by Steve | May 12, 2024 | May-June 2024
To Contend for the Faith
By David F. Watson
Jude 3 weighs on me: “Beloved, while eagerly preparing to write to you about the salvation we share, I find it necessary to write and appeal to you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints.”
We are not just to teach the faith, but to contend for the faith – and not just any faith. This is the faith once for all entrusted to the saints. What does that mean? It’s another way of talking about the witness of the Apostles. This faith was passed on through Jesus to the Apostles, and through them to trustworthy witnesses across the centuries. Over time, guided by the Holy Spirit, the church would develop in its understanding of this faith. It would come to rely upon a canon of Scripture and particular summaries of the faith, such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. These beliefs form a minimum standard for what we call Christian orthodoxy.
I know God doesn’t need me to defend his church or the faith it professes. I’m not that important. I have no illusions about the fact that God could raise up stones to witness to him. Yet the Scriptures teach us to contend for the faith, and not just in Jude 3. Peter warns, “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence” (1 Peter 3:15-16).
The Apostle Paul writes, “Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us” (2 Timothy 1:14). He goes on further, “In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths” (2 Timothy 4:15).
As uncomfortable as it may be at times, the Bible admonishes us to contend for the apostolic faith. To be clear, the Bible doesn’t admonish us to be jerks. But Jesus turned over tables! will come the response. Fine, but he only did it once, and you’re not Jesus.
Perhaps some reflection is in order before the table-flipping commences. As we read earlier, Peter urges us to make our defense with gentleness and reverence. To proceed in this way isn’t a sign of weakness. You’re not a squish if you don’t crush people on Twitter when they make heretical statements. You’re not simply succumbing to the rules of polite society. You’re being obedient. What’s more, just on a practical level, I can’t think of anyone who has been brought to an acknowledgement of the truth by being browbeaten or humiliated in public.
Generally speaking, I try to get along with people and to maintain friendships across ideological and theological lines. I also, however, try to speak truthfully, even if I do so imperfectly. Truthful speech will sometimes make people angry.
When reflecting on “Christian orthodoxy” or the “Nicene-Chalcedonian” tradition, we could use the language of Vincent of Lerins and refer to it as the faith confessed “everywhere, always, and by all.” We could use William J. Abraham’s language of the “canonical tradition.” I think, however, it would be best to go with Thomas Oden’s term, the “consensual tradition” – a consensus that has emerged regarding how best to understand the witness of the Apostles.
To stand within the consensual tradition is to hold a set of remarkable claims. Among these are that the God of all creation became human in Jesus Christ, who lived a perfect life. Jesus died on the cross, and when he did, he took all of the gone-wrongness of creation (sin) upon himself, and he created a bridge between humankind and God. We call this “atonement.”
After three days, God raised Jesus bodily from the dead, and he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.
To adopt this account of God’s saving work is to enter into an entirely new understanding of life. It is to take on a relentlessly optimistic and enchanted worldview. When God’s story becomes our story, life takes on depths of meaning we could never have imagined before. God’s story is greater than anything we could ever have made up in the best moment of the best day of our lives.
It would be utterly preposterous if it weren’t true.
The Church Got It Right. I was a church kid. I was in the children’s choir. I went to Sunday school, vacation Bible school, and of course weekly worship. I participated in United Methodist Youth Fellowship. I did all the church things.
Many of our family discussions were around matters of faith. Growing up in the 70s and 80s in Texas, faith and football were really the only two things worth talking about. Hal Lindsey was doing his thing. Most people in my neck of the woods were pretty sure Jesus was coming back soon, and it would have something to do with Russia, China, and the bomb. In the meantime, though, the Cowboys were winning, and Texas Stadium had a hole in the roof so God could watch his favorite team play.
I look back on this time with gratitude. My childhood in the church taught me the faith. It gave me a sense of identity and provided me with moral direction (which I’ve followed in varying degrees over the years). What’s more, the churches I attended taught me a basically orthodox version of the faith. During worship, for example, we recited the Apostles’ Creed. Week after week, year after year, the recitation of the creed was formative. The hymns we sang, including the Doxology and the Gloria Patri, and the prayers we prayed shaped my faith in ways that I could only see in retrospect. Lex orandi lex credendi – as we worship, so we believe.
When I got older, I came to understand that the faith in which I was raised was essentially consistent with the Great Tradition of Christian faith. I had learned about a God who was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I had learned that this God loved me, but that my sin kept me separated from him. I had learned that God sent his son, Jesus Christ, that Christ had died for our sins, and that after three days he rose from the dead. He will come again in judgment, and the faithful will reside with him forever, while the wicked will go into eternal punishment. Nothing fancy here – just basic Christianity.
In the wild and wooly world of late twentieth-century American theology, though, this narrative of salvation was consistently under fire. It reflected an ancient worldview, one we could not with integrity accept today, went the argument. It assumed a vision of God and divine action that we could no longer believe. It was mythological, superstitious, naïve, and patriarchal to boot. It was steeped in platonic philosophy. It mimicked themes of Greco-Roman mythology, such as the dying-and-rising God. It could not reckon with the problem of evil. It had been debunked by critical biblical scholarship. The formation of “orthodoxy” was the result of a power struggle in the early church. The dominant figures in the early church had suppressed “gospels” that did not fit their preferred narrative. High christologies were later developments. The preaching of the earliest Christians (the kerygma) had been obscured by mythological accounts of Jesus’ ministry and significance. You get the idea.
