John Meunier

The prophets did this, too, so who am I to complain? The Hebrew prophets always had a litany of failures as part of their word to the people of God. They had turned away. They had set up shrines to Baal and poles to Asherah. They had oppressed the poor and covered it over with fancy church liturgy. But now, a new thing was happening.

As I say, if it was good enough for Isaiah, who am I to carp? But so often, I read words to the church or the denomination these days and they sound like beating up on our parents and grandparents for no reason. They sound like evil-speaking to me. Here’s a recent example from a post meant – I gather – to encourage us not to lose faith in God’s faithfulness:

We are recovering from decades of passivity in the church. We forgot somehow that being a good Christian was more than showing up at church on Sunday and belonging to the right civic organizations. We forgot that we need to develop Christians — to make disciples out of the people who were already in the building! Given this forgetfulness, how is it realistic to expect these same pew-sitters (and their progeny) to go into the world to make disciples? Jesus tells us the disciples to witness to what they have seen. In general, what these folks have seen is what people wore to church on Sunday, not the power of the resurrected Christ. No wonder we’re dying.

Is this true? Well, I’m sure in some cases. But is this necessary?

Other than saying people who have been part of the church for 25 or 50 years aren’t really Christians, what is the value of these exercises? When offered by the middle-aged and seniors, they sound like score settling. When offered by the young, they sound like people who seek their own identity in trashing those who came before. The use of the pronoun “we” does not really cover this up. The tone is rarely one of shared shame and guilt, but rather pointing out other people their errors and failures.

It is not that these little rhetorical swipes at the gray-heads in the pews don’t have some truth in them. I just don’t see what purpose they serve. If you want to encourage me to believe God will remain faithful even if the UMC dies, please do so. Why make sweeping generalizations about decades of church life and millions of Christians in the process? Does the point you are trying to make depend on throwing sister Eunice under the church bus? Often when I read such posts or articles or books it does not. But chasing the old broad out of the sanctuary with her floral print dress and her covered dish just feels so good, we do it anyway.

See how I used “we” there? I’m a sinner, too.

How about a little more Exodus and a little less Isaiah in our rhetoric? How about a little less – you people are horrible but God loves you anyway – and a little more – God has heard your cries. There is a land of milk and honey over there. I’ll show you the way.

Yes, yes. The people in the pews are going to start hankering after the flesh-pots of Pharaoh pretty much right away, and the leaders are going to be praying to God, ”Why did you give me these ungrateful people?” But I don’t recall Moses ever saying, “You know, if you wouldn’t have been so lazy and contented in the 1950s, you could have gotten yourself out of Egypt pretty much on your own.” 

Maybe I’m just – as my daughter reminded me this morning – getting old. But I find myself less and less persuaded by people who feel the need to beat up on senior citizens in the service of a theological argument.

Is there a difference between doing wrong and committing a sin?

And what is that difference?

A question someone asked me recently raised these questions for me.

Here’s an interesting story out of Austin, Texas, about a project to assess and counsel United Methodist churches with fewer than 150 members that are within 2 miles of another UMC congregation.

The Ecclesiastes Project, named I assume for the “there is a time” passages and not the “eat, drink, and by merry” verses, is the only one of its kind in the UMC. Possible outcomes of the process include relocation, merger with a larger congregation, or closing. I’m not sure if revitalization in place is an option on the table or an imagined possibility. The story does not say. The church featured in the story had its – somewhat creepily named – “Celebration of Life” service on May 22. The closing church will be taken over by a larger and growing UMC congregation that needs more space.

After reading the story, I checked out the blog of the Austin District Superintendent Bobbi Kaye Jones. She appears to have a bold vision of the district. Her blog includes a recent talk she gave at a session on leadership.

I imagine many of you feel something like – our church is pretty good as it is, maybe really good. We already have strong activities and meaningful mission. We support our budget, pay our apportionments, raise our children and love our older adults. We can put ‘deep change’ off, we can tinker and tweak and basically redo most of what we did last year….. Ok. You can. Here’s the thing – I know most of our churches ARE pretty good, and some are really good. AND being pretty good and really good is good enough for us but we are not attracting other people.

This is not standard church happy talk.

She offers her pastors some bracing news about their role as well.

Your church has asked you for leadership, but may be more likely to reward you for management.  We are more likely to agree on best practices than we are to agree on bold vision.  This is a true statement:  delivering Satisfaction, comfortableness has to go off the list, for leadership – you can’t measure how you’re doing by number of complaints…or by the number of compliments.

Not keep people happy.  We are no longer in that moment.  Decisions we make now may determine whether or not our churches are alive even into the next generation. 9 million young adults who were confirmed in mainstream churches across America in the last decade are no longer attending anywhere.  We are one generation away.

Not happy news. But truth is not always happy.

