Author Archives: Maxie Dunnam

However We Witness, Witness We Must by Maxie Dunnam

However We Witness, Witness We Must by Maxie Dunnam

One of the privileges and responsibilities too many Methodist Christians ignore is witnessing. We take the way some Christians do it as the norm and that turns us off. We close our minds to the fact that some may never hear unless we share.  

I was blessed to chair the Committee of the World Methodist Council for 12 years. This gave me opportunity to travel the world and meet extraordinary Christians. One of those is Stanley Mogoba, the first black person to be elected the presiding bishop of the Methodist Church of South Africa.

About the time Nelson Mandela was sent to prison, Stanley met with a group of angry students and sought to dissuade them from violent demonstration. Just for that – trying to avert violence – he was arrested and imprisoned for six years on the notorious Robben Island. Mandela was already in prison there. His life and witness led to break the back of Apartheid, the awful governmental system of racial oppression in South Africa. He and Magoba became friends there in prison.

One day someone pushed a religious tract under Magoba’s cell door. Don’t ever forget: most persons who come to Christ do so not by big events, but by relationships and simple actions, like a person putting a tract beneath a prison cell door. By reading that little tract and responding to the Holy Spirit, lives forever changed. Magoba quoted the words of Charles Wesley’s hymn to describe his experience:

“Thine eye diffused a quickening ray
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
my chains fell off; my heart was free

God showed up, and something unexpected happened.

God who came unexpectedly at Pentecost, continues to show up, in persons, on the streets, in the Church. Some sort of witness shares in the redemptive process. It certainly doesn’t require a printed tract, but, more often than not, it requires some form of witness. That is the task of every Christian. How seriously are you assuming your task?

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You Never Mentioned Him To Me by Maxie Dunnam

You Never Mentioned Him To Me by Maxie Dunnam

James Rowe is a prolific music composer, and yet most of us have probably not heard of him. He was born in Ireland and worked for the Irish government before immigrating to the United States in his late 20s. Eventually, he became a full-time writer, composing hymns and editing music journals for publishers. One of my favorites songs among his best-known works is “Redeemed,”

Redeemed—how I love to proclaim it! 

Redeemed by the blood of the Lamb; 

Redeemed through His infinite mercy,

His child, and forever, I am. 

Redeemed, redeemed…

Another well-known favorite is “Love Lifted Me.”

Love lifted me!

Love lifted me!

When nothing else could help,

Love lifted me!

One of his songs I have never heard sung in a congregation. It is entitled, “You Never Mentioned Him to Me,” and it speaks directly to an essential function of every Christian. We are witnesses.

O let us spread the word

where’er it may be heard,

Help groping souls the light to see,

That yonder none may say, “You showed me not the way,

You never mentioned Him to me.”

Scripture charges us to take the good news about Jesus to others, to sow the seed. We know that not all soil is fertile; the responsibility to respond to the gospel lies with the hearers, not with us. The prophet, Ezekiel, encourages us, “But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way, that person shall die in his iniquity, but you will have delivered your soul. (Ezekiel 33:9) Our charge is to be faithful. Paul was rather adamant about it. “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.” (1Cor.3:6-7)

O let us spread the word

where’er it may be heard,

Help groping souls the light to see,

That yonder none may say, “You showed me not the way,

You never mentioned Him to me 

 A few sweet words may guide a lost one to his side,

Or turn sad eyes on Calvary;

So work as days go by, that yonder none may cry,

“You never mentioned Him to me.”

The song pictures Judgment Day as we stand to hear our fate pronounced. Before our appearance at the bench, another is condemned to eternal death. He cries out an accusation toward us:

“You never mentioned Him to me,

You helped me not the light to see;

You met me day by day and knew I was astray,

Yet never mentioned Him to me.”

That is a harrowing thought. Perhaps that is why the song is sung so infrequently. It makes us uncomfortable. But the hymn isn’t intended to make us feel guilty about our shortcomings in talking about Jesus. It has an end in itself. As followers of Christ, we are called to witness. How often do we share Him with others? When was the last time we had a serious conversation with someone about our faith? Dare I ask? When was the last time you mentioned him? More painful perhaps, “when you mentioned him, what did you say?”  

