Methodist preaching is Spirit filled

This is the last of four posts trying to identify that makes Methodist preaching Methodist. In my mind, I have been narrowing the focus as I have gone, reducing the overlap at each step with other Christian traditions. In the widest claim, I wrote that Methodist preaching is orthodox. Then I wrote that it is also evangelical, marking it as distinct from all those forms of orthodox Christian preaching that do not place as much emphasis on a high view of biblical authority, the importance of the cross and conversion, and the translation of faith into action. Next, I distinguished Methodist preaching from Calvinistic strains of evangelicalism by pointing to the Arminian commitments that inform our preaching. In this post, finally, I assert hat the final distinctive of Methodist preaching is our powerful expectation that the Holy Spirit will bring to completion what begins when we are justified by grace.

I will discuss two examples of what we preach with regard to the Holy Spirit. First, we believe and preach that the Holy Spirit gives believers an assurance of their salvation in Christ. Second, we believe that the Holy Spirit will transform us into the image of Christ, provided we follow his leading in the work of grace.

Blessed Assurance

Not long ago, I had a conversation with a Christian who was struggling with the fact that she had never had a Paul on the road to Damascus conversion. She remembered being led to pray a version of the sinner’s prayer as a child and young person, more than once. But she did not remember any experience of change. Was something missing, she wondered.

In the hit streaming show The Chosen there is a powerful example of the conversion experience told through an extra biblical embellishment of the story of Mary Magdalene. Mary has a powerful, redeeming, and liberating encounter with Jesus, who drives out the demons within her. Later, when she is recounting what happened, she is at a loss to explain it. She says, “I was one way, and now I am completely different. And in between, there was him.” ^*

This is what many people feel they lack in their Christian experience. We don’t often feel “completely different” after praying for Jesus to be our Savior and Lord. And we sometimes wonder if we did something wrong or if we are really saved.

We Methodists — along with many other Christians — believe that God does not want us to wonder such things. Indeed, we believe that the Holy Spirit longs to give us the assurance of our salvation that so many long for. One of our great hymn writers, Fanny Crosby, wrote one of our most popular hymns about this very thing.

Methodist preaching is grounded in the conviction that the Holy Spirit is active and present and moving. He speaks to our spirit that we are children of God. We do not have to limp along wondering if we are saved. We can know it.

Prior to John Wesley’s Aldersgate experience, a spiritual mentor asked him this simple question: “Do you know you are saved?” Wesley stumbled and fumbled around. He certainly hoped he was. He certainly had tried to live as if he was. He was intelligent, dedicated, and as hard a worker as the church could ever ask for, but faced with a simple question he was brought up short.

His mentor told him that he could know he was saved. He could have the assurance of his salvation. He did not have to wonder and stumble. Not long afterward, Wesley was given that assurance, and Methodist preachers have to this day continued to preach what we sing: Assurance is a gift of the Holy Spirit, who is active and ready to fill you with his presence.

This, I know, is not what we often think about when we write about Spirit-filled preaching. We usually mean by that signs and wonders and energetic and ecstatic experiences. We think of healing and people being slain in the Spirit and speaking in tongues. And none of these should be outside the bounds of our expectation as Methodists. The Holy Spirit is alive and active, and he will do what he will.

But these are not the essential hallmarks of the Spirit-filled preaching of Methodists. They are outward signs of the inner work of the Holy Spirit, work that can go on amid shouting and fire or in the quiet of a Bible study small group gathering. The essential thing is that Spirit gives you the assurance of your salvation and then leads you to work out the full sanctification of your soul. Methodist preaching should help people to understand that this gift is being offered to them by God. It should help them seek it. It should help them sing it.

In the conversation I had with the woman who was wondering if she had missed something in her conversion, I observed that her faith in Jesus seemed very solid to me. I asked her how that came to be. She told me about a summer when she came to have this firm sense of Jesus’ love and the peace she had in trusting in him. It was that summer that she found the unshakeable certainty of the love of Jesus.

I smiled when she recounted this story and told her she was more Methodist than she knew. That assurance of her salvation and the dissolving of her doubt was her Aldersgate. It is something the Holy Spirit will do for all believers, and something Methodist preachers should encourage Christians to seek, anticipate, and expect.

Going on to Perfection

The most controversial convictions of John Wesley’s teachings was a natural extension of his insistence that all the commands of God in Scripture are “covered promises.” In other words, God never commands us to do a thing that he will not also give us the grace to do. So, when God calls us to be as merciful as our Father in heaven is merciful, this is not an impossible hurdle for us to clear. It is a promise that if we seek it, God will give us the grace to become truly merciful.

Likewise, when God calls us to love God with all our soul, to love each other, to have the mind that was in Christ Jesus, he is also promising to work within us by the transforming power of the Holy Spirit and the sanctifying grace of God to become what he commands us to be.

In some Christian traditions, the Sermon on the Mount is taught as a tool God uses to crush our self-righteousness. We hear the commands of Christ in the sermon and — if we are honest — acknowledge that we are never going to be that good and so are driven to seek forgiveness for the sinful nature that we are powerless to rise above.

Methodists also believe that we are powerless, on our own, to rise above our sinful nature. But we believe that what is impossible for us is possible for God. When Jesus calls us to love perfectly and completely, he is also offering us the grace to do so, if we lean into that grace and cooperate with the work of the Holy Spirit within us. We will never be free of temptation, but in Jesus Christ we have the power to overcome what once held us fast in chains.

Methodist preaching gave rise to the holiness movements and pentecostalism precisely because it took on faith the idea that God really does intend to restore us by the power of the Holy Spirit. We believe that the Spirit is active right now and the grace of God is capable of doing within us what we would never be able to do on our own.

