A Rather Sanguine Reflection

Blood used to be mystery. Before we figured out that it was the iron in the blood that both makes it red and carries oxygen to the brain and other organs and that is what keeps us alive. Earlier humans just knew what they saw: when blood was drained from a creature it died. Blood was life force.

And those earlier humans engaged that mystery. They surmised that somehow the life contained in every little creature must in some way be connected with the Great Life Force. In efforts to control or cajole or assuage that Great Life Force they experimented with the life force they could reach. Offer a little of our precious life force to touch the Great Life Force. And we called it sacrifice.

Some of our ancestors offered the life force of crops or trees, and others saw it in animals. Some offered the most precious ichor they knew: our own. This mystery of blood as a life force is also at the heart of the Christian schema. “Drink from this, all of you,” the gospels say that Jesus said, “this is my blood (my life force, God’s Life Force) given for you.”

But somewhere along the line some Christians screwed up the mystery. Instead of Jesus the Christ being the gift of the Great Life Force, it was reduced to a terrible tit for tat commerce appeasing an angry, petulant God  who has a blood fixation for payment. And just blood wasn’t good enough for some of these Christian thinkers. It became about how that blood was spilled. It wasn’t a donation given at the blood bank. It had to be blood extracted through suffering. In this way of thinking Jesus had to suffer  (not just die, not just offer the life force) to expiate the sins of the world.

Maybe we dreamed up this nightmare to in some way justify or explain or even deify our own suffering. But suffering is never a virtue unto itself. We’ve just gone through the liturgical season of the Incarnation, which proclaims Emmanuel: God with us. We pray, “Thank you, God, for giving yourself to us in Jesus Christ.”  It is life that this whole story is supposed to be about. Not death. Not suffering. It’s about the mystery that the stuff that keeps us alive connects us with Life itself.That’s the mystery of the blood. And in this screwed up, suffering world it’s past time for a transfusion.

Baby Jesus is a Ninja

We have ninja ketchup in our fridge. It’s ninja because everytime I open the door to find it, the ketchup turns invisible. I look and look, and yes I move stuff around but all to no avail. I tell my wife that it must be time to get more ketchup and she asks “why?” as she reaches in and pulls out the  bottle of ketchup that has been sitting there all the time. It was there but I couldn’t see it.It was ninja.

I believe this happens to a lot of people regarding Christmas, too. With all the noise and bustle and spending and hurrying, it is easy to miss a holy moment. On the other hand, there are a lot of people who like to holler about how Godless the world has become, they have no hope and some can’t wait for God to get done with this world and get on to the next one.

But right there is the real mystery and power of the Christmas story. God chooses this world, our world, in which to be known. God enters into the complicated, confusing world that we are trying to understand, And God doesn’t come overwhelming us in grandeur and omnipotence. God comes to us born just like any one of us. God comes as a baby needing love and tenderness, as one of us, to give our hearts to just like we do when we hold our children or grandchildren for the first time. It’s so ordinary that it can be easy not to see it. It’s almost ninja.

Just because some can’t see that God loves this world so much that God chooses to join us here, doesn’t mean the world is Godless. Just because the tinsel and flashing lights tend to blind us a little doesn’t mean Jesus won’t be born. It is easy to miss and sometimes hard to see, but Jesus and his manger have been here on Christmas all the time. God joins us again.

Subscribing to a Wider View

I’ve been wondering lately if the people of , North Dakota thought my dad was an odd duck. Well, maybe not everybody there, but maybe just the people at the post office.

WIlliston has changed a lot since we lived there. We moved there from an even smaller town in 1967. At the time it was a town of maybe 10,000. It was not a highly integrated town. I was all of 6 years old when we moved there, and not aware of a lot of social issues, but I do not remember any African Americans there at all. I could be wrong.

In fact, I remember being something of a minority in Williston because we were not Norwegian. Most of the people in town were of at least partial Norwegian ancestry. But not us. Not a drop of Scandinavian blood. Now, in my adult years I have become aware that most of us Willistonites inherited a cultural blindness regarding real minorities.Williston and all of North Dakota have a rich Native American Heritage but they were invisible to us. Lutefisk, lefse, and krumkake were the cultural beacons we were guided by.

