Recommended reading: The church as public health network

Last Friday, UMNS reporter Vicki Brown wrote this piece entitled "Church best way to reach rural Africa." She begins the piece by noting, "The church often has a bigger presence in rural Africa than the government." The UMC is obviously doing good work by promoting the health of pregnant women and others in rural areas, as described in the article. Yet it is worth reflecting on what it means for the UMC to fill voids that might be occupied by the government elsewhere. How does that shape the UMC's sense of mission in Africa? How does that lead to different conceptions of the relationship among church, government, and social services in Africa compared to other areas of UMC presence? Please share your thoughts on these or related questions below.

Daniel Shin: Evangelism after Charleston

Today's post is written by Dr. Daniel Shin, Bishop Cornelius and Dorothye Henderson/E. Stanley Jones Chair of Evangelism and Assistant Professor of Evangelism at the Interdenominational Theological Center.

The recent tragic massacre at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, SC, in which Dylann Roof brutally gunned down nine innocent African-Americans attending a prayer meeting and the subsequent controversies surrounding the removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina state house grounds painfully remind us of the racial fault lines that still divide our nation. These incidents arrive on the heels of heartrending deaths of unarmed blacks, such as Trayvon Martin (FL), Eric Garner (NY), Michael Brown (MO), Ezell Ford (CA), Tamir Rice (OH), and Freddie Gray (MD). The geographical locations of these incidents and their frequency suggest that these tremors are not isolated, episodic occurrences, but indicate forces that run deep and wide, like the movement of tectonic plates colliding against one another and shaking the foundations violently. Indeed, although what happened in Charleston and the deaths of unarmed blacks are two separate issues that should not be collapsed, our responses to them may reveal our fundamental values about race, which is the issue at hand.

It is in this racially supercharged context of public life in the U.S. and other global locales where the intersections of race, religion, culture, class, and gender are ripe with tension and potentially violent clashes, that we pause to think about the very nature of Christianity and more specifically the meaning of evangelism. What does Christianity have to do with Charleston?  What is the witness of Christian faith in experiences of void and abyss that refuse any easy, readymade defenses of theodicy? How do we move forward with the dangerous memories of the past and yet with hopeful imaginations about the future of common flourishing? 

Notwithstanding the enormously difficult, if not impossible, questions about race relations, we cannot remain silent but must speak lest we be liable to the charge of appalling silence which Martin Luther King, Jr. issued against moderate Christians. However, having to speak so that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition is not the appalling silence of the good people entails coming to terms with the fact that there is no panacea that will remedy the human condition in an instant. Only God’s grace can move us toward healing through the long and rigorous therapy of transvaluation of values that are inveterate but not incorrigible.

H. Richard Niebuhr did not remain silent but spoke with eloquence and insight about revelation in terms of transvaluation of values in The Meaning of Revelation. He bemoaned the fact that the gospel ideals of Christ, i.e., unity, brotherhood/sisterhood, and the reign of God, have not been realized as the American society capitulated to national, ethnic, and class divisions in his own lifetime. Noticing widening disparity between gospel and culture, Niebuhr attributed its cause to people centering their lives on misplaced objects of devotion, such as power, self-fulfillment, family, race, or nation, rather than God. He also pointed out that when this happens, all too often, one’s faith, church, and religion become captive to such centers of value and pressed into service of anthropocentric piety in which God becomes an instrumental means to distorted, or even demonic, ends.

Niebuhr clearly saw the grave danger of accommodation and sought to disentangle the church from unholy cultural alliances through devotion to God who has revealed Godself to us. God’s revelation is not about impersonal facts or creeds, such as inerrancy or the virgin birth, but has to do with personal knowledge of God and ourselves in an I-and-Thou relation. This relation involves reciprocal valuation in which God values us and we value God in return. More specifically, to know God means to be known of God through seeing ourselves reflected in the eyes of God as created, finite, and sinful but also loved, judged, and redeemed as God’s children with infinite worth. We encounter a God who radically reorients our subjectivity and enables us to reflexively value God in the deepest sense possible and regard ourselves appropriately. In short, revelation has to do with transvaluation of values that turns us from anthropocentric piety to theocentric piety, to borrow the words of James Gustafson.

