Words of Welcome

1971 Good News Convocation

Bishop F. Gerald Ensley
Columbus, Ohio

Good News
October /December 1971

It’s a great delight to be here tonight and to welcome you to this occasion, to this city and this state. I see a few friendly faces out there ….

Let me say first of all, I think that evangelicalism is authentic Christianity. And it comes at a time when it is greatly needed. Evangelicalism says basically, among other things, that all men sin and need to be saved. And that the way to salvation is faith in the grace of Christ. That was the Gospel in the beginning, and it is still the Gospel. When we depart from this we have departed from the Gospel. This was what the early Church had to say. It was centered in the idea of redemption. Christ centered his own ministry in people who were in need of being saved. The brazen sinner, like the woman at the well. The sexual sinner like the one the pharisees would do away with. Financial crooks like Zacchaeus. The boy in the far country, the sin of youth. You could name a long list.

Jesus Christ was concerned about people who had done things they ought not to do, and had failed to do things they should do. People who were without a redemptive Spirit or without a saving relationship to God or man. This is the Gospel. And this has been the Gospel that Methodism has preached when it has been authentic.

I heard my colleague, Bishop Roy Short, reporting on something he’d read in the literature of long ago. He said that back in the frontier community, when one particular denomination would come, the first question the preacher would ask this new community was, “Are there any men of wealth?”

There was another church, and the first question one of its preachers would ask was, “Are there any men of learning here?” But if a preacher came and said, “Are there any sinners here?” they knew he was a Methodist.

This has been the note that we have struck from the beginning. And in the degree that you, as the forefront of the evangelical movement, are sounding this note, you are preaching an authentic Gospel that comes down from the first century. And we need it. My word, how we need it in these days!

Oh, I don’t suppose we need perhaps the same Gospel that our fathers heard. A man said to me not long ago, speaking gratefully about his church, “Back in the days before my church got a hold of me, they swept me up every Saturday night and deposited me in jail. Drunk.” He was everlastingly grateful. Well, you’d be surprised how often that message is relevant, even today.

But I’m thinking also of those subtler and more pervading sins that we have. Sins of selfishness. Are there any selfish people in your town? The sins of cynicism. Of alienation. These are the sins to which we need also to address ourselves. And as long as the Gospel has a word for anybody, it has a word for us. Some of the long, sociological terms are really just synonyms for sin.

I was speaking in the south a while ago. I was entertained very kindly by a man who happened to be an auto financier. After dinner he was out showing me this car lot. I said, “Are you a car financier, or are you a car salesman?” He said, “You don’t finance cars very long before you’re in the car selling business. One leads inevitably into the other.”

You’re not very long talking about international affairs until you’re in the sin business. Or racial justice, until you’re in the sin business. And so in the degree that this evangelical movement centers on the redemption of God’s sons and daughters, praise the Lord! It is valid. And you don’t need to bow your head to anybody but the Lord. For this is the Gospel.

But let me say something else. The Gospel that’s needed for our time is the evangelical Gospel of salvation. But if I were to utter a criticism – and I don’t mean to be critical tonight because I identify so completely with you in this  sense of need for the evangelical Gospel – if there is one shortcoming that the Church has, and I think that the evangelical movement has, it is that it hasn’t saved people enough. It has saved people, for example, in a part of their relationships, but not in others.

A man goes to the altar of the church – or did in the days when this was the common thing – and had his sins forgiven. He became honest, cleaned up his mouth, and perhaps warmed his relationships with his family and friends. He made restitution for things he’d done wrong.

But oh, there were so many things that didn’t seem to come under the label of being saved! And hardly a week passes but what I get a letter from somebody saying, “Why is the church messing around with the race issue? Why is the church fooling around with the economic order? That’s not religion.”

Well, now, dear friends, if we save people, but ignore their relations as a citizen of the United States; if we ignore the fact that they’re a white man or a black man; if we ignore the fact that they’ll have to go to war one of these days, or maybe won’t, then we’ve missed a good part of the man. We’re just saving a fragment of an individual. And so I’d say that the evangelical movement has got to save all of us, and the whole being.

Let me say a word too, about something else. We’ve got to save the whole of a man’s personality. We’ve got to save both his intellect and his feelings. Now one of our troubles is that we haven’t saved men’s intellects enough. The trouble with the decline of the church right now, dear friends, if I am any judge of it, is simply that we have millions of people in the United States who don’t believe the Gospel. It just isn’t true for them, that’s all. And when we have convinced them that it is true, we won’t have so much trouble melting and warming their hearts.

And on the other hand, we have a lot of people who believe it with their minds: O yes, there’s a God! There was a poll the other day, revealing 96 percent of the American people believed there is a God, a Supreme Being. But are those 96 percent the American people Christians? To ask that question is to answer it. We’ve got to convert a man’s mind, and we’ve got to convert his feelings. We’ve got to keep them together. And we might be surprised how effective our preaching could be to their minds if it were warmed with a feeling spirit. And how much more intense our feelings might be if we felt right down to the very heart that it was true.

I always remember a remark that Bishop Calvin McConnell made years ago. He was speaking about John Wesley having been a contemporary of David Hume, the skeptic, than whom there was no sharper. McConnell had written a life of Wesley, and had read everything about Wesley that was ever written. And he said the notable thing about Wesley was that he never tried to prove that Hume was wrong. What did he do?

“Why,” said McConnell, “He set England a-singing.” And the glory, the celebration through song of the redemption of God swept away their skepticism. We’ve got to save men’s minds, and we’ve also got to save their feelings.