Reading John Dominic Crossan’s Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography was a watershed moment for me. Crossan, a brilliant scholar and writer, argued that the church’s whole story of Jesus is wrong – no incarnation, no virgin birth, no healings, no exorcisms, no atonement. To understand Jesus, he wrote, we have to hear his message as one of “radical egalitarianism.” Oh, and he wasn’t raised from the dead, either. He was probably thrown in a ditch and eaten by dogs. So there’s that.
I hadn’t read enough biblical scholarship at that time to understand that Crossan was one of a long line of scholars, from Friedrich Schleiermacher to David Friedrich Strauss to Albert Schweitzer to Rudolf Bultmann to Robert Funk, etc., who made some form of this argument. The church had gotten it wrong, each said, but I’m here to show you how to get it right.
Fiction of the early church? Crossan was my introduction into radically revisionist biblical scholarship and, holy crow, did he make an impression on me. He forced me to confront a question I really wished to ignore: was the basic story of salvation, the one taught to me from my childhood, the one taught across the centuries to countless souls, some of whom gave their lives for it, simply a fiction of the early church? Had the church gotten it wrong for all of these centuries? Had she perpetuated a false narrative? Was the Great Tradition of Christian faith a lie?
I’ve met people across the years who have answered that question affirmatively. Yes, they say, traditional Christianity’s story of salvation is a lie. Its understanding of Jesus is a lie. And what’s more, many people have known about these lies but have perpetuated them for their own gain. Take the pastor who has gone to seminary, learned about critical scholarship, perceived the historical problems with early Christianity, and then enters the pulpit week after week to preach things he knows are untrue. Some people understand the clergy of their upbringing this way, and have thus developed considerable resentment.
It took me years to sort through all of this. In some ways, I’m still sorting through it. I remember sitting in a group of scholars and grad students whom the late William “Billy” Abraham had called together to work on something he would name “Canonical Theism.”
Billy made what was, in the theological world I had come to inhabit, an audacious claim: “The church got it right.” What he meant was, the church’s story, what philosopher C. Stephen Evans calls the “incarnational narrative,” is a true story. God really did become incarnate in Jesus Christ. Jesus really was born of a virgin. He really lived a perfect life and died an atoning death. He really did rise from the dead – in body, not just as a dream or apparition. And he really will come again to judge the living and the dead.
In some contexts, this claim – that the church got it right – would be uncontroversial. In the context of mainline Protestantism I was living in, it was a shot across the bow of the liberal consensus. Theological liberalism assumes that, in many of its basic truth claims, the church got it wrong.
The main point of difference between theological liberalism and the consensual tradition (theological orthodoxy) is the concept of divine agency. To insist that the church got it right requires a strong sense of divine action and divine revelation. Whereas theological liberalism conceives of God as lacking the power or will to work directly in this world, theological orthodoxy – the consensual tradition – bases everything on the idea that God has acted powerfully and decisively for our salvation. To put it more simply: God does things. Scripture tells us what God has done for our salvation, and the consensual tradition helps us to understand the witness of Scripture.
I recognize, of course, that the church hasn’t gotten everything right. The church has erred in many ways across the centuries. But in its basic story of salvation, in its conception of God and his work through Jesus Christ, the church got it right. Our story is a true story. It would take a lot of study, prayer, worship, conversation with friends, and annoying my professors, but I would come to believe this.
We’re the ones asking the questions here. When I was an ordination candidate, I was invited to interview before the Board of Ordained Ministry for my commissioning (a half-step toward ordination). With the group discussing theology and doctrine, one of my interviewers leaned in and looked at me with a mix of suspicion and irritation. “You said in your paperwork that the Nicene Creed is the most important creed. Who gets to decide which creed is the most important?”
“Yeah,” another interviewer chimed in, gazing quizzically as if beholding a caveman trying to make fire. “Who gets to decide?”
I promise you my response was a genuine question of clarification. I knew I was on thin ice and didn’t want to sink to the bottom of the pond. “What are the other options?” I asked. Did he mean the Apostles’ Creed? The Athanasian Creed? The Creed of the United Church of Canada? Apollo Creed? I just needed more information before I answered the question.
No creedal formulation has exerted more influence or shaped more theological discourse than the Nicene Creed. It provided a response to one of the most venomous and stubborn heresies in the history of the church – Arianism. It has shaped the faith of untold multitudes across the centuries. It was strange to me that my interviewers, presumably knowledgeable in matters of history and theology, wouldn’t take for granted its importance.
“We’re the ones asking the questions here,” he responded.
So that was awkward. Nevertheless, for reasons hidden within the mysteries of God, I passed my interviews and I was commissioned in spite of my archaic belief in the centrality of the Nicene Creed.
Betraying indifference. That memory has stayed with me, and not just because of the “We’re asking the questions here” flex. His question about the Nicene Creed betrayed an indifference to sound doctrine that has plagued the mainline and is increasingly prevalent among evangelicals.
Why should one statement of faith be any more important than another? With the emergence of theological liberalism in the late eighteenth century, many in the West came to think of the faith as something they construct for themselves, according to their own experience and standards of reason, rather than something they inherit.
At one church I attended, the confirmation class was charged with writing its own creed. That seemed like a tall order. Why would we ask a group of kids to write something as important as a creed? I’ve raised kids. Heck, I was a kid. I was interested in things like playing Donkey Kong and shooting my bb gun and scoring a cherry Dr. Pepper at the Dairy Queen.
It took the church hundreds of years to hammer out its creeds. Shouldn’t we just teach these kids one of the perfectly good creeds we already have, such as the Apostles’ Creed or (dare I say it?) the Nicene Creed?
