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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Renewal is found in Wesley’s ‘means of grace’ Andrew C. Thompson, Jan 21, 2010
Andrew Thompson
By Andrew C. Thompson UMR Columnist
Editor’s note: This is the first column in a multi-part series.
There are a lot of dissatisfied Christians in our culture. The world constantly pulls and pushes them in ways they don’t want to go. They know their faith should help them make sense of their lives, but it often feels too thin to make a real difference.
When I talk to members of the United Methodist Church from around the connection, they often say they want to see the renewal of the Church. I believe that. But I also think they want to see a renewal of their own lives.
Put another way: They want to experience salvation.
These two types of renewal are intertwined. The renewal of the Church depends on the renewal of the individuals in its membership. And the salvation of God’s people depends on their incorporation into the Church, which is the body of Christ.
I’ll make the case in my next few columns that the Church’s renewal depends on how we engage a specific set of practices called the means of grace. These are the practices God gives us to build us up (individually) and the Church up (collectively), so they are important to the very possibility of our salvation.
But just so I don’t get the cart before the horse, let me explain a little bit about what I mean when I use that term—means of grace.
Historian Richard P. Heitzenrater has suggested that the best understanding of grace in a Wesleyan sense is the “active presence and power of God.” Grace is the pardon we receive in Jesus Christ for sin. But grace is also the source of our transformation into new creatures.
That means God doesn’t just want to forgive us. God also wants to restore us to the holiness for which we were originally created. God wants to transform us through love.
Naturally, God can give grace any way he likes. (The Book of Acts provides some examples of grace given in pretty extraordinary ways.) But the consistent witness of Scripture is that God has provided certain means by which grace is regularly received in the Church.
John Wesley explains the importance of the means of grace for salvation when he says, “As God . . . knew there was but one way for man to be happy like himself, namely, by being like him in holiness; as he knew we could do nothing toward this of ourselves, he has given us certain means of obtaining his help.”
Elsewhere he calls the means of grace “means of drawing near to God.”
So the means are central to any notion of renewal for just this reason: They are the way we can draw near to God. And that means it is important to understand what they are and how to engage in them.
I call the means of grace “practices” because they are repeatable activities of worship and discipleship.
For instance, the “instituted” means of grace are those that were instituted by Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Methodists identify the instituted means of grace as Prayer, Searching the Scriptures, Holy Communion, Fasting and Christian Conference.
Then there are the “prudential” means of grace. These might not be specifically commanded in the Bible, but they arise out of biblical principles and are found by experience to be sources of God’s gracious activity. We call them “prudential” because we discover them by prudence, or practical wisdom, as we live out our discipleship. Sometimes these are described with reference to Matthew 25—as activities of ministry that involve feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger, caring for the sick and visiting the imprisoned.
Some of this stuff might sound like no big deal. Who doesn’t pray every once in awhile? And who hasn’t received Holy Communion in the last year?
The tension comes in when we look at the role of the means of grace in our daily lives. Do we allow our lives to be patterned according to other priorities, adding in our Christian faith only when there is time? Are we really choosing to serve other gods and only occasionally giving a nod to the God we know in Jesus Christ?
Or are the means of grace themselves the pattern for our daily lives? For only when the central practices of faith become truly central to our lives will transformation really happen.
And only then will we see renewal in the United Methodist Church.
Andrew Thompson
