Friendship with God

by Steve | Oct 11, 2010 | Magazine Articles

By Christopher L. Heuertz and Christine D. Pohl —

“Go…and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”
—Matthew 28:19-20

Jesus’ parting words to his followers ignited a missionary movement that has now spanned millennia. In his teaching, he left no doubt that every commandment and every undertaking should derive from—and point to—love for God and neighbor. But undergirding everything Jesus said and did is God’s love for each person, most clearly evident in the love and sacrifice of Jesus himself.

Jesus made our outreach, mission, and ministry very personal when he said in Matthew 25 that when we have responded to the needs of the least of his brothers or sisters, we’ve responded to him. When we’ve fed or clothed, sheltered or visited a person in need, Jesus has experienced our expressions of care as ministry to himself.

Sacrificial love is at the heart of mission and reconciliation. But love and reconciliation can seem pretty abstract until we ask questions like What does reconciliation look like when you love Jesus and want the best for people who are caught in situations of terrible evil, need, or despair? How would our lives and our ministries be different if our understandings of love emphasized friendship?

Friendships are revelatory of truth. Within friendship we learn truths about the other person we couldn’t know any other way except through a context of trust and fidelity. Within friendship we learn about ourselves as we see our love and action through the eyes of another who loves and trusts us. And relationships forged among friends can open into deeper understandings of God’s love and concerns.

Evangelism, and even the notion of mission itself, has sometimes been reduced to the words we share with another person, telling him or her about Jesus, salvation, or eternal life. Words are important, but they can also be cheap. If we use words and get words in response, sometimes we think we’ve done mission or evangelism. Ministry among poor and vulnerable people reminds us that words are rarely enough—what each of us needs is to know that we are loved by Jesus, beloved of God. Everything else flows from that. In situations of injustice or despair, words alone are particularly insufficient. People need to be loved and valued by others. They need to see what love looks like.

The heart of it all
We don’t usually think of God as having friends, but several times Abraham is described as being God’s friend (2 Chronicles 20:7; Isaiah 41:8; James 2:23). Abraham—mostly faithful, generous, and obedient but also imperfect and prone to taking shortcuts—is described as one chosen to “keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice” (Genesis 18:19). Abraham’s life was transformed by his relationship with God. He followed God to a new place and a new role; he was chosen and willing to be a part of God’s purposes. And God was remarkably faithful to Abraham, confiding in him, rescuing him, and blessing him.

Jesus calls his disciples friends rather than servants because of shared commitments and purposes (John 15:7-17). The love that Jesus commands his friends to have is the love that he is about to show them. “No one has greater love than this,” he explains, “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). The linking of sacrificial love and friendship is key for his disciples, and the result is joy, lasting fruit, and a love that endures.

When Jesus is called a friend of tax collectors and sinners, the description is not intended as a compliment (Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:34). But it does acknowledge the shocking welcome he embodied in reaching out to those considered unclean and unworthy. He seems to have enjoyed being with them. Causing considerable offense to the religious authorities, Jesus gladly shared meals with these friends and brought them love, hope, and healing. And they often embraced him with dramatic generosity and powerful spiritual insight.

Friends of God love what and whom God loves. The Scriptures make clear that God’s love is abundant and available for each of us, but also that in a particular and protective way God loves those who are most vulnerable: widows, orphaned children, strangers, and those pushed to the margins of a community.

Jesus offers us friendship, and that gift shapes a surprisingly subversive missional paradigm. A grateful response to God’s gift of friendship involves offering that same gift to others—whether family or strangers, coworkers or children who live on the street. Offering and receiving friendship breaks down the barriers of “us” and “them” and opens up possibilities of healing and reconciliation.

Contemporary collisions
Learning to see the so-called other as a friend increases our sensitivity to the reductionism, commodification, and manipulation that plague some versions of mission and ministry. Human beings who are not Christians are far more than potential converts. In our concern for reaching out with the gospel, we can unwittingly reduce the person to less than the whole being that God formed. When we shrink our interest in people to the possibilities of where their souls may spend eternity, it is easy to miss how God might already be working in and through a particular person. We are better able to resist tendencies to reductionism when we are in relationships that affirm each person’s dignity and identity and when we come into those relationships confident that God is already at work in the other person.