In that environment, I think most of the citizen thought my dad was normal enough. He was the minister at the Methodist church, enjoyed coffee at the Red Owl supermarket coffee shop, and moved comfortably among the social strata of WIlliston. By most appearances he was the same as everybody else in that North Dakota town.

But I’m guessing that a few of the postal workers in Williston may have scratched their heads about him. You see, my dad subscribed to Ebony magazine. I can’t imagine that in those days there were many subscriptions to Ebony magazine in WIlliston, North Dakota that postal workers were placing into mail boxes. So I kind of wonder what they may have thought about my dad.

If I ever asked Dad why he read Ebony, I don’t remember the answer. But I know the times now that we lived in then. North Dakota was a long way from South where Martin Luther King, Jr. was working but I remember my parents were aware of him and the turmoil happening in our nation.I am unsure just when Dad starting reading ebony, but I kind of imagine it might have been soon after King’s assassination.

I think my dad read Ebony magazine in Williston, North Dakota because he was aware that his view of culture was not the only one. I think he read it to learn something of a broader view of race and culture and life in these wildly diverse United States. Maybe it was a small step. But I imagine that my dad was a bit of an odd duck in Williston. Maybe there were a few others who were trying to understand the dreams and fears of people very different from themselves in very white WIlliston. Long before it became a slogan, I believe Dad read Ebony because he sensed that indeed black lives matter.

I know reading a magazine isn’t much in the grand scheme. But if I’m at all right, it was in the least an attempt to understand more than the status quo. I don’t know if the the term “white privilege” was even coined in the late sixties or early seventies when we lived in WIlliston, but I’m going to give my dad and his choice of reading material credit for the seeds of my own understanding and openness to know more.Maybe we need to increase Ebony’s distribution, at least as a first small step to getting out of our own parochial white world view.

Not to be Preachy, But Jesus has Won.

            “New Icon” by Doyle Burbank-Williams

Ready for some good news? Jesus has won. I don’t mean that Jesus has won over sin or the devil or any of that eschatological crap. Jesus has won the imagination of the people who have lost faith in the institutions that are supposed to know him best.

Churches are reeling from the absence of especially younger people in their pews. These are generations who have never been there in the first place, but they seem to have nothing to  bring them in or keep them there. Much head-scratching and hand-wringing and actual heart-felt prayer has gone into the scrying of the mystery of their absence. It’s my own opinion that we in the church have given too much effort into attempting to discern what’s wrong with them, than with looking at ourselves and the ways we embody the Christ we try to proclaim.

I’ll name two areas where I believe the church has mis-incarnated, at least for the absent generations. The first is substitutionary atonement. It is a metaphor whose time is past. Millennials are particularly quick to sense the disconnect between the proclamation of a God of unconditional love and the God who demands a bloody sacrifice to expiate the sins of humanity (and who commits filicide in order to accomplish this plan). Substitutionary atonement simply no longer commands the moral or theological authority it has for past generations. If God is love, then the God who is Love must be more creative and compassionate than the blood-thirsty, angry God taught in Sunday school. If the Gospel is about life, and life abundantly, then it cannot be achieved through death.The cross must mean something other than an act of divine violence to exact the payment for sins of human beings, than the deification of suffering. The church’s seeming refusal to explore these other meanings is but one more sign to the absent generations that the institutional church is irredeemably irrelevant to life today.

The second is the church’s inability to accept (much less embrace) the full range of human sexuality. This, of course, has its roots in a selective fundamentalism that insists each and every word of the bible must be held authoritative and inflexible, especially the few words about sexualtiy but not so much the many words about justice and equality and  compassion.

The more the church (and the United Methodist Church in particular right now) doubles down on the idea that the God of unconditional love finds homosexuality unacceptable (because the bible says so), the more it erodes any hope of having any connection with the generations who viscerally understand that love is love is love is love is love.