The story in the newspaper offered some analysis that suggests the Methodist problem is not so easy to fix.

Other large denominations have closed churches — about 3,000 a year across denominations, [David Roozen , director of the Connecticut-based Hartford Institute] said, even before the recession — or merged some of their smaller churches with bigger ones. What makes the Methodist church project different is that a larger percentage of the country’s United Methodist churches have small congregations, which makes them more vulnerable, he said. Because Methodists are theologically in the middle of the road, it’s difficult to find people who feel strongly about the church’s identity, he said.

“They’re more conservative than most old-line Protestant churches, and they’re not as conservative as most evangelical Protestants,” Roozen said. “Very religious people have very strong commitments to their tradition. Those who are conservative wouldn’t look to the Methodist church, and those who are liberal wouldn’t necessarily look to the Methodist church.”

Austin appears to be trying to prove Roozen wrong. It will be interesting to see if the district does.

Richard Baxter (1615-1691) had a huge influence on John Wesley. It is easy to see when you read the work of both men. Last night, while reading Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor, I came across two passages that reminded me of Wesley. One gave me encouragement, the other one challenged me.

The first:

When we once return to the ancient simplicity of faith, then, and not till then, shall we return to the ancient love and peace. I would therefore recommend to all my brethern, as the most necessary thing to the Chruch’s peace, that they unite in necessary truths, and bear with one another in things that may be borne with; and do not make a larger creed, and more necessaries, than God hath done.

I can almost hear “think and let think” in those words. The passage grows out of Baxter’s concern that our dividing up of the body of Christ into wary and suspicious camps is dividing the work of God and encouraging people to remain outside of faith. They look and see the contention and the quarreling and conclude that if the church cannot settle the truth and live in peace, then why not remain at outside of it?

As often happens when I read old authors, I find the problems of our day are not so new. The present generation, apparently, did not invent the notion of staying away from religion because the people inside it don’t look much like Jesus.

Baxter moves from this section to discuss what he believes is needful for the church – once it has adopted a simple faith based on Scripture and ancient creeds and dropped its spirit of contentious infighting. This is church discipline, which he says is as much the pastor’s duty as preaching itself.

To the complaint of pastors in his day that exercising discipline will make them unpopular with the people and provoke anger from those who do not wish to be under church discipline, Baxter has little simpathy.

But if you cannot suffer for Christ, why did you put your hand to his plough? Why did you not first sit down and count the cost? This makes the ministerial work so unfaithfully executed, because it is so carnally undertaken; men enter upon it as a life of ease, and honour, and respectibility, and they resolve to attain their ends, and have what they expected by right or wrong. They looked not for hatred and suffering, and they will avoid it, though by the avoiding of their work.

Ouch. The Rev. Baxter hits pretty close to home here.

Does the ministerial office require at times suffering and enduring the hatred of humanity? Jesus seemed to think that every Christian would have to endure that. Why, then, would the clergy be exempt? But I – for one – am pretty good at being inoffensive in just about everything I do.

Some pastors embrace with too much gusto their roles as disciplinarians and notch their Bibles with sinners they’ve turned out of church. But this is not the direction my pastoral rivers run. The danger of my ministry is to be too kind not too cruel.

So, Baxter’s words remind me that being nice may not be the be-all and end-all of the pastoral vocation. Of course, I am not well tutored in the arts of loving discipline. Being a novice, I’m apt to be clumsy if I were to try to do this better.

Even as I write these words, I hear in my head the voice saying I should not worry about discipline. What people need is someone who will walk side-by-side with them with compassion and pray with them. I recall Eugene Peterson’s pastoral books that offer spiritual direction as a pastoral office but make no mention of church discipline. The contemporary spirit appears to be that the disciplinarian pastor is an anachronism and likely to do more harm than good.

If that is so, we need to take up this issue at General Conference.

Just last week we added new members at the church I serve – one by adult baptism. The new members and the congregation spoke the “I do” and the “I will” in response to the baptismal questions. We pledged to hold each other up and resist the working of evil in our lives and in the world. Read the words. We were making some pretty big pledges there.

In my Book of Discipline (please note the title of the book), it speaks of the obligation on the congregation to respond to those who do not keep their baptismal promises – to call them back to the faith they spoke at the font. In most churches I’ve been a part of, we mostly ignore these parts of the Discipline. We sometimes speak of the meaning of baptism and membership, but we don’t go so far as to put to individuals their Christian duty in a way that might unsettle them.

I must confess I would be very bad at that. But I’m not convinced either my awkwardness or my discomfort with the task is an excuse for my leaving the work undone.

Storms in my life are often reminders to seek the solid ground of spiritual disciplines that I have laid aside or let lapse. They are invitations to explore new disciplines that I have never allowed to sink into my life.

So, I have gotten Richard J. Foster’s Celebration of Discipline back off my bookshelf and started my apprenticeship back up again.