You never mentioned him to me. You may have difficulty with the imagery, but reflect. The imagery reminds us of what is happening, in reality, every day of our lives. If we are faithful to our commission, whether we are successful in our efforts or not, this hymn should be an encouragement. But if we are not, songs like this should be a powerful appeal to redouble our efforts. Which is it for us?

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And Are We Yet Alive? by Maxie Dunnam

And Are We Yet Alive? by Maxie Dunnam

My friend, George (Chuck) Hunter, has told a thrilling story – one of those lively vignettes of Methodist history that gives us our vision for now and the future.

A great Methodist leader named C. C. McCabe was the leader of new church extension for the Methodist Episcopal Church in about 1881. He was a prodigious planner, strategist, fund-raiser, and mobilizer. Under his leadership for sustained years, the Methodist Episcopal Church averaged starting one new congregation a day, and some months averaged two congregations a day.

One particular day he was traveling to help launch a round of new church plantings in Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, when he picked up a newspaper that had recorded the speech delivered in Chicago by Robert G. Ingersoll, a famous philosopher and agnostic, to the annual convention of a group that imagined itself to be the wave of the future, the Free-thinkers Association of America. In this speech, Ingersoll contended that the churches of the United States of America were in a terminal condition and in another generation there would be few, if any, of them left, which, on the whole, would be a good thing. That incensed McCabe. He got off the train at the next town, went to the Western Union office, dictated a telegram, and sent it to Ingersoll at the convention that was still meeting in Chicago. The telegram read, “Dear Bob: In the Methodist Church we are starting more than one new congregation a day, and we propose to make it two. Signed, C. C. McCabe. P. S. All hail the power of Jesus’ name.”

That was the first of many spirited exchanges and debates between them. The word about that telegram got out and there evolved a folk hymn, part of which went like this:

The infidels, a motley band,

In counsel met and said,

The churches are dying across the land,

And soon, they’ll all be dead.

When suddenly a message came,

And caught them with dismay,

We’re building two a day.”

Chorus

We’re building two a day, dear Bob,

We’re building two a day.

All hail the power of Jesus’ name,

We’re building two a day. 

It has happened before. It can happen again. It should happen. It will happen again when we Methodists recover the warm heart, when we provide structures of love and care, and when we get a passion for ministry and mission, believing the world is our parish.  

Then, we can offer Charles Wesley’s great hymn to those so ready to proclaim the church’s death, and truly sing it with the conviction of seeing it again in our day.

And are we yet alive,

And see each other’s face?

Glory and praise to Jesus give

For His redeeming grace. 

Preserved by power divine

To full salvation here,

Again in Jesus’ praise we join,

And in His sight appear.

What troubles have we seen,

What conflicts have we passed,

Fightings without, and fears within,

Since we assembled last.

But out of all the Lord

Hath brought us by His love;

And still He doth His help afford,

And hides our life above.

Then let us make our boast

Of His redeeming power,

Which saves us to the uttermost,

Till we can sin no more.

Let us take up the cross

Till we the crown obtain;

And gladly reckon all things loss,

So we may Jesus gain.

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The Unattended Moment by Maxie Dunnam

The Unattended Moment by Maxie Dunnam

I read T. S. Eliot’s poetry, even though I have to struggle to read and understand it. I keep reminding myself that what he expresses is worth the arduous effort and energy I might exert in reading him. One of his geniuses is his creation of power-packed phrases and images. Here is one of them:

“For most of us, there is only the unattended Moment.”

The unattended Moment.  I want to ponder that image as we continue our reflection on Jesus’ call, “Don’t be anxious about tomorrow.” In our last article, pondering this call, we made the case that when we are anxious about tomorrow we take on excessive anxiety about things we cannot change and many of us are paralyzed with fear of our inability to live the Christian life.  If fear of tomorrow or the day after tomorrow consumes us, we will miss the possibilities of the richness of living today.

