Today's post is written by Dr. Hendrik R. Pieterse, Associate Professor of Global Christianity and Intercultural Theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.
In September, I was privileged to be able to launch a two-year transcontinental initiative in intercultural theology, supported by a grant from the In Trust Center for Theological Schools and a matching grant by my institution, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.
The focus of the project is to encourage and facilitate deep-running theological exchange between North American scholars in the Wesleyan/Methodist traditions and their sub-Saharan African counterparts. Key outcomes of the project are the strengthening of intercultural Wesleyan/Methodist communities of theological inquiry, the generation of fresh scholarship, and the production of innovative scholarly resources—all in the service of a global Wesleyan/Methodist movement whose diverse witness today demands the theological contribution of all.
In approaching this work, I am guided by two convictions:
(1) The future of theology in the Wesleyan/Methodist traditions is intercultural. As with theology generally today, Wesleyan/Methodist theology finds itself in an unprecedented moment. Theological production in the Wesleyan/Methodist traditions is more widely distributed and culturally diverse than ever before, with unrivaled capacity for dialogue, mutual learning, and collaboration.
(2) Theological isolationism perpetuates theological ethnocentrism. A polycentric Wesleyan/Methodist witness calls for a polycentric approach to theology.
Such a polycentric approach to doing Wesleyan/Methodist theology finds a promising model in intercultural theology. With deep roots in missiology and world Christianity studies, intercultural theology attends closely to the hermeneutics of cross-cultural communication and the dynamics of culture, context, and power in theological dialogue across boundaries. In short, it offers a ready model for theological exchange in a Wesleyan/Methodist theological community that now spans the globe. There simply is no reason for not doing our theology “connectionally,” through a global “web of interactive [theological] relationships,” to adapt the language of the Book of Discipline.
This is of particular note for North American Wesleyan/Methodist theology, which thus far has tended to be rather insular. I believe the time has arrived when engaging Wesleyan/Methodist scholarship in Africa and elsewhere merely out of courtesy or curiosity—as an option and not an obligation—is no longer adequate.
Why should this be so? To begin, the fact is that the crisscrossing forces of globalization, denominational ties, personal relationships, professional partnerships, and, yes, theological networks have given us all a stake in one another’s lives.
Further, and in a more theological vein, if theological isolationism breeds theological ethnocentrism, then the notion of a self-sufficient theological tradition is never far behind. By “self-sufficient” I mean a tradition that views itself as having within itself all that is required to pursue the theological task in today’s world. Others elsewhere are welcome to join in, the reasoning goes, but our theological work does not depend on their contribution. I fear this has all too often been the tacit disposition of North Atlantic Wesleyan/Methodist theology.
Intercultural theologians demur. They reject the idea of a self-sufficient tradition. All theological traditions are contextual and thus partial, fragmentary, and incomplete. This means we all need one another’s insight and contribution and, when necessary, one another’s correction in adequately interpreting our shared faith. Indeed, there are theological insights into the meaning and relevance of the Wesleyan/Methodist message that one can gain only through conversation with a colleague from another cultural context. For just this reason, intercultural theologians insist, all theology should be intercultural theology, with dialogue (or, as I prefer, polylogue) as its primary modality.
There is something very Wesleyan about seeing things this way. After all, at the heart of our connectionalism lies the idea of a worldwide community held together by relationships of radical interdependence, mutual learning, and mutual accountability. Should these commitments not characterize our global community of Wesleyan/Methodist theological inquiry as well?
The fact is no one of us today can render a theological account adequate to the depth, scope, and reach of the Wesleyan/Methodist heritage by relying on only one contextual expression of it, no matter how prominent. We truly need the counsel, collaboration, and correction of a worldwide theological collegium to do our theology responsibly. Think how much richer and fuller—and dare I say, more plausible and more persuasive—our theological labor would be wherever we are!
As an intercultural theologian, I submit that all Wesleyan/Methodist theology today should be intercultural theology. And the mode in which we pursue such theology should be dialogue—or, to use our own parlance, “conferencing.” It is in the spirit of these convictions, and with great humility, that I enter the project noted at the outset.
Dedicated to fostering conversations about the global nature of The United Methodist Church
Showing posts with label Hendrik Pieterse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hendrik Pieterse. Show all posts
Monday, October 24, 2022
Henk Pieterse: The Necessity of Intercultural Theology
Friday, October 7, 2022
Recommended Reading: North American and African Wesleyan/Methodist theological education initiative
Dr. Hendrik R. Pieterse, associate professor of global Christianity and intercultural theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and contributor to UM & Global, will be leading a new initiative at Garrett to strengthen networks between American and African Wesleyan/Methodist theological educators. The goals of the project include "mapping scholarly networks, institutions, scholarship, partnerships, and publications among sub-Saharan African and North American scholars in the Wesleyan/Methodist traditions who are actively engaged in-depth intercultural theological exchange, collaboration, joint research, and publishing" and "convening representative groups of African and North American Wesleyan/Methodist scholars and thought leaders to serve as consultants and partners in organizing a theological symposium for the second year of the initiative, with an accompanying book project."
As various contributors have emphasized on this blog, and as Pieterse and UM & Global blogmaster David W. Scott have argued in a recent article, intercultural dialogue is critical for the future of Methodist theology. It is hoped that this new initiative will make a substantial contribution in that direction.
Wednesday, August 17, 2022
Recommended Reading: Soundings Towards an Intercultural Identity for The United Methodist Church
The journal Methodist Review recently published another article that may be of interest to UM & Global's readers. It draws on history and theology to comment on the intercultural nature of The United Methodist Church. Hendrik R. Pieterse and David W. Scott wrote "Soundings Towards an Intercultural Identity for The United Methodist Church: Some Historical and Theological Resources." The piece can be found for free, with registration, on Methodist Review's website. A full abstract for the piece is below.
Hendrik R. Pieterse and David W. Scott, "Soundings Towards an Intercultural Identity for The United Methodist Church: Some Historical and Theological Resources"
The United Methodist Church today is in an identity crisis rooted in the
role of culture, power, and agency in the negotiation of denominational
identity. To confront these challenges, the UMC must recognize the
extent to which white American understandings of Methodism have
functioned as normative in debates over Methodist identity. To
illustrate the intercultural dynamics at stake, we analyze the history
of Italian and Japanese immigrants’ struggle to find a place within
American Methodism in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
These case studies show that Methodism flourished when there was room
for intercultural conversation about its nature. Thus, United Methodists
need an alternative understanding of our collective identity that
evolves out of intercultural conversations that remain alert to the role
of culture, power, and agency in identity formation. We suggest that
one promising resource in this task is the Methodist practice of
conferencing or dialogue.
Friday, May 25, 2018
Hendrik Pieterse: My Hope for Methodism
Today's post is part of a series that features United Methodist scholars and leaders from around the world reflecting on their hope for the future of The United Methodist Church as a global movement within the larger context of worldwide Methodism as a whole. Today's post is written by Dr. Hendrik R. Pieterse, Associate Professor of Global Christianity and World Religions at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.
When United Methodists seek to cast a vision of our “nature” as a church, we routinely employ the terms global and worldwide. Paragraph 123 of the Book of Discipline reminds us of the “global nature of our mission” as a denomination, while ¶125 speaks eloquently of our “connectional covenant” as a set of “interdependent worldwide partnerships in prayer, mission, and worship.”
This is a powerful vision, and I affirm it. In fact, it expresses my hope for United Methodism. It is a genuine hope, but a chastened one, for these claims we make about ourselves remain largely unaddressed and unfulfilled.
And so I think it is more truthful to say we stand at the threshold of becoming a “worldwide connectional covenant.” Our vision describes a United Methodist Church we can become but are not yet. The fact is crossing that threshold requires that we become a worldwide connection in conviction and practice and not just in sentiment and name. Paragraph 125 puts the point provocatively: Our “worldwide nature,” it says, must become a “living practice” in our congregations, woven deeply into their daily being and doing. In other words, our worldwide covenant must take on concrete life in our churches, shaping congregational mission, discipleship, and witness.
This is an audacious suggestion, but difficult to visualize. What would such a living practice look like in our congregations, our conferences, our general church? What needs to happen for it to take form? What values and habits need correcting or abandoning? Which need adopting, retrieving, or renewing? And perhaps most important: Is such an idea even worth considering right now? After all, we find ourselves in a worldwide United Methodist connection fractured by factional standoffs, distrust, divisions, and brinkmanship. For many of us, the idea of a connectional covenant-as-living-practice feels like a pipe dream at best and cynical propaganda at worst. I too share these misgivings, more or less intensely, depending on the day.
So yes, the idea is counterintuitive, to put it mildly. And yet, I believe the vision of a worldwide connectional covenant as living practice might just provide us with a pathway through our current brokenness toward the church we can become but are not yet.
Unlike the Bishops’ Commission on a Way Forward, I have no plans to recommend for traversing this pathway. But then, I don’t think plans are where we need to start. Better to start at the level of presupposition, value, habit, and practice. After all, more often than not, fueling our intractable conflicts are unexamined presuppositions, unquestioned beliefs, default habits, and taken-for-granted practices. Let me suggest a couple such habits and practices we would do we to examine as we consider this pathway.
In reflecting on our “worldwide connectional covenant,” let’s focus on “covenant” more than “worldwide.” We seem enamored with geography: where we are located around the globe, where we are growing and declining, which areas need additional or fewer bishops, and the like. These are important concerns. However, in the process we can easily neglect the theological center of the phrase, namely, “covenant.”
As I understand this rich biblical concept, covenantal relationships exist in two modes: Some are symmetrical (the human partnerships) and some are asymmetrical (the divine-human partnership). Paragraph 125 uses phrases like “web of interactive relationships,” “interdependent worldwide partnerships in prayer, mission, and worship,” and “a covenant of mutual commitment based on shared mission, equity, and hospitality” to describe the symmetrical dimension.
What is virtually missing in the paragraph (and in our churchly discourse) is the asymmetrical dimension: We are equal partners with one another, but not with God. The covenant exists because of God’s initiative. Without it, there is no covenant, no “connection.” And that divine initiative—that divine mission—forever transcends our plans and our prognostications, as a grace that always “goes before.” This lends the covenant an eschatological character—open, pliable, expectant. If we believe that God’s mission grounds our “connectional covenant,” too, should we not then be a bit less ready right now to design our own undoing? Shall we not at least hold open the possibility that there is a connection we can become but are not yet?
Let’s resist the temptation to substitute affinity for unity. Against our better instincts, United Methodists tend to think of unity as conformity and compliance and diversity as autonomy and freedom. Paragraph 125 encourages this view by juxtaposing “connectional unity” with “local freedom.” On this view, the freedom to be different must be wrested from the sameness of unity. (Even a cursory reading of the Commission’s deliberations reveals the same understanding at work.)
