by Steve | Aug 30, 2021 | Magazine, Magazine Articles, September/October 2021
“Jesus himself is called a light in the darkness. He is the light that darkness cannot overcome,” writes Tish Harrison Warren. (Shutterstock).
By Tish Harrison Warren –
It was a dark year in every sense. It began with the move from my sunny hometown, Austin, Texas, to Pittsburgh in early January. One week later, my dad, back in Texas, died in the middle of the night. Always towering and certain as a mountain on the horizon, he was suddenly gone.A month later, I miscarried and hemorrhaged. We made it to the hospital. I was going to be okay, but I needed surgery. They put in a line for a blood transfusion, and told me to lie still. Then, I yelled to Jonathan, lost amidst the nurses, “Compline! I want to pray Compline.” It isn’t normal – even for me – to loudly demand liturgical prayers in a crowded room in the midst of crisis. But in that moment, I needed it, as much as I needed the IV.
Relieved to have a direct command, Jonathan pulled up the Book of Common Prayer on his phone and warned the nurses, “We are both priests, and we’re going to pray now.” And then he launched in: “The Lord grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end.”
Over the metronome beat of my heart monitor, we prayed the entire nighttime prayer service. “Defend us, Lord, from the perils and dangers of this night.” We finished: “The almighty and merciful Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, bless us and keep us. Amen.”
“That’s beautiful,” one of the nurses said. “I’ve never heard that before.”
Bleak season. Grief had compounded. I was homesick. The pain of losing my dad was seismic, still rattling like aftershocks. The next month we found out we were pregnant again. It felt like a miracle. In the end, however, early in my second trimester, we lost another baby, a son.
During that long year, as autumn brought darkening days and frost settled in, I was a priest who couldn’t pray.
I didn’t know how to approach God anymore. There were too many things to say, too many questions without answers. My depth of pain overshadowed my ability with words. And, more painfully, I couldn’t pray because I wasn’t sure how to trust God. Martin Luther wrote about seasons of devastation of faith, when any naïve confidence in the goodness of God withers. It’s then that we meet what Luther calls “the left hand of God.” God becomes foreign to us, perplexing, perhaps even terrifying. Adrift in the current of my own doubt and grief, I was flailing.
If you ask my husband about 2017, he says simply, ”What kept us alive was Compline.” An Anglicization of completorium, or “completion,” Compline is the last prayer office of the day in the Book of Common Prayer. It’s a prayer service designed for nighttime.
Imagine a world without electric light, a world lit dimly by torch or candle, a world full of shadows lurking with unseen terrors, a world in which no one could be summoned when a thief broke in and no ambulance could be called, a world where wild animals hid in the darkness, where demons and ghosts and other creatures of the night were living possibilities for everyone. This is the context in which the Christian practice of nighttime prayers arose, and it shapes the emotional tenor of these prayers.
Nighttime is also a pregnant symbol in the Christian tradition. God made the night. In wisdom, God made things such that every day we face a time of darkness. Yet in Revelation we’re told that at the end of all things, “night will be no more” (Revelation 22:5; cf. Isaiah 60:19). And Jesus himself is called a light in the darkness. He is the light that darkness cannot overcome.
The sixteenth-century Saint John of the Cross coined the phrase “the dark night of the soul” to refer to a time of grief, doubt, and spiritual crisis, when God seems shadowy and distant.
And in a darkness so complete that it’s hard for us to now imagine, Christians rose from their beds and prayed vigils in the night. Long after night vigils ceased to be a regular practice among families, monks continued to pray through the small hours, rising in the middle of the night to sing Psalms together, staving off the threat of darkness. Centuries of Christians have faced their fears of unknown dangers and confessed their own vulnerability each night, using the dependable words the church gave them to pray.
Of course, not all of us feel afraid at night. I have friends who relish nighttime – its stark beauty, its contemplative quiet, its space to think and pray. Yet each of us begins to feel vulnerable if the darkness is too deep or lasts too long. It is in large part due to the presence of light that we can walk around without fear at night. With the flick of a switch, we can see as well as if we were in daylight. But go out into the woods or far from civilization, and we still feel the almost primordial sense of danger and helplessness that nighttime brings.
Compline. I don’t remember when I began praying Compline. It didn’t begin dramatically. I’d heard Compline sung many times in darkened sanctuaries where I’d sneak in late and sit in silence, listening to prayers sung in perfect harmony.
In a home with two priests, copies of the Book of Common Prayer are everywhere, lying around like spare coasters. So one night, lost in the annals of forgotten nights, I picked it up and prayed Compline.
And then I kept doing it. I began praying Compline more often, barely registering it as any kind of new practice. It was just something I did, not every day, but a few nights a week, because I liked it. I found it beautiful and comforting.
For most of my life, I didn’t know there were different kinds of prayer. Prayer meant one thing only: talking to God with words I came up with. Prayer was wordy, unscripted, self-expressive, spontaneous, and original. And I still pray this way, every day. ”Free form” prayer is a good and indispensable way to pray.
But I’ve come to believe that in order to sustain faith over a lifetime, we need to learn different ways of praying. Prayer is a vast territory, with room for silence and shouting, for creativity and repetition, for original and received prayers, for imagination and reason.
