by Steve | Sep 1, 2010 | Magazine Articles
A UMNS Report
By Heather Hahn
The United Methodist Church can experience revival by returning to the spiritual practices of Methodism’s early years, say two scholars leading an effort to develop passionate lay leaders.
In joining the mainline establishment, the church jettisoned many of the activities that made John Wesley’s movement so vibrant, said Scott Kisker, associate professor of church history at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.
“Methodism was a method of helping people, a discipline that enabled people to have their lives transformed by the gospel and become holy,” Kisker said. “Mainline means we are an establishment religion that basically doesn’t see much difference between creating good citizens and creating Christians.”
In the 18th century, Methodist preachers took to the road to share the gospel and Methodist laypeople gathered each week for class meetings to discuss the state of their souls. Often the class leaders — rather than ordained clergy — performed pastoral duties for their communities.
It was all a bit countercultural. The early Methodists were the Jesus freaks of their day.
Kisker and the Rev. Steve Manskar, director of Wesleyan leadership for the United Methodist Board of Discipleship, would like to see the church recapture some of that 18th century spirit.
To help with this revival, Manskar and Kisker will lead the Wesleyan Leadership Conference on Oct. 14-16 at West End United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tenn. The theme of the conference derives from Kisker’s book “Mainline or Methodist? Rediscovering our Evangelistic Mission.” Manskar is working to get United Methodist congregations across the country to establish Covenant Discipleship Groups, based on the model of lay-led class meetings.
“Lay leadership is essential,” Manskar said. “That’s where the revival is going to come from. We need to have laity taking the lead in the visiting, the caring and the mission of the church.”
Small group vitality
The conference comes on the heels of a recently released Congregational Vitality study that identified small groups as one of the main “drivers” of church growth, attendance and giving.
Such a finding would not have surprised John Wesley. Kisker said small groups were a key part of Methodism from the beginning.
Wesley started out with band meetings, intimate groups divided by sex and marital status where people met weekly to confess their sins.
At band meetings, participants each had to answer five questions:
- What sins have you committed?
- What temptations have you met with?
- How have you been delivered?
- Do you have any questions?
- Do you have any secrets?
“It was a way to experience God’s grace,” Kisker said, “and have more compassion on your neighbor.”
Wesley next added class meetings where people could discuss how well they were following Jesus’ teachings. At a time when professional clergy were scarce, class meetings led by lay men and women became one of the core units of Methodism.
Membership in the Methodist church required membership in a class meeting, Kisker said. A person who missed three class meetings risked being dropped from the church rolls.
However, as the church grew in size and its members grew in prosperity, Methodists started to want to be more like their Presbyterian and Episcopal neighbors, Manskar said. They stopped wanting to attend class meetings each week, and they wanted pastors who no longer traveled but served one congregation.
By the middle of the 19th century, many of the circuit riders had dismounted, and such practices as field preaching and class meetings had fallen by the wayside.
In the process, many laity lost their passion for discipleship. The church still attracted new members. But as a percentage of the U.S. population, it stopped growing sometime after the Civil War, Kisker said.
“I think we became more about building an empire and less about creating disciples for Jesus Christ and redeeming people,” Kisker said. “We became more about building a church instead of building the church.”
Applicable today
The practice of class meetings still works amid people’s busy 21st century schedules, Kisker and Manskar said.
Kisker is part of a class meeting with fellow members of Hyattsville (Md.) United Methodist Church. The group usually gathers in a member’s house on Friday evenings.
“We’ve seen some amazing things happen — people making dramatic life changes,” Kisker said. “One woman who was a lawyer decided she was going to become a nurse. … I just think making yourself aware of what God is doing in your life and having someone who asks you about it every week is pretty profound.”’
Manskar hopes Covenant Discipleship Groups will lead others around the country to have similar profound experiences.
In these groups, members hold each other accountable for following Wesley’s three simple rules: Do good, do no harm and stay in love with God. The goal, Manskar said, is “to witness to Jesus Christ in the world and to follow his teachings through acts of compassion, justice, worship and devotion under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.”