A preacher friend tells of a person who, awakening to how dingy his life and world had become because of his worrying, made a worry table. Analyzing how he and other people worried, he concluded that 40 percent of most worries never happen; 30 percent were about past decisions we cannot alter. 12 percent about criticism (mostly untrue) of us by others, usually arising from envy and misunderstanding; 10 percent were about personal health that only grew worse with worry; and only 8 percent were legitimate concerns that need our attention. All of this means that when we worry we waste a lot of time and energy, and overlook opportunities which may never come again to us, special moments that may occur only once in our lifetime. 

Unattended moments. Think of the hugs that we have shunned because we were worrying, the spontaneous surprises of children growing up, the wayside miracles in nature, the fun of playing together, the secrets that we could have known, the beauty we could have shared.  The unattended moment is packed with possibilities for richness, meaning, and growth. But we miss it because we are not focusing our eyes on the present and are anxious about tomorrow. The greatest price we pay for worry is the loss of the richness of living today.

We need to hear clearly, and heed Jesus’ words: “But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O men of little faith?”  I’m seeking to live by the conviction that we can trust God for tomorrow, because we can trust God for today.

A member of our congregation and a dear friend knows this truth as well as anyone I know. He is an alcoholic, but has celebrated over twenty years of sobriety. He remains sober because of his one-day-at-a-time trust in the Lord. He wrote a contemporary gospel song which expresses this truth in a memorable way. The title of the song and its message are a simple prayer he heard an old man pray: “Lord, we know what you’re gonna’ do ’cause we see what you’ ve already done.”

Focus again on the powerful image with which I began my reflection: violets cracking rocks. It’s a powerful picture. A tiny, fragile violet with so much life in its tiny structure, with so much thrust for sunlight and air that it literally cracks the rocks and pokes through so that it can peek at the sunlight and finally burst forth in its pristine purple glory. Paul said that nothing in all the world can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. We can trust God for tomorrow, because we can trust God for today. 

Someone reminded me recently that what lies behind us and before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.’ I know that I have the Holy Spirit within me. That means I have power, like the violet, to crack all the rocks of circumstances. So I listen to Jesus: “don’t be anxious about tomorrow”!

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Don’t Worry About Your Ability To Live The Christian Life by Maxie Dunnam

Don’t Worry About Your Ability To Live The Christian Life by Maxie Dunnam

We have been pondering the way Jesus’s resurrection can crack through our worry. An important perspective on hearing Jesus’ word, “Don’t be anxious,” is to know that he is certainly saying  Don’t borrow the trouble of worrying about your ability to live the Christian life. This is something most of us have thought little or nothing about. Yet, I think it’s a big problem in many of our lives.

Recently I counseled with a psychologist who thirteen months before had been freed from a gripping drug addiction. He was thankful for his deliverance, but was almost paralyzed by his fear that God was going to place in his life something to which he would be unable to respond.

Worrying  about our ability to live the Christian life is a big problem for many of us. It expresses itself particularly in anxiety about the fact that we will fall into sin again. We know that we are weak and that we do give in to temptation. Our problem comes when we adopt a poor me attitude that says, “It’s always going to be like that. I’m simply not able to live the Christian life.”

To be sure, we sin. Hopefully, we feel guilty for our sins. But we must not remain in our guilt. Scripture promises that when we confess our sin, God forgives and “remembers our sin no more” (Jer. 31:34).  The fact is we are adding sin to sin if we choose to remain guilty after confession and repentance. We can exchange our guilt for praise because “the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).

So we should not borrow the trouble that comes from saying, “I’m sure I’ll do it again.” As Christians, we are in Christ, and we must live believing that in him we live one day at a time. We don’t dwell on the possibility of succumbing to temptation tomorrow. Jesus has set us free now, not tomorrow! Christ is our keeper today and tomorrow. We are living in him; as long as we do, he will keep us. So don’t borrow trouble by worrying about your ability to live the Christian life.

What are you worried about? Rehearse the lessons we need to keep in mind

Don’t borrow trouble.

Don’t borrow the trouble of worrying about your ability to live the Christian life.

Be aware of, but don’t give into anxiety about the fact that we may fall into sin again.

