The United Methodist will meet in Charlotte
The “Methodist” name is a derogatory name given to a group of pious disciples of Jesus Christ who began meeting in 1729 at Christ Church, Oxford. Included in this group was John and Charles Wesley, children of an Anglican Priest, George Whitfield, who would become the evangelist of the Great Awakening in America, and others. These members spent long, early, and continuous hours studying the Greek New Testament, examining their inner perfection, and praying. Their desire was to be holy and in complete contact with their faith at every moment of the day. The critical and funloving students at Oxford called them “Methodist” due to their strict method of life. The name stuck.
Throughout their day the “Methodists” spent time working with the poor, teaching homeless or unattended children, visiting prisons, and caring for widows. They were living-out the words of Jesus. They also spent much time in self-examination attempting to rid themselves of idleness, sin, and imperfections through weekly fasting and holding each other accountable.
University practices evolved into graduations and careers with George Whitfield being ordained as a Deacon in the Anglican Church, and John and Charles Wesley being ordained as priests. In 1735, John and Charles accompanied Governor James Oglethrope on a voyage to America where John served at the rector of Christ Church in Savannah, Georgia. The experiences of this trip, and the conflicting desires of an overly pious disciple, are worth investigating on your own. The result was that John quickly exited the states as a broken man of faith questioning his priesthood.
On May 24,1738,this broken Anglican priest found himself in a Bible study in London on Aldersgate Street where at around 8:45 pm someone read from Luther’s Preface to the Book of Romans. John wrote in his journal, “While he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed.” This religions experience was the gift Wesley had been pursuing since Oxford but had previously been trying to personally accomplish through pious living. After the Aldersgate experience John believed he had received an inward witness of having been delivered from bondage to sin and eternal damnation to a place of freedom from sin. John believed he had received eternal life. This experiential moment in a persons life is core to the current beliefs of United Methodists for all Christians.
Beyond Wesley being delivered from sin this experience opened Wesley to embrace his natural creative skills (organizational skills, creative preaching, and ability to influence people) with bold and courageous acts of discipleship through the use of the modern technology of the day (printed pamphlets, open air preaching, education for the poor children, and health care for all). Wesley, an appointed Anglican priest, may have been the first person to believe, “Church is more about what we do outside of the building than what we do inside of the building.”
In 1739, George Whitfield returned from America. He was soon banned from preaching in the Anglican pulpits due to his fiery and animated preaching style. Since he had lived near Bristol, England, a very large coal mining town close to the southern border of Wales, he decided to take his preaching to the open coal mines with 200 coal miners attending the first service. Within two weeks there were ten thousand attendees for daily services. George reached out to Wesley for help.
In this impoverished area of very underpaid hardworking people, whom the Anglican Church and the refined society of England viewed as simply a part of the “working machinery,” Wesley left the pulpit of his Anglican Church preaching to the overlooked masses. With great results from his preaching and the immediate default to organizational brilliance, Wesley bought a piece of land and soon built the “New Room,” the first Christian Life Center, where education, health care, and spiritual instruction accentuated the great outdoor preaching in the area. The Wesleyan Revival of England had begun.
Pamphlets were published and distributed free to all who were hungry for spiritual instruction. The movement spread outside London and Bristol to resorts, industrial towns, and spiritual deserts throughout England. The attempt to reform the Anglican Church was soon to follow. As to all change, the entitled beneficiaries of the “old way” of the Anglican Church were slow or declining to move. Wesley and his organization circumnavigated the Anglican Churches attempts to put a stop to this revival. However, the fire had been started and there was no turning back.
The UMC continues in an evangelical emphasis with a mission statement to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. The issue of the 2024 General Conference is a mirror of the division that is occurring around the world. There are those who would like to limit access to church and human rights of certain people due to various credentials including, gender, race, nationality, sexual identity, economic status, educational level, or personal preference. There are many other levels of exclusion at the hands of entitled people. At the heart of these entitled people are fearful little people with power who believe they have the right to judge others for most any reason. Judgement is always about control. Judging people are those who feel powerless and want to control anyone who might offer an outside threat. This amounts to a “middle school” tactic once used by each of us to dodge personal responsibility for our own life condition and situation. Middle schoolers find it easy to off-load onto others their issues as a way to feel good about themselves. “It’s not my fault,” or “It’s not fair,” are common excuse mechanisms to explain away a personal weakness or mistake. Then as this ploy becomes transparent and spineless the judging accusers becomes more belligerent with loud shouts and desperate tactics. The wrong side is usually the loud and belligerent side made up of weak and powerless people.
