John Meunier

I’ll be away from blogging until Jan. 9 or so.

Happy New Year.

Pursue the goal of peace along with everyone — and holiness as well, because no one will see the Lord without it. (Hebrews 12:14, CEB)

No one will see the Lord without holiness.

If there is a single verse that explains the ministry of John Wesley, this is it. He was convinced of this. He spent ten years striving after holiness by human means. Then, God revealed to him the miracle of faith. It was by faith that a person could be made holy. Any person, all persons could be made holy by faith.

And the rest is history.

If John Wesley stood up in the end zone of a football game with a rainbow-colored wig and a cardboard sign, he would display Hebrews 12:14 and not John 3:16.

There are all kinds of good reasons not to do this, but I do find myself wondering what my single verse would be.

Do you have one?

I want to offer a challenge/bit of encouragement to my brothers and sisters in the Methodist/Wesleyan family.

Along with your various resolutions about calorie intake and exercise and starting a new hobby, make this promise to yourself. Read one of John Wesley’s sermons each week and think about the ways it does or does not speak to you today. At one sermon per week, that’s the first 52, which depending on which list you use is almost the entire set of “standard” sermons. You can read the funeral sermon for George Whitefield on New Year’s Day 2013 to close out the list.

If you don’t own a copy of the sermons in book form, here’s a link to the sermons by number.

First up, Sermon 1 “Salvation by Faith.”

John Wesley was writing to a Scottish woman about the trials of Methodists and the failures of Methodist preachers in and around Edinburgh. Wesley attributed the problems to the work of ministers and preachers who opposed the Methodist doctrines.

If any one could show you, by plain Scripture and reason, a more excellent way than that you have received, you certainly would do well to receive it; and, I trust, I should do the same. But I think it will not be easy for any one to show us, either that Christ did not die for all, or that he is not willing as well as able to cleanse from all sin, even in the present world. If your steady adherence to these great truths be termed bigotry, yet you have no need to be ashamed. You are reproached for Christ’s sake, and the Spirit of glory and of Christ shall rest upon you.

These two points of doctrine I find Wesley defending throughout his ministry. This letter from 1771 stakes out the same ground that the much younger Wesley often defended.

Jesus Christ died for all people, not just the elect. Therefore, salvation is open to all. No one has been predestined out of grace.

God can remove all sin from us in this life. We do not have to wait for heaven or the edge of death for this gift of grace. In this life, we can be perfected in love of God and neighbor. We can love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength and our neighbor as ourself.

In my own pastoral work, I find the second doctrine — perfection — still as controversial as it was in Wesley’s day. Few I encounter would deny that grace is free for all, but many deny strongly that perfection in love is possible. They say, “I am not perfect. I never will be perfect.”

This is, in part, the same problem with the meaning of words that Wesley struggled with. In every extended discourse on perfection I’ve read, Wesley was at pains to distinguish the difference between perfection in love and more general notion of being a perfect person. He always had to explain that even the perfected saints were and are subject to errors, mistakes, and other limitations of life in this body of flesh.

But, even so, what I detect in the response of people I meet is a resignation to sin. There is some comfort in the notion. If I can never escape sin, then perhaps I do not have to strive so hard to resist it. But it is more than that. We do not preach perfection, so people do not imagine it is possible. We do not know many — or any — examples of those who have been granted perfection in love, so we have few models. Our optimism about the power of grace extends only so far.

Wesley believed Scripture and reason (as opposed to tradition, I wonder?) taught that God promised to cleanse us of all sin. He believed that what God promises God can and will do.

There is no doubt that this doctrine is an essential teaching of Wesley, but it is not — and has not been — an essential teaching of United Methodists.

I wonder where, then, Wesley was wrong in his reading of Scripture and in his thinking. By what Scripture and plain reasoning do we consider him to have been on the wrong path for so much of his ministry? How can we correct his flaws?

USA Today published a story on Christmas about people who take a “who cares?” or “so what?” attitude toward all religion. The article quotes a spate of folks who say they just can’t be bothered to get curious about God. In polls they are sometimes called “nones.” They are not religious, but neither are they atheists of a militant stripe. They just say spiritual questions do not matter.

A typical example:

For them, the Almighty is off the radar, like some tiny foreign country they know exists but never think about.

“God? Purpose? You don’t need an opinion on those things to function,” says Suhas Sreedhar, 26, a engineer working in a computer company in Manhattan.

Raised in New Jersey by his devoutly Hindu mother and staunchly atheist father, “I was saturated with both views and after a while, I realized I don’t need either perspective.

“There may be unanswerable questions that could be cool or fascinating. Speculating on them is a fun parlor game, but they don’t shed any meaning on my life,” Sreedhar says.

The question I had as I read this story was how I should interpret the experience of the spiritually apathetic.

John Wesley would say they are spiritually asleep. They are in a state of nature. It is no surprise that they have no awareness of God or the life of the spirit. That is the very definition of the “natural man” as Wesley would put it.

For his soul is in a deep sleep: His spiritual senses are not awake; They discern neither spiritual good nor evil. The eyes of his understanding are closed; They are sealed together, and see not. Clouds and darkness continually rest upon them; for he lies in the valley of the shadow of death. Hence having no inlets for the knowledge of spiritual things, all the avenues of his soul being shut up, he is in gross, stupid ignorance of whatever he is most concerned to know.

To Wesley, the blissfully apathetic about religion are not at all shocking. They are not a threat to religion or faith. They are the lost, the blind, the happy captives of the devil.

What do we in the United Methodist Church say? How do we understand the spiritual significance of this widespread attitude?