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What Are You Worried About by Maxie Dunnam

What Are You Worried About by Maxie Dunnam

There have been a few occasions in my life when, almost immediately after meeting and greeting a person, they asked, “What are you worried about?” Persons often wear themselves on their faces. 

In my last article I reflected on Tennessee Williams’ image, violets cracking rocks. In his teaching, Jesus used an equally powerful image: “Consider the lilies… how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” This was a primary teaching of Jesus. He closed a section of the Sermon on the Mount with his lesson about God’s care for us, “Don’t be anxious.” 

Ours is a jittery age. We are terribly worried about success and prestige, but we’re not worried half enough about what we’re doing to ourselves. We ought to be bothered about ulcers and heart attacks that we bring on ourselves. We ought to be bothered about the fact that our friendships are superficial. We ought to take note of the fact that no amount of money can compensate for the way we rob ourselves and become slaves to ourselves.

We have a right to be anxious. Conflicts and upheavals around the world are moving nations deeper and deeper into a war mentality. That’s a part of the big picture, and it is anxiety-producing. We don’t have to think at that level. Our day-to-day living brings enough. Jesus knew that, so he said, “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day” (Matt. 6:34).

One of the important things Jesus is saying is this: Don’t borrow trouble. I don’t know the history of that phrase, but we know what it means. So did Jesus. “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.”

Look at that issue from two perspectives. One will immediately strike a chord in us; the other, we have probably thought too little about.

First, don’t borrow trouble by taking on excessive anxiety about things you cannot change. Excessive anxiety about things we cannot change is one of the biggest issues in our life. There are some burdens that we cannot handle for ourselves, and there are some burdens that we were never meant to handle. Those burdens are to be turned over to God. 

A second perspective on hearing Jesus’ word, “Don’t be anxious,” is Don’t borrow the trouble of worrying about your ability to live the Christian life. This is something most of us have thought little or nothing about. Yet, I think it’s a big problem in many of our lives. We worry about our ability to live the Christian life. This expresses itself particularly in anxiety about the fact that we will fall into sin again.

We know that we are weak and that we do give in to temptation. Our problem comes when we adopt a poor me attitude that says, “It’s always going to be like that. I’m simply not able to live the Christian life.” To be sure, we sin. Hopefully, we feel guilty for our sins. But we must not remain in our guilt. Scripture promises that when we confess our sin, God forgives and “remembers our sin no more” (Jer. 31:34).

The fact is we are adding sin to sin if we choose to remain guilty after confession and repentance. We can exchange our guilt for praise because “the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).

So we should not borrow the trouble that comes from saying, “I’m sure I’ll do it again.” As Christians, we are in Christ, and we must live believing that in him we live one day at a time. We don’t dwell on the possibility of succumbing to temptation tomorrow. Jesus has set us free now, not tomorrow! As far as tomorrow is concerned, Christ is our keeper. We are living in him; and as long as we do, he will keep us. 

Don’t borrow trouble by worrying about your ability to live the Christian life. What are you worried about? Rehearse the lessons we need to keep in mind:

Don’t borrow trouble.

Don’t borrow the trouble of worrying about your ability to live the Christian life.

Be aware of, but don’t give into anxiety about the fact that we might fall into sin again.

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Violets Cracking Rocks by Maxie Dunnam

Violets Cracking Rocks by Maxie Dunnam

Easter is the punctuation mark of the Christian Faith: the death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s Son as his gift of salvation for all who will receive it. Easter stirs an image in my mind: violets cracking rocks.

The image was connected with the work of Tennessee Williams, one of America’s greatest dramatists. In their commentary about his life and work, critics often made the point that he was a lonely and frightened man. His plays presented a world of shattered hopes and failed visions. While he loved his characters, they, like him, struggled against the frightening blindness of their lives.

Later, Williams became less angry and frightened. After his death, Darn Sullivan, writing in the Los Angeles Times, noted that Williams’s themes had changed; that in his later work, he was writing about “the power of violets cracking the rocks.” 

