Tag Archives: United Methodism

Unity in United Methodism

26 Thursday May 2016

Posted by in United Methodism

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I’ve been following the conversations about unity during and since The United Methodist Church’s General Conference. The appeal to unity is powerful and appealing. And it is at one level effective because calling for unity is, well, unifying. I am in favor of unity. I want United Methodism to be unified, desperately. I also have a growing concern that appeals to unity in our current moment are often superficial and act as a kind of opiate to numb us to reality. We should be actively working toward unity. But we should not do so in ways that are vague, distract us from reality, and fail to either bring about meaningful unity or address the reasons we are currently divided. Here are two more specific thoughts I’ve had about unity that I’ve been chewing on since General Conference:

1. It is interesting that the value of unity is often used as a rationale for not enforcing the Discipline. One of the basic purposes of polity is to make unity possible. If you took away the presenting issues related to profound disagreements about human sexuality, I suspect one would be able to get pretty broad and firm agreement that the very purpose of polity is to secure unity within a denomination. The idea that polity is a barrier to unity, rather than part of what makes unity possible, reveals some serious problems in a tradition. I suspect that the appeal to unity as a rationale for not upholding the Discipline virtually guarantees disunity.

2. I find that appeals to unity are typically vague and lack any concrete precision when they are connected to the deep disagreements we currently have about human sexuality. Consider same sex marriage: A group of United Methodists believes that there can be no such thing as Christian marriage that is composed of two people of the same gender. Another group of United Methodists believes that not only are such marriages possible, but that it is harmful to deny people access to same gender marriages. A third group is frustrated by the inflexibility of these two groups. The appeal to unity most often comes from people in this third group. But I don’t believe I have seen someone from this group make a theological argument for why one church can be both for and against same sex marriage and how such a position would express the value of the Church’s unity. I can’t recall a theological argument from someone in this camp that argues that same sex marriage is a matter of indifference to God. As far as I can tell, the most accurate way of describing the current crisis of unity in United Methodism is precisely that people are convinced that God is not indifferent about these matters and they deeply and profoundly disagree about what faithfulness looks like. The hard truth is that, short of divine intervention, this is not going to change.

In moments of crisis, United Methodists often fall back on an appeal to unity. The appeal to unity feels good because we are fighting for the church. The litmus test for the value of an appeal to unity should be this: Does it address the reasons we are divided and offer a concrete solution that can bring about actual unity? Leaders within United Methodism need to consider whether appeals to unity that cannot pass this basic test may actually be doing more harm than good in our current moment.

The Church That Was Born Again

14 Sunday Dec 2008

Posted by in Life, Ministry, Wesley

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Eldbrooke UMC

Eldbrooke UMC

Elbrooke United Methodist Church no longer exists, at least not as a community of faith that continues to gather together to worship God and serve others. My internship in seminary was at Eldbrooke UMC, where I watched the church yoke itself to Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church. The following year it was closed. I graduated from seminary and moved to Oklahoma before Eldbrooke was closed, yet I occasionally heard pieces of news as Eldbrooke was closed and then put up for sale. My internship at Eldbrooke was difficult because I came to love the people at the church, yet the church was obviously not moving in a positive direction. Attendance was low, the building was in disrepair, and people seemed to be fighting just to stay above water.

I saw so much potential for the church, as it was located in a growing neighborhood of Northwest Washington, D.C., within a block of a metro stop. From a strategic standpoint, there seemed to be every reason why the church should be thriving, not dying. Yet, die it did.

I heard that the church would likely ultimately be sold to the highest bidder, which most people thought would mean that the church would be torn down. But due to the church being designated an historical landmark, and other circumstances, it was ultimately sold to another church. And that is how Eldbrooke United Methodist Church became The City Church DC.

I made this discovery when my brother and I walked to Eldbrooke, reminiscing, and noticed that the lights were on and people were in the parking lot. I introduced myself and explained that I had been an intern at this church and was in town for the weekend and asked if there was any way that I could take a quick look around inside. I discovered I was speaking to one of the lead pastors. She seemed genuinely glad to meet me and show me around. She gave me a thorough tour of the church, and introduced me to her husband, the other lead pastor.

I have to say that seeing concrete evidence that a group of people were investing in this church made my heart sing. They have remodeled the sanctuary and the area where we used to have our soup suppers after worship on Sunday morning. And the work continues.

What particularly impressed me was how charitable they were in their discussion of the church. When I introduced myself to the second lead pastor and told him I was currently working on a Ph.D. in church history he immediately responded, “Well, there is a lot of history in this place.” Michael and Heather provided a wonderful example to me of how to work towards unity in the Body of Christ. The City Church DC is nondenominational and, therefore, not United Methodist. But there was not hint of gloating or dismay or judgment of what is, to be honest, a failure of the United Methodist Church. They seemed to see themselves as simply stepping into the history of this church, leading to its next steps of faithfulness and obedience to how they understand God to be at work.