Theology is hard. Talking about God is tricky business. Yes, saving faith is simple: we confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, we receive baptism, and we enter into the church with its attendant beliefs and practices. When we begin to give expression to the mysteries of our faith, however, things become more complicated. To articulate our truth claims about the nature of God, Christ’s saving work, the work of the Holy Spirit, the resurrection of the body, and the nature of the church is a delicate and difficult undertaking.
When I was a seminary student, we had to write a “credo,” a thirty-page account of the content of the Christian witness. In many seminaries it’s a capstone project. It’s supposed to demonstrate what you’ve learned in seminary and your ability to integrate ideas from various disciplines. I studied hard in seminary. I got good grades. I really took my theological education seriously. And guess what? My credo was hot garbage.
My professor was a merciful soul and he didn’t expect his students to be Thomas Aquinas, but I look back on this document with some embarrassment. All copies were tragically and accidentally shredded, incinerated, and immersed in acid.
Since that time, I feel like I’ve learned enough over the past three decades to teach Scripture without misleading people terribly and to talk about God with some degree of coherence and truth. Nevertheless I always tell my students at least 30 percent of what I teach is wrong. I just don’t know which 30 percent it is. The more deeply I’ve dived into study, the more I realize how much I don’t know.
This is one reason I lean so heavily on the Christian tradition. I trust the church’s collective wisdom more than my own wisdom. I trust the spiritual experiences, the discernment, the intellect, the wrestling of the great cloud of witnesses more than I trust any of these in me. Christian theology consists of a long, rigorous, prayerful conversation across the ages and throughout the earth.
Despite efforts in every age to undermine the consensus that began to emerge in the time of the apostles, a core set of truth claims has persisted. The faith once and for all entrusted to the saints has survived imperial persecutions, Arian emperors, bad-faith bishops, schisms, and wars. It has survived heretics from Marcion to Spong. It has survived the old atheists and the New Atheists. It will survive postmodernity, and whatever comes next. The Great Tradition of Christian faith frees us from the bonds of “presentism” – the assumption that the beliefs and values of our current moment are necessarily superior to those of the past.
How could this faith have survived so many attempts to destroy it, both from outside and within? Why hasn’t Christianity simply collapsed under the weight of human sin? Why is it that, despite periods in which the church has capitulated to the spirit of the age, God continually calls us back to something more profound than a single generation can discern? Perhaps God has guided us across the ages because he loves us, and this gospel, the consensual tradition, the faith once delivered, teaches us how to be saved. That is God’s will for us, after all – to be saved, to be plucked out of the clutches of sin and death and receive new life, even into eternity.
The God who so desires our salvation hasn’t left us to our own devices to figure out how this might happen. The saving faith first delivered to the apostles has been entrusted to the saints, who have entrusted it to other saints, and so on, across the ages. Now it is our turn. The faith once delivered to the saints has been delivered to us. Generations to come will remember our witness, for better or worse.
David F. Watson is Lead Editor of Firebrand. He serves as Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. A version of this essay was first published in his Substack, www.davidfwatson3.substack.com. It is republished by permission. Image: Symbolum Nicaeno-Constantinopolitanum. Icon depicting the First Council of Nicaea with text of the Nicean Creed in Greek. Public domain.
by Steve | May 12, 2024 | May-June 2024
Your Journey Matters
By Shane Stanford
May/June 2024
Our journeys matter. Yes, our destination is important, but it is the journey that makes us who we are.
Some of my sweetest memories are of family road trips over the years. My wife and daughters and I have literally traveled across the country, spending time together, exploring exciting places, and attending interesting events. However, the most important part of each adventure – and the focus of most of our pictures from those travels – was simply our being together.
I recently watched a news report that included “migration” as one of the core indicators of a culture’s progress. It said that “movement” – the journeys of a culture from place to place – identifies what that culture considers critical to its identity and longevity.
I’ve experienced my own “migration” in life. I don’t live in the same house where I was born or even the house where I grew up. Some people do, and that is certainly okay. But most people don’t. And the story of how a person got from the home(s) where they grew up to the home where they currently live helps to describe and define the very nature of who they are and what they have learned along the way. Movement brings identity.
Similarly, I don’t believe it is a coincidence that Jesus spent his ministry years moving from one place to another. He didn’t begin his ministry in Nazareth where he grew up. No, his ministry started at Cana in Galilee, and his earthly journey ended in Jerusalem. And, between Cana and Jerusalem, he traveled throughout the region, dealing with unfamiliar places and foreign people like the Samaritans while, at the same time, coming to terms with the truth that “he couldn’t go home to Nazareth” either (see Luke 4:24). Yes, he was a Nazarene, but that was just one part of his story. Jesus’ journey helped to define and clarify who he was.
Even more than that, Jesus’ journey changed the world, defining and clarifying all of its people and nations, for all time.
My personal journey has had its share of struggles and learning moments. I have now lived nearly forty years as a “positive” after receiving a blood transfusion to treat hemophilia. That is the lingo we attach to someone who is HIV-positive, whether we say it from within the HIV community or from the sidelines. It means many things to many different people: it is a test result, a way of life, a question of morality, a lifestyle, a badge, a condition, or a burden.
For me, it has been all of those things at various stops along the road. However, “positive” is, more than anything, the story of my journey. My journey includes chapters involving great illness and medical obstacles, personal betrayal in one of my most important relationships, and having the first church where I was appointed as pastor reject me. I have also dealt with many of the normal avenues of life, including marriage, parenting, friendships, and professional commitments. I have founded a new local church and a new center for applied theology. And, of course, I have traveled to countless points and places in between these marks on my life road map.