What a powerful image… “the power of violets cracking the rocks.” More powerful, but in the same category, is an image: Jesus used, “Consider the lilies… how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” (Luke 12:27)

That the image came to me should not be a surprise. I grew up in rural Mississippi. Winters were wet and cold. We had few clothes, but they were adequate. I had three brothers and two sisters. I was the youngest of three boys. I not only wore “hand-me-down” shirts and overalls, but shoes. The size needed, and shoes available, determined what shoes were purchased in the Fall before winter set in. It was rare that we wore shoes at any time in the summer. Wearing shoes was determined by season and weather.

That necessity was decided primarily by my mother. We children didn’t enjoy wearing shoes, and we hounded our parents to let us shed them. I don’t know how other parents made the decision, but Momma had her own way. A blooming violet was proof of spring and promise of summer. If we could bring home a blooming violet, it was “shoes-off-time.”

That’s the reason Williams’ image came to mind just before Easter. What an image for resurrection: the power of violets cracking the rocks. In the weeks ahead I am going to reflect and share with you more about this dynamic because Jesus used a similar one in teaching about life.

Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! (Luke 12:27-28 NIV)

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Distinctive Style of Methodists: Our Worldwide Parish by Maxie Dunnam

Distinctive Style of Methodists: Our Worldwide Parish by Maxie Dunnam

Followers of Jesus have a distinctive style. There are many marks of the Methodist Style. We have considered A Catholic Spirit and Heartfelt Religion. Let’s look now at one other distinctive mark, our worldwide parish.

It is gathered up in Wesley’s popular saying, “The world is my parish.” That word captures the style of the Methodist movement—a concern for all humankind, a spending of ourselves and our resources that all the world might be brought to Christ.

Most of what I share here and much I have shared about other marks are from my book, Going on to Salvation (Nashville, Discipleship Resources, 1996). The truths still speak to us today.

We need to know that Wesley came to this position “kicking and screaming.” His decision to join Whitefield in preaching in the fields to the poor and to coal miners was a difficult one. He fought against it. Whitefield was having great success in reaching for Christ those for whom the established church paid no attention. He sent for John Wesley, knowing his preaching power and organizing skill.

Up to this point, Wesley had only preached in regular church services while in England. Should he accept Whitefield’s appeal and help with the open-air meetings in Bristol? Charles insisted that he not do it. But John practiced what he preached. He called on the Christian fellowship for guidance. He submitted the decision to the Fetter Lane Society, and they decided he should go. Wesley’s Journal for Saturday, March 31 reads:

In the evening, I reached Bristol and met Mr. Whitefield there. I could scarce reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields, of which he set me an example on Sunday; having been all my life (until very lately) so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order, that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church.

Wesley spoke to a little society on Sunday evening using the Sermon on the Mount “one pretty remarkable precedent of field-preaching,” he observed, “though I suppose there were churches at that time also.” The next day, Monday, Wesley reported in his Journal:

At four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in ground adjoining the city, to about three thousand people. The scripture on which I spoke was this,…”The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor.”

In his book, The Radical Wesley, Howder Snyder sums up what happened:

Characteristically, Wesley immediately began to organize. He formed a number of societies and bands and on May 9 acquired a piece of property where he built his “New Room” as a central meeting place. When Whitefield returned to America in August, Wesley was left totally in charge of the growing work. He divided his time between Bristol and London, concentrating on open-air preaching, organizing bands and speaking at night to an increasing number of societies.

The Wesleyan Revival had begun. From the beginning it was a movement largely for and among the poor, those whom “gentlemen” and “ladies” looked on simply as part of the machinery of the new industrial system.The Wesleys preached, the crowds responded and Methodism as a mass movement was born. (pp. 32-33)

That’s what Methodism is all about—a missional and evangelical witness and outreach that sees the world as our parish—and every person in the world, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, without regard to race—every person as a person for whom Christ died.

The movement will go on and be empowered as we Methodists recover the warm heart, when we provide structures of love and care, and when we get a passion for ministry and mission, believing that “the world is our parish.”

