The Catechism Lesson, by Jules-Alexis Meunier

My new column in the United Methodist Reporter is on the practice of confirmation.

Confirmation is one of those practices that has enormous formative potential for youth. Sometimes churches take confirmation very seriously. When that happens, confirmation does a lot of work in helping to initiate adolescents into a mature form of discipleship.

But all too often, confirmation is looked upon as a burden—one of those practices we feel obligated to do but to which people don’t really want to commit themselves fully. The results are predictable: confirmation becomes a rite of passage with no real substance underneath. Churches still practice it because of the vague sense that it is important, but no one (pastors, parents, or children) take it seriously as the chief avenue of adolescent Christian formation.

I’ll offer a rather extreme example of the latter, which is an anecdote I share in my column. I know a pastor who discovered upon arriving at a new appointment that all the children in the church from the second grade and up had been confirmed. He interviewed the sixth graders to see what they had learned from their ‘process.’ He found that none of them were familiar with even basic terminology from the Christian tradition (like “Trinity”) or Methodism (like “John Wesley”). They had apparently gone through a confirmation liturgy one Sunday, but it wasn’t clear to my friend whether there had been any class sessions at all. My friend refused to speculate much on what had happened — perhaps out of respect for the congregation—but it sounds to me almost as if his predecessor was looking to pad membership stats on a charge conference report one year.

If confirmation becomes simply an empty ritual performed once a year—form with no content—then we are much better off simply not doing it at all. The danger of having a confirmation service with no actual catechesis is that we’ll communicate the message to youth that there is something spiritually beneficial in just going through the motions. Clearly, that is not the case.

On the other hand, if we actually invest time and energy into making confirmation a central, vital part of our ministry with adolescents, then the result could be important indeed. Sarah Arthur has written about just such an approach with confirmation in the chapter she contributed to Generation Rising: A Future with Hope for the United Methodist Church. She argues that it takes an investment by an entire congregation to reach confirmation’s full potential.  The church has to see confirmation as central to what it is trying to do with youth. And along with that, Arthur suggests that confirmation should be seen as a way to integrate youth into the full range of the church’s ministry (bucking the tendency to treat youth ministry as some semi-independent operation that the rest of the church doesn’t have anything to do with).

We’re all well aware of the challenges of ministry with teenagers and young adults. But we tend to make that ministry more difficult than it has to be by treating people in those age groups as if they don’t want to be a part of the larger church. What if the church was what they desperately wanted and needed, it was just that the developmental stages they were experiencing in life made everything in their lives more difficult? I suspect that to be the case. And while confirmation is not a cure-all for all problems in youth and young adult ministry, it is an important way to ground teenage boys and girls into the life of the church at a crucial point.

But all this requires confirmation to be a truly catechetical, truly formational process. That will take a real commitment by the congregation to achieve. But you know what? Our kids are worth it.

I am finding fatherhood to be a singularly remarkable experience.

Like many new parents, I’ve experienced the wonder at new life, the thankfulness for the blessings of God and the intense love for a child of my own making.

But one of the most remarkable parts of all of it is in witnessing the relationship of mother and baby. Never was this impressed upon me more than when I saw Alice and Emily together in the days and weeks after Alice’s birth.

From conception to birth, and from birth to the present day, Alice has relied on her mom for everything she needs. In the broad sense, all life is a gift from God. But in the narrower and even biological sense, life is a gift that a mother gives her child.

To be present at each stage along the way is to bear witness to this astounding reality. Human babies are among the most helpless of all God’s creatures, both at birth and for a long time afterward. Without the enormous investment of the mother’s love, they simply couldn’t survive.

I’m not trying to diminish my own role in Alice’s life, or any father’s role in the life of his child. But I am saying that the order of creation puts mothers in a unique place with respect to the welfare of their children. For life and for the sustenance that life requires, the mother’s role is indispensable.

Necessary to faith

This recognition can give us a key insight into our connection to the church. We too often tend to see the church in functional terms: as a voluntary association, helpful to the Christian life in a variety of practical and spiritual ways but not absolutely necessary to our faith.

But the functional view of the church is a deep error, best seen when we look at how the church is understood as our mother in Scripture and tradition. In fact, the motherhood of the church is one of the most needed Christian teachings we should seek to better understand in the present.

The New Testament sees the church as the “New Jerusalem” that God is establishing to serve as the home for all his people. The Apostle Paul speaks of the church in this way when he says that, whereas those still under the law are in chains, “the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother” (Galatians 4:26).

