Learn About Methodism

A Conversation with the Bishop:

Subject: Bishop's Video Conversations

Dear Sisters and Brothers,

In this chapter of our video conversation, I hope to reconnect every member of our Western North Carolina Conference with the Power of Three that is being lived out in churches all around the area. Through the marvels of technology, I am able to make a connection with every member with your help. While this does not take the place of person-to-person meetings, these videos open the possibilities for dialog as never before.

After you've watched the video yourself, please forward it to other members of your church. If possible, I hope you might show this video to your congregation at an appropriate time in the life you're your church, perhaps during your announcements, or at various meetings throughout the week. The whole series will be available for download here. Thank you for your help in strengthening our connection with every member of Christ's church.

Conversation with the Bishop - Vol III

If you'd like to hear more from the Bishop you can sign up on the same page to receive an e-mail alert when additional videos are posted.

View all of the Rethink - Reconnect Videos

Larry M. Goodpaster
bishop@wnccumc.org

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A Conversation with the Bishop:

Subject: Bishop's Video Conversations

Dear Sisters and Brothers,

I know each one of you is working diligently right now in preparation for the Advent and Christmas season to reconnect with as many of the people of your church as possible. This is a vital and constant work of the church - reconnecting with Christ, with one another and with our mission in the world. I want to extend and strengthen that connection to the conference and to mission work of our United Methodist Church around the world through a video conversation with our members.

This is the latest video message I am sending to every member of our conference churches. Through this medium, I hope to encourage every member to become engaged in our mission of Following Jesus, Making Disciples and Transforming the World. I hope you will watch the newest chapter of this video conversation yourself and then send a copy of this message to other members of your church.

Conversation with the Bishop - Vol II

If you'd like to hear more from the Bishop you can sign up on the same page to receive an e-mail alert when additional videos are posted.

View all of the Rethink - Reconnect Videos

Larry M. Goodpaster
bishop@wnccumc.org

_________________________________________________

Recommended Books:
Methodist Doctrine: The Essentials by Ted A. Campbell
Wesley and the People Called Methodists by Richard P. Heitzenrater
United Methodist Beliefs: A Brief Introduction by William H. Willimon
Recapturing the Wesley's Vision by Paul Chilcote
Three Simple Rules by Rueben Job

The official United Methodist website: www.umc.org

View more information on The Wesley's and Their Times.

What does it mean to be a United Methodist? Dr. James C. Howell, the Senior Pastor at Myers Park United Methodist, addressed that question in the eBest Ideas of Methodism
 series of e-mail reflections. Here are excerpts…

While Methodists may take immense pride in their angle on the faith, it is hard to find many Methodists who arrogantly assume we have a corner on truth. We delight in our friendships with Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists, and Catholics, and we are eager in the diverse world in which we find ourselves to build on our strong relationships with Judaism and other faiths, and to learn from each other.

In the Apostles’ Creed (maybe without thinking, or understanding) we say we believe in “the holy, catholic church.” The word “catholic” (with a small c) does not mean the Roman Catholic denomination, but rather is a synonym for something like “universal,” and highlights our pursuit of unity among Christians…

I believe the vast majority of Christians are impatient with division, and are eager to embrace ways we can emphasize what we share. We are enriched by friendships with each other: my closest friends among the clergy are Catholic or Pentecostal! We also recognize that the Church becomes an embarrassment to itself when we wrangle over subtleties that are lost on a cynical world…

What is more important? To be right on this or that issue? Or to maintain the unity of the Church?

The godfather of Methodism, John Wesley, nearly died when he was five. He was the 15th of 19 children born to his mother Susannah; so there was a crowd of children the night the house caught on fire. Everyone was out safely – except John (nicknamed “Jacky”). In despair, his father Samuel knelt and commended his son’s soul to God. But then a neighbor climbed onto another man’s shoulders and rescued little Jacky…

After this brush with death, Mrs. Wesley resolved to be “more particularly careful of the soul of this child, whom God has mercifully provided.” She had a Bible verse to explain his destiny: quoting Zechariah 3:2 she called this son “a brand plucked from the fire.”

