John Meunier

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“John Wesley had good answers for the problems and challenges of his day – for his context – but we need new answers for today.”

United Methodists vary quite a bit in how they react to claims like this one.

To one end of the spectrum are those who really don’t see much point in engaging with Wesley. His context and time were so different that they leave us with few clues to our own. He is a revered but ultimately irrelevant theological ancestor.

To the other end are those who verge on making John Wesley a false idol. (I’ve been accused of this from time to time.) Wesley’s theology, methods, teachings, and example are held up against current church practice and where variance is found it is called error.

I certainly am more at risk of the second extreme than the first. I find it odd to bear the name of the people called Methodist and disdain any connection with the person, the spirit, and the ideas that gave rise to the name of Methodist in the first place.

I am also influenced by the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre and his notion of a tradition. A tradition is a conversation through time that finds itself continually engaged with certain questions and observes certain mutual understandings about what counts as a good answer to those questions.

For me, the Wesleyan tradition asks vital questions and poses some of the most compelling answers about the nature and meaning of Christianity. When we stop asking the questions that so animated John Wesley’s ministry, we cease to be part of the movement.

We might very well still be in the Christian tradition, but we’ve moved out of the Wesleyan channel into other waters.

Among the questions I hear Wesley asking are:

1. What is the true nature of Christian religion?
2. How do I get to heaven?
3. What is salvation?
4. What can I know and experience with regard to my salvation?
5. Who does God want to save?
6. How do faith and works go together?

The questions themselves are not unique at all to Wesley, but the kinds of answers he gave them and the centrality he placed on them shaped the conversation that would become the Wesleyan tradition.

So, for me at least, being a part of this tradition means wrestling with the same questions Wesley did and at least starting from the position of saying his answers place a burden on me to explain why I find them inadequate if I refuse to accept them but still desire to be among the people called Methodist.

This is why I read and write and think about Wesley so much. For me at least, doing so enriches my experience of the Christian faith.

The cartoon Zits is one of those that makes you feel like someone must have a camera inside your house. Every Sunday morning it seemed like our life was being put on the funny pages.

Recently, the Revised Common Lectionary has been doing the same thing to me. (Unliked Zits, of course, the lectionary suffers for not having illustrations.)

Here’s the gospel reading for next Sunday:

Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, ”Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.

Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’

Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace.

So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

I’m not going to go into details of my personal life on a public blog, but – let me just note – it’s a bit creepy to have the lectionary hit you between the eyes.

John Wesley’s message about the use of money is probably among the top 10 most quoted of his sayings.

Gain all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can.

Some have noted that contemporary United Methodists take to the first two principles, but seem to have forgotten the third. But I’d contend we – me included – do not practice the second very well either.

Part of this stems from a misunderstanding. When Wesley counseled the people called Methodist to “save” all they could, he did not mean put it in a bank. He was not arguing for a fat retirement account and a healthy stock portfolio.

By “save” he meant “do not spend.” Here’s how he puts it in his sermon “The Use of Money.”

Having gained all you can, by honest wisdom and unwearied diligence, the second rule of Christian prudence is,” Save all you can.” Do not throw the precious talent into the sea: Leave that folly to heathen philosophers. Do not throw it away in idle expenses, which is just the same as throwing it into the sea. Expend no part of it merely to gratify the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eye, or the pride of life.

He goes into detail on what he means in the sermon, but the point is clear if we know anything about his preaching and life. Wesley himself gave up drinking tea in part because doing so was a way to reduce his own expenses.

He taught that Christians need nothing more than “plain” clothing and simple food to eat. He preached against the ownership of multiple homes – and certainly would have been aghast by the mansions many of us feel we cannot live without. I cannot even fathom his reaction to our contemporary consumer culture.

Somewhere along the way, we either decided that he did not know how to interpret the Bible with regard to this topic, or we just stopped paying attention to what New Testament teaches. In some ways, our relationship with money and material things are even more out-of-whack with the origins of our movement than our relationship with spiritual things.

