On his Twitter feed, United Methodist pastor Mike Slaughter wrote that the gospel of sin management has turned us into Christian vampires who are interested in Jesus only for his blood. (paraphrased).  To my mind, there’s a lot of truth in that statement.  Modern evangelical Christianity does place an awful lot of emphasis on Jesus’ death.  My father-in-law, who grew up Baptist, refers to the Baptist hymnal as “the bloody hymnal” because of all the blood hymns.

There is a fountain filled with blood

Now the point of this post is not to dispute the doctrine of blood atonement – it is one of many keystone doctrines of our understanding of atonement.  Rather, I simply want to ponder a Wesleyan approach to the Christian life in a way that fleshes out my agreement with Slaughter’s statement.  There is, to put it bluntly, far more to the Christian life than avoiding or stopping sin.  (“Are we able to stop sinning on our own” is an interesting Systematic Theology question for another day!)

The finest, lushest, softest grass in the world is zoysiagrass.  If you’ve ever been to a really nice golf course you’ve walked on it.  The tee areas and fairways are almost always made of zoysiagrass.  It’s like a natural carpet.  And I think there’s an awful lot of Wesleyan wisdom and indeed Gospel reflected in zoysiagrass.

• Zoysiagrass requires maintenance.  If your lawn is zoysiagrass, you probably need to be prepared to aerate the soil by walking around in spiked shoes or using a lawn tractor attachment.  And it grows so thick that it can be difficult to mow if you let it go too long.  It’s also important to keep it properly thatched and watered if you want it to be at its greenest and loveliest.  Likewise, the Christian life requires regular maintenance.  Holy tempers, Holy habits are vital to living a truly Christian life.  Prayer, scripture study, worship, sacrament, Christian action (e.g. visiting the sick and imprisoned, clothing the naked, Matthew 25 stuff), fellowship – these are all essential stuff for maintaining a truly robust and healthy Christian life.  Never forget that the Wesleys were ridiculed by their classmates for their devotion and rigor and were derided as “methodists.”
• Zoysiagrass is the first to turn brown in fall, and the last to turn green in the spring.  This makes me think of the old story of two monks who argued over whose Master was greater.  The first monk said his master was greater because he spent hours upon hours in prayer and could recite the scriptures from memory.  The second said his was even greater than that because he “eats when he is hungry, drinks when he is thirsty and sleeps when he is tired.”  It’s almost as if zoysiagrass has an intuitive sense of kairos:  it knows when it is time to green up, time to lie back, time to grow, and time to sleep.  John Wesley’s Exacter diary showed that he was concerned (if not downright obsessive-compulsive) about how time is spent and achieving proper balance between private and communal acts of worship and mission.
• Zoysiagrass is drought resistant. While it needs water to be at its greenest, zoysia will go into a dormant state during periods of drought.  Hard times may put it through a Dark Night of the Soul, but will not kill it.  I don’t need to expand that metaphor, do I?
• Zoysiagrass chokes out weeds. You will not need to poison your lawn to kill dandelions, clover, crabgrass or buckhorn if you have zoysiagrass.  When properly healthy, zoysiagrass chokes out weeds on its own.  When properly maintained, the Christian life is so full and so robust that many of our sins become incompatible with our lifestyle.  I’m not saying that being a healthy Christian chokes out all sin, but it certainly does choke out many sinful habits – and this understanding is essential to a true Wesleyan understanding of Entire Sanctification.  Consider Slaughter’s term “the gospel of sin management,” which implies a lifestyle of weeding and pruning.  While weeding and pruning are important, so are fertilizing, aerating, watering, thatching.  Holy habits encourage naturally choking out some sin rather than wasting time trying to chase them all down and pull them out.
• Zoysiagrass spreads. Those who can afford it will have rolls of sod spread over their lawns, planting the zoysia all at once.  Others will buy it in plugs.  When those plugs of sod are planted in your lawn, the zoysia will choke out your other grass around it and eventually those patches will grow together.  Eventually it can take over your neighbor’s lawn!  And a Christianity that is robust and healthy like zoysiagrass will be evangelical more by nature than by intention.

