints of your church. Tell them about the faithful who planted it. Tell them about the missionaries it sent. Tell them.
2. Nourish faith while growing understanding. When we teach confirmation, we plan for a lot of information transfer. We want our kids to learn about the Trinity, who Jesus is, what the church is about, the sacraments, and the hope of heaven. But we don’t just want them to know a set of teachings. We want them to understand. We don’t just want them to tell us that Jesus is fully divine. We want them to find ways to live lives that testify to Jesus’s divinity.
Charles Wesley, praying for children, asked God to “unite the two so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety.” The two go together. Dull piety is marked by a lack of knowledge. It substitutes pious sentiment for true understanding. Methodist classes were so formative because they gave early Methodists a common language of the soul. And that language was grounded in John Wesley’s teaching on the way of salvation. Early Methodists, in societies, classes, and bands, learned a way to speak the language of the soul, and learning that language allowed them to grow deeper in the faith.
Methodist Sunday school, if it is to recover the Wesleyan heritage, needs to be a space for recoupling. If your Sunday school classes are only about knowledge, complement them with vital piety. And watch for the warning sign of sentimentalism. You may have neither knowledge nor vital piety, and will need to work on both.
3. Love order like Wesley. One thing is certain: Sunday school isn’t necessary for the propagation the gospel. Sunday school is less than 300 years old, and the form you and I remember is significantly younger than that. It was an answer to a question American Methodists once asked. It was a similar question to the ones Wesley asked, and the one we ask. How do we propagate this faith? How do we nourish it in us and pass it on to others?
John Wesley was a master of order. His theological contributions were all in the doctrine of grace. He understood and explained the way of salvation, that path we pilgrims tread on the way to our heavenly home. His genius was chiefly in organizing meaningful methods for each stage of that journey, indeed every stage of that journey. He was wise about the way to holiness.
I don’t know if Sunday school is salvageable in your context. But I know that if we neglect to develop orderly structures for discipleship, structures that renew spiritually and doctrinally, then we risk another generation. The stakes are high. But we have an ideal example.
Justus Hunter is assistant professor of church history at United Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.
by Steve | Jan 13, 2020 | January - February 2020, Magazine, Magazine Articles
By Tom Lambrecht –
In the aftermath of the highly contentious General Conference last February in St. Louis, many ideas have surfaced as a way to attempt to resolve the conflict dividing our church.
One of these ideas is a proposal from the denomination’s Connectional Table to create the United States portion of the church as its own Regional Conference, allowing it to make changes to the Book of Discipline as it relates specifically to churches here in the U.S. The church constitution already gives the central conferences outside the U.S. the ability to “make such rules and regulations for the administration of the work within their boundaries including such changes and adaptations of the General Discipline as the conditions in the respective areas may require.” The new proposal wants to give the U.S. part of the church authority to make the same “changes and adaptations” that the central conferences may.
The original reasoning behind the proposal was to allow U.S. delegates to act on matters that pertain only to the U.S. church. The prime example is the pension program for U.S. pastors and professional staff. There are also some resolutions on political or moral issues that pertain to conditions in the U.S. It has been asked: Why should delegates from outside the U.S. be forced to sit through arcane discussions about provisions that do not pertain to them?
More recently, however, some progressives and centrists have attached themselves to this proposal as a way to provide for the U.S. delegates to change the standards in the U.S. to allow clergy to perform same-sex weddings and for practicing gays and lesbians to be ordained. That way, conservative African UM churches could keep the current restrictions on such practices, while they are allowed in the U.S.
This is actually not a new idea. A similar proposal was passed by the 2008 General Conference in response to the report of the World Wide Nature of the Church study committee. While the constitutional amendments needed to implement such a proposal passed General Conference by more than the requisite two-thirds vote, it failed to be ratified by the members of the annual conferences. In fact, it failed to garner even a majority of annual conference member votes, let alone the two-thirds needed to ratify the proposal. The idea was tried again in 2016, but was defeated in legislative committee. The same arguments that were persuasive in defeating this Regional Conference idea in the past still apply.
1. There is no clarity on which parts of the Book of Discipline can be “changed or adapted.” Paragraph 101 of the Discipline lists the parts that cannot be adapted, including the doctrinal standards and the Social Principles, covering paragraphs 1-166. The Standing Committee on Central Conference Matters was supposed to come back to the 2020 General Conference with a proposal as to which of the remaining paragraphs (paragraphs 201-2719) could be adapted. They have wisely decided, in light of the deep conflict in the church and the possibility of separation, that they will delay their defining proposal until 2024.
That means under the current Discipline everything after Paragraph 166 can be adapted or changed by a central or regional conference. The adaptable section would cover over 80 percent of the Discipline, including matters related to ordination, marriage, and sexual ethics. Under this Regional Conference proposal, almost any part of the “operation, governance, witness, and ministry” of the church (in the words of the relevant petition) could be changed or adapted by U.S. delegates for U.S. churches.
What was originally being sold as a way to handle a few specific issues now has the potential to further erode our connection. Rather than continuing as a unified global church, we could evolve into a conglomeration of diverse national churches.
2. There is no evidence that this proposal will save money or time of the General Conference. Proponents believe that, by allowing U.S. delegates to deal with uniquely U.S. matters, several days could be cut from the ten-day General Conference, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, proponents have produced no evidence of such a saving. There has been no analysis of the petitions and resolutions proposed at previous General Conferences to determine how many of them would actually be able to be dealt with by only U.S. delegates. There has been no analysis of the time spent in legislative committees or in plenary sessions on U.S. only issues.
3. This proposal sets up a whole new level of bureaucracy. This bureaucracy would exist between the jurisdictional conference and the General Conference. It would include a regional “judicial court” to decide questions of church law arising from the region. The proposed legislation also gives the regional conference the authority to “establish such other agencies, commissions, or committees as it may determine are important to the work and witness of the Church in the United States.” At a time when we are cutting the general church budget by 20 percent and apportionment payments are drastically declining, why would we create an expensive new bureaucratic structure in the church? It has the potential of siphoning funds from the global church and from the mission and ministry of the church.
4. Many central conference delegates do not favor this proposal. In 2008, the annual conferences outside the U.S. – particularly in Africa – voted almost unanimously against this idea. While this proposal is being portrayed as coming from the central conferences, delegates from Africa whom I have talked to do not support it. They have told me they wonder why, now that delegates from outside the U.S. are approaching a majority of the church, the U.S. wants to cut itself off from the global voice. For 50 years, while global delegates were a small minority of the General Conference, the U.S. was content to set policies and procedures for the whole church, with a very limited right of adaptation given to acknowledge the differences in legal structures outside the U.S. But now, the U.S. does not want to be subject to the voice of the global church and is proposing to allow itself to “opt out” of the global policies and procedures at will. Such an approach does not feel to them either respectful or fair.
The Renewal and Reform Coalition believes this proposal for a U.S. Regional Conference does not merit resurrection.
Thomas Lambrecht is a United Methodist clergyperson and the vice president of Good News.