And while those of us in the church know that neither of these areas is by any means the only voice or school of thought in Christianity, the success of the popular and conservative Church at making it seem that way has been a large part in the abdication of the absent generations from that Church.The triumph of the popular Church at broadcasting such a monolithic message, though, has been its downfall. And the reticence and meekness of those of us who are liberal or progressive at promoting alternative theologies and understandings has contributed to the mudslide.

These generations are absent from the church because they do not find the Jesus there that the church tries to proclaim. The person of Jesus for them seems to have much more integrity than the churchiness presented on Sunday mornings. The compassion of the Jesus who heals the bleeding woman and who refuses to cast the first stone is more compelling than any diatribe about the sanctity of traditional marriage. They are attracted to the Jesus who generously feeds a crowd of strangers even as they are repelled by the judgmentalism that effectively puts bouncers at the front door of the church.The Jesus who  asks for the children to be brought, the Jesus who talks of a good Samaritan, the Jesus who chose the cross instead of violent rebellion embodies a love that one can live by. Somehow Jesus has transcended the institutionalism of the Church that claims his name.

So you see, the Church has lost but Jesus has won in the imagination and hearts of the absent generations. They are compelled by Jesus’ insistence that the meek are blessed, the peacemakers are blessed, that feeding the hungry and advocating for the oppressed are more important than purity or piety, that women and foreigners and outcasts are more acceptable than the vipers of righteousness. They have no time or room for the Church in their lives, but the teachings and example of Jesus offers for them a dynamic and often life-changing context that offers meaning and hope and sometimes even community. If we are lucky (or maybe it’s grace) the Church might yet learn a thing or two about Jesus from the absent generations.

American Pieta

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Every now and then an idea pops into my consciousness that will not leave me alone. As the consequences of our culture’s addictions to guns and violence continue to play out, I have been feeling helpless to find something worth adding to the conversations. I am stunned that we seem to be so tolerant of the destruction we inflict on each other in the United States. And I am painfully aware that as a Christian minister, this is the worst place in the world to get preachy.

I watched with horror that video of the killing of Alton Sterling. The shooting of Philando Castile forced an expletive prayer from my gut. In report after report, I see the lives of black men sacrificed on the altar of America’s love affair with violence. The image of a black man laying bleeding on the altar made me recall The Pieta in fresh perspective.

The best known Pieta is a sculpture by Michelangelo depicting Mary the mother of Jesus holding her son’s broken and lifeless body. It embodies grief and loss and horror. It is painfully beautiful. Many others have also portrayed this apocryphal but utterly true moment.

It was when listening to the video taken by Castile’s partner, hearing the panicked police officer’s screams that I heard the maddened crowd in Jerusalem calling “crucify! crucify!” regardless of Jesus’ guilt or crime. Every black death is a crucifixion committed to ensure the empire’s hegemony. And so I saw Philando Castile draped across a contemporary Mary’s knee.

So that is what I painted. But also more than just Philando Castile. I painted a black figure lying across the lap of a Mary clad in a light blue track suit. It is a non-specific figure, representing not just Castile but all of the horrific shooting deaths of black men that have become too commonplace in our society. The scene is place behind a shattered piece of plexiglass pierced with bullet holes. You can only see the scene of the painting through the screen of the debris of the shootings.

I felt compelled to create my “American Pieta.” I generally stay away from overtly political works because they tend to have a short shelf life. They speak to a particular moment and when that moment has passed they fade into irrelevance. I created “American Pieta” on July 12. I posted a couple pictures but then left for a family reunion assuming that the world’s conversation would move on and my piece of art would become an outdated relic. I thought its moment would pass and it wouldn’t command enough timeliness to merit mention here.

I was wrong. I have woefully underestimated American’s propensity for violence.The shootings continue and now have been directed back at the police. Yes, there are peaceful demonstrations and, thankfully, examples of cooperation and unity. But too many of us seem to think that guns and violence are the only effective means of change. In America, victims of violence (and particularly people of color) continue to be the Christs who die because of our sin. In America, the cross has become the gun. And there are far too many Marys shedding tears.

