Assurance: Initial thoughts about Why?

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Richard Heyduck

Why would a person want assurance of salvation? That seems like a silly question. If having salvation means going to heaven when you die – and not having salvation means an eternity in the other place, the unquenchable fires of hell – it’s easy to imagine why a person would want to know they’re destined for the one rather than the other. If by chance one knew oneself to be destined for hell, one could, perhaps, do something about it.

So, it seems, one wants assurance for peace of mind. Ok, we like peace of mind. But let’s keep asking why? What’s the point of having peace of mind about our eternal destiny? Or, put differently, what are the consequences of having peace of mind, of having assurance of salvation?

For some people, assurance of salvation will function as a tether. They will take themselves to be tethered to God in such a way that they are safe. Being safe, some might further reason, means one doesn’t need to worry or attend to such things any more. When we have insurance we worry less about the things we insure. When our eternal life is insured, we don’t have to worry. In fact, we can even trust God to keep us out of any really serious trouble at all. If we start getting too close to the edge, either of falling into hell, or something really destructive, we can trust God to yank on the rope and pull us to safety.

Over the years when the topic of wise dating comes up, I’ve heard teenagers ask, “How far can I go?” What they mean by this is, “How far can I go in this relationship without getting into trouble with God, my parents, the church, or morality?” Or, put more crassly, “What can I get away with?”

When we view assurance as a tether connecting us to God it becomes easy to think this way. We want to get on with our lives. We want fame, success and happiness. We want money and all the things it offers. But we also want to be safe for eternity. So we tether ourselves to God, saying something like, “Ok, God, you’ve got me. Now I’m going to go out and live my life. I’ll check in on Sunday – well, at least some Sundays. If you see me doing something really bad, reel me back in so I’ll be safe again.” Assurance functions as a sort of life insurance. I have life insurance. The bills are paid automatically and I pay no attention to it. It’s just there in the background. It makes no difference in my daily life.

Clearly, if this is the way we think of assurance, we are missing the very nature of salvation. If salvation is nothing more than having a the status, “Going to heaven when dead,” then maybe we could conceive of assurance on the tether model. That’s not the salvation I see pictured in the New Testament, however. What I see there is an ongoing relationship with God beginning now, and, because God is eternal, taking us into eternity. If salvation is an ongoing relationship, something God intends for us to enjoy daily, just what might the role of assurance be?

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Assurance: Receiving

Posted on August 2, 2012 by Richard Heyduck

I want to think just a little more about the aspect of “receiving” that I wrote about in the last post in this series. Here’s Jesus, extending a gift. What is that gift? In its essence, the gift is himself. The eternal life of which he speaks is not something that can be commodified – some sort of heavenly elixir, a “Get Into Heaven Free” card, a set of doctrines, or secret knowledge. Jesus wants to give himself.

It is true that when we face the possibility of receiving Jesus, knowledge is involved. As we seek to articulate who Jesus is, what he’s done, and how we experience him, we start moving into the realm of doctrinal development. It’s also true that one of the experiences we expect to have as we receive Jesus is a healing that takes us from now through eternity.

Notice another aspect at work here. Our act of “receiving” Jesus is not a once for all event. Sure, there is a sense in which we can narrate our lives and look at a time or occasion in which we “received Jesus,” much like if we’re married we can tell of the occasion of our wedding. But receiving Jesus is an act that begins and then continues. We keep receiving. There is always more Jesus than we now have.

On the one hand, there is nothing mystical here. When we receive any person and remain in healthy relation with that person there is a depth of relationship. We grow in union with each other in an ongoing act of giving and receiving. We perhaps see this most clearly, again, in marriage. Marriages that are not characterized by a lifetime of giving and receiving, much more than a “Ok, we’ve had our wedding, now let’s get on with it,” are not likely to last long.

