John Meunier

Q7. Is field-preaching unlawful?

A. We conceive not. We do not know that it is contrary to any law either of God or man.

Q8. Have we not used it too sparingly?

A. It seems we have; (1.) Because our call is to save that which is lost. Now, cannot expect them to seek us. Therefore we should go and seek them.

— From the “Minutes of Several Conversations Between the Rev. Mr. Wesley and Others; From the Year 1744 to the Year 1789.”

In his most recent column, Donald Haynes exhorts United Methodists to recall that we are Arminians. To that end, Haynes recounts some of the particular marks of Arminian theology. The first key distinction for Wesleyans, Haynes writes, is our belief that Jesus died for everyone not just for a special few.

You don’t have to be an Arminian to preach in fields, of course. Wesley’s mentor in field preaching, George Whitfield, was a staunch Calvinist.

But Wesley believed Jesus died for everyone and this is why he preached in the open air. It is why he sought out coal towns and factory slums to preach in. It is why some churches today are so passionate about reaching out to people who do not look exactly like the people already sitting in the pews. It is one of the great traditions of Methodism.

Who is it near us that will not come to us? How shall we go and seek them?

Do not be silent, O God of my praise.
For wicked and deceitful mouths are opened against me,
speaking against me with lying tongues. (Psalm 109:1-2, NRSV)

Max walked up to me as I stood next to the altar. We had practiced letting go of resentments over those who had hurt us or hated us. Max said it was an interesting experience — in that way that indicated that “interesting” was the kindest word he could muster — but he had a problem. He could not think of anyone who hated him.

Sometimes the Psalms are hard for me to pray the same way that exercise was hard for Max. The Psalmist is to aware of his enemies. He knows who has it in for him. He could name names if asked.

I’m good a being inoffensive and nice. I know a few people who don’t particularly like me, but I don’t know any that I feel hatred or even malice from. This used to make it hard to pray the Psalms.

Then I remembered that we all have an accuser ready to accuse us where we are least able to ignore it. I have an accuser. The names all make most grad school educated mainline Protestants nervous – the devil, Satan, Lucifer, Lord of Flies.

He is there always speaking lies into our ears and our hearts. With a deceitful mouth and a lying tongue, the accuser tells us we have no place in the kingdom. We are fools to hope for so much. We are fools to believe any of the good news is true.

And here, the prayer of the Psalmist comforts me.

With my mouth I will give great thanks to the LORD;
I will praise him in the midst of the throng.
For he stands at the right hand of the needy,
to save them from those who would condemn them to death.
(Psalm 109: 30-31, NRSV)

Amen.

Jeremy Smith offers some brilliant advice to clergy candidates who care about justice issues.

As I said on his blog, this list of suggestions should be handed out to everyone in the ordination process. Great advice.

The Foundation for Evangelism has a great page I just discovered. It lists interviews with leaders of churches that have experienced 20% membership growth over a five-year period.

Reading the stories provides an interesting glimpse into the issue of “vibrancy” for those who find quantitative analysis too abstract. Of course, the stories need to be taken with some caution. Descriptions about what has happened at a church may or may not be a good indication of why things happen. But it is still interesting.

One interesting part of the page is that you can search by church size or annual conference. The church size categories are medium, large, and mega. I’m not sure why no small churches are on the list. So far no Indiana churches make the list.

By salvation I mean, not barely, according to the vulgar notion, deliverance from hell, or going to heaven; but a present deliverance from sin, a restoration of the soul to its primitive health, its original purity; a recovery of the divine nature; the renewal of our souls after the image of God, in righteousness and true holiness, in justice, mercy, and truth.

— From John Wesley’s “A Further Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion”

What does salvation mean to you?

For some it means being rescued from Hell. To say, “I am saved,” is to say something about Hell. But this is not so for John Wesley, at least not entirely.

For Wesley, sin is the prison from which we are sprung. To be saved is to be released from the present and future power of sin. Hell comes into the equation only because sin will drag us down to Hell if it can. If we do not break sin’s bonds, we will go with it all the way to its final destination.

But sin shackles us now. It infects our bodies and souls like a virus. It weakens and destroys even our awareness of God and the things of God.

For Wesleyans, the great celebration of salvation is not freedom from a future fiery fate. The great celebration is the breaking of sin’s power in our lives right now. Today.

But it is not something we can do ourselves. We cannot will ourselves out of our chains. We cannot resolve to be better. Earnest effort will avail us little. Instead, we must rely on grace. We must seek faith that Jesus Christ came for us, each one of us. He went to the cross for me. He went to the cross for you. When we are given faith enough to fill our hearts with that truth, the shackles of sin fall.

My great struggle has been the awareness that I can’t manufacture that faith. Reading so many books, writing so many blog posts, praying so many prayers, did not give me that faith and did not substitute for it. I could not create it. I had to wait for it in prayer and study and works of mercy.

Jesus Christ came that you might be free of sin. He came so everyone might be freed from its power. That is the good news.

Thanks to John Battern for this link to a great post by Dan Phillips. If I explain why the post is great, I’ll ruin Phillips’ work. Just go read it.