Responsible and honorable people mature up and work to make things better through relationship, listening, conversation, transformation, and trust. This responsible work is more time-consuming, requiring more personal involvement, and is personally taxing. The outcome of a mature and responsible process is always a deep and thorough healing. The mature process works. The middle school immature tactics of screaming and throwing insults leads to further division built on thin and hateful tactics. Christians are instructed to listen, reach out, feed the hungry, cloth the naked, care for the outcast and in all things to find relationship and community based on the transformational love of Jesus Christ. We are never taught to find ways to divide or to work against each other.
Modern day Christians are either Nostalgic or Romantic. This is a gross generalization I admit but ride this wagon with me for a moment. Many Christians believe the faithful exercise of discipleship is to do everything possible to return to the good old days of some selected past. We hear this in statement like, “The old hymns were the best,” or “We need to do church the way it was done back when I was a youth,” or “Lets go back to the way things used to be.” My grandmother often spoke of the good old days of the 1930s in America. This was a time when she had a young family, a job that kept food on the table, a big garden, and her larger family was close since it was a time of the Great Depression. For her, this was a great time when everyone came together with great support and community. My parents have often referred to the 40s and 50s as being the great age. This was when there was great growth and financial prosperity for white Americans with few outside threats. Of course, this was during the Cold War, the over-power of Government with McCarthyism, and the segregation and confinement of various groups of people without voice or benefit to the good times.
Our backward-looking eyes quickly exclude the great issues perplexed the “good old days.” Backwardlooking eyes are always viewing through rose colored glasses equipped with selective blinders. Only the favorable facts are remembered. Backward-looking eyes are always blinded to the truth that once existed. Nostalgic people believe the best days were back there and their selective vision is their flawed truth.
Christian people are romantic people. We believe the future is the only view. The past is where we were sinners, living without a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and trying to vainly make “it” on our own. The future is where Christians grow more like God, live into their sanctifying grace relationship with God, and find great redemption in God’s Kingdom. Romantic people, as a whole, believe in tomorrow.
A young couple walking arm in arm through those early days of a developing love see only a bright future. They do not want to go back to the past. Their joy and hope is in the present aimed toward the future. Romantic people believe tomorrow is going to be better than today. Nostalgic people are paralyzed with fear when they look into the future. Their fear has blinded them to the fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control). These fruits swivel and die on the vine of nostalgia. A nostalgic church will try to legislate, dogmatize, fundamentalize, or doctrinize the fruits of the spirit. Nostalgia will make a church rote, religious, and filled with drudgery. The fruits of the spirit grow and thrive only in the life of a romantic person who has received the freedom to listen to the Holy Spirit through scripture, tradition, experience, and reason. Romantic Christians live with courage. Nostalgic Christians live out of fear.
Christians are romantic because we have great faith in Jesus Christ. They believe in their future with Jesus Christ more than they believe in a past of a broken world. Christianity is bravely moving forward or it is a dead religion serving only to segregate, judge, and implicate.
This is the task of the 2024 General Conference. We are to stay true to our evangelical outreach to all, to believe the future is the direction we are to move, to free the people who are bound and excluded in our culture, and to stand courageously with Jesus Christ as our Savior. Remember, courageous people are not people without fear. Courageous people are people with great fear who refuse to let that fear be the way they decide the course of their life. Courageous people are fearful people who do hard and great things at personal risk and against all odds. Courageous people are the elected members of the 2024 General Conference and they are convening to not let their fear be the voice they hear but let the truth of Jesus Christ to be the only song they sing. United Methodist are not afraid to stand up and represent. This is why we gather and this is who we are.
You are free to look for more information of the early Methodist movement in England on your own. You can follow the proceedings of the General Conference online. Great things are ahead for the United Methodist Church. I am proud to be a voice.
The UMC has never, and is not, perfect in inclusion and acceptance. This 2024 General Conference will not make us perfect but is about our continued stand to represent the presence of Jesus Christ to all of God’s children whether our culture, society, legislative rules, or personal mores agree. I will be reporting from the floor of the 2024 GC with mostly daily articles. I will be honest and accurate to the events. I will add my commentary often. You may or may not agree with me or the events of the GC. My prayer is, as Wesley always held, that we may disagree but are always united in the grace of Jesus Christ. The Christian Church will never be united in this life and no individual or church has the inside knowledge or secret formula to figure it all out. We trust God to guide us and to bring a victorious close to this broken kingdom. We pray for a return to Eden through the grace of Jesus Christ.