Merger

I wanted to write this with many Wesley quotes and bits from the several newspaper articles, both from Methodists who see the merger of Methodist and Anglican Churches as positive, and several more who grew up Methodist and, ideologically, feel the Methodist Church is rolling over to get a belly-rub from Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. We've just moved, and I've had to leave my articles with the electric blankets and open space of Thurlby Manor. So here are my thoughts without them:

I do not agree with a state-established Church. I believe that Constantine's involvement with Church polity--calling together the Council of Nicaea to reconcile differences between the East and West and consolidate doctrine and giving Christian soldiers Sundays off among other preferential treatment--was the start of Christianity's compromising shift from a radical, illegal community preaching good news to the poor to a well-financed religion that became status quo. Instead of radical people becoming Christians--and being known by their love--everyone became a Christian (at least nominally so), and the radical ones became the odd ones out within Roman culture.

It is with this lens then that I cast a wary eye on recent events in Britain. The Methodist Church, originally an Anglican reform movement, has re-merged into the state-supported Anglican Church.

State-established or not, there are some incredible people within the Church of England, our dear friend Nick Walsh included, and these people are doing amazing things for God, their hearts in the right place; for my mind, though, to be supported by state funds is to be in the state's pocket in some way. Often, the government does things of which the Church should not be supportive--torture is a good example--and if we are serious Christians, then we should be protesting this, or at least dropping down in prayer, wondering how the human spirit could get so low; but if our meal ticket comes from the government, then we are limited in our Christian nonviolent opposition, else our families go hungry. So we bite our lips and grow complacent, and the light of faith that burns within us becomes less recognizable as the spirit of Christ, for we are unequally yoked.

John Wesley, however, never focused on this high criticism. His concerns were more local, and the first time he was barred from preaching within the Church of England--as a student at Oxford--it was for asking, basically, "Are we a Christian nation? Nay!" For all its provocation, his concerns were local: instead of attacking the Church as a whole, he is really asking his listeners, "Are we owning our own faith, or are we status quo Christians? One look at government and we see we're not a Christian nation, and let's not worry about being one. How are we, in this room doing at being Christians?"

So Wesley called for reform, not separation. His focus was on the cobblers, the miners, and everyone else the Church of England was too nervous to reach out toward. Though he was, for most intents and purposes, shoved out of the Church, he never left it, to the chagrin of some of his fellow Methodist leaders. His movement challenged people to better their minds through learning, their bodies through exercise, and their spirits through integrity and a relationship with Christ. He read widely, and his own every-shifting theology drew from all over Christendom, from Eastern Orthodox all the way to Jonathan Edwards, (though throwing out the idea of double predestination wholesale). It was this movement he hoped would be a breath of fresh air to the Anglican Church and re-enliven it. And now, 219 years after Wesley's death and the Methodist leaders' subsequent withdrawal from Anglicanism, English Methodists have come back home.

I think Wesley would have approved of this merger, but I think he'd say we have work to do. Visiting at Emory University, I heard Dr. Rex Matthews say that Methodism very well might have worked better as a reform movement than it did as its own denomination. So now that Churches are reunited, will we shed our ties to government? Will we move out of our old, dead buildings into gymnasiums and let those stone money-pits wither except for the few we turn into museums of a bygone age? If we can do these two things I humbly think we'll be well on our way to re-enlivening Christianity in England.

All I really know is that families are splitting up, reasonable people in government have poorly voted on illegal, personal war, and that lawyers are allowing lawsuits that make doctors, restaurant owners, and every other working person watch their every step with fear. Furthermore, Westerners are ignoring their neighbors because of their TV sets and forgetting the blessings of their bodies, friends, and nature. If that doesn't say that our culture needs the love of God through Christ, nothing else does, and if this merger means one less division within Christianity, then I am for it too.