John Wesley followed Jesus when his heart was cold as a stone. He followed when he thought what Jesus wanted was hard work and sincere effort. He followed until his faith as nearly broken by failure and abandonment. And then Jesus came to life within his heart and the Holy Spirit came upon him with power, and he changed England.

How do we help United Methodists who have started this journey — like the disciples and John Wesley — but have not completed it?

This blog has an exceptionally good response to the whole matter.

In an interview published last week, she said this:

Demi added: ‘What scares me is that I’m going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I’m really not lovable, that I’m not worthy of being love. That there’s something fundamentally wrong with me.’

The lectionary this week has me spending a lot of time pondering the man with the unclean spirit. I hear in Moore’s statement above a kindred spirit to the man in the gospel lesson this week.

We are not told whether the man with the unclean spirit has a mental or physical ailment. It may be that the spirit is hidden from others. Perhaps the congregation is stunned when the man bursts out because he seemed so “normal” up to that point.

Whatever the case, the exorcism in the middle of a Sabbath service stirs things up. And, I am told, for 21st century people stirs up all kinds of questions. People come to this text with questions about faith healing and science.

Are these questions getting in the way of Jesus and the gospel or are they the doorway to Jesus and the gospel?

How explicitly should the sermon engage these questions?

And how should they be engaged?

Since the next couple weeks with Mark we will be getting a series of healing stories, it might be best to bring these questions up and deal with them directly this Sunday. Or is this falling into a mistake by placing the emphasis on the wrong things?

These are some of the questions I’m thinking about and praying about this week thanks to the Revised Common Lectionary.

I once had the organ player have a bit of a spell during the sermon. She swooned a bit. We stopped what we were doing and attended to her. The rest of the sermon was gone. I preached it, but no one remembered it. They were all watching our organ to player to see if she was okay.

Jesus had a similar problem at the synagogue that day. Notice the Scripture does not give us any clue what he taught. The only thing we remember from that day was this remarkable outburst and exorcism. Here, indeed, was the real teaching of the day.

Where the messiah goes, the demons flee.

I think some very hard realizations are going to hit us as a denomination. If we are going to make the shift to be about making disciples instead of making church members, there are people who are not going to be happy. In discipleship mode, neither clergy nor congregations are”cared for” – we become resources. Maybe even expendable resources.

For those of us who recently renewed our Wesleyan Covenant, his words echo in that prayer.

• Why do people need Jesus?
• Why do they need the church?
• Why do they need this particular church?

Hamilton’s answer to the first question goes something like this: Jesus Christ is the answer to the deepest longings of the human heart. In relationship with Jesus we discover the key to a life filled with joy, love, and hope.

It is a great answer. It makes me want to know Jesus better.

In the book where I read it, Hamilton does not go into the Scriptural basis for this answer. I was trying to think where I’d go to develop that.

“I’m the way, the truth, and the life,” seems like an obvious brick in that theological house.

Where else would you go in Scripture for this?

Where do you see Scripture making this answer difficult to maintain?

Do you have a different answer than Hamilton?

I thought of that when I read a remarkable letter John Wesley wrote May 14, 1738, just 10 days before Aldersgate. The letter was to the Rev. William Law, who had been something of a spiritual mentor and teacher to the young Wesley. In the letter, Wesley recounted how law’s teaching had led him to preach the law.

For two years (more especially) I have been preaching after the model of your two practical treatises; and all that heard have allowed, that the law is great, wonderful, and holy. But no sooner than did they attempt to fulfill it, but they found that it is too high for man: And that by doing “the works of the law shall no flesh living be justified.”

To remedy this, I exhorted them, and stirred up myself, to pray earnestly for the grace of God, and to use all the other means of obtaining that grace, which the all-wise God hath appointed. But still, both they and I were more and more convinced, that this is a law by which a man cannot live: the law in our members continually warring against it, and bringing us into deeper captivity to the law of sin.

