Author Archives: Ken Loyer

Note from the Editor: Ken Loyer’s forthcoming book, “Holy Communion: Celebrating God with Us” will be available beginning in December 2014 from Abingdon Press. Readers may explore more details here.

What is Holy Communion, and why does it matter?

Those questions have given rise to a book that I have written, “Holy Communion: Celebrating God with Us,” the second in the Belief Matters series edited by Bishop William H. Willimon. Today I begin a series of posts about the book and about the pressing need to recover a robust understanding and practice of Holy Communion for the renewal of the church in faith, mission, and sacramental life.

Celebrating the presence of God through Holy Communion nourishes our souls and refreshes our sense of community. For small groups and Sunday School classes, and as a resource for preaching, “Holy Communion: Celebrating God with Us” is suitable for a four-week study and offers questions for reflection at the end of each chapter.

The more Christians link Communion with spiritual formation and daily faith practice, the more likely the church will be invigorated and empowered to carry out its missional mandate to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Through the service of Communion, the church remembers and celebrates the presence of God with us. Yet many Christians do not understand Communion or see it only as an empty ritual, devoid of meaning or personal significance. As a result, many congregations experience a drop in worship attendance or enthusiasm on Communion Sundays. Then churches wonder why they are so spiritually depleted. This book offers a richer appreciation of Communion and provides insights and practical suggestions for giving this sacrament a more prominent role, not just in church life, but in the Christian formation of individuals.

Current tensions in The United Methodist Church show how desperately we need a better approach to understanding and ultimately embodying sanctification.

My new book is now in print, and it might interest some of you. In it I place Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley, along with their interpreters, in conversation regarding the person and work of the Holy Spirit and the virtue of love. I explore the pressing need for a deeper theological foundation for the Methodist doctrine of sanctification that avoids the pitfalls of both subjective spiritualities and reductionist political partisanship. The book is entitled God’s Love through the Spirit: The Holy Spirit in Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley (Catholic University of America Press); additional information can be found HERE.  Here is the abstract:

Although the doctrine of the Holy Spirit has often been a neglected subject in theology, it remains vital for understanding both the Christian confession of God as Trinity and the nature of the Christian life. In view of those two topics, God’s Love through the Spirit examines the relationship between love and the person and work of the Holy Spirit in Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley – two very different figures whose teachings on the Spirit and the Christian life are found to be, on the whole, surprisingly compatible. An investigation into Aquinas’s amor-based pneumatology, including a groundbreaking analysis of his recently discovered Pentecost sermon, and a fresh assessment of the doctrine of sanctification in Wesley show that in distinctive yet largely complementary ways, Aquinas and Wesley provide resources that can be used to reclaim a richer pneumatology, specifically in relation to the theological virtue of love.

Despite the obvious differences between these two figures in method and style, there are certain conceptual parallels in their writings – such as the central themes of love and holiness – that create the possibility for mutual enrichment among their respective theological heirs. Aquinas’s pneumatology can be illuminated and amplified by the emphasis on the Holy Spirit and sanctification that is found in Wesley, even as the insights of Aquinas can aid Methodists and Wesleyans in accounting more fully for the properly theological, and indeed trinitarian, basis of sanctification. The conclusions reached in God’s Love through the Spirit, particularly concerning an understanding of love both within God’s own life and in Christian participation in God by grace, challenge the claim that Western theology suffers from a pneumatological deficiency, and represent a significant contribution to the study of Aquinas and of Wesley, to ecumenical dialogue between Catholics and Methodists (and Protestants more broadly), and to the retrieval and development of a genuinely constructive pneumatology.

This post continues a series of reflections on doctrine and renewal. In my last post (Part 1) I shared about the challenges that we face in the UMC to recover our distinctive Wesleyan doctrinal heritage. I mentioned that one of those challenges is moralistic therapeutic deism, a counterfeit “gospel” that has worked its way deep into the minds and hearts of many pastors and lay people in the UMC. I also suggested that we desperately need to return to the theological and doctrinal sources within our tradition in order, first of all, to be more fully formed by those sources as Wesleyan Christians, and, secondly, on that basis, to engage in critical and constructive ways with the issues of our day. I believe that this kind of retrieval is absolutely vital to any hope we have for the renewal of the UMC.