I think most of us are overwhelmed by the journey of life. We encounter so much that is hard, so much that is bad – to such a degree that if we knew today what would happen a year or a decade from now, we might not take that next step. But there is also good in our journeys. And there are stops along the way that we are proud of. There is growing and learning and so much that is positive.
Seeing from a different perspective. In 2014, I went from being the senior pastor of a church that was considered one of the top 25 fastest growing United Methodist churches in the world to sitting in a waiting room at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, dealing with the liver disease that I had contracted back when I was 19 years old. My liver had gotten to the point of late, stage-three cirrhosis.
I began a new treatment. For the next two and a half years we went through 140 weeks of targeted drug therapy and then chemotherapy. Finally, it worked, and my liver was cured. But the journey to get to that point had been very hard. I remember a lot in my own soul, my own spirit trying to figure out what it all meant.
Coming out of that experience in 2017, we took a trip down to Mexico to build houses for people in need. We’d done this before (and we’ve done it since), and so much of the trip felt pretty standard. My wife, our girls, people on our ministry team, and I flew into San Diego and drove a couple hours south to Ensenada where we met with a local church there and loved on people by building homes.
But I’ll never forget this particular year. The pastor’s wife there, “Pastora,” had a strong connection to the Spirit, and we knew her well. She and her husband had connected us over the years to people in need. But on this particular night when I got done preaching to their congregation, Pastora came up to me and told me that she had heard a word from the Lord and that she wanted to pray with me.
She invited my wife and daughters to join, and as she prayed I noticed that she motioned to a few of the young men to come up and stand around me – and I felt my stomach sink. I grew up Baptist. I love my charismatic brothers and sisters dearly, but I could tell that Pastora wanted to heal me in the way that I thought only televangelists heal people. She was going to touch my head, and then she expected me to pass out and the young men would catch me, and that would be it. Simple, right?
I was beyond nervous. All I could think about was how much I didn’t want to embarrass her. How much I didn’t want her to realize that this thing that works for her doesn’t work for me.
I wasn’t thinking about what God could be doing. I wasn’t thinking about the possibility of a miracle. Nope, I was worried about how things would look when she failed.
And that’s the last thing I remember.
She dipped her finger in the oil, touched me on the forehead, and I went completely out. The people around me would later tell me that it was as if I floated back, and then the guys there caught me.
I woke up, sitting on the ground in a way that I would never normally sit due to past hemophilia injuries, and I remember feeling as well as I’d ever felt in my life. Nothing hurt or ached, which alone seemed to be a miracle because my body always hurts, always aches. But more than that – the thing that had gotten into my soul was the fact that I kept hearing a voice while I was out. Over and over, the voice said, “It’s about me. It’s about me.”
Ten years before that, I’d had heart surgery to correct some issues that medication had caused, and when I was coming out of that surgery, I remember sitting at the end of what appeared to be a long, white hall, and a man who I believed to be Jesus sat next to me. And he kept saying to me those very same words. “It’s about me.”
To hear those words again, after having the anointing from Pastora, I knew that God was getting my attention. He wanted me to focus on something other than leading a large church or trying to be the right kind of theologian.
Jesus wanted me to really listen to what it means for him to be in charge. And from that moment, I began to pay attention to all the ways that I’d made my life – my faith, my vocation, my work, my relationships – so that everything revolved around anything but Jesus. And as I recentered my life, as I made Jesus my journey-mate rather than a regular stop along the way, the paths before me became overwhelmingly more complete.
A passage to transform your journey. As we consider our individual and collective lives, a common thread binds us together: the broken, forgotten, rediscovered, and redeemed roads we all travel. My story, your story, Pastora’s story, God’s story – they all become our story, if we let them. If we allow the stops along the way to settle in and shape us while Jesus participates in the journey with us. If we allow him to transform us through the “movement” of our lives. Recognizing this bond is what defines a life that is not just “lived well” but one in which we learn something as we travel along the path and are faithfully formed by the journey as a whole.
Jesus’ Beatitudes in Matthew 5 are more than just poetic verse used to begin the Sermon on the Mount. They are the essence of his message from beginning to end. Here is a portion of the biblical passage: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. …” (Matthew 5:3-6).
These familiar, simple words establish the overall tone of Jesus’s teaching ministry and provide an intimate look at his most deeply held values. The Beatitudes are a road map for growing and learning each step of the way. They provide a clear look at what Jesus believed as he began his ministry on earth because his very humanity was formed around these truths. You see, when Jesus said something, he not only meant it but also lived it. To hear him speak these words was to know his heart. The Beatitudes echoed throughout his ministry, providing us a glimpse of God’s view of the world through his Son.
It seems as if bookstore shelves and online book websites are filled with titles that promise a better business, better health, better relationships, and a better life overall. Program after program, technique after technique has come and gone – some with wild success, others completely forgettable. But these modern-day solutions, with all their good intentions and advice, are man-made and man-promoted. They are new ideas to fix old problems – the very problems that Jesus addressed more than two thousand years ago when he provided the answers that people today spend thousands of dollars seeking out.
It is through the Beatitudes, a term that literally means “blessings,” that Jesus gives us a new definition of significance before poetically leading us to reflect on the deeper meaning of life, our relationship with God, and the interconnections we have with each other. Jesus never intended the Beatitudes to serve only as road markers of lives lived well. He meant them to serve as vehicles by which we experience the very best life.
