Matthew A. Laferty: Dialogue as a Tool for Unity and Mission

Today's post is by Rev. Matthew A. Laferty. Rev. Laferty an ordained elder in The United Methodist Church and director of the Methodist Ecumenical Office Rome.

The Feast of Peter and Paul on June 29th is a major affair here in Rome. Both Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome, and their tombs remain to this day important pilgrimage sites. Many representations and icons of the two saints exist, but the Eastern Orthodox icon of Peter and Paul meeting and holding each other in embrace remains for me the most powerful. In Rome this icon of the two saints in embrace is an important symbol for the ecumenical movement and holds a prominent place of viewing in the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, the Vatican’s ecumenical department. The icon reflects the deep longing and love for one another and the reconciliation with God and each other found through Christ; it too remains us that as contemporary followers of Jesus Christ that each of us embodies both elements of Peter and Paul in our lives.

For me this icon engenders our journeys in Christ and the point where the unity of the church meets the mission of the church. In recalling Jesus’ prayer from John 17, the Rev. Dr. Kyle Tau, former ecumenical staff officer at the Council of Bishops, remains us in his blog post on this website of the clear linkage between unity and mission, concluding that, “mission is the beginning and true end of ecumenism.” The church cannot separate mission and unity as if they are two unrelated activities; rather, unity and mission, like Peter and Paul, are intrinsically linked at the heart of our ecclesiology.

Yet, mission and unity too often are severed from one another. Instead of close embrace, unity and mission are broken apart and only gaze at each other from a distance. Equally as disturbing is our impulse to privilege mission over unity as if the unity of the church is a secondary calling to mission in the world; it cultivates a situation where missionary zeal demands theological purity which, in turn, diminishes or entirely negates the call for Christian unity. Methodists are often plagued by both approaches.

It then begs the question – what tools are necessary and fundamental to draw together the mission of the church and unity of the church into loving embrace like Peter and Paul? How do we bridge the division between Christians so that “mission is the beginning and true end of ecumenism”?

In this journey, dialogue remains a relevant instrument in the quest for the full and visible unity of the church and necessary to manifest the greatest expression of the mission of the church.

I am hesitant to strictly define dialogue because many theological/philosophical understandings and typologies exist. In its broadest sense, dialogue is a conversation between two or more people which is characterized by the exchange of ideas or opinions.

In the church, dialogue is often marked by encountering one another to gain greater understanding of our own Christian faith and the Christian faith of others, dispel myths or misperceptions, mutually recognize of a common baptism and faith in Jesus Christ, and grow together in God. Dialogue is formal and informal, local and global, and short and long. Dialogue is contextual and has different points of departure.

For church leaders, dialogue can be viewed within a formal context which seeks to bring one church into dialogue with another church for the purpose of full communion and interchangeability of clergy. Such dialogues for The United Methodist Church have been conducted with the Moravian Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Roman Catholic Church (U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops), and The Episcopal Church. These formal dialogues also take place between world communions (association of churches with a shared theological heritage and mission like the World Methodist Council or the Lutheran World Federation).

An example of international dialogue is the Methodist-Roman Catholic International Commission, a special theological dialogue between the World Methodist Council and the Roman Catholic Church. The international Methodist-Roman Catholic dialogue celebrates 55 years of continuous dialogue in 2022, working for “a vision that includes the goal of full communion in faith, mission and sacramental life” (§20, The Nairobi Report, 1986). For the international dialogue (and in my opinion, every Christian dialogue), unity and mission are intertwined; we dialogue so we may be in unity and mission together.

I do caution that dialogue should not be viewed strictly as a project of the elite nor within a formal framework. While church-to-church (or denomination-to-denomination) and international dialogues are critical, dialogue should find a home in local congregations, not as formal theological dialogues but rather informal dialogues with siblings from different Christian churches which focus on faith practices, encounter, friendship, and mutual discernment. Local dialogue should give attention to the gifts of each local congregation and what can be shared with one another. Local dialogue can be shaped in learning-settings in small groups or shared action or mission projects in a community. Sometimes it is easier to bring together different Christian congregations through service to the community, thereby building friendship and trust. For local dialogue, encounter is key.

We cannot expect dialogue on its own to resolve all differences or heal all wounds. But dialogue opens Christians to one another, so the Holy Spirit may draw the unity of the church and the mission of the church into loving embrace.

Robert Hunt: The Connection Between Text and Context, Part 3

Today's post is written by Dr. Robert Hunt, Director of Global Theological Education, Professor of Christian Mission and Interreligious Relations, and Director of the Center for Evangelism at Perkins School of Theology. It is the third of a three-part series on contextualization. Here are the first and the second parts of that series.