But there is a mystical element here also. At least I’m having trouble thinking of a better word than mystical. The Jesus we receive is a historical person – but a historical person that lived two thousand years ago. This Jesus is also – not just was– God incarnate. When we receive Jesus, we are entering a history, a history of God. One way I’ve put it before is that in our act of receiving Jesus we are becoming willing participants in his story. Before our initial reception, we were participant in his story, though perhaps unwilling or unwitting. We are all part of God’s story as created beings. We are all part of God’s story as people Jesus had in mind when he lived and died for us. We are all part of God’s story as the Spirit draws us toward God through prevenient grace. We can understand and study our relationships with other humans – at least to a degree. Scientists and scholars churn out the works all the time. Many are deeply insightful. But with Jesus there is a depth that is beyond our sciences, our rationalizings, and our quest for understanding. God is always beyond us, more than we can imagine or grasp.

This is good news. The God we receive in Jesus is bigger than we are. This God, though beyond our understanding, wants to know us and be known by us. Even more, this God wants to live in us. Paul writes, nay prays, in Ephesians 3 that “all the fullness of God may dwell in us.” All the fullness of God. How sad when we think we’re signing up for something as mundane (ha!) as continuing existence through eternity. When we receive Jesus we’re receiving life beyond our imagining, a life so deep we can explore it throughout this lifetime and innumerable lifetimes to come and only scratch the surface. I think of Charles Wesley’s image of trying – and failing – to “sound the depths of love divine.” There’s infinite depth here, life, blessing, beyond our imaging. How could we miss that?

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A Different Future

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Richard Heyduck

Will Willimon’s Bishop functions as a study of the episcopacy and as a spiritual autobiography. Reading it, we gain insight into the church, its leadership, and its leaders.

Willimon is explicit and plain-spoken about his convictions. At one point he says,

One of my core beliefs is that God has given us all we need to have a different future than the morbid one to which I once feared we were fated.

When we look at the tremendous losses United Methodism has faced over the past generation, we understand why one might fear a morbid future. In the mid 1960s we took 12 million Methodists and 2 million EUBs and ended up with – 12 million United Methodists. That’s pretty poor – and disappointing math.

When we look in so many of our congregations today and see the looming “death tsumani,” we understand why one might fear a morbid future. I’ve seen that tsunami myself. In my last congregation over 50% of the most active and committed members were age 70 and above. It doesn’t take an actuarial degree to tell you that those folks aren’t likely to be as active and committed in 5 years, let alone 10.

In the face of these and other negatives, Willimon still holds on to God. I’m with him. Every time a person joined the church I told them and the congregation that I believed God had brought them for a purpose. First, they God had brought them to us because the Christian life is not the kind of thing one can do by herself. Our congregation was there to help each new member grow in her walk with Christ. Second, however, God had brought that person as a gift to the congregation. There is some way, usually yet to be discovered, that we could not fulfill our mission from God without this person and the gifts and experience God had given him.

So if God has given us “all we need to have a different future,” why aren’t we seeing it?

First, we have to wait a bit. We don’t usually see movements of God happening instantaneously in scripture. Why should we expect things to work differently now?

Second, there is the matter of obedience. What are we doing with the gifts God has given us? Sometimes congregations marginalize new people until they reach a certain tenure. Sometimes we take these gifted folks and force them into old molds. And then sometimes, we as members perceive that the way is hard – and it is – and refrain from even trying. Or, finally, we might get distracted into doing our own thing – even some good thing – rather than what God wants us to do.

Sometimes I think it would be nice if God would just make people do the right thing. When I see my own weakness, I even wish that for myself. But God rarely operates that way. God rarely coerces us to do the right thing. But he does call us, and equip us, and give us the opportunity to join in his kingdom work. I for one don’t want to miss out.

Posted in Ecclesiology, Local church, Ministry, United Methodism, Will Willimon | 1 Comment

Assurance: How Does it Happen?

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Richard Heyduck

Supposing that assurance of salvation is possible, how might it happen? The Bible and the Wesleyan theological tradition give us some ideas.

First, and most importantly, is the witness of the Holy Spirit. Texts that explicitly use witness language are found in Romans and I John. I John 5:10-11 uses witness language more generally: “Anyone who believes in the Son of God has this testimony in his heart. Anyone who does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because he has not believed the testimony God has given about his Son. And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.” In this case, God has given testimony of the way things are. This testimony is not necessarily directed to me as an individual, but to all who will listen. Romans gets more personal. There (Romans 8:16) Paul speaks of the Spirit of God bearing witness with our spirits that we are his children. Here the sense is not just of a general fact from which we can reason for ourselves regarding our status, but the notion that Spirit speaks to us as individuals.