Before talking more about renewal, though, I want to share another story. This one involves a reaction to a YouTube video called “What is Methodism?” that I showed students in a seminary class on United Methodist Doctrine:

The student writes,

“I listened to the video and was amazed that someone would put this video on a public website. It does not make us look good – only one woman actually had any concept of what she believed. But it accurately conveys our sense of who we are – most of us haven’t a clue. We vaguely know that our pastors encourage us to minister to people, but I hear very little about the Gospel, about Christ, or about holiness coming from our leaders. Instead, we hear about the cause of the season, whether it be immigrants, oppressed workers…or – well, you’ve all heard it. At our meetings, we sound like the tear-jerker movie society while all around us people walk past our mostly empty churches headed to soccer games or drug buys.

Yes, this is common in our churches, partially because I have not attempted to define Methodism or generate a pride in being Methodist, but have focused upon using the word ‘Christian’ as I define the character of a good Christian, which hopefully is what our church members will become. If I focus upon Methodism, there is too much disconnect between what I am preaching and what they see in the publications.”

My student shares his thoughts frankly here, and whatever we might think about some of his word choices, he clearly identifies a major challenge facing our church today. What does the UMC believe? What do (or should) leaders in the UMC teach? And in both cases, why? We need to attend to such questions carefully, prayerfully, and when necessary, repentantly. I don’t think Steve Long puts it too strongly in his claim that when UM pastors are generally far more comfortable explaining their personality type on the Myers-Briggs personality test than they are of talking in any meaningful way about the Chalcedonian formula, then we have a theological and intellectual crisis in our church.

So if such stories identify the problems of doctrinal neglect and confusion, where can we turn for a solution? In the face of the challenges before us, what hope is there for a way forward? I believe that we will discover the most promising way forward through a deep retrieval of our doctrine and a comprehensive re-reception of it at every level of our church, especially in the local church since that is the most significant arena for making and growing disciples of Jesus Christ. This retrieval project will be a long and difficult one, but it is critical. My hope is that efforts to reclaim our theological heritage and develop a richer theology for the renewal of the UMC today will continue to bear fruit and spread throughout our church and world. I see doctrine as a light on the path to renewed vitality for the UMC.

Wesley warned of the sort of problems that we now face in his 1786 tract entitled “Thoughts upon Methodism” where he writes this: “I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid, lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power. And this undoubtedly will be the case, unless they hold fast… the doctrine, spirit, and discipline with which they first set out.” Here Wesley not only provides a warning but also points to a remedy: holding fast the doctrine, spirit, and discipline with which the Methodists first set out—or in other words, recovering the Methodist heritage in its fullness.

I hear echoes of Wesley in 2 Timothy 1:13-14: “Hold to the standard of sound teaching that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.”

What does doctrine have to do with renewal? To those who view doctrine (that is, official church teaching) as an impediment to renewal, or in other words as part of the problem and not the solution, the answer might seem simple: “Nothing!” I don’t see it that way, however, and I want to reflect on why. As a lifelong United Methodist, I care deeply about the UMC. I also care deeply about both doctrine and renewal. In fact, I believe that doctrine and renewal are integrally related and mutually informative.

Before I explain why, a little background information about me will set the context for what follows. I attended seminary at Duke Divinity School and then completed a PhD in systematic theology at SMU. My dissertation dealt with the Holy Spirit and the Christian life in Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley. Since I finished school in 2010, I have been serving as a pastor in York, PA. Since 2011 I have also taught as an adjunct instructor in theology and United Methodist studies at United Theological Seminary and at Wesley Theological Seminary.

I say all that as a preface to the question that I would like to address in a two-part post on doctrine and renewal. The question is this: How, if at all, has the theological task changed in our generation?

From my vantage point, limited as it no doubt is, I sense that there is an increasing awareness of the need for church renewal and the importance of theology and doctrine for the renewal of the church. One example is the John Wesley Fellows program supported by A Foundation for Theological Education; some of the leading scholars and theologians in the UMC are part of that group promoting a recovery of our Wesleyan heritage in the context of classical Christianity. Of course, others are also working in various ways toward that same goal as well, and it is encouraging to see the progress that such groups and individuals have made and are positioned to make in the years ahead. I have also been encouraged by the example of faithful lay people who are hungry to learn and grow in their Christian faith and service. Laity will surely play a vital role in the renewal of our church. Even with these signs of progress, we have our work cut out for us. We have a long way to go.

