John Meunier

A comment on Richard Hall’s blog led me to these two links.

The first is a promotion for an Easter service that includes giving away a free BMW to one lucky person in the congregation.

The second is a defense of the idea by the pastor that includes the following justification:

Free gifts draw people to malls and stores, so why not God’s House?  In fact, the Ultimate Free Gift is what Easter is all about!

Could you consider Wesley’s theology essentially penitential in nature?

This question arises for me after reading Louis Newman’s Repentance: The Meaning & Practice of Teshuvah.

In the book, Newman describes a Jewish understanding of repentance and the steps entailed in turning back to God. He outlines seven steps of repentance that apply whether the one we have sinned against is our neighbor or our God.

• Recognizing our culpability
• Feeling truly remorseful
• Confessing in public
• Apologizing to the one we have wronged (repeatedly if necessary)
• Making restitution or “setting the scales right again”
• Take careful accounting of our souls
• Facing the temptation to sin again and resisting it

Jewish and Christian understandings of repentance differ, of course, but as I read his book I find myself wondering if this process he describes is what Jesus meant when he told the crowds to repent.

Wesley’s small groups – it seems to me – were all about fostering a culture of repentance. The weekly questions in the bands about sins confronted, the constant reminders about the state of the sinner’s soul, the teaching of the moral law, and the only entry requirement, a sense of being under the wrath of God and needing refuge from it, all fit in with the picture of repentance Newman paints in his book.

If to any degree the answer to my initial question is “yes,” then I wonder how we recapture some of that.

I am struck in worship how often the confessional prayers – when prayed at all – are greeted with a decided lack of gusto. It may be because you cannot truly confess if you have not first truly examined yourself and taken responsibility for your sins. But I suspect that it is also because we do not like to think of faith in penitential terms.

That does not work for us.

We want a faith of uplift that sanctifies our desires, not one that pulls us down in the dust and teaches us that our hearts often desire what would kill us.

Repent! Jesus and the apostles preached. Do we truly know what it means to preach that word the way they did?

In the early centuries of the church, the Exodus and the Resurrection were linked closely in the Easter festival.

Since Jesus’ last days were during Passover, the early church continued to tell the Passover story as a part of its celebration of the resurrection story. These two stories sat side-by-side. The first is of the God who spared the first born of Israel, battered the oppressors with plagues and terrors, and led God’s people through the waters to freedom. The second was the story of the God rejected by his own people to pass through death and an earthen tomb to rise again.

When you hold these two stories close together, what do they bring out in each other? How do they echo one to the other? What do we hear when both are told that we do not hear when only one is?

Another look at “The New Calvinism” by an influential mainstream media outlet.

By most logic, the stern system of Calvinism shouldn’t be popular today. Much of modern Christianity preaches a comforting Home Depot theology: You can do it. We can help. Epitomized by popular titles like Joel Osteen’s “Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential,” this message of self-fulfillment through Christian commitment attracts followers in huge numbers,turning big churches into megachurches.

Talbot Davis reports the happy results when he challenged his congregation to post a specific – but obscure – phrase on Facebook. It lead to theological conversation among friends. Great story.

Here’s the post.

Bishop Will Willimon writes a post that rejects out of hand the content of my last post.

That many of us preachers still preach using essentially secular (i.e. godless) means of persuasion borrowed uncritically from the world is yet another testimony to our failure to believe that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, thus radically changing everything. In so doing we act as if Jesus were still sealed securely in the tomb, as if he did not come back to us, did not speak to us and cannot, will not speak to us today, as if preaching is something that we do through our strategies rather than through the speaking of the risen Christ.

I wonder if I should take it personally.

Yes, the title of the post makes me uncomfortable, but Wesley said we should act as if our efforts alone were the keys to successful gospel spreading. The Holy Spirit may be the real agent, but we should act as if it is all up to us. If so, then we should use every tool at our disposal. In that spirit, I’ve written twice about Cialdini’s work. I’m reblogging because so far no one has commented – good, bad, or otherwise.

Robert B. Cialdini has written one of the most influential books in the business world on the topic of persuasion. The retired Arizona State University professor is quoted widely and widely read by men and women in business who want to figure out the science of influence.

He has indentified six means of influence that have been supported by experimental study and derived from 30 years of research work in the social sciences.

They are:

Reciprocity – We do things for people who have done things for us.

Scarcity – We want things that are scarce and act to avoid loss of things we have.

Commitment to Consistency – If we commit to do something, that previous commitment becomes a motivator even when circumstances change.