Methodists have a keen sense of why our personal stories matter, and a sharp awareness that we are not here by accident, that God has some purpose for each of us. Every day, if you drive a car or cross the street, or if your heart still beats when it might not, we have narrow brushes with death. You can’t dwell on this or you can drive yourself insane. But to reflect on the fragility of life, and how precious it is to exist for another day, is at the heart of faith…

In their charter, Methodists imagine themselves to be the kind of people who locate the meaning of their lives in what God has done and is doing, who know that “Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home.” You survived another day: but why? The answer is God’s grace found in Zechariah 3:2 and many other verses.

Methodism would probably never have happened were it not for the profound faith of Susannah Wesley, who made faith, prayer, Bible reading and holiness as essential as any other household routine. She held church for the family in her kitchen at night, and one of her regular prayers was “Help me, Lord, to remember that religion is not to be confined to the church, or closet, nor exercised only in prayer and meditation, but that everywhere I am in thy presence. So may my every word and action have a moral content. May all the happenings of my life prove useful to me. May all things instruct me and afford me an opportunity of exercising some virtue and daily learning and growing toward thy likeness… Amen.”…

The peril a denomination faces (or that a congregation faces) is the same one every individual faces: that religion will be a few motions we go through, something that we value in our brains but gets short-circuited on the way to the heart or to our actual tangible behavior, and we never live into what Susannah prayed – that “everywhere I am in thy presence.” We may have heard of the “power,” but is it a rumor? or reality for us?

Mind you, in 2008 plenty of people want and think they can access the power without the form – but we will learn how the power of God requires the form, the habits and motions, but then also how the power actually comes to fruition through the form.

Most of us have heard about the day the Israelites exited slavery in Egypt, with God parting the sea. Few readers have noticed the curious twist that God told the Israelites to ask the Egyptians for their jewelry – and the Egyptians complied (Exodus 12:35)! We call this “plundering the Egyptians.”

John Wesley used this as an image for how we think about non-Christian knowledge. Should Christians be wary of science, archaeology, current music and culture? Wesley encouraged Methodists to know all they can know, to grab jewels of truth from any quarter…

Of course, Wesley assumed Methodists were spending sufficient time studying Bible and other Christian resources! So – while Methodists have no fear of secular knowledge, while we delight in new discoveries (even if they seem to threaten the faith!), and while we learn to notice God’s hand in the story line of a novel, or the sad wrinkle in a country song, or the hints of life on another planet in another solar system, or a symphony, painting, or poem, these are no substitute for more direct study of God and the faith. The Israelites carried their Egyptian plunder to their true destination, Mt. Sinai, to receive God’s Word…

A staple of the Methodist life is a discipline of reading – and not fluffy page-turners, but the kinds Mark Helrpin spoke of: “The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that devastate and remake one’s soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.” Wesley rode a donkey, and he always carried books wherever he went. We insist that children read every day; Wesley would insist that Methodists also read constantly.

If the average Methodist knows one fact about John Wesley, it is that his heart was “strangely warmed.” We may know little to nothing about his labors for disadvantaged children, his insistence that we give the vast majority of our money away, or his diligent attention to God’s presence in the minutiae of daily life, but we are fond of the idea of a “heart strangely warmed.”

But why? Wesley himself rarely mentioned this experience, focusing instead on the work at hand. Perhaps our selective memory of Wesley says a lot about us: we want to feel, we want an experience – and there is nothing wrong with this, unless we forget that Jesus came, not so we could feel different, but so we could be different. Isn’t our whole culture’s obsession with feeling the ruin of relationships, rendering us unable to make and keep commitments and strive for the common good? Wesley knew religious feeling matters, but he found it to be an unreliable guide to the things of God – and if anything, our feelings are what stand in need of conversion!