Shane Stanford is President and CEO of The Moore-West Center for Applied Theology and JourneyWise. This essay is adapted from his book JourneyWise: Redeeming the Broken & Winding Roads We Travel (Whitaker House 2023). Reprinted by permission. Photo By Jeremy Perkins (Pexels).
by Steve | May 12, 2024 | May-June 2024
Steps to Move Forward
By Rob Renfroe
May/June 2024
Not long ago The United Methodist News Service published an article reporting that some of us who lead Good News and the Wesleyan Covenant Association intend to be present at the upcoming General Conference in Charlotte. The article was fair and balanced, quoting us and those who disagree with us. Shortly thereafter UMNS published a commentary by a well-known church leader on our being at the General Conference that was quite critical.
Reaction by United Methodist clergy and laity on social media to the two articles was predictable. We were described as hateful and disingenuous, portrayed as “foxes in the hen house,” and blamed for creating all the division within the UM Church. The main message was: Disaffiliation is over and it’s time for Good News, the WCA, and other critics to move on and stop damaging The United Methodist Church.
“Disaffiliation is over.” That’s the claim most centrists and progressives in the U.S. are making and that’s one of the reasons they think we should not be in Charlotte. But how can disaffiliation be over when it was never allowed to begin for the majority of United Methodists? Paragraph 2553 that permitted churches in the United States to leave was ruled by our bishops not to be applicable for congregations outside the U.S. where the majority of United Methodists live. The statement that “disaffiliation is over” evidences a US-centric view of the church that diminishes the importance of and denies the rights of churches in Africa, Europe, Russia, and Asia.
If the General Conference acts as if disaffiliation is over and does not give international churches the same right to determine their future that we in the U.S. were afforded, the message will be clear to members in Africa and the Philippines: United Methodists are willing to extend privileges to primarily white and wealthy congregations in the United States that it will deny to churches in the developing world whose members are predominantly poor and persons of color.
Liberal and “centrist” United Methodists talk often about justice and frequently denounce colonialism. Yet they seem intent on creating a two-tiered denomination where UMs in the U.S. are given more privileges than those outside the States. We agree it is time for the UM Church to move on. But not before it provides the same rights to those outside the United States that were given to churches here.
Second, some responded to the articles with the understandable sentiment that those no longer in The United Methodist Church should not have a voice at the General Conference. That’s one reason Tom Lambrecht, Good News’ vice president, and I, are still United Methodists. Rev. Lambrecht is an ordained elder in the Wisconsin Annual Conference, under active appointment. I am a retired UM elder in the Texas Annual Conference, properly located at a United Methodist congregation in Houston. I understand many are tired of hearing our voices and disagree with our views, but we are still United Methodists. How long we remain United Methodists will be dependent upon what the General Conference decides. But both of us have been UM elders for over forty years. We have both given our lives to the UM Church. For the past four decades we have cared deeply about its health and its future. We still do. When we leave, we will no longer feel the need or possess the right to attempt to influence the direction of The United Methodist Church. Until that time, we have as much standing as any other UM clergyperson to call upon the UM Church to do the right thing.
Others have charged that we have created division within The United Methodist Church for too long and our work at the General Conference will only continue the dissension we have sowed in the past. The truth is the UM Church was divided long before the Wesleyan Covenant Association came into existence in 2016, many years prior to Rev. Lambrecht’s and my ordination in the 1980’s, and even before Good News was formed in 1967. We did not create the issues that have divided the UM Church and have led to the exit of a quarter of its congregations.
We, like those within the UM Church possessing views different from ours, have expressed our beliefs and encouraged delegates to vote in line with what we believed was best for the church. But we did not create the differences that led to disaffiliation. Nor did we promote disobedience to the Book of Discipline as some charging us with fomenting division have done.
A UMNS reporter asked me, “How do you respond to those who say your work at General Conference is nothing more than your trying to harm The United Methodist Church on your way out?” My response was, “All we’re planning to do is call upon The United Methodist Church to be fair and do justice. If that harms an institution, it must be a very sick institution.”
Lastly, we have heard the objection that those who do not plan on remaining in the UM Church should not try to impact its future. Again, that is a very valid concern. Good News and the WCA have no desire and will not be working in Charlotte to influence the future direction or policies of The United Methodist Church – not its views of marriage, not its standards for ordination, not its policy on abortion, not its Social Principles, not its budget.
Our efforts will be constrained to asking the General Conference to provide justice for two groups. One of those groups being the churches outside the U.S. which have been denied the right to discern if disaffiliation is right for them. The other being the congregations in the United States which were told by their bishop or their district superintendent that they did not have to act before Paragraph 2553 expired – they could wait to see what changes the General Conference made in 2024 and then determine whether to disaffiliate.
It’s possible we will feel compelled to address one other issue in Charlotte. If a just opportunity for disaffiliation is not provided for churches outside the U.S. and if international delegates ask for our help, we will assist them in trying to defeat the regionalization plan. Our friends in Africa with whom we work closely have told us they cannot remain in a church that allows for a contradictory, “contextualized” sexual ethic. If they are given no opportunity to exit, we will stand with our brothers and sisters who have described regionalization as a plan for creating “the separate but equal United Methodist Church.”
The proposed plan for regionalization necessitates constitutional amendments. The passage of such amendments requires a two-thirds vote at the General Conference and then the approval of two-thirds of all the connection’s annual conferences. We believe the amendments can be defeated at the General Conference. We feel certain they can be defeated once the vote goes to the annual conferences. But we have no desire to engage in that struggle, and we will do nothing to thwart its passage if an exit path is offered to churches outside the U.S.