The church’s motherhood is established first because the church is the bride of Jesus Christ. So in Revelation, John of Patmos tells us, “I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2).

We experience the church’s motherhood in our own lives first through baptism. Our confession about baptism is that it is a sign of new birth, which comes through water and the Holy Spirit. Baptism is a birth that comes through a sacrament of the church, so that the church is the mother of all Christian men and women.

Feeding her children

The early church fathers recognized the significance of the church as mother in a way we often do not. St. Augustine, for instance, writes that “those born of [the] flesh are not Christians, but become such afterwards through the motherhood of the Church.”

But the motherhood of the church extends beyond the sacrament of baptism as well. Just as a mother feeds her newborn baby by her own body, the church feeds her children through Scripture, prayer and especially through Holy Communion.

Life is given to us through our baptism, and the sustenance that life requires thereafter is given through the ministry of the church throughout our earthly sojourn.

If we reflect on the church as the mother who gives us birth and nurtures us as we travel the journey of our lives, we can begin to reverse the long and unfortunate trend to see the church as an optional part of our faith. It is the church that gives us the food of salvation.

That conviction seems especially appropriate now, and indeed at all times for Christians who await the coming of Jesus Christ, who is himself the bridegroom and who shows us the way to the New Jerusalem.

[Originally appeared in the United Methodist Reporter on November 24, 2010. The current form has been slightly altered from the original. Used by permission.]

Alice Thompson

The faith of a child is marvelous.

My daughter Alice is 2 1/2 years old. We usually leave the house together in the morning — she to daycare and I to work. This morning, Alice walked into the kitchen holding a baby doll wrapped in a little blanket. “Look!” she said. “It’s the baby Jesus.”

“Oh,” I said, “I see.”

“Yeah,” she said. “We’re gonna put him in the manger.”

I smiled down at her. “That’s right, isn’t it? Because there’s no room for him in the inn.” Then I went off to hunt her socks and shoes while she cradled the baby doll and spoke softly to it.

When I got back she was in the laundry room by the back door. She was sitting down on the floor still holding the baby doll. “Come on, Alice,” I said. “Time to go.”

She looked up at me sharply. “I’m Mary,” she said. “And you’re Joseph.”

“Oh! Okay,” I said. “Then let’s go, Mary.”

I must have look startled when she scolded me. Because when I picked her up she looked at me sympathetically and said, “I love you, Joseph.”

“I love you too, Mary,” I replied. (Alice pronounces ‘Joseph” something like “Jofuff,” which makes the whole thing better.)

We went out to the car then. And during the ride into town, she kept calling me Joseph and referring to herself as Mary. When we got to her daycare, I asked her if she wanted to leave the baby Jesus in the car. But she wouldn’t have any of it. “No,” she said. “Maybe I can share Jesus with my friends, and then when they’re done they can give him back to me.”

I could spend days waxing on about what I think about our time together this morning. But let me resist and just offer this instead:

“At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven’” (Matthew 18:1-4).

Seedbed is a multi-purpose publisher that offers ministry resources and spiritual formation tools through a variety of venues: online articles, sponsored blogs, print books, and an innovative “Seven Minute Seminary” series that offers teaching vignettes by seminary professors. The breadth of what J.D. Walt (the “chief sower”) and his staff are doing is really impressive. Seedbed offers its resources in new and old forms of media, but it is clearly a web-driven enterprise and in that sense represents something new for the Wesleyan world.

You’ve got to realize what a remarkable thing the development of Seedbed represents. In the Wesleyan/Methodist world, publishing enterprises are not growing. They’re contracting. So the fact that Methodist folk can look forward to a completely new source of print and digital media—and one that has adopted a self-consciously Wesleyan ethos—is highly encouraging.

In my view, I think Seedbed is at the cutting edge of providing Wesleyan resources for today’s church. In a time when other traditional publishing venues seem to be contracting dramatically, it is nice to see an organization like Seedbed bucking the trend. It is growing and growing in the right way: by publishing print, online, and digital media with a distinctly Wesleyan accent. The church is hungry for resources of real spiritual substance, and I think Seedbed is going to be the main avenue for those kinds of resources to reach individuals and congregations.