Today, I read his chapter on meditation.

In it, he draws an important distinction between Eastern forms of meditation – which focus on emptying of the self and detachment – with Christian meditation, which is an attempt to fill the mind and obtain a deeper attachment to God.

What happens in meditation is that we create the emotional and spiritual space which allows Christ to construct an inner sanctuary in the heart. The wonderful verse ‘I stand at the door and knock …’ was originally penned for believers not unbelievers (Rev. 3:20). We who have turned our lives over to Christ need to know how very much he longs to eat with us, to commune with us. He desires a perpetual Eucharistic feast in the inner sanctuary of the heart.

Meditation, Foster writes, is the discipline that allows Christ to set up a sanctuary in the heart that we carry with us even when we are not in the moment of meditation.

That sounds good to me.

This week – and on going – I will be putting in to practice two of the meditation techniques Foster outlines in his chapter.

Meditation on Scripture – This one will be difficult for me because the point of meditating on Scripture is not to analyze it or study it, but to “internalize and personalize it.” Meditation on Scripture seeks to make the word or verse a word to you and about you. See. Feel. Hear. Taste. Touch. Enter into it.

My impulses are all to analyze and dissect. Meditation will be a learning experience.

Palms Down. Palms Up. – In this meditation, you begin with palms down and hand over to God – release to God – all that burdens you and causes anxiety. Let go of your concerns as you verbalize them out loud or silently. Then turn palms up to receive from the Lord. You may again put words to what you receive.

I take Foster’s word near the end of the chapter as my guide.

You must not be discouraged if in the beginning your meditations have little meaning to you. There is a progression in the spiritual life, and it is wise to have some experience with lesser peaks before trying to tackle the Mt. Everest of the soul. So be patient with yourself. Besides, you are learning a discipline for which you have received no training. Nor does our culture encourage you to develop these skills. You will be going against the tide, but take heart; your task is of immense worth.

In my previous post, I commended this story by Donald Haynes about a recent visit to a hospital:

Yesterday I visited a 27-year-old woman whose mother called my lay leader to ask if I would visit. I drove 60 miles to a regional hospital to see this young woman. Her ovarian cancer has now metastasized. She can tolerate no more chemotherapy.

Only she and her fiancé were in the room. After a few minutes of conversation, I said: “Lisa and Tim, I know you must ask why this is happening. I am not here to tell you that I know, but I do want to reinforce that God is love and this cancer is not from your Heavenly Father.

“Jesus said, ‘If you love your children, how much more does your Father in heaven love them. If they ask you for bread you will not give them a stone.’

“Lisa, God is weeping that you are not getting well.”

She brightened and said, “I believe that. We were going where the preacher said that everything that ever happens to us is from God, and we quit.”

I have no desire to retract my admiration for his pastoral grace, but as I have been driving around and attending to my morning work today, the context in which he sets the story has been jangling around in my head. Haynes sets the story in an article about the contrast between Arminian and Calvinist theology.

It reminds me of a blog post written by John Piper about not wasting your cancer. In it, Piper certainly argues against the pastoral approach in Haynes’ story. Piper writes that God does not just use our cancer to help us grow, but permits it as part of his divine plan. Since God does not prevent cancer, he is the cause of it.

So, does that mean a Calvinist would walk into this dying woman’s room and tell her that God gave her cancer and she needs to use the cancer as an opportunity to get her head straight about the sovereignty of God?

Does that sound like Jesus?

Donald Haynes’ latest rallying cry for Arminian theology includes a wonderful story about his youth and his upbringing in a small Methodist church. He recounts a charming exchange with his mother who was worried that the young Haynes was being seduced by the Nazarenes away from Methodism.

(The concluding story of a pastoral hospital visit is worth the whole article. Read that if you skip the rest.)

The article also has a nice excerpt from a letter written by Susanna Wesley to John while he was at college:

This amazing “Mother of Methodism” wrote to her collegiate son in 1725, “’Tis certainly inconsistent with the justice and goodness of God to lay any man under either a physical or moral necessity of committing sin, and then to punish him for doing it.” She continued, “faith should never derogate God’s free grace nor impair the liberty of man.”

Aside from making me rethink the notes I write on my son’s Facebook page while he is at college, the quote – and Haynes’ article – reminds me why I find Wesleyan/Arminian faith so compelling and why I continue to return to Wesley for spiritual guidance.

I also note the role of parents in watching of the faith of their children. We might find it rather quaint now that a mother would be worried that her son was being lured from Methodism to the Nazarenes. We find such denominational border building wrongheaded today. But it does indicate a concern for the soul of a child so deep that it spills over into active care. Often today, it seems we place so little weight on the spiritual life of our children and neighbors that we do not care about the choices they make.

