The following address was delivered at the eleventh annual Good News Convocation in 1980.
"The Church is of God, and will be preserved to the end of time, for the conduct of worship and the due administration of His Word and Sacraments, the maintenance of Christian fellowship and discipline, the edification of believers, and the conversion of the world." —The Ritual
As we gather to ponder "The Future of the Church" and especially the future of the United Methodist Church, let us start with two fundamental facts:
1. There is one Church of Jesus Christ, holy, universal, invisible. The Church is of God and will be preserved. The future of the Church is secure in His promise.
2. There are many denominations. Denominations are merely visible structures of the Church, means for worship, fellowship, discipline, edification, and conversion. As such, they are tools for our Lord Jesus Christ. The future of the United Methodist denomination depends upon its continued usefulness to Him. And that depends upon our willingness to be reforged to His pattern instead of ours. The United Methodist Church is not the Church of Jesus Christ; it is a Church of Jesus Christ. Our future as a connection is not guaranteed by His promise. It is possible for our denomination, like His church at Ephesus, to be discarded by our Lord as useless, have its lamp removed from among the lamps of the churches, and perish (Rev. 2:4-5).
The Methodist Connection is fundamentally one of people tied together by bonds of human love. Each of us here today are United Methodists because people we love are--relatives, faithful pastors, close-knit congregations. This connection is warm, wonderful and in healthy condition.
The Methodist Connection is also a structure, a polity, and a hierarchical set of Conferences devised by our forefathers as a means for doing God’s work. Now, what the church needs most is not structural reorganization, but pure doctrine, holy living, and the fire of the Holy Spirit. Does our connectional structure aid or hinder in these matters? We must analyze honestly the health of the structure beyond the local church, and compare it to New Testament norms. I would suggest that we find the following:
• We are no longer connected properly, lacking the one thing a Christian connection most needs--a common conviction about Jesus Christ.
• We centralize too much, dampening local zeal.
• We emphasize too much the less edifying activities of our connection.
By remedying these faults, we may perhaps make the structure more open to the Spirit. The remedies, I suggest, are division, devolution, and de-emphasis.
Warm and healthy though our connection of human love is, it is not enough to hold us together for long, or to empower us as a church. Any religious Society must have a unity of call and purpose that comes from a shared theology. A Christian connection of men and women must be tied together by a shared conviction about the person and work of Jesus Christ and a shared experience of His living presence. No lesser ties will hold in the absence of this one.
Our love for one another, our shared past, our shared pride in our traditions, our hymnody, our publications, our property--all of these are insufficient connecting ties if we lack a shared vision of Christ and a shared purpose under His call.
Today we lack that shared unity of conviction. This separation into different convictions, under way for fifty years, was openly recognized by the 1972 General Conference when it adopted "Doctrine and Doctrinal Statements;" a statement embracing theological pluralism as the only realistic doctrinal statement we could make as a denomination.
I do not condemn the 1972 statement. It was a step forward toward theological honesty, and open recognition of a fact long dodged, that much of the United Methodist Church no longer believed our ancient doctrine. The statement did not create our theological confusion; it merely confessed it openly; and that enables us to face it better.
As the 1972 statement says, the spectrum covered by our pluralism is very broad. Consider first the two major theologies:
1. Those United Methodists gathered here, and many others, represent Scriptural Christianity, as set forth in the Bible, and interpreted in the Articles of Religion, the Confession of Faith, and Wesley’s Standard Sermons and Notes on the New Testament. We hold unashamedly to what Wesley called "the old religion, the religion of the Bible, the religion…of the whole church in the purest ages." We find the "landmark documents" to be fresh, ever new, and ever true in their literal sense.
This group sees the salvation of each soul for whom Christ died as the prime goal of Christ and hence of His Church. We believe each person is oppressed and kept from self-realization first and foremost by his own sin, and that each must be individually reached with the good news of Christ’s victory over sin. Then, changed by His power, each person will change the society about him.
2. A second major group believes the old religion must be reinterpreted in the light of modern understanding of the Bible and of man. The crisp formulations of the landmark documents "are not to be construed literally," or "accorded any status of finality, either in content or rhetoric." Instead, what each one believes is to be determined individually by "free inquiry within the boundaries of…Scripture, tradition, experience, and reason."
