Bishop Huie's Thoughts On Why the World Needs the UMC

I believe in God’s dream for the people called Methodist.  Come with me now to “remember our future.  It is time to have deep, thoughtful conversations around the question, “Why does the world need the UMC, anyway?”

What is it about our Wesleyan past that can make a difference in the world in the 21^st century?   I want to suggest three essential things.

I.                     Who are we?  Our identity

The first essential has to do with identity—who we are and what we believe.   Methodists are a people grounded and growing in grace.  That grace emphasizes both personal holiness and social holiness.    

Methodists believe every human being is made in the image of God which is the image of love.  God’s prevenient grace encompasses all humankind.  However, sin has caused that image to become distorted, blurred, marred—like a mirror that is warped or a glass that is dirty.  Through the confession of our sin and the justifying grace of Jesus Christ, we are forgiven, healed and restored to the true image in which God created us.  We are a new creation by water and the spirit. Every person sitting in this room is testimony to Christ’s justifying grace. 

Therefore, Methodists are called to “have the mind in us which was in Christ Jesus.”  Charles Wesley describes Christ Jesus this way: “pure unbounded love thou art.”    John Wesley describes the Christian this way: “Love filling the heart, taking up the whole capacity of the soul.”  Methodists commit themselves to a life-long process of becoming perfect in pure, unbounded love.   Such love is possible only because of God’s sanctifying grace.   

Perfect love is not only perfect love of God.  It is also perfect love of neighbor.  John Wesley described neighbor love saying, “The Christian not only loves those who love him.  Christian love embraces neighbors and strangers, friends and enemies, not only the good and gentle but also the froward, the evil and unthankful, every soul God has made of whatever place or nation.“

God knows we need help to become perfect in love, so God blesses us with the means of grace—the means to holiness.  You know them:  prayer—public, private, family, reading and studying Scripture, fasting, community worship, receiving the sacraments, and doing good.

What does it take to cause someone to change from one kind of life to becoming perfect in love?  Each of you has a copy of Bishop Schnase’s book, Remember the Future.  Take yours out and turn to page 29 at the bottom.  Read.  How did God’s grace break through in your life?  Pair up with a neighbor and take one minute each to share a story about how God’s grace broke though in your life. 

Being a Methodist Christian makes a difference in individual lives.  Come Holy Spirit, come.

II.                 What are we to do?  Mission

If our identity is centered in the prevenient, justifying and sanctifying grace of God, then what are we to do?

Methodists have a mission.  We are called to love God and neighbor.  More specifically, Methodists do no harm, do good, and stay in love with God.   As Wesley put it so famously, “Do all the good you can in every way that you can in every place that you can every time that you can as long as you can.”

I invite you to use your imagination to bring the vital past into the expectant present.  Compelled by grace and determined to do good, imagine the difference that a Methodist can make in the life of a second grade boy who is already a grade level behind in school.  His Mom is a single parent working fourteen hour days to make ends meet.  This little boy comes home every afternoon to an empty house.   Imagine a Methodist layman driving the church van to pick him up along with a dozen children like him from the nearby elementary school?    One afternoon a week, this little boy gets to come to the United Methodist Church fellowship hall for a snack, help with his homework, games,  and an adult friend who thinks he’s special.  His imagination is stirred by hearing the stories of Jesus for the first time.  That summer our Methodist layman drives the church van to bring our young friend and others like him to Vacation Bible School.   In time, he and his wife meet the mom and invite her to come and hear her son sing in the vacation bible school choir on Sunday.  She comes because she has experienced that these Methodists must truly care about her son.  A new future opens for her as well.  Multiply that story by 285,000 Methodists in this annual conference.  Would it make a difference in our communities?

Methodists have been making a difference for good for more than two centuries here in the United States. President Abraham Lincoln made a speech to a delegation of Methodist leaders from the General Conference of 1864.  In part he said,

“Nobly sustained as the government has been by all the churches, I would utter nothing which might, in the least, appear invidious against any.  Yet, without this, it may fairly be said that the Methodist Episcopal Church, not less devoted than the rest, is, by its greater numbers, the most important of all.  It is no fault in others that the Methodist Church sends more soldiers to the field, more nurses to the hospital and more prayers to Heaven than any.  God bless the Methodist Church.”

III.                How do we engage in mission?  How do we practice our faith?  Ecclesiology

So what is our method for being Methodist?  How do we Methodists practice our faith?    

Methodists embody an ecclesiology that might best be described in three verbs:  connect, cooperate and create. 

Connect

I recently asked a group of our young pastors, “Why do you need the United Methodist Church?  What is it about the UMC that is so compelling you are willing to bet your lives on its future?” 

I confessed I was surprised—maybe even shocked by their response.  The first thing they said was, “We want to be part of a connection.  Who we are in Jesus Christ is bound up in our relationship with the community of faith.  The Methodist Church is not about an individual alone or a congregation alone.  We are part of a connection that starts in Jesus and includes the whole world.”  

 Many of us in my baby boomer generation see “connection” as primarily structural or financial.  Connection has become boards and agencies or apportionments.  The young understand connection primarily as relational, missional, and theological.  Only then is it structural.  Can you see their wisdom?

Cooperate

Methodists are people of head and heart, of Word and Table, personal holiness and social holiness, knowledge and vital piety, individual conscience and community good.  Methodists helped shape this nation in those same values.  Even as an incredibly diverse nation, the center held.  

Twenty-first century Americans find ourselves living in an age of serious division.  The gap between rich and poor, insured and uninsured, educated and uneducated grows more and more wide.  Extreme voices seem to dominate the air.   Who has a heritage of building bridges in this midst of a culture of such polarities?   Who can lead us to deep, thoughtful conversations about important  issues in which diverse peoples have different points of view?  When we remember who we are, it should be the people called Methodist.   Strong, vibrant Methodist congregations enrich the public conversation in our communities, our state and our nation.

Create

Change almost always comes from the edges, and Methodists are innovators.  It is part of our DNA.   John Wesley was a priest in the Church of England with its beautiful church buildings and empty pews.  As industrialization expanded, he sought to respond to the emerging needs around him.  It started personally with “vile field preaching.”  He appropriated the new communication technology of the day:  publishing.   He saw the challenges in health care for the poor and wrote a book on low-cost health care.  Methodists saw the vacuum in public education and created the Sunday School.

In the U.S., Francis Asbury saw that the American frontier was a very different context than England.  He innovated.  Asbury created and inspired circuit riders—moving resources from the center to the margins, he said.  He made great use of the particular American invention—the camp meeting.  Especially in the South, thousands upon thousands of people heard the gospel  for the first time a camp meeting.  Not everything Brother Asbury created worked.  He tried to create a celibate, all-male clergy—preachers like himself.  However, despite his railings that “I do believe that the devil and women will get all my best preachers,” most of the men were determined to marry and have a family.  These circuit riders did a little innovation on their own, and life-long celibacy for Methodist preachers disappeared in less than a generation.

We Methodists have it in our bones to learn how to adapt to a changing context.   Some things we try will fail, but we will learn and try again.

These three capacities: connecting which is relational, theological and missional; cooperating within dynamic tensions on behalf of a greater good, and creating through innovation are part of our Methodist DNA.  All are made possible by the power and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Come Holy Spirit, Come.