Because a business mindset is so prevalent in our society, the work of mission is sometimes recast in very economic terms. Missional language like “target audience” and a focus on results-driven measurements echo a sales approach that sees people first as potential consumers—in this case, consumers of the product we’re offering, a particular version of Christianity.

Such approaches open us to the temptation toward manipulation, and manipulation should never be mistaken for evangelism. Unfortunately, certain types of strategic outreach assume that the means don’t matter if the end result is good. But the means and ends are profoundly intertwined. If we want people to experience the kingdom of God and to dwell with God for eternity, then how they experience their relationship with us should be a foretaste of that goodness and beauty.

The very content of the good news helps us resist temptations to overlook the connection between the goal and means of mission. To understand mission and evangelism, we need to recover a fuller understanding of the good news itself: the gift of God to humanity expressed in the incarnation of Christ.

Becoming friends of God
The idea of being a friend of God should strike us as pretty outrageous. That members of God’s obstinate, broken creation could be drawn into friendship with the Creator and Redeemer of the universe is extraordinary. And yet this is what God offers us. We are welcomed into the deepest fellowship and friendship of the Trinity. Jesus invites us in and wants to live in us. If this notion weren’t so familiar to Christians, we might respond more often with grateful astonishment.

Jesus promises believers that he and the Father will make their home with those who love him and keep his word (John 14:23). He prays, “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” The possibility of mutual indwelling is overwhelming: “so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:21-23). In these verses, we catch a glimpse of an intimate community of love that turns outward for the sake of the world. Jesus closely connects our testimony and mission to our relationships of love and unity.

The scriptural story reminds us over and over again that we are loved by God. This truth tempers the temptation to think of friendship with God as something we have to earn. We do not need to work harder to gain God’s favor or to be better so Jesus will like us more. Our belovedness—in spite of our sins and frailties—establishes the basis for a response of gratitude for the mercies we have received. Our lives then are offered back, out of gratitude, and with a heartfelt desire to love what God loves and live as Jesus’ friends.

Most of us understand friendship with God in a very individualistic way—a close, loving relationship between Jesus and me. Such a relationship is a priceless treasure of the Christian life. Yet there is more; friendship with Jesus is also bigger and more spacious.
In drawing closer to Jesus, we discover that we cannot love him without loving others. Our friendship with Jesus does not become diluted as more people are included in God’s heart of love. But neither can our friendship with him be overlooked because of others. The relationships are mutually reinforcing.

When we recognize the significance of Jesus words in Matthew 25 that inasmuch as we have welcomed “the least of these” we have welcomed him, we begin to understand the extraordinary kind of identification and oneness available to us. As we love and live among those most likely to be overlooked—those who are poor, hungry, despised, imprisoned, or sick—we find ourselves in intimate relationship with Jesus.

There is no way our friendship with Jesus can remain dynamic and close, however, unless we take time to be with him in worship and reflection. Little gasps for help or quick prayers of desperation in the midst of difficult circumstances do not sustain a friendship. In the same way that e-mail, text messaging, or Twitter can only support friendships that are sustained by extended conversations and being periodically in one another’s company, friendship with Jesus involves being in his presence, taking time to know him.

Our challenge, as we seek to draw closer to God’s heart, is not to presume on the friendship or to take it for granted, but rather to cherish it. As we grow in friendship with Jesus, he will continue to transform our love to make it bigger and more fruitful. Love is not a scarce commodity we need to ration in case we run out. Friendship with the source of love guarantees that we will have sufficient supply.

At the heart of mission is friendship. God’s friendship is a gift available to anyone who is open to receiving it. It sustains us in mission as we introduce our friends to friendship with Jesus.

Not prim but pure
We live in response to and in light of God’s friendship and goodness. What can we do except offer everything, our very selves, in response to God’s mercy? Paul grasps this powerfully when he writes about offering ourselves as living sacrifices in response to the mercies of God (Romans 12:1). Living sacrifices—not dead animals, not substitutes, not giving something and holding the rest back, but giving it all in gratitude.