The personal nature of revelation is not without a rational dimension as it is central to it. Transvaluation of values radically alters our previous conceptions about the past, present, and future of our personal lives and the history of the world, allowing us to discern order, unity, and meaning in a single cosmic epic of creation, redemption and consummation. There is no part of our history that is destroyed, forgotten, or blinded by the light of divine revelation but brought into a sharp and clear focus. This means we have to face all of the resurrected buried past, even the crimes, absurdities, and denials of humanity, such as slavery, and see them in light of God’s judgment and redemption. Clearly, transvaluation is no easy undertaking but requires conversion of memory and hope that leads to the common good of all.  

If revelation is about transvaluation of values, then evangelism understood as Christian witness to God’s self-revelation is by definition implicated in a profoundly meaningful and hopeful endeavor of reconstituting individual selves and communities in theocentric piety. On a realistic note, evangelism is a highly costly undertaking that demands a revolutionary transformation of our habits, dispositions, affections, and worldviews, ushering us into a strange world in which God’s power is manifest in self-emptying sacrifice and existence for the other.  Highlighting such upheavals of thought and life, Niebuhr said, “the self we loved is not the self God loves, the neighbors we did not prize are his treasures, the truth we ignored is the truth he maintains, the justice which we sought because it was our own is not the justice that his love desires.”  Seeing ourselves, neighbors, truth, and justice as reflected in God’s gaze is without question a daunting task, but certainly worth the risk because black lives matter and all are invited to the beloved community.

Recommended Reading: Laudato si

If you haven't heard by now, Pope Francis released an encyclical about care for the environment which touches on, among other things, climate change. Did you know, though, that you can find the full text of the encyclical online from the Vatican?  It's available here and well worth a read.

Once you've read that, if you'd like a United Methodist perspective on the pope's encyclical, Thomas Kemper, head of GBGM, has written one that's available here.

White American UMC, Non-white global UMC

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Assistant Professor of Religion and Pieper Chair of Servant Leadership at Ripon College.

The Pew Research Forum recently released data on the most and least racially diverse religious groups in the US. As it turns out, the UMC is one of the whitest religious groups around. We're whiter than Presbyterians, than Mormons, than the UCC, than Episcopalians. It turns out the American UMC is even whiter than American Jews. Only Lutherans, with their traditional association with Northern European ancestry, are whiter.

This is obviously a problem for the UMC domestically, both for reasons of equality and reasons of demographic trends. Our whiteness raises questions about racial justice in our denomination. It also portends further numeric decline in an increasingly non-white American future.

The whiteness of the American UMC is also a problem, though, as the UMC seeks to map a global future. While most American UMC members (60% of the global church) might be white, most African (30% of the global church) and Filipino (5% of the global church) members are not. White Americans will need to learn to relate to non-white, non-Americans on a more equal footing.

There are a number of thorny issues involved in transitioning the UMC to be a less American-centric denomination, even were the world completely free of biases. Differences of nationality and culture would be enough to snarl these issues even more. But when issues of race are added in, the complexities become that much more difficult.

I'm not saying that all or even most American United Methodists are actively racist. I am saying that when you have a group of people (white Americans) who have little experience of interacting with racial others in their denomination or thinking through their racial privileges within the context of church, and then expect them to do so across not only racial but international boundaries, that will be a challenge.

It's a challenge that the UMC must take up, however. An overwhelmingly white future is not an option for the UMC, in the United States or as an international body.

Recommended Reading: Regnum Edinburgh Centenary series

The Edinburgh 2010 group, one of several who marked the hundredth anniversary of the World Mission Conference in Edinburgh 1910, commissioned a series of studies about the current state of mission. The twenty-five books in the series cover a wide range of missiological topics and Christian traditions. The best thing about this series, though, is that these great resources are available for free electronic download, via the Regnum Books website. The books can also be purchased in printed version, either singly or as a set.

What United Methodist content would you put in humanity's digital library?

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Assistant Professor of Religion and Pieper Chair of Servant Leadership at Ripon College.

United Methodist Communications recently announced its collaboration with a company called Outernet. Outernet has the ambitious goal of connecting every person in the world to freely-accessible content via satellite.

The collection of content that Outernet is assembling is being referred to as "humanity's public library." The agreement between Outernet and United Methodist Communications is essentially that UM Communications will contribute some content to this global digital library. UM Communications is the first faith-based organization to agree to do so.

What exactly that content will be has yet to be announced. Outernet began the selection process this last weekend at a conference in Uganda in conjunction with receiving input electronically from all over the world. Presumably UM Communications will have some say in recommending what they think would be appropriate content that they can provide.

This raises the question, though, of what United Methodist content should belong in "humanity's public library." What United Methodist documents, text, and pictures are important enough and demonstrate United Methodism's unique contribution to humanity that they should be included in this collection?