The very real danger is that such a view of unity can easily justify a move to unity as affinity, as conformity by self-selection. This is particularly tempting when an issue—at the moment, sexuality—becomes the criterion for how, why, and with whom we belong. Such a moribund understanding of unity and diversity puts paid to the possibility of a worldwide connectional covenant. Perhaps it is time to ponder the idea of “connectional freedom”—a freedom found and lived precisely as a connection. Perhaps we discover our unity in and not despite our diversity.
Let’s not use “contextualization” as a strategy for resolving conflict. “Contextualization” and “contextual freedom” have become popular terms in our current discourse, notably in the Commission’s deliberations. The problem is that contextualization is employed as a tool for ameliorating discord, negotiating compromises, and forestalling division.
In fact, contextualization is not a tool or a strategy. It is the church’s obedience to a profound theological truth, namely, that God has chosen to dwell with us as one of us, in the cultural particularity of our cultural forms, our language, our context. That is, contextualization is the church’s acknowledgment of the Incarnation. Unless United Methodists see this truth, we will remain stuck at the threshold of the worldwide connection we can become—or abandon it altogether.
My chastened (at times, anguished) hope is that we will choose to surrender to a connectional covenant yet to be—in which “worldwide” and “global” depict a living practice, a form of discipleship, a spirituality, more than a location on a map.
When United Methodists seek to cast a vision of our “nature” as a church, we routinely employ the terms global and worldwide. Paragraph 123 of the Book of Discipline reminds us of the “global nature of our mission” as a denomination, while ¶125 speaks eloquently of our “connectional covenant” as a set of “interdependent worldwide partnerships in prayer, mission, and worship.”
This is a powerful vision, and I affirm it. In fact, it expresses my hope for United Methodism. It is a genuine hope, but a chastened one, for these claims we make about ourselves remain largely unaddressed and unfulfilled.
And so I think it is more truthful to say we stand at the threshold of becoming a “worldwide connectional covenant.” Our vision describes a United Methodist Church we can become but are not yet. The fact is crossing that threshold requires that we become a worldwide connection in conviction and practice and not just in sentiment and name. Paragraph 125 puts the point provocatively: Our “worldwide nature,” it says, must become a “living practice” in our congregations, woven deeply into their daily being and doing. In other words, our worldwide covenant must take on concrete life in our churches, shaping congregational mission, discipleship, and witness.
This is an audacious suggestion, but difficult to visualize. What would such a living practice look like in our congregations, our conferences, our general church? What needs to happen for it to take form? What values and habits need correcting or abandoning? Which need adopting, retrieving, or renewing? And perhaps most important: Is such an idea even worth considering right now? After all, we find ourselves in a worldwide United Methodist connection fractured by factional standoffs, distrust, divisions, and brinkmanship. For many of us, the idea of a connectional covenant-as-living-practice feels like a pipe dream at best and cynical propaganda at worst. I too share these misgivings, more or less intensely, depending on the day.
So yes, the idea is counterintuitive, to put it mildly. And yet, I believe the vision of a worldwide connectional covenant as living practice might just provide us with a pathway through our current brokenness toward the church we can become but are not yet.
Unlike the Bishops’ Commission on a Way Forward, I have no plans to recommend for traversing this pathway. But then, I don’t think plans are where we need to start. Better to start at the level of presupposition, value, habit, and practice. After all, more often than not, fueling our intractable conflicts are unexamined presuppositions, unquestioned beliefs, default habits, and taken-for-granted practices. Let me suggest a couple such habits and practices we would do we to examine as we consider this pathway.
In reflecting on our “worldwide connectional covenant,” let’s focus on “covenant” more than “worldwide.” We seem enamored with geography: where we are located around the globe, where we are growing and declining, which areas need additional or fewer bishops, and the like. These are important concerns. However, in the process we can easily neglect the theological center of the phrase, namely, “covenant.”
As I understand this rich biblical concept, covenantal relationships exist in two modes: Some are symmetrical (the human partnerships) and some are asymmetrical (the divine-human partnership). Paragraph 125 uses phrases like “web of interactive relationships,” “interdependent worldwide partnerships in prayer, mission, and worship,” and “a covenant of mutual commitment based on shared mission, equity, and hospitality” to describe the symmetrical dimension.
What is virtually missing in the paragraph (and in our churchly discourse) is the asymmetrical dimension: We are equal partners with one another, but not with God. The covenant exists because of God’s initiative. Without it, there is no covenant, no “connection.” And that divine initiative—that divine mission—forever transcends our plans and our prognostications, as a grace that always “goes before.” This lends the covenant an eschatological character—open, pliable, expectant. If we believe that God’s mission grounds our “connectional covenant,” too, should we not then be a bit less ready right now to design our own undoing? Shall we not at least hold open the possibility that there is a connection we can become but are not yet?
Let’s resist the temptation to substitute affinity for unity. Against our better instincts, United Methodists tend to think of unity as conformity and compliance and diversity as autonomy and freedom. Paragraph 125 encourages this view by juxtaposing “connectional unity” with “local freedom.” On this view, the freedom to be different must be wrested from the sameness of unity. (Even a cursory reading of the Commission’s deliberations reveals the same understanding at work.)
The very real danger is that such a view of unity can easily justify a move to unity as affinity, as conformity by self-selection. This is particularly tempting when an issue—at the moment, sexuality—becomes the criterion for how, why, and with whom we belong. Such a moribund understanding of unity and diversity puts paid to the possibility of a worldwide connectional covenant. Perhaps it is time to ponder the idea of “connectional freedom”—a freedom found and lived precisely as a connection. Perhaps we discover our unity in and not despite our diversity.
Let’s not use “contextualization” as a strategy for resolving conflict. “Contextualization” and “contextual freedom” have become popular terms in our current discourse, notably in the Commission’s deliberations. The problem is that contextualization is employed as a tool for ameliorating discord, negotiating compromises, and forestalling division.
In fact, contextualization is not a tool or a strategy. It is the church’s obedience to a profound theological truth, namely, that God has chosen to dwell with us as one of us, in the cultural particularity of our cultural forms, our language, our context. That is, contextualization is the church’s acknowledgment of the Incarnation. Unless United Methodists see this truth, we will remain stuck at the threshold of the worldwide connection we can become—or abandon it altogether.
My chastened (at times, anguished) hope is that we will choose to surrender to a connectional covenant yet to be—in which “worldwide” and “global” depict a living practice, a form of discipleship, a spirituality, more than a location on a map.
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Hendrik Pieterse: Creating a “Global” or “Worldwide” Church: Does Our Language Matter?
Today's post is by regular contributor Dr. Hendrik R. Pieterse, Associate Professor of Global Christianity and World Religions at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.
As anticipated, the Advanced Daily Christian Advocate (ADCA), the tome containing all legislation for the 2016 General Conference, features several proposals for more efficient denominational machinery to enable more effective witness in United Methodism’s increasingly varied ministry settings around the world. Among these are a revised “Plan UMC” (ostensibly fixing the shortcomings of the failed 2012 attempt); a substantive proposal from the Northeastern Jurisdiction (under the banner of the “NEJ Global Structure Task Force”); a couple of submissions (Northern Illinois, Wisconsin) essentially identical with the NEJ initiative; and an effort touted as “the simplest, least controversial way to move forward,” by a group laboring under the mantra “A Place of Reason UMC” (http://aplaceofreasonumc.org/). The latter three proposals presuppose the adoption of a “global” Book of Discipline (for the report and legislation about the global or “general” Discipline, see ADCA, pp. 895-901, pp. 1413-14).
Indeed, one might fairly consider the intent of these three proposals (NEJ, Northern Illinois/ Wisconsin, “Place of Reason”) to give structural shape to the logic driving the idea of a global Discipline, namely, accepting our growing cultural diversity as “a precious gift” while honoring the “essentials” that are “crucial for our Covenant and structural unity” (ADCA, p. 1413). For all three proposals, an equitable structural approach to the unity-diversity conundrum demands two moves: (1) Creating “central” or “connectional” conferences all the way down, including the United States; and (2) restricting the labor of General (or “Global Connectional”) Conference to “global” or “worldwide” issues only, employing the Global of “General” Discipline as yardstick and arbiter.
All three pieces of legislation deserve careful evaluation, but I’m not going to attempt that here. Nor will I dissect the legislation for the global Book of Discipline. Instead, I focus my musings on the language we United Methodists use to couch such solutions to our unity-diversity challenge.
Two terms have become key to our restructuring parlance over the past several years, namely, global and worldwide—with some people opting for one term over the other, while others use both interchangeably. The ADCA reports and legislation reflect these habits. For example, the NEJ proposal prefers “global,” while the Book of Discipline report and legislation (pp. 465-66, 897-901), as well as the report of the Commission on General Conference (pp. 42-46), like “worldwide.” The Connectional Table report employs both “global” and “worldwide” without differentiation (pp. 781-83).
Is anything of substance at stake in the varied, at times, indiscriminate, use of these terms? Do they convey different convictions and meanings or are they pretty much interchangeable? In short, does our language matter in this instance? I suggest that it does.
It would behoove us to devote some thought to what we intend by global and worldwide, because, while related, these terms are not the same. And getting clear on the similarities and differences in meaning and nuance can improve the analytical rigor and thoughtfulness of our unity-diversity discussions. Let me briefly illustrate.
Take the term worldwide. It is primarily a geographical term, and as such denotes the denomination’s territorial reach. However, our use of this meaning harbors an ambivalence that often goes unnoticed. On one hand, it reminds us to respect the particularities of land, soil, space—and the stories, memories, and habits that weave a particular space into a place. This use is clearly evident in the global Discipline legislation and the various reports noted earlier. On the other hand, we employ “worldwide” missionally—to denote our desire to expand the denomination’s presence around the world. The ADCA offers ready examples of this use, as well.
We would do well to ask how these two meanings should function in the understanding of our mission. In a world awash in religion—both Christian and non-Christian—expansion can quickly turn into competition. And competition—even “holy competition”—tends to dull attentiveness to the often-fragile social, political, and religious particularities of a place. In some instances, the cost of such tone-deafness can be injury to ecumenical relationships, in other instances damage to volatile interreligious balances. Either way, a great deal is at stake in being “worldwide.”