The Spirit speaks from within, because the Spirit is the gift of God to all who believe. When we put our faith in Jesus, the Holy Spirit comes to live within us. We see this in Ephesians 1:13-14: “And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession– to the praise of his glory.” A down payment “guaranteeing our inheritance” sounds good to me. A very similar passage is found in 2 Cor. 1:21-22: “Now it is God who makes both us and you stand firm in Christ. He anointed us, 22 set his seal of ownership on us, and put his Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.”

The Holy Spirit is the direct witness that we belong to God. Wesley also spoke of an indirect witness. The indirect witness comes from our considering the evidence before us. In this regard a good place to start is to ask, “Have I ever put my faith in Jesus?” This is not the question, “Do I know about Jesus?” or “Do I believe Jesus exists?” It is also not the question, “Have I done things in Jesus’ vicinity (i.e., participated in church)?” The faith question does have a knowledge element. We know something about Jesus and the life he offers. Often this knowledge will be very minimal. But what matters next is what we do with it.

Think of it this way. (I build here from imagery in John 1:12) You see someone standing in front of you. He is holding a beautifully wrapped gift, apparently offering it to you. You can acknowledge his presence and the presence of the gift. You can comment on the gift and study the details of the gift. But all that misses the point. The point is to receive the gift. And the way we receive the gift is with empty hands. Because it’s a gift, it’s not a matter of offering something in exchange. We come with empty hands. We don’t offer Jesus our resumes, whether intellectual, familial, moral or religious. We extend our empty hands and receive.

This is the first and most important question. Have you received Jesus’ gift of life, his gift of himself? If you have, that is a profound clue to consider.

A second thing to consider is what your life looks like following your reception of the gift. Is there a difference between before and after? One practical way Wesley expressed this was through what he called the General Rules. These are framed, even today, in epistemological terms, as a way to give evidence of where we stand with God. Put most colloquially, these three rules can be summarized as:

  1. Don’t do bad stuff.
  2. Do good stuff.
  3. Live with God.

The first rule means that when we look at our lives we see a sensitivity to sin, both against God and against others. We are sensitive enough that we do what is in our power to avoid that sin. We avoid breaking laws. We avoid hurting others.

The second rule approaches the issue from the other direction. We don’t only refrain from doing what we shouldn’t do, but we also dedicate our lives to doing what we should do. We love others and build them up. We seek to extend blessing near and far, as much as we can.

In these first two rules Wesley addresses sins of commission and sins of omission. Both are serious. Both keep us from God’s best.  When we look at our lives and see that we are avoiding wrong and doing the right, that is a clue to us that God is indeed living within us, a clue that when we hear the voice of the Spirit we are not merely fantasizing.

Moralism alone will get us these first two rules. Committed atheists and practitioners of other ways of living will encourage us to turn from doing bad things and turn to doing good things. It’s the third rule that makes the set as a whole explicitly Christian.

When Wesley talks about living with God (that’s my language – he speaks of attending to all “God’s ordinances”) we move beyond merely the things of life that passively give us evidence – we look, we see, we discern – to that which actively gives us assurance. In other words, as we engage in certain practices, such as engaging with scripture, prayer, confession, fellowship with other Christians, worship, and the Lord’s Supper, for example, we experience grace and are built up in the faith. We gain assurance in our life with God as we actively live out that life with God. This is a hugely important point and I will return to it later.

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Assurance of Salvation: Two Objections

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Richard Heyduck

The idea that Christians can have assurance of their salvation has deep roots in the theology of John Wesley. Though he struggled with his own assurance from time to time, Wesley preached and taught that it was the privilege of every believer to know that they were forgiven and accepted by God when they came to faith in Christ. Though distinctive in Wesley’s day, this doctrine is not now peculiar to Wesley’s Methodist heirs, but is widely shared among other Christian traditions.

In Wesley’s day the doctrine of assurance was challenged by those who thought it was presumptuous or “rank enthusiasm.” In my years of ministry I almost never heard the doctrine attacked as an instance of enthusiasm, but I often heard it challenged by the charge of presumption.