I brought a friend to my Anglican church and she objected to how our liturgy contained (in her words) ”other people’s prayers.” She felt that prayer should be an original expression of one’s own thoughts, feelings, and needs. But over a lifetime the ardor of our belief will wax and wane. This is a normal part of the Christian life. Inherited prayers and practices of the church tether us to belief, far more securely than our own vacillating perspective or self-expression.
Prayer forms us. And different ways of prayer aid us just as different types of paint, canvas, color, and light aid a painter.
When I was a priest who could not pray, the prayer offices of the church were the ancient tool God used to teach me to pray again. … When we pray the prayers we’ve been given by the church – the prayers of the psalmist and the saints, the Lord’s Prayer, the Daily Office – we pray beyond what we can know, believe, or drum up in ourselves. ”Other people’s prayers” discipled me; they taught me how to believe again. The sweep of church history exclaims lex orandi, lex credendi, that the law of prayer is the law of belief. We come to God with our little belief, however fleeting and feeble, and in prayer we are taught to walk more deeply into truth.
When my own dark night of the soul came in 2017, nighttime was terrifying. The stillness of night heightened my own sense of loneliness and weakness. Unlit hours brought a vacant space where there was nothing before me but my own fears and whispering doubts.
So I’d fill the long hours of darkness with glowing screens, consuming mass amounts of articles and social media, binge watching Netflix, and guzzling think pieces till I collapsed into a fitful sleep. When I tried to stop, I’d sit instead in the bare night, overwhelmed and afraid. Eventually I’d begin to cry and, feeling miserable, return to screens and distraction – because it was better than sadness. It felt easier, anyway. Less heavy.
I began seeing a counselor. When I told her about my sadness and anxiety at night, she challenged me to turn off digital devices and embrace what she called ”comfort activities” each night – a long bath, a book, a glass of wine, prayer, silence, journaling maybe.
But slowly I started to return to Compline. I needed words to contain my sadness and fear. I needed comfort, but I needed the sort of comfort that doesn’t pretend that things are shiny or safe or right in the world. I needed a comfort that looked unflinchingly at loss and death. And Compline is rung round with death.
It begins ”The Lord Almighty grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end.” A perfect end of what? I’d think – the day, the week? My life? We pray, ”Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit” – the words Jesus spoke as he was dying. We pray, ”Be our light in the darkness, O Lord, and in your great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night,” because we are admitting the thing that, left on my own, I go to great lengths to avoid facing: there are perils and dangers in the night. We end Compline by praying, “That awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.” Requiescat in pace. RIP.
Compline speaks to God in the dark. And that’s what I had to learn to do – to pray in the darkness of anxiety and vulnerability, in doubt and disillusionment. It was Compline that gave words to my anxiety and grief and allowed me to reencounter the doctrines of the church not as tidy little antidotes for pain, but as a light in darkness, as good news.
There is one prayer in particular, toward the end of Compline, that came to contain my longing, pain, and hope. It’s a prayer I’ve grown to love, that has come to feel somehow like part of my own body, a prayer we’ve prayed so often now as a family that my eight-year-old can rattle it off verbatim:
“Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.”
This prayer is widely attributed to St. Augustine, but he almost certainly did not write it. It seems to suddenly appear centuries after Augustine’s death. A gift, silently passed into tradition, that allowed one family at least to endure this glorious, heartbreaking mystery of faith for a little longer.
As I said this prayer each night, I saw faces. I would say ”bless the dying” and imagine the final moments of my father’s life, or my lost sons. I would pray that God would bless those who work and remember the busy nurses who had surrounded me in the hospital. I would say ”shield the joyous” and think of my daughters sleeping safely in their room, cuddled up with their stuffed owl and flamingo. I’d say ”soothe the suffering” and see my mom, newly widowed and adrift in grief on the other side of the country. I’d say ”give rest to the weary” and trace the worry lines on my husband’s sleeping face. And I would think of the collective sorrow of the world, which we all carry in big and small ways – the horrors that take away our breath, and the common, ordinary losses of all our lives.
Like a botanist listing different oak species along a trail, this prayer lists specific categories of human vulnerability. Instead of praying in general for the weak or needy, we pause before particular lived realities, unique instances of mortality and weakness, and invite God into each.
Tish Harrison Warren is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America. She is the author of Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life. This article is adapted from Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren. Copyright © 2021 by Tish Harrison Warren. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA. (IVPress.com)
by Steve | Aug 26, 2021 | Magazine, Magazine Articles, September/October 2021
“We must go back, way back to our future,” said Bishop Mike Lowry. “We need to go back to the heart of the gospel in its full dimension – both spiritual and social.” Photo by Valerie Johnson (Shutterstock) and modified by Kendall Jablonowski.
By Mike Lowry, Bishop of the Central Texas Conference
The harsh reality is that we are in a post-Christendom age. No longer does the Christian faith, and more specifically the United Methodist Church, assume a leading societal position.