Methodism is a religion of the heart. God is keenly interested in our desires and passions, as everything we do grows out of what is in the heart. Wesley’s heart was “warmed” on May 24, 1738 – but you may ask “How did that happen? Can my heart be strangely warmed, too?”
Americans tend to wait until the heart is warmed… and then I will serve, then I will pray, then I will go out in mission. But this is as if I wish to converse comfortably in a language I have never studied, as if I want to propose to a woman never I’ve met, as if I’d like to make a hole in one without ever swinging a club on the driving range.

For Wesley there was a “method” to his approach to God (hence, “Method-ist”!), a discipline, a patience, a long-range strategy. For years he felt he wasn’t good enough for God (which implied he was certainly trying diligently to be good enough!), he fretted that his devoted service to God wasn’t sufficient. But he had built a structured life that was prepared for the rush of God’s Spirit when it came – although Methodists never linger too long over the feeling, but get back to the work at hand in service to God.

One of Methodism’s best ideas is that religion is personal. Not that Methodists are the only ones who conceive of our relationship with God as just that – a relationship! But it was a bit unusual in the 18th century for someone like Wesley to think of the life of faith as something so intensely personal. Most people in England believed in God – but for most this meant “I believe there is a God, although God isn’t featured prominently in my life, God made the world and has pretty much left it to run on its own, religion is a factor during a crisis, Church is a nice activity, and God wants me to be nice too.”

For Wesley and us Methodists, God is not the proverbial watchmaker who built the contraption and leaves it ticking. God is not “the Force” in Star Wars that invisibly gives us a boost. God is not a stern drill sergeant or a faceless bureaucrat. God is love. God is a companion, closer than any friend, more constant than the best spouse. The miracle of the universe is God is quite literally dying to be in a vital, personal relationship with each one of us…

When Methodists think theologically, when we are truest to our charter in how we function in the world, our center of gravity is the English’s language’s most beautiful word: Grace. We sing “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound” – and Grace is the sound that takes on flesh and becomes reality. Grace is not a vague warm-heartedness that says “I’m OK, you’re OK,” or Voltaire’s cynical quip, “God will forgive me, that’s his job.” Grace is God’s extraordinary love, mercy, unmerited favor, unearnable friendship, the overwhelming determination of God to be with us even when we ignore God or behave badly.

The secret delight in Grace is that we Americans (who love to be in control, to make things happen, to get what we deserve) get to become like little children, no matter our age. We can just be. God loves us, achievement means nothing, and the whole idea that I can manage my life strikes me as laughable. Grace is everything: so can I learn to see it all around me, to rest in its strength, to soar joyfully in its wake?

Too often we focus on faith more than Grace. We think about my faith, my spirituality. But faith is a mere echo of Grace which speaks first. Faith is a reflex (the way your knee kicks when the doctor plunks you with a gray hammer) to Grace. Faith replies, faith notices it has been grasped by God, drawn toward God and into the family of God. It’s about God, not us; without Grace faith would be mere human fantasy...

If Grace is God’s generous favor toward us, and if Grace is God’s power remaking us from the inside out, then how do we come to have this Grace? We believe it, we receive it by faith, we open ourselves to it, we let our defensive shields down and stop shoving God away.

John Wesley taught the Methodists to avail themselves of the “means of grace.” Christians had always believed that Grace was conveyed to us through the Sacraments, Baptism and Holy Communion. But Wesley taught that God provides conveyances of Grace outside the walls of the Church and its services of worship. Grace is something we want increased in us; we want to heighten our availability to and awareness of Grace.

