The most awesome privilege

I picked up a copy of John Stott’s preaching book, Between Two Worlds. It was published in 1982, but does not feel dated to me. Perhaps Indiana in 2012 is like England in 1982 when it comes to preaching and the life of the church.

At the heart of his book on preaching, Stott calls for two things: conviction and bridge-building.

First, he pleads for preachers to have conviction. Conviction about who God is and does. Conviction about the authority and inspiration of the Bible. Conviction about the need for preaching pastors in the life of the church.

Second, he summons preachers to be bridge-builders, connecting the Bible to the life of the people who gather to hear it read and expounded upon. He knocks conservatives for preaching the Bible without making any connections to the world in which people live. He knocks liberals for preaching the questions and concerns of the world without significant contact with the Bible.

While his second point resonates, it is his first point about conviction that hits most home for me. So much of the preaching advice and counsel I read these days suggests we need to start with an acute awareness of the doubtfulness of what we preach. The congregation  gives the Bible no real authority, and certainly does not give the preacher any, so we must approach them at angles and lure them with promises that what we offer will make their lives better.

Stott argues counter to this. He writes that preaching must emerge from strong convictions about God, Scripture, the church, the pastorate, and preaching itself. If it does not, he writes, it is folly and arrogance.

Can we find a common foundation?

Perhaps because he was an evangelical striving to keep other evangelicals within the Church of England, I find John Stott to be one of the contemporary writers who most reminds me of John Wesley in tone and broader concerns. His little book Evangelical Truth: A Personal Plea for Unity, Integrity, and Faithfulness is a real gem.

Near the end of the book, he has this summary:

We have been preoccupied through much of this book with the trinitarian shape of the evangelical faith, that is, with the initiative of God in revealing himself, the love of Christ in dying for our sins, and the ministry of the Holy Spirit in facilitating every aspect of our Christian discipleship. More simply, we have focused on the Word, the cross and the Spirit as three essential evangelical emphases. To be an evangelical Christian, however, is not just to subscribe to an orthodox trinitarian formula. The evangelical faith reaches beyond belief to behavior; it brings with it a multifaceted challenge to live accordingly.

Nothing Stott writes here is novel, which I imagine was his intention. His effort in the book was to identify the core essentials that can be the foundation for unity among the sometimes warring tribes of evangelicalism. Wesleyan Methodist, for instance, can agree with everything he writes even as we continue to hold some particular beliefs about entire sanctification.

It is not at all a new observation that liberals and evangelicals within United Methodism often have more in common with liberals and evangelicals in other denominations than they have with each other. As I was reading Stott’s book, it struck me that the things that liberal and evangelical United Methodists have most in common are mostly in the areas that Stott considers secondary.

Outside the core evangelicals emphases (summarized in the paragraph above), Stott describes things that good evangelicals can disagree about and still regard each other as good evangelicals. His list includes things such as: sacramental theology, polity, the role of women in ministry, liturgy, and the meaning of mission.

My hypothesis is that most of the things that hold us together as United Methodists come from Stott’s list of secondary or indifferent issues. While liberals and evangelicals would agree on the Trinity as crucial and share some language about behavior being an important outgrowth of belief, we are often deeply divided on issues regarding the inspiration and authority of scripture and centrality of the cross — things that Stott argues are essential to evangelical Christianity. At the same time, we find common identity in things like our form of polity and a set of vocabulary words that come from Wesley, although we often differ on the meaning of these words.

Is it possible for United Methodists to find common ground on the core trinitarian affirmations of our faith, or are we doomed to ground our unity on the less certain ground of bishops and infant baptism and the hymns of Charles Wesley?