Those boundaries have turned out to be pretty broad: there turn out to be very few "essential doctrines." Some in this group believe in the full divinity of Jesus Christ; many, including more than half of Protestant pastors, according to one survey, do not. Some believe in His bodily resurrection; many do not. All, however, believe God’s redemptive love showed itself in Jesus Christ. All believe God endowed each person with dignity and moral responsibility. All believe Jesus’ followers must imitate His overriding concern with persons.
This group sees this concern for the well being and self-realization of persons as the central purpose of the church. Many of them believe that people are oppressed and kept from self-realization chiefly as groups and by the structures of society, so the work of the church must center on the reforming of those structures and the liberation of those groups,
A word of appreciation is in order. A chief work of the past generation has been to awaken church and country to our deepest national social sin-segregation and racism. The saints who have led the church in this work have mostly come from this theological group.
3. A third group, perhaps the largest in our church, really are theologically indifferent. They hold that "there are no essential doctrines, and that differences in theology, when sincerely held, need no further discussion." Christians must, above all, imitate Christ’s love. (All quotations from "Doctrine and Doctrinal Statements," The Discipline)
Friends, there is no reconciling these views. They are not minor variants of one Gospel; they are poles apart. The essential question about a faith is not, "Is it congenial to my thinking?", but "Is it true?" All three of these positions cannot simultaneously be true.
In 1972 we bravely attempted to agree to disagree in a loving manner. We acknowledged our profound differences and resolved to cooperate and co-labor despite them, But differences in conviction so profound yield profound differences in purpose, and, as I shall enumerate later, our labors have consequently become weak, It is time to admit that pluralism cannot work—a Methodist connection with no common view of her Lord and His purposes is in fact disconnected.
What then are we to do, brothers and sisters? Leave, either severally or jointly? It is an option we have all considered from time to time, But no!
It is we who are the intellectual and spiritual heirs of the John and Charles Wesleys. It is we who are responsible for faithful Christian souls under our care, whether we are preachers, teachers, helpers, or friends. It is our grandparents to whose gravesites the Annual Conferences hold title. Why should we leave our United Methodist Church?
Well, then, are we called to fight to recapture the church structure for Jesus Christ? For many years I have thought so. It took only a small number of liberals to capture the UMC structure, but it took a generation. Probably we have seen the high tide of that movement. At the 1976 General Conference, for the first time in a generation, an evangelical voice was heard and was influential. This voice was much stronger at the 1980 General Conference. Indeed, the Conference was in many ways a standoff—governed by a maintain-the-status-quo, middle-of-the-channel-spirit. If the trend continues, and if our Lord delays His return, we shall, in our lifetimes, see the evangelical voice in the church become a majority at General Conference.
But is it this to which our Lord calls us? Our brothers and sisters of the liberal persuasion are both numerous and firmly convinced that they have the authentic message of Jesus for our time. our honestly atheological brothers and sisters are perhaps even more numerous. Can a mere shift in who controls the structure bring unity, vision, and power to the church? Hardly. Whoever controls the structure, the deep theological division that disconnects us will persist for another generation, and we will continue to fritter our strength in isotonic exercises in which the body parts push and pull against each other without motion. Perhaps my vision is too short or my faith too small, but I cannot see that as accomplishing our Lord’s purposes.
Professor Earl C. De Brewer of Candler School of Theology, in his most thoughtful paper given before the Southeastern Jurisdictional Conference here two weeks ago, dared us * as a church to think the unthinkable and to dare the impossible concerning our structure. In this spirit, let me suggest that it is time to finish the work begun by the theological task force in 1972. At that time we first faced honestly the profundity of our theological divisions, and agreed to disagree in love, The eight years show this to be merely the first step—the present tension is unstable and cannot endure. As our Lord taught us, "No house divided against itself will stands" (Matt. 12:25)
Therefore it is time now for the church itself to take the next step, and work out in love a way to divide itself into two independent bodies, each unified by its own theological integrity.