I Support Bible Control

I would say that the shooting in Orlando has left me speechless, except here I am writing about it. Well, not the shooting itself, but more the aftermath. Yes, there has been an outpouring of love and support for the LGBTQ community. Yes, I am heartened by the little bits of action toward some kind of sensible gun control (which, sensible or not, constitutional or not, we’ve got to find ways to stop shooting each other). But I am particularly dismayed and disgusted by the mouths of purported Christians that have been shooting madly like deranged sons of Sam instead of children of God.

While I am one of those liberals who think we do indeed need gun control, as a liberal Christian I am thinking we really need some bible-control about now. I don’t want to, and I don’t need to either, repeat the atrocious and hurtful things right-wing Christian nutjobs flung into the universe following the Pulse shootings.While I know that these vile-hearted extremists neither speak for nor determine the stance of Christianity as a whole, when mainstream Christianity tolerates bigoted and injurious conversation regarding sexuality that allows the extremists to claim legitimacy. When those who read the bible literally claim literalism as the only permissible and authorized method of interpretation, then every deadly and vicious and hateful thing written in the bible is given divine imperative. And if they can believe that God hates homosexuals or women or foreigners, then they have permission to hate, too.

To enact bible-control is to disempower the use of the bible to injure and demean people. The first of John Wesley’s General Rules is “do no harm.” But great and sometime irreparable harm is done when the bible is literally read to say that God wants to kill homosexuals, to subjugate women, or to claim exclusive access to God’s will and favor. A good first step toward bible-control would be the retirement of the word “abomination.” The United Methodist Church is prepared to do much great harm by continuing to read the bible literally and maintain its discriminatory stance proscribing homosexual candidates for ministry, ecclesiastically outlawing marriage equality, and persecuting as well prosecuting those clergy who defy these wrong-spirited invectives. By giving in to this idea that the only appropriate reading of the bible is the literal one, the United Methodist Church and and others become complicit in every act of hate and fear toward the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and followers of religions other than Christianity.

In this day of uncontrolled violence, it has become of ultimate importance that those of us who believe that fallible humans wrote the bible claim our authority as theologians and interpreters. A metaphorical and/or historical-critical view of the bible is not an alternative reading. It is not fundamentalism’s diminutive sibling or step-child. We claim a harder-won holiness, one wrested from the imperfect words of finite people. To proclaim that God speaks through our evolving understanding of the world, of our history, of our bible and even our understanding of God liberates us from the chains of literalism. It is not only OK to say that the words of the bible reflect ancient worldviews and prejudices, it is imperative that we do so. Bible-control is putting down the ammunition of fear and hate and choosing instead a humbler but more compassionate use of the bible to heal, include, and shelter those who have been injured by our religion.

gETTING dONE WITH THE cRAZY

     Let me see f I can ease into this one. People think our God is batshit crazy. All right, maybe I can clarify that a little bit. People not raised in the church (which is most of them these days) think the God of the Bible is violent, judgemental, capricious, and indefensible. And who can blame them? The predominant paradigm for reading the Bible in our culture is literalism. When Christianity is portrayed as the religion whose God bespoke the exact words of the Bible (and that those words cannot be modified, mitigated, metaphored, or challenged) then the Bible becomes God’s self-portrait, accurate in every nuance and detail. And read that way, what a portrait it paints indeed.

It is a portrait of a God who taunts an old, childless couple with the promise of a baby. Then, years later, when that promise is finally redeemed that same God commands this late-in-life father to commit the human sacrifice of that same only child. For those of us not inculcated with the lesson of Abraham’s unflinching faithfulness, they see inexcusable cruelty in the demand itself – the belated appearance of a substitutionary sacrifice notwithstanding.

It is a portrait of a God who effects the liberation of the chosen people at the cost of the most innocent of lives. The firstborn of Egypt died to convince Pharaoh to let them go. A God whose end is justified by a terrible means.

It is the portrait of an imperialistic God who wipes the indigenous peoples out of the promised land without mercy or remorse. Young and old, male and female, even infants and, on more than one occasion, livestock (as if they had a political affiliation). Sometimes the goods and properties are decimated, sometime permission is given to pillage and plunder. This is God cum Andrew Jackson cleansing the land for the dominant species.