The term global encompasses what we mean by “worldwide” but adds important angles of vision we would do well to keep in mind. “Global” invokes “globalization”—and so draws attention to the transnational political, social, economic, and religious forces that connect and shape, for good or ill, the myriad places around the world in which United Methodists find themselves. The constant, often contested, negotiation between the “global” and the “local” reminds us that “global” and “local” are always intertwined in a dance of give and take, enrichment and loss, accommodation and resistance. For better or worse, as some would say, our lives are best interpreted as “glocal.”[1]
And so one wonders: How might sustained attention to this global-local dynamic prompt United Methodists to question the ease with which the legislation calls for a U.S. central conference to “deal with U.S.-centric issues” (Executive Summary, “Place of Reason”; http://aplaceofreasonumc.org/executive-summary/); or for a “Global Connectional Conference” that “will ONLY deal with global issues ...” (ADCA, p. 468); of for separating the “essentials” from the “non-essentials” in our search for a “global” Book of Discipline (ADCA, pp. 1413-14)? Would deeper awareness of our increasingly “glocal” reality not at the very least give us pause?
I trust it is clear that I’m not suggesting we quit using “worldwide” and “global” in defining our ecclesial identity. Rather, I’m suggesting we do the hard theological work of clarifying what we mean when we talk this way. It turns out our language really does matter.
As anticipated, the Advanced Daily Christian Advocate (ADCA), the tome containing all legislation for the 2016 General Conference, features several proposals for more efficient denominational machinery to enable more effective witness in United Methodism’s increasingly varied ministry settings around the world. Among these are a revised “Plan UMC” (ostensibly fixing the shortcomings of the failed 2012 attempt); a substantive proposal from the Northeastern Jurisdiction (under the banner of the “NEJ Global Structure Task Force”); a couple of submissions (Northern Illinois, Wisconsin) essentially identical with the NEJ initiative; and an effort touted as “the simplest, least controversial way to move forward,” by a group laboring under the mantra “A Place of Reason UMC” (http://aplaceofreasonumc.org/). The latter three proposals presuppose the adoption of a “global” Book of Discipline (for the report and legislation about the global or “general” Discipline, see ADCA, pp. 895-901, pp. 1413-14).
Indeed, one might fairly consider the intent of these three proposals (NEJ, Northern Illinois/ Wisconsin, “Place of Reason”) to give structural shape to the logic driving the idea of a global Discipline, namely, accepting our growing cultural diversity as “a precious gift” while honoring the “essentials” that are “crucial for our Covenant and structural unity” (ADCA, p. 1413). For all three proposals, an equitable structural approach to the unity-diversity conundrum demands two moves: (1) Creating “central” or “connectional” conferences all the way down, including the United States; and (2) restricting the labor of General (or “Global Connectional”) Conference to “global” or “worldwide” issues only, employing the Global of “General” Discipline as yardstick and arbiter.
All three pieces of legislation deserve careful evaluation, but I’m not going to attempt that here. Nor will I dissect the legislation for the global Book of Discipline. Instead, I focus my musings on the language we United Methodists use to couch such solutions to our unity-diversity challenge.
Two terms have become key to our restructuring parlance over the past several years, namely, global and worldwide—with some people opting for one term over the other, while others use both interchangeably. The ADCA reports and legislation reflect these habits. For example, the NEJ proposal prefers “global,” while the Book of Discipline report and legislation (pp. 465-66, 897-901), as well as the report of the Commission on General Conference (pp. 42-46), like “worldwide.” The Connectional Table report employs both “global” and “worldwide” without differentiation (pp. 781-83).
Is anything of substance at stake in the varied, at times, indiscriminate, use of these terms? Do they convey different convictions and meanings or are they pretty much interchangeable? In short, does our language matter in this instance? I suggest that it does.
It would behoove us to devote some thought to what we intend by global and worldwide, because, while related, these terms are not the same. And getting clear on the similarities and differences in meaning and nuance can improve the analytical rigor and thoughtfulness of our unity-diversity discussions. Let me briefly illustrate.
Take the term worldwide. It is primarily a geographical term, and as such denotes the denomination’s territorial reach. However, our use of this meaning harbors an ambivalence that often goes unnoticed. On one hand, it reminds us to respect the particularities of land, soil, space—and the stories, memories, and habits that weave a particular space into a place. This use is clearly evident in the global Discipline legislation and the various reports noted earlier. On the other hand, we employ “worldwide” missionally—to denote our desire to expand the denomination’s presence around the world. The ADCA offers ready examples of this use, as well.
We would do well to ask how these two meanings should function in the understanding of our mission. In a world awash in religion—both Christian and non-Christian—expansion can quickly turn into competition. And competition—even “holy competition”—tends to dull attentiveness to the often-fragile social, political, and religious particularities of a place. In some instances, the cost of such tone-deafness can be injury to ecumenical relationships, in other instances damage to volatile interreligious balances. Either way, a great deal is at stake in being “worldwide.”
The term global encompasses what we mean by “worldwide” but adds important angles of vision we would do well to keep in mind. “Global” invokes “globalization”—and so draws attention to the transnational political, social, economic, and religious forces that connect and shape, for good or ill, the myriad places around the world in which United Methodists find themselves. The constant, often contested, negotiation between the “global” and the “local” reminds us that “global” and “local” are always intertwined in a dance of give and take, enrichment and loss, accommodation and resistance. For better or worse, as some would say, our lives are best interpreted as “glocal.”[1]
And so one wonders: How might sustained attention to this global-local dynamic prompt United Methodists to question the ease with which the legislation calls for a U.S. central conference to “deal with U.S.-centric issues” (Executive Summary, “Place of Reason”; http://aplaceofreasonumc.org/executive-summary/); or for a “Global Connectional Conference” that “will ONLY deal with global issues ...” (ADCA, p. 468); of for separating the “essentials” from the “non-essentials” in our search for a “global” Book of Discipline (ADCA, pp. 1413-14)? Would deeper awareness of our increasingly “glocal” reality not at the very least give us pause?
I trust it is clear that I’m not suggesting we quit using “worldwide” and “global” in defining our ecclesial identity. Rather, I’m suggesting we do the hard theological work of clarifying what we mean when we talk this way. It turns out our language really does matter.
[1] See Robert J.
Schreiter, The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local (Orbis, 1997), esp. ch. 1.
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Hendrik Pieterse: United Methodist Identity In a Changing U.S. Context: Some Musings
Today's post is by regular contributor Dr. Hendrik R. Pieterse, Associate Professor of Global Christianity and World Religions at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.
Regular contributor David Field’s recent reflection on Methodist identity in a rapidly secularizing Europe is a thoughtful reminder that discerning ecclesial identity and mission is always a contextual affair. This is not a new insight, of course. Indeed, “contextualization,” “contextual theology,” and related themes have been front and center in missiological debates and wider theological conversations for the better part of sixty years now. Field’s reflection on European United Methodism is a model of just such contextual theological work.
It is safe to say, I think, that U.S. United Methodists have been less prepared, and perhaps less concerned, to mine this missiological discussion for their own context. The reasons are varied and complex, no doubt. One of these, I suspect, is that U.S. United Methodists in large measure haven’t felt the need to, given decades of Christian, and at times Methodist, dominance in U.S. religious culture. Not surprisingly, now we find ourselves ill prepared to make theological sense of a North American religious and cultural context that is changing out of proportion—and doing so at a dizzying pace and on a massive scale.
Current denominational responses to this shifting landscape, I fear, will be of little help in the long run. Preoccupation with rightsizing, downsizing, dashboards, and membership metrics, tethered as these are to an incessant rhetoric of denominational decline, are seed sown on “rocky ground” (Mt. 13:5). They may show results in places in the short term, but they will do little to sustain denominational fortitude in the long haul. For one thing, they remain beholden (albeit largely viscerally) to the now long-defunct narrative of Christian (if not Protestant) ascendancy. More important, and perhaps as a consequence, they fail to be sufficiently contextual. That is, they neglect to pay attention what is actually going on—to those demographic, cultural, religious, and other forces that are reconfiguring the current U.S. societal landscape as we speak. The fact is we are confronted with the reality of social change that in kind, intensity, scope, depth, and sheer relentlessness is unprecedented. Fundamental to this dynamic—in part both its result and catalyst—is rapid religious change, reshaping both the Christian and the larger religious make-up of the country.
A key feature of this religious change is growing religious diversity. To be sure, religious diversity—at least in its Christian variety—is as old as the founding of the Republic. What is different about today’s religious diversity is precisely its potential to radically recast this longstanding Christian-dominated social imagination. I say “potential,” because there is nothing given about this prospect. Indeed, in his extensive surveys of American religious attitudes, Robert Wuthnow notes a “significant tension in American culture between a long-standing and still deeply held view among sizable numbers of Americans that America is a Christian nation, on the one hand, and norms of civic liberty that recognize the reality and rights of non-Christian groups, on the other.”[1] Closely intertwined with this interreligious struggle in the American social psyche, I suggest, are two additional shifts: (1) A rapidly diversifying Christian landscape: For example, the Protestant share of the Christian pie continues to decline (it dipped below 50 percent for the first time ever in 2012) and immigrant Christians are slowly diversifying Christianity’s racial, ethnic, and theological makeup. (2) A loosening of religious loyalties: Here an example is the so-called “nones.” Whether this segment of the adult population represents the growing edge of religious secularization in the United States is an open question. What is clear is this mostly young “spiritual but not religious” cohort consider religious affiliation not so much objectionable as simply irrelevant.[2]
How do United Methodists construct a “clear, convincing, and effective” witness (to quote the Book of Discipline, ¶105) in this rapidly shifting context? In place of an answer, let me offer a few musings. For starters, we would be wise to resist the impulse, as we are wont to do, to view these shifts as merely demographic, sociological, and cultural processes, whose primary use is to serve as data sources for more effective strategic planning, institutional innovation, and entrepreneurial leadership. (United Methodists have shown ourselves particularly adept at such reductionism.) Instead, we should take a leaf from contextual theology and learn (again) how to read context theologically. Then our primary question becomes, “Where, how, and to what ends is God at work in these processes of cultural and religious change?” Asking this question opens the way to theological meanings within what otherwise might appear as merely sociological or historical events. And so we might wonder: What if diversity is first of all the abode of divine mission and not impetus for religious and ecclesial contest? Might change and diversity thus interpreted not stem our current self-preoccupation in favor of curiosity about a divine wind that blows where it wills for purposes yet to be discerned (John 3:8)? And might boundary not in this way become gift instead of threat, threshold instead of barrier, horizon instead of perimeter?
I realize that for some readers this line of thinking will amount to so much spinning of intellectual wheels at a time when increasingly perplexing circumstances call for decisive action. And yet, with my colleague David Field, I am persuaded that cultivating the virtues and skills—and, above all, the patience—for discerning the theological meaning of context is an indispensable discipline for ensuring a United Methodist witness that will not only endure but thrive in these changing times.