What if the General Conference voted early in its deliberations to fairly extend Paragraph 2553 to churches outside the United States and to those churches that would like to enter discernment in this country? Honestly, I think Good News and the WCA would say “thank you,” pack our bags and go home early.
The other option is we go at it one more time. We have fights on the conference floor. The focus of the General Conference once again becomes our differences and the UM Church that needs to move forward gets mired in the divisions of the past.
I prefer the former – people of goodwill on all sides voting to let those leave who desire to do so. It’s fair. It’s just. It stops the fighting. It’s a path that will allow The United Methodist Church – and us – to “move on.”
Rob Renfroe is the president and publisher of Good News.
by Steve | May 12, 2024 | May-June 2024, Uncategorized
Christ in You, the Hope of Glory
By Oswald Bronson
Good News Archive
1971 Good News Convocation
May/June 20204
Think with me on the topic, “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). Our theme comes from a man physically imprisoned, but liberated in mind and convinced that in his soul lived a universal mystery – the presence of Jesus Christ, who was the ground of his faith and conviction. Any man with a conviction becomes ill at ease when the foundation of that conviction is subjected to misinformation. And so it was with Paul. He had heard that false teachers in Colossae were proclaiming a dangerous and deceptive heresy.
Under the influence of what came to be known as gnosticism, these false teachers sought to syncretize [mix together] the Christian faith with Greek and Oriental religious systems that reduced Jesus Christ to one of many intermediaries between God and man. They instituted complex and secretive initiation rites, paganistic ceremonies that extolled the so-called mysteries of their syncretistic faith. Little did they care that this mixture of religious ideologies was an insult to a prisoner under lock and key in the Roman jail. You see, they had not been with Jesus, not been pricked by his power on the Damascus road.
In the Epistle to the Colossians, Paul speaks to a communal irregularity that threatened to bankrupt the Church’s spiritual treasure, and to immobilize its moral behavior and its Christian witness. Here, my friends, we see one of Paul’s ablest defenses against heresy in the ranks. It is against this background of false teaching – of a divided community, of a church threatened by ethical decadence, and spiritual erosion – that Paul courageously reaffirmed his evangelical faith and pointed to the Mystery hidden for ages and generations. The Mystery is the topic of this address. For Paul says, it is “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
This theme underscores three basic dimensions of Christology (or the doctrine of Christ), without which our faith is emptied of its pulling power.
1. Jesus Christ, The Image of the Invisible God.
2. Jesus Christ, The Mystery of the Indwelling Presence.
3. Jesus Christ, The Hope of Glory.
In Pauline theology, Christ was not one of a number of equal intermediaries; not simply one of the angels; not a power among other powers, as the heretical teachers at Colossae would have the Christians believe. In Colossians 2:8 Paul warned the church to beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men or after the rudiments of the world.
This warning has relevance for modern day Christianity. You and I know that the modern church runs the risk of becoming theologically sterile and spiritually bereft. Many churches have departed from the biblical faith, lost their spiritual magnetism and the fire that burned in the hearts of our fathers. The absence of the Holy Spirit leaves a vacancy open and available to all kinds of heresy, such as the [1970s] God-is-Dead movement. Preachers and laymen quarrel, blaming the other for the church’s predicament.
Some time ago I came across a rating chart that sought to evaluate the pastor’s work. It sought to measure a pastor’s adaptability, effectiveness in pastoral calling, strength of character, spiritual maturity, preaching skills, and communication. Those were the areas of measurement. Across the top of the chart were the degrees of measurement: Far exceeds requirements, exceeds requirements, meets requirements, needs some improvement, does not meet minimum requirements.
The first area of performance is the preacher’s adaptability. Far exceeds requirements: Leaps tall obstacles with a single bound. Exceeds requirements: Must take running start to leap over tall obstacles. Meets requirements: Can leap over small obstacles only. Needs some improvement: Crashes into obstacles. Does not meet minimum requirements: Cannot recognize obstacles at all.
Sadly, we have folk who are not able to recognize sin and its creeping effects.
What about the pastoral calling? Far exceeds requirements: Faster than a speeding bullet. Exceeds requirements: As fast as a speeding bullet. Meets requirements: Not quite as fast as a speeding bullet. Needs some improvement: Would you believe, a slow bullet? Does not meet requirements: Usually wounds self with bullet.
What about preaching? Far exceeds requirements: Enthralls huge throngs. Exceeds requirements: Enthralls the congregation. Meets requirements: Interests the congregation. Needs some improvement: Only spouse listens. Does not meet requirements: Not even spouse listens.
Surely if you’re going to be a real pastor, you need strength of character. Far exceeds requirements: My pastor is stronger than a herd of bulls. Exceeds requirements: Stronger than several bulls. Meets requirements: Stronger than one bull. Needs some improvement: Shoots the bull.
Surely we need someone who can communicate. What about the pastor’s communication if they’re shooting the bull? Communication far exceeds requirements: Talks with God. Exceeds requirements: Talks with the angels (Paul would be concerned). Meets requirements: Well, talks with self. Needs some improvement: Argues with self. Does not meet minimum requirements: Loses argument with self.
If Paul had to rate the heretical teachers and preachers in Colossae, he would simply say that, “You are losing arguments that are vital, the argument that stands tall and places our faith solidly on Jesus Christ.”
Paul teaches not to be misled by any attempt to establish a religious faith on any power except Jesus Christ. Here he underscores the uniqueness and supremacy of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is not one of many intermediaries. Christ is the Mediator. He’s not a power among other equals. He is the supreme Savior, the highest expression of God’s love. He is God’s image from all of eternity, before creation was brought forth, before the Spirit moved upon the waters.
