Our Theological Chickens Have Come Home to Roost

As I sat on the floor of the convention center in Jackson, Mississippi during Annual Conference 2011 for the Mississippi Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, I was thunderstruck and dismayed by what I was listening to. A petition to General Conference 2012 had come forward asking for the following change in the Mission Statement of the UM Church.  “The mission of the Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the salvation of souls and for the transformation of the world. Local churches provide the most significant arena through which disciple-making occurs.” The part in bold and underlined was the wording that was being debated.  And as I sat there on the floor of the Mississippi Annual Conference I actually heard two fellow clergy rise and argue in opposition to the addition of the words "for the salvation of souls" to our Mission Statement found in Paragraph 120 of the UM Discipline.  John Wesley said, “You have nothing to do but to save souls. Therefore spend and be spent in this work” (Jackson, VIII, p. 310).  Seems like a pretty basic concept for UM clergy.  Yet there I sat as a fellow UM clergy (who is a friend of mine) argued that to insert this language in the mission statement would make salvation too individualistic, that indeed Christ had come to redeem all of us and all of creation, and I wondered out loud, "How did we get here?"

And I think I know.  But the answer is not one any of us may like because of the implications for our connection.  We are here because we have changed our minds; about who God is, what He has or had to say to us, how we can know His will, about the authority of and how to read and interpret, scripture and the goal or purpose or mission of the church.  In the late 19th and early 20th century we saw the emergence of modern liberal theology that Wikipedia defines as; "Liberal Christianity, broadly speaking, is a method of biblical hermeneutics, an undogmatic method of understanding God through the use of scripture by applying the same modern hermeneutics used to understand any ancient writings. Liberal Christianity does not claim to be a belief structure, and as such is not dependent upon any Church dogma or creedal statements. Unlike conservative varieties of Christianity, it has no unified set of propositional beliefs. The word liberal in liberal Christianity denotes a characteristic willingness to interpret scripture without any preconceived notion of inerrancy of scripture or the correctness of Church dogma."

This liberal theology now labeling itself as progressive came to dominate most main line seminaries in the middle to late 20^th century, relying on the writing of scholars such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Henry Ward Beecher, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Leslie Weatherhead, and John Shelby Spong.  It was in response to this rise of modern liberal or progressive theologies that led a group of visionaries to start Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, KY, my Alma Mater.  Dismayed at what was being taught in seminaries and to our young pastors the mission statement of Asbury in 1923 read, “Asbury Theological Seminary is a community called to prepare theologically educated, sanctified, Spirit-filled men and women to evangelize and to spread scriptural holiness throughout the world through the love of Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit and to the glory of God the Father.”  The same cannot be said of all or even most of our official United Methodist Seminaries. 

If we are upset by where our church is, we can lay it squarely at the feet of our seminaries, teachers, theologians, and denominational leaders.  We can also lay it at our own feet for allowing it to happen. As I write this today, after listening to the arguments on the floor of the conference this year, I wonder.  Do our churches share the same theology as their pastors?  Do they even know what THEY believe?  Do they even know what their pastors really believe?    Are we open about our theology?  Do we lie, obfuscate, or otherwise dodge the question?  Do we say nothing so as to not be pinned down?  What does your pastor believe?  What does she or he think, who do they read, who taught them?  And don’t you have not only right but a duty to ask those questions?  If not you, who?  If not now, when?  Hopefully before it is too late.