The New York Times recounts the religious influences on the governor of Illinois as he moved from death penalty opponent to signer of the law to abolish the penalty in his state. (ht: Religion News Service)

In the preceding weeks, he had heard arguments on the subject from prosecutors who spoke of the death penalty’s deterrent effect and from the grieving relatives of murder victims who saw in it fierce justice. He had reacquainted himself with about 20 capital cases overturned by DNA evidence or tainted by judicial error.

But on that decisive morning of March 9, he laid aside the secular factors and opened his Bible to a passage in II Corinthians about human imperfection. He prayed. And when he signed the bill striking down the death penalty, he cited one influence by name: Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago.

I caught this story on the Today Show this morning. It is about a multimillionaire and his spouse’s ugly divorce*. The facts of the story are complicated and messy. The media attention to the divorce and the blogging of the woman led the man to write a lengthy piece in the Huffington Post defending himself. But the part of the story that jumped out at me was the conclusion of the woman when looking back at her disaster of a marriage. She said people need to realize that marriage is a business contract with all the power issues that a business transaction includes.

Now, this is actually a very traditional view of marriage. Marriages for most of civilized history were little more than property transfers in which a woman was added to the household of the man, often with the exchange of valuable goods in one way or the other.

Christian marriage did not buck this system for most of its history, but it did set out some higher aspirations. Christian marriage placed obligations on both husband and wife. Men were called to treat their wives as sisters in Christ rather than as breeding stock and domestic labor. And marriage was viewed – at least ideally – as a permanent union between a man and woman, for better or worse.

Maybe this ideal never stood up to the tides of human sinfulness and social and economic pressures. But it certainly seems today that marriage as “business contract” is widely accepted. It might be a business contract celebrated with a huge and expensive party at the front end, but the primary reason to get married for many people is to secure certain tax and social advantages for the partners and their offspring. When the restraints or inconveniences of a marriage exceed the costs of breaking the contract, partners abandon their marriage vows.

This leaves me wondering what the proper Christian response is.

My first response, in all honesty, was not terribly Christian. My first reaction was anger. Indeed, I first wrote this post as a bit of a screed about the way straight people are destroying marriage. But as I took a breath and asked myself what the Christian take on this story should be, I recognized my anger as a temptation to sin.

So, I’m left more with questions than answers.

How do Christians speak about marriage in ways that resist the “business contract” understanding? How do we practice marriage in ways that mark us as different from the culture in which we live? How do we explain why Jesus Christ changes the way husbands and wives live together?

* Note: The story did not mention anything about the couple’s religious views. I write about this because the case represents an extreme case of the culture’s view of marriage, a view that is often unchallenged by Christians.

John Wesley on war:

And surely all our declamations on the strength of human reason, and the eminence of our virtues, are no more than the cant and jargon of pride and ignorance, so long as there is such a thing as war in the world. Men in general can never be allowed to be reasonable creatures, till they know not war any more. So long as this monster stalks uncontrolled, where is reason, virtue, humanity? They are utterly excluded; they have no place; they are a name, and nothing more.

The quote comes from Wesley’s pamphlet on Original Sin. The existence of war serves as one of his arguments that humans are depraved and fallen creatures. If the deists and the humanists were correct in their assessment of humanity, Wesley argues, why do we murder each other with such zeal?

Whether the humanists have an answer or not, the Christian surely must. For Wesley, that answer was Original Sin.

“The temptation for this Sunday and the next several Sundays will be to omit readings and/or to shorten the lengthy gospel readings. Resist that temptation. These are the church’s stories.”

Taylor Burton-Edwards (ht: Keith McIlwain)

My wife tried to help me one week when I was struggling to put together a sermon for Sunday. She said, “Just do what you do best. Tell us a story.”

In this five-year odyssey into and back out of the preaching ministry, I lost that. The weekly sermon – 50 times a year – made it more difficult to tell stories. I found myself talking about the Bible and expounding on principles. I found myself quoting or paraphrasing what some other person said. In my effort to “get something out of” the biblical texts, I’d squash the story right out of them.

Don’t misunderstand. Preachers talk about principles and life lessons for good reasons, holy reasons. They are trying to equip the saints and make disciples. They want the stories – and the non-stories – in the Bible to transform people, and most of us need road signs. Left to our own, we will smile at a pretty story and keep on going down the highway.

Preachers need to get out the map and show us that the road we are on is not going where we want. They need to give us directions. Check the tires. Top of the oil. Clean the headlights. With their exegetical coveralls and their hands stained with the grease of human life, preachers labor away to get us on the right road and ready us for its narrow and slippery curves.

It just turns out that I am not much of a mechanic of lost souls.

It is why I never could preach the epistles. You can’t preach those without talking about the “so what” factor. You have to preach application. And I never got to the point where I felt I had any business doing that.

I’m just an English major and a journalist at heart. I like good stories. I like watching and listening and repeating what I’ve seen and heard. I like the way words hook up to each other. I want to know the name of the dog and the hometown of the kid who set the record for watermelon seed spitting.

But I don’t want to tell you what to do or to think or to say.

I don’t want to boil the story of David and Goliath down to a single point. I don’t want to tell you what Easter should mean to your life. I don’t want to assemble a cleverly contrived sermon series that changes the way you think about marriage or your job or forgiving your jerky neighbor for killing your cat.

The church needs men and women who do that. It just is not me.

Give me the stories. Give me the church’s stories. Even if it takes too long to read them on Sunday morning.