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Distinctive Style of Methodists: Heartfelt Religion by Maxie Dunnam

Distinctive Style of Methodists: Heartfelt Religion by Maxie Dunnam

Followers of Jesus have throughout history exhibited a distinctive style.  In my first article I shared about Wesley’s peculiar flair. The second article highlighted a Methodist’s catholic spirit. Here, we will look to the heart of the Wesleyan movement.

 

 

The Methodist movement was born in England and soon began to burn with a fire of love across the land, in large part, because of two big problems in the Established Church. One was spiritual apathy. Deism had flavored the intellectual and religious climate. God had become a benevolent ruler of the universe, removed from personal experience. In the arrogant rationalism that pervaded the day, everything had to be utterly reasonable.

The second thing that had happened was that the nature of the church as an organization had become remote, removed from life, not touching the people where they were. One cleric, for instance, had been made a bishop and given a lifetime stipend, but never set foot in the diocese over which he presumably had spiritual and temporal oversight. It was obviously all temporal and nothing spiritual.

Into that setting with those two characteristics – spiritual apathy and a remote church structure -came the Methodist revival with an answer to these two glaring, devastating failures of the church. The answer? Heartfelt religion.

For spiritual apathy, there was the experience of the warm heart. People wanted desperately not only to hear the gospel, but also to experience it. So John Wesley’s Aldersgate experience became the model: “I felt my heart strangely warmed, I felt I did trust Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” That experience was repeated over and over.

Furthermore, for people who experienced a church that had become lifelessly formal at best, and coldly remote at worst, the Methodists came with ministries of care and warm concern. The class meetings and bands of the Methodist societies became the settings for these expressions of compassion. People cared for and looked after each other’s souls. Loving hearts set other hearts on fire.

In a lecture at Emory University, Dr. Theodore Runyon introduced what to me was a whole new way of thinking about the “heart strangely warmed” and structures of care as means for our growth in Christ and our life in the world. It is a new way of thinking about a Methodist style. He used three terms to make an important distinction: orthodoxy, orthopraxis, and orthopathy. The first two terms were familiar; not the third. Orthodoxy is right doctrine, right opinion, right belief. But Methodists have never believed that orthodoxy was enough. God demands right action, right practice, right behavior – that is orthopraxis.

Even with that kind of plea for orthopraxis, working faith, Wesley always insisted that as faith without works is dead, works without faith profiteth nothing; that “all morality, all justice, mercy and truth – without faith – is of no value in the sight of God.”

Neither orthodoxy nor orthopraxis alone is sufficient. And what Runyon adds is that even together, they are not enough. There must be orthopathy. This means right passions, senses, tempers, dispositions; and in the larger sense, right experience. This, says Runyon, is the challenge to a theology of conversion – 

To recognize the crying need of humankind to be encountered and transformed by Christian faith in all aspects of their being, including the emotions, feelings, and experiences. Nothing less is a sign of the kingdom and its power in the midst of the present age. And nothing less than this kind of theology and experience ought to undergird our preaching, our Christian education, our evangelism and mission, and our witness and action for peace and justice.

Runyon then gave three hallmarks for such an orthopathic theology. First, Wesley’s “bookends” of creation and kingdom, the fundamental conviction that all creation is to be redeemed by Christ. The world and everything in it is to be brought under the Lordship of Christ not destroyed, but redeemed.

The second hallmark of orthopathy is realism about the present order of things. “We are a part of a world that has corrupted God’s good creation and become insensitive and deaf to God’s will and way.” The gospel forces us to see the alienation and estrangement of the present order and present the gospel necessity of being reborn into a new order.

Thus, the final hallmark of orthopathic theology is the familiar word of John 3:7: “You must be born from above.”

Runyon’s insight helps us think clearly about how we provide the opportunities for the “heart strangely warmed” and the structures of care that will be settings for the transformation of our whole life and total experience. When Wesley insisted that “true Christianity cannot exist without the inward experience and the outward practice of justice, mercy, and truth,” he brought orthodoxy, orthopraxis, and orthopathy together and gave us our marching orders.