So I’d encourage you to check out what the folks over there are doing. The Seedbed website is rapidly developing. I’ve only been following it for a few months, but during that time it has expanded in terms of resources and scope. The ‘look and feel’ is generally pleasing and the site is easy to navigate.

And yes, I’ll admit that there is a little bit of self-interest in all of this for me. I’ve recently come to an agreement with Seedbed to write a book on the means of grace in the practice of Christian discipleship. I’ll start work on the manuscript this summer with an anticipated release date of sometime in 2014. This is a book that will be geared specifically for congregational use. And in it, I hope to make one very important part of the Wesleyan tradition accessible for contemporary readers.

I’ll post plenty of updates on the book in the coming months. Until then, check out Seedbed and let them know what you think.

St. Augustine of Hippo

I had the pleasure this semester of reading theology with St. Augustine and with my students. I teach a seminar course on early church history. In it, we spend a couple of weeks reading through Augustine’s Confessions. It’s a remarkable book—one about which I commented on Twitter that I think it is perhaps the best thing to read on the Christian faith outside of Scripture itself. The Confessions is so theologically rich I discover something new every time I work through it.

For many laypeople, the idea of reading theology that is not Scripture probably seems foreign. Isn’t “theology” something that trained academics and pastors read? Actually, I think the Confessions is a wonderful example of how the best theology can find an audience amongst the church at large. I don’t mean that anyone can pick up a text like Confessions and read it as easily as the latest James Patterson novel. But it certainly is readable, and particularly so for a lay audience that is committed to reading together as a group and preferably under the guidance of someone (like a pastor) who has read it before.

The gifts one can receive from diving into Augustine are many and profound. The Confessions is an autobiographical work, of course, but Augustine writes it in such a way that its universal character is evident. Take, for instance, a passage I like to read with my students from Book IV. Augustine narrates the death of an unnamed friend of his in his hometown of Thagaste. This friend was so dear to him that he describes the two of them as “one soul in two bodies.” When the other young man dies, Augustine says that he was devastated. “My heart was utterly darkened by this sorrow,” he says, “And everywhere I looked I saw death.”

Augustine goes on to describe his grieving, which continues for a long time unabated. At the time of his friend’s death, he had recently been baptized. Augustine—who was not a believer at this time—did not understand the significance of his friend’s baptism; in misunderstanding his friend’s faith, he also misunderstood his friend’s death as well. As his description of grief goes on, it becomes clear that a large part of Augustine’s pain comes through the fundamental error of loving his friend as if he would last forever. His friend’s life was transient—as all our lives are—and Augustine had loved him as if he were really permanent. This misdirected love is only compounded by Augustine’s grief, which in the absence of faith in Jesus Christ has nowhere really to go. “I fretted, sighed, wept, tormented myself, and took neither rest nor counsel,” Augustine tells us, “for I was dragging around my torn and bloody soul. It was impatient of my dragging it around, and yet I could not find a place to lay it down.” His description is one of complete misery.

The Augustine of later years looks back on this episode and offers a prayer that captures how we ought rightly to love other people: “Blessed is he who loves thee,” Augustine says, “and who loves his friend in thee, and his enemy also, for thy sake; for he alone loses none dear to him, if all are dear in Him who cannot be lost.” Here Augustine begins to show how the only love which cannot end in a morass of endless grief is a love that is grounded in God. A love that ends in a mortal creature is sure to meet disaster, for the creature is bound to die. But those who die in God, and who are loved in God, are not loved in vain. Moreover, the grief that comes from the loss of such a one is not a grief that will ultimately consume us, for it is a grief that will be met by the healing grace of Jesus Christ.

As he moves the episode towards a conclusion, Augustine’s description of the power of life in Jesus Christ over the pernicious enemy of death reaches the level of the sublime. He counsels the lost sinner, “Seek what you seek; but remember that it is not where you seek it. You seek for a blessed life in the land of death. It is not there. For how can there be a blessed life where life itself is not?”

Into this death-dealing conundrum, Augustine’s response is pure gospel: “But our very Life came down to earth and bore our death, and slew it with the very abundance of his own life.” This is none other than Christ the Lord, who for our sake “ran through the world, crying out by words, deeds, death, life, descent, ascension—crying aloud to us to return to him.” Our Lamb has conquered.

And if we should be tempted to fret that we do not live during the earthly life of Jesus, Augustine says to us, “He departed from our sight that we might return to our hearts and find him there. For he left us, and behold, he is here.” For Jesus Christ is the Son of God; not a lowly prophet anointed by God, but rather God Himself. “He could not be with us long, yet he did not leave us. He went back to the place that he had never left, for ‘the world was made by him.’”