As the Church carries on its mission in a multi-cultural world, it is critical to understand what it has learned from its engagement with the Word about that world.

In the Bible human history begins with a generic human, Adam. This human is first separated into male and female, and then over endless generations into families, clans, tribes, and ethnic nations. Thousands of new peoples and cultures come into being, and notably God is with each, guiding its history. (Amos 9:7)

Part of the story of the generic human is the introduction of sin into human life. As a result, the story isn’t just about a happily growing diversity of cultures spreading away from Eden. It is also about how humans move further and further from what God intends for them.

What the story doesn’t tell us is how the sin which entered Adam’s life (Genesis 3) is perpetuated in the lives of Adam’s descendants. All we know is that is it ubiquitous, reappearing in every people and culture and manifesting itself in behavior characterized as “unrighteous.” So one thing we know about the world we inhabit is that it is a realm in which sin is present.

The Bible also tells a story about differentiation and diversity. God’s fundamental command to Adam, reiterated to Noah, is “be fruitful and multiply and cover the face of the earth.” As humans are fruitful they quickly diversify, stopping only once (at Babel) to try consolidate themselves before God blows that plan apart and essentially forces them to spread and thus diversify.

After the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11 the Old Testament increasingly focuses on the life of Israel as a community knowing God, beginning with Abraham and moving forward in narrowing circles to the original tribes from which the ethnic nation of Israel traced its descent. This focus on Israel is hardly surprising since the Israelites wrote the Old Testament. Naturally it is all about them and their special covenant with God.

But the story offers plenty of evidence that it isn’t the only story about God accompanying humanity, with Amos 9 being notable as well as Isaiah 19:19-23. Psalm 87:5 and many passages in Isaiah create a fascinating narrative arch, in which Zion becomes not only the final destination of all human nations but also somehow retrospectively their birthplace as well, the urquelle of their peoplehood. There are many human communities that know God, because despite sin (which in any case is found in both Israel and the Church) God is involved in every human society.

This story of finding God’s self-revelation among the nations, and indeed righteousness among the nations is continued in the story of Jesus, whom the gospels depict as continually coming into contact with God’s work outside of Israel. And this is ratified by Peter’s vision in Acts and the subsequent conversion of the gentiles to Christ. Those visions in Isaiah and the Psalms suddenly become much less eschatological dreams and far more a historical movement of discovery of God among the nations embodied in the Church.

Unfortunately, and I’ve documented much of this in my The Gospel Among the Nations: A Documentary History of Inculturation, the Church, imbued with the Roman exceptionalism that was part of its earliest cultural context, struggled to see God at work among the “barbarians” and “heathen” encountered on the edges of the empire. It was a struggle that continues to this day, now articulated in terms of the newly invented word “culture.” The concept of culture gives us the ability to talk about “inculturation” as a way of doing mission (a term which I and other missiologists have tended to use anachronistically.) It also gives us the ability to dismiss non-Christian cultures as lazy, ignorant, sinful, totalitarian, and so on. And unfortunately it can mislead us into believing that there is some divine “text” that can be separated from its cultural context, and that this cultural context can somehow be differentiated from its human community; a true distinction without a difference.

The concept of culture can become particularly problematic when we speak of “the gospel and culture." We mistakenly assume, as I suggest in Part 1, that these are two distinct things; the first needing to be expressed in terms comprehensible to the second. It is far more accurate to understand that the Church in its ongoing life in mission with God’s Word continually enters into dialogue with other bodies of human beings who have likewise been engaged in a life with God. The Church engaged with the Word enters into dialogue with others whose societies are also engaged with God in different ways. And this means that each has the possibility of learning things about God that it did not know. And of course each has the responsibility of questioning and rejecting so-called knowledge of God contradictory to its own ongoing encounter with the Divine.

Put in other words, “inculturation” isn’t planting the gospel in another culture, nor is it clothing the gospel in another culture. Inculturation is the emergence of new expressions of the Church's engagement with the Word arising out of the ongoing life of the church in mission.

One should not imagine that these new expressions are limited to matters of music, dress, language, and so on found in worship. They may be, as we find in Anselm’s doctrine of the atonement, a new way of speaking about Christ’s work on the Cross that couldn’t be conceptualized within the limitations of Greek and Roman culture.