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Distinctive Style of Methodist: Catholic Spirit by Maxie Dunnam

Distinctive Style of Methodist: Catholic Spirit by Maxie Dunnam

In my last article I made the claim that Methodists have a distinct style. As Christians, our style defines us as much, maybe more, than anything else.

I have the privilege of observing that more than most. My wife and I live in a life cafe. We have lived here for seven years, and plan to make this our “earthly home.” Though not formally defined and labeled as a “Christian Community,” we are. We have Christian worship on Sunday and a vesper service on Thursday.

We have many denominations represented here and at least two Jewish couples. Baptists and Church of Christ are the largest defined denominational groups. Though a minority, there are Methodists and our group is growing.

Other than the local churches I have served, different expressions of my ministry career have given me opportunity to live and test the popular expression of how Christians should relate: In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and, in all things, charity. Wesley described his approach to differences in belief in one big question, “Is thine heart right, as my heart is with thy heart…If it is, give me thine hand.”

I don’t know who first suggested it, but I confirm that sadly the church and too many Christians are plagued with xenophobia. Formally defined, xenophobia is “hatred or distrust of foreigners or strangers.” It is not new to the church. The apostles feared Paul and his work among the Gentiles. They were suspicious because they did not understand. That spirit within the church has often hindered the ministry of Christ. We fear opinions, positions, attitudes, and beliefs that do not match our own.

Over against xenophobia I want to put those celebrated words of John Wesley. “Is thine heart right, as my heart is with thy heart … If it is, give me thine hand.” Those words are actually from 2 Kings 10:15. Wesley used them as the text for one of the noblest sermons he ever preached, his sermon on the “Catholic Spirit.” It was one of the few instances in Wesley’s preaching when the scriptural setting of the text had nothing to do with the sermon. Unlike most of us preachers, Wesley didn’t take a text and depart from it; he stayed with it. Not so in this instance.

Wesley took the words completely out of their grisly context in 2 Kings 10 and asked, not what they meant there, but what a follower of Christ should find in them. And from that exploration, he gave us a great word to guide us as we claim and cultivate one of the most important marks of our distinctive style as Methodists: a catholic spirit.

Unfortunately there has been destructive misunderstanding and a misapplication of Wesley’s concept of the catholic spirit. We interpret that to mean “theological pluralism,” and such a pluralism has been projected as both acceptable and desirable of what it means to be a Christian within the Methodist tradition. Taken to an extreme, there is a fallacy in this concept. The way it is projected suggests that such a believer can believe almost anything about God, Jesus Christ, and the essential doctrines that relate to salvation. But this is a perversion of Wesley’s idea of the catholic spirit.

Such an uncritical, undemanding, unexamined emphasis on so-called pluralism was the furthest thing from Wesley’s thinking. He was unreserved in his condemnation of what he called “speculative latitudinarianism,” which would be his word for the way many interpret pluralism today. Wesley was rather adamant:

A catholic spirit is not speculative latitudinarianism. It is not an indifference to all opinions: this is the spawn of hell, not the offspring of heaven. This unsettledness of thought, this being “driven to and fro and tossed about with every wind of doctrine'” is a great curse, not a blessing, an irreconcilable  enemy, not a friend, to true Catholicism. A man of a truly catholic spirit has not now his religion to seek. He is fixed as the sun in his judgment concerning the main branches of Christian doctrine. It is true, he is always ready to hear and weigh whatsoever can be offered against his principles; but as this does not show any wavering in his own mind, so neither does it occasion any. He does not halt between two opinions, nor vainly endeavor to blend them into one. Observe this, you who know not what spirit ye are of: who call yourselves men of the catholic spirit, only because you are of a muddy understanding; because your mind is all in a mist; because you have no settled, consistent principles, but are for jumbling all opinions together. Be convinced, that you have quite missed your way; you know not where you are. You think you are got into the very spirit of Christ when, in truth, you are nearer the spirit of Antichrist. Go, first, and learn the first elements of the gospel of Christ, and then shall you learn to be of a truly catholic spirit (Fifty-Three Sermons, “Catholic Spirit,” p. 502).

With that perspective, it is easy to see that nothing is more needed in the church today, certainly in the United States, than a Catholic Spirit.

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