I think this is a useful question for United Methodists to reflect on as part of discerning not only what it means to be a global church, but what it means to be a church that is part of a much larger global community. The United Methodist Church's 12 million members is a tiny fraction of all of humanity. We would like to think that we have something to offer to the rest of humanity, but we should be humble and realistic in discerning what that is.

So, readers, what do you think? Share your ideas for what United Methodist content should belong in humanity's public library in the content section below.

Arun Jones: How the Catholics can be a global church

This blog post is the first in a two-part series by Arun Jones, Dan and Lillian Hankey Associate Professor of World Evangelism at Candler School of Theology. In these two pieces, Dr. Jones examines how other Christian traditions function as global churches for the sake of making comparisons with The United Methodist Church.

It seems to me that there are two Christian traditions that are successfully pulling off the feat of being truly global in today’s world.  These are Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism.  I think they are successful for very different reasons – their mutual antagonism in many places speaks to that difference!  Let me reflect on how the Catholics can be global.

My experience of Roman Catholicism is as much a lived experience as an academic one.  While my courses in church history and in Roman Catholic missiology have provided me with my academic knowledge, living with Roman Catholics (including close family members) in India, the Philippines and the U.S.A. is really the source of these reflections on global Catholicism.  As I moved from one country to another in my young adulthood, I was struck at how different Catholicism is in each context: how the self-understanding of what it means to be Catholic changed from country to country.  Despite my disagreements with certain Catholic doctrine, I have wondered in amazement, “How is this possible?”

Roman Catholics are bound together by a common liturgy (for the most part – however, there are at least 3 different Roman Catholic rites in India alone) and a common set of doctrines and laws.  However, Catholicism allows for flexibility in the following ways.

It allows for multiple readings of common practices and texts.  By “reading” I mean something close to “interpretation.”  The impact of words, of teachings, of gestures is different in different cultural, national and linguistic contexts.  And Roman Catholicism, on the whole, is fine with that.  I think most of us Protestants (and the press) get so caught up with the few internal fights that Catholics have about proper interpretation of doctrine and practice that we forget the many, many ways in which our sisters and brothers are happily “reading” their faith differently.

Secondly, Roman Catholicism allows for multiple practices.  There are devotions, saints, liturgies, pilgrimages, and other practices in different contexts that the Catholics in those contexts understand to be absolutely vital to their faith, and which are completely irrelevant to Catholics outside the context.  I was struck by this the first time I read about the devotion to the black Nazarene in Manila, the Philippines, and how I had heard of nothing like it in India.  Yet that devotion is vital to the faith of millions of Filipino Catholics.

Thirdly, Catholicism allows for multiple Catholic identities.  A few years ago I was having a pleasant conversation with some Catholic priests in New Delhi, and I asked them about the discussion on priestly celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church in India.  This particular group of priests looked at me like I was out of my mind – for them, at least, there was no discussion!  I then realized how the Indian religious context, which has a very strong tradition of holy men and holy women who are celibate ascetics, could very well make celibacy a prize and not a burden for priests and nuns.  Similarly the various branches of the Orthodox tradition in India take great pride in the fact that their bishops must be celibate.  In the Philippines, on the other hand, I found lay people who felt sorry for priests because they could not marry, and even excused priests who were known to have a “family” somewhere.  For Filipino priests and nuns, Catholic identity lies elsewhere.  And the same goes for laity – to be an American Catholic is quite a unique experience in worldwide Catholicism in some ways.  I have come to the conclusion that in the U.S.A., Roman Catholicism is paradoxically the largest denomination and yet thrives on an identity that sees itself as a minority Christian tradition.

My point here is not to minimize the problems of the Roman Catholic Church – we all have problems, and will have them until Christ returns in glory – but to point out how the Roman Catholic Church in some ways handles the issue of unity in diversity.  We Protestants are probably too logocentric, insisting on “correct” readings first of Scripture and subsequently of doctrine and subsequently of practice, to deal with diversity the way our Catholic sisters and brothers do (and the diversity I have pointed out is mostly a lay initiative).  So we United Methodists are floating ideas of having different “Disciplines” for different parts of the world, instead of giving flexibility in “reading” the same Discipline.  But as the difficulties of the worldwide nature of Protestantism are making clear, I don’t think we have come up with a good alternative to the Roman Catholic way of being catholic.  And maybe reflecting on the Roman Catholic experience can help us to start thinking differently about what worldwide United Methodism can and actually should mean.