In matters spiritual, at least, we still claim to strive to be wise and faithful. We still claim to seek the fruits of the Spirit and follow Jesus. But when it comes to money and material possessions, Wesley’s diagnosis of his contemporaries fits all too well to us.

With regard to most of the commandments of God, whether relating to the heart or life, the Heathens of Africa or America stand much on a level with those that are called Christians. The Christians observe them (a few only being excepted) very near as much as the Heathens. For instance: the generality of the natives of England, commonly called Christians, are as sober and as temperate as the generality of the heathens near the Cape of Good Hope. And so the Dutch or French Christians are as humble and as chaste as the Choctaw or Cherokee Indians. It is not easy to say, when we compare the bulk of the nations in Europe with those in America, whether the superiority lies on the one side or the other. At least the American has not much the advantage. But we cannot affirm this with regard to the command now before us. Here the heathen has far the pre-eminence. He desires and seeks nothing more than plain food to eat and plain raiment to put on. And he seeks this only from day to day. He reserves, he lays up nothing; unless it be as much corn at one season of the year as he will need before that season returns. This command, therefore, the heathens, though they know it not, do constantly and punctually observe. They “lay up for themselves no treasures upon earth;” no stores of purple or fine linen, of gold or silver, which either “moth or rust may corrupt”, or “thieves break through and steal.” But how do the Christians observe what they profess to receive as a command of the most high God? Not at all! Not in any degree; no more than if no such command had ever been given to man. Even the good Christians, as they are accounted by others as well as themselves, pay no manner of regard thereto. It might as well be still hid in its original Greek for any notice they take of it. In what Christian city do you find one man of five hundred who makes the least scruple of laying up just as much treasure as he can? — of increasing his goods just as far as he is able? There are indeed those who would not do this unjustly; there are many who will neither rob nor steal; and some who will not defraud their neighbour; nay, who will not gain either by his ignorance or necessity. But this is quite another point. Even these do not scruple the thing, but the manner of it. They do not scruple the “laying up treasures upon earth,” but the laying them up by dishonesty. They do not start at disobeying Christ, but at a breach of heathen morality. So that even these honest men do no more obey this command than a highwayman or a house-breaker. Nay, they never designed to obey it. From their youth up it never entered into their thoughts. They were bred up by their Christian parents, masters, and friends, without any instruction at all concerning it; unless it were this, — to break it as soon and as much as they could, and to continue breaking it to their lives’ end.

How radical a change would it require in the life of Methodism in North America to take even this one teaching of Wesley’s as a rebuke and measure of our discipleship?

How important is authenticity?

John Wesley famously followed Peter Bohler’s advice to preach faith until he had it. He later – according to Richard Heitzenrater’s Wesley and the People Called Methodist – had months of wrestling with himself over the timing and nature of justification, sanctification, and assurance. But even as he struggled, he continued to preach again and again what comes to us as sermon 1 in his collected sermons, “Salvation by Faith,” which states things in terms he would later qualify or move away from.

By what I understand to be contemporary standards of authenticity, Wesley would come up short. He did not preach his doubts and qualify in his sermons with the questions that he clearly wrestled with in his own mind.

So, do we fault him for his bad practice? Or do we look at the fruit of these practices and question whether our attachment to preacher authenticity is perhaps itself a doubtful thing?

In a really stunning 1985 article in Theology Today, Albert Outler argued that the first task of post-liberal (that would be us) biblical work is to recapture the idea of the unity that holds the Bible together:

In a postliberal age, a fresh case must be made for the Bible’s integrity, if this can be done—and if the proper hermeneutical implications can be drawn. If such an integrity is to be denied, the alternatives cannot be evaded. Neither Judaism nor Christianity can survive with their Holy Scriptures regarded as nothing more than anthologies of religious literature.

I am reminded when I read that of the oft-used teaching that the Bible is not “a” book, but a library of books. I wonder if such an attitude is the idea that Outler is critiquing here.