Fairmount Avenue United Methodist Church in St. Paul, Minn., which has a weekly attendance of about 200, has seven such groups of four to seven members.
They meet for about an hour each week. Members go around in a circle sharing what they have done in the past week as acts of compassion, justice, worship and devotion. Then they discuss their spiritual promptings and share prayer requests.
Dan Thielen, a member of one of the groups, said the gatherings help him think about what is important in his life.
“We support each other through the bad times and pat each other on the back in the good times,” he said.
The Rev. Michelle Hargrave, the church’s senior pastor, said she and others have seen their faith deepen because of their Covenant Discipleship Groups. She is a member of a group with six other women.
“It’s such a foundational piece of Wesley’s own thinking, and it lives out in our lives so concretely,” Hargrave said. “That’s a pretty exciting tool for the church.”
The Wesleyan Leadership Conference costs $95. Further information is available at www.gbod.org/wesleyanleadership.
Heather Hahn is a multimedia news reporter for United Methodist News Service.
by Steve | Sep 1, 2010 | Magazine Articles
Editorial by Rob Renfroe
It doesn’t happen often that I read something that stops me dead in my tracks and makes me think, “C’mon, he didn’t really say that, did he?” But it happened last week when I was perusing an article from the United Methodist News Service about the Call to Action Committee.
Concerned about the general effectiveness of our denomination and our continuing numerical decline, the Council of Bishops and the Connectional Table commissioned the Call to Action Committee in 2009 to bring forward “…a plan of action that will lead to reordering the life of the church.” To its credit, the 16-member committee has taken its work seriously and hired two well-respected, secular consulting firms (Towers Watson and Apex Healthcare Consulting) to study the church and its structures.
More than 400 UM leaders were surveyed and the results were reported in a 95-page summary. One of the findings that did not surprise me was that “general lack of trust within the Church was a pervasive and recurring theme in the majority of interviews.” Nor did it surprise me that Apex reported “lack of accountability was…cited as a root cause of distrust—when people are not accountable for their actions and behaviors, they cannot be trusted.” Specifically mentioned was the lack of trust between “the pew and the leadership.”
Another conclusion, hardly unexpected, was the unfavorable view of the church’s general boards and agencies. They were seen as less than effective in making “disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.” According to another United Methodist News Service article regarding the survey’s results, “the autonomous organization structure of the agencies has lessened their value to the church, according to the ‘Operational Assessment of the Connectional Church.’”
Bottom line: people in the pew have a problem trusting our leadership, in general, and our autonomous (read “unaccountable”) boards and agencies, in particular—some, I’m sure more than others.
The findings of these reports should not have been surprising. The results only confirmed what many of us who serve in local churches have known for years. What was unexpected and refreshing was to read a report that was so frank about the problems we face.
The response by our leaders to these finding by outside observers will tell us much about their seriousness and resolve in regard to the renewal and reform of the United Methodist Church.
What absolutely floored me was a remark made by Jim Winkler, General Secretary of the General Board of Church and Society, what might be our most controversial, polemical, and distrusted church agency. “People do not join general agencies; they join local churches,” Mr. Winkler told the United Methodist News Service. “If we want to focus on ineffectiveness in making disciples for Jesus Christ, that’s the place to start.”
Astonishing. A credible outside source with no ax to grind, reports that “agencies often fail to collaborate with each other and their boards are too large and meet too infrequently to provide effective oversight;” “the agencies are a cacophony of voices;” and (not surprisingly) the people in the pews of local churches don’t trust our boards and agencies—and Mr. Winkler seems to say: The board and agencies are not the problem, the local churches are.
This is exactly the kind of response that will doom the best intended plans for the renewal and reform of the United Methodist Church.
The local churches that Mr. Winkler references are the same local churches that pay the salary of the General Secretary, correct? These are the same local churches that are being asked to pay $12.4 million this quadrennium in apportionments so the Board of Church and Society can represent (and misrepresent) grassroots United Methodists on the most important social issues of the day, right?