During my first year or so as a bishop, when I would mention that we were in a post-Christian era, clergy would tend to sigh and say, “look we already know this, that’s obvious.” To which I would respond (then and now!) “But I don’t see you changing your behavior. Most of you are operating as if we are still living in a time of Christendom” (i.e. a time of dominant cultural Christianity and influence). When I would make similar observations in a group laity, it almost inevitably sparked passionate discussions about whether this was an accurate or true statement. It would quickly be followed by comments related to the various issues of what we have come to call the “culture wars.”
While there can be no doubt that we are still grappling with various issues of the “culture wars,” I think it is safe today to say that with most of high society, the culture wars are over. In much of American society, traditional cultural Christianity (which is very different from and should not be confused with deep discipled orthodox Christianity!) has largely been defeated. Put bluntly, the cultural wars are largely over, and cultural Christianity lost.
Regardless of where you see yourself and your church on the conservative to liberal (or if you prefer traditional to progressive) spectrum, none of this should be news to us. The challenge of faithfulness is what do we do about this new day and culture in which we find ourselves?
Charles Taylor’s encyclopedic A Secular Age chronicles our movement from a time in history where belief in God was a given that could be assumed to an age where the notion of a transcendent God is one option among many. Closer to earth, in the central part of the State of Texas (the geographical area of the conference I serve), those in regular worship on an average Sunday in the United Methodist Church make up approximately 1.1 percent of the population.
Furthermore, in the eight states of the South Central Jurisdiction of the UM Church, this percentage is roughly average. For a wider view, consider the Washington Post headline: “Church membership in the U.S. has fallen below the majority for the first time in nearly a century.” According to the story, “The proportion of Americans who consider themselves members of a church, synagogue or mosque has dropped below 50 percent … It is the first time that has happened since Gallup first asked the question in 1937, when church membership was 73 percent.”
Gil Rendle, the recently retired Senior Consultant for the Texas Methodist Foundation (TMF), has commented about our society that “we are in a moment of seismic shift.” He calls this an anxious time because we need to move ahead without really knowing where we are going. The good folks at TMF talk in terms of “following the North Star of purpose.”
The issue for us is who or what defines and shapes our purpose. For the faithful church of Jesus Christ, the North Star of purpose is driven by the mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. For Christians I submit that our purpose should not be driven by our emotions, our preferences, or especially whatever is considered culturally popular (regardless of whether it is progressive or traditional). We will not navigate ourselves out of the morass we are in by the politics of either the left or the right.
“We are, in many ways, a civilization adrift on the stormy seas of relativism and existentialism,” writes Louis Markos in On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis. “The first ‘ism’ has robbed us of any transcendent standard against which we can measure our thoughts, our words, and our deeds; the second has emptied our lives of any higher meaning, purpose, or direction. Our compass is broken and the stars obliterated, and we are left with nothing to navigate by but a vague faith in the modern triad of progress, consumerism, and egalitarianism. They are not enough.”
There is a deep hunger in our times which is at once both counter-intuitive and counter-cultural. Mother Teresa’s comment to a reporter after delivering lectures in America remains strikingly accurate: “I’ve never seen a people so hungry.” Signs of spiritual starvation are all around and yes, even in our churches. We need more than good advice. We need good news! We desperately need the gospel of Jesus Christ!
The truly great news is that this is precisely what God in Christ through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit offers us. We must go back, way back to our future.
Back to Our Future. In the 1989 film Back to the Future II, there is a pivotal scene in which Doc Brown (played by Christopher Lloyd) arrives in his DeLorean time machine to take Marty (Michael J. Fox) and Jennifer (Claudia Wells) back to the future. Reluctant to head off on another adventure through time, Marty asks about the urgency. Doc Brown replies: “It’s your kids, Marty. Something’s got to be done about your kids!”
If not for our sake, then at least for the next generation, let us stop this insidious dance with slow decline in the United Methodist Church. We need to go back to the heart of the gospel in its full dimension – both spiritual and social. Make no mistake. To do so will cut uncomfortably across the scarred wasteland of our cultural wars tearing at every single one of us. It will call us back to our primary allegiance to Christ above and beyond political party, financial gain, racial identity, and even nationality.
The cross is not a symbol of execution, but a sign of victory. The grave is not a grief-filled prison, but an empty tomb of triumph. The birth of the church in worship at Pentecost is not a gathering of polite gentle religion, but an assembly of the troops under the leadership of the Risen Lord through the Spirit’s power and presence, saturated in praise to the glory of God.
We need not fear. We have lived through the crisis of decline and massive cultural change before. Just think of the earliest Christians. They were a tiny, persecuted minority which offered a social witness radically different from any of the competing political or social platforms of their day. They understood themselves to be in, but not of, the world. Thus in 2 Peter, what scholars think might have been a baptismal address, we read: “Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).
A conviction of being in but not of the world was at the very heart of the Methodist movement. In his book John Wesley in America: Restoring Primitive Christianity, Methodist scholar Geordan Hammond concludes that Wesley “continued to believe that primitive Christianity provided a normative model to be restored. Wesley had no doubt that the doctrine, discipline, and practice of the primitive church was embodied by the Methodist movement.”