As I heard one preacher say over the radio, before there was a “when” or a “where” or a “then” or “there,” or “this” or “that” – before there were plants, animals and human life on the face of the earth – Christ was already in existence. St. Paul, the man of faith, said, “He is the image of the invisible God, the first born of creation, for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities, he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:15-18).
Not only was Christ with God in the beginning, but on earth he was fully human. Herein lies the great paradox. It is the link between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. In his humanity dwelt the fullness of God, in his deity dwelt the fullness of man. This is a paradox that dramatizes God’s extending himself in suffering love. And humanity reaching its highest in obedience, in humility, and in devotion to God’s will. The downward reach of God, and the upward reach of man, had its highest hour and met in Jesus Christ.
In Christ the Son we meet God supremely revealed. On the cross we experience God’s aching heart, his agonizing love, and his forgiving spirit. Often my heart bleeds when I look at my Savior on the cross, and think how he has there, on his shoulder, all my sins. And then I hear him say, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Oh Christ, I love you! Easter brings the Good News that God-in-Christ is victorious over the forces of evil. Pentecost signals through Christ a new baptism, the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Surely, God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.
We enjoy singing, “All Hail the Power of Jesus Name.” He is not one among equals – he is superior! He is preexistent! He is God, the image of the invisible God. “Let angels prostrate fall. Bring forth the royal diadem and crown Him lord of all.”
We must crown him Lord of all. Jesus Christ, the image of the invisible God, is also the mystery of the indwelling Presence. Please note that Paul frequently uses the word mystery. It denotes the incomprehensible, an event or an idea that cannot be explained and understood by human faculties. A mystery defies human intellect. The secret of his power is on a level beyond our human understanding.
This universe that God has made is filled with mysteries. It is true, we are extending our explorations to other planets. Yet, with each such exploration, we realize that we are dealing with but an infinitesimal part of this vast universe. The full knowledge of God’s power lies only in his mind. Paul was eminently correct in using the word mystery, for life is a mystery. Nature is a mystery. The human being is a mystery.
Through science and technology, the human mind is grasping facts once thought to be miraculous. We think now that we know the secret of the Universe. We understand how to manipulate certain physical laws to bring about desired results. But how these laws came into existence remains a mystery. There is so much we cannot fully explain.
When I was a lad, I used to like to watch Molly, the cow. And I used to wonder how a brown cow, eating green grass, with a red tongue, could give white milk, churned into yellow butter.
Regardless how much we try to explain many of these things, we come back to the question, “Who did it? Who got it started?” We have to come to grips with this one outstanding fact: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and everything therein found.”
I heard a radio preacher very eloquently remind his audience that we live in a push-button age today. We can push a button and lift tons of steel. We can push a button and send astronauts throughout space, even to the moon. We can push a button and sail heavy aircraft through the skies. We have come to feel that there is hardly anything that the push-button cannot do.
But, said the preacher, man cannot push a button and cause the sun to shine, or the stars to twinkle, or create mothers and fathers to provide love for their children, or our Savior, who brings healing to our souls.
The push-button is mechanical, cold, and indifferent to the deeper yearnings and needs of the human heart. Only God can push that button! As Isaac Newton stood in the presence of nature’s mysteries, he said “I feel like a child who has picked up a few pebbles on the shore of a boundless ocean.”
I was glad to hear the great scientist Albert Einstein said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.” Mystery is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. His eyes are closed.
Yes, we are surrounded by mystery.
Paul’s time was the age of mystery religions and secret initiation rites. The false teachers of Colossae were greatly influenced by these religious practices. Against this background, Paul is saying, “I, too, have a Mystery into which I was initiated. It is a divine secret, which for ages no man guessed. Now it has pleased God to make known the secret. And it is, Christ in you. The innermost dynamics and the very nature of God’s being reaches its apex in Christ. And we know this Christ as the inward presence, making our lives one with his life. Christ is the mystery, because in him lies hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Because he represents far more than has yet been disclosed.”
Notice that Paul said Christ in you; not Christ on you, nor merely around you. Not Christ objectified in a philosophical system, or any system locked to a period in history. Not a Christ beautifully painted in a picture, or described in poetry or set to popular music.
Christ on me is not enough! I might change toward him as I changed my clothes, or as I moved from group to group, from city to city, from position to position. Christ around me has great advantages, but he is still external. In theory he is limited to intellectual activities, but our problems are deeper than the intellect.
A Christ arrested in the past is good for the museum; a picture may be good to adorn the walls of our homes and our offices. Jesus Christ in poetry and music is fine, though he runs the risk of becoming a fad rather than the savior.
Instead, Paul sees an urgency in the indwelling Christ. When Christ is truly internalized – permeating every cell, every fiber, thought, utterance, motive, behavior – we become new creatures. We experience unspeakable joy. We have an eternal assurance. We have a new light, a new spirit, a new love, a new heart, a new code of ethics, a new behavior, a new fellowship. With Christ in you and Christ in me, I declare, we’ve got to be together.
On a sign prepared by youth in one of our Atlanta United Methodist congregations are the words, “If you were arrested and charged for being a Christian, and indicted, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”
The indwelling Christ supplies the evidence. It is expressed courageously in a life of love and service, and the record is filled with testimonies across the ages of the transforming power of Jesus Christ as an indwelling presence.
How well do I remember when I was a small child, I heard my father pray, “Lord, I gave Oswald to you before he was born. Help him to be your servant. May you live in his life.”