And yet the independent reports confirm that there is a breach of trust between the pew and the upper echelons of power within the United Methodist Church. Why would that be?
Why would we fail to trust a Board that is an official partner of the Religious Coalition of Reproductive Choice, which believes that there should be no restrictions on abortion—late-term, partial birth abortions are acceptable; so are abortions for the purpose of birth control; so are abortions for gender selection. All of these stances are contrary to our United Methodist position.
Why would we distrust a Board that instructed United Methodists to encourage their Senator not to block a healthcare plan that at the time would have provided federal funding for abortion? The sanctity of life concerns of many persons in the pew were dismissed by GBCS staffer Linda Bales Todd as “one narrow religious doctrine” when she spoke at a National Press Club briefing, sponsored by the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.
Why would we distrust a Board that has had to spend close to $1.8 million dollars in legal fees to defend its use of a trust fund designated for “temperance and alcohol problems”—simply because it chose to use the several million dollars generated by that trust for purposes that had nothing to do with alcohol or temperance?
Why would we distrust the Board of Church and Society when its study on sexuality includes an article written by a Unitarian Minister who teaches that sex outside of marriage, heterosexual and homosexual, can be a moral choice as long as it is consensual, pleasurable, and protected? Why would we be less than trusting when a separate article sent under the Board’s sponsorship argues that expecting single clergy to be celibate is unrealistic and unnecessary?
Why would we distrust a Board that submitted a petition to the 2008 General Conference that would have redefined marriage so that it no longer would have reflected the historic Christian understanding that marriage is the union of a man and a woman?
Why distrust the Board when it has lobbied for decades to change our biblical and compassionate stance that all persons are made in the image of God, worthy of the church’s ministry, but that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching?
Why distrust a Board that receives church monies to carry out the church’s will, simply because it spends so much of its time and resources trying to change the church’s will?
Why distrust a board whose leader openly and publicly stated, “I don’t know if Jesus believed he was the Messiah or not,” as he did when I served on the Board of Church and Society? That kind of language is applauded at fringe theological gatherings such as the Jesus Seminar, but it serves to deepen the hole of distrust that exists between the people in the pews and their United Methodist leaders.
We are often told by our bishops that our people don’t feel good about paying their apportionments simply because they don’t know all the good our boards and agencies are doing. Just tell our story, they say, and your people will be happy to pay. The clear message of the consultants is that our people do know the story, as well as what is going on, and they are not happy.
For example, people all over the connection checked out “our story” after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi thanked the United Methodist Church for helping pass the recent healthcare reform bill because of the work of the Board of Church and Society. Grassroots United Methodists went to the Board’s website and they didn’t like what they found. They discovered exactly what I have described above. And some left the denomination. Others called our Good News offices, others wrote letters, and others sent emails—all wondering, “Is this really true? Does my church and does my money really support this Board?”
“Autonomous.” “Unaccountable.” Remember those words in the survey about why we have such a lack of trust in the UM Church? They describe the Board of Church and Society. No one holds the Board accountable.
A much different and more hopeful response to the Apex survey was given by Neil Alexander, a steering team member and president and publisher of the United Methodist Publishing House. In the same article he is quoted as saying, “As accountable stewards, we must accept the implicit criticisms and make changes that address them. Many of us share deep concern that overall the UMC is not seeing the magnitude and quality of results we aspire to achieve.” “… We have urgent and difficult work to do to deliver high quality resources and services and to persuasively demonstrate how general agencies add value.”
The Call to Action Committee is one of several recent attempts to re-order and revitalize the UM Church. Here’s what the Committee must understand if its work is to achieve its goal. As essential as restructuring is, even the best structures will fail to lead us into spiritual renewal and missional effectiveness, if the church continues to find itself unable to trust the persons who lead those structures.
