Category: United Methodist

My Perfect Church

This entry is heavily inspired by an article in Relevant Magazine. I don’t know much about the magazine, but the article’s worth reading if only for the acknowledgment of similar frustrations.

Of course, I’m not in the same age bracket as the author, but there are some things on his top ten list that I’d love to see. But instead, I’m going to work on a list of 10 things I like about my church.

1. When we decided to start a food program, there was no vote, no forms to fill out, just people who showed up and worked.

2. Members of our church started a thrift store. The money they make goes to help people who can’t pay their utility bills, or don’t have enough food. When they decided they needed a bigger building to do this work, the church voted unanimously in favor of spending the money. They’ve been doing this for more than 10 years.

3. A man who once spent many of his nights living under a nearby bridge now has a home in his name, and a life that he enjoys. This is entirely due to the grace of God and the people whom he worked through in our church.

4. There are many Sundays each year when three generations of several different families are present for worship.

5. Many of our members have had their weddings in our sanctuary, and some have had their funerals there as well. Funerals in a church sanctuary somehow seem so much more reassuring, perhaps because we don’t gather there ONLY in times of death.

Ok, so that’s 5. This might be a good blog tag sort of thing. Pass it on.

New Churches

The church I attend is 100+ years old. I have been associated with it (sometimes living other places, but returning to visit while away) for 27 years. Yikes. Now I feel old.

I understand that new church plants grow, and that United Methodists see this in the Southern Baptist church and hope to emulate it. I know that the UMC has things to offer that simply aren’t offered in any other church. I understand that my congregation is fairly static in membership numbers because we don’t conscientiously reach out to people who have no church background. But I don’t know that I think that a constant building effort by the church is the way to fix that. Those churches will become old some day too.

This article is what brings me to think about this topic currently: Amid Growth…

Teaching

I’m a teacher. I don’t get paid for that skill, but I use it in Karate and at church. I’m decent at it, and more importantly, I’m willing to do it.

But I need something. I can’t keep teaching like this. Karate isn’t too bad right now, since it’s bodily involved, but the classes at church are not inspiring me, so I know I’m not inspiring my classes. I’ve read about the different learning styles, and I understand how different people learn from different styles, but nothing has jumped out at me in recent weeks.

Maybe it’s because I’m in about the third month of the book of Acts and I need a jolt. Maybe it’s the fact that my class seems perfectly happy to just sit back and listen to the few who have questions. Or, that they practically refuse to argue with me. Are they afraid that if they hurt my feelings I’ll quit teaching?

Preparation helps, and I can tell when I’m better prepared. I should work on that, since it’s one of the things that I can actually do. I can’t make the students care more. I can demonstrate how much I care. Keep trying.

Unspoken creeds

I love the creeds of the church. Apostle’s, Nicene, Korean, Masai, etc.,. They help remind us of who we are in relationship to God. They are one way we demonstrate our Christianity.

Even churches that are opposed to creeds are usually not opposed to what’s contained in them. And almost all churches have creeds, even if they do not use them. Those who say “no creed but the Bible” will find themselves hard pressed to find such useful descriptions of the Trinity in scripture as they will in the creeds.

But unspoken creeds are less about God, and are only useful as a means to examine ourselves and what we’ve come to demonstrate as belief though it may have no scriptural basis. For example, at our church, one part of a church creed might include “We believe we should gather together at 11 a.m. on Sunday morning for one hour of worship. Anything beyond that is purely voluntary.”

Certainly, we would never say such a thing, but our actions speak it.

At a church retreat several years back, we had a person along with us to help with the children during events designed for parents only. She had been around our church quite a bit, even though she was a member of a different Christian faith tradition.

During the weekend, we shared the eucharist, and she was puzzled by this. Apparently at the church she was part of, one of the unspoken creeds was “the eucharist is to be shared in a church building.”

John Wesley wrote a brief statement called The Character of a Methodist in which he lays out the various scriptural principles which guide him and other Methodists.

In his summary he states:

If any man say, “Why, these are only the common fundamental principles of Christianity!” thou hast said; so I mean; this is the very truth; I know they are no other; and I would to God both thou and all men knew, that I, and all who follow my judgment, do vehemently refuse to be distinguished from other men, by any but the common principles of Christianity, — the plain, old Christianity that I teach, renouncing and detesting all other marks of distinction.

That’s of course what we’d all like to say about our church. We’re just doing what it takes to follow Christ. It’s the very reason that the predominant church in my town refuses to take any name besides “The Church of Christ”.

But let’s face it — John Wesley was being intentionally obtuse for this argument. Surely he knew that Methodism had become associated with a different frame of worship, with “social gospel” ideas and an evangelism that went beyond the activities of the Anglican church from which it came.

Those are good parts of an unspoken creed. But as I mentioned with the 11 o’clock worship tradition, we might have some areas we need to examine in our unspoken creeds that are not as kingdom directed.

Unspoken statements such as “we’d prefer you have a first shift job so you can come to regularly scheduled activities” or “we believe you should have time to teach Sunday school if you bring your kids” or “we like wooden pews and if you’re not able to get out of your wheel chair, you can listen at home on the radio” might be some of the things we’re projecting that go without saying.

I’m going to spend this week thinking of some of my own unspoken creeds and confessing them. It’s certainly easy for me to point them out in others, so I shouldn’t have any trouble identifying them in myself. Pray for me.