Regular contributor David Field’s recent reflection on Methodist identity in a rapidly secularizing Europe is a thoughtful reminder that discerning ecclesial identity and mission is always a contextual affair. This is not a new insight, of course. Indeed, “contextualization,” “contextual theology,” and related themes have been front and center in missiological debates and wider theological conversations for the better part of sixty years now. Field’s reflection on European United Methodism is a model of just such contextual theological work.
It is safe to say, I think, that U.S. United Methodists have been less prepared, and perhaps less concerned, to mine this missiological discussion for their own context. The reasons are varied and complex, no doubt. One of these, I suspect, is that U.S. United Methodists in large measure haven’t felt the need to, given decades of Christian, and at times Methodist, dominance in U.S. religious culture. Not surprisingly, now we find ourselves ill prepared to make theological sense of a North American religious and cultural context that is changing out of proportion—and doing so at a dizzying pace and on a massive scale.
Current denominational responses to this shifting landscape, I fear, will be of little help in the long run. Preoccupation with rightsizing, downsizing, dashboards, and membership metrics, tethered as these are to an incessant rhetoric of denominational decline, are seed sown on “rocky ground” (Mt. 13:5). They may show results in places in the short term, but they will do little to sustain denominational fortitude in the long haul. For one thing, they remain beholden (albeit largely viscerally) to the now long-defunct narrative of Christian (if not Protestant) ascendancy. More important, and perhaps as a consequence, they fail to be sufficiently contextual. That is, they neglect to pay attention what is actually going on—to those demographic, cultural, religious, and other forces that are reconfiguring the current U.S. societal landscape as we speak. The fact is we are confronted with the reality of social change that in kind, intensity, scope, depth, and sheer relentlessness is unprecedented. Fundamental to this dynamic—in part both its result and catalyst—is rapid religious change, reshaping both the Christian and the larger religious make-up of the country.
A key feature of this religious change is growing religious diversity. To be sure, religious diversity—at least in its Christian variety—is as old as the founding of the Republic. What is different about today’s religious diversity is precisely its potential to radically recast this longstanding Christian-dominated social imagination. I say “potential,” because there is nothing given about this prospect. Indeed, in his extensive surveys of American religious attitudes, Robert Wuthnow notes a “significant tension in American culture between a long-standing and still deeply held view among sizable numbers of Americans that America is a Christian nation, on the one hand, and norms of civic liberty that recognize the reality and rights of non-Christian groups, on the other.”[1] Closely intertwined with this interreligious struggle in the American social psyche, I suggest, are two additional shifts: (1) A rapidly diversifying Christian landscape: For example, the Protestant share of the Christian pie continues to decline (it dipped below 50 percent for the first time ever in 2012) and immigrant Christians are slowly diversifying Christianity’s racial, ethnic, and theological makeup. (2) A loosening of religious loyalties: Here an example is the so-called “nones.” Whether this segment of the adult population represents the growing edge of religious secularization in the United States is an open question. What is clear is this mostly young “spiritual but not religious” cohort consider religious affiliation not so much objectionable as simply irrelevant.[2]
How do United Methodists construct a “clear, convincing, and effective” witness (to quote the Book of Discipline, ¶105) in this rapidly shifting context? In place of an answer, let me offer a few musings. For starters, we would be wise to resist the impulse, as we are wont to do, to view these shifts as merely demographic, sociological, and cultural processes, whose primary use is to serve as data sources for more effective strategic planning, institutional innovation, and entrepreneurial leadership. (United Methodists have shown ourselves particularly adept at such reductionism.) Instead, we should take a leaf from contextual theology and learn (again) how to read context theologically. Then our primary question becomes, “Where, how, and to what ends is God at work in these processes of cultural and religious change?” Asking this question opens the way to theological meanings within what otherwise might appear as merely sociological or historical events. And so we might wonder: What if diversity is first of all the abode of divine mission and not impetus for religious and ecclesial contest? Might change and diversity thus interpreted not stem our current self-preoccupation in favor of curiosity about a divine wind that blows where it wills for purposes yet to be discerned (John 3:8)? And might boundary not in this way become gift instead of threat, threshold instead of barrier, horizon instead of perimeter?
I realize that for some readers this line of thinking will amount to so much spinning of intellectual wheels at a time when increasingly perplexing circumstances call for decisive action. And yet, with my colleague David Field, I am persuaded that cultivating the virtues and skills—and, above all, the patience—for discerning the theological meaning of context is an indispensable discipline for ensuring a United Methodist witness that will not only endure but thrive in these changing times.
[1] Robert Wuthnow, “Religious Diversity in a ‘Christian Nation,’” in Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism, ed. Thomas Banchoff (Oxford, 2007), 152-68.
[2] See, for example, the Pew study “Nones” on the Rise: One-In-Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation (2012); online at www.pewforum.org.
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Hendrik Pieterse: Make Disciples, Transform the World: Reflections on United Methodist Mission (Pt. 2)
Today's post is written by Dr. Hendrik R. Pieterse, Associate Professor of Global Christianity and World Religions at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Dr. Pieterse contributed this piece as part of our reflections on the WCC's new document on mission and evangelism, Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes. You can find more posts in this series by clicking on the "Together towards Life" tag at the bottom.
Given the danger of focusing too much on human initiative in mission, as I outlined in my last post, what should we do, then? For a denomination wracked by anxiety over perceived decline, is the temptation to take matters into our own hands simply too great, unwittingly perpetuating the distortions of which Bosch and others have warned? Therefore, should we abandon the Matthean commission in favor of, say, Johannine or Lucan themes of mission and discipleship? Some have argued as much.
I, for one, am not yet persuaded. What we need, I think, is not a new mission statement but a coherent ecclesiology to give our disciple-making task the theological depth and missional flexibility fit for a global context. And to that end Grace Upon Grace and GBGM’s Theology of Mission, reflective of the ecumenical consensus summarized in Together Towards Life (TTL), offer important resources. I will mention just one or two.
We should pause to insist, however, that we dare not do our ecclesial reflection without substantive exegetical attention to Matt. 28:19-20—and to do so in the context of Matthew’s Gospel as a whole. This exegetical work serves not only to resist the all-too-common habit of using “making disciples for the transformation of the world” as a free-floating mantra in denominational discourse, deliberation, and communication. It serves also—and more importantly—to anchor our mission statement in Matthew’s total account of Jesus’ identity and mission. Surprising, perhaps even transformative, insights might result.
Take, for example, the fact that Matthew intends chapter 28:19-20 as a summary of his Gospel. “[T]eaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (v. 19) thus lifts up the entirety of Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection, recounted in the preceding chapters, as the pattern of discipleship. The result lends discipleship a prophetic, even costly, edge. Comments Bosch: “To become a disciple is to be incorporated into God’s new community through baptism and to side with the poor and the oppressed. . . . This is what Jesus has commanded his disciples . . .”
As a further example, consider that verse 20, promising Christ’s abiding presence with the disciples is not intended as a spiritual “back up” for however the church happens to define its mission. Rather, it reminds the disciples of mission as divinely generated and directed gift and promise. The church’s mission depends upon and endures as long as Christ’s promised presence.[1] To use mission parlance: the church’s mission is always and forever a function of and a grateful response to the missio Dei. Does the absence of this concluding promise in the Discipline’s citation of the Great Commission confirm the above suspicion that United Methodists tend to sublimate the priority of grace in mission?
Which brings us, briefly, to Grace Upon Grace and Theology of Mission as resources in constructing a coherent missional ecclesiology. In both documents, and beautifully and succinctly in the latter, United Methodists encounter at least three crucial affirmations:
(1) Mission is always and irreversibly the work of the triune God. Mission is a function of the doctrine of God. Mission is missio Dei.
(2) This means the church’s mission is always and irreversibly derivative, as instrument and servant of the divine mission. Foregrounding the church’s disciple-making charge at the expense of the divine initiative contradicts the logic of the missio Dei and compromises the church’s call.
(3) Mission is a journey of discovery, surprise, repentance, and transformation, as the church encounters in the neighbor a divine initiative that always and irreversibly precedes even our loftiest visions and best-laid plans. Thus mission regains its sense of expectancy and unpredictability. And, as the GBGM document notes, the virtues appropriate to an ever-surprising divine initiative is “openness” and “gratitude,” as we “await the leading of the Spirit in ways not yet seen as God continues to work God’s purposes out in our own day in a new way.”
This understanding of mission, and these virtues of missional discipleship, we Methodists once knew well. Grace Upon Grace and Theology of Mission are ready resources in recovering these seminal affirmations, however counterintuitive to a denomination so anxious to pull itself up by its own bootstraps.
Given the danger of focusing too much on human initiative in mission, as I outlined in my last post, what should we do, then? For a denomination wracked by anxiety over perceived decline, is the temptation to take matters into our own hands simply too great, unwittingly perpetuating the distortions of which Bosch and others have warned? Therefore, should we abandon the Matthean commission in favor of, say, Johannine or Lucan themes of mission and discipleship? Some have argued as much.
I, for one, am not yet persuaded. What we need, I think, is not a new mission statement but a coherent ecclesiology to give our disciple-making task the theological depth and missional flexibility fit for a global context. And to that end Grace Upon Grace and GBGM’s Theology of Mission, reflective of the ecumenical consensus summarized in Together Towards Life (TTL), offer important resources. I will mention just one or two.
We should pause to insist, however, that we dare not do our ecclesial reflection without substantive exegetical attention to Matt. 28:19-20—and to do so in the context of Matthew’s Gospel as a whole. This exegetical work serves not only to resist the all-too-common habit of using “making disciples for the transformation of the world” as a free-floating mantra in denominational discourse, deliberation, and communication. It serves also—and more importantly—to anchor our mission statement in Matthew’s total account of Jesus’ identity and mission. Surprising, perhaps even transformative, insights might result.
Take, for example, the fact that Matthew intends chapter 28:19-20 as a summary of his Gospel. “[T]eaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (v. 19) thus lifts up the entirety of Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection, recounted in the preceding chapters, as the pattern of discipleship. The result lends discipleship a prophetic, even costly, edge. Comments Bosch: “To become a disciple is to be incorporated into God’s new community through baptism and to side with the poor and the oppressed. . . . This is what Jesus has commanded his disciples . . .”
As a further example, consider that verse 20, promising Christ’s abiding presence with the disciples is not intended as a spiritual “back up” for however the church happens to define its mission. Rather, it reminds the disciples of mission as divinely generated and directed gift and promise. The church’s mission depends upon and endures as long as Christ’s promised presence.[1] To use mission parlance: the church’s mission is always and forever a function of and a grateful response to the missio Dei. Does the absence of this concluding promise in the Discipline’s citation of the Great Commission confirm the above suspicion that United Methodists tend to sublimate the priority of grace in mission?