We plead with and pray for the Committee—please take the results of the survey you commissioned seriously. Please, understand that if you change our structures, but not the personnel who lead them, “a general lack of trust within the Church” will continue to be “pervasive and recurring” and the UM Church will be nothing more than a new wineskin containing the same old wine. We must have leaders who believe in, support, and promote the positions of the church. And we must have leaders who actually believe the local church is who they are called to serve—not the problem they have to overcome.
Rob Renfroe is the president and publisher of Good News.
by Steve | Sep 1, 2010 | Magazine Articles
United Methodist Communications
Office of Public Information
www.umcpresscenter.org
Lively, vital churches come in all sizes, locations, and settings says a new study commissioned by The United Methodist Church, but they consistently share some common factors that work together to influence congregational vitality. That means what works to make those churches energetic and growing can likely work for other churches too.
Dynamic churches with high attendance, growth and engagement tend to have inspirational topical preaching, lots of small groups including programs for children and youth, and a mix of both traditional and contemporary worship services including contemporary music and multi-media in contemporary services. Other factors include effective lay leaders, rotating lay leadership, pastors who work at developing and mentoring lay leaders, and length of pastoral appointment.
An essential finding of the research was that it’s the combination of factors that contribute to vitality, rather than any one or two.
“We’ve taken a data-driven approach to identify what works for thriving congregations large and small, both rural and urban, all over the U.S.,” said Bishop Gregory V. Palmer, chair of the denominational Call to Action committee that engaged the global consulting firm Towers Watson to conduct the study. “While there’s no silver bullet, we believe these findings can lead to vitality for many more congregations.”
“Lively churches offer more than one style of worship. They work hard to make preaching interesting and relevant. They encourage more lay members to take on leadership roles. They start small groups and keep them going,” Palmer said. “If more churches do these things, we believe we will see measurable positive results over time.”
Robust and comprehensive research on data from various sources using proven data collection and analysis techniques was conducted in order to gain highly statistically reliable information about the cluster of factors that lead to congregations being more vital as evidenced by selected vitality indicators.
The process included interviews with stakeholders across The United Methodist Church, group meetings, and surveys targeted at different stakeholder groups. In addition, data on attendance, growth, and engagement from over 32,000 United Methodist churches in North America was analyzed.
Because of the survey methodology utilized and the high response rate, the report concludes that the findings apply across the whole North American United Methodist population and would be replicated if the study were done again.
While the key drivers of vitality were consistent regardless of church size, predominant ethnicity, and geographic location; there were additional nuances by church size and regional area. For large churches, being representative of the community and having pastors who spend more time on preaching, planning and leading worship had a strong relationship with vitality.
In the South Central and Southeast regions, the length of tenure of the clergy as pastors had an impact, while in the Northeast, vitality was related to pastors spending more time on personal devotion and worship. In the Western region, churches that are representative of the community and have a pastor that leads in the context of the community have a higher association with vitality.
The study identified other factors that did not appear to have a significant impact on vitality, including whether outreach programs are local or global, the number of programs for adults and young adults, the use of experiential activities during worship services, length of sermon, type of music used in traditional services, and whether the pastor graduated from seminary or not.
The Call to Action steering team was created to develop a plan that will lead to reordering the life of The United Methodist Church for greater effectiveness and vitality. Palmer said that the information will be used to develop recommendations about how the denomination should organize, the role of its leaders, and how the church’s culture, structure and processes can be aligned in ways that support vitality in congregations.
The full report is available for review at umc.org/vitalcongregations.
by Steve | Jul 28, 2010 | Magazine Articles
Ashlee Alley
I headed to Southwestern College, a United Methodist-related college in Winfield, Kansas, as a freshmen expecting to get a good education in a Christian environment. What I did not expect was to be called to ministry.
The years just prior to my starting college were lean years for campus ministry at Southwestern. But when Dr. Steve Rankin was appointed as campus minister/religion professor during my sophomore year, the tide began to turn. Chapel once again became a place of gathered worship, small groups and Bible studies were reignited, and other Christian faculty and staff were encouraged to live out their own calling by serving the college students.
