Where did we go wrong?

I write a lot - some might say too much - about the need for the church to be a place of truly intentional discipleship. Sometimes I catch myself falling into a mindset of "Church: love it or leave it!" And needless to say, that point of view can err on the side of a lack of compassion.

But what is supremely frustrating to me is the wide gulf that seems to separate early Methodism from the Methodism of our own day. In Wesley's day, the Methodists were regarded as dangerous "enthusiasts" who took their religion way too seriously (which begs the question, is it possible to take Jesus too seriously??). In our time, the Methodists are seen as the ultimate mainline Christians - neither hot nor cold, we are as comfortably lukewarm as the Laodiceans of Revelation 3. In between that time and this one, a whole lot of spiritual power has been lost.

The reasons for our spiritual decline are many, but perhaps looming over them all is the way that we Methodists sold our church's soul to the devil in return for cultural respectability. As a professor of mine pointed out recently, there was a time when the best way for politicians to take the national pulse on any given issue was to call the Methodist bishops. Methodism quite literally was American culture. And when you get to a position of that kind of dominance, it is all too easy to just assume that little matters like discipleship, accountability, and sanctification will take care of themselves.

Well, gentle reader, the point I would make to you is that I am not alone in my frustration. I get e-mails from pastors and layfolk from all over the connection who share in the desire to see renewal happen in the church. For instance, one laywoman from Illinois wrote me last week:

"Our dear, old UMC appears to be still stuck on making up programs and strategies and meaningless slogans, which mostly amount to fiddling while Rome burns. Of course we do good in the world, but what a church our size could really accomplish for the Kingdom only God knows. And He wants to lead us to do it. You're right, our member numbers are shocking, and I fear they'll soon be tragic if our church doesn't get seriously into the scriptures, humble ourselves before God, and beg Him to lead us once again..."

From the standpoint of the national church, our main stumbling block seems to be that we still think we are in that position of cultural dominance. I deeply respect our Council of Bishops, but I wish they would spend less time trying to get their photographs taken with famous politicians (and I wish they would ask themselves why such an effort is important). I also wish the church as a whole would ask itself what it thinks it is accomplishing by making a slogan like "Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors" as the church's chief public witness to the world (a slogan which is almost entirely devoid of meaning).

The quote from the reader above is as indicting as it is insightful. And so was the comment that a first year M.Div student at Duke made to me on Wednesday. She said, "You know, the more I learn about John Wesley, the more I realize that we don't do anything he said we should do."

If that doesn't make you want to fall on your knees and beg for forgiveness, I don't know what will.

Choosing your Church

My latest column in the UM Reporter is on the "Country Club Commitment" that so many of us make to our churches.

Choosing the church you attend is one of the hallmarks of American Christianity. Since competition among Protestant denominations has been going on since the founding of the country (a feature of national life supported by the lack of an established religion), the denominational smorgasbord that we have now is the natural result of a 230-year old process.

Here's the bad news: It might also be the single biggest factor working against your ability to become a real disciple of Jesus Christ.

Why?

Because in our culture, the number and variety of churches resembles the number and variety of fast-food restaurants or department stores. And since we live in a world that teaches us that we deserve to choose, and choose again, until we find the "product" that suits us best, we tend to treat the church the same way we treat any other consumer choice.

This has a lot to do with American culture. It has nothing to do with discipleship. And if we cannot be real disciples of Jesus, then we cannot come to know God. And if we do not come to know God, then we will never have a place in God's kingdom.

So have you ever thought that the issue of "church choice" could have a bearing on your salvation? It very well may.

Changes Afoot for the United Methodist Reporter

As most of you probably know, this blog got its start as a companion to the column I write for the United Methodist Reporter. But what you might not know is that I was a reader of the Reporter long before I started writing for it. I received the Memphis Conference edition of the Reporter back when I was the associate chaplain at Lambuth University. Even after I moved back to Arkansas, I continued to read the Reporter online.

I think the Reporter is a great periodical that serves an extremely important function for the church, and I don't just say that because I happen to write a column that appears in it every other week. It serves to unite the whole United Methodist connection in a way that no other periodical can (official denominational publications like the Interpreter Magazine, for instance, do not appear often enough to do this). By publishing church- and ministry-related news each and every week, the Reporter keeps us in touch with one another, whether we are in California, North Carolina, or Cameroon.

Because I intentionally write out of a Generation X perspective, I especially appreciate the ways that the Reporter has sought to include younger voices over the past couple of years. Just in the past few issues, there have been columns, opinion pieces, or book reviews by the likes of Wes Magruder, Jason Byassee, Eric Van Meter, and Kevin Baker. Don't underestimate the importance of that in a rapidly aging church that desperately needs to address the issue of its disappearing youth.

The reason I bring all this up is because the online edition of the Reporter is making major changes this week. The old Reporter Interactive site is about to be shut down, and the online version of the newspaper will be rolled into UMR Communications' wider online effort, called the UM Portal. You can go to that site here. As you will see, besides the Reporter itself it includes blogs, letters to the editor, secular news headlines, a search portal, and lots of other stuff. It is also designed to be more user friendly, with more tabs right up front to take you where you want to go.