A crisis is an accelerator. In the slamming impact of COVID-19 and the wrenching internal church doctrinal dispute over human sexuality, we as a church are being given by God an opportunity to re-embrace our purpose and commission. I contend simply that we must go back to the earliest Christian movement in the Roman Empire over the first three centuries and to the early Wesleyan (or Methodist) revival of 18th century England for guidance.
The death of nominal Christianity or cultural Christendom is a good thing. Ironically, or more accurately providentially, the Christian church grows when persecuted and withers when awash in prosperity. Individually and collectively we are being forced, by the movement of the Holy Spirit, to confront whether we are really Christ followers or not. Put theologically and biblically, is Jesus Lord of your life and your church’s collective life or not?
Forward to a New Spring. How then do we move forward in faithfulness and fruitfulness? As stated earlier, the North Star of purpose is driven by the mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. It is given to us by the risen Lord for the sake of this disease stricken world. In his book The Forgotten Ways, Alan Hirsch puts it this way: “The desperate, prayer-soaked human clinging to Jesus, the reliance on his Spirit, and the distillation of the gospel message into the simple, uncluttered message of Jesus as Lord and Savior is what catalyzed the missional potencies inherent in the people of God.”
Let me offer three key markers we might employ as elements for moving forward to a new spring from the earliest Christians in the Roman empire: (1) Clear in Christological identity: Jesus is Lord!, (2) Sacrificial in service, and (3) Wise in witness.
The Apostle Paul put it this way in the opening chapter of his letter to the beloved Philippians: “Only, live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that, whether I come and see you or am absent and hear about you, I will know that you are standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel, and are in no way intimidated by your opponents. For them this is evidence of their destruction, but of your salvation. And this is God’s doing. For he has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well – since you are having the same struggle that you saw I had and now hear that I still have” (Philippians 1:27-30).
Did you read that? “The privilege” of suffering for Him!
An additional key marker of faithfulness was assumed by the earliest Christians and put firmly in place by the leaders of the Methodist revival. Both embraced the use of small groups for discipleship formation. The first small group was made up of 12 disciples who became the apostles, the sent ones. In the Gospel of Mark we read, “He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits” (Mark 6:7). Those called Methodist under first Wesley and then Asbury’s tutelage in America were required to be a part of a “Class Meeting” for their own spiritual growth and discipleship training.
Moving forward to a new spring necessitates a biblical and theological recovery of the gospel. Both the earliest Christian witness and the Methodist revival focused on what God was doing in and through us, not what we humans are working at. Their focus was on God, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! I am tired of a spiritually atrophied Unitarian United Methodism which acts as if the Holy Spirit is not real. I have had it with a vague deistic theology which condescends to Jesus as an interesting teacher but denies his kingship. The Lord is calling us back to the center of the Christian faith in the great doctrines of the incarnation, sin, salvation, and sanctification in both their personal and social dimensions. Wesley’s dying breath was anchored on the incarnation: “The best of all is that God is with us.”
Ask yourself, when was the last time you heard (or preached!) a sermon on salvation? When was the last time you were challenged to explicitly turn your life over to Christ – the Lord/leader of your life – over, above, and beyond your own transitory preferences?
Alan Hirsch’s book, Reframation, highlights three aspects of salvation in today’s culture – salvation related to (1) guilt, or (2) shame, or (3) liberation. All three are historically a part of the Christian doctrine of atonement or soteriology (the “way” of salvation). Furthermore, the early Christian Church, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, explicitly refused to limit salvation to simply one element or aspect of life (i.e., sin as related only to guilt), but lifted as the center of orthodoxy the greater understanding of core Christian doctrines like the Trinity, the incarnation, sin, salvation, and the church. It is past time we go back to teaching the essentials of our faith.
Firm core/Flexible strategies. A crucial way to think and pray about our future in a new spring is to guard the core while being flexible in strategy. For years we have done just the opposite. We’ve been loose and even indifferent to the core while being rigid in strategy. The early church, as well as the early Methodists, did just the opposite. They held firmly to the doctrinal core of the Christian faith and were wide open on strategy. Wesley was so flexible on strategy that he went so far as to embrace field preaching, which he considered “vile” (his word, not mine).
For congregations and conferences in the United Methodist Church, guarding the core and being flexible in strategy will involve an openness in organizational structure, creative worship styles, and deployment of clergy (to mention just a few areas) while assiduously rebuilding the doctrinal core of the Church.
A necessity in moving forward in a new spring is the recovery of a working discipline in our life together. This is an uncomfortable subject in today’s rabidly individualistic culture, but I invite us to look back to our future. Indeed, I would go so far as to assert that we must recover a sense of communal discipline, or we shall surely perish.
I have on my desk a “class meeting ticket” which used to be a basic part of being a Methodist. To recover who we truly are – those who are methodical and disciplined in their faith walk – will mean that our church “membership” will be less than our average worship attendance. The earliest Christians held the concept of church discipline so deeply that they debated the issue of readmittance to worship of those who had proved apostate or unfaithful.
Grace must abound, but it cannot be cheap. Currently, I fear that we have strayed into a culture of “cheap grace.” Pouring out his life as a martyr in resistance to Hitler and the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s profound insight should resonate with the core of our being and the practical essence of how we go about being “church” together. “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession,” he wrote in The Cost of Discipleship. “Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
Let all that you do be done in love. Now, I come at last to that element of which I am reluctant to speak. I have come to believe that if we are to find a way forward, as the Holy Spirit is leading us, the United Methodist Church must engage in some form of denominational separation.
