What the United Methodist Church needs

WHAT THE UNITED METHODIST CHURCH NEEDS PART 2 - AND ARE WE YET ALIVE? JOHN 16:7-15 MAY 22, 2016 TRINITY SUNDAY, YEAR C FARM HILL UNITED METHODIST CHURCH, HARRISBURG, AR INTRO. You have heard me mention before that my background is the Church of the Nazarene. That is where I was taken when I was a baby of a few days old and where I came to know about God and where I received Jesus as my Savior. My involvement with the United Methodist Church has been a slow journey over many years. One step of that journey was an uncle I had who was a United Methodist pastor in Missouri for a number of years. Although I did not know him all that well, I got the understanding from him that it was OK to serve God in a little different way than how I was raised. Another step of my journey was receiving the Masters of Divinity degree at Asbury Seminary in Kentucky. Asbury is not an official United Methodist seminary, but it is approved by the Methodist church. It’s OK to go there, and a number of pastors in the Arkansas Conference, including Clark Atkins, up the road in Harrisburg, are Asbury graduates. Another step of my journey was the time I spent as the associate pastor at a six-church United Methodist parish in Missouri. My pastor there was deeply in love with God and shared that love with Carol and I. All six of those churches were like any other church - they had saints and sinners both - but I found in all six churches people who loved Jesus.

And so my journey has led me here to Farm Hill, and as we travel together in service to the Lord, I have watched developments in the United Methodist Church with great interest, great concern at times, but always with the conviction that God wants to move in the United Methodist Church. Methodism got its start with John and Charles Wesley in Great Britain, where they lived and ministered from the 1730s through the 1780s, preaching, as John Wesley said, “scriptural holiness throughout the land.” While Wesley was still alive, the Methodist revival and the Methodist church spread to the new land of America. Methodism spread out across this new country of ours. As people moved west, so did the circuit riders of Methodism, preaching a gospel of repentance and holiness.

Along the way, America became more civilized, and so did the church. In the 1870s and 1880s, great camp meetings were held that sought to recover the early themes of Methodism, and out of those came denominations like the Nazarenes that I grew up with. It is a simplistic statement, but there is a lot of truth in saying that these other denominations are where the Methodists were 50 or 75 years ago, 2 or 3 generations back in time. So when I speak about the United Methodist Church, I am not just thinking of the United Methodist Church, I am also thinking of the denominations it gave birth to and are following in its footsteps in many ways. What does the United Methodist Church need? I. IT NEEDS TO HAVE A SPIRITUAL REVIVAL. Didn’t we just hear about that a few months ago? Hasn’t the Bishop been all about it for the last few years? When will it ever end? The thing about spiritual revival is this - we need to keep praying for it, and talking about it, and longing for it, until it happens. And once it happens, we keep on looking for it to happen again and again and again. It seems as if our tendency is to pull away from God, to lessen our commitment to him, to wander away, unless we continue to commit and seek revival on a constant basis. Revival means we seek the power and presence of God in every area of our lives. It means we are on fire for God. It means more of him and less of me. Phineas F. Bresee, a pastor of over 100 years ago who got his start in Methodism, talked about revival this way: “Keep the fire hot and work the edges.” We need to work the edges of our living on a daily basis; Paul said that he died daily, and we must do the same. Individuals need to be revived, but so do churches and so do denominations. That is why the Bishop has talked about spiritual revival. I doubt he is interested in just an individual here and there being revived, although that is important. I am sure he is looking for churches to be revived, for the Arkansas Conference to be revived, for the United Methodist Church to be revived. Can revival come on a denomination, a country, a society? Has it ever happened before? “Early in the Eighteenth Century, revival so impacted the church that the movement simply became known as the Great Awakening, but British historians often refer to it as the Evangelical Revival, which includes the Moravian Revival at Hernhutt in Germany, the ministry of Jonathon Edwards and the Surprising Work of God in Northampton in New England, the Fetter Lane (Wesleyan) Revival of England that was the forerunner to the Methodist Church, and the Crossweeksung Indian Revival of David Brainerd. These revivals kept England and America from the horrors of the French Revolution” (http://www.phpreston.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/10_Greatest_Revivals.pdf). In 1801, the Cane Ridge revival came to eastern Kentucky, but it sure didn’t stay there. “The Cane Ridge (revival) quickly became one of the best-reported events in American history, and according to Vanderbilt historian Paul Conkin, ‘arguably … the most important religious gathering in all of American history.’ It ignited the explosion of evangelical religion, which soon reached into nearly every corner of American life. For decades the prayer of camp meetings and revivals across the land was ‘Lord, make it like Cane Ridge’” (http:// www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-45/revival-at-cane-ridge.html). A revival like that would change the course of America, and it would change the course of the United Methodist Church. We need a spiritual revival! II. IT NEEDS TO RECOVER ITS PROPHETIC VOICE. When Jesus talks here in John about the Holy Spirit and what he will do, he says, “He will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment” (8), he was speaking to what a church filled with the Holy Spirit will do as well. The prophets of the Old Testament cried out about sin and righteousness and judgment. One account in Jeremiah tells of the prophet Uriah who cried out for God. He so angered King Jehoiakim that he fled to Egypt to escape death. But the king sent men to Egypt to bring back Uriah, and the king killed him with a sword. When we turn to the New Testament, we don’t have to even to get started with Paul and all he went through. And with the inspiration for all these prophets, Jesus Christ? He died for what - and who - he believed in. Speaking with a prophetic voice is no easy task. But if the church is to really serve the culture around us, we must speak with that voice. To do otherwise is to not really love those around us. If we really care, we will speak the truth that will call people to Jesus. The problem with too much of the church is that we want to fit in. Instead of lifting the culture and its values to the cross of Christ, we pull the church and the gospel down to the level of the culture, no matter where it takes us. And in doing that, we lose the church and the culture both! Just like it did with the prophets of old, speaking with the voice of God will open us up to ridicule. We will be called intolerant, unloving, haters. But speaking the truth in love is the way of Jesus! What other way is there to follow? Where else can we go? Folks, the prophets spoke up for God even when the church was falling away around them. They spoke for God even when the government turned against them and outlawed their worship of the true and living God. They paid any price, even the ultimate price, as they spoke with their voice for God. No matter what it costs, the church today, including the United Methodist Church, needs to recover its prophetic voice. III. IT NEEDS TO STAND FOR THE BIBLE. This attitude flows directly out of the prophetic voice that we need from our church. It is not enough to raise your voice and take a stand for an issue that is in the wrong or in a way that does not lead to the redemption of the human soul. That is not to say that churches should not take stands on different issues. There is nothing wrong with speaking out about the environment, or war, or race relations, or a lot of other things. But all of these positions need to be principled and based on the truth of God’s word.