There is great comfort for Augustine that the same God who has created the world is the God into whom his friend was baptized, and the same God to whom he can now call out with the full assurance of faith. And there should be comfort in that for us, too. “In this world he was,” Augustine says, “and into this world he came, to save sinners.” Hallelujah! we might cry, with the bishop of Hippo. And we might join him, too, when he says, “To him my soul confesses, and he heals it, because it had sinned against him.”

This is theology at its finest. It is a deep and profound reflection on the gospel, made present to us through the wisdom and faith of this greatest father of the early church.

Read him and discover the reading to be a true means of grace.

It has taken some time to finish out various parts of the site since I first launched it. But from time to time I carve out the space needed to do some work to it. Sometimes that is fixing things that don’t seem to work well. And sometimes it is adding new material.

For instance, one area I’ve added quite a bit lately is in my writing archive. You can access that here. I write regularly for a couple of newspapers: the United Methodist Reporter and the Arkansas United Methodist. Since my columns for those periodicals appear online, it is easy to link to them from here. I also write articles and essays for popular-level magazines from time to time, and so I link to those where I can as well.

As an academic, I also do a lot of writing for academic journals. Happily, most academic journals are undergoing a process of becoming ‘open source,’ which means that you can access their contents online fairly easily without having to pay a pricey subscription to the print edition. I’ve now uploaded copies of my journal articles to this site, which you can find here. I also have two new academic-level articles coming out later this year (in the Asbury Journal and Methodist History), so I’ll be adding those to the site as soon as they appear.

One other area that I’ve tried to update more regularly has been my speaking schedule. I now get more invitations than I can honor — a good problem to have, of course, but one that makes me wish I had unlimited time and energy to travel and speak in local churches and at conferences. I have a couple of gigs in the works for the late summer and fall, and I’ll add those when the details become clear. But for churches and other groups interested in hearing me present on some aspect of Wesleyan theology, discipleship, etc., I am trying to maintain the speaking schedule up-to-date so they can use it as a reference tool for what I’ve got on the horizon.

Thanks to so many of you who have e-mailed and sent messages directly through the site to comment on things you like (or would like to see). I appreciate my readers and the feedback they offer, and I marvel at the way in which this form of social media allows me to reach so many people I would not be able to do otherwise.

Then there’s another part of me that is drawn to more academic work. It is my vocation as a teacher that I’ve followed primarily the past few years, as I have pursued a doctorate in theology and joined the faculty of Memphis Theological Seminary in Memphis, Tennessee. Everyday, I get to work with seminary students who are preparing for ordination and a lifetime of service in Christ’s church. That is a rare gift, and it is one that I relish. I am also profoundly drawn to the study of the Christian tradition, and I love to research and write in the area of my specialty, Wesleyan theology and Methodist history.

When my family and I moved back to Arkansas from North Carolina in 2011, my bishop asked that I serve as the Wesley Scholar for the Arkansas Annual Conference. This is a kind of “canon theologian” position, where I am called upon to consult, write, and speak in a variety of venues as a way to help resource the work of the conference through my expertise in the Wesleyan tradition. It has been fascinating work, which has caused me to have to think hard every single week about why and how the work I do as an academic is really vital to the church and its practical ministry.

Now I am moving into a new position that is going to plant me even more firmly with one foot in the academy and one in the church. I have accepted a position as minister of discipleship at Marion United Methodist Church in Marion, AR, where my family and I have been active since the fall of 2011. This is very “part time,” and I will continue to work primarily as a seminary professor. But the congregation and its pastor, the Rev. Tom Letchworth, have seen a need that they think I can fill: namely, to help the church think programmatically about how to form committed Christian disciples who love God and neighbor in all that they do. I will be able to help develop curriculum materials and ministry initiatives, in addition to teaching within the congregation. Marion is a growing church with a lot of great stuff going on, and I am very excited to be joining the staff.

John Wesley himself used to say that he was interested in “practical divinity,” which meant the kind of theological work aimed at the practice of faith, that would intersect with the real lives of men and women. I am going to be able to commit myself fully to that kind of work at our church in Marion, which is very exciting!

It’s a word that makes one think of mist lifting off a lake in the morning. Or the heat of day gradually giving way to the cool of evening.