In 1786, John Wesley famously said, “I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power. And this undoubtedly will be the case unless they hold fast both the doctrine, spirit, and discipline with which they first set out.”
Painfully, this is too often largely the truth in United Methodism today. Our internal church struggle, which I take to be doctrinally important and serious, is damaging the witness of us all. We need to set each other free. It is time we move forward to a new spring through a grace-filled separation which would allow for shared ecumenical ministry and the possibility of a coming back together in the future.
A litigious fight over property and position benefits no one and damages the advancement of the kingdom of God towards which, I trust, we all work and pray. I believe the best way to accomplish this is through the so-called “Protocol” which will be voted upon at General Conference in 2022.
To those of you who insist on some version of unity at all costs, I remind you that we came into being by separating from the Church of England after the Revolutionary War in 1784. I would further ask, based on a historically irrefutable reading of church history, that if you really believe in unity at all costs, then why are you not already a member of either the Greek Orthodox or Roman Catholic branches of the Church universal?
Do you recall the word of the Lord as it comes to us from the Prophet Isaiah? “But now thus says the Lord… Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine… I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (Isaiah 43:1, 19).
Presiding at what I believe will be my last Annual Conference, I think this is where we find ourselves no matter in which camp we place ourselves. We are wandering in the wilderness as a church, and we know what deserts are like. May the words of the Apostle Paul to the contentious, troubled church at Corinth provide guidance to us all: “Keep alert, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Corinthians 16:13-14).
Mike Lowry is the Bishop of the Central Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church. This is a revised version of an Episcopal address delivered to the conference on June 21, 2021. Upon his retirement, Lowry will join United Theological Seminary as the school’s first Bishop-in-Residence. Bishop Lowry, the longest-tenured leader of the Fort Worth episcopal area, has served the Central Texas Conference since 2008.
by Steve | Aug 11, 2021 | July/August 2021, Magazine, Magazine Articles
By Max Wilkins –
At TMS Global, we talk a lot about “joining Jesus in his mission.” But what, exactly, is that mission? Maybe you’ve wondered that, too. In recent decades, parts of the church in North America have watered down the mission of Jesus until anyone who is doing anything even remotely helpful or is simply being nice to others is thought to be on mission.
From its inception, however, the actual mission of Jesus has been about one thing: making disciples. Jesus spent the entirety of his earthly ministry making disciples. And as he gathered with his disciples on the evening before he was crucified, he prayed to his heavenly Father: “I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do” (John 17:4).
It is essential to note that Jesus had not yet been to the cross, much less risen from the dead. He had much remaining work to do. But he had made disciples. And it says something about the importance the Lord places on disciple-making that he would indicate that this was the work his Father sent him to do, and that by doing it, he had brought glory to his Father on earth. How remarkable that Jesus would now entrust this God-glorifying mission to us! Yet, that is exactly what he does.
The final words in Matthew’s gospel have come to be widely known as the Great Commission. It is understood by the church that in these words Jesus is giving marching orders to those who would join him in his mission.
“Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age’” (Matthew 28:18–20).
There is a command in these verses, and only one. I have had the opportunity to share with communities of believers in dozens of countries around the world, and I commonly ask them: “What is the command in the Great Commission?” Nearly 100 percent of the time the immediate and enthusiastic answer is: “Go!”
Many years ago, the late Christian singer Keith Green recorded a song entitled “Jesus Commands Us to Go.” It is a beautiful song, and the song’s sentiments are shared by many passionate believers. It is, however, also theologically incorrect. The Great Commission does not command us to go. We know this because the text is handed down to us in Greek, a language in which command verbs have their own form. When looking at this passage in Greek, it becomes clear: the only command in the entire passage is “make disciples.” In fact, Jesus seems to assume that those who follow him would not need to be commanded to go. Movement is more or less implied in the act of following. A better translation of this passage in English would be something like: “As you are going … make disciples!”
The mission of Jesus is to make disciples. Period. And while there are thousands and thousands of ways to make disciples, and we can utilize many platforms to accomplish this vital work, not everything that is nice and helpful is also disciple-making. It is essential that those who would live lives worthy of the calling of Jesus be about the work of making disciples. It is the only mission that ultimately matters, and the one that brings glory to God on the earth.
The good news is that we are not on our own as we live into this mission. Paul reminds the believers in Thessalonica that it is the power of God that makes the mission possible. These outcomes are both accomplished “by his power” (2 Thessalonians 1:11).
At TMS Global our mission statement calls us to join Jesus in his mission, but we understand that mission to be making disciples. Thus, all TMS Global cross-cultural workers are engaged in disciple-making regardless of their platform for ministry.
Max Wilkins is the president and CEO of TMS Global. This column is adapted from his latest book, Focusing My Gaze: Beholding the Upward, Inward, Outward Mission of Jesus. To learn more, visit seedbed.com/focusingmygaze, or inside cover.
by Steve | Aug 6, 2021 | July/August 2021, Magazine, Magazine Articles
The Rev. Rob Renfroe, president of Good News
By Rob Renfroe –
Will we hold General Conference in 2022? That’s the question many people are asking. The simple answer is we must. And we can.