The New Testament has better packaging, but the crazy God is still there. Hell is a big deal in the New Testament. A God who loves us unconditionally constantly threatens to consign us to eternal torment. God who loves the entire world leaves one narrow path for acceptance and salvation or else we’re back to that hell thing again. And while Paul declares that in Christ there is no slave or free, Gentile or Jew, male or female at another point the women are told to sit down and shut up because that is godly. Interpretation of the Book of Revelation has been left to the Left Behind loonies. According to their incredulous reading of what is admittedly a difficult to understand book says: a few get saved, a bunch get to live through a lot of shit, but most end up inhabitants of a lake of fire. Because God loves us.

And that literalist reading of the Bible has been put to use in the stratagem of substitutionary atonement. God, who loves everybody and created the whole infinite universe somehow requires a blood sacrifice for the sins of the human beings on the third planet orbiting a nondescript star in the suburbs of the Milky Way galaxy and that the best way to pay off that blood debt is to send (in traditional language) “his only begotten son to take on the sins of the world, suffer and die on a cross that we might reconciled with God.” God, who is love, is so constrained by what, honor?, that this infinite being cannot conceive of any other way of forgiving humanity aside from the suffering and spilling of blood.

No wonder so many people not raised in the church say they cannot believe in God, when this is the only kind of God they see presented by the church. I think too many of those “nones” simply think that if this is what God is then they are better off with no God at all. And if God is something other than what is read to them in the BIble, then maybe God is not batshit crazy but that we in the church are batshit crazy for believing all that stuff.

But there is a simple and actually pretty obvious way out of the batshit crazy trap. God did not write the Bible. At all. The Bible is not words from God describing God. The Bible is a collection of human testimony, deeply pious and deeply flawed, about how these people understood God, used God to justify their actions and history, and hoped for God to stand by them in good times and disastrous times. That is is not to say that the Bible is of no worth. It is in my opinion one of the most miraculous things that, whatever God is, the Divine can still speak through these ancient, obscure, arcane, flawed, sometimes hateful authors to flawed human beings even today. The Bible is a human document that glimpses God through the darkest, most crud-encrusted windows of human experience. The God of the Bible is the God we describe.So the Bible is not a self-portrait of God; it is a gallery of human portaits of how those ancient people saw God. And by grace every now and again we might just snag a bit of something that actually points us in a Divine direction.

One of the most obvious places that our culture deems Christianity or its purported God as crazy is the obsession over human sexuality, particularly homosexuality. But when we give up the erroneous idea that God dictated those words about who is lying with whom of what sex (and actually there are very few of those verses in there anyway), and that those words reflect the historical and human discomfort with sexual variance, then we are freed to a more open and compassionate understanding of ourselves (created in the infinitely complex image of God) and of God (who is not limited by human discomforts or descriptions).To paraphrase eminent New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan: regarding the biblical authors and homosexuality, they got it wrong and it is time we get over it.

Yes, admitting that we humans wrote the Bible means that we also have to admit that we don’t know as much about God as we would like to think we do. Certainty is a difficult thing to give up. Maybe doing so will make us more careful about declaring what God wants, what is God’s judgement or punishment, or who is unacceptable in Divine sight. We have to admit that trying to talk about God is always crazy business, but at least we are all in the crazy together.

I also realize that those who rely on a literal reading of the Bible will find this whole discourse, and me as its author, batshit crazy There is nothing in this writing that will convince them to change their minds. But as is probably obvious, I’m more akin with those who cannot buy a literalist methodology and are searching for other ways to explore their spirituality. God and the universe and human beings are complex, often undefinable realities. There is more to life than certainty. We all struggle to discern who we are and who God is and how we all interact in this muddled life we live. This may not be the sanest of all possible worlds, but at least God doesn’t have to be batshit crazy.