Putting aside for the moment all questions as to the practicality of such can action, what virtues might flow from it if it could be done?
Honesty—First and foremost, each child-church of such a division could honestly say its own creed, proclaim its own vision of the gospel, and teach its own doctrine, without any need to equivocate.
Clarity—Soft, fuzzy language, ambiguous and shot through with code words, now characterizes our resolutions pronouncements, and materials. This is not only a disease in itself, it is a symptom. Fuzzy language either hides fuzzy thought, papers over essential disagreement, or purposes to deceive, With a unity of understanding, each child-church could be plainer and clearer.
Unity of purpose—Each child-church would be bound together by a shared understanding of the purpose of Christ for it. This alone-would give immense new vigor.
Decision—The theologically indifferent would by the very necessity of choosing membership come face to face with the questions of truth: "But who do you say that I am?" and "What shall I do, Lord?" (Matt. 16:15 and Acts 22:10).
Smallness as such—We have idolized numbers far too long, and there are many indications that our denomination is well beyond the most effective size. The very reduction of size of each child-church might well itself bring vigor.
By all the rules of purely human organizations, a self-initiated, orderly, and loving division is unthinkable and impossible. Human organizations do not voluntarily make themselves smaller, even by fruitful division. The rulers over them do not voluntarily relinquish empire or power.
But a church of Jesus Christ is not a purely human organization, and impossible feats of service and self-humbling are not unthinkable to those who remember the footwashing bowl of our Lord.
Perhaps we need not wait for an official commission appointed by authorization of a General Conference. Instead, the Council of Bishops, seizing the initiative and exercising their authority for general supervision of the church, could appoint an unofficial working group of perhaps 20 persons to prepare a proposal for loving division. This might then be pondered by the church before the 1984 General Conference.
Some principles that would seem proper might be:
• Division should be like cell mitosis, with initially duplicate structures on each part.
• Full freedom of choice under conscience, free of all direct and indirect coercion, should be inviolate. Coercion has no place in a church of Jesus Christ.
• Each local church should decide, in quarterly conference assembled how it wants to go, and local property should go with it.
• Each ordained pastor, including those serving as missionaries, district superintendents, or bishops should decide how to affiliate, without any loss of pension rights or less of guarantee of appointment.
• Each institution whose ownership is by a board that is not a Conference creature should decide its own affiliations.
• All property held by Annuals, Jurisdictional, or General Conferences or their agencies should be divided pro-rata according to the proportion of Conference membership affiliating with each child-church.
Ultimately, though, we may each be required to face Martin Luther’s call to Christians, "Let goods and kindred go." But I should hope the United Methodist Church could, through the supernatural power of Jesus Christ, show to the world a church dividing in love rather than anger, in peace rather than pride, in order rather than chaos. Is not such a witness possible in our time?
"It is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance
of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser
and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought
of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social
and never destroy and absorb them."
-Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931)
The great Christian economist, E. F. Shumaker, entitled his revolutionary book of essays Small is Beautiful--Economics as if People Mattered (1973). In it he challenges our "bigger is better" thinking,, not only in economics but with respect to all our organizations:
"Today we suffer from an almost universal idolatry of giantism. It is therefore necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness…What is needed in all these matters is to discriminate, to get things sorted out. For every activity there is a certain appropriate scale."
In this spirit, let us together look at the connectional structure of the United Methodist Church, get things sorted out, and inquire as to the appropriate scale and connectional level for each of our joint activities as servants of the Most High God.
We can safely assume that each level of the Methodist connectional organization was devised to answer one or a very few central purposes. Each has by now taken on a host of secondary purposes and a substantial machinery. It sometimes seems to a layman as if the maintenance and operation of our organizational machinery has become our preoccupation, hiding both original purposes and true needs.
Moreover, our American obsession with efficiency and our Methodist passion for organization has caused us to centralize church functions more and yet more. Many evils flow from this:
• First, we tend to destroy the growth and smother the action of the individual member, rather than building him up.
• Second, we lose sight of the central purpose of each function, the distinctive mode in which it is to serve the church.
• Third, we in fact lose efficiency because we lose flexibility independence, and local initiative.