The argument went something like this. The Bible is full of commands. Even if we drop the commands that were specific to the people of Israel, we’re left with a large number. We see in the Bible that there are so many ways to go wrong. We can do the wrong thing; we can fail to do the right thing. Our wrongs might be done in the open or even in the recesses of our thoughts and attitudes. We can sin and no one around us will even know. In light of how easy it is to go wrong, how can we possible imagine that we’ve done well enough to find acceptance with God? We see our awesome moral and religious performance and think we have an in with God? What presumption!

Some people I encountered didn’t argue against the doctrine of assurance. Instead, their lives testified to their own insecurity. One of my men used to ask me every Sunday, “Preacher, am I good enough to get in yet?” He was a good guy. Everyone loved him. Yet he knew there was a gap between his performance and God’s expectations. He felt it would be presumptuous to claim to know he was ok with God. My standard answer to his question was, “No, you’re not good enough to get in. But it doesn’t matter, because no one gets in on the basis of their own goodness. We get in on the basis of trusting Jesus.”

That’s some of the good news we find in scripture. Getting in a good relationship with God, being forgiven, being saved – whatever terminology we use – is not a matter of what we do. It’s a matter of what Jesus does. Our faith is in Jesus, not in ourselves.

In recent years the argument against the possibility of assurance has shifted. While most would still think it presumptuous to claim acceptance by God, the surge toward soteriological universalism has made claims of assurance passé. What’s the point of claiming assurance when everyone is going to be saved anyway?

Both challenges to the doctrine of assurance – the argument from presumption and the argument from universalism – are not merely mistaken about the possibility of assurance, but also about the nature of salvation. Both work from the assumption that salvation is something we have, or some future state we achieve: “going to heaven when we die” has been a common way of putting it. The biblical picture of salvation, however, is very different. Instead of referring merely to a status “headed toward heaven” or “in with God,” the salvation depicted in the New Testament is much bigger. It is a life with God that starts now and, because of who God is, goes into eternity. When one has assurance on this model, one is not primarily assured about one’s eternal destination, but about one’s current life with God.

Is it presumptuous to claim to have a “current life with God?” As I’ve already noted, this life with God is not something we accomplish on our own. Life with God only happens through Jesus.

If people today know any of the claims Christians make about God, they know that “God is love.” God loves everyone, we believe. Is it a matter of love to let the one you love know about your love? If you love someone and you know that person is in doubt about your love, would it not be an act of love to bring clarity? This is the Wesleyan take on God’s motivation for giving us assurance. God loves us enough to let us know. In the next installment I will discuss some of the ways that God provides for us to gain assurance.

Posted in Assurance, John Wesley, Salvation, Theology, United Methodism | 1 Comment

The “Most Revealing Indicator…”

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Richard Heyduck

One of the claims Will Willimon makes in his book Bishop is that, “The most revealing indicator of congregational vitality is the trend in worship attendance.”

Worship attendance sure is important. I remember many years ago reading a biographical blurb on a pastor. It said of him, “During his tenure at X UMC, 3000 members were added to the roll and the average attendance rose by 800.” Each statistic taken on its own is awesome. I’d love for either to describe my church. But taken together they’re deadly. How can adding so many members result in such a proportionally small increase in attendance? What kind of members are these?

When I arrived at my last congregation the most recently reported average annual attendance was 135. That’ s more than most UM churches across the land today. But membership was over 400. I asked my people. “Imagine that only a third of your body is functioning. Where will you be? ICU? Hospice?” Attendance, not just absolutely but as a percentage of membership is essential to church health. I’ve even gone so far as to say that a truly healthy church will have more people in attendance then it has members, since it will be attracting people checking out the faith. Yes, I know. Not many churches make the cut that way. Most all of us pastors look incompetent and ineffective by that standard.

Then there’s that pesky little word, “trend,” in Willimon’s claim. It’s not just attendance itself that is the revealing indicator. It’s the direction that attendance is going. When attendance is rising, that tells us the congregation is doing something right. When it’s declining, well, you get the idea.

As I said above, I believe worship attendance – both the absolutely and as a trend – are strong signs of church health. But the “most revealing indicator?” I’m not so sure about that. It may be the most revealing quantitative indicator. The number of professions of faith is important – essential to the life and health of the church. If people are not coming to faith in Christ, the church is sick – on life support. A growth in worship attendance, however, theoretically shows that people added are not just roll padding, not just in the front door and out the back.

