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Commentary
WESLEYAN WISDOM: Can United Methodism break the institutional mold? Donald W. Haynes, Mar 3, 2010
Donald Haynes
By Donald W. Haynes UMR Columnist
I am not an ostrich. I know that the denominational identity sign on the front lawn is now the least effective means of the local church’s reaching new people. I have read Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change (Thomas Nelson, 2009).
Mr. McLaren, as we know, is the pacesetting voice of “the emerging church.” His book title comes from the words of a young woman in Rwanda, who says: “Today for the first time I see what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God. I see that it’s about changing this world, not escaping it or retreating into our churches. If Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God is true, then everything must change. Everything must change.”
Basically, Mr. McLaren sounds like a mid-life convert to liberation theology and speaks mostly to societal issues in this book. But his premise is that as Christians, we have bought into a “suicidal system,” and that the church reflects the culture.
Critiquing the church
For Christmas my son gave me a little volume called So You Don’t Want to go to Church Anymore (Windblown Media, 2006), written by Wayne Jacobsen, the man who was mentor to William Paul Young, author of the popular novel The Shack (Windblown Media, 2007) and his friend, Dave Coleman, a hospice chaplain. One of the endorsements is from a college student: “It will challenge you to rethink what church is all about.”
In a long series of apparently apocryphal conversations, the authors record one about “traditional church.”
Bright young Laurie says, “I know I got some truth and my hunger for God in a congregation just like this.”
John asks, “But did it also satisfy that hunger, Laurie?”
She responds: “At times I thought it did. Looking back, however, I think it only frustrated me. It made me hungry to know God in a way it could not fulfill. It also made me feel that this was my fault—that I either did not understand enough or did not work enough.”
Then comes the authors’ critique of the church:
“That’s what happens when an institution tries to do what it cannot do,” the authors write. “By providing services to keep people coming, it unwittingly becomes a distraction to real spiritual life. It offers an illusion of spirituality in highly orchestrated experiences, but it cannot show people how to live each day in Him through the real struggles of life.”
Meager fruit
The guru continues: “In the first days of a new group forming, the focus is usually on God, but that usually fades over time as financial pressures and the desire for order subvert the simplicity of following Jesus. Relationships grow stale, and the machinery siphons off so much energy just to keep it running, it grows increasingly irrelevant.”
A third party, a pastor of a megachurch, joins the conversation.
“For all the work that goes on here and all the money we spend, the resulting spiritual fruit is pretty meager. New people aren’t coming to know God. Our new people are transfers from other congregations that are having trouble. I don’t know anyone here who is on the Journey, and only a few share my hunger. We’re so busy that we don’t care much about it. I am torn between the responsibility to reform it and the desire to leave it. Neither sounds like a good option. I doubt it can be reformed. Yet I have no idea how I could make a living if I walked away.”
The frustrated pastor continues, “People have been trying to reform it for two thousand years and the result is almost always the same—a new system emerges to replace the old, but it eventually becomes a substitute of its own. We have people in leadership positions who don’t know God very well, but who have strong opinions about the way things should be done.”
The dialogue represents the recurring language of those who are giving up on denominational churches like United Methodism. I am in conversation with so many young adults who feel that we are asking young pilgrims groping their way along their life journey to find their way by keeping the nursery at church!
The questions being raised by the emerging church cannot be ignored. We cannot continue to lose our children and our children’s children. As important as congregational care is to every pastor, we cannot overlook the priority of ministering to the needs of the seeker, the newcomer and the struggler.
I have three grown grandsons. The oldest finished college in 2009, but has found no job that is remotely commensurate with what he expected as he received his degree. He is living with us, and our discussions challenge us both to reach over generational lines of philosophy, faith and experience.
His brother, a college junior majoring in geology at a huge state university is deeply involved in a fundamentalist campus group! While taking a religion course whose professor is a self-proclaimed atheist, my grandson’s spiritual mentors in the evenings are quoting half of John 14:6 and insisting that anyone who does not know Jesus as their personal Savior can never go to heaven! Their concept of God does not root salvation in God’s love, but in the believer’s faith.