• Fourth, our centralized organizations have become remote from our members; they neither respond to our needs, command our interest, nor call fourth our prayers and support.
• Fifth, our servants, the full-time staffs of General Board and Agencies, have become our masters—setting our priorities, devising our programs, specifying our giving levels, prescribing our charitable expenditures, speaking publicly in our name, and dictating our views on all sorts of questions. Not only the laymen, but also the ministers, and even the bishops have become powerless to direct our high-inertia machinery.
Today’s centralization of our church can be justified by neither Biblical warrant nor Wesleyan example. The New Testament church was surely connectional—they met in council to interpret doctrine, they commended traveling members to one another, and local churches made love gifts to the necessities of other churches. Nevertheless, the structure beyond the local church was apparently informal, and that structure per se seems to have absorbed the full-time efforts of not even one Christian worker.
Similarly, we have far overreached the Wesleyan pattern, He set apart bishops, presiding elders, and no one else, for the far-flung but modest work beyond the local church. Today, on the other hand, the United Methodist Church is second only to the Roman Catholic Church in the size of its central organization and the multiplicity of its staffs.
The evolution of our centralization has been natural, and much of it has been salutory. There are indeed many things that only the "greater and higher associations" can do, and we are called of God to do some of those things.
Even so, our Methodist century of centralization has been in step with a period when our whole society has tended to over-expect, overemphasize, and over-trust centralization in all kinds of organization—civil government, corporations, labor unions—as well as in churches. In each such area, we have now begun to recognize the fallacies of over-centralization and the truth of Shumaker’s Principle of Subsidiarity, so neatly stated by Pius XI, In large corporations, decentralization has become the order of the day. In government, a revulsion against overcentralization is sweeping the land.
Now is the time to look again at the machinery of the United Methodist Church, reasoning from prime purposes and first principles, asking, "What activity that can be moved down in level, nearer to the local churches and to the people?" Such proposals do not call for retrenchment, a reduction in the total work of the church, but for devolution, a decentralization of responsibility, funding, and activity. In fact, even if we were theologically united, only such decentralization could bring expansion of activity, of service, of commitment.
The mission of the church is carried out by particular Christians in particular places, mostly in local churches. It is there that worship is offered, there the Word taught and sacraments celebrated, there fellowship shared, there discipline administered, there individual believers built up as disciples of Christ, there sinners converted by the power of the Gospel.
All of our structure, organization, and machinery exists for only one reason, to serve the local church in its work.
This truism can become a perspective, a way of viewing every activity. Through this window, we can see more clearly.
Consider, for example, the Annual Conference. The Constitution (paragraph 34) says, "The Annual Conference is the basic body in the church...... And so perhaps it is, from the viewpoint of ministers, who have their membership in that unit, Yet, from the other perspective one starts with the local church. An itinerating ministry requires an organization to recruit, train, ordain, appoint, oversee, and discipline ministers. The Annual Conference was created to serve the local church in this way. But few sinners have first come to Christ at the meetings of Annual Conferences, and it is not the chief organ by which believers are edified.
If we believe The Ritual’s statement of the basic purposes of the church, and if we view the local church as a collection of believers, rather than as a pastoral appointment, then we must gently insist that the local church, not the Annual Conference, is the "basic body in the Church."
This difference in viewpoint may seem a subtle, even a negligible, distinction. Why does it matter which way we view the Annual Conference? Why does it matter which we call the "basic body?" Precisely because this view determines whether our first approach to every need is to specify program (and perhaps staff) at the Annual Conference level or to seek ways of meeting the need directly in the local church, letting God summon the interests and energies of the lay member in the pew. This viewpoint will determine whether we see the Annual Conference as assisting the ministry of the local church, or the local church as serving the program of the Annual Conference.
The District
Pastor for pastors. Pastors need pastoring, too. Few callings are so inherently lonely; few so inherently demand gregarious, people-oriented peoples Moreover, in contrast with most professions, young pastors can only rarely watch older ones work, as they preach, visit, and counsel. They need training and advice.
The first purpose of the District, therefore, is to furnish a pastor of pastors, a supervising and training elder. The size of the district is governed by the number of pastors one superintendent can so serve, and the physical territory he can traverse.