We’ve got to save people’s views of the Bible. Now, we’re divided in the Church, unfortunately, between those who take a literal view of the Scriptures and those who take a liberal, critical view of the Scriptures. The trouble is, they don’t have much use for one another. Now let me say very frankly, I’m a liberal when it comes to interpretation of the Scripture. I couldn’t be a fundamentalist. But bless him, if a man can get help out of that, I’m not against him. But I do think a literal conception of the Scripture is narrowing and fails to appreciate the great riches that are in the Scripture.

When I was a student up at Ohio Wesleyan, Harry Emerson Fosdick, who was then having a warm time with the fundamentalists in New York, came out to speak to the students. Fosdick was not a fundamentalist, and they were giving him a rather warm time. So he was ready to say some things about them that perhaps wouldn’t hold up on later reflection. He likened a fundamentalist to a mountaineer who  gets up in the morning, peeks out from a chink in his cabin, sees the sunrise, and then says that anybody who wants to see the sunrise must come into his cabin and look out through his chink.

Well now, that’s a shortcoming of a lot of  liberals too. And all of us need to realize that the sun is great enough that we can all get some good out of it, whether we approach it as a strict conservative, or as a liberal.

We’ve got to have a Gospel that has both Law and Grace. We have a lot of preaching these days that has a lot of Law in it. Talks about how you ought to do this and you ought to do that.

I had a letter the other day from a parishioner in one of my conferences. That good lady said, “I wish you could take our preacher away.” I guess every bishop recognizes this as a professional hazard around conference time, and I wondered what was wrong. Her letter continued, “He’s so negative. He holds  up these things he says we’ve got to be and tells us we’re not. It takes me till about Thursday of every week to get over Sunday. I used to go to church to get built up, to take the week, but now I go into the world to recover from what I’ve had in church.”

Well, that’s the emphasis on the Law. And then, of course, we’ve got a lot of brethren running around who’ve found their own problems insoluble, but who are trying to solve ours.

We’ve got to have both the Law and the Gospel. We’ve got to hold up the moral code, but we’ve also got to say a word about hope. The hope of a man who comes within the orbit of Christ.

Wesley did this, you know. In one of his journal passages, Wesley reported that he had preached in the morning in a certain place, and talked about the glorious grace of God, and gave the altar call, and nobody came. Then in the evening he changed his tactic. He gave them the works on Law, and indicated in no uncertain terms their destination, and what they might have ahead of them. And then, as a closing appeal, over against the Law, he gave them the Gospel of God’s mighty grace. He says in his journal that the altars of the Church were full. And he says, “I should know always, that the Law and the Gospel must be preached together.”

Or take the matter of method. Ours must be a comprehensive view of things. We can’t say, “Now, this is Christian, ’cause my daddy did it that way; that’s the kind of appeal he made.” Nor can we go along with these folks that seem to be in every bush, who tell you that this is a new day: you’ve got to stand on  your head, or do a thousand other things, because it’s a different day. Both of them are dreadfully one-sided in their approach.

John Wesley was a conservative. If you ever found anything radical in John Wesley, it was a typographical error, you can be sure. He was at heart a conservative. But he also had on his heart the desire to save men and women. And so one day he did that which is awful. He stood out on his father’s tomb, outside the old parish church at Epworth, and preached to the people there. And my, the crowds came from all around to hear him preach! He said that he did more good in three days standing on his father’s tomb than in three years preaching inside the church. You see, that’s adjustment too. He didn’t give up preaching inside the church; but he believed in “both-and.”

Let me say one more thing. I think that evangelicalism must end in evangelism. When the experience those who are evangelicals proclaim takes hold of a man, he wants to go out. He becomes an evangelist. He’s first an evangelical and then he’s an evangelist. And he goes out himself to seek to restore and to redeem. I have a feeling that if some of us had the courage to preach the Gospel of loyalty to Christ, we just might be surprised at what might happen.

A few months ago I was at the British Methodist Conference, and they were celebrating the retiring class of ministers. They mentioned a man who had retired, saying a word of praise about him. One of the brothers said, “Well, old brother so and so, he didn’t seem to have much to say, except “Come to Jesus.” And another man said, “Well, they came, didn’t they?”

People might be surprised with us, sometime. They might come, if we ask them.

I hope you see what I’m saying. I’m not unsympathetic with what you stand for. The trouble with evangelicalism is, it just hasn’t gone far enough. It’s an authentic note. It’s in the right direction. And in some of its best advocates, it does go all the way. But it needs to get a hold of all of a man’s relationships. It needs to get a hold of all men. It needs to use every device and method that’s in the book. It needs to keep going on and on until the darkness turns to dawn.

There’s a great sentence in the book of Zechariah. I think it ought to be  the text of every evangelical, of every preacher of every rank. That ancient prophet says that when the Lord finally comes, “Holiness unto the Lord shall be upon the bells of the horses.” That is to say, when God’s Kingdom finally comes, the horses pulling the dray down the street and the horses in the furrow with the plow, the bells on the harness will be ringing, “Holiness unto  the Lord.”

The Gospel shall encompass everything. And it says, “And every pot and pan in Jerusalem shall be as sacred as the bowls upon the altar.” Well, that’s our goal. And to the degree we do that, we bless and sanctify the Church in the evangelical movement.

Well, I appreciate so much your listening to me. Hope you’ll have a good time here. Behave yourselves. And if you have a good time, come again. Thank you.

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