My junior year I strayed from my normal biology classes and took a New Testament class for fun. I remember Steve keeping me after class the day I did an exegetical presentation and asking me the question that stopped me in my tracks: Have you ever thought about seminary? To him, it was a simple question. To me, it was a watershed moment. True, others had identified gifts in me for ministry, but for the first time in my life, I actually entertained the idea that perhaps God had different vocational plans for me than I had thought.
My experience of being called to ministry in the college years is not isolated. Thousands of others in the United Methodist Church have also heard a call to ministry through their Wesley Foundation or other ministry on campus. In fact, in order to find some of these folks, my campus ministry colleague, Creighton Alexander, pastor of young adults at New City/Central UM Church in Kansas City, and I started a Facebook Group called United Methodist Campus MinistryRaising Up Christian Leaders. Through this venue alone, we have discovered over 850 people who heard a call to ministry through campus ministry!
One of the four areas of strategic focus that was adopted by General Conference in 2008 was developing principled Christian leaders for the church and the world. Perhaps I am clouded by my own experience, but I can think of no better place to find these leaders than on college campuses. Each year thousands of students across the country are being introduced to a relationship with Christ and are serving in ministry through the auspices of their Wesley Foundation, campus ministry at a United Methodist-related college, or local church with an emphasis on collegiate ministry. Some of these students become leaders. Some of these leaders feel a call to ministry. And some of the called go on to seminary and prepare for ordination in the United Methodist Church.
Unfortunately, not all campus ministries are equal. Due to a neglect of campus ministries as an area of focus by the overall denomination, many are small, overlooked, under-resourced, and directed by someone who may or may not have a calling to campus ministry. However, there is simply nowhere else in the world that has more potential young church leaders than on our college campuses. Would it not make sense to put our brightest and best servants of the church in this fallow ground? Of the 17 million students who will head to college this fall, are we as a church offering the heart of the gospel to a population looking for answers? These questions, and others, compel us to do more than just ask the questions. They compel us to pray.
On August 17, 2009, a 40-day, nationwide prayer effort was launched with the goal of witnessing to United Methodist campus ministries as being vital centers of vocational calling. We are praying for new clergy and lay ministers who will answer Gods call over the coming decades to campus ministry and we are interceding for our campus ministries in the start of the 2009-2010 school year.
The prayers were written by people who are supportive of campus ministry across the denomination including bishops, general board officials, professors, administrators, and campus ministers themselves, many of whom received their call to ministry through campus ministry. The prayer effort from August 17-September 25 is in conjunction with the first six weeks of school for many universities. As the new school year is launched, we are praying that campus ministers and students will be intentionally sustained by prayer. Our hope is that boards of directors of Wesley Foundations, pastors of neighboring congregations, grandparents with grandchildren in college, campus ministers themselves, and anyone who wants to see a revitalization in the UM Church will join us in the prayer effort. The prayers can be found at www.collegeunion.org/prayer.
Personally, campus ministry is not only the place I discovered a calling, but it is also my place of service. In a turn of events that I can only identify as Gods hand at work, four years ago I returned to Southwestern College, this time not as a student but in campus ministry. To be the campus minister who asks the timely question or provides the opportunity for a student to hear Gods voice is my front row seat to watch how God is already developing Christian ministers to lead us in the church and in the world.
Ashlee Alley serves as campus minister at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas, and is a provisional deacon in the Kansas West Conference of the United Methodist Church. She blogs regularly at ashleealley.blogspot.com and, together with Creighton Alexander, serves as the co-editor for www.CollegeUnion.org.
by Steve | Jul 23, 2010 | Magazine Articles
Elliot Wright
Can Methodists learn anything about effective Christian evangelism from their denomination’s founding period 250 years ago?
“Yes,” says a Duke University professor, who told 600 church developers how the Wesley brothers, John and Charles, gave rise to a movement that swept the young United States of America.
