Forward to Our Methodist Heritage (By Charles Keysor)

By Bishop Earl G. Hunt

1996

AFTER DR. JAMES S. STEWART of Edinburgh had preached a few years ago to a large audience of United Methodist ministers and their wives in Charlotte, North Carolina, a young minister (suffering, I fear, from creedal poverty in his  own mind and life) said with devastating honesty, “We were embarrassed by the immensity of his faith!”

This candid comment serves to remind us that the Christian community has come dangerously close to losing its gospel in recent years. The reasons are too complex for easy analysis, and are related to the secularization and the affluence of contemporary life as well as to philosophy and theology. In many instances we clothed what amounted to a fundamentally humanistic  perspective in the historic vestments of the Church and its ministry. Diminishing church attendance and waning effectiveness in evangelism undeniably are traceable to this grave malady of diluted conviction. In fact, the total problem of the contemporary Church, in my opinion, is the various manifestations of Christian agnosticism that have confronted believers in the last few decades .

But, praise God, there are startling and encouraging evidences of a renaissance of faith around the world today. We seem to be engaged deliberately in the gradual recovery of those cardinal beliefs that compose our faith. The days of creedal drought are surely in twilight. This is an obvious return to our Wesleyan position, for the little Oxford don to whose insights we owe our sectarian origin was never in doubt about what he believed regarding God, Christ, sin, forgiveness, prayer, and the holy life! His theology, always firmly based in the Scriptures, was doxology, and his trumpet never gave an uncertain sound.

It has been my observation that significant and lasting social action by the Christian community always and forever rests upon deep and authentic conviction about the great doctrines of the gospel. There is a historic sequence of idea and deed, conviction and mission, faith and action. Before the imperative of the Great Commission came the indicative of God at work through Jesus Christ in his incarnation, his death on the cross, and his  resurrection.

But this has been, in recent decades, the lost movement of the symphony. Now, at long last, we seem about to hear again, in all of its surging power, the whole score of the gospel’s music. If this prognosis is correct, it constitutes the best authentic hope from an earthly standpoint for the survival of the Church.

This renaissance of evangelical Christianity has many faces in our time, but the movement itself is far broader and larger than any one of them. It has already permeated the grass roots of the Church around the earth and is now invading all but the most reluctant of ecclesiastical leadership levels. The Good News movement in the United Methodist Church is one aspect of this development and has articulated effectively its emphasis to our entire  denomination. As one who is himself wholly committed to the historical evangelical doctrines of our faith, with appropriate and courageous social implementation, I am pleased to write this brief foreword for Dr. Keysor’s little volume. His skill as a writer and his deep dedication as a United Methodist Christian are everywhere apparent in the pages that follow. I confidently pray that the message of Our Methodist Heritage may find lodging in many lives, and may result, through God’s Spirit, in an awakened interest in the basic truths of our holy religion.

EARL G. HUNT, JR.

Presiding Bishop Nashville (Tenn.) Episcopal Area

United Methodist Church