We will go to great effort to warn them about buying the wrong gadget but never about buying into a harmful theology. Perhaps we would all be wise to follow the example of Susanna Wesley.

Did Jesus tell jokes? Did Moses?

In the Psalms, God laughs, but it is not the raucous laughter of someone hearing a good joke. It is the knowing laughter of someone who sees how silly our plans stack up against God’s reality.

Did Paul who wrote that joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit laugh at knock-knock jokes?

John Wesley – I’m sorry to say – seemed to frown on levity and laughter. Richard Baxter considered preachers who tell jokes offensive, and he has his legions of supporters today.

But why?

Cruel laughter, mocking laughter, evil laughter, I get why we don’t like these. But what about just good old-fashioned joyful laughter?

We know that Jesus wept.

Did he laugh? Does he?

“Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field …” (Jeremiah 10:5)

A great number of books and commentators today remind us that we who go by the name of Christ often represent Jesus poorly. We are told that many people today do not want to associate with the church because they do not like what Christians do or say.

I find it interesting, therefore, when I read John Wesley sharing more or less the same feeling about Christians. He looked around him and saw few – barely a handful – of those who bear the name of Christ who live by what they claim to believe.

His phrase for this was to say many had the outward form of godliness but none of the power of it. They had no inward faith, only outward show.

In his pamplet “An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion” he went so far as to warn against judging Christ by Christians.

Whenever, therefore, you see an unreasonable man, you see one who perhaps calls himself by that name, but is no more a Christian than he is an angel. … The lives, therefore, of those who are called Christian, is no just objection to Christianity.

Wesley had no less of a sharp eye than those of our day who love Christ but do not like his friends, as the saying goes.

And here was his response: He sought with passion true Christianity. He looked for the essential heart of it, and proclaimed, taught, built up, and defended that against all who would tear it down or undermine it. He set aside all that was not absolutely central to this.

Hence he constantly dismissed as profitless wrangling questions of worship styles. This is the source of his famous “think and let think” approach to many questions of belief and doctrine.

And what was the central thing?

Again, from “An Earnest Appeal”:

We see, on every side, either men of no religion at all, or men of a lifeless, formal religion. We are grieved at the sight; and should greatly rejoice, if by any means we might convince some of that there is a better religion to be attained – a religion worthy of God that gave it. And this we conceive to be no other than love; the love of God and of all mankind; the loving God with all our heart, and soul, and strength, as having firt love us, as the fountain of all the good we have received, and of all we ever hope to enjoy; and the loving every soul which God hath made, every man on earth, as our own soul.

This love we believe to be the medicine of life, the never-failing remedy for all the evils of a disordered world, for all the miseries and vices of men.

This is the religion Wesley preached. It was what he said we could have only as an unmerited gift of faith by grace. It was his response to those who called Christians unChristian in his day.

As I read and think about what troubles the United Methodist Church – and the church universal – I often find myself wondering if what we are most wanting is more Christianity. I often wonder if we are too busy setting up scarecrows and knocking down straw men and not busy enough earnestly seeking and waiting for a rebirth of faith – as a gift of grace – among us.

By grace you are saved through faith. Such a simple claim, but so hard to truly grasp. I know that I fight the full truth of it.

I cannot let go of the sense that my work is not only necessary but also effective. If I only do the right things and will myself to have a pure enough faith and clean enough hands, I can click the tumblers of grace in my favor. If I try hard enough, I can believe. I can have faith. I can grab hold of salvation.

How badly I betray the meaning of grace when I do this. Grace is a gift. Faith itself is a gift. We cannot attain it by our efforts. We cannot. Nothing we can do can secure faith.

As John Wesley puts it in “An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion”:

If you ask, “Why then have not all men this faith? all, at least, who conceive it to be so happy a thing? Why do they not believe immediately?”

We answer, (on the Scripture hypothesis,) “It is the gift of God.” No man is able to work it in himself. It is a work of omnipotence. It requires no less power thus to quicken a dead soul, than to raise a body that lies in the grave. It is a new creation and none can create a soul anew, but He who at first created the heavens and the earth.

The only work that we can do is the work of repentance. This is a clearing of the ground, digging up the weeds and moving the rocks to make our souls ready for the seed of faith. But we cannot plant the seed and neither can we make it grow, because the seed is not ours, but God’s.

This is why poverty of spirit and meekness are among the first of the happy attitudes that Jesus commends to all who would believe.

And we fight this teaching – I fight it – because I want so dearly to hang on to my control over my faith. I don’t want to get down on my knees and say that it is beyond my power to believe. I don’t want to be the last. I want to be first. I want to show God my report card and hold out my hand for my reward – the one I have earned by my own effort and own merit.

I want to turn grace into wages of my good works. But – as Scripture tells us – only sin pays wages. Grace is the ultimate free lunch. I do not deserve it. I can only wait for it and accept it when it arrives.