One illustration of the challenges before us comes from a teaching experience that I had several years ago, when I taught UM history and doctrine at Wesley Seminary. For an assignment in that class, I required my students to choose a sermon by Wesley and respond to it with a summary and outline of the sermon as well as a sermon of their own that was based on or inspired by that sermon of Wesley.

One student reported that sermons like Wesley’s were foreign to her because in his sermons Wesley addressed sin and salvation in specific terms. She further said that in her church salvation and sin were not normally addressed in detail in sermons, but instead were discussed in small groups and Sunday School classes insofar as they were discussed at all. The assignment took this student outside of her comfort zone because she had to preach specifically about salvation!

Her words got me thinking: If we are not preaching in specific terms about salvation, about what exactly are we preaching? What is the content of our message if not salvation in and by the Triune God? Preaching that is not clearly connected to salvation, to our life in God—how often is that the case in churches today? I also began to wonder, “How can I do a better job of staying on message in my preaching and teaching, in offering people bread and not stones—offering them nothing other than Jesus Christ and the truth of his gospel?”

If we are not careful, our preaching and teaching can be reduced to what Kenda Creasy Dean in her book Almost Christian: What the Faith of our Teenagers is Telling the American Church calls moralistic therapeutic deism. Our preaching and teaching might be moralistic in that it calls for people to be good moral people and to think nice thoughts about others. It might be therapeutic in that it stresses that God wants us to be happy and feel good about ourselves (which of course is true but becomes a problem when we lose sight of the cost of discipleship). And it might be deistic in that it presents an image of a “god” who is watching from a distance, looking down on us—no doubt smiling, because this is a nice, happy “god”—but not a God who is intimately involved in the daily affairs of the world, and certainly not a God who becomes incarnate and dwells among us and who suffers, dies, and defeats sin and death for us on the cross and in the resurrection.

Moralistic therapeutic deism—you can imagine what kind of effect this kind of superficial teaching and preaching could have on a church or denomination. That is an impediment to renewal. The neglect of sound doctrine is part of the problem, not the solution. Clearly God expects more from us as pastors and teachers than this, and thankfully we have so much more to offer the church and the world than this!

I believe that Wesley can help us steer clear of the problem of moralistic therapeutic deism, as well as other barriers to renewal, so we stay on track in providing solid biblical teaching and preaching. He can do this with his robust vision of the Christian life, at once grace-filled and rigorous, communal and personal, leading to the goal of Christian perfection in God’s holy love.

That vision is one of the treasures of our theological heritage, which is a heritage that has the power to help renew the church today. So the way forward might be first to go backward, back to Wesley and the broader Christian tradition, and then forward through a constructive engagement with the issues of our day using the best theological and spiritual resources at our disposal. I’ll say more about what that might mean in my second post in this series.

Sometimes I wonder why foot washing is not practiced more widely in the church today.

Certainly, I understand concerns about it being a bit too personal and potentially awkward—touching someone else’s feet, or having someone else touch your own feet. Our feet tend not to be the most flattering parts of our bodies, in terms of aroma as well as overall aesthetics. Why would I want anyone else to touch my dirty, smelly feet, which hardly see the light of day? Yet not only is there strong historical precedent for this practice among God’s people, but, even more, it is also something that Jesus commands his followers to do. Is foot washing, by and large, the forgotten command of Jesus?

It is, in fact, a clear command of Jesus. After he washed his disciples’ feet, the Lord said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them” (John 13:12-17).

The times I’ve participated in worship services with foot washing, I have been blessed by the experience. They have been among the most meaningful worship experiences that I’ve ever had. Still, I can identify with Peter, who wanted to excuse himself from foot washing on the night of the Last Supper. He was reluctant to have Jesus wash his feet, and he would have been more comfortable not participating, that is, until he learned what it was truly about. On that fateful night, Jesus got up from the table, took off his outer robe (thus revealing his true identity—his heart—as the Lord who serves and gives of himself for others), and tied a towel around himself. As St. John tells us, “Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, ‘Lord, are you going to wash my feet?’ Jesus answered, ‘You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.’ Peter said to him, ‘You will never wash my feet.’ Jesus answered, ‘Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.’ Simon Peter said to him, ‘Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!’” (13:5-9)

The traditional time to observe foot washing in worship, Maundy Thursday, is coming up once again. Especially this time of year, pastors and lay people alike would do well to remember and heed the words of Jesus about this practice: “If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”

Featured art is “Christ Washing the Feet of the Disciples,” Tintoretto.