This year, the most vocal progressive church in my annual conference, the Texas Annual Conference, requested and was granted disaffiliation. It will join the United Church of Christ, a denomination that has no ties with our Wesleyan heritage.
Last year, the second largest congregation in our conference left. It is a traditionalist church with a pre-COVID weekly worship attendance of 3,000.
Outside of Texas we are witnessing the same exodus. The largest progressive church in the country, Glide Memorial in San Francisco, disaffiliated earlier this year. Asbury Memorial Church in Savannah, Georgia, left in 2020 explicitly because of United Methodism’s stance on marriage and sexuality. Three smaller progressive churches in Maine are in the process of leaving the New England Conference. UM News Service reports that 51 congregations disaffiliated from the UM Church in 2020.
Two traditionalist midwestern megachurches have also disaffiliated. Granger Community Church in Indiana, with a weekly worship attendance of nearly 4,000, and multi-campused Christ Church in Illinois, with a weekly attendance of well over 2,000, have both departed.
The longer we wait to resolve our differences, the more opportunity there will be for mistreatment of congregations, real or imagined. The largest church in Georgia, Mt. Bethel in Marietta, has announced its intention to leave because its senior pastor was to be removed without the church or the pastor being consulted. The largest church in New Jersey (a Korean congregation) has split for a similar reason. And three Korean churches in Southern California are at odds with their bishop and district superintendents because their pastors have been told they would be removed. (See article on page 36.)
Of course, it’s not just churches; it’s people, too. We are told that some persons are leaving UM churches or not joining because they cannot be associated with a denomination that does harm to LGBTQ persons. Every week our office receives notice from long-time Methodists that they are leaving the denomination because they can no longer sit under the ministry of a pastor or a bishop they believe is preaching a gospel that is contrary to what God has revealed in Scripture.
Some of the exiting churches are uniting with other Wesleyan denominations. Some are not. Most of our members who are leaving are joining Baptist or non-denominational churches.
Whether we are progressive, “centrist,” or traditionalist, we all believe there is something very special about our Wesleyan witness that prioritizes God’s grace and emphasizes his call to holiness of heart and life. The longer we wait to hold General Conference and adopt the Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation, the more churches and members we will lose to the Wesleyan way and the weaker our witness will be.
We must end our division and move on. That means General Conference must meet in 2022.
But, can we? What if delegates outside the United States are not fully vaccinated and are unable to travel? Or they cannot receive visas to come to this country? Good News is encouraging overseas delegates to get vaccinated wherever possible. We are working with others to try to ensure visas will be available to delegates and others.
But what if, despite all of our efforts, international travel is still impossible and an in-person General Conference cannot take place with all our international delegates present? Then a virtual or a hybrid General Conference can and should be held. Is that really do-able? Of course, it is. Corporations hold meetings with hundreds of their employees in scores of different countries every day. They have found the required technology to hold such meetings.
The reason these companies did not decide that virtual meetings are too difficult to pull off is simple. They want to make money. The desire for greater profits has been sufficient for corporations to find or develop the technology required to conduct detailed, multinational meetings. And if we do not do the same, it will only be because the Kingdom of God is not as important to United Methodists as making money is to corporate America.
Nearly every capital city in the world has a hotel near its major airport with sufficient technology for delegates to connect securely with General Conference. Delegates could stay in those hotels at no greater cost to the church than the hotels in Minneapolis. And whatever additional technological costs may be required will be more than offset by the savings of not having to pay for air travel to the United States.
Some of us have been calling for separation since 2004. It has taken others of us longer to reach the same conclusion. But the vast majority of our representatives were prepared to vote on the Protocol in 2020. We gave the Commission on General Conference the benefit of the doubt when GC 2020 was postponed, and we understood their concern that equal access to technology and full participation at the Conference might not be possible for all delegates.
But it is now time for the Commission to be understanding of us. The Church is hurting. We’re losing congregations and members. Our Wesleyan witness is being weakened. We need the Protocol to be passed. We need to adopt it no later than 2022. It can be done and it must be done.
by Steve | Aug 6, 2021 | July/August 2021, Magazine, Magazine Articles
Blood-stains from World War II on the pews of the church-turned-combat-hospital in Angoville-au-Plain, France. Photo by Bob Kaylor.
By Bob Kaylor
Driving through the countryside of the Normandy region of France feels a bit like entering the world of an animated Walt Disney film. The green fields, bushy hedgerows, lolling cows, and medieval-period stone houses, churches, and barns call to mind many stories that we learn as kids – stories that begin, “Once upon a time…”
A few years ago, I chose this area because the D-Day battlefields have been a place on my bucket list that I have always wanted to visit. We based ourselves in Sainte Mere Eglise, the tiny village where the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions landed in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944. An effigy of Private John Steele of the 101st and his shredded parachute still hangs from the church’s bell tower, commemorating where he landed on the roof that night. During that early morning, this sleepy Norman village quickly became a maelstrom as paratroopers landed in the midst of stunned villagers and scrambling Germans who had been fighting a house fire. The town looks today much like it did in 1944, but with a few more cafes, ice cream shops, and memorabilia stores.