Sharing training. A second purpose of the District is to provide a sharing group for specialized skills and tasks in the local churches The superintendents of the church schools, for example, each have a job shared by no one else in their church. A grouping of churches within easy traveling distance can enable all the church school-superintendents to grow by sharing experiences and ideas, instead of each having to make all the mistakes himself.
Works of love and mercy. A third purpose of the District is to do works of love and mercy that are beyond the means of individual churches. A District cant for examples operate a Group Home providing child care to 10-15 young peoples A District can maintains small retirement home serving perhaps 25-50. Sometimes a District is the right unit-to run-a camp or retreat facility.
Is this a devolution we now need to study? My own Annual Conference, for example, has recently perceived the greater desirability and potential effectiveness Of many small group homes for young people, instead of the large central home built three generations ago. In this perception we respond both to real changes in need and to the whole American society’s renewed appreciation of the small and local.
In decentralizing child care, however, our instinct has been to keep centralized administration, to operate a network of group homes by a conference-wide Board of Trustees, with a conference-wide Director of Children’s Homes. If on the other hand we try to think small, why not devolve this function to the Districts, sharing out the existing capital assets among the Districts, and charging volunteer District committees with the responsibilities? Each such committee will know its local needs best; each will be able to give closer oversight to its own home; gone will be all pulling and hauling of the needs of one district against those of another.
The Annual Conference
The Ministry. The basic purpose of the Annual Conference is to provide an itinerating ministry for local churches." Because of itineracy, ministers belong to the Annual Conference, rather than to churches.
As a professional unit, the ministers (only) in an Annual Conference properly select, approve for ordination, and discipline the ministers. The Bishop, with the advice of the cabinet, appoints the ministers to their charges.
Works of love and mercy. The second basic purpose of the Annual Conference is to do works of love and mercy whose scale is inherently beyond that of the District. Historically these works have been the care of children and of older people.
Whenever these works become such in scale that they can be done on the District level, they should be. What we have said above concerning child care can equally well be said concerning residential care for the elderly.
Equipping the Laity. The third purpose of the Annual Conference is the equipping of the laity for service in the local church. Historically this has been done through colleges, through summer camping, and through workshops and training institutes. Colleges do indeed seem to be of scale exactly suited to the Annual Conference.
Program. The above three purposes seem to me to complete the set of basic and appropriate purposes for the Annual Conference, "But," you will say, "you have said nothing about program and nothing about finance. Most of our Annual Conference staff people are employed in these activities, rather than the ones you mentioned."
You are right. So they are. And it is here that we have got purposes topsy-turvy. The Conference Program has become a mode in which the higher organizational levels often try to tell the local churches what to do and what to think. In our Annual Conference, surely not atypical, the 1979 Program recommended by the Council on Ministries urged the local churches:
• to observe 27 different special Sundays—a veritable new Christian calendar, promoting causes rather than saintly lives.
• to hold 14 studies, workshops and other special programs, besides the special Sundays.
• to buy and use 11 distinct sets of materials prepared by one or another of the higher organizations.
• to start 8 new activities and/or committees in the local church, besides—the studies.
Let me say here a word of appreciation about intentions. Each of these proposals was made in Christian zeal by a person whose intention was to help the local church. I believe that such a Program is not in fact an effective way to help local churches, but this does not detract from these intentions to serve.
What philosophy, may we ask, underlies these special observances, studies, and activities? Are they responses to heartfelt cries for help from local pastors and congregations? Or are they efforts on the part of the informed persons at higher levels to arouse and teach the dull folk in the pews, who somehow cannot perceive the needs of society?
The recommended materials answer the question. First, the whole emphasis on using the recommended materials tells much. It is not sufficient that the Christian woman in the pew study China, it is necessary that she do it with the (pro-Marxist) materials from Woman’s Society headquarters It is not sufficient for youth to study conversion with the aid of the Bible; it is necessary to use "Born to Grow." It does not suffice for local churches to study simpler life styles; it is necessary that they do it in "three-two-hour sessions using material provided by the Division of Stewardship."