One of the advantages of both of these important statistics – attendance and professions of faith – is that they are not only quantifiable but easily quantifiable. They can be reckoned at any time.

Jesus’ command in the Great Commission was a bit different, however. He said there, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Leading people to make professions of faith is explicit here. Having these disciples stick around – a reality marked by attendance – is implicit. But making disciples – especially the “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” isn’t so easily quantified. There’s life change involved here, the change of allegiance reflected in making a profession of faith and the change of the way one lives that grows out of the changed allegiance. We can have a large, growing organization and still be missing Jesus.

Do I want worship attendance to be trending upward? Absolutely. Do I want the number of profession of faith to rise? My heart is broken for the people who don’t know Jesus, so I am cheered by everyone who connects with him. But what I really want is for these quantifiable statistics to reflect the reality of lasting life change in Jesus followers. If the quest for a “most revealing indicator” asks for something that can be quantified, I’m inclined to think it might be asking the wrong question.

Posted in church growth, Ecclesiology, Evangelism, United Methodism, Will Willimon | Leave a comment

Ed Stetzer’s Subversive Kingdom

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Richard Heyduck

The best thing about Ed Stetzer’s Subversive Kingdom is that it’s true. First, it’s true that Jesus has inaugurated the kingdom and that the kingdom has not yet eradicated all the competitors. Second, it’s true that the best way for Christians to live out the Kingdom of God vis-à-vis neighboring communities is as subversives. Neither hiding in our own little enclaves nor trying to conquer those communities through force of arms or legislation is the appropriate strategy.

In talking about the “already and not yet” aspect of the Kingdom Stetzer uses inauguration language and the D-Day imagery (D-Day was the decisive point of WW2 in Europe, but not the end of the war) without mentioning either Tom Wright or Oscar Cullmann. This is characteristic of the book as a whole. He shows broad familiarity with theology, biblical studies and missiology without the name-dropping and scholarly apparatus one would expect in a book written for academics. Rather, SubversiveKingdom is a popularization of important themes in recent theology It is thus of value to “ordinary” Christians.

The ten chapter book breaks down into three sections:

  • A Subversive Way of Thinking: In this section Stetzer provides his basic analysis of the biblical and theological case for seeing the Kingdom of God as subversive.
  • A Subversive Way of Life: This section delineates the personal development required for living as an agent of the subversive kingdom. A substantial part of this section is drawn from the Sermon on the Mount. I found this section to be the weakest part of the book, lapsing too often into repetition and sentimentality. The final chapter, on the elimination of Idols, was the strongest.
  • A Subversive Plan of Action: In this section, Stetzer turns to considering action plans for congregations. The strategy he proposes seeks to balance both evangelism and social action. He’s convinced that people need Jesus, apart from whom they will never experience deliverance from sin and death. He’s also convinced, however, that the church needs to demonstrate the reality of God’s kingdom through ministries that meet the practical needs of people in their communities and wider world.

Some modern evangelicals have marginalized the kingdom, focusing only on individuals coming to faith in Jesus. In their Christology they have too often imagined that the first thing Jesus did of soteriological value was dying on the cross. Stetzer doesn’t follow that route. Though he sometimes evidences too much individualism, he is strongly committed to the role of the church not only in mission, but in soteriology. He also counts Jesus’ incarnation as soteriologically significant.

I really appreciate how Stetzer, a Southern Baptist pastor and leader, writes for a broader audience than his own denominational family. His generous approach draws in other Christian traditions by looking to churches of many denominations for his examples of various ways of “getting it right.”

I have two primary critiques of the book. The first has to do with substance. Stetzer seems stuck on some modern assumptions. On p. 15 he writes, “Through Jesus’ teaching and preaching, he was proclaiming to everyone that they could be part of God’s agenda on earth by repenting and believing, that this ‘kingdom of heaven’ was primarily spiritual in nature.” This is related to where he later says (p. 35), “Some people love the perceived opinions and politics of King Jesus more than they love the King himself. Yet Jesus never promoted his politics, although he did respond to political questions.” We’re talking here about a king who has a kingdom. Saying this kingdom is “primarily spiritual in nature” (as opposed to what?) and that this king “never promoted his politics” is incomprehensible – unless we are forced to use modern understandings of “spiritual” and “politics.” Jesus wants to exercise actual authority in the public, external world. A spiritual/non-spiritual dichotomy won’t work; neither will the notion of a non-political king.