The regular “means of grace” are obvious habits (although an embarrassing number of Methodists have poor habits), like Bible reading and prayer (and not just the mini-prayer you quickly insert before a meal or a big decision, but daily, regularly throughout the day, an ongoing conversational union with God)…

Essential to the lively reception of Grace in our lives is what Wesley called “conferencing.” Sounds like a meeting – and it is! To be close to God, to live into the Grace of God, we need friends, not to divert us or flatter us, but to bolster each other in the quest for God. Wesley demanded that every Methodist be in a small group, where members not only prayed, sang and studied; they also quizzed each other about their sin and holiness, held each other accountable, encouraged and valued each other in striving after God…

For the final 57 years of his life, Wesley kept an “exacter diary,” in which every hour of every day he jotted down little notations of how he had lived during that past hour with respect to the grace of God. Have I been faithful? Or grateful? Did I harbor dark thoughts? Or pass up an opportunity to do good? Imagine this kind of stellar devotion to God, working as diligently as possible to live a life that in some way was appropriate to the immense glory of God’s grace!
How far Wesley had come since his early years when he presumed religions was nothing more than (as he put it) “the mere saying of a few prayers, something superadded now and then to a careless or worldly life”! He came to see, and taught us, that religion is “a constant habit of soul, the renewal of our minds in the image of God…”

Keeping his message simple, Wesley explained that we should imagine our life with God in three successive stages, along which we pass repeatedly: repentance is the porch, faith is the door, holiness is the house.

Repentance is the porch. Modern people do not think much about sin, or our remorse before God; but Methodists are to be keenly aware that we put ourselves at odds with God, that we grieve God and hurt each other, that in little and big ways we rebel against God. But there is hope for us: we can repent, which means to turn back toward God, to have a change of mind, to plead in genuine sorrow to God for mercy, to declare our intention to trash our old decadent (or even self-righteous!) habits and cast ourselves on the mercy of God, to expect God’s power to work a radical metamorphosis on our lives.

Then the door opens: Faith. How surprising: For many Christians, faith would be the house itself. We believe, and that is enough; we are saved, and Christianity has fulfilled its reason to exist. But for Methodists, faith is our steady stepping up out of repentance and into a new life; we are no longer on the outside looking in. We are now home.

That home is holiness, the new life in Christ. This holiness is not life as we know it out in the world with a little package of religiosity strapped on the back. Holiness is not the dessert after the meal of what the world has to offer us. Holiness is not a slightly improved version of all that we value and hold dear. The Hebrew word “holy” means “set apart.” The holy are different, they keep away from much the world fawns over, they care about being clean and pure, their obsession is to have nothing to hide from people or from God. The holy know they will be misunderstood and probably ridiculed; but they do not mind, since they live for God, their home is God, they have stepped onto the porch, through the door, and now they rest in the house of the Lord.

Just as Grace has two aspects (the marvelous, free kindness of God toward us; and also the life-altering power of God laboring to reshape us), there are twin doctrines of the work of God. Justification (which has gotten most of the press in theological debates over the centuries) is what God does for us: the love of God in the Cross of Christ saves us, gives us the dizzyingly grand gift of eternal life, reconciles us to God, achieves salvation. Sanctification isn’t what God does for us, but what God does in us: God the Holy Spirit makes us holy, purges what is unclean, plants new thoughts and desires in us, brings our out of kilter lives into rhythm with God’s ways…

If our goal is closeness to the heart of God, seeing the world with the mind of Christ, then we practice for that, we strive to heighten our skill at every opportunity. Even at the very outset of the life of faith: to the unconverted only beginning to think about God and faith, Wesley encouraged “works meet for repentance.” “Meet” in 18th century English meant something like “appropriate to” or “fitting.” While we go out of our way not to make demands on people who are merely visiting a Church, whose faith is iffy, who might be put off if we get pushy and ask for too much (and so we pamper, we cajole, we are sweet, we make Christianity sound easy and ever so comfy), Wesley saw no reason to beat around the bush, or to pretend the life of faith is a breeze when the truth is “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”

So when people inquired about how to become a Christian, he told them to get busy doing Christian things. To faith’s strangers, Wesley said “Visit in the prison, empty your pockets for the poor, do without food for a few days, get up at 5 am to pray” – and amazingly it worked.

Could it be that as we make Christianity easier, user-friendly, and palatable we not only falsify our religion but actually give people more reason to stay away from something that’s just too trivial? We should nail signs outside the Church saying “Danger! Sanctification happens here: your life will be melted down and reconstructed in here.”