So I encouraged my congregation yesterday to give themselves a Christmas gift by planting a little Wesleyan Christian zoysiagrass in their lives: to engage in holy habits that will choke out sin, make us resistant to droughts, encourage healthy balance, and will grow and spread.  A Zoysiagrass Christianity will be tough as nails at the roots but gentle on your feet and beautiful to the eye.  Good news!

Taking a page from Tripp Fuller, a Baptist blogger with whom I agree more often than not, I’m going to make some New Year’s resolutions.  Tripp’s ideas are good ones so I’m going to modify them for myself in order to be conversant with his blog and intentional about my own.

First, the personal resolution: exercise.  I’ve lost a ton of weight but I really need to get into shape.  Not because I want to look good, but because I have low HDL cholesterol – which is a risk factor for heart problems.  I really need to build some muscle mass and bring that HDL up – and exercise is really the only reliable way.

Second, the Church resolution: EPIC preaching.   When I preached on Mary and Joseph presenting baby Jesus in the temple, I focused on Simeon’s words, “for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples…”  I was struck with the image of a Japanese hibachi restaurant where the food is prepared in the presence of all who sit around it, and that a true worship experience is to sense God’s salvation cooked up in the presence of the people.  I want our worship to be more Experiential, Participatory, Image-rich, and Connective (to borrow Len Sweet’s formula, which is a good one).

And finally, the Blog resolutions.  Tripp lists these four ideas, which I think are good ones:

1. Question of the Year: What is Religion?
2. Gospel of the Year: Matthew
3. Theologian of the Year: Paul Tillich
4. Doctrine of the Year: Ecclesiology

So here’s my list:

1. Question of the Year: What is Worship?
2. Gospel of the Year: Matthew (hey, it’s Year B!)
3. Theologian of the Year: John Cobb (I’ve got some Cobb I haven’t read, and this should be good motivation).
4. Doctrine of the Year: the Trinity

So if I post, like Tripp, on each of those four questions twenty times in 2009 I should have eighty worthwhile blog posts.

Hopefully I can get around to adapting 12 songs  (or even collections of verses) by the Wesleys with new original music.  One per month should be doable.

And maybe I will succeed with RPM ‘09 (I failed in “08, but I got a couple of good songs out of it!) Oh crap, that’s in like a month!

I’ll continue playing Friday Five games and blogging about good CDs and musical discoveries.

I’m not talking about the John Lee Hooker album (which is GREAT, by the way).  No, I’m talking about spiritual gifts.

As part of our most recent Residence in Ministry retreat we were required to read the book Equipped for Every Good Work by Dan Dick and Barbara Miller.  Having read Dan Dick’s excellent Vital Signs, I was intrigued at the prospect of a spiritual gifts assessment from a United Methodist perspective.  The results were surprising to me.

First, the book was better than I expected it to be.  I almost expected a spiritual gifts book to be cheesy in some ways (and in some ways it was).  But in other ways it was an exercise in self-awareness and perspective, and it gave me strategies for leadership in the local congregation.

Second, my highest score – and one that came as a big suprise to me – was in healing.  It wasn’t just my high score, it was one mere point from the highest possible score.  I’m not sure I would have ever considered myself a healer, at least not as my primary spiritual gift.  I don’t know what I expected it to be, but healing wasn’t my first idea.  Of course, my second highest score was in miracles and I sure didn’t expect that one either.  

If I were to describe my gifts and graces on my own, healer and miracle worker aren’t the first things that come to mind.  But let’s look more closely at how Dick and Miller describe them.  These descriptions are from the handouts available at the book’s website (which makes using the book with a congregation exceptionally easy).

 

Healing—the gift of conducting God’s healing powers into the lives of God’s people. Physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological healing are all ways that healers manifest this gift. Healers are prayerful, and they help people understand that healing is in the hands of God. Often their task is to bring about such understanding more than it is to simply erase negative symptoms. Some of the most powerful healers display some of the most heartbreaking afflictions themselves.