Jason Vickers‘ Minding the Good Ground: A Theology for Church Renewal should be read widely by the leaders and members of our denomination. It is a short but deep book that assumes a level of comfort with theological terms and concepts that probably would make it a challenging book for most small group book studies. But any lay leader with some previous exposure to theology or any pastor should be able to easily engage with Vickers’ argument.

His method is to look for a theology to underpin our renewal efforts by asking three questions.

He asks first: What is the nature of the church. His answer: A charismatic community whose life depends entirely upon the Holy Spirit.

He asks next: What is the mission of the church. His answer: To worship the Trinitarian God and to witness to Jesus Christ in word and deed.

He asks finally: What does the church have to offer the world. His answer: Incorporation into the Trinitarian life of God by the working of the Holy Spirit.

How Vickers arrives at each of these answers and why he asks these particular questions are worth discovering in the reading of his book. His observations about the current debates and divisions within the church ring true and offer some telling insights into our situation.

This is not a “how-to” book with a raft of steps to take to renew the church. Indeed, his first suggestion is that we “tarry in prayer” as the post-Ascension disciples did while we await the Holy Spirit’s leading. This suggestion will not play well with those who have already despaired of any solution or who are agitating for an approach that amounts to “we must do something!”

The forces of anxiety and the “functional deism” that Vickers identifies in his book have us in their grip, so I do not anticipate his theological approach to the problems of the church will move our conversations much — at least not at the highest levels where public relations and the tactics of implementation are the topics of primary concern.

Nonetheless, it is a rewarding book to read, one that asks important questions and offers interesting and compelling answers.

From Minding the Good Ground by Jason Vickers:

Amid our growing anxiety about the church, we ought to be doing ecclesiology on our knees. Far from shouting at one another, we need to enter into a round of prayerful reflection on what the church is called by God to be and to do in the world. The proper way to begin this prayerful reflection is not by naming what is wrong with the church or by making a case for how to put things right, and we certainly shouldn’t  begin by deciding who is to blame. Rather, we should begin by reflecting prayerfully on what sort of community the church is. In other words, the proper place to begin is with the nature of the church.

I’ve been studying Galatians 4:4-7. In Galatians, much of Paul’s concern is arguing against what he calls elsewhere the circumcision faction, those who taught that Gentiles must convert to Judaism before they could become Christians.

I’m curious what analogies we can draw between the circumcision faction of Paul’s day and the church today. Who are the people or what are the ideas that are common today that would be like the circumcision argument of Paul’s day?

Craig Adams has been tweeting bits and pieces of books he has been reading on his Kindle. One of his recent tweets from Scot McKnight‘s book The King Jesus Gospel reminded me of something William J. Abraham writes about in his works on evangelism:

Most of evangelism today is obsessed with getting someone to make a decision; the apostles, however, were obsessed with making disciples. Those two words — decision and disciples — are behind this entire book. Evangelism that focuses on decisions short circuits and — yes, the word is appropriate — aborts the design of the gospel, while evangelism that aims at disciples slows down to offer the full gospel of Jesus and the apostles.

Enough people I respect have written this — and it rings true with my reading of the Bible — that I try to keep such thoughts in mind any time the idea of evangelism comes up in my own thoughts or conversations.

And yet, I want to be cautious here. We should not fall into the trap of setting decisions and discipleship against each other. (I am not arguing McKnight does that. I have not read his book.) Discipleship — at some point — requires a decision to follow Jesus. Throughout the Bible, God puts people to a decision.

What is true, though, is decision is not the end of discipleship. As Taylor Burton-Edwards wrote a while back, taking decision as the end-point leaves a lot of new born Christians trapped in infancy or leaves them abandoned to the elements of the world where they die of exposure.

Discipleship is much more than a decision, but each of us must decide whether we will receive the grace and follow the lead of the one who calls us.

As a licensed pastor, I have not taken vows of ordination. The bishop has not laid hands on me. No one has ever said to me, “Take thou authority.”

So, perhaps it is outsider’s envy or fascination that gets me thinking about the vows our deacons and elders take. I wonder what they mean and how they shape our common ministry.

The service of ordination of elders in the United Methodist Church includes the following questions asked of those coming forward for ordination. (Taken from this online order of service.)

Do you trust that God has called you to the life and work of ordained ministry?
I do so trust.

Do you believe in the Triune God, and confess Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?
I do so believe and confess.

Are you persuaded that the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments contain all things necessary for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, and are the unique and authoritative standard for the church’s faith and life?
I am so persuaded, by God’s grace.

Will you be faithful in prayer, in the study of the Holy Scriptures, and with the help of the Holy Spirit
continually rekindle the gift of God that is in you?
I will, God being my helper.

Will you do your best to pattern your life in accordance with the teachings of Christ?
I will, with the help of God.

Will you, in the exercise of your ministry lead the people of God to faith in Jesus Christ, to participate in the life and work of the community, and to seek peace, justice, and freedom for all people?
I will, with the help of God.

Will you be loyal to The United Methodist Church accepting its order, liturgy, doctrine, and discipline,
committing yourself to be accountable with those serving with you, and to the bishop and those who are
appointed to supervise your ministry?
I will, God being my helper.

There is a lot of wiggle room in some of those questions, of course. What does it mean to “accept” the order, liturgy, doctrine, and discipline of the United Methodist Church, for instance? Or, what does it mean to say the Old and New Testament are the standard for the life and faith of the church? Or, even, what does it mean to seek justice and freedom for all people?

Nonetheless, as I try to construct an understanding of my ministry, I find myself looking to places like this. At the foundation, what are the things that clergy understand to be their shared commitments? This is my question.