The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

I've recently had a chance to read accounts from the Good News Magazine of the recent meeting of the Wesley Covenant Association, and of course of what the Good News movement itself expects of the Traditional Plan before the upcoming UMC General Conference. And I was impressed. I think these groups really do believe that they are preserving an authentic witness to God's Reign against a culture drifting further and further from God's plan for humanity. And I note that they appear willing to pay a price. If the WCA forms its own denomination it will be small, and will give up access to substantial denominational resources. And even if at the upcoming General Conference their plan, the Traditional Plan, passes some of their members are so discontent they will leave regardless. And yet I also think their cause is quixotic, because as I explain below, when it comes to marriage they are defending not so much the traditional teaching of the church as they are defending a mid-20th ...

CS Lewis gave an address in 1955 entitled “The Old Western Man.” He referred to himself and others as “dinosaurs." Lewis was both enough of an observer and a scholar to see that the world and worldview in which he was nurtured was passing away.  Lewis had lived long enough to know that it wasn’t merely the old western man that was disappearing. The church of England and the particular form of evangelical Anglicanism that he represented was already in a state of almost complete collapse. His book,  Mere Christianity , which had animated a generation of English Anglicans, had transported very well to the American evangelical context of the time. But it’s vision of orthodox Christianity was not sustainable in England after World War II. Evangelical orthodoxy simply could not initiate or sustain a revival of Christianity in the England of the 1950s or indeed up until today.  Far longer lasting and far reaching are Lewis's narrative works. Like the works of J.R.R. Tolkien at t...

The problem of distinguishing between critical moral teaching and mere legalism is a problem both older and broader than Christianity. When Jesus takes it up in his teaching and actions he actually joins a tradition of thought well-established in not only rabbinic Judaism, but that of religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism as well.  What makes Jesus’ teaching distinctive is his criteria for distinguishing between morality and legalism: He asks what serves or does not serve his mission of proclaiming God’s Reign. He doesn’t do away with Jewish law, he simply asks on a case by case basis whether the application of the law is moral in that it advances the goal of making God’s Reign manifest. So, for example, he doesn’t do away with the teaching that one should “honor the sabbath and keep it holy” as a way of manifesting God’s Reign. Instead he asks whether the forbidding of healing on the sabbath serves the purpose for which the sabbath was intended: the flourishing of humankind....

The structure of the church derives from its mission, and is subordinate to the demands of that mission. The problem with our United Methodist understanding of our history is that it begins with the question: how did we get here from there? When we ask this question the “here“ dictates what we see in our history. We are engaged in creating anachronisms as we read our present back into our past in order to discover some kind of process of continuing evolution, or to authorize our existing institutions.  Further, when we look at our history under the influence of the theological idea of God‘s providence, or the work of the Holy Spirit, our history becomes idealized. Everything that doesn’t belong to the providential evolution that we have identified falls away from our consciousness and is no longer seen. And this includes, almost inevitably, the actual human forces that really drive the generation by generation creation of the Church. And this in turn of skews out understanding of t...

NOTE: I've substantially edited this blog to address more clearly its central purpose. Over the Advent and Christmas season I’ve been re-reading the gospels, asking myself again just who this Jesus is and what does he teach.  One thing is quite clear: the church structure of the UMC simply does not exist in the teaching of Jesus. Nor is it found described in Acts and the Epistles. You would have to be able to squeeze water from rocks to get anything like our book of Discipline from scripture. Or for that matter anything like the older Protestant churches and their antecedents in Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy.  Despite the endless arguments, a plain reading of the New Testament shows what is normative in scripture concerning the Church isn’t the  structure  of the church, but its  mission . A mission   is what Jesus passed on to his disciples, not an org chart.  The churches we have today are the result of a long evolution in which Christian communiti...

Well - quadruple or quintuple narratives. I’m writing this in Bethlehem, where I’m helping lead a group of students in both the footsteps of Jesus and the complexities of the this land. This is my 23rd year of visits to this land, and the 14th leading groups of students. This year our students started with a couple of days in Jerusalem being guided in what is often called a “dual narrative” approach to understanding Israel and Palestine. This isn’t my favorite approach, but then I don’t always call the shots. I prefer that our Israeli and Palestinian partners decide how to represent their experience.  As for my own experience? In my years coming here I’ve heard far more than two narratives. I’ve heard dozens.  For example. In Israel there are two Israeli narratives at least. One is the narrative of how people of different religions and ethnic backgrounds can build a new nation together out of the detritus of a thousand years or more of colonialism. The other is the narrative o...

In the last several months I’ve worshipped many times in congregations that are small, and are not growing rapidly. Yet they are strong and faithful in social contexts where the public worship of Jesus Christ offers no public reward and may well have a social cost.  I’ve come to realize as a missionary and teacher of evangelism that church growth, whether at a congregational or denominational level does not indicate one way or the other God’s presence or blessing in the church. It indicates only that that church has temporarily met some pressing need within a particular cultural context. A church that grows rapidly may as rapidly disappear.  All successful social movements face a problem: they become ubiquitous in a culture to the extent that they merge with it and disappear as a distinctive movement. This is particularly the case with religious movements. They may have distinctive institutions, such as churches and temples, but these are so widespread and publicly accessible ...