“Early Methodism was evangelistic,” the Rev. Laceye Warner (pictured right) explained to the 2009 United Methodist School of Congregational Development in July. “When the Wesleys talked about spreading ‘Scriptural holiness,’ they meant evangelism.” She defined evangelism as preaching the gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ and “living it out.”
One of the recurring themes at successive annual Schools of Congregational Development, which are sponsored by the United Methodist Boards of Discipleship and Global Ministries, is the decline in Methodist membership in the United States (and also in Britain, where it originated). Mission-founded expressions of the denomination found elsewhere are growing.
Reclaiming strengths. Numbers alone are not all that matters, said Warner, who holds a chair of evangelism at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina.
Among the qualities of early Methodism that could help the contemporary church reclaim its earlier strengths is the idea that growth in grace is as important as growth in numbers. Other relevant qualities are the beliefs that theological reflection is essential, sustained Christian practices maintain the community of faith, and wealth and material goods are meant to be shared.
The building blocks for the early Methodist movement included “classes” and “bands” that developed after people responded to Methodist preaching, often set in open fields and other public spaces, rather than in church buildings.
Classes were groups of 10 to 12 people organized by geographic location—neighborhoods—while bands were 6 to 8 people who voluntarily came together for spiritual nurture. There were two kinds of bands: “select” and “penitential” or “over-achievers” and “backsliders.” But, when the lists of band members are examined, those who show up on the “select” list were once themselves among the “penitential,” Warner said.
“The experience of sanctification was expected to take place in small groups,” she continued, “but it didn’t happen for all at the same pace. We have one record of it taking someone 48 years to experience sanctification.” Growth in grace, Warner said, was as important to the Wesleys as expanding membership rolls. The growth was steady but gradual.
People fed one another spiritually in the early Methodist movement; they kept personal journals that were shared. Not everyone stayed with the spiritual and social “discipline” that the Wesleys taught and practiced. Scriptural and “social holiness” were partners in the Wesleyan movement. Warner indicated that membership loss started at the very beginning among those who did not share the vision.
By Elliot Wright, information officer of the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries. This article was distributed by United Methodist News Service.
by Steve | Jul 23, 2010 | Magazine Articles
By Phillip C. Thrailkill
Hope and Michael were lead characters in the once-popular TV show Thirtysomething. She was a Christian and he a Jew. As I was reading Philip Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew, I was reminded of an argument between the two characters during a December episode.
Hope is on the attack, “Why do you even bother with Hanukkah? Do you really believe a handful of Jews held off a huge army using a bunch of lamps that miraculously wouldn’t run out of oil?”
Michael explodes, “Oh, and Christmas makes more sense? Do you really believe an angel appeared to some teenage girl who then got pregnant without ever having had sex and traveled on horseback to Bethlehem, where she spent the night in a barn and had a baby who turned out to be the Savior of the world?”
The Christian story is an incredible one, hard to swallow for someone who doesn’t believe in an unseen reality, or that God might show up in the world. For such skeptics, the Christian story requires a major shift in worldview.
But even a person who believes the historical accounts of Jesus might still have a heart of stony unbelief. Faith is not something we produce by a combination of biblical knowledge, will power, and emotional zeal. Faith is not our doing; it’s a gift from God. It’s not just intelligent assent. It is experiential and experimental. Faith requires engaging God.
In our Christian lives we must do business with the Lord, just as Mary, the mother of Jesus, did. We must hear the Word of God, just as Mary did. We must receive the incredible news that God desires to implant Christ within us, just as Mary did. And we must surrender to an uncertain future in which God draws us out into his work in the world, just as Mary did.
In our Christian journey, which requires the whole person—our mind, our emotions, and our will—Mary can be a mentor and spiritual guide.
Mary, the magnificent insignificant.
What can we say of Mary but that she was a village girl, likely unable to read, with the whole of her life pre-programmed. As property to be traded between her father and husband-to-be with a dowry, she would have an arranged marriage, bear children one after another and be dead perhaps by age 30, having lived the religiously “insignificant” life of a female. Mary was young in a culture that valued age; female in a culture where men ruled; poor in a rural economy, with no children yet to give her status. She was among the powerless people in her society, and it is for this reason that so many poor around the world find in Mary such a friend. She is one of them. She understands oppression and the pressure of unmet needs.