Some of you reading this live in annual conferences that use local editions of the Reporter as their conference newspaper. If that's the case, you should call your conference office and order a print subscription. If you live in an annual conference that does not use the Reporter, you can order a subscription to the national edition here. At the very list, bookmark the UM Portal site and visit it often. The good folks down in Dallas are doing a great service for the church, and they produce a top-notch publication.

The Power of the Global South

Here's a really good article about Scottish church historian Andrew Walls that appears in the current issue of Christianity Today. Walls, as the article explains, was one of the first historians of Christianity to recognize the power and vibrancy of the faith in the "Global South," i.e., Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For decades - or centuries, in some cases - the church understood such areas only in terms of a decidedly paternalistic colonialism. But as it is now clear, these are exactly the places where the Holy Spirit is most powerfully at work.

According to the article, it was Andrew Walls who first began to look at the church in Africa on its own terms rather than through the lens of condescending European colonialism. His willingness to set aside his cultural prejudices in order to see more clearly the creative work of God allowed him to open that perspective up to others.

The article, written by Tim Stafford, explains how Walls came to view the spread of the Christian faith: "The spread of the gospel is often presented as inexorable progress outward, like an inkblot, but Walls saw that time and again the real story was of ebb and flow. The loss of Christian territory happened not just on the periphery but at the heartland. Jerusalem was the first heartland until the Romans leveled it, and the Jewish church all but ceased to exist. Then came Rome, until the northern Vandals sacked it; Constantinople, until Islam overran it; northern Europe, before Enlightenment skepticism cut its heart out. At each turning point, the gospel made a great escape, crossing over into an unknown culture just before disaster struck. History suggested that Christianity lives by this pilgrim principle."

Great stuff. And by the way, I am convinced that disaster has struck in the American church as well. Anybody want to guess what that disaster is?

A personal note: I have experienced the church in the "Global South" primarily in two areas - Peru and Egypt. I have been in ministry with the Iglesia Metodista del Peru on several occasions, and just last year I got to spend a couple of week studying Coptic Orthodoxy in Egypt. The way the church goes about being the church in those two locales is wonderfully different, but in both places I have seen the presence of the Holy Spirit at work in powerful ways.

The church in the good ol' U.S.A. has a lot to learn from our brothers and sisters in other countries. Whenever I am asked how I can justify taking mission teams to foreign countries when there are needs right here at home, I respond, "Go with me and you'll see." When you leave your 'comfort zone,' go to a different cultural context, and surrender yourself to ministry, you are able to see God and the church with new eyes. It changes you. You find out that American Christians (or Americans in general) don't have all the answers. And you begin to realize that the relationship we all share in Jesus Christ is a heck of a lot more real than any ties of nation or culture. In paricular, I think American Christians can be helped by going to the Global South and seeing what God is doing there. It might be the first step toward revival closer to home.

Worth Checking Out

I know most of us don't have the time or inclination to add one more blog to the list of those we frequently read, but here's one worth checking out. It's called Theolog, and it is the new blogging venture of the The Christian Century. Though the editorial sections of the Century can often appear to just beat the same old, tired liberal Protestant motifs, the commentaries and feature pieces are usually excellent. That's why it, along with Christianity Today, are the two Christian periodicals that I subscribe to and read regularly.

The strength of blogging as a media form is that it allows for contemporaneous engagement on issues by people from vastly different backgrounds and geographical locales. I think that quality may help the Century overall, since its much smaller readership and overall operation often makes it appear behind trends in media that a larger publication like Christianity Today jumps on.

I am particularly glad to see the presence of strong Methodist voices like James C. Howell and Jason Byassee among the mix of Theolog contributors. Howell is a rare example of a theologian who finds his vocation in the church rather than the academy - a wonderful model of Christian scholarship that allows him to directly form a local Christian community while contributing to the larger church through publications that are eminently accessible to laity. Byassee is a young, up-and-coming theologian who serves as one of the Century's main editors, while also teaching at seminaries in the Chicago area. Both also have Ph.D's from Duke.

Note links to both the Chrisitan Century and Christianity Today in the sidebar to the right.

New UMC Website

The United Methodist Church recently completed a major overhaul of its website. Check it out at www.umc.org when you get a chance.

I haven't had the chance to spend a great deal of time on it, but I applaud United Methodist Communications for the effort. It seems designed to be highly interactive, with lots of portals going off the front page to various aspects of the church's ministry (one of the coolest is the 'interactive map,' where you can drag a little box around a world map and see what the church is doing in different areas. It's a little bit slow, but worth the time it takes). Seems pretty user-friendly to me. And in this day and age, having a website that is top notch is a must for a denomination that expects to reach people with the gospel in cyberspace.

That actually leads me to a question that I was asking myself as I was poking around on the new site. What is the purpose of a denomination's main website? Is it just for the purposes of sharing information - this is who we are, this is what we do, this is our history, etc.? Or is it actually to engage in evangelism through sharing the gospel with needy souls? Or, on the other hand, is information sharing itself a form of evangelism?

What are the main benefits of ministry in cyberspace after all, and what are the liabilities?