Which brings us, briefly, to Grace Upon Grace and Theology of Mission as resources in constructing a coherent missional ecclesiology. In both documents, and beautifully and succinctly in the latter, United Methodists encounter at least three crucial affirmations:
(1) Mission is always and irreversibly the work of the triune God. Mission is a function of the doctrine of God. Mission is missio Dei.
(2) This means the church’s mission is always and irreversibly derivative, as instrument and servant of the divine mission. Foregrounding the church’s disciple-making charge at the expense of the divine initiative contradicts the logic of the missio Dei and compromises the church’s call.
(3) Mission is a journey of discovery, surprise, repentance, and transformation, as the church encounters in the neighbor a divine initiative that always and irreversibly precedes even our loftiest visions and best-laid plans. Thus mission regains its sense of expectancy and unpredictability. And, as the GBGM document notes, the virtues appropriate to an ever-surprising divine initiative is “openness” and “gratitude,” as we “await the leading of the Spirit in ways not yet seen as God continues to work God’s purposes out in our own day in a new way.”
This understanding of mission, and these virtues of missional discipleship, we Methodists once knew well. Grace Upon Grace and Theology of Mission are ready resources in recovering these seminal affirmations, however counterintuitive to a denomination so anxious to pull itself up by its own bootstraps.
[1] David J. Bosch, “The Structure of Mission: An Exposition of Matthew 28:16-20,” in Paul W. Chilcote and Laceye C. Warner, eds., The Study of Evangelism: Exploring a Missional Practice of the Church (Eerdmans, 2008), 84, 87-91.
Thursday, December 11, 2014
Hendrik Pieterse: Make Disciples, Transform the World: Reflections on United Methodist Mission (Pt. 1)
Today's post is written by Dr. Hendrik R. Pieterse, Associate Professor of Global Christianity and World Religions at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Dr. Pieterse contributed this piece as part of our reflections on the WCC's new document on mission and evangelism, Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes. You can find more posts in this series by clicking on the "Together towards Life" tag at the bottom.
In reading Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes (TTL) alongside Grace Upon Grace and Theology of Mission (the mission statement of the United Methodist mission agency), it is heartening to note the resonance of major themes in mission theology and practice over the past several decades: mission as initiative of the triune God; the church as missionary by nature and so servant of the missio Dei; mission as holistic (i.e., embracing “dynamism, justice, diversity, and transformation” within the divine aim of “abundant life” for all creation [TTL, 6, 7]), and more.
One difference is striking, though—the absence of the so-called Great Commission (Matt. 28:19-20) in the ecumenical statement. This passage seems to play no interpretive role in TTL; in fact, it appears nowhere in the document. Instead, Lucan and Johannine commission themes predominate. Now, arguments from silence are notoriously shaky; and so I will resist the temptation to divine the document’s motives for the omission. Yet, given that the Matthean commission serves as the basis for United Methodism’s mission statement (Book of Discipline, ¶¶120-21), its absence in TTL should at least prompt United Methodists to ponder the implications of the emerging ecumenical consensus about church and mission for our continued appeal to the Great Commission as an aspiring global denomination.
Most readers of this blog are well aware of the checkered, and often deeply troubling, career of the Great Commission in the history of Western mission, especially in its heyday during the late 1880s and into the first third of the twentieth century. Interpreted as a command to be obeyed (“Go!”), and riding the tide of Western social, economic, and political power in league with a taken-for-granted inferiority of the receiving cultures, Matt. 28:19-20 was often pressed in the service of Western Christian expansionism. At least in part bolstering this Western missionary chauvinism and its resultant cultural tone-deafness, as David Bosch has pointed out, was a gradual foregrounding of human autonomy and agency, reflecting the contest with divine providence and power in some quarters of Enlightenment thought. Tellingly for us Methodists, Bosch calls this foregrounding of human agency “the gradual ‘Arminianization’ of Protestantism, evidenced . . . by the rapid growth of (Arminian) Methodist and Baptist churches in the United States . . .”[1]
Now, we would surely want to debate Bosch’s claim. Yet it is worth noting that a significant cadre of United Methodist scholars have detected a similar dynamic at work in our current employment of the Matthean commission. The foregrounding of “making” language in the Discipline’s description of our mission (¶¶ 120-122), they complain, obscures the priority of grace in mission, focusing on “what ‘we’ do, rather than the primacy of God’s grace and power.” In so doing, and perhaps inevitably, disciple-making becomes a “system,” with disciples as “output” or “product.”[2]
Should it surprise, then, given the deep anxiety in the U.S. church, fuelled by decades-long rhetoric of decline, that the already tenuous depiction of the grace-faith dynamic noted above should deteriorate into a full-blown obsession with “fixing”—with rightsizing church structures, with membership metrics and “dashboards”?
Buried in this frenzy is our deep-seated Methodist commitment to an accountable faith—a discipleship that is actively guided and shaped in all its dimensions, from individual devotion to denominational structures, by the rhythms of the means of grace. As Randy Maddox and others have reminded us, at our best, “making disciples” is always the function of that delicate synergy of divine initiative and human response.[3]
In reading Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes (TTL) alongside Grace Upon Grace and Theology of Mission (the mission statement of the United Methodist mission agency), it is heartening to note the resonance of major themes in mission theology and practice over the past several decades: mission as initiative of the triune God; the church as missionary by nature and so servant of the missio Dei; mission as holistic (i.e., embracing “dynamism, justice, diversity, and transformation” within the divine aim of “abundant life” for all creation [TTL, 6, 7]), and more.
One difference is striking, though—the absence of the so-called Great Commission (Matt. 28:19-20) in the ecumenical statement. This passage seems to play no interpretive role in TTL; in fact, it appears nowhere in the document. Instead, Lucan and Johannine commission themes predominate. Now, arguments from silence are notoriously shaky; and so I will resist the temptation to divine the document’s motives for the omission. Yet, given that the Matthean commission serves as the basis for United Methodism’s mission statement (Book of Discipline, ¶¶120-21), its absence in TTL should at least prompt United Methodists to ponder the implications of the emerging ecumenical consensus about church and mission for our continued appeal to the Great Commission as an aspiring global denomination.
Most readers of this blog are well aware of the checkered, and often deeply troubling, career of the Great Commission in the history of Western mission, especially in its heyday during the late 1880s and into the first third of the twentieth century. Interpreted as a command to be obeyed (“Go!”), and riding the tide of Western social, economic, and political power in league with a taken-for-granted inferiority of the receiving cultures, Matt. 28:19-20 was often pressed in the service of Western Christian expansionism. At least in part bolstering this Western missionary chauvinism and its resultant cultural tone-deafness, as David Bosch has pointed out, was a gradual foregrounding of human autonomy and agency, reflecting the contest with divine providence and power in some quarters of Enlightenment thought. Tellingly for us Methodists, Bosch calls this foregrounding of human agency “the gradual ‘Arminianization’ of Protestantism, evidenced . . . by the rapid growth of (Arminian) Methodist and Baptist churches in the United States . . .”[1]
Now, we would surely want to debate Bosch’s claim. Yet it is worth noting that a significant cadre of United Methodist scholars have detected a similar dynamic at work in our current employment of the Matthean commission. The foregrounding of “making” language in the Discipline’s description of our mission (¶¶ 120-122), they complain, obscures the priority of grace in mission, focusing on “what ‘we’ do, rather than the primacy of God’s grace and power.” In so doing, and perhaps inevitably, disciple-making becomes a “system,” with disciples as “output” or “product.”[2]
Should it surprise, then, given the deep anxiety in the U.S. church, fuelled by decades-long rhetoric of decline, that the already tenuous depiction of the grace-faith dynamic noted above should deteriorate into a full-blown obsession with “fixing”—with rightsizing church structures, with membership metrics and “dashboards”?
Buried in this frenzy is our deep-seated Methodist commitment to an accountable faith—a discipleship that is actively guided and shaped in all its dimensions, from individual devotion to denominational structures, by the rhythms of the means of grace. As Randy Maddox and others have reminded us, at our best, “making disciples” is always the function of that delicate synergy of divine initiative and human response.[3]
[1] David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts In Theology of Mission (Orbis, 1991), 343. See also David J. Bosch, “The Structure of Mission: An Exposition of Matthew 28:16-20,” in Paul W. Chilcote and Laceye C. Warner, eds., The Study of Evangelism: Exploring a Missional Practice of the Church (Eerdmans, 2008), 84, 87-91.
[2] Thomas Frank, Polity, Practice, and the Mission of the UMC (Abingdon, 2006), 163. See also Sarah Heaner Lancaster, “Our Mission Reconsidered: Do We Really ‘Make’ Disciples?”, Quarterly Review 23/2 (Summer 2003): 117-30.
[3] See Randy Maddox, “Wesley’s Prescription for “Making Disciples of Jesus Christ”: Insights for the TwentyFirst-Century Church,” Quarterly Review 23/1 (Spring 2003): 7-14.
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Connectionalism and context - Hendrik Pieterse on Grace Upon Grace: A Church Formed By Grace
Today's post is the latest in a series of posts that are re-examining the mission document of The United Methodist Church, Grace Upon Grace
(Nashville: Graded Press, 1990). Various United Methodist mission professors and practitioners are re-examining this theological statement and how it can inform our corporate life in The United Methodist Church today. This piece is written by Dr. Hendrik R. Pieterse, Associate Professor of Global Christianity and World Religions at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Dr. Pieterse is commenting on paragraph 50 on "connectionalism," from the ninth section of the document, "A Church Formed By Grace." Use the "Grace Upon Grace" tag to identify other posts in this series.
In her perceptive comment on the overview of this section (“A Church Formed by Grace”), Elaine Robinson refers to the paragraphs 50-54 “as a list of structural and relational commitments that are characteristically Methodist . . .” She identifies para. 50, on connectionalism, as one such “structural commitment.” While appreciating the document’s claim that connectionalism “expresses our [United Methodist] missional life,” she worries that the paragraph might serve largely as an “apologia” for the current churchly bureaucracy, perhaps most pertinently, its general agencies. She points to the increasing tendency in recent decades to trim the work of the general church to the aims of local churches, and rightly asks about implications of this tendency for United Methodism’s “global nature,” given its still-predominantly U.S.-centered configuration. As such, connectionalism, instead of serving as “rationale” for the church’s mission might in fact obscure or even obstruct it.