I had arranged an all-day private tour with a local guide, Monica Baan, a Dutch resident of Saint Mere Eglise, who was very knowledgeable and who spent a lot of time interviewing veterans of D-Day, most of whom are gone now. The stories I had read in a myriad of history books suddenly came to life as we walked through the town and then drove to places like Utah Beach, Pointe du Hoc, Omaha Beach, and even to Brecourt Manor where Easy Company and Lt. Dick Winters of Band of Brothers fame fought their first engagement. It was stirring to visit those sites and be reminded of the immense task at hand that day for these soldiers, sailors, and airmen.
As someone with a passion for military history, I knew a lot about what took place, but Monica filled in some gaps with stories I had never heard. While driving through the Norman countryside, she stopped by a little church in the village of Angoville-au-Plain, a place so small that it’s barely noticeable in the midst of the bucolic backdrop of farms and fields. “I want to tell you a story you probably have never heard,” she said. We went through the side door of a small 11th century Catholic church into a quiet sanctuary where the story took place.
In the early morning hours of D-Day, thousands of U.S. paratroopers were scattered across Normandy and small crossroad villages like Angoville-au-Plain suddenly became hotly contested territory. As the wounded began to cry for help, two medics from the 101st, Robert Wright and Kenneth Moore, looked to set up an aid station and the village church seemed to be the best available option. They set about gathering the wounded from both sides into the church using a handcart and wheelbarrow they found, often exposing themselves to enemy fire in the process. They used the pews of the church as hospital beds and, incredibly, there are still several of those wooden benches in use that continue to show the stains of blood where those wounded were treated.
A hole in the roof, still stuffed with canvas, and a shattered tile on the floor are remnants of the intense fighting around the church where a mortar round entered the sacred space but failed to detonate. As the battle raged back and forth, American paratroopers were forced to retreat from the village and the medics faced a difficult decision. Their lieutenant wanted to withdraw them, but Wright and Moore insisted on staying to tend to the wounded, even if it meant their capture by the enemy.
Robert Wright described the scene in the church on the evening of D-Day: “By the evening we had 75 of them (wounded personnel and one local infant, in the church). Our own folk had come to tell us that they could not stay any longer. So we were left with the wounded. A German Officer soon arrived and asked if I could tend to his wounded too. We accepted. During the night the churchyard was the scene of another battle. Two of our casualties died. But among those I could tend, none lost their lives. I tended all sorts of wounds, some were skin deep but others were more serious abdominal cases.”
The battle raged outside for three days, with the village changing hands several times. All the while, Wright and Moore kept tending the wounded from both sides. At one point, several Germans stormed through the door of the church, but seeing that the medics were treating wounded from both sides they quietly left and marked the door with a Red Cross. In another instance, a German soldier came seeking treatment but Wright and Moore had established a rule that no weapons would be allowed in the church. They refused to treat the German until he added his weapon to the growing pile outside the church door. He would eventually do so and come under their care.
The windows of the church were all blown out and Wright was hit by a piece of the falling ceiling. He would receive a Purple Heart for it, but it was a medal he only grudgingly accepted. On June 8, a couple of days into the fighting, two Germans who had been in the bell tower of the church since before D-Day finally came down and surrendered to Wright and Moore, who immediately put them to work. The medics tended the wounded for 3 days straight with no break and no sleep, short on supplies and under constant fire, but they saved some 80 lives in the sanctuary of this little church. Many other lives would be birthed in the future families of those whom they saved. The pews that had been built for saving souls became the place where people broken by conflict and pain found salvation of their bodies as well.
As I listened to Monica spin out this true story, it occurred to me that Wright and Moore were doing the ultimate form of pastoral ministry in that holy place. They had been baptized by fire and ordained by duty to continue their work. They were priests officiating over a sacrament of broken bodies and shed blood. Their tireless work revealed a much deeper truth about what the church is about – a hospital for broken people, no matter their “side” or whether they are combatants or innocent civilians. These priestly medics seemed to understand this instinctively to the point at which even their enemies recognized the importance of the mission. They were being the church, not just using one for an aid station.
With this story echoing in my soul, I began to have a deeper awareness of the wounded people I saw around me. I noticed them walking around places like London and Paris, standing in doorways puffing a cigarette, or crammed into a pub looking for some solace or community. I saw it in the hollow eyes of business people walking quickly to a job they might have hated and in the immigrant trying to find his way in a strange new land. Casualties are stacking up in a culture where people have become commodities and pawns in a consumeristic war for their bodies and souls. What sort of ministry will reach them?
It will be the kind of ministry that will risk everything to save the people around us, no matter who they are. I loved the way one pastor put it in his welcome at one church I visited that summer: “If you’re our guest today, we want you to know that this is a place where it’s OK to not be OK. But our hope is that you don’t want to stay in that not-OK place. We love you enough to tell you the capital ‘T’ truth about Jesus Christ.” That’s a welcome for all – an invitation to add our weapons and conflicts to the pile outside and come inside to be made whole.