Authority – We obey figures we view as authorities.

Social Proof – We look to what others have done to help us decide what to do.

Liking – We tend to do things for those we like or who are like us.

As I think about these principles, I am struck immediately by the materialism that underlies them. Cialdini does not have a pneumatology, which means “applying” such principles to preaching has some inherent trapdoors. But I can clearly see some ways that preachers have used them – whether consciously or not.

Scarcity – “Seize hold of God why he is near!” “Do not lose what you have gained from God.” “Only the elect have God’s favor.”

Social Proof – the altar call, stories of model Christians, appeals to the conduct of Christians throughout the ages, small group

Authority – Jesus, God, the preacher himself where preachers are still viewed as authorities

Reciprocity – “Christ died for you.” “We love because God first loved us.” “God has given us everything that we have.”

Consistency – “Keep your baptismal vows.” Reciting the creeds. Vows of all kinds made in public.

Liking – charismatic preachers, humor, appealing to a shared identity that says we are all alike in some way.

Should we be more aware of these influencers and use them? Should we be more aware of them and be cautious about them? Are they merely “prudential helps” that we can and should employ to help Christians as they mature in faith? Are they manipulative?

The latest edition to my never full and never empty Amazon.com shopping cart is a 350-page book dedicated to a debate about one Greek phrase in Romans and Galatians.

Since it is not likely at this point that I will become an expert in Greek or Hebrew and it is certain that I will never read everything there is to know about any particular Biblical passage and its context, I am reminded how large the gap is between what I know and what is known about the biblical texts from which I preach.

This reality teaches me that the secret of preaching is not packing my head with facts – although facts are good. No matter how much we learn – and we should learn all we can – we will always go to the preaching task not knowing everything there is to know. There will always be a huge gap. We preach around that gap or over that gap or with eyes closed to the gap, but it is there.

Knowledge may not be the secret to preaching, but rather opening myself to the wisdom of my tradition and the leading of the Holy Spirit – who speaks all languages as necessary.

Listening to NT Wright and some Lutherans go round and round about the new perspective on Paul got me thinking about the place of justification in John Wesley’s practical theology.

Compared to these Lutherans – at least – he says all the good Reformation things in his sermons, but if he were alive right now, I’m not sure he would be hung up on this debate. For one, he was indifferent to the doctrine of imputation of righteousness. But he also seemed to spend an awful lot more of his energy on the life we Christians live after justification than he did on championing a certain reading of Romans.

That is not to say he was not firmly in the “faith alone” camp. He was. He breathed that air.

But even as he did so, it was the consequences of justification in our actual lives that seemed to engage his passion much more. Justification by grace was such a wonderful doctrine to him because it meant the power of sin was broken. We could live and should live free of the tyranny of sin – not just free of the guilt over past sin but free of the power of sin and death right now and for the rest of our lives. Justification was a dearly held doctrine for Wesley not because it punched us a ticket to heaven, but because it made possible holiness of heart and life right now.

The real drama of the Christian life is not our “I’m saved” moments – our Aldersgate – but the day-by-day living into our new lives as Christians and growing into the sanctified and perfected people of Christ.

I may be overstating this. Wesley argued in one of his sermons that the two great doctrines he taught were justification by faith and new birth. He would probably not agree with my assertions here. To my reading, though, compared with those who make the entire Christian life turn on the moment of justification – who see this as a one time and one way ticket – Wesley sounds like he is not as deeply invested in a particular readings of Romans 3:28 as some others would be.

The Washington Post writes about the gay marriage conflict in Washington, DC, arising out of the decision of one United Methodist Church to defy the denomination’s rules about gay marriage. The newspaper casts the issue as a conflict between church law and civil law.

As gay rights spread through civil society, an increasing number of clergy are, like Snyder, caught by conflicting loyalties, forced to choose between church law and civil law in pastoring to their gay and lesbian congregants.

I find that an odd way to frame the issue.

First, the civil law does not require churches to do anything. Many civil laws allow or even encourage behaviors that the church does not. How often are discussions about those issues cast as a conflict between civil law and church law?

Second, I don’t think the pastors who are defying the denomination would say they are siding with civil law over church law. I’m pretty sure they would say they think the church law has misinterpreted God’s will. I don’t think they believe their loyalties are divided the way the story does. They may feel divided, but not in the way the story suggests they are. Or, I hope not.

Reading these stories, I keep thinking I can hear Stanley Hauerwas standing behind me saying, “I told you so.”