My second critique is more formal. I believe this book could use more careful editing. A couple of examples. Beginning on p. 33 Stetzer discusses the parable of the enemy planting weeds among the wheat. Jesus’ explanation indicates that the weeds are non-believers in the midst of those who believe. Stetzer concludes from this, rightly I believe, that “we are not responsible for weeding,” i.e., we are not called to go heretic hunting among the members to achieve a completely pure church. Later on, however, (p. 58) Stetzer evokes another weed metaphor, talking about the “‘weeds’ of pain, abuse, worry, and danger.” It would be clearer if he’d been consistent in his usage of the “weed” imagery. A second area in which closer editing would have helped is in some of the word choice. When he says (p. 60) that “Crack use was epidemic” “endemic” would have fit better. The other word choice that jumped out at me was on p. 100: “All too often the nearness of a particular subject matter can gauze it from careful notice.” Using “gauze” as a verb strikes me as odd.

Stetzer dedicates this book to “small church pastors” (though, oddly, only mega-church pastors provided blurbs for the front pages). Pastors of any size church that want to introduce their people to a broader conception of the kingdom, particularly one that presses past the too-popular notion that it is something far off, either in time and/or space, will profit from this book. It would be especially useful for small group studies.

Posted in Books, Culture, Ecclesiology, Evangelism, Local church | Leave a comment

An Observation on Secularization Theory

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Richard Heyduck

At least as fat back as August Comte, secularization theory has claimed that the rise of reason would compel the decline of religion. The more society progressed in knowledge, understanding and technology, the more secularized society would become.

We take progress for granted. Technology proves it to us. Considering my first major computer upgrade was paying $175 for a used 44 mb hard drive to add to my first computer, and the ad I saw today for a 500 gb drive for only $59, I know that progress. Secularization theorists received confirmation of their theories for some time by looking at Western Europe. The empty churches, decline of Christian influence, and de-Christianized population looked just like what the theory predicted.

But then we noticed an exception: the USA. In the US we had all the progress, but it looked like religion was more popular than ever. Even in Europe, especially with the increase of Muslim immigration, there has been a resurgence of religion. Some of us who saw secularization theory more as a strategy than a descriptive scientific program were cheered by the critiques scholars have offered of the theory. I think of works like Christian Smith, The Secular Revolution and Charles Taylor’s, A Secular Age, as leading exemplars. Whatever the outcome, reality is much more complicated than simply positing an indirect relationship between the place of reason and its fruits in society and the status and role of religion.

I had a good visit with pastor friend Jeff Olive yesterday. Jeff pastors what is probably the fastest growing United Methodist Church in the northern part of the Texas Annual Conference. As Jeff told me about the kinds of people his church was primarily reaching – and not reaching – I got to thinking about how this relates to secularization theory, Christian apologetics, church growth and evangelism. Jeff told me their strong point for growth is young families – adults in their 30s and up. Given Wuthnow’s studies on how even this demographic is harder to reach now, this IS a good thing. But what about the 18-30 group? Jeff says – and this fits with my experience – that this group is very hard to reach, even for his young, growing, energetic church plant.

Nicky Gumbel’s Alpha Course, designed for Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, in London, begins with a talk entitled, “Boring, Untrue, and Irrelevant?” Gumbel talks about how these are the adjectives many in our culture think of when they think of the Christian faith. His argument is that it is anything but these things.

My thought is that most of recent apologetic effort has addressed the “untrue” argument. Apologists thought about the challenges offered by atheists, the same challenges assumed by secularization theory. If unbelievers don’t have reasons to believe, well, we’ll give them some reasons. Josh McDowell is the popular exemplar of this strategy. Once upon a time this approach seemed effective. I don’t think it is anymore, because the main complaint I see people having against the faith is not intellectual (“it’s untrue”) but more affective (“it’s boring and irrelevant”).  If this is so, our efforts to give reasons to believe will continually miss the point.

