Five weeks ago, I saw a video produced by the General Board of Discipleship. Several United Methodist leaders were interviewed and asked a series of questions about the future of the United Methodist Church. Most of their answers turned toward praxis, or the practice of being United Methodist in the world.

I’ve been reading a lot of N.T. Wright lately, and found that the GBOD’s work in this video fit into the mold that Wright used on several occasions to interpret and understand a person or institution and their movement through history.

You can read the first four installments here.

• A Vision for the Future: Premise (1/5)
• A Vision for the Future: Story and Symbol (2/5)
• A Vision for the Future: Praxis (3/5)
• A Vision for the Future: Questions (4/5)

With a clearer understanding of story, symbol, praxis, and the first three of four questions answered, I see the last question forming its own answers.

Before the Solution, A Restatement of Problem

In every case of resurgence of the Methodist movement, the children of Wesley have returned to holiness of heart and life. In the modern era, a phrase like that immediately puts the hearer in the frame of mind of the Waltons, or maybe the Puritans.

The reality is that holiness of heart and life has already been offered up as a part of modern Methodism and post-modern Methodism. But when the topic comes up and the church is confronted with the challenge, the cries go up that we are burdening our people. We are asking too much of a modern society, already overburdened with the busy-ness of life.

This is one of our problems. We have placed such a high value upon busy-ness that we have allowed it to push out all other endeavors that seem pointless.

And my assertion is this: Methodists in this post-modern era have eliminated holiness of heart and life because it seems pointless to so many of them.

We have all but relegated prayer to Sunday mornings, and then, it is undertaken by a paid professional or a stalwart volunteer. We’ve ruled out reading our own Bibles because we don’t understand what we read. Certainly, there are those who still take their discipleship seriously, but there are far more disciples preferring to seem rather than to be.

Story vs. Myth

Dan Dick published a deeply insightful blog post that bears mentioning here. His work with two rural churches revealed a gap between the churches’ collective memories and their recorded histories. In this enlightening blog, we can see what happens when the story of a congregation is revealed to be a myth. Dan writes:

During the course of my work with them, I unearthed written histories of both churches; one written in 1948 and the other in 1955.  No one in the current congregations were aware of these histories.  Their discovery almost led to me being tarred and feathered and run out-of-town on a rail.

Pastors who were remembered as villains and rogues had enjoyed relatively peaceful service and gone on to greater things. Disasters remembered as defining moments in the life of the church were revealed to be mere mishaps, from which the congregations quickly recovered.

Dan’s article, as his articles usually do, sat me back on my heels and gave me pause. That’s the first sign of a good communicator, incidentally — he had my undivided attention.

This caused me to rethink my assessment of the story of Methodism that I shared earlier last month. Could it be that the reality of what we know as Class Meetings is not the same as the experiences recounted in journals and letters from the time? Even if it did exist in those days, can it be said that these experiences were wide-spread? And, most importantly, does this mean that the United Methodist Church cannot reclaim the effective model of the class meeting — because it was never the predominant case?

Dan’s article makes a great case for rooting out the reality of our history. But I’m not sure I agree with his assessment regarding our ability to learn from our history. There’s a certain mistrust of the historicity, or historical authenticity, of our collective memory.

Maybe we are not meant to learn from the past — we seem to do an exceptionally poor job of it.  Ours is a story of repeating most of our worst mistakes again and again — from restructure to human sexuality, from equal rights to pastoral privilege, from politics to piety — we will find some way to divide and debate and denigrate and destroy.

…

We glorify “our Wesleyan past,” we wax nostalgic for the glory days of the 1950s (which were an aberration, not a norm), and we wallow in the story of our decline and decay of the past 20/30/40/50 etc., years.  We need to wake up to the fact that the early days weren’t that much better and the recent days haven’t been all that bad — and that none of it defines what we can be in the future.

Maybe I have an “out” here. You see, I’m not waxing for the 1950’s. I’m waxing nostalgic for the 1750’s.

What is the Solution?

I’m not conceited enough to think that I have the only answer. There have been countless studies, initiatives, and creative problem-solvers who have come before me. What makes this so different? The answer to that question is simple. I’m trying to reach the people I serve. If you are reading this, you are probably a friend. (I pulled any and all of my advertising from Rush Limbaugh’s show after his atrocious remarks yesterday, so I doubt there’s a national audience.)

And avoiding a national audience may well be the point.

We are pressing so hard to achieve denominational superiority that we’ve forgotten that our local congregations are still the folks who make up the church — not the buildings, not the logos, not the institutional structures and org-charts.

I don’t serve at the Board level, but if I did, I would have a hard time forgetting that the money I was paid and the money I was budgeted to spend had its origins in the worn leather wallets of dairy farmers in Kentucky. I would have a clear image of a carefully folded check being pulled from the threadbare purse of a Tennessee widow who was a Methodist before my parents were born.

Yes, our agencies are fantastically staffed and led by creative, energetic people — who sometimes have agendas apart from our doctrinal standards. But the general board agencies are not the future of the Church.

I believe our bishops are godly men and women and have a calling from God to revive us, despite being over-tasked with a multiplicity of roles that prohibit effective leadership. But the episcopacy is not the future of the Church.