These are legitimate concerns. Surely, too often, and perhaps especially in recent years, “connectionalism” has stood proxy for bureaucratic navel-gazing and self-preservation. Yet, as para. 50 reminds us, “system” and “mission” are indelibly linked in United Methodist ecclesiology. The reflection on connectionalism in this paragraph of Grace Upon Grace, I hope to show, remains remarkably relevant to our efforts today to make our missional commitments concrete as a global connectional system.[1]
Paragraph 50 opens with the rather striking claim: “Connectionalism is the distinctive form of United Methodism’s organizational obedience.” Indeed, it goes on, “this connectional system expresses our missional life . . .” Given the increasingly contentious wrangling about denominational restructuring (typified, perhaps, most notoriously by the 2012 General Conference), the equation of “system” and “mission” here might strike many readers as not only hopelessly idealistic but also thoroughly misguided (not to mention, self-serving). Isn’t the “system” exactly the problem? Now, no one who is paying attention would disagree that United Methodism’s current system—from general agencies to local church—needs fundamental rethinking. Yet our debates often miss a key insight about the relation between mission and system: For United Methodists, structure, system, organization, and polity are indispensable modes in giving concrete form to our ecclesial convictions in a particular time and place. As para. 50 notes, it is precisely through the mundane mechanisms of structure, precept, and polity that United Methodists express “our bodily life in Christ”—or, equally, express our life in Christ bodily. In other words, structure, organization, polity, and pattern are crucial elements in the way United Methodists contextualize their mission in and for a time and place. Connectional “system,” then, in its often convoluted complexity, embodies and expresses what Russell Richey calls our “practiced or practical ecclesiology.” It is a form of being church in which theological self-understanding is “embedded in the everyday structures, policies, organizations, and patterns of Methodist life.”[2]
Now, lest I be construed as an unreconstructed apologist for the status quo, let me note a couple of implications that might shed light on the radical potential of our “practiced” ecclesiology for our mission today. First, if our system always embodies our missional convictions, then “structure” is always already theologically freighted. This means denominational restructuring efforts dare not proceed without careful theological work. For such theological attention allows us to ask the sorts of questions that often get sublimated in our politically-charged debates: What convictions, beliefs, and values do we seek or have sought to embody in a particular local, annual conference, or general church structure? How would such convictions, beliefs, and values be diminished, upheld, or altered by a proposed change? Indeed, how might prayerful theological reflection on these convictions, beliefs, and values in fact prompt or demand changes in the system? Moreover, and perhaps most important, how might such theological reflection remind us of dimensions of our Methodist self-understanding and missional practice that have become corrupted, covered up, or even abandoned in our current system?
Questions like these allow us to acknowledge the contextual nature of our connectional system (as pointed out above). As contextual, the concrete forms our ecclesial identity takes are always both timely and time-bound: timely so as to render a “faithful Christian witness”[3] in and for a particular time and place; time-bound, because contexts constantly change. It is lamentable that these rather obvious points about context and contextuality often receive so little overt theological consideration in our denominational deliberations. Such neglect prevents just the self-critical attentiveness to cultural embeddedness, if not captivity, that faithful “organizational obedience” to our connectional covenant in a particular context requires. A number of previous posts, including Dr. Robinson’s, have noted the deleterious effects of such contextual tone-deafness on our efforts to be a global church. Unwitting U.S. self-preoccupation continues to cripple our capacity to attend with theological integrity to the growing contextual complexity of our denomination around the world. Equally important, however, such tone-deafness discourages U.S. United Methodists from engaging their own rapidly changing context with the theological astuteness that effective contextualization demands. I suspect the tectonic cultural, economic, political, and religious shifts that are reconfiguring the North American context provide vital clues to why, how, and to what ends we U.S. United Methodists continue to fight over certain issues and neglect or ignore others.
Russell Richey observes that, at its best, connectionalism is “malleable, evolving, vulnerable . . . forming and reforming.” Our confidence in a connectional covenant that is Spirit-inspired and Spirit-led has prompted United Methodists again and again “to go with the Spirit, to experiment, to try new things, to change.”[4] Such attributes and virtues are critical to effective contextualization in the multivalent, complex, and rapidly changing contexts within which United Methodists find themselves today. However, as Grace Upon Grace wisely observed twenty-five years ago, these virtues and attributes (and their fruits, inclusiveness, ecumenical affirmation, global awareness, diversity [paras. 51-54]) will remain vibrant and effective only in a United Methodist connection that is “alertly critical of its context and self-critical of its relation to that setting.” (para. 55) Today, more than ever, do we need such theological vigilance, as the missional needs of an increasingly multicultural, multicontextual global United Methodist connection chafe under a connectional machinery designed for a U.S. context now rapidly disappearing.
In her perceptive comment on the overview of this section (“A Church Formed by Grace”), Elaine Robinson refers to the paragraphs 50-54 “as a list of structural and relational commitments that are characteristically Methodist . . .” She identifies para. 50, on connectionalism, as one such “structural commitment.” While appreciating the document’s claim that connectionalism “expresses our [United Methodist] missional life,” she worries that the paragraph might serve largely as an “apologia” for the current churchly bureaucracy, perhaps most pertinently, its general agencies. She points to the increasing tendency in recent decades to trim the work of the general church to the aims of local churches, and rightly asks about implications of this tendency for United Methodism’s “global nature,” given its still-predominantly U.S.-centered configuration. As such, connectionalism, instead of serving as “rationale” for the church’s mission might in fact obscure or even obstruct it.
These are legitimate concerns. Surely, too often, and perhaps especially in recent years, “connectionalism” has stood proxy for bureaucratic navel-gazing and self-preservation. Yet, as para. 50 reminds us, “system” and “mission” are indelibly linked in United Methodist ecclesiology. The reflection on connectionalism in this paragraph of Grace Upon Grace, I hope to show, remains remarkably relevant to our efforts today to make our missional commitments concrete as a global connectional system.[1]
Paragraph 50 opens with the rather striking claim: “Connectionalism is the distinctive form of United Methodism’s organizational obedience.” Indeed, it goes on, “this connectional system expresses our missional life . . .” Given the increasingly contentious wrangling about denominational restructuring (typified, perhaps, most notoriously by the 2012 General Conference), the equation of “system” and “mission” here might strike many readers as not only hopelessly idealistic but also thoroughly misguided (not to mention, self-serving). Isn’t the “system” exactly the problem? Now, no one who is paying attention would disagree that United Methodism’s current system—from general agencies to local church—needs fundamental rethinking. Yet our debates often miss a key insight about the relation between mission and system: For United Methodists, structure, system, organization, and polity are indispensable modes in giving concrete form to our ecclesial convictions in a particular time and place. As para. 50 notes, it is precisely through the mundane mechanisms of structure, precept, and polity that United Methodists express “our bodily life in Christ”—or, equally, express our life in Christ bodily. In other words, structure, organization, polity, and pattern are crucial elements in the way United Methodists contextualize their mission in and for a time and place. Connectional “system,” then, in its often convoluted complexity, embodies and expresses what Russell Richey calls our “practiced or practical ecclesiology.” It is a form of being church in which theological self-understanding is “embedded in the everyday structures, policies, organizations, and patterns of Methodist life.”[2]
Now, lest I be construed as an unreconstructed apologist for the status quo, let me note a couple of implications that might shed light on the radical potential of our “practiced” ecclesiology for our mission today. First, if our system always embodies our missional convictions, then “structure” is always already theologically freighted. This means denominational restructuring efforts dare not proceed without careful theological work. For such theological attention allows us to ask the sorts of questions that often get sublimated in our politically-charged debates: What convictions, beliefs, and values do we seek or have sought to embody in a particular local, annual conference, or general church structure? How would such convictions, beliefs, and values be diminished, upheld, or altered by a proposed change? Indeed, how might prayerful theological reflection on these convictions, beliefs, and values in fact prompt or demand changes in the system? Moreover, and perhaps most important, how might such theological reflection remind us of dimensions of our Methodist self-understanding and missional practice that have become corrupted, covered up, or even abandoned in our current system?
Questions like these allow us to acknowledge the contextual nature of our connectional system (as pointed out above). As contextual, the concrete forms our ecclesial identity takes are always both timely and time-bound: timely so as to render a “faithful Christian witness”[3] in and for a particular time and place; time-bound, because contexts constantly change. It is lamentable that these rather obvious points about context and contextuality often receive so little overt theological consideration in our denominational deliberations. Such neglect prevents just the self-critical attentiveness to cultural embeddedness, if not captivity, that faithful “organizational obedience” to our connectional covenant in a particular context requires. A number of previous posts, including Dr. Robinson’s, have noted the deleterious effects of such contextual tone-deafness on our efforts to be a global church. Unwitting U.S. self-preoccupation continues to cripple our capacity to attend with theological integrity to the growing contextual complexity of our denomination around the world. Equally important, however, such tone-deafness discourages U.S. United Methodists from engaging their own rapidly changing context with the theological astuteness that effective contextualization demands. I suspect the tectonic cultural, economic, political, and religious shifts that are reconfiguring the North American context provide vital clues to why, how, and to what ends we U.S. United Methodists continue to fight over certain issues and neglect or ignore others.
Russell Richey observes that, at its best, connectionalism is “malleable, evolving, vulnerable . . . forming and reforming.” Our confidence in a connectional covenant that is Spirit-inspired and Spirit-led has prompted United Methodists again and again “to go with the Spirit, to experiment, to try new things, to change.”[4] Such attributes and virtues are critical to effective contextualization in the multivalent, complex, and rapidly changing contexts within which United Methodists find themselves today. However, as Grace Upon Grace wisely observed twenty-five years ago, these virtues and attributes (and their fruits, inclusiveness, ecumenical affirmation, global awareness, diversity [paras. 51-54]) will remain vibrant and effective only in a United Methodist connection that is “alertly critical of its context and self-critical of its relation to that setting.” (para. 55) Today, more than ever, do we need such theological vigilance, as the missional needs of an increasingly multicultural, multicontextual global United Methodist connection chafe under a connectional machinery designed for a U.S. context now rapidly disappearing.
[1] The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church—2012 (The United Methodist Publishing House, 2012), ¶ 125.
[2] Russell E. Richey, with Dennis M. Campbell and William B. Lawrence, Marks of Methodism: Theology In Ecclesial Practice (Abingdon, 2005), 1-2.
[3] Book of Discipline, ¶ 105.
[4] Richey, Marks of Methodism, 25, 28. Italics in original.
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Hendrik Pieterse on UMC Conflict and Grace Upon Grace: Mission: An Expanding Agenda
Today's post is the latest in a series of posts that are re-examining the mission document of The United Methodist Church, Grace Upon Grace (Nashville: Graded Press, 1990). Various United Methodist mission professors and practitioners are re-examining this theological statement and how it can inform our corporate life in The United Methodist Church today. This piece is written by Dr. Hendrik Pieterse, Associate Professor of Global Christianity and World Religions at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Dr. Pieterse is commenting on the sixth section of the document, "Mission: An Expanding Agenda." Use the "Grace Upon Grace" tag to identify other posts in this series.