Or they may be, as found in modern political theologies and the understanding of the equality of men and women, new ways of knowing what it means to be a human in society that couldn’t be conceptualized in the pre-modern culture of European Christendom. The United Methodist Social Principles Creed, for example, arises of the Methodist church engaged with God’s word in ongoing dialogue within modern societies, and it reaches conclusions impossible in European and American Christianity only a few hundred years earlier.

What makes this process of dialogue between the Church and the societies (and thus cultures) it encounters in mission both challenging and troubling is that our inner life of encounter with God’s Word can never give us complete confidence in our grasp of who God is and what God wants of us. At the same time God’s life with societies outside the church means we can never dismiss out of hand their insights into God’s righteousness. We may not always be right, and they may know things we don’t know. Thus, our only confidence, given the limits of our humanity and the ubiquity of sin, is confidence in God’s grace and forgiveness in Christ.

That is why we begin our worship with confession, placing ourselves in the context of our limited grasp of God’s righteousness and our ability to enact it. It is only after confession and absolution that we can meaningfully speak the words, “And now with the confidence of children of God. . .”

For many Christians, faced with the assaults of a contemporary society that denies God and worships its own self-sufficiency, engaging in dialogue within this sometimes-hostile culture is psychologically impossible. Being the Church engaged with the knowing of God outside the church is too difficult, too threatening, too complex. They are not prepared to open themselves to the possibilities that even an apparently hostile culture is a realm in which God’s Word is at work.

And that is okay. CS Lewis in his letters to Malcom on prayer noted that we are not all called to the front lines. There is a place for the keepers of the flame just as there is a place for those who bear it into the tempest to seek out the lost. There is a place for those who keep a warm hearth and welcome the refugees from modernity, as there is a place for those looking for new outcroppings of solid rock on which to build new houses of God. And for all there is the Word of God, abiding outside our doors even when we cannot recognize it.

Which means, and this is good news, that it is also abides within the Church even when we cannot see it within ourselves.

Robert Hunt: Emerging Languages (Part II)

Today's post is by guest blogger Dr. Robert A. Hunt, Director of Global Theological Education, Professor of Christian Mission and Interreligious Relations, and Director of the Center for Evangelism and Missional Church Studies at Perkins School of Theology at SMU.  This post is the final of four by Dr. Hunt over the month of September and a continuation of his post last week. 

As I explained in the first part of this post, United Methodist unity will not be based on either existing commonalities of commitment to justice or historical roots.  Rather, I would suggest, it will be based on a commitment to an emerging understanding of the work of the Spirit that doesn't privilege any Methodist community or presuppose the direction in which the Spirit blows us. In short it will be a unity based on the presupposition that God desires unity for God's people, but has not yet revealed the shape of that unity.

Is that a justifiable theological presupposition? Is it a practical possibility? 

The second question is easier to answer than the first. One of the most universally observed human phenomena is the way in which new languages emerge out of the encounter of different cultures and language groups. (It is observable, but it is only by being universally observed that it becomes the basis of any unifying discourse.) Through dialogue - often simple but growing in depth and complexity - people with different worldviews and cultural experiences find a common language that allows them to articulate their differences and similarities and in particular name the latter with more and more precision. 

English happens to exhibit a remarkable flexibility in this regard, both borrowing and loaning words and expressions with shocking promiscuity. But the history of any language demonstrates the degree to which it has been the result of mutual transformations that make it better and better able to account for the wide variety of human experiences of its speakers and communicate in the widest possible public forum. 

I believe that dialogue, call it “holy conferencing” if you will, is capable of generating an emerging language able to express a not-yet-discovered unity of Methodist experience. 

However, if at a practical level, dialogue can create a common language for the experience of being United Methodist, is such an approach to seeking unity theologically justified? 

I suggest that Christian unity, and specifically Methodist unity, is not something scandalously lost after the age of the apostles or Wesley. Instead unity is something that is inevitably emergent because the essential encounter with the Christ is finding him in the crossing of cultural and experiential boundaries. The New Testament is in fact a record of disunity among the followers of Christ. They are moving toward unity but always, impelled by their own personal encounters with Christ, reaching into difference-creating realms of human experience. The apostles could never be unified because Christ himself, in their own record of faith, compelled them to break any tenuous uniformity of belief and practice and discover his Spirit in places where those who name him as savior compose their experience with different beliefs and reiterate those beliefs in different practices. 

There is also a deeper theological rationale for a commitment to present diversity accompanied by a dialogue toward an emergent unity. God has created a universe whose future is open because (at the basic earthly level) God's creatures are free. The presumption that unity can be achieved at this or that General Conference through this or that legislative process and these or those unifying beliefs and practices is a presumption against God's intent that humans be both free and that this freedom extend as far as the human imagination can cast itself into the future.