I spent the first part of my life and ministry as a soldier – a soldier bearing weapons of war and then the sword of the Word of God, which I have wielded in defense of the faith. Those are both honorable occupations, but standing in that little church in Normandy I felt a conviction that what the world needs the church to be right now is more of an aid station, and pastors to be more like medics. The cultural battles might continue to rage around us, but we have a job to do. It’s not to preserve a pristine institution, but to be the kind of place where blood stains on the pews remind us that our work is about saving lives, both bodies and souls.
Robert Wright would return to Normandy in 2002 for the dedication of a monument to what he and Moore did during those three days in June. He died in 2013 and is buried in the little cemetery outside that church in Angoville-au-Plain under a simple marker that reads “R.E.W.” He wanted his final resting place to be near this sanctuary of life that he and his friend created in the midst of horror and death.
I loved that this little church didn’t fix the holes, patch up the floor, or scrub down the pews after the war. The missing pieces of stone on the walls that were taken off by bullets and shrapnel haven’t been paved over. They did replace the windows, but with a tribute to these two medics who became saints. This holy place is now a monument to the kind of church God has called his church to be.
Bob Kaylor is Lead Pastor of Tri-Lakes United Methodist Church in Monument, Colorado. He is a member of the Good News Board of Directors and a council member of the Wesleyan Covenant Association. Dr. Kaylor is the co-host of the WCA podcast called Holy Conversations.
by Steve | Aug 6, 2021 | July/August 2021, Magazine, Magazine Articles, Uncategorized
By B.J. Funk –
“It is always just possible that Jesus Christ meant what he said when he told us to seek the secret place and to close the door,” C.S. Lewis observed in God in the Dock.
In the Beatitudes, Jesus said, “And when you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they will be seen by people. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But as for you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6, NASB).
When my two sons were little boys, I gave them each a drawer at a table in their room. That drawer was theirs only. I called it their Special/Secret Drawer. They were young – ages five and three – and it gave them joy to have their own special place. Their own crayons, their own stamp collection, etc. I don’t know why it worked so well, but it did.
At that same time, I had my own Special/Secret Drawer in our guest bedroom. Into that drawer, I stuffed page after page of my hurtful marriage. I wrote a lot about my pain, my broken heart, and also a lot about what God was teaching me. I read books that I knew would give me spiritual strength.
The book I clung to was Dennis Bennett’s book, Nine O’Clock in the Morning. Bennett, an Episcopal priest, found himself in a spiritual wilderness. Along with his wife, Rita, he shared the fire that led to a longed-for renewal. This now classic story tells how the Charismatic Movement began and swept into churches across America.
I was in a spiritual wilderness. I could not sleep. I lost weight rapidly. I cried to the Lord for help.
The title of Bennett’s book is taken from a New Testament episode and the words of the Apostle Peter right after the Holy Spirit descended on the small group gathered and waiting for the Lord’s guidance. When they came into the streets, they were swaying and stumbling and so they were accused of being drunk. Actually, they were woozy with the power of the Spirit. Peter corrected them.
“These men are not drunk, as you suppose,” he said. “It’s only nine o’clock in the morning” (Acts 2:15). Then Peter explained that the prophet Joel had prophesied this very thing, that God said through Joel that he would, in the last days, pour out his Spirit on all people. That’s when the church was born, and three thousand people were added to their roll on that very day.
I began meeting the Lord each morning before the boys got up. There, he bathed me in love. I learned that, as C.S. Lewis said, Jesus implores us to pull away and go to God in secret. He would reward us.
That marriage lasted five more years before my husband divorced the boys and me. I include the boys in that statement because, by his choice, their dad has not seen them in thirty years.
But that’s not really the point of this article. I believe that my special times with my Lord in those early morning hours were the real reason I didn’t hit bottom five years later. The Holy Spirit had become real to me. And in all of the feelings of loneliness and betrayal that would come to me again, I knew I would make it. I threw away everything in that drawer.
In many churches, the Holy Spirit is ignored or feared. Yet when we ask him to baptize us with his Spirit, we find a life with Jesus that we had not known before. And by the way, he has never required me to do anything that would embarrass me. He is a Gentleman. My walk with him is between a Gentleman and a Lady.
Oswald Chambers says, “The Holy Spirit makes real in me all that Jesus did for me.” The United Methodist Church needs the power of the Holy Spirit to invade our lives with depth, joy, and power. And we would all welcome a 3,000 member surge. Dear Lord, let it be.
B.J. Funk is Good News’ long-time devotional columnist and author of It’s A Good Day for Grace.
When I was a priest who could not pray, the prayer offices of the church were the ancient tool God used to teach me to pray again. … When we pray the prayers we’ve been given by the church – the prayers of the psalmist and the saints, the Lord’s Prayer, the Daily Office – we pray beyond what we can know, believe, or drum up in ourselves. ”Other people’s prayers” discipled me; they taught me how to believe again. The sweep of church history exclaims lex orandi, lex credendi, that the law of prayer is the law of belief. We come to God with our little belief, however fleeting and feeble, and in prayer we are taught to walk more deeply into truth.
