Joy Moore on the vitality of the UMC
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Here's one such quote from Dr. Joy Moore, who is the Associate Dean for Black Church Studies and Church Relations at Duke Divinity School.
Dr. Moore recently wrote in Good News Magazine:
"The greatest evidence of the lack of vitality in the United Methodist Church might not be survey results but our commercials. Consider the tag line of the insurance company that speaks of vitality as intentional responsibility to care for others while our tagline is 'open.' Absent is a simple use of expressions of a called-out community demonstrating the biblical values of justice, community, and peace. Our acts of charity, justice, and even community have not been submitted to the reign of God evident in Jesus Christ."
- Dr. Joy J. Moore, "Seriously Talking Back,"
Good News Magazine (March/April 2011), p.17.
In her article, Dr. Moore is echoing some sentiments that I have voiced myself in the past. She is an excellent preacher, which I can say from the experience of having listened to her in worship. And as the quotation above suggests, she's got a real willingness to look at where the church is situated in relation to the current culture and make some pretty fearless critiques -- but always in the hopes of helping us to become more faithful.
Dr. Moore is also a contributing author to Generation Rising: A Future with Hope for the United Methodist Church. Her chapter in the book is entitled, "Preaching: Telling the Story in a Sound-Bite Culture." It's a fast-paced, high-energy introduction to the kind of narrative preaching that Dr. Moore sees as more faithful to the Scriptures and more formative for the church.
The book will be out in mid-April, but you can pre-order it here.
The book will be out in mid-April, but you can pre-order it here.
Labels: Generation Rising book, Igniting Ministry, Joy Moore, UMC
posted by Andrew C. Thompson at 10:29 AM
3 Comments:
I'm glad more voices are speaking out about this, because I'm getting a little annoyed at all the local Methodist churches using the same "Open Doors" tagline to tell people how unique they are. As if other churches have bouncers ready to exclude people who don't look and talk like them...
Joe -
A good point. I've often thought that defining ourselves by our "openness" is something like a negative identification. It really says nothing about what we stand for, what we believe, the character of the God we worship, or the possibilities for life within our communities. It doesn't even identify us as confessionally Christian.
It's also worth considering that there is nothing at all Wesleyan about such a tagline or 'motto' either. The gospel of free grace is Wesleyan (and biblical) to its core, but I struggle to see how 'openness' as an ethos connects with our doctrine of grace in any meaningful way. And at its worse, it does exactly what you say - which is to imply that our sister denominations from other strands of the Christian tradition are closed and exclusionary. That's not fair to them, of course, and we shouldn't have to use such a foil for our own understanding of the gospel.
I realize the impetus that exists in the culture at present to communicate through sound bytes and brand mottos, but I'm just not convinced that the church should engage in such practices.
Thanks for those thoughts.
- Andrew
That particular quote was good but I have to admit: I found her "Good News" article a bit stuffy, i.e. too academic for a pop-level magazine. It smelled like Duke :)
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