For freedom in the Biblical witness creates diversity, and this freedom, which diversifies rather than unifying, must sometimes be forced upon a humanity willing to enslave itself for the sake of unity and its consequent promise of security and power (see Genesis 11). God will not let us drag the unity we find only in God into the idolatrous structures that we create. We cannot live at Sinai or Jerusalem any more than we can live in Babel or Egypt, for each finally enslaves whether our intentions are holy or mundane. 

In short, it is not God's will that we be unified except in our love one for the other. Rather, we should be ever seeking unity. A perpetual dialogue appears to be what God has in mind when we read across the scripture toward an end in which the peoples of the earth unceasingly bring their varied gifts to God's Holy City. And that dialogue is not between partners fixed in their language and positions and negotiating a middle ground, but rather between partners themselves being transformed and diversified by the process of "going to all nations to make disciples."

Of course my assertions in the paragraphs above must themselves be mere beginning points in dialogue, in this case a dialogue around a Bible we all accept, in some way, as foundational to our experience of Christ. Worship might be another such starting point.

I do not believe that global United Methodism is either possible or desirable. But United Methodists should seek through loving dialogue to learn an ever renewed and renewing language of Christian experience. That process will lead us toward, but never closer to, the Holy City where in God's presence alone exists our unity; a unity seen fleetingly at moments, but never grasped, and never seen again unless we turn away to speak with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Robert Hunt: Lessons for a Global UMC from Macedonia

Today we feature another guest blogger, Dr. Robert A. Hunt.  Dr. Hunt is the Director of Global Theology Education and Professor of Christian Missions and Interreligious Relations at Perkins School of Theology.

 To be a global church what we really need is an ongoing global dialogue that doesn't rush toward crystallization in structures, creeds, systems, or principles. It's easier to walk together when we aren't chained together.

I spent this past week in Skopje and Sturmica, Macedonia, giving lectures on unity, diversity, and dialogue. I was reminded again of the extent to which the concept of a Global United Methodist Church represents a challenge that we haven't begun to really explore.

The United Methodist Church and its antecedents have been in Macedonia and its antecedents longer than it's been in Texas. But it is still a small church, too small to have a local superintendent much less a bishop. So its most senior clergy leader, its superintendent, and its bishop come from three distinctly different cultures and social situations.

As a church it lives in a social situation, as part of a brand new country in tension with its immediate neighbors, that is as unique as it is largely incomprehensible to most UM leaders. Within Macedonia it lives in considerable tension with the majority Macedonian Orthodoxy church because their very ways of conceptualizing "church," not to mention human nature and the gospel, are quite different. Warm personal relationships between priests and pastors are possible. But how does a Protestant church build on the concept of individual confessions of faith (a distinctly modern concept) and live with a Christian neighbor who claims the population as its own purely by accident of ethnic and linguistic heritage combined with the artificially created boundaries of a new state?

Over and over I heard that becoming Christian meant leaving Orthodoxy. And in one case (from an Orthodox priest) that becoming United Methodist meant leaving Christianity/Orthodoxy. And when in my lectures I suggested that Methodists might seek to understand Orthodox spirituality the older members of the church suggested I wasn't really a Christian. An Orthodox woman at the same lecture said it was the first time she had heard a Protestant pastor that didn't denigrate her religion.

Let's not even talk about the impact of half a century of communism on Macedonians, or before that being part of a Serbian Kingdom and before that the Ottoman Empire.

And of course in Macedonia we are talking about a largely rural church of congregations with a dozen to 20 people. A clergy that has only the most basic training – and for whom no university level seminary degree is available in their own language. Not even course of study. Half a dozen UM churches in Dallas alone have more members and clergy than the whole Macedonian UMC.

Up until now our United Methodist leadership has seen being a "global church" as a matter of perfecting certain structures and finding transnational commonalities in Christian expression. The small Macedonian Church, with its massive complexity and difference from the majority of UM churches, suggests to me that this isn't the right approach. The word "culture" as used by our church leaders doesn't begin to comprehend the differences between Macedonia and the United States.

Ultimately what we have in common as United Methodist churches is nothing more than a idiosyncratic and sometimes awkward history that often quite arbitrarily and artificially traces its origins to the Wesley brothers. To be a global church what we really need is an ongoing global dialogue that doesn't rush toward crystallization in structures, creeds, systems, or principles. Its easier to walk together when we aren't chained together.