As both Dr. Carlos-Orlandi and Rev. Lisa-Beth White point out in their reflections, the section “Mission: An Expanding Agenda” interprets grace as a form of “seeing.” And both point to the increased complexity of such “grace-ful” seeing for United Methodist mission today—a complexity, as they both note, that now challenges the adequacy of the expansiveness of that original agenda. And both, rightly, suggest important ways in which United Methodism’s missionary agenda today needs fresh interpretation, correction, and expansion.
Rev. White points to an important dynamic at the heart of Methodist mission—a kind of hermeneutical dance of vision and confession, imagination and repentance. It is just the interplay of these two modalities that enables us to see the world rightly—the world as grace sees it (para. 37)—and precisely so to experience the world’s summons for our concrete response. And, for United Methodists, authentic response to the world’s need has always demanded that we give grace a concrete shape—a form attuned to this place, this time, this context. Hence the ever-recurring question “[W]hat is grace . . . for us?” (para. 29, emphasis added) As United Methodist historian Russell Richey has pointed out, at its best, Methodism has thrived when it held in dynamic tension a missionary imagination fired by a “confidence to go with the Spirit, to experiment, to try new things, to change”[1] and an obligation to give that imagination concrete form in discipleship contoured in discipline, structure, precept, polity. Yet, the all-too-familiar litany of lament in paragraphs 30-39 is testimony to our struggle to dwell in this tension for long. Abandoning the “creative tension”[2] of this space, we opt either for the comfort of a connectional covenant turned predictable bureaucracy or for an iconoclastic frenzy in which denominational “restructuring” stands proxy for missional vitality (as the 2012 General Conference illustrates all too well). Either way, as para. 38 reminds us, the church loses the “prophetic dimension” by which faithfulness to the missio Dei “brings it in conflict with culture” and, in so doing, sets it at odds with its own complacency.
That Methodist mission at its best invites us to expect, even to embrace, conflict may be less than welcome news for a conflict-ridden and conflict-weary United Methodist denomination today—in the midst once more of a contentious battle over human sexuality, episcopal authority, the propriety of church trials, and on. Yet para. 38 might hold a reminder for us precisely at this point. For I think the state of our current churchly bickering reveals a denomination that has made its peace with conflict, so to speak, by thoroughly domesticating it. Our present ecclesial Sturm und Drang, after all, exists in a predictable (if fragile) equilibrium of opposing forces holding each other at bay—“progressive” versus “conservative,” “liberal” versus “orthodox,” and the like. Have we not in the process, ironically, become the “comfortable church” that para. 38 indicts as a “questionable church”?
Paragraph 38 powerfully reminds us just at this point that conflict in fact signals a church alive to God’s mission on behalf of the world. But here is the crucial difference: This conflict is the work of “clear-eyed,” piercing grace (para. 37), exposing, making visible, the world and the church “as they are.” It is conflict that strips the world and especially the church of pretense and self-deception. It is the kind of conflict that sets a comfortable church at odds with its taken-for-granted internecine stalemates and stand-offs. And it is kind of conflict that allows United Methodists to embrace “crisis” not as a problem to solve but as a sign of missional faithfulness. As the great Dutch missiologist Hendrik Kraemer once remarked: “Strictly speaking, one ought to say that the Church is always in a state of crisis and that its greatest shortcoming is that it is only occasionally aware of it.” Crisis, says Kraemer, is a sign of the church’s faithfulness because of “the abiding tension between (the church’s) essential nature and its empirical condition.”[3] Comments David Bosch, “Like its Lord, the church—if it is faithful to its being—will, however, always be controversial, a ‘sign that will be spoken against’ (Lk 2:34).”[4] It is on these terms, I think, that this section in Grace Upon Grace invites United Methodists to make our peace with conflict, to welcome crisis as a state of being. We can do so, however, only in once more indwelling that tensive space between confession and vision, repentance and imagination of which Rev. White has reminded us in her post—a space that is the lifeblood of a United Methodist Church enabled to be “challenged by Christ and, with Christ, [to] challenge[] the world and offer[] its life for that world.” (para. 38)
As both Dr. Carlos-Orlandi and Rev. Lisa-Beth White point out in their reflections, the section “Mission: An Expanding Agenda” interprets grace as a form of “seeing.” And both point to the increased complexity of such “grace-ful” seeing for United Methodist mission today—a complexity, as they both note, that now challenges the adequacy of the expansiveness of that original agenda. And both, rightly, suggest important ways in which United Methodism’s missionary agenda today needs fresh interpretation, correction, and expansion.
Rev. White points to an important dynamic at the heart of Methodist mission—a kind of hermeneutical dance of vision and confession, imagination and repentance. It is just the interplay of these two modalities that enables us to see the world rightly—the world as grace sees it (para. 37)—and precisely so to experience the world’s summons for our concrete response. And, for United Methodists, authentic response to the world’s need has always demanded that we give grace a concrete shape—a form attuned to this place, this time, this context. Hence the ever-recurring question “[W]hat is grace . . . for us?” (para. 29, emphasis added) As United Methodist historian Russell Richey has pointed out, at its best, Methodism has thrived when it held in dynamic tension a missionary imagination fired by a “confidence to go with the Spirit, to experiment, to try new things, to change”[1] and an obligation to give that imagination concrete form in discipleship contoured in discipline, structure, precept, polity. Yet, the all-too-familiar litany of lament in paragraphs 30-39 is testimony to our struggle to dwell in this tension for long. Abandoning the “creative tension”[2] of this space, we opt either for the comfort of a connectional covenant turned predictable bureaucracy or for an iconoclastic frenzy in which denominational “restructuring” stands proxy for missional vitality (as the 2012 General Conference illustrates all too well). Either way, as para. 38 reminds us, the church loses the “prophetic dimension” by which faithfulness to the missio Dei “brings it in conflict with culture” and, in so doing, sets it at odds with its own complacency.
That Methodist mission at its best invites us to expect, even to embrace, conflict may be less than welcome news for a conflict-ridden and conflict-weary United Methodist denomination today—in the midst once more of a contentious battle over human sexuality, episcopal authority, the propriety of church trials, and on. Yet para. 38 might hold a reminder for us precisely at this point. For I think the state of our current churchly bickering reveals a denomination that has made its peace with conflict, so to speak, by thoroughly domesticating it. Our present ecclesial Sturm und Drang, after all, exists in a predictable (if fragile) equilibrium of opposing forces holding each other at bay—“progressive” versus “conservative,” “liberal” versus “orthodox,” and the like. Have we not in the process, ironically, become the “comfortable church” that para. 38 indicts as a “questionable church”?
Paragraph 38 powerfully reminds us just at this point that conflict in fact signals a church alive to God’s mission on behalf of the world. But here is the crucial difference: This conflict is the work of “clear-eyed,” piercing grace (para. 37), exposing, making visible, the world and the church “as they are.” It is conflict that strips the world and especially the church of pretense and self-deception. It is the kind of conflict that sets a comfortable church at odds with its taken-for-granted internecine stalemates and stand-offs. And it is kind of conflict that allows United Methodists to embrace “crisis” not as a problem to solve but as a sign of missional faithfulness. As the great Dutch missiologist Hendrik Kraemer once remarked: “Strictly speaking, one ought to say that the Church is always in a state of crisis and that its greatest shortcoming is that it is only occasionally aware of it.” Crisis, says Kraemer, is a sign of the church’s faithfulness because of “the abiding tension between (the church’s) essential nature and its empirical condition.”[3] Comments David Bosch, “Like its Lord, the church—if it is faithful to its being—will, however, always be controversial, a ‘sign that will be spoken against’ (Lk 2:34).”[4] It is on these terms, I think, that this section in Grace Upon Grace invites United Methodists to make our peace with conflict, to welcome crisis as a state of being. We can do so, however, only in once more indwelling that tensive space between confession and vision, repentance and imagination of which Rev. White has reminded us in her post—a space that is the lifeblood of a United Methodist Church enabled to be “challenged by Christ and, with Christ, [to] challenge[] the world and offer[] its life for that world.” (para. 38)
[1] Russell E. Richey, with Dennis M. Campbell and
William B. Lawrence, Marks of Methodism: Theology In Ecclesial Practice (Abingdon, 2005), 25.
[2] The phrase belongs to David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Orbis, 1991), 11.
[3] Quoted in Bosch, Transforming Mission, 2.
[4] Ibid.
Thursday, November 14, 2013
"A grace-formed church" - David Scott on Grace Upon Grace: Introduction
Today's post is the second in a series of weekly posts that will re-examine the mission document of The United Methodist Church, Grace Upon Grace (Nashville: Graded Press, 1990).
Various United Methodist professors of mission will contribute to a
re-examination of this theological statement and how it can inform our
corporate life in The United Methodist Church today. This piece is written by Dr. David W. Scott, Assistant Professor of Religion and Pieper Chair of Servant Leadership at Ripon College. Dr. Scott is responding to Dr. Hendrik Pieterse's piece from last week commenting on the Introduction to Grace Upon Grace. Use the "Grace Upon Grace" tag to identify other posts in this series.
I want to thank Dr. Hendrik Pieterse for beginning our conversation about Grace Upon Grace in his post last week. Like Dr. Pieterse, I too hope for productive conversations to come out of the re-examination of this document, conversations that will continue The United Methodist Church's openness to the work that God would do through it.
I want to affirm the three themes that Dr. Pieterse identified last week in the Introduction to Grace Upon Grace. Dr. Pieterse highlighted three affirmations about mission: 1) Mission is missio Dei, the work of God. 2) Mission enacts God's triune life of grace. 3) Mission is a response to and stewardship of God's gift of the world. By looking at these themes and other statements that the Introduction makes about the document itself, we can see another important aspect about the document: it is a statement of mission theology, not a plan for a mission program.
The Introduction tells us this in no unclear terms. It states, with original emphasis, "The purpose of this mission statement is, therefore, not to offer a specific program but to set forth as clearly as possible the gospel of grace as it impels us to evangelize and serve the world which God in Christ 'so loved.'" (Introduction, 3rd paragraph) I think it is important for United Methodists, especially those in the United States, to heed these words. Grace Upon Grace is not another organizational plan or turn-around strategy or business scheme to reverse the numerical decline of our church. The point of the document is not denominational "success," as defined in worldly terms. The point of the document is that we may better know and love God, that we may therefore share God with the world.