William Wilberforce, whom God raised up to bring slavery to an end in Great Britain, campaigned in Parliament for 20 years for abolition, and the guiding force was his strong faith in Jesus Christ as a result of his conversion as an adult. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the writer of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a leading voice for abolition in the United States, spoke and wrote and taught out of her strong personal faith in Jesus Christ. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a well-known minster of the day; one of her brothers, Henry Ward Beecher, was an even more well-known preacher and abolitionist. Perhaps the best example we have in modern times of standing for the Bible is that of Billy Graham. For decades, he has stood for God and his word, despite opposition and the siren call of compromise and conformity. Through it all, he has lifted high the Word of God. How would that work for Methodism? Standing for the Bible would involve Biblical ethics, and that is where we come to all the fighting about homosexuality. Now, although I have never devoted an entire sermon to the problems of sexuality and Methodism, you know from my comments from time to time that I stand for marriage as the Bible defines it. Not because I hate the homosexual or anyone else. The simple fact is that God designed marriage one way, one man, one woman. To give license for any other way is to fail God. But we do not have a problem with homosexuality or transsexuality in the United Methodist Church. Those are only symptoms of the problem. The problem is the failure of our leaders and preachers and laity to lift high the truth of God in a loving way, based on the Bible. The church has such a weak voice because it does not hold to the Bible. If all the church is to be is an organization dedicated to doing good, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, with a prayer or a Bible verse tacked on, then we have failed God, we have failed the world around us, and we have failed ourselves. We might as well take down the church sign and quit pretending.

Paul says in Romans 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed!” I happen to believe what Bishop Mueller says: “Jesus’ love is so unconditional that it accepts us just the way we are; so transforming he is unwilling to leave us the way we are and so powerful he gives us what we absolutely need but can never get on our own - reconciliation with God, healing and a new way of living that is eternal in every sense of the word” (Bishop’s Mission Plan, step 1). Folks, if we all took that out to a hurting world, if that is something we prayed for and lived for and spoke for, then God could use that to bring revival to the slums and the mansions, the jails and the halls of power as we spoke for him and stood secure on the Bible. The world needs to see the United Methodist Church stand for the Bible. CON. If you have gotten the idea today that I am not hopeful about the future of the church, then I have given you the wrong idea. The church will go on with or without my participation or yours. If you have gotten the idea that I am not hopeful about the future of the United Methodist Church, then I have given you the wrong idea there as well. Sometimes it is hard to hear the truth and it is hard for me to tell it, but we need to hear it and I need to tell it if I am going to be faithful to God who has put me behind this sacred pulpit to speak his Word. God can use the United Methodist Church once again! He can shake it with his mighty power until we go out into the world to share the good news of Jesus and see sinners come to follow God! But the message must be true to the Bible. It must be Jesus and nothing else. Here is a success story of how one denomination turned away from its decline. Back in the 1970s, the Southern Baptist Church was struggling with liberalism in its denomination, most of all in its seminaries. The problem was with professors who did not believe in the total truthfulness of the Bible in the original manuscripts in Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek. Now, that issue is not my issue. I am not sure how you can prove or disprove it when the original writings have disappeared. But those who did not hold to the position Baptists had held for hundreds of years were drifting away on other issues as well. Sound like a denomination we know about? The Baptists have their version of General Conference every year, not every four years the way we do. So, for several of their annual meetings, they fought the good fight and they turned the Southern Baptist Convention back to the way they had always understood the Bible. They lost seminary professors in the process. They lost officials at headquarters. They lost pastors. They lost churches. But they held the line and won the day.

If they were willing to endure and hold on and pray and fight for their commitment of hundreds of years to the Bible, should we not be willing to endure and hold on and pray and fight for our commitment to what God clearly states in the Bible, both Old and New Testaments? Make no mistake, if we do, we will lose seminary professors, denominational leaders, bishops, district superintendents, pastors, laity, churches. But it is my conviction that, if we hold to the truth in love, we will see Methodism restored to what God wants it to be, and we will be yet alive once again! God help us to make it so.