Author: al
Posted: 2007-10-22 18:03:41
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Shi'a Methodist
I have all but stopped going to church over the summer. For the past six years we spent more weekends two hours away with my wife's parents than we did at our own home. That was a great arrangement. There is a church in that town that we loved, and we got to spend an appropriately proportioned time being something besides a nuclear family.
It has been a busy summer though, and without even trying, our three or so trips south each month have dried up to one. For a month in late spring, this just meant that we spent a few extra Sundays in a city church. City Church is a funny moniker for this particular church. It is as far out of town as I am willing to go for just about anything, and its average attendance and overall size is something like a quarter of Country Church. Still, the place reeks of the particular problems facing Methodism in the West. Western cities are dangerously balkanized. Churches, for example, tend to be either fundamentalist, or off the charts fruity. Since Methodism is relatively incompatible with fundamentalism (I dare you to quote Wesley to a fundamentalist), fruity tends to be the path of least resistance.
I searched long and hard for an adjective other than fruity, but none came to me. It is a pejorative term, but it is so fitting too. These churches bend over backwards to avoid convicting the congregation or anyone else for that matter. There are two possible sermons at these churches. One is a feel-good sermon. The other is a condemnation of some government practice. It is unfair to imply that only city churches are like this. Truth be told, Country Church has succumb to this phenomenon as well. Perhaps it is a probabilities game, and a church that large cannot avoid a preacher like that forever.
I suppose that is why it has been ever more difficult to drag myself to church on the few weekends that we are in the country. Heresies are cyclical. We beat them down for a while, then get comfortable, and when we aren't looking they spring back up. If I were more observant, I could tell you which years heterodoxy was en vogue at the OST. As it stands I can only give the vague time line that says the batch of preachers that have retired in the last five years or so are the last Methodist clergy that you will see for a while that fit my ideal.
This ideal is for the most part, just a step back in time. It is the kind of preacher that most every church should have. These people are Shi'a Methodists. They are what our denomination once was. I feel like a traitor even coining that term though, for once I have laid out the criteria for a Shi'a Methodist, you will see that there really is no such thing as a Methodist that is not Shi'a. Kind of like how Chesterton said that there is no such thing as Christianity that is not corybantic.
A Shi'a Methodist believe in the Trinity. This simple thing alone probably negates half of the ordained clergy in Idaho from eligibility. It is so crucial though. It is not good for God to be alone, at least not in our minds. If he is, then he is quickly reduced to a mechanistic god, harsh and unyielding to strict rules like the Mormons believe, or he is some esoteric “Higher Power” that just wafts through the universe and is best experienced in a sunrise or sunset as so many feel-good sermons in our own churches pretend. Through Christ, God is a personal god. He is there to deal with us on whatever level we are on. Our trifling concerns are his as well. Most importantly, he is there to perfect us. He is what makes us complete.
Which brings me to the second criteria for a Shi'a Methodist. You must believe, as Wesley did, in the possibility of Christian Perfection. Believe it, and shout it. Maybe I missed the “Summer of loving God” over my absence this season, but I haven't heard a sermon, or even a mention of what it is to love God with all of your heart in years from a Methodist. It seems like we don't even try to help people to this point anymore. Do we even try to get anyone to any point anymore? Our clergy have abandoned their authority to help change our lives almost altogether.
Shi'a Methodist clergy do no resent or throw away their authority. The best, most amazing preacher I have ever known was completely unapproachable. To this day I am still certain that he hated me. Yet I still daydream about him coming into my life and helping me through my issues. That is the kind of authority he had, embraced, and used. I miss you Keith. The preacher at Country Church is the nicest, most approachable guy I have ever met. I have yet to take something applicable away from one of his sermons. Many times I have wanted to confront him about perceived fallacies that I have heard him say from the pulpit, but I lose my nerve every time. I am a very mean guy, but even I won't beat a puppy. City Church fares no better. The pastor there seems to want to be my peer. A pastor is a spiritual leader, not a peer. Peers are a dime-a-dozen, and I have more than I want already.
Next, and this just about makes my head explode to even have to mention it, a Shi'a Methodist preacher continues the fine Wesleyan tradition of moving on. These decades long appointments have got to end. Preachers were meant to travel. Christ traveled. Paul traveled. Wesley traveled. Even in my childhood as a fledgling Methodist, preachers rarely stayed at a church for more than a few years. Let's be honest, after five years anyone will have said all that they can possibly say to a congregation. Whatever good or ill you can work will already have been done several times over. There is a beautiful philosophy in Methodism in that the church and preacher are separate things. Neither defines the other. The preacher can feel free to convict the church because, hey, they're moving on somewhere else soon. Likewise, the church does things for itself and does not become reliant on the preacher as a crutch to get anything accomplished. I am looking at you City Church.
In short, a Shi'a Methodist, whether clergy or layman, does not disregard tradition. Throwing away tradition is the ultimate act of pride. In effect, you are saying that you think you know more than two thousand years of Christians put together. That thought is where heresy is born. We are raising a brood of those heresies, and as Lewis once wrote when dealing with one of the most difficult passages in the bible, it is high time we dashed the little bastards against the rocks.
That is what my new society of Shi'a Methodists intends to do. |
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