I think that most of my colleagues are overworked and underpaid, and yet they toil away knowing that if they do their job well, they are more likely to be moved because they upset the status quo. But even the dedicated men and women of the clergy are not the future of the Church.

The people in the pews — no, not those, the ones who are awake and attentive —  they are the future of the Church. I differentiate because they are fewer and farther between than any of us would like to admit. I refer to those who have decided to follow Jesus, to those who are willing to abandon what they have for the promise of God’s “something better.”

Something to Lose

That brings me back to Dan’s argument against a return to the 1950’s Golden Age. I find myself agreeing with him. Those days are the most marked period of institutionalization in our denominations fractured history, second only to the early 1970’s when the burgeoning United Methodist Church was establishing its foothold in history.

While we might like to think there was a golden era of growth, vitality, vision, unity, and shared purpose, we need to understand that this is our myth, our story, but it cannot stand up to very close scrutiny.  Those who think our church is fractured today beyond salvation need to read the records of our debates over race, war, economics, gender equality, ordination changes, and social reform from earlier times.  They will make you cringe.  Not only will those who are ignorant of history repeat it, they will simply rewrite it.

Too right.

We have much to lose — mostly our collective memory. But we must be willing to lose it in order to regain that which was lost well before those rose-colored memories were offered. The United Methodist Church needs a return to individual discipleship even though we have all but forgotten its value and shunned its difficulty.

The Unit

There are many places across our denomination that still show signs of life.

What of the revivals? They occur at the local church level. I refer not the pointless exercises in memory and museum piece routines, but honest and authentic reconnection with the Divine.

What of the explosive growth of churches embracing the high expectations of Wesley’s shared covenant of discipleship? That has been a function of the local church as well.

When we behave like small groups joined together at the heart, we recall the days of Wesley with authenticity and effectiveness. Instead, we more often behave like a lumbering institution encompassing agencies and congregations and conferences joined at the hip pocket.

Recent divides along political lines and social lines have created a conglomerate structure of diverse and often opposing groups — sometimes within the same congregation.

In the local congregation, we find our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. The lay person in the United Methodist Church carried our denomination to the heights of excellence, surpassing all other denominations in the 1800’s. And it is the lay person, misled by the culture and society to pursue the things of the world that have advanced cause after cause in the name of progressive issues, who has forgotten that we are to be makers of disciples before we are to be formers of public policy. They must both be accomplished, to be sure.

But we fail utterly when we are more interested in recruiting a voting bloc for Annual Conference or a curried delegate for General Conference or a General Secretary who is representative of a disparaged group first and foremost.

Here, we see at last, that it is the clergy who must recall their most basic calling and live it to the uttermost. The laity will follow the leader that reaches them in the name of Jesus Christ. And God will bless the efforts to build the Kingdom of Heaven that are done so in God’s name. But any other endeavor is doomed to fail.

Something Must Change

If we are to write a whole new story as Dan suggests, then we should establish who we are going to be, the nature and purpose of our character in this grand plot. And we should decide now who shall play the lead role.

We should eke out a rough outline of our symbols. Shall it continue to be the open table of communion or will it be the rough gavel of Robert’s Rules of Order and the jockeying for votes that has come to characterize our denomination.

We must determine if our praxis honors our identity. Or shall we simply carry the cross into battle as we slay the foes who oppose us on the seminal issues of the day.

Who are we? Where are we? What is the problem? What is the solution?

We are Christ’s brothers and sisters, saved by grace. We are in a land that has largely forgotten its origins and eschewed the Word of God. Our problem is collective and individual: We have largely forgotten that true acts of discipleship are selfless and not selfish. The People Called Methodist are pursuing our own dreams and visions without regard for the historical Christ or the historical Wesley, both of whom sought to establish the Kingdom of Heaven as a refuge for the poor, the hungry, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned.

We demand our own way. We proclaim privileges as rights and relegate rights to the status of privilege. Tolerance is recast as mandatory agreement and disagreement results in demonizing behaviors that only serve to set us further apart from each other and from the world that the rest of us are trying to reach for Jesus Christ.

Conclusion

For several years now, I have envisioned the Cross of Christ as the enabling moment. I have grasped the Resurrection of Christ as the empowering moment. And, through these two lenses, I have come to understand the Kingdom of God as demonstrated through the dozens of teaching moments in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

When we attempt to establish the Kingdom without the empowering or enabling moment, we simply offer a middle-eastern philosophy for social reform. When we focus only upon the Cross and the Resurrection, we forget the cause for Christ’s advent.

Our Church is emphasizing some aspects of Christ at the risk of losing the whole.

Our uniquely Methodist story, its symbols, and our praxis are best exemplified in the context of the entire story of Jesus Christ, the fullness of each Christian symbol, and through the shared praxis of selfless living.

Not even Wesleyan Methodism could recapture the exact flavor and impact of Jesus-led Christianity, but his was a very close approximation that brought about a new age of heart-and-life holiness. The same could be said of our leaders today: We cannot bring back Wesley-led Methodism, but we can more closely approximate that model today. And I believe that renewing our Wesleyan identity will allow us to usher in a new age of holiness of heart and life.