He conlcudes by quoting what Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel said after listening to a long theological discussion at a conference that Outler was part of:

It has seemed puzzling to me how greatly attached to the Bible you seem to be and yet how much like pagans you handle it. The great challenge to those of us who wish to take the Bible seriously is to let it teach us its own essential categories; and then for us to think with them, instead of just about them.

I love that. Thank you Rabbi Heschel and Brother Outler.

On the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “I Have a Dream” speech, here is a thoughtful post by Methoblogger Tom Parkinson on the tensions between pacificism and injustice as understood by MLK and Reinhold Niebuhr.

The story is about too many pastors and not enough pulpits. The link on the UMC homepage uses these words: “clergy careers.”

Why does that word seem so out of place to me? Career.

Make it an -ism and we say bad things about it. Careerism is rarely praised.

But in its origin the word means nothing more than road. It was – if my dictionary is to be believed – a word that got its meaning from the carts, the cars, that use it. Your career is the road on which you travel.

For all that, I struggle with the idea that clergy have careers. The word is too infested with contemporary meanings of self-advancement and self-direction, at least in my ears.

We do not choose this road. It is not ours. We can refuse to get in the car, but we never get to drive it.

If you can’t tell by my recent posts, I’m gearing up to go back to teaching, which leads me to spend time with books and ideas not meant for Methodist church pastors.

Today, it’s single-loop vs. double-loop learning.

Chris Argyris argues that there are two kinds of organizational learning. The first is when we spot a problem or something that does not fit our expectations and we use well-known procedures and processes to  make this match again.

This is single-loop learning because routine and well-used processes fix the problem or address the situation.

Single-loop learning becomes a problem when the situation that needs correcting cannot be fixed based on the skills and processes we already have or that grow out of what we already know. When the nature of the problem not longer fits within the box of our established paradigms, values, and goals, single-loop solutions lose their power.

Double-loop learning is when we go back and question and change the basic governing ideas that shape everything we do. It is where you go back under the hood and ask, “Now why do we exist?” “What assumptions shape what we do?” And so on.

Double-loop learning is hard, hard, hard.

And it is where the United Methodist Church is these days. The well-worn and highly successful single-loop answers of the last 100 years broke down a while back, but we keep trying to apply them all the same because we don’t know how to do anything else.

Given our structure, I’m not sure we have the capacity for the kind of organizational learning that Argyris envisions. His work is much more within hierarchical organizations like business firms.

But as I was reading his ideas, I could not help but think of us.

Which of these more closely resembles you belief about intelligence?

1.Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much.

2. No matter who you are, you can significantly change your intelligence level.

Professor Carol Dweck has studied the implications of answering these questions for more than two decades. It turns out, most of us exhibit with a fixed mindset about people’s abilities (including our own) or a growth mindset. And the mindset we have has a profound influence on the way we live and experience life.

Read Dweck’s book for full details, but the short version is that fixed mindset folks tend to believe their abilities cannot change and therefore tend to be careful about putting themselves in positions where they might fail – and find out they are not that smart or talented or whatever – and tend to experience losing and failure as crushing.

Growth mindset people tend to look at failure and challenge as an opportunity to learn and are more likely to take on hard challenges because they do not believe failing at a task says anything permanent about them.

Again, the book has more detail.

Among the things I was thinking about as I read this was whether these concepts help us think about our faith and the situation of the United Methodist Church.

Do we believe that our spiritual gifts are fixed for all time? Or do we believe they grow and develop?

Wesleyanism seems to me to be based on a growth mindset about faith and holiness. With God’s help, we can always grow in faith. We can always be a little more holy tomorrow than we were today. Our failure today says little about where we might be next year.

And if that is so on the individual level, how much more would it help our denomination to have a growth mindset? I don’t mean here the church growth movement, but the idea that whatever strengths, abilities, and gifts we have as a denomination are not fixed in stone or beyond any power of God or humanity to change them. With effort, practice, and grace they can grow. Our weaknesses can be offset. The future potential of the denomination, of our individual congregations, or our own faith cannot be determined by the present or the past.

As a person prone to a fixed mindset about myself and the world, I found the book quite an eye opener.