Grace Upon Grace does not just present a mission theology, it presents a devotional or formational theology. That should not be too surprising. Wesleyans have never been about theologies of the head only; they are about theologies of the head and heart together. What is perhaps surprising is that the process of formation is not individual but corporate. Once again, the document itself explicitly indicates the formational nature of its theology: "Mission is the action of the God of grace who creates out of love, who calls a covenant community, who graciously redeems and reconciles a broken people in Jesus Christ, and who through the Holy Spirit calls the church into being as the instrument of the good news of grace to all people." (Introduction, 1st paragraph) God forms us not just as individuals, but as a covenant community, a people. Grace Upon Grace seeks to produce what it calls "a grace-formed church." (Introduction, 1st paragraph)
This attention to corporate spiritual formation and not some 10-point plan can be see in each of the three themes identified by Dr. Pieterse. If mission is the work of God, then ultimately, the planning must be God's as well, and to be effective in our planning, we must be conformed to God's will. If mission is about enacting God's triune life of grace, then it as much about who we are as what we do. If mission is a response to God's gift of grace to the world, then we must be transformed by that gift. As we (re-)read Grace Upon Grace together, let us pay attention not only to what God would have us do, but who God would have us be as a corporate body, that is, "a grace-formed church."
I want to thank Dr. Hendrik Pieterse for beginning our conversation about Grace Upon Grace in his post last week. Like Dr. Pieterse, I too hope for productive conversations to come out of the re-examination of this document, conversations that will continue The United Methodist Church's openness to the work that God would do through it.
I want to affirm the three themes that Dr. Pieterse identified last week in the Introduction to Grace Upon Grace. Dr. Pieterse highlighted three affirmations about mission: 1) Mission is missio Dei, the work of God. 2) Mission enacts God's triune life of grace. 3) Mission is a response to and stewardship of God's gift of the world. By looking at these themes and other statements that the Introduction makes about the document itself, we can see another important aspect about the document: it is a statement of mission theology, not a plan for a mission program.
The Introduction tells us this in no unclear terms. It states, with original emphasis, "The purpose of this mission statement is, therefore, not to offer a specific program but to set forth as clearly as possible the gospel of grace as it impels us to evangelize and serve the world which God in Christ 'so loved.'" (Introduction, 3rd paragraph) I think it is important for United Methodists, especially those in the United States, to heed these words. Grace Upon Grace is not another organizational plan or turn-around strategy or business scheme to reverse the numerical decline of our church. The point of the document is not denominational "success," as defined in worldly terms. The point of the document is that we may better know and love God, that we may therefore share God with the world.
Grace Upon Grace does not just present a mission theology, it presents a devotional or formational theology. That should not be too surprising. Wesleyans have never been about theologies of the head only; they are about theologies of the head and heart together. What is perhaps surprising is that the process of formation is not individual but corporate. Once again, the document itself explicitly indicates the formational nature of its theology: "Mission is the action of the God of grace who creates out of love, who calls a covenant community, who graciously redeems and reconciles a broken people in Jesus Christ, and who through the Holy Spirit calls the church into being as the instrument of the good news of grace to all people." (Introduction, 1st paragraph) God forms us not just as individuals, but as a covenant community, a people. Grace Upon Grace seeks to produce what it calls "a grace-formed church." (Introduction, 1st paragraph)
This attention to corporate spiritual formation and not some 10-point plan can be see in each of the three themes identified by Dr. Pieterse. If mission is the work of God, then ultimately, the planning must be God's as well, and to be effective in our planning, we must be conformed to God's will. If mission is about enacting God's triune life of grace, then it as much about who we are as what we do. If mission is a response to God's gift of grace to the world, then we must be transformed by that gift. As we (re-)read Grace Upon Grace together, let us pay attention not only to what God would have us do, but who God would have us be as a corporate body, that is, "a grace-formed church."
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Starting a conversation - Hendrik Pieterse on Grace Upon Grace: Introduction
Today's post begins a series of weekly posts that will re-examine the mission document of The United Methodist Church, Grace Upon Grace (Nashville: Graded Press, 1990). Various United Methodist professors of mission will contribute to a re-examination of this theological statement and how it can inform our corporate life in The United Methodist Church today. The first piece in this series is written by Dr. Hendrik Pieterse, Associate Professor of Global Christianity and World Religions at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Use the "Grace Upon Grace" tag to identify other posts in this series.
From the start, in 1968, it seems United Methodists have been preoccupied with getting the denomination’s mission right. In recent years, as the church outside the U.S. has taken a larger share of total membership, the debate has morphed into studies of our “global” or “worldwide” mission. Ostensibly providing the theological lodestar for these conversations has been the mission “to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world” (Book of Discipline, ¶120). Yet, research conducted last quadrennium in preparation for the Council of Bishops-sponsored Call to Action report records widespread confusion and lack of clarity among the United Methodist faithful about what “mission” and “making disciples” should mean and look like today. So it should probably not surprise that our mission statement functioned less as a lodestar and more as a mantra pressed into divergent, often contradictory, purposes in the debacle over denominational restructuring at the 2012 General Conference. Ought such missional confusion and institutional dysfunction not at the very least prompt a fresh look at the theological convictions that we think should guide our discipleship and decision making? After all, some kind of theological perspective—overt or tacit, explicit or implicit—is always already in play in our thinking and doing of mission, both as individual believers and as a corporate body. So the question is not whether we will do this necessary theological work, only whether we will do it well or badly. The vexing challenges of mission and ministry so apparent in our corporate life today should leave no doubt about the urgency of engaging this task well.
We United Methodist professors of mission believe that, in taking up this theological task of thinking through a coherent theological framework for the church’s mission in the years ahead, United Methodists would do well to revisit Grace Upon Grace, the theological statement of the mission of The United Methodist Church approved by the 1988 General Conference. Much neglected and rarely if ever referenced in denominational debates, this document, we believe, offers theological wisdom well worth attending to in our discernment of the church’s future. And so to that end we invite you to join us over the next few months in a critical conversation with this important text. I begin this conversation with a brief comment on three crucial theological themes found in the opening paragraphs of the document—themes that will guide its argument throughout.
The first theological theme is also, appropriately, the first line of the document: “Mission is the action of the God of grace.” This statement affirms a revolutionary shift in theology of mission over the past half century: Mission begins and ends with God, not with the church. God is the first missionary—always. God’s mission (missio Dei) forever and always precedes the church’s mission; it is never at our disposal or under our control. United Methodists would do well to recall this (also deeply Wesleyan) affirmation about the absolute priority of God’s grace. Indeed, several scholars in recent years have noted the relative absence of just this theme of grace in the paragraphs on the church’s mission in the Book of Discipline. What is at stake here is not doctrinal orthodoxy as such. Rather, what is at stake is the way this foundational conviction can “rightsize” our debates about the church’s mission. For it is precisely in times of anxiety, uncertainty, and turmoil that we are tempted to neglect God’s gracious priority and take matters into our own hands. And we do so not deliberately or brazenly but inadvertently—through the necessary labor of analyzing, forecasting, planning, and legislating the church’s mission and ministry. Subtlely, in the very doing of them, the familiarity, stability, and predictability of these churchly processes can reinforce a tacit assumption: we have it within ourselves to figure out what the church needs and how to get it there. Lost is just the unfamiliarity and the unpredictability of the missio Dei: the divine Spirit blows its redemptive winds where it wills, forever unsettling our plans and outpacing our predictions. How might a reminder that the church’s mission is finally in God’s hands because mission is finally “the action of God’s grace” instill greater humility in our churchly deliberations, more openness to listen for God’s word, especially in those with whom we most disagree, and increased forbearance as we struggle together to discern our place in the mystery of God’s way with the world?
Lest talk of missio Dei evaporate into pious generalities with little real impact, Grace Upon Grace clarifies, secondly, the content of God’s mission. As anchored in God’s own being, God’s mission in the world enacts God’s triune life: “The triune God is grace who in Christ and through the Holy Spirit prepares, saves, and makes a new people.” Significantly, in the next section on our church’s “unifying vision” (and then throughout the document), the text spells out the radical implications of this triune mission for the church’s identity and mission. In imitating the divine love made manifest in Christ, we are told, the church’s mission too will take the form of self-giving, sacrificial love, emptying itself in uncalculating service to the world. How might sustained and prayerful reflection on this content of the divine mission help address our self-professed perplexity about mission and discipleship today? Might it not enable United Methodists to rediscover the radical nature of “making disciples” in the Wesleyan way—a Christ-shaped form of missional living peculiarly fit for challenges of our times?
The third theological theme flows directly from the first two: If, in the words of Grace Upon Grace, the church’s mission “is given to the church by God’s saving activity in and on behalf of the world,” then the church’s mission always proceeds as “grateful response to what God has done, is doing, and will do” (emphasis added). In other words, mission is forever stewardship of a gift. As the document makes clear, acknowledging the “giftedness” of the church’s identity is no counsel for passivity. On the contrary, and perhaps counterintuitively, freed of the anxiety of having to devise its reason for being, the church can explore the “form” of its mission—its “relevance”—with fresh eyes, now attuned to the ever-surprising creativity of God’s redemptive ways among us. How might such grace-bestowed freedom embolden United Methodists to stray beyond the taken-for-granted and the customary in our corporate discernment of mission and ministry, beyond our near-instinctive predilection for innovation through legislation, beyond our predictable resort to polity and precept?
I trust these brief reflections are sufficient to persuade you that Grace Upon Grace still has much to offer United Methodists now twenty-five years later. If so, we United Methodist professors of mission invite you to join our exploration of this provocative document over the next several months.
Friday, August 30, 2013
Hendrik Pieterse on a Connectional Theological Imagination
I have referred readers to articles in Methodist Review in previous posts, and I'd like to do so again today. As great a format as blogs are for fostering discussion, no one's going to read a 23-page long blog. But sometimes there are things worth discussing that take 23 pages to say. One such thing worth discussing in Dr. Hendrik Pieterse's piece in Methodist Review from early this year entitled "A Worldwide United Methodist Church? Soundings Toward a Connectional Theological Imagination." In it, Pieterse asserts that we need to reject center-periphery thinking in the church that privileges the United States as the center of the UMC and everywhere else as less-important periphery. Instead, he suggests, we need to form mutual, reciprocal relationships through our connectional system. These suggests are certainly in line with other things posted in this blog, but said in a much more thorough and (hopefully) theologically persuasive way.
The article is available freely online, though accessing it does require the creation of a login for the Methodist Review's site. I recommend you read it and the other fine work put out by the Methodist Review. For other articles by the Methodist Review, see www.methodistreview.org/index.php/mr/issue/archive.
The article is available freely online, though accessing it does require the creation of a login for the Methodist Review's site. I recommend you read it and the other fine work put out by the Methodist Review. For other articles by the Methodist Review, see www.methodistreview.org/index.php/mr/issue/archive.
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