 

The Murky Green of Authenticity (Looking for Soul in the United Methodist Church)

    My apologies for being parochial in this and my last post. I have never intended Expressionist Coffee to be all United Methodist all the time. And it won’t be. I simply felt a need to follow up on some of my thoughts from last week’s post, When the United Methodist Church Sold Its Soul. Some have taken that post as an all-out attack on evangelism or an overly critical lumbering down the nostalgic lane for a time I felt more at home in the United Methodist Church. I don’t think it is either of those.     

We live in an era when all Christian churches, and especially the mainline churches, are desperately trying to skry who and what we will be in the coming years and decades. The shift of population away from churches is stark, undeniable, and in many ways irreversible especially using the modes and methods of the previous two decades. I believe asking the question, “how do we get these people (often phrased ‘these young people’) back in our churches?” Is a wrong-headed one. These people were never in our churches, have never felt the need, and are repulsed by what they see as hypocrisy, judgmentalism, and rigidity in churches. What they do seem to respond to, though, is authenticity.

      Authenticity can be a rare commodity in our culture. Movie producers test-screen their stories to judge which ending will sell more tickets (as opposed to telling the best story). Politicians poll and survey beta test platform planks to determine which has the best chance of getting elected. Advertising tells what clothes will make us sexy, what beer will make us popular, and what car will make us powerful or successful. The aim in all this is not to help us be who we really are, but to create ourselves in the image of what is being sold to us. It is difficult indeed not only to be who we authentically are but sometimes even to remember who we are.

    Therein lies our malady. In our attempt to regain members we have forgotten the best of who we are as United Methodists. We have reduced our movement to a brand and simplified our product with the vain goal of regaining market share.

    The dilemma we face is that the very people that we look at as that lucrative “market share” are the group yearning for authenticity. They have so many options from which to choose that the inauthentic never even gets considered. And quite frankly they look at our “brand” and see a denomination that preaches universal love and flatly refuses to grant equality and dignity to LGBT persons. They are more than suspicious that the offer of the love of Christ is a sales pitch for their dollars. They are greatly motivated by the care and healing of the planet while we hem and haw about polity and doctrine. We have migrated from top shelf to sharing space with the boxes of Franzia (f you can tolerate a wine metaphor).

    There was a time when we knew who we were, even though we were never in total unity. But the people called Methodist were known for the things they did. We stood with the disenfranchised and offered places to meet for those working for suffrage. We struggled with those enslaved and worked for abolition even though that split our church. We embodied solidarity with workers, called for an end to child labor, safe working conditions, a living wage, and a sabbath rest for those who labor. We embraced the human rights of all people for education and health care. Methodists understood that working for God’s Kin-dom began in this world, that the perfection of human life begins in this life and not held in escrow for some indeterminate eschatology. Yes, all these things were undertaken out of Methodists’ deep love of Jesus and his mission. Yes, it was accomplished by those who had been invited to join the Christian Way. Methodist discipleship happened outside the walls of the chapel. The emphasis was not just on “how is it with your soul?,” it also included “how have you served the poor?’

    My premise in the last post was that we lost our authenticity when we chose “making disciples for Jesus Christ” as a means of plugging the leaks and filling the pews. Indeed, we tried to rectify that when we appended “for the transformation of the world” onto our mission statement. But when we continue to evaluate ministry solely on the rubrics of numbers (bodies present, dollars given, professions made) the transformation of the world remains ambiguous at best. As does our spiritual and temporal identity.

    I am not yearning for a restoration of a nostalgic past. I am hungry and thirsty for the United Methodist Church to step into the muddy reeds of society and lead the way to justice, equality, and peace. I’ve always imagined that when the Ethiopian eunuch stopped the chariot, turned to Philip and said, “here is water, what is to prevent me from being baptized?” that what was available was the fetid water standing in the ditch overgrown with cat tails and algae. Philip knew the Spirit had put him there so he waded waist deep in what was probably very living water, knowing that there was nothing to prevent the grace of Christ.

When a gay couple comes and asks, “What is to prevent us from being married?”, when a transgender person asks “will your Church love and accept me as I am?’, when a young man with thick spectacles and a long beard or a young woman with complete tattoo sleeves peeks in our door and wonders, “are you for real?”, or when a gay man or lesbian asks the church “what is to prevent me from being ordained?” they will know, and we will know, that the United Methodist Church will put aside its scruples and wade waist deep in the murky green living waters. 