I heard my Daddy pray that, morning and night. Sometimes I would wake up in the night. I would hear him praying, “God, I gave Oswald to you before he was born ….” I thought about that. At an early age, my Father, not having the kind of theological sophistication that many of us have, but a faith in Jesus Christ, was reminding me of the divine origins of any human being. And that my own existence in the world is the result of God’s creative activity, that in my life was a purpose – a purpose to glorify God.
He surrounded me with the Christian faith. I saw Christ in him. But I needed more than Christ around me, I needed Christ within me. My father’s faith was not enough. As Billy Sunday used to say, “Your wife’s faith cannot save you. You’ve got to be more than a brother-in-law to God.”
When I made my own decision for Christ, God became more than just a distant relative. He became an intimate Savior. The old Gospel hymns took on new meaning. It became a joy to affirm deep within that “I am Thine, oh Lord;” “Have Thine Own Way Lord;” “Blessed Assurance, Jesus is Mine.”
The Christian faith claims that in Christ, God’s nearness becomes a greater reality. He lives within. He becomes the battery that makes a glow radiate from our personality. And when you walk, somebody will say, “There goes a Christian, I see their light.”
Yes, Jesus Christ, the image of the invisible God. Jesus Christ, the mystery of the indwelling presence. Christ, the hope, is a theme that winds its way through the Pauline epistles. The word hope communicates the sense of the possible. It is an attitude towards life affirming that what we really need is possible.
The value of hope is poetically demonstrated by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s drama Prometheus Unbound: “To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite, to forgive wrongs darker than dark of night, to defy powers which seem omnipotent, to love and bear, to hope till hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”
Christian hope, however, is more than a general kind of optimism. It is more than hope in hope, or faith in faith. Christian hope is tied to the goal of history, and the purpose of each person’s existence. It is the unshakable confidence in the sovereignty of God, and his eventual triumph over all the forces that stand against truth, justice, righteousness, faithfulness, love, and mercy. In the great contest between good and evil, Christian hope declares God as winner. He is the victory.
For the Christian, in race relations, Christ is the victory. In family crises, Christ is the victory. In marital conflicts, Christ is the victory. Not only is he the hope of victory, he is also the hope of glory. The hope of sharing with God the eternal radiance of his victory.
Today, I have hope. I have hope that through Christ, all men and women will recognize their common bond. I have hope because in everything God works together for the good. Yes, I have hope. It is this hope that sends Christians forth witnessing against wrong, upholding the right, giving God the glory and the praise. It is this hope that brings light and deliverance to the downtrodden, the dejected, the underprivileged, the overprivileged, the “just-right” privileged.
Reverent. A matron in an orphanage whipped little Jimmy E. West, and put him on a bread and water diet. She said he was evading his chores by pretending to be sick. Fortunately a lady who knew Jimmy’s mother before she died, came by to see him. And she asked the matron to let her take the lad to a doctor. The matron agreed. The doctor examined the nine year old lad and sure enough, he had a tuberculous hip. He was laid up for a year on a very hard board. After a year the doctor said, “There’s no hope, so I might as well send him on back.” He called the orphanage, and the matron said she couldn’t take him.
The doctor called the taxi, gave him instructions, and in the gathering darkness he took Jimmy to the orphanage, left him and his crutches on the porch. Little Jimmy was found there by a girl who came to lock up for the evening. She dragged him in. What hope was there for a nine-year-old lad? No mother, sickly, rejected. None, according to the socially accepted opinions of the psychologists and social workers. He was doomed for a miserable life and death.
But a miracle took place. In this orphanage was a Sunday school. And Jimmy’s class was taught by a man who was in charge of the heating plant. He was not a man sophisticated in theology, but he had a faith – a living, vibrant faith, a belief in Jesus Christ that he shared with Jimmy.
Jimmy said later, “I came to believe that my life need not be hopeless wreckage.” And so, he started a life of prayer. He finished high school, worked his way through college and became a lawyer. He was brought to the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt because of his work with underprivileged children. This work was so significant that when the Boy Scouts of America was chartered, Congress elected Jimmy E. West (1876-1948) as its first chief executive.
But the story doesn’t end there. The Boy Scout code of America has one line that the code does not have in England. “A Boy Scout is Reverent.” Who put it there? It was a Sunday school teacher, faith, and spirit, working in the life of Jimmy West. Through Christ, he came to find that God had meaning for him in his time of wreckage. So now, Boy Scouts around the world raise their hand to God and say, “A Boy Scout is Reverent.”
Christ is the hope not only in the world to come, but he’s the hope right now.
In my home community we used to sing a spiritual called “Ain’t That Good News?” The lyrics are: “I’ve got a Savior in the Kingdom, ain’t that good news? He’s the joy of my salvation, ain’t that good news? He’s going to lead us from earth to glory, ain’t that good news?”
Yes, the Christian community has Good News! We have what the world desperately needs. It is Christ within us, the hope of glory. Ain’t that Good News?
When he delivered this address to the 1971 Good News Convocation, Dr. Oswald P. Bronson, Sr., Ph.D., an ordained United Methodist clergyman, was President of Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC) in Atlanta. After completing his time at ITC, in 1975, Dr. Bronson began an appointment as the fourth president of his alma mater, Bethune-Cookman University, a position he held for 29 years. Dr. Bronson passed away on February 2, 2019, at the age of 91 years old. This sermon first appeared in the October/December 1971 issue of Good News. Photo courtesy of Atlanta University Center. Photo: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Shutterstock).
