Tuesday, 27 July 2010

• Currently Hello Hurricane By Switchfoot see related

  One for the money, two for the show...

  Well friends, I had the opportunity to attend and also to lead the worship music for the Missouri School of Lay Ministry (we'll say MOSOLM now) last weekend on the Central Methodist University campus in Fayette.  I am pleased to report that the attitude of the learning environment was excellent, the fellowship and worship was awesome, and the overall experience was fantastic.  The experience, the information, and the community were all fantastic, really.  And that's just pretty great to be able to say, considering the weekend's focal point - that God's transforming power in Jesus Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit will not really be accompanied by anything less than those very things: experience, information, and community.  This, I think, was the clear, key message for Missouri’s UMC lay leadership at MOSOLM.

   

  It's nice, sometimes, to have our complex systems reduced to an applicable working model.  For me, it helps me to isolate and come to terms with some of the less-than-transformational moments in my journey.  For instance, I can see now, after having run to the altar under the weight of syrupy music and thick convictions, after having been "saved" on a whim so many times throughout my youth, why those particular experiences never seemed to lead me to much more than a God-image problem.  It wasn’t for lack of much – but what little was lacking was also essential.

   

  I did not lack the information (you have sinned, even if you love Jesus you've still sinned since the last time you were here, sinners need salvation, Jesus does that, you shouldn't take chances, you should come to Jesus again, Jesus will be down here when the song that makes you cry plays).  And I definitely had the experience (I did run down to the altar, I did confess, I did feel the burdens lift, I did feel redeemed, and I certainly did have an encounter with God’s grace).  But I still didn't have the community.  Sure, I had my communities - my youth group at church or my friends at school or my confidants from camp.  But this “let's get salvation and say we have it” philosophy (see here) was, thankfully, never the true opus operandi of my communities.

   

  So, when I left this or that Christian conference, Christian concert, or mega-church sanctuary (or any combination thereof), the community, one which would help me mold what I knew and what I experienced into some sort of a real transformation, was just… gone.  And likewise, these moments of what our Wesleyan theology would term ‘justification’ never became anything more than hiccups in my Christian journey, avenues by which my own doubt and neglect began to distort and diminish my perception of God's transforming power.

   

  At MOSOLM, Rev. Tom Albin, Dean of the Upper Room Ministries, termed what I described above as the "revivalist” model of transformation – basically, that experience and information are all that is needed for transformation.  I will hereby vouch that this is not enough.  It may be enough to work a person up and elevate his or her spirit, and it may even be enough to awaken a slumbering longing for God, but without community, it is incomplete.

   

  If the revivalist model of transformation is incomplete, so, too is the "modernist" model of transformation, which might say that good and true information alone is enough for transformation.  Again, I will vouch, this is definitely not enough.  If it were, all I'd really need to do is have a serious conversation with several people who truly trust me and tell them that God is love, that Jesus is alive, and that the Holy Spirit is at work even now, and they'd all be on-board, 100 percent.  It’s just that simple.  Let me know if you have any luck with that one!

   

  No, when I go back in my mind and recognize the truly formative moments of my adoption into the Kingdom of God, they are each accompanied by the trio Tom relayed to us as the “methodist” model of transformation – where experience, information, and community are the essentials for transformation.

   

  This trio, for me, is the fall youth retreat with Campbell UMC where I fell in love with the creator God after watching Leanne Thixton (now Donaldson) passionately interpret the Genesis creation poem, a story I already thought I knew, in an amazing, immersive dance.  This was 13 years ago, and I am to this day shaped by her deep understanding and display of a God who creates and recreates me.  Why?  Because I continued then and continue now to be in community with those who remind me often that I was created down to the details and am loved through and through.  Experience – information – community.

   

  This trio is the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter at GWU, where the leaders wouldn’t relent when it came to discipleship – insisting that following Jesus was not for the faint of heart, that the scriptures were alive and that God had something very relevant to say to all of us about life and love and purpose.  I watched transformation happen before my very eyes as my friends came in with degrees and dollar signs in focus and left with Jesus in focus, entering fields of ministry and service that most people never even consider when they come to a school like GWU. 

   

  And like them, I was also transformed.  One day, the good news according to Mark came alive and Jesus said “follow me now, not later,” and I found myself colliding with God’s calling on my life – worship… music… ministry.  Not for the faint of heart, right?  This crazy Kingdom business prompted me to leave GWU behind, which meant that some plans had to be laid down for all of us.  Still, the fellowship let me go like families should let each other go, nurturing and encouraging me the whole way, even after I was gone, and even still today.  Experience – information – community.

   

  This trio is the Campbell UMC of today, where I’ve watched an entire congregation come alive as we’ve sought together a deep understanding what it means to be a disciple of Jesus in a historic United Methodist church.  In the process, we are walking right across the choppy waters of polls and surveys and news shows and all of the other voices that would like to tell us how our churches are going to drown.

   

  We’ve learned that we’re to be connectional – aware that we are lifting up real, live-action brothers and sisters here, there, and everywhere with our gifts and our service and our prayers and our witness.  We’ve learned that we’re to be outwardly focused –concerned with what is going on in the community around us, not content on keeping to ourselves the gifts of grace and love and peace that we tend to encounter on Sunday or Wednesday.  We’ve learned that we’re to be fiscally mindful – tuned in to what we’re doing and imagining what God could do with our resources, both personally and as a body, here in the epicenter of global wealth.  And so, transformation is happening now, this very day, as what we’ve learned and what we’ve experienced at Campbell is strengthened by a collective, Spiritual yearning to keep… moving… forward.

   

  Experience – information – community.  It’s not another three-step program, or some action plan to increase our program participation or membership numbers.  It’s just a Methodist framework for understanding God’s transforming power.  It is a framework we can use in our committee and team meetings, where we can ask: How am I being transformed?  How are we being transformed?  Where have we experienced transformation this day, week, month, year?  Where is transformation not happening?  Are we OK with it not happening?

   

  These are important questions, because we’re just not going to be effective if we’re trying to lead people where we haven’t been ourselves.  If, as a global church, we’re all about “making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world,” but we aren’t seeing, or maybe just aren’t choosing to be aware of the transformation (or lack thereof) locally in our lives, our teams, our committees, and our congregations… friends, we’re bust!  How do we envision the church as Christ’s partner in the world, bringing poverty and addiction and slavery to an end, if we are not even attuned to what personal transformation looks like?  I’m tired of not asking these questions!  I'm tired of gathering as if we've arrived when we don't really even know where we've been!

   

  Following up on a footnote in Rev. Albin’s notes at MOSOLM, I read where John Wesley once said, in a sermon entitled The Nature of Enthusiasm, “Beware of imagining you shall obtain the end without using the means conducive to it. God can give the end without any means at all; but you have no reason to think He will. Therefore constantly and carefully use all those means which He has appointed to be the ordinary channels of His grace.”  Did you hear it?  God can transform us without us – but more than likely God would rather we be carefully involved in the process.  Are we involved?  Are we carefully involved?

   

  I’m probably wrong, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the ‘conducive means’ Wesley spoke of could be simplified for us today in the transformational trio I’ve been writing about – experience, information, and community – so that, where we see we have all three, we might do pretty well to ramp up our awareness of God’s transforming power, we might do even better to get carefully involved in the process, and then maybe – just maybe – we might risk it all to imagine the possibilities…
  
  

  --kory // www.korywilcox.com

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