… can be found here. He calls Methodism to rediscover its original spiritual DNA, rather than hanker for a golden age. Here are some juicy quotes:
I understand God best in missiological terms.
The Church is first and foremost the product of God’s mission, and then participants and partners in God’s mission to restore and renew all things. … Whenever pre-occupation with its own survival takes centre stage then the Church has lost sight of its true nature and purpose.
Consequently when the Church is missionary and evangelistic in this cosmic, wide and wonderful sense it is never more truly being itself, and when it is not, it is never more ‘unlike’ its true self.
My own view is that new ways of being Church are called into being by the Spirit of God whenever existing expressions of Church are unable or unwilling to share effectively in God’s mission in a new time, place and context. God does not shape the mission to the Church, but reshapes Church around God’s mission of reaching out, redeeming and restoring.
we should proceed apace with new ways of being Church, working out our issues as we enable their emergence, rather than kicking them into the long grass until we’ve got it all sorted. And if they are God’s idea then we must continue to take ever more seriously the strategizing and management required to redirect our resources, reconfigure our ministries, and revisit and re-envision what it means to be the People called Methodist.
Methodism was brought into being by the restoring, renewing God with a particular DNA – or better, particular Charisms, – grace gifts of a gracious God – so as to be able to play a particular role in God’s conspiracy of goodness.
My own ‘two-pennyworth’ is that the People called Methodist – lay and ordained, one People in Christ’s ministry – are a movement ‘charismatised’ with an engaging evangelicalism. The roots of some traditions are found in doctrinal disputes; the Wesleyan tradition emerges from an evangelistic imperative. Our ecclesiology is essentially missiological. Our charisms include humbly but clearly sharing Jesus Christ as our Saviour and Lord, by word and action. They include a reliance on the prevenient work of the Spirit, God going before and beyond and urging us to follow. They include living – individually and corporately – lives of social and personal holiness and responsibility, all arising from taking the scriptures with the utmost seriousness. Each of these involves a pragmatic, incarnational engagement rather than an unresponsive, distant disengagement. As a movement, we are created to move, being dynamic rather than static in terms of embodying the hope that is within us.
Steve Wild talks about Methodist evangelism as ‘evangelastic’; that which stretches and alters so as to be what it is. I like this term because it also hints at a lifelong process of conversion and discipleship, an Emmaus road journey, on which Damascus road encounters occasionally break in and lead on.
renewal, true renewal, is fundamentally and ultimately a sovereign work of God. We can’t create it or command God to bring it about. We can’t strategize or scheme so that renewal must come. On the other hand renewal is not totally disconnected from human longing and preparation.
My favourite model of renewal arises from Vatican II and catches this energizing balance between what God alone can do, and what lies with us. The first is to return to the gospel, and more particularly to those words of Jesus which most powerfully articulate ‘who you are’ as a community of Christ; the ‘loud’ words which speak prophetically to you, and relocate you in the gospel tradition.
The second is to return to the founding charisms, to revisit why God raised you up in the first place. Not that renewal comes because you have rediscovered your charisms. Rather that through the challenging process of identifying charisms, then retrieving them, and then reproducing them for today, you rediscover who you are in God’s continuing call. You find yourselves again.
Thirdly, to do all this as you read the signs of the times. To take seriously that you live in world radically different to that of your founding mothers and fathers, and therefore although the charisms remain, how they are expressed and embodied changes.
The continuing call of God to the People called Methodist involves fresh expressions of our DNA, for today. It is more about raising children than making clones.
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