    

When the United Methodist Church Sold Its Soul

There are all sorts of people who are more wise and educated out there trying to divine the nature of the pathological illness besetting the United Methodist Church and mainline churches in general. This is neither a comprehensive nor systematic analysis. This is a confessional statement.

I am not an evangelical. It is not my heritage, even though I am a multi-generational Methodist. I am not sure (and even as I say this I realize I am not a certified historian) that John Wesley would claim evangelicalism as it is popularly defined today. There is a whole lot more of “join us the way we define us or burn in hell” than “in all things charity” to today’s evangelicalism.

But however it is defined I am not an evangelical. I have no burning desire to sell my version of faith to anyone. Yes, if someone is interested I would have lengthy conversations about how I understand faith and God and the universe but I would never walk up to anyone else and and ask if they want to know that stuff. Even as ordained clergy.

The Methodist church I grew up in  was not overly proud of its faith. Not in the “I have a better faith than you do” sense. Not in the “let me win you for Jesus” sense. In fact, that latter idea kind of embarrassed us. We followed Jesus and his teachings because it made the world and us at least a little bit better. Not because it carved a notch in some spiritual gun butt.

A change adopted for the 2000 Book of Discipline made a stark change in that sensibility. The United Methodist Church adopted a mission statement that said simply: “The mission of the church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ.” Nothing about making the world a better place, nothing about making us better. I believe that the our leadership and voting delegates bought the popular notion of the time that liberal churches were dying and evangelical churches were growing. In the first major reflex reaction to the perceived foundering of the institution, they joined the wave of fear-based desperation that lurched in any direction promising to restore the glory days of the church. “To make disciples of Jesus Christ” was a bald attempt to “add abundantly to our numbers.” And The UMC has been numbers obsessed ever since.

I bought into that wave-riding for a time. I tried to live up to the idea that pastors were supposed to be chief number generators (and, by the way, feeling woefully inadequate to that task). Everything else has become secondary to that primary emphasis: grow the church. And grow the church at any cost. Repaint the walls in evangelicalism. Rewrite the script to include more words about Jesus or the bible or saving souls. Anything to bring warm bodies into the church.

Now the United Methodist Church I grew up in (it was the Methodist Church for the first few years, formative ones I suppose, but also rather beyond my memory) eschewed the term evangelism. I recognize that this probably reflects the local churches I was a part of and may not be indicative of the denomination at that time. Nonetheless, those Methodists around me were embarrassed by evangelism. They were all about making the world better, more like the kingdom the Jesus was trying to bring about, more filled with justice and compassion and equality and human dignity. But to win somebody over for Jesus was at the very least distasteful. One’s relationship with Jesus was personal, not public.

This was the time when the Methodists had come to accommodation with a number of social changes. Divorce, once reason for exile in religious circles, was recognized and if not outright accepted at least tolerated as reality of modern society. Likewise alcoholism shifted from condemnation in churches to understanding, accepting the concepts of addiction and recovery. Whereas my grandparents, Methodists from way back, vilified dancing and movies and gambling in any form, the United Methodist Church I grew up in took a more moderate stance. It chose, it seemed to me, to stand within a society that had come through enormous changes (think about the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution, as well as the economic shifts of unionism following the second World War) rather than being a rigid voice opposing these changes for the sake of an illusory consistency.

What this stance did, more or less subtly, was to adopt a more moderate and reasoned approach to biblical authority. Since the beginning of the 20th Century, fundamentalism captured the popular imagination as the predominate method of biblical interpretation. Mind you, it is not the only nor even the best method. Still the narrative it employs was (and seemingly continues to be) an easy sell: the bible says exactly what God wants it to say. Even more so, it is God’s actual words somehow divinely transmitted via inspired human conduits. This method leaves no room for conversation, no accommodation or adaptation to changing culture or even newer and better translation of ancient words and anthropologies. It is literally God’s words, and as such the last word.