And so Eldbrooke United Methodist Church, which was put to rest a few years ago, was born again. Eldbrooke, which was dead, is now City Church, which is alive and growing. (Michael told me that since they began worshiping in February attendance has grown fro 65 to 130.) I suspect that some United Methodists in the D.C. area may not care much about The City Church DC, but whether United Methodists notice or not, the kingdom is coming. Jesus continues to draw people to himself and he sends them in love to others.

I think this is a great story in and of itself. Yet, it seems to me that there is something in this story that United Methodists can learn from. It should not escape our notice that a church is growing in literally the same location and even in the very same building. In some ways, it seems that the main thing that had to die for the church to live was the United Methodist affiliation of the church. While in some ways that may not be that big of a deal, as the wellness of “the Church” is far more important than the wellness of “The United Methodist Church.” In other ways, Eldbrooke’s legacy may be, more than anything, to question United Methodism. What was it about Eldbrooke UMC, the district that the Church was in, and the Baltimore Washington Conference that made it unable to survive, while it seems to be doing very well with a new start? Was there a failure of the connectional system? Was there a failure of imagination? Of nerve?

Part of Eldbrooke’s legacy may be in the questions that it asks of United Methodists. My sense is that if we are willing to take a hard look at churches like Eldbrooke United Methodist Church, we will find some things that are not easy to acknowledge. We will be led to repent of the ways in which our church has not been faithful to our Lord. Yet, if we are unwilling to acknowledge our mistakes and our sins, how can we expect to move forward? For my part, I lament that United Methodists were not able to resurrect a vibrant ministry in that place, but mostly I praise God that the Church is present and Christ is still being proclaimed at 4100 River Road NW in Washington D.C.

Good Readin’ Part 1

11 Monday Feb 2008

Posted by in Book Review

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I have been able to do a fair amount of reading lately, but I have not sat down and blogged about very many of the books I have read. So, this week I thought I would take the time to post brief reviews of a few of the books I have read lately. Today we will look at How Great a Flame: Contemporary Lessons from The Wesleyan Revival by James Logan.

How Great a Flame is a very quick read. The book is a smaller format than normal and is 96 pages. I read most of the book in one sitting. I have to say that I was a bit thrown by the Foreword, which was written by Rev. Karen Greenwaldt. Greenwaldt’s foreward made me think I was going to be reading a book that was very different than the one that I actually read. Her review on the back cover of the book has the same tenor as the forward, “James Logan offers a thought-provoking book that explores the interconnection between vital piety and social witness among those Christians who were part of the Wesleyan movement.” This would certainly be a worthwhile undertaking, but I did not find this to be a prominent focus of How Great a Flame.

Aside from the discrepancy that I found between the foreward and the book itself, I really enjoyed this book. Logan calls United Methodists to account a few times, like when he compares our desire for respectability, decency, and order to John Wesley’s. He writes, “But herein lies the difference between Wesley and us. It was ‘the cross’ he chose to bear, and the one which we leave to other churches and groups who don’t conform to our standards of decency and order” (16). Logan writes this in a discussion about field preaching, suggesting that Wesley was able to get out of his comfort zone in order to be faithful, while Methodists today are rarely willing to take these kinds of risks.

In the second chapter, Logan beautifully describes the distinctive features of the Wesleyan revival as: open-air preaching, the organizing of converts into two distinctive on-going structures, and the deployment of a two-tiered lay ministry (26). This chapter includes a wonderful description of the often gradual nature of conversion and how this related to the importance of sanctification. Logan connects the eclipse of the class meeting with the move toward altar call preaching aimed at instantaneous conversion. He writes, “With the eclipse of the class meeting, Methodists came more and more to accept and practice a truncated form of evangelism that focused exclusively upon a decisionistic, instantaneous conversion…. The eclipse of the class meeting marked a decided decline in the church’s sense of being a disciplined people. Without the class meeting the major structure for spiritual accountability was lost, and the church compromised its ecclesial identity, exchanging a missional consciousness for an institutional consciousness” (38).

In the final chapter Logan discusses some bad habits we have gotten into in relation to evangelism and then suggests some ways forward.

My main criticism of this book would be that it felt a bit unfinished. It may have been the point in which I stopped reading and then began reading again – but when I got to the last page, I was surprised it was over. It felt like more should be coming. Ultimately, that is at least a sign that he said many things that really resonated with me and I wanted to hear more.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a brief overview of Wesleyan distinctives, especially as they connect a Wesleyan understanding of grace, discipline, and Christian living to evangelism in the twenty-first century. I definitely found this book to be worth the read!

(Coming soon! Later this week we will look at Vital Signs: A Pathway to Congregational Wholeness by Dan R. Dick, Preaching as Testimony by Anna Carter Florence, and Deepening Your Effectiveness: Restructuring the Local Church for Life Transformation by Dan Glover and Claudia Lavy.)