 

I have described myself on this blog before as a Wesleyan theologian with Process leanings, which makes sense in this context.  One of my pastor friends puts it this way: “if you pray, and you expect God to do something about your prayers, then you are a process theologian to some extent.”  I think that’s right.  I believe God’s will is ultimately done, but that God really does hear our prayers and responds to them in real time.  Sometimes God changes our circumstances, but more often God changes the pray-er.  And sometimes God just says, “No.  Not right now.”  I believe very strongly in a responsive, relational God.  

It also makes sense that my two careers – mental health counseling and pastoral ministry – merge at healing.  I believe both are healing professions.  And in my life as a therapist I was a Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapist, a disciple of Albert Ellis.  This makes sense if I am gifted as a healer, because REBT adds technique and method to my natural empathic abilities.  

A lot of my theology revolves around healing in one way or another.  I often articulate the doctrine of depravity as an expression of our inherent brokenness rather than sinfulness, corruptibility, or badness. Wesley often described original sin as sickness or disease, and Christ as the healer or the cure.  I work hard to articulate that healing takes many forms – including death which is the ultimate healing, our full incorporation into the life of God.   

Miracles—the gift of an ability to operate at a spiritual level that recognizes the miraculous work of God in the world. Miracle workers invoke God’s power to accomplish that which appears impossible or impractical by worldly standards. Miracle workers remind us of the extraordinary nature of the ordinary world, thereby increasing faithfulness and trust in God. Miracle workers pray for God to work in the lives of others, and they feel no sense of surprise when their prayers are answered.

Our worship bulletin has one scripture quote printed across the bottom every week.  It’s Mark 10:27 “With God all things are possible.”  So maybe that one makes sense too.

News reports, including those within the denomination, tell us that the church is dying.  I refuse to believe it.  It’s not denial.  I believe that to write the church’s obituary before we are dead is to deny the power of God to renew, reform and vitalize the church.  In other words, I believe that if you are focused on the numbers and the statistics and you see a bleak future for the church, then you are the one who is in denial.  When our little local church has improved our weekly attendance from 25-30 to 35-40 (and sometimes more) since I’ve been here I am not surprised.  I won’t be surprised when our numbers jump even higher.  God has a future for our churches if we pray, if we work hard, and if we are intentional about making disciples (first of ourselves, then of others).  Maybe I am a miracle person.

One thing I could have predicted is that I am not a director-administrator.  I do know enough about myself to know that.  So it is my challenge in each church I serve to find people who are gifted as director-administrator-organizers who can help me lead more effectively.  All in all, I learned a lot more than I expected from a relatively simple study.

Andy Bryan reflects on that question over on his (always thought-provoking) blog Enter the Rainbow.  It’s a question I also pondered as I read a little anecdote in F. Belton Joyner’s Being Methodist in the Bible Belt.  Joyner writes of overhearing a conversation in a restaurant and being able to tell that the conversants were Mormons, first because they declined coffee then from a few key words in their vocabularies.

So if an astute observer were listening in on a conversation how would s/he know we were United Methodist? Sure we have a few key words that would give us away.

• Itineracy / itinerancy
• Connectionalism
• Prevenient
• Wesley
• Sola Hymnala
• Covered Dish

But seriously, what makes us distinctive?  I know of a church in the nearby area that has grown by leaps and bounds over the past several years, and my wife knows several people who attend there.  In fact, her sister and her husband used to attend there when they lived in that town.  They all tell the same story – they left their home churches because the sermons left them feeling beaten up: you are a sinner, you need to repent, God hates sin, you’re not doing enough, etc.  They found a home in a church that preached one simple message and got it right:

Grace.

Everyone who left a Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal, or other church to attend this one will tell you that they didn’t really understand grace until they attended there.

This is not to say that the statements above aren’t true – they are.  We are sinners who need to repent.  We are not doing enough.  We are not good enough.  God does hate sin.  But that’s only half the message.  The other half is that God’s grace is bigger than that.  We are sinners, but God loves us anyway.  We aren’t doing enough but God loves us anyway.

That church succeeded where other churches in town failed by forming a central identity – they’re the grace church.  That’s not their name, it’s just who they are.