Here is the “try harder” Christianity that my friend spoke of. If we cannot be good and holy and loving people, the solution is to redouble our efforts. Hunker down. Put your back into it. Try harder.

But here is what Wesley wrote to Law.

Under this heavy yoke I might have groaned till death, had not a holy man, to whom God lately directed me, upon my complaining thereof, answered at once, “Believe, and thou shalt be saved. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ with all they heart, and nothing shall be impossible to thee. This faith, indeed, as well as the salvation it brings, is the free gift of God. But seek, and thou shalt find. Strip thyself naked of they own works, and thy own righteousness, and fly to him. For whosoever cometh unto him, he will in no wise cast out.”

And I love what Wesley wrote next, the young disciple to the mentor and teacher.

Now, Sir, suffer me to ask, How will you answer it to our common Lord, that you never gave me this advice?

I my mind’s ear, I hear the sound of one who had struggled and strained terribly. He had despaired of relief. And then one day someone offered him a key to unlock the chains that bound him down. It was liberating and exciting, but in a moment the thought occurred to him. “If this was so easy to do, why did no one do it before? Why was I forced to toil in such darkness when the light was so close at hand?”

Part of the goal of the letter, so it appears to me, is to challenge Law’s own faith, so the tone is not so innocent as I suggest here. There are barbs aplenty.

And yet, I wonder how many people sitting in our pews might throw the same question up at us. How many people who have heard the ungospel of “try harder” from our pulpits might ask us “why have you never told us this before” if we were to preach more faithfully the gospel of, as Wesley puts it, “the living, justifying faith in the blood of Jesus”?

How many of our people stumble onward with the kind of faith Wesley had: “that speculative, notional, airy shadow, which lives in the head, not in the heart”?

Bonhoeffer tells us that the path to our true self is to find and follow and obey God.

Nouwen tells us that the path to God starts by delving into our inner and true selves.

When I read John Wesley, I hear Bonhoeffer’s voice much more strongly than Nouwen’s in the background.

Over at the Emerging UMC blog, he posted today the framework. It includes four things a congregation can and should do well: offer public worship, teach basic doctrine, care for members and participants, and be a reliable institution in the local community. (At the blog, he adds a fifth aimed at Methodists and other missional bodies.)

What I have long liked about the framework is that it gives us a way to think carefully about what a congregation can do, what it historically has done, and what it should do. It also helps us understand what a congregation is not generally set up to do well. Taylor has long argued that “making disciples” is not a core competency of a congregation. Disciples are made in intentional communities — like the early Methodists society and bands — consisting of people who want to pursue discipleship and agree to covenant together to watch over each other in love. A congregation might house some disciple-making bodies, but it is not itself such a body. The congregation is open to everyone. The disciple-making community is open only to those willing to submit to its rule and expectations.

His argument is hugely important for the United Methodist Church. Getting a clear bead on what a congregation is meant to do and what it cannot do will go a long way toward helping us plot a path forward. In many ways, the Call to Action plan lines up well with Taylor’s framework. The things the Vital Congregations initiative seeks to do fit within his four competencies.

But you can do all the things that Vital Congregations calls for and what you will have at the end is stronger congregations. You will not necessarily have more disciples (unless you define the word “disciple” loosely enough.)

This is why so many people are wary of the Call to Action and Vital Congregations efforts. They claim more than they can deliver or even attempt to deliver. They claim they will create disciples. What they really will do — and perhaps quite well — is create more congregations that have strengths in some of the four competencies Taylor outlines.

This is not  bad thing. Quite the contrary. It is good. Stronger congregations are good because the four things they do well (or five in Taylor’s expanded framework) are necessary for the functioning of the church universal.

But they do not actually produce or make disciples. They provide a support structure on which disciple-making communities can anchor.

This way of thinking about it helps me. It helps me think about the church I serve. It helps me be less anxious about the claims of the Call to Action initiative. I appreciate Taylor’s willingness to share his ideas.