Paul gives us an idea of what such living and holy sacrifices might look like. He tells the early believers to stop conforming to the patterns of this world and instead to be transformed by the renewing of their minds. What patterns of the world got the early church at Rome in trouble? What threatens us? They, like us, struggled with pride and arrogance, with making inappropriate distinctions among persons, with envy and revenge, with returning evil for evil, and with losing hope.

Our minds are renewed as we come to share the mind of Christ, as we see with his eyes and as we cherish what he loves. This renewed mind allows us to understand better God’s good and perfect will. The change is radical. Our minds are not just altered—they are transformed.

Particularly when we dwell on the margins, we desperately need a robust holiness that is simultaneously strong and tender. It is a holiness of heart that can experience genuine horror at evil, but also see human beings for what God intended them to be. It is a holiness that trusts God for redemption and therefore can sustain hope.

Paul’s final words to his beloved friends in Philippi include an assurance that the peace of God would guard their hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. He writes, “Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8). Paul was not saying to close our eyes to the misery, need, or evil around us, or to create holy huddles that exclude, but rather, in the midst of the world, to fix our minds and to take our joy from what is good.

The holiness we need for living on the margins comes only as we draw closer to Christ, as we take hold of what he loves and cherishes and as we take on more of his heart and mind. The gracious surprise is that this transformation is not burdensome but a gift of freedom and grace and an opportunity to become part of the beauty of God’s goodness.

Our holiness then is an eruption of God’s goodness and beauty in the world. When we embody a unified commitment to personal righteousness and efforts at justice, we help to expand the possibilities of transformation and healing.

Christopher L. Heuertz is international director of Word Made Flesh, an organization that exists to serve Jesus among the most vulnerable of the world’s poor. He is the author of Simple Spirituality. Christine D. Pohl is professor of social ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. Her books include Making Room and Living on the Boundaries. This essay is adapted from Friendship at the Margins: Discovering Mutuality in Service and Mission by Christopher L. Heuertz and Christine D. Pohl. Copyright (c) 2010 by Christopher L. Heuertz and Christine D. Pohl. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, PO Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515. www.ivpress.com.

A tribute to Peg Snyder

by Steve | Oct 11, 2010 | Magazine Articles

By L. Faye Short

Peg Snyder went to be with the Lord on Wednesday, July 21, 2010. We have lost a dear friend and faithful colleague.

Peg & Bob Snyder were connected to Good News during the time the Women’s Task Force was active. It was natural for Peg to be invited to be a part of the Evangelical Coalition for United Methodist Women (ECUMW) when it formed in 1989.

I recall one of our earliest meetings when it was voiced that we needed to base the ministry upon the firm foundation of prayer. Therefore, we needed a Prayer Coordinator, who would prepare a monthly devotional and gather prayer requests for a prayer letter, to be released at the beginning of each month. In a quiet, unassuming way, Peg spoke up and said, “I can do that.”

And so she did. From 1989 until the Renew Network came under new leadership in 2009, Peg sent a monthly devotional and prayer requests to the Renew office prior to the first of each month. This prompted the office to get busy, layout the newsletter, and send it out to the Renew Steering Committee and Support Team.

Peg Snyder was more than Renew’s Prayer Coordinator. She was a loving friend to the team members, and especially to me. Peg and Carole Sprague came to the first Renew office and spent a week volunteering to help us get ahead on office demands. She and Bob visited me and my husband, Dennis, in our new home in Habersham County. What a joy to have this godly couple as our first house guests.

Peg brought so much to our Renew Steering Committee meetings and retreats. She was always sharing insights from her years of ministry with her husband. She soaked up and gave out so much to each of us. Often Bob would accompany Peg. It was beautiful to see his support of her ministry after so many years of her support for his ministry. This was as God would have it.

In the years after Bob passed away, Peg would call me periodically and share her sadness over the loss of her husband. Inevitably, she would move from that sadness to telling me about her various children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren—with much pride and with warm affection for them. Her commitment to her family always lifted her spirits and gave her a fresh focus. Her commitment to Jesus Christ and faith in Him gave her the courage to continue on for her remaining years.