If these programs arose in response to heartfelt needs in the local church, it would not be necessary to prescribe the materials—the hungry man only needs to be told where food is; he doesn’t require either prescribed menu or high-pressure advertising.
The study materials themselves also confirm the top-down nature of the Program. In content they are usually one-sided, sometimes even when the issues are complex and people of good will disagree. In purpose, they seem intended to arouse us, blind and self-centered, to the needs of our fellow men, and to teach us the "proper solutions," which usually turn out to be programs of federal action.
Our top-down programming instinct is well developed When Dr. Brewer aroused our Jurisdictional Conference with his stirring call for new emphasis on spiritual renewal within structure, rather than on structure along, we referred it to four legislative committees, and then, in adopting their reports, we sent it to Annual Conference Councils on Ministry for implementations The time has come to de-emphasize programming as an Annual Conference function.
The Jurisdiction
The chief (but not only) purpose of the Jurisdiction is to elect and appoint bishops, the "itinerating general superintendency" confirmed as an unchanging part of our polity by the Third Restrictive Rule of our Constitution. I rejoice in the episcopacy; the present Constitutional crises in our church is not whether the bishops have too much power, but whether they exercise too little. It seems far better for the church to be led and governed by elected and consecrated bishops, beyond further ambition of office and clearly responsible to God for souls, than by General Secretaries neither elected nor consecrated.
Two weeks ago, here, I participated in my first Jurisdictional Conference. We elected some strong leaders for our church; we retired some great bishops; and we heard some anointed preaching. Bishop Nolan Hamon, however, best characterized the political activities. "The church is less holy at conference than at any other time.…It used to be that the secularism we fought was the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life; today it is that the church itself has become secular."
As one whose chief political experience has been in years of dead-serious, secular, hardball corporate politics, I could not avoid some comparisons:
First, some political maneuvers were used at the Jurisdictional Conference that would have been rejected as dishonorable by my largely pagan corporate colleagues’.
Second, the corporate political struggles of my experience were conducted as debates about how the customer might best be served and a competitive advantage thereby derived. Faction, division, laboratory loyalties, though’ fierce, did not dominate policy; and personality took a distant third place. In the Jurisdictional Conference, it seemed that Annual Conference and caucus loyalties and advancement dominated heavily, personality came a distant second, and I did not hear policy or theology discussed at all.
How can it be that church elections can have come to such a super-secularized state? Partly, it is because as fallen humans we usually behave worse in packs, than as individuals. We convince each other that "realism" demands the action that will win. Partly, the very nobility of our ends—the election of the beat servants for Christ’s church—blinds us to the impropriety of our means. Partly, because we all will do for a friend, or a group loyalty, things we would not do for our own advantage. Partly, because we have through familiarity lost the awe of handling holy things.
More fundamentally, of course, Satan’s ancient weapons of ambition and pride in our cause or our cleverness are active in his hand yet; and unless we invoke our supernatural defenses, we have none against such a foe.
John Wesley, upon learning that Asbury and Coke had styled themselves bishops, rebuked: "Men may call me a knave or a fool, a rascal, a scoundrel, and I am content, but they shall never, by my consent, call me Bishop!…I study to be little; you study to be great.…O, beware; do not seek to be something! Let me be nothing, and Christ be all in all!"
Oh, for a revival of that cry in our hearts! Our Lord still calls us to see reality, as opposed to the cynical "realism" of the world: "Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted" (Luke 14:11), or, as it has been paraphrased, "The branch that bears the most fruit hangs lowest."
The General Church
Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, our General Church is a national one (with ever-fewer missionary conferences abroad), rather than a world-wide one.
What are the purposes of such an organizational level? Several can be seen in our history:
1. To maintain the purity of Wesleyan doctrine as prescribed by the First Restrictive Rule of our Constitution.
2. To maintain worship (The Ritual, The Hymnal) and order (The Discipline).
3. To publish teaching materials for the upbuilding of faith and for training in godliness.
4. To organize the selection, training, and sending of missionaries with the Gospel of Jesus Christ to all the world.
5. To sponsor seminaries for the training of a devout and faithful clergy.
6. To-speak as a united voice on moral issues.
To maintain doctrinal purity. The United Methodist Church, at its 1972 General Conference, officially abdicated this role and renounced this purpose. This abdication was confirmed by the General Conference of 1980, which steadfastly refused to insist on purity of sexual practice as a requirement for ordination. Right and wrong are not central; such things are best left to each Annual Conference to decide. This seems wrong—surely doctrine and moral standards are proper functions of our General Conference.