Right now, I am heartbroken that the third dropped out of college last week with clinical depression and a low self-image. Like millions of others who grew up in Sunday school and United Methodist Youth, personal Christian faith has not been sufficiently nurtured to “rescue the perishing.” All of these are my grandsons, all were reared in large United Methodist churches with large staffs providing multiple program ministries. All have been left to find their own way with their septuagenarian grandfather as their primary mentor.
No denying reality
I therefore confess that I am worried about my beloved United Methodist Church. Our membership losses, demographic aging contribution base and what Perkins School of Theology professor William Abraham calls “doctrinal amnesia,” are reality factors that cannot be denied. Voices across the connection seem to agree that General Conference in 2012 will have to seriously address guaranteed appointment, present pension support level and equitable salary support.
Many local churches who turned to “contemporary worship” as a means of reaching new people have been disappointed that the result was to divide the existing congregation into an “us” and “them.” Even a “dyed in the wool” churchman like Russell Richey closes his profound book Methodist Connectionalism (General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, 2009) with the ominous words: “Our divisions, especially between liberal and evangelical, run deeper and wider . . . than anything separating us from other Christian bodies! The warring camps flail against each other and against what remains of established authority—bishops, boards and agencies, seminaries, and the clergy themselves.”
He continues, “Mainstream Protestantism is in trouble; a general malaise reigns.” We could go on, but my ultimate concern is not a ‘what’s wrong’ analysis of the challenges before us.
Need a new vision
Revealed biblical faith is not a set of “pat” answers. It’s only by playing biblical hopscotch that can we make the Bible a monolithic book of religious prescriptions. As Hebrew history unfolds, so does their understanding of God’s will. It is not the same for Ezra that we see in Ruth; it is not the same for Joshua who was convinced God wanted ethnic genocide as it was for Jonah who grudgingly admitted that God loved the Ninevites!
Jeremiah caught a new vision, “when the law of God will be written on our hearts.” Ezekiel taught us that sin is not inherited; we are responsible only for our own! Jesus said, “You have heard it said of old, but I say unto you . . . ” Paul argued for liberation from circumcision and Mosaic food laws. Revelation pictures avenues into the consummate kingdom from the east, north, west, and south (Rev. 21:24).
Like Rip Van Winkle, we lost touch with scriptural primacy, neglected Wesley’s “way of salvation,” slept through a revolution and are blinking our eyes as we awaken to a world in which Methodism has no defined message, mission and method. Can we “serve this present age”? Yes, if we re-think, re-vision and take on the work of the surgeon—to cut, to experience pain and to be healed.
A book that deserves more serious consideration is Diana Butler Bass’ Christianity for the Rest of Us (HarperOne, 2006). Like many others, she experienced in her home United Methodist church not the grace theology of Wesleyanism or the controlled doctrine of fundamentalism, but a mirror of the “conventional morality” found in her father’s Rotary Club. Now she sees an emerging place for churches that mentor vital spirituality within the context of intellectual openness and honest inquiry. Indeed when radical liberals and rabid fundamentalists draw their battle lines and make mincemeat of the Beatitudes, United Methodist grace will be the gathering place for “the rest of us.” In our new future, we must be neither secularized nor escapist, grounded in spirituality that is the fruit of our grace theology. So it was with Wesley; so it will be if God revisits the people called Methodists.
Dr. Richey closes his latest book with words of great wisdom—foundational words upon which I believe we must build a new future for this “middle way,” Wesleyan heritage of grace theology: “Trust will bring the four walls tumbling down. One little word. One little word opens up a new future. Trust in God, trust in one another, trust in our mission—‘A Mighty Fortress is Our God.’”
Dr. Haynes is an instructor in United Methodist studies at Hood Theological Seminary. dhaynes11@triad.rr.com.
Donald Haynes
Meager fruit 