When I attend non-Methodist churches, I sometimes hear some of our hymns sung in worship. I always take a small bit of joy that our gift to the church universal is music. It can also be a time that reminds me of how we Methodists do have our own place within the wider church. I recall a non-Methodist worship service that concluded with the hymn “Love Divine, All Loves Exceling,” but it changed the words of the final verse. In that verse, we speak of God bring us into the full image of Christ, in which we were first made. It is a joyous verse, but one that must have rubbed our brothers and sisters in a related tradition as fanciful or just plain wrong. I don’t remember exactly the words that they sang that day, but I will conclude this post with the words as they appear in our hymnal, a confident plea that God do what he has promised he will do with us.

Finish then, thy new creation,
Pure and spotless, let us be.
Let us see thy great salvation
Perfectly restored in thee.
Changed from glory into glory
Til in heaven we take place,
Til we cast our crowns before thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.

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* We may quibble that a scene about an exorcism is not exactly an good example of what happens in our conversion, the line from that show has powerful resonance in evangelical imagination, so much so that this one scene has become the inspiration for a song by a popular Christian recording artist.

The pastor, his wife, and his girlfriend

I’ve been asking versions of the following question for about 10 years.

My understanding is that my clergy colleagues in the United Methodist Church who support what they call “full inclusion” are arguing that the denomination celebrate and solemnize same-sex Christian marriages between two people. I understand that my colleagues are sincere in their belief that such a stance is not only loving and biblical but also a matter of justice.

So help me out, please.

The City Paper of Pittsburgh recently published an anonymous article claiming to be written by a pastor of two UMC churches in Western Pennsylvania who claims to be bisexual and polyamorous. He writes of having a wife and a girlfriend and how his desire is for them to be able to all live together, but he knows if this arrangement were known, he’d lose his position as a pastor.

Since it is written anonymously, we cannot know if the facts provided in this article are true, but let us just assume for a moment that they are.

Here is where I need help.

My polyamorous colleague from Western Pennsylvania longs for the day when his polyamory will be affirmed and celebrated by the UMC.

To my centrist and progressive brothers and sisters in the UMC, I have a question and a request.

Is this the direction we are heading?

If it is not, please, please, please tell me the biblical and theological argument that stands in the way of his longing? I know the traditional argument about this, but that position has been deemed retrograde by most of my centrist friends and certainly my progressive ones. So without the traditional argument — or some version of it — how does the church answer the longing of this pastor and what I assume are some number of laity?

Back in 2013, I wrote to retired Bishop Melvin Talbert a similar question. At the time, he was leading the Western Jurisdiction’s resistance to the Book of Discipline and defying the Council of Bishops in pursuit of what he believed God required with regard to gay marriage. I wrote and I asked him if he could help me understand what arguments the church would have in the face of polyamory if we abandoned the one man – one woman definition of marriage. The bishop wrote me back to say he was only interested in the struggle that was before him not ones that might come later.

Well, later is here. It is unclear to me what resources the church has to respond to my anonymous and polyamorous colleague from Pennsylvania. Saying “Love is love” and “All means all” does not sound like a very strong argument to keep the girlfriend out of the parsonage.

Methodist preaching is orthodox

I’m told the first point I want to make about the faith a Methodist preaches is no longer controversial.

Ten or twenty years ago, I’m told, yes. But not now.

There was a time when you did not struggle to find a Methodist preacher — or a bishop — who openly questioned foundational doctrines of the Christian church. It was not infrequent to hear a sermon on Easter that quibbled with whether it really mattered in the end if Jesus really rose from the grave.

I’m told those days are over, that the generation of clergy who questioned the virgin birth, the resurrection, and the divinity of Jesus are no longer among us. That such preaching ever happened from our pulpits still staggers my imagination.

And yet, I can start no other place than to say clearly that Methodist preaching, the faith we preach, is orthodox. It holds to and affirms the creedal formulations laid down in the early centuries of the church. It preaches the Trinitarian God. It preaches the resurrection. It looks forward to the return of Christ and the present work of the Holy Spirit.

Let me outline a couple of particular things this entails.

First, Methodists preach that there is one God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Other descriptions of God can be well meaning, but they are mistaken. They may not be vicious or malicious in their error, but they are in error. To argue that there is no Son or that the Holy Spirit is not fully God is to be wrong about who God is. To put it plainly: Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhist, pagans of various stripes, and all who do not name God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are fundamentally in error about God. Methodist preaching can be gracious toward other religions, but it cannot say that all ways of talking about God are equally true.

Second, Methodists preach that our salvation is necessary, that sin must be forgiven, and that there is a judgment coming. I will write more about this when I turn to discuss the ways in which Methodist preaching is evangelical, but it should be recognized that the importance of salvation, the problem of sin, and reality of judgment were not ideas invented in the Protestant and evangelical revivals. It is all plainly affirmed in the Bible and the creeds.

While you may struggle to find Methodist clergy who deny the resurrection, or carefully avoid affirming it, you still can find quite a few who hold to some form of universalism — a belief that either there is no Hell or that it will be empty. You can still find Methodist preachers who speak dismissively or not at all about our sin and our need for forgiveness. Such preachers at times will proudly assert that they are not evangelicals. What is really at question is whether they are even orthodox.

There is much more that can be said about what orthodoxy entails and what it does not. Even these two points bear much more discussion than is suitable in a blog post. But this, at least, is a starting point. The faith we preach as Methodists is orthodox. It is in keeping with the grand and central doctrines of the church handed down through the centuries. When preaching ceases to be orthodox, it ceases to be Methodist.