To maintain worship and order. This the General Church does energetically.
To publish teaching material. The abandonment of an unambiguous doctrinal base has naturally undermined the purpose of publishing. If as a church we have no unity on what is true about God, Jesus Christ, the nature of man, sin and atonement, how can we have anything, as a church, to teach? And we have not. Our curricular materials, whether individually heretical or orthodox, are uniformly flabby, ambiguous, weasel-worded. The trumpet’s uncertain sound reflects the uncertainty of the church. So, lacking a message to cry out, we seek new media over which to mumble.
Many of our churches will not use such materials. Many others do so only as threatened or cajoled, as a touchstone of "loyalty." Effective material needs no coerced adoption, but we shall have such material only when we restore theological integrity.
To send missionaries with the Gospel. The collapse of our mission enterprise has been documented enough; numbers alone prove us to be in full retreat while independent mission agencies grow and flourish.
Here, too, our theological ambiguity has undermined our purpose. In contrast with many of our missionaries, many of our Board of Global Ministry leaders do not really believe humankind’s chief problem to be sin and Jesus Christ to be the unique answer. In the absence of such belief, missions become merely means of relief and social alleviation. So we have honestly scrapped the name of Board of Missions; instead, it is the more ambiguous Global Ministries.
Our General Church mission structure itself, aside from theology, weakens the enterprise by making missions remote from the people. Cannot a single general sending agency that collects all the money and itself recruits, trains, commissions, and maintains the missionaries lose more in personal commitment than it gains in "efficiencies?" I think so, and it seems that a devolution is in order.
My little country congregation recently had their first member in a generation go as a short-term missionary (with an independent sending agency). The effect on the church was electric. They raised his support, in fives and tens scraped up and sacrificed. They commissioned him, surrounding him in a circle as his family in Christ. They pray for him daily. They rejoice in his letters. They now share the joys known by the New Testament churches of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Phillippi. Surely this is more nearly God’s pattern of missions than the massive and impersonal bureaucracy of our United Methodist Church.
To sponsor seminaries. Brother Ed Robb, in his address to the Good News Convocation two years ago, described the state of our United Methodist seminaries so well that it does not need doing again. It is, I think, clear that the theological ambiguity of the church flows from that of the seminaries.
Much of the difficulty of our seminaries and their teachers lies in squaring the truth which scholars must honestly seek with the Biblical faith that godly pastors must honestly hold. The special temptation faced by the seminary is to desire academic respectability above faithfulness, and the special temptation of all teachers was identified by our Lord when he said to us, "...you (teachers) seek the praise of men instead of that of the one true God." (John 5:44)
Even if, as we pray, our Methodist seminaries again become models of faithfulness, springs from which only sweet water flows, the sponsoring of seminaries no longer seems a proper purpose of the General Church.
Firstly, we do not and cannot control the Methodist seminaries we only partially support. Secondly, the seminaries are primarily regional, rather than national, in their clientele.
This suggests that the support of seminaries should be devolved down to the Jurisdictions or to the Annual Conferences. Perhaps the best method would be for the Annual Conferences to adopt a voucher system, contributing so much per candidate each year to any seminary where its ministerial candidates enroll. Once again, this form of devolution would not only save the General Church some bureaucratic machinery, it would fairly distribute Methodist support according to enrollment by United Methodists and would encourage seminaries to greater sensitivity to the needs of their client Annual Conferences. And surely the conferences, for their part, would take a more lively interest in their seminaries and their needs.
To speak as a church. Our General Conference spends almost as much effort deciding what to say as a church to the world as in operating the church. In practice, these pronouncements are usually directed to the voters and government of the United States. This is a purpose and function I believe our General Church should surely de-emphasize, and probably renounce.