Are we Methodists missing the boat here?  Are we so busy preaching about the evils of this world, condemning the correct sins, supporting the right missions, getting things done, that we have forgotten to preach the essential grace-fullness of God and the prevenient nature of that grace?  That salvation is a process, a journey and a way of life rather than a one-time event that happened one evening at church camp?  Are we willing to loosen our grips on our personal theological agendas (running the gays out, running the conservatives out, running the liquor stores out, boycotting chain stores) long enough to embrace our identity as those who now recognize God’s grace at work in our lives before we were aware of it?

I believe with my whole heart that Methodism should look, smell, sound, taste and feel like prevenient grace.  Therein lies who we are.

John at Locusts and Honey put up a great post called “Devaluing Holiness.”  I love it when a post really makes me think.

John writes:

It is true that we should not be disguising our sin, rather we should not be doing it. Sanctification is a long process, but it is reasonable to conclude that Christianity is invalid if there is no discernible moral difference between Christians and non-Christians.

He goes on:

But isn’t Christianity “a religion whose goal is sinless perfection”. If our goal is not sinlessness, then we are necessarily making compromises with sin.

Is Christianity, as David Wayne describes it, about redemption or improvement? I would answer “yes”. This is a false dichotomy; there’s no need to choose between the two.

This is not a rhetorical question, nor is it intended as snarkiness toward John.  Is holiness the same as sinlessness?  Can the two be used interchangeably?

The words sin, redemption, sanctification, holiness all stand in relation to one another, and it seems that most of us have a more robust theology of one or two while giving another short shrift.  I’ve heard from some that there are too many sermons on how we have to do better or be better (sanctification) and not enough on how we’re loved in spite of ourselves (justification, redemption).  I’ve heard that there are too many sermons on sin and not enough on grace, and vice-versa.

Len Sweet in his book SoulTsunami makes a cool argument that I will paraphrase here.  In the recent past, the medical field has shifted its focus from a disease-treatment paradigm to a wellness paradigm.  In other words instead of diagnosing and treating health problems, there is more focus on keeping healthy people healthy.  Find what is strong and build on it.  Sure there’s diagnosis and treatment, but far less of it if the patient’s strengths are emphasized.  The church needs to switch from a “name the sin and cut it out” paradigm to a wellness (holiness) paradigm, encouraging folks to develop habits of spiritual health.

How do we, as Christians, take seriously the doctrines of Original Sin and Total Depravity while also taking Entire Sanctification equally seriously?  If we truly believe that sin-fullness is necessarily part of the human condition, how can we honestly preach sinlessness?

I know how I reconcile those seeming contradictions (paradoxes).  I simply don’t equate holiness with sinlessness.  At least not in the human sphere.  The best we can do, even with God’s help, is to be loving.  I’m pretty sure that even if we’re loving we’ll still miss the mark (the very definition of sin), but we were at least motivated by love.

Thanks for posting that John.

Check out this story from the United Methodist News Service.

I’m a big fan of Charles Wesley. As a music-obsessed, guitar-playing, uke-strumming, songwriting, United Methodist, I have long considered it the height of cool that our heritage is based upon the work of a great theologian (John) and a great songwriter (Charles). I say that not to diminish John as a songwriter or Charles as a theologian. I say it to lift up Methodism’s historic emphasis on artistic expression of faith.

It has long been asserted that the Wesleys did a better job of describing their Eucharistic theology in song than in writing. Some days I too wish I had a thousand tongues to sing my great redeemer’s praise (most days I wish I felt that way more often) – and that passionate expression of faith’s assurance is far more powerful than simple descriptive words. I’ve even heard some assert that United Methodists in the pews actually learn more theology from our hymnals than from our pastors. (That’s not the downfall of pastors, it’s the power of song).

I don’t know about you, but I totally look forward every Easter to singing those loud, lusty Alleluias in Christ The Lord Is Risen Today. (sidenote: when we say Christ is risen today, how existential is that?) Thank you, Charles. How much theology is there in this single stanza?:

 Let us plead for faith alone, faith which by our works is shown; God it is who justifies, only faith the grace applies.

Thank you, Charles. Come, Sinners, to the Gospel Feast! Thank you, Charles.

Who are today’s Charles Wesleys? Can we aspire to express our faith as beautifully, lustily, passionately as Charles did? I pray we can.