Some churches have recognized the “boring” complaint and have sought to become centers of excitement and entertainment. Taking this route is difficult – certainly inaccessible to most churches. Just think of the competition: how many churches have the budget and personnel to compete with Disney, MTV, the NFL and the like. That route looks like a losing game to me, at attempt to play by the wrong rules.

Instead, the church needs to consider ways intrinsic to its own story that will challenge the prevailing cultural notions of “boredom” and “irrelevance.” (James K.A. Smith’s current project is working in this direction.) Addressing boredom will require us to deal with the reality of living in a consumerist culture of excess that deadens us to real joy. Addressing irrelevance will require us to offer a better narrative of the good life. We have plenty of work ahead of us.

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Human?

Posted on July 19, 2012 by Richard Heyduck

I’ll be teaching a couple of section of Introduction to Ethics this fall. This will be the first time I’ve taught this course in several years, and the first time ever at Wiley College. When I taught it at NTCC I taught it from a purely secular point of view, since NTCC is a public community college. Wiley is a Christian college, so though the adopted text is not written from a Christian point of view, I am allowed and encouraged to do so.

Some people might think, Oh, Christian point of view – that must mean divine commands. I believe there are divine commands, and that those commands are worth obeying, but, no, that’s not where I start. I also don’t start a step of abstraction away from that with deontology. I also don’t begin with consequentialism, natural law or natural rights. For me, the starting point is asking what we are as humans and where we find ourselves in time and space.

Put very briefly, I start with the assumption that humans are made in God’s image. Being made in God’s image is not primarily substantial: our bodily appearance, our reason, or our speech. It’s not even our inherent relationality. Rather, being made in God’s image is a calling, a task, to image God to the broader creation (including other humans). Our primary model for figuring out both what this looks like and how to do it is Jesus, God incarnate. Stanley Hauerwas takes a similar approach in this short video:

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Who’s Fit to Preach?

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Richard Heyduck

My memory of the fine details of my own life events isn’t too sharp. Since my own passage through the hurdles set before me by the Board of Ordained Ministry was thirty years ago, I don’t remember everything. I do remember writing out answers to many questions. I remember running all over Houston trying to find the site for my psychological test (I thought at the time that putting people through the stress of being given a wrong address for such an important event must be part of the test itself). I remember that my answers to the committee about the reason we were (then) ordained Deacon before being ordained Elder were somehow inadequate.

Beyond the fact that they approved me, I never heard any details of what the committee thought of me. Over the next several years I heard horror stories, mostly tied to results from the psychological testing and how candidates were quizzed on their pathologies – pathologies they claimed to know nothing about. I never heard anything about my test results – not a peep – so I guess I was distressingly boring.

I’ve not yet served on a BOM (or a DCOM), but the job strikes me as terribly difficult. It’s difficult because it is of such great moment for the candidate and the church. The candidates have invested hugely just to get there. Most have sacrificed their families in one way or another. The churches of the conference depend on faithful leadership, not just people who want a job, however nice and hardworking they might be.

In his book Bishop, Will Willimon puts it this way:

The free movement of the Holy Spirit is one reason it is so difficult for our Boards of Ordained Ministry to make decisions about the fitness of candidates for the ministry. Scripture is full of instances of God calling unbalanced, not-too-bright, ill-equipped, and even disreputable people to positions of leadership in the People of God.

It’s hard to be Methodist when we serve a God who acts like this. We love things to be proper and in good order. We want impeccable policies and procedures to ensure a well-oiled, well-functioning bureaucratic machine. And the machine works pretty well, though, unfortunately, not for the ends we ought to be pursuing.

If I were one of the BOM members that had to stand before the Conference and report and the incoming preachers, I’d much rather tell of their proven aptitude and early signs of success. I’d love to pass on their stellar recommendations from seminary. To have to say, “This person’s life is currently messed up, but we couldn’t deny God’s call,” would be mighty hard to do. No, we would never say that. We’d keep that in the confines of the committee, when we told the person either to seek another line of work or to come back in a year when life was more orderly and under control. Like ours.

Like Bishop Willimon, I fear that our high level of organization, structure and commitment to policy may often cause us to miss God. I don’t want to miss God. Even if it means I have to make a mistake sometimes.

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