In the first place, it has no warrant in Scripture, in our Lord’s own practice, nor in the practice of the New Testament Church. Our Lord, His herald John the Baptist, and His apostles uniformly addressed social evils, which they had aplenty, by speaking to the hearts of individuals, calling on individual soldiers to forswear extortion, individual tax collectors to stop cheating, individual slave-owners to free their slaves. These methods do not seem as potent as our lobbying, but they are our Lord’s methods, and we should accept His example as our instruction.
Secondly, our General Church often, indeed usually, does not speak with a united voice accurately expressing the shared sentiments of United Methodists everywhere, Did our General Conference speak for you when it condemned the use of force to rescue the hostages? Did it speak for you when it supported abortion-on-demand? Did it speak for you in urging economic boycotts of states and companies? Did it speak for you in endorsing the ERA amendment? (It seems to me that there is something sick about a society in which the fathers would send their daughters out to defend them.) These are matters on which devout Christian citizens differ as to what is wise and what is moral. In such circumstances, a modest silence, rather than pronouncements would seem in order.
Thirdly, who listens anyway? Our legislators are no fools; they know how much weight to attach to our official positions. By speaking too often, by speaking without proper expertness, by speaking on subjects where United Methodists are deeply divided, we have so lost our creditability as to have no audience left except ourselves. Little would be lost if our General Church pronounced no more on issues of public policy. Indeed, local churches crying out would be more effective as well as more democratic.
Some may say that this would still the prophetic voice of the Church. The true prophets of our Lord have, however, always been individuals. Organizations have a poor record as the Lord’s spokesmen, whether the 400 prophets of Ahab, the Pharisees, the Sanhedrin, the Roman Catholic Church of Luther’s time, or the Anglican Church of Wesley’s time. It is better that we not attempt corporate prophecy.
We are confused in our theology, therefore we should consider division. We are remote and impersonal in much of our over-centralized function; therefore we should consider devolution of function down from Annual Conferences to Districts, from the General Ch7urch down to lower bodies. We are burdened with top-down programming and proclamations therefore we should consider de-emphasis. In these ways, perhaps,, we can recover in each of our local churches our first love, the Lord Jesus Christ, and follow him in holy living that fires a concern for our neighbors and our society.
We must take to heart, I fear, our Lord’s message to the church at Sardis,
"You have the name of being alive, and you are dead, Awake and strengthen what remains and is on the point of death, for I have not found your works perfect in the sight of God. Remember then what you received and heard; keep that and repent" (Rev. 3:2-3).
1. The Discipline, 1976, "Doctrine and Doctrinal Statements,"
2. John R. W. Stott, What Christ Thinks of the-Church, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois 1958, 1972. An exposition of Revelation 2 and 3 for our time.
3. J. M. Buckley, Constitutional and Parliamentary History of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Methodist Book Concern, New York, 1912, Chapters I-IX illuminate the loving division of the Methodist movement into autonomous British and American branches.
4. Colin Williams, John Wesley’s Theology Today. Abingdon, Nashville, 1960. Chapter I. on doctrine and opinion, and the Appendix, "The Unresolved Tension: Truth and Unity", are especially relevant to Wesley’s relation to the Church of England,
5. Alan K. Waltz, Images of the Future. Abingdon, Nashville, 1980. A study commissioned by the General Council on Ministries on the future prospects of the United Methodist Church. Pages 25-26, 31, and 65-67 treat the need for some substantial change to develop a clear sense of direction and unity on moral and theological issues.
6. Malachi Martin, The Final Conclave. Pocket Books, New York, 1978. A startlingly apropos novel about the tensions within another denomination, Page 170 assesses Methodism explicitly. Page 201 is also very thought-provoking.
7. E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful. Perennial Library, Harper and Row, New York, 1973. Chapter IV-2, "Toward a Theory of Large-Scale Organization" is most relevant; the whole book is excellent.
Author’s Note: This paper, like all the addresses at Good News Convocations represents only the personal views of the author, not those of the Good News movement. In order to avoid ambiguity on this point, I did not discuss the paper with, nor show it to, any member of the Good News staff or Board of Directors before delivering it at the 1980 Convocation.