God chose her when she had nothing but an empty, virginal womb to commend her—no priestly lineage, no long track record— just a simple Jewish village girl waiting for her wedding day.
But Mary’s faith was great, and to all who are poor she gives a new dignity. If God can use her, then why not me? If she can bear Christ physically, can I not bear him spiritually?
When God breaks in.
Then it happened. Into Mary’s world, likely her parents’ home, the angel Gabriel intrudes, unsheathes his presence and breaks the sound barrier: “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). There is a play of words here between the words hail and favored, both of which draw from the root meaning grace (charis). Gabriel bears the grace of God, which is not a thing but the gracious presence of God, to Mary. In essence, Gabriel is saying, “Good morning, Mary. You are chosen of the Lord whose presence and presents I bring to you.”
Mary’s reaction is worth notice. She responds on both emotional and intellectual levels. The Scripture says, “But she was greatly troubled at this saying [emotion], and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be [intellect]” (vs. 29). Mary is frightened and curious at the same time. The numinous is near.
When God comes near, all human capacities are put on high alert. For me, a clue that God is near is a shift of consciousness and an unusual focus of attention. An internal switch turns on. I am aware that the Holy Spirit is active in and around me; God is speaking, and it is time to listen. Perhaps an angel is present.
Encounters with spiritual reality always have multiple dimensions. Feelings are touched; the mind is set spinning. In religious experience, God claims the whole person. He may start with a part—a stirring in the heart or an illumination of the mind—but the goal is to focus all the powers of the person on the Lord. Therefore, we should not be discouraged by our own (or put off by others’) honest displays of emotion, by intellectual doubts, or deep wrestlings of the will. As with Mary, God may come to us through one of these avenues, but the goal is to align them all in obedience.
For me, the pattern is most often first the head, then the will, and finally the feelings follow afterwards. Yours may be a different order. For Mary, emotions were kindled first, then the mind was illumined. But still she had to make a decision, an act of the will that would reveal her heart. What did God want of her? And did she want what God wanted?
Notice Gabriel’s word of reassurance to Mary: “Do not be afraid” (vs. 30). Why does he say this? Because that is what she likely was, terrified! An angel intrudes into the world of a peasant girl whose life script has been laid out by her parents, her husband-to-be, and the social expectations of Nazareth. When one of God’s emissaries interrupts us when we’re going about our life, this is not just for entertainment. Such encounters are storm surges down the ravines of our lives that push us into the deep flow of God’s river.
Mary, the God-bearer.
God is messin’ with Mary’s life. She is afraid, and rightly so. Gabriel then delivers the invitation, as if it were already a done deal, “And behold [angelic slang for ‘Getta load of this!’], you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus” (vs. 31).
What happens next is important. In the form of a five-line prophecy (which may have been sung), Gabriel gives Mary a glimpse of the future of this child. “And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David” (vs. 32). This is a messianic promise. Mary is invited to bear the long-awaited Messiah, one whose reign will never end. With these lyrics, we see the focus of the story is not on Mary, the bearer; it’s on Jesus, the born. Jesus will be the one who fulfills all the promises of God. Mary’s role is always secondary to his.
When the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci went to China in the sixteenth century, he brought samples of art to illustrate the story for people who had never heard it. The Chinese readily adopted portraits of the Virgin Mary holding her child, but when Ricci produced paintings of the crucifixion and tried to explain that the God-child had grown up only to be executed, the audience reacted with revulsion and horror. They much preferred the Virgin and insisted on worshiping her rather than the crucified God.
The temptation is perpetual. But Jesus came in the incarnation to die in the crucifixion, and then to rule by resurrection and ultimate return. Mary is to be honored for her part in the incarnation, but not worshiped. The central figure is Jesus.
Mary, the Trinitarian theologian.