It’s also a word that John Wesley uses when he wants to talk about the danger of losing a once vital faith, over time, as the pressures and trials of life take their toll.

When I first came across the concept of dissipation to describe how faith can be lost (and lost even without meaning to do so), it was a real revelation to me. Dissipation helps to explain a spiritual dilemma: namely, how it is possible that a faith once received may not remain as strong as it does in the beginning. We continue to live in a broken world, and even if we find ourselves transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit, the nature of life in the present means that we will experience challenges to keeping on the path of faith.

Wesley puts it this way in his sermon, “On Dissipation” – “We are encompassed on all sides with persons and things that tend to draw us from our centre. Indeed, every creature, if we are not continually on our guard, will draw us from our Creator. The whole visible world, all we see, hear, or touch, all the objects either of our senses or understanding, have a tendency to dissipate our thoughts from the invisible world, and to distract our minds from attending to him who is both the author and end of our being.”

I write on the spiritual issue of dissipation in my new column for the Arkansas United Methodist newspaper. I tend to think that pastors becoming more familiar with this concept can aid in the pastoral care of their congregations. It is a good example where learning the doctrinal content of a solid Wesleyan practical theology can make a real difference in ministry.

In Mommy Time, Sarah draws on her recent experience with motherhood and child-rearing. She and her husband Tom (a Methodist pastor) have a son named Micah. In between the diaper changes and nighttime feedings, Sarah had the presence of mind in her child’s early months to really reflect on the way in which motherhood and faith and the biblical witness are deeply intertwined.

I admit that I sometimes hesitate to pick up devotional books. They can tend to be overly-sentimental, almost like reading the Bible through the lens of a Hallmark card. But that ain’t Mommy Time. This is a remarkable set of reflections on Scripture that mixes together real biblical insight, reflections on church history and Christian literature, and the often earthy experience of parenting. It’s the first book of devos I’ve read that manages to draw on the martyrdoms of early Christian mothers Perpetua and Felicitas as models for contemporary life (yes, you read that sentence correctly). Sarah also writes in a deeply moving way about introducing her newborn son to her 100 year old grandfather, and about the profound experience of reading Psalm 139 in the light of being pregnant (“I was woven together in the dark of the womb…”).

Sarah Arthur

What Mommy Time represents is the considered reflection of a gifted writer who has put her writing ability and theological insight into the service of daily life & faith. There’s a lot here to offer any parent. I’m not a new mommy (obviously), but my wife and I did manage to have three kids in the past 2 1/2 years. So I know a little something about recent Daddyhood. I found myself reading the devotionals and nodding, connecting over and over with Sarah’s often humorous and always relevant stories about trying to understand parenting in the light of Christian faith.

Check out this book. Now for some background:

Sarah has served in the past as a youth minister and she’s written a number of popular books, including Walking with Bilbo and The God-Hungry Imagination. I know Sarah and her husband, Tom, from our days at Duke Divinity School. A couple of years ago she collaborated with me on the project that resulted in Generation Rising: A Future with Hope for the United Methodist Church. Sarah wrote a chapter on youth ministry for the book where she argued for the need for a robust practice of confirmation in the life of the local church–a ministry that has the potential to be hugely formational for youth but which is often not treated seriously enough. For a review by me of Sarah’s book, At the Still Point, check out this link. You can find her personal website here.

I mention this because as of this week, I’m back on the job. My new column space (which we’re calling “Faith in Action”) is ready to go. The first installment of this renewed work with the Reporter is a look at the visibility of the Wesleyan message in the larger culture. I’ll be writing monthly for the Reporter, including the quarterly column I write for the Arkansas United Methodist newspaper. Of course, this blog will serve as a clearing house for those other outlets and I’ll always post here to let me regular readers know when I’ve got something in another venue.

My new column for the Reporter is one looking at the way in which Wesleyans seem to lag behind some other groups in making their voices heard broadly. This is about a conversation that originated on Facebook and Twitter, and it is now crossing a variety of social media. You can follow some of it by going to #andcanitbe on Twitter. And I’d encourage you to follow me as well @andrew72450.

I’m grateful for the optimism of others about what Wesleyan theologians might be able to do if we put our noses to the collective grindstone. As always, your thoughts and feedback are welcome.

Update: Jeremy Smith of the Hacking Christianity blog has written a critique of my new column, which is worth reading along with the resulting comments.