Peg and Bob Snyder were “salt of the earth” people who cannot be replaced. They are with the Lord—rejoicing in His presence. But we miss them, and look forward to the day we shall know them in heaven, even as we also are known by them.

By L. Faye Short, the Founding President of the Renew Network.

An unexpected ecumenical greeting

by Steve | Oct 11, 2010 | Magazine Articles

By Terry Mattingly

Anyone who attends one of the national church assemblies that dot the calendar every summer knows that they are highly ritualized affairs.

Officers will be elected.

Political issues will be discussed. Lofty resolutions will be passed. At least one long business session will include a proposal about clergy benefits and salaries.

In recent decades, gatherings in the “seven sisters” of mainline Protestantism have also—to varying degrees—featured battles over sex. These flocks are, in descending order of size, the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Episcopal Church, the American Baptist Churches USA, the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

But as the hours pass during these gatherings, veterans know that they can take breaks whenever the word “greeting” appears in the agenda, marking a polite mini-speech by a visiting civic leader or religious dignitary.

But something unusual happened recently during the 219th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). An official “ecumenical advisory delegate”—Father Siarhei Hardun of the Orthodox Church of Belarus—used his moment at the podium to deliver a message that was courteous and stunning at the same time, if not genuinely offensive to many in the audience.

“Frankly, he was pretty sly about what he said and how he said it,” noted the Rev. Carmen S. Fowler, president of the conservative Presbyterian Lay Committee. “People are used to dozing off during these greetings, so this caught them off guard. … Most of the General Assembly yawned its way through the most provocative moment of the whole event.”

Speaking in clear, but careful, English, Hardun thanked the Presbyterians for the economic aid that helped Orthodox churches in his land rebuild social ministries after decades of bloody Communist persecution. Only 20 years ago, he noted, there were 370 parishes left and, today, there are more than 1500. He thanked the assembly for its kindness and hospitality.

However, the Orthodox priest ended by offering his take on the assembly’s debates as it prepared for another attempt to modernize Christian doctrines on sexuality. Shortly before his “greeting” the commissioners voted 373-323 to approve, for the fifth time in two decades, the ordination of non-celibate gays and lesbians. Regional presbyteries must now approve the measure, which is the stage at which previous efforts were defeated—by increasingly smaller margins.

“Christian morality is as old as Christianity itself. It doesn’t need to be invented now. Those attempts to invent new morality look for me like attempts to invent a new religion—a sort of modern paganism,” said Hardun, drawing scattered applause.

“When people say that they are led and guided by the Holy Spirit to do it, I wonder if it is the same Holy Spirit that inspired the Bible, if it is the same Holy Spirit that inspires the Holy Orthodox Church not to change anything in Christian doctrine and moral standards. But if it is the same Spirit, I wonder … if there are different spirits acting in different denominations and inspiring them to develop in different directions and to create different theologies and different morals?”

The priest closed with a quote from St. Paul, urging the Presbyterians: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Later in that business day, a slim 51 percent of the assembly voted to defeat a proposal to redefine marriage as a holy covenant between “two people,” rather than one between “a man and a woman.”

General Assembly moderator Cindy Bolbach—an outspoken advocate of the gay-rights measures—offered no comment whatsoever about Hardun’s remarks when he left the podium, but quickly moved on to other business. However, before her election she urged her church not to fear the repercussions of an era of change. The denomination has lost half of its members since the 1960s.

“We have to learn how to proclaim the Gospel in a multicultural age where Christianity is no longer at the center,” she said, in a survey of the candidates for the moderator post. “We have to learn how to tell people who have grown suspicious of institutions why an institution like the P.C. (U.S.A.) can be of value to them.…And we have to accept the loss of the church we have always known—as the church transforms itself into something new.”

Terry Mattingly (www.tmatt.net) directs the Washington Journalism Center at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. He writes a weekly column for the Scripps Howard News Service.

Tone Deafness and the Call to Action

by Steve | Oct 11, 2010 | Magazine Articles

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.