But mid to late 20th Century Methodists applied a practical methodology to their theology. Divorce, alcoholism, and a host of other complicated human behavior were not going away. There were a part of the fabric of life in the modern age. Christianity had to create a relevant approach to this complicated life. Despite what a literal reading of the bible said about any of these situations, the church opted for a compassionate and understanding response. In the simplest terms, compassionate love was a higher authority than literal interpretation. This is not to say that the bible is unimportant. But it was not the last or only word in the Church’s ongoing conversation with the world.

By the 1980’s the decline in attendance and membership in the United Methodist Church was undeniable. The first ripples of panic were affecting the institution.The prophets of doom began to circulate the “wisdom” that the liberal or mainline churches were dying. This was the zenith of the megachurches. These conservative tent shows were drawing in people by the thousands. Those within the UMC looked around for explanations to the denomination’s decline and, whether it was spoken of directly or not, the fear loomed large that open-minded theology and historical-critical biblical interpretation were a hard sell in that current atmosphere.

Church leadership began to look for a solution to the declining membership conundrum. One strategy hit upon was to devise a mission statement for the denomination. This would focus its identity and energy in a common direction. It also, I guess, was a way of addressing the liberal/conservative – who is growing and who is declining fear. The proposed mission statement was an encapsulation of the Great Commission: go into all the world and make disciples. It glossed over the Wesleyan twinning of social gospel and personal gospel. Personally, I think it was an attempt to repackage Methodism as a more conservatively acceptable form focusing solely on evangelism. The Great Commandment (love God and love your neighbor) would have been as biblically compelling a mission statement but more challenging for the ways we would act and move in our society as the Church.

“To make disciples for Jesus Christ” was simple and salable. It was a clear nod toward those voices in the denomination (and wider world) that a shift was occurring. It (maybe inadvertently, maybe not) validated the stricter interpretation of the bible which was a part of the crowd being courted. And it set the stage for the inability of the United Methodist Church to create a healthy and embracing position on human sexuality. While other societal shifts were “grandparented” in, homosexuality was opposed on the grounds of a strict biblical interpretation. We have been unable to move past what the bible says to hear what the Word is saying in a new world. Because “evangelical” has become synonymous with conservative and even fundamental, our denomination has become both spiritually and functionally ossified. Even though the mission statement was subsequently modified and the phrase “for the transformation of the world” pinned on, the direction had been set.

“Making disciples for Jesus Christ” set our direction and, I believe, was the moment the United Methodist Church sold its soul. Our inability as United Methodists to transform ourselves into a compassionate, world-relevant, culturally erudite community of faith is a direct result of that direction. This is nowhere as evident as in our condemnatory position on homosexuality. While not directly stated, the implication is that only certain kinds of disciples are correct or acceptable. Only heterosexual disciples need apply, as if that is the sole defining characteristic of humanity. As if that is the Rubicon of religious or spiritual acceptability within United Methodist (or Christianity at large). By allying ourselves with the readers of a narrow orthodoxy, we denied our historical identity as a church of compassionate, social adaptation and transformation.  And because we have denied that identity, those who look at us from outside our closed circle read us as disingenuous.And that more than anything else I believe is the primary contributing factor to today’s ongoing decline in the vitality of the denomination in the west.

We have been at our best when we have been a movement of adaptability and social engagement. The early Methodist classes worked to alleviate suffering, hunger, illness, and oppression. The invitation to discipleship was to enter into kin-dom building. It seems to be that we began as a movement that was more aligned with the great Commandment than the Great Commission, not that the two are mutually exclusive. Evangelism was not about reporting numbers, it was recruiting workers to rebuild a hurting world. In essence, since the adoption of our mission statement we have over-emphasized the biblical corner of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.In a desparate but obstensively well-reasoned attempt to breathe life into the two hundred plus year old denomination, we diverted from who we were becoming and away from our life-giving core.

It is past time to reassess our mission and our identity. Being evangelical alone will not move us fully into the 21st Century, will not fulfill either our calling or our potential as presence in our culture and world. It is time to reclaim our soul as a denomination that loves and embraces the world we live in.