Notice that Mary talks back. Hear her juvenile voice tremble. She engages Gabriel in dialogue. A pubescent girl carrying on a conversation with the greatest power this side of heaven! Pretty bold on her part. But God is not put off by questions that are genuine. “How shall this be, since I have no husband?” (vs. 34). Mary was not ignorant of how and why babies come. Village life was earthy; Palestinian homes had little privacy.
Gabriel answers, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.”
Here, the Trinitarian dimension of God’s coming is made explicit, and Mary becomes the first Trinitarian theologian. Theology will be written, so to speak, in her very flesh. God the Father (the transcendent one) sends a mediator so that God the Holy Spirit (the immanent one) can carry out actions, as God the Son (the incarnate one) is planted in Mary’s womb. Think of it. Mary, a worldly nobody, was caught up in the life of the Trinity. The word of the Father to her, the power of the Spirit upon her, the presence of the Son within her.
We, like Mary, are made for God. Hearing the Father’s voice, knowing the Spirit’s power, having Christ formed within us. This is our true dignity and our final destiny as redeemed human beings. Mary is our model and her son’s first follower. She is the first to know the revelation of God as a Triune communion of love.
This was, when you think of it, the fittest means of God’s coming. Since only women bear children, and since the incarnation should honor both sexes, it was necessary that the Savior be male. And the child thus formed would be without sin, fully human and fully God in one person. Emmanuel. God with us. The great God would come, and be little among us. “The God who roared, who could order armies and our empires around like pawns on a chessboard,” writes Philip Yancey, “this God emerged in Palestine as a baby who could not speak or eat solid food, or control his bladder, who depended on a teenager for shelter, food and love.”
Mary, the spiritual director.
But what will Mary’s answer be? If yes, the process and the prophesies thus outlined will unfold. If no, then the God who gives and respects freedom must search again. It is important that Mary’s decision be honored. Will she loan her body to God as his earthly mother? And so the angel, who has come with God’s offer, waits for Mary to come to the altar of surrender and the risk of faith. You decide for yourself how long the pause was between verses 37 and 38. Was it immediate, or did Gabriel have to twiddle his thumbs for a while?
There is a prayer I highly recommend. It is a summation of Mary’s prayer in only two words, “Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord.” When my heart is cold or stubborn or rebellious, I sometimes repeat it over and over till I begin to sense the smile of God upon me. Mary is my spiritual director; she teaches me how to pray, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord;” she says, “let it be to me according to your word.” Mine is often less elegant, “Here I am, Lord; do it in me, do it through me, do it in spite of me!”
An Eastern Church father, Cabasilas, summed up the transaction, “It was only after having instructed her and persuaded her that God took her for his Mother and borrowed from her the flesh that she so greatly wished to lend him.” With Mary’s yes the mission was ended, the conception completed, and Gabriel departed. And the revolution that flowed from Mary’s yes continues to shake the world.
The novelist Frederick Buechner has written: “Whether he was born in 4 B.C. or A.D. 6, in Bethlehem or Nazareth, whether there were multitudes of heavenly host to hymn the glory of it or just Mary and her husband when the child was born, the whole course of human history was changed.…Art, music, literature, Western culture itself with all its institutions and our Western man’s whole understanding of himself and his world—it is impossible to conceive how differently things would have turned out if that birth had not happened whenever and wherever and however it did. And there is a truth beyond that: for millions of people who have lived since, the birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it.”
What is your answer? How many signs do you need to trust? How is God calling you to bear Christ to the world? Will you say yes and leave the rest to God?
Phillip C. Thrailkill is the pastor of St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Hartsville, South Carolina. He is the former chair of the board of The Mission Society and the current chair of the Theology Commission for The Confessing Movement. You can receive Pastor Thrailkill’s weekly sermon via email by contacting him at PThrailkil@aol.com. This article was adapted from his book Mary: Lessons in Discipleship from Jesus’ Earthly Family © Phillip C. Thrailkill. Published by Bristol House, Ltd. Reprinted with permission.
