Post-Prop 8, California United Methodist Bishop Promotes “Ecumenical” End-Run Around Same-Sex Union Ban

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Bishop Warner-Brown, California-Nevada Annual Conference, Institute on Religion and Democracy, John Lomperis, LGBT, marriage, sexuality, United Methodist

Bishop Warner Brown of the United Methodist Church (Photo credit: Ronny Perry / United Methodist News Service)

By John Lomperis (@JohnLomperis)

Yet again, a Western Jurisdiction bishop is using his position (subsidized by the other four U.S. regions of the United Methodist Church) to promote an end-run around established church policies and biblical teaching on sexual morality.

Bishop Warner Brown presides over the California-Nevada Conference, which encompasses the northern portions of those two states. After the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision effectively allowing the legal redefinition of marriage in California to encompass same-sex pairings, Bishop Brown released a public response later the same day.

The focus of Bishop Brown’s statement is “what this ruling means for United Methodism, and specifically the California-Nevada Annual Conference.” He does not use this opportunity to issue a strongly worded, very explicit endorsement and celebration of this landmark victory for gay-rights advocates. He does remind readers of our denominational rules prohibiting the blessing of same-sex unions and the ordination of “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals,” and notes that all United Methodist clergy have covenantally committed themselves to following our democratically established denominational rules, even when they may personally disagree. He also admits that the California-Nevada Conference includes members with a range of views on such issues, in refreshing contrast to how the oppressively dominant heterodox faction there has spoken and acted as if the evangelical United Methodists in the conference do not exist.

But the framing and trajectory of the statement leaves little doubt about Bishop Brown’s own liberal views on sexuality, juxtaposing today’s struggle for gay rights with yesteryear’s struggle for civil rights. The bishop also avoids any mention of the most directly relevant official United Methodist position, our “support [for] laws in civil society that define marriage as the union of one man and one woman,” which IRD President Mark Tooley submitted into the Book of Discipline at the 2004 General Conference and about which our U.S. United Methodist bishops and other church officials have remained steadfastly silent for nine years.

Bishop Brown even uses sloppy language suggesting that all those created in God’s image (i.e., all human beings) are “God’s children.” While all people are certainly preciously loved by their Creator, and made in His image, the New Testament describes “children of God” as persons who have by grace come to faith in Him.

To his credit, Bishop Brown does not join recent dissident calls for United Methodist clergy to personally perform same-sex union services in defiance of church law. But for United Methodist clergy asked to lead such ceremonies, he “encourage[s] pastors to reach out to their ecumenical partners” and help the same-sex partners in question find clergy of another faith community to wed them.

Bishop Warner calls non-Methodist clergy offering same-sex blessings for homosexual partners a form of “pastoral care.” Since the bishop apparently does not share the church’s view that sex outside of marriage between husband and wife is inherently sinful, he does not counsel encouragement of repentance, self-denial, and taking up one’s cross to follow Christ as the proper form of “pastoral care.”

I realize that some may see relative value in such nudging of heterodox clergy in a slightly different direction than very direct defiance of United Methodist Church law. But the Brown Proposal has the same moral consistency as saying that it would be wrong for me to sell drugs to someone who wanted them but it would also be a moral obligation for me to help them find a willing drug dealer.

(I understand that many self-identified gay and lesbian people find such an analogy to be offensive, and it is not my intention to hurt anyone’s feelings. But it is worth pressing the question of why this is offensive. If you really listen to the rhetoric of pro-homosexuality activists in our denomination, you will notice that the outrage expressed against listing homosexual practice alongside other sins sounds like they are saying, “How DARE you compare us to THOSE people??! THOSE people are SINNERS, and thus so obviously inferior to us!” But anyone who thinks of sinners as a category of other people either does not understand or does not believe in the Gospel at the most basic level, as we are all sinners equally needing God’s constant grace.)

Bishop Warner portrays the introduction of legally recognized same-sex marriage as a new situation for ministry in the conference, since now pastors may be approached by same-sex couples seeking to be married. But such changes in civil law change nothing about the biblical or church-law requirements for United Methodist ministers. As far as the church is concerned, all United Methodist ministers and congregations asked to conduct or host “[c]eremonies that celebrate homosexual unions” (prohibited by Discipline ¶341.6) face the same situation, regardless of whatever sort of legal status the civil authorities may or may not bestow on such a union. Attempts to pretend otherwise are ploys of pro-homosexuality advocates to pressure the church to reconsider its alignment with biblical teaching.

Bishop Warner oddly asserts that that his exhortation to seek ecumenical assistance in working around clear biblical and United Methodist teaching is something that he “must” do. But he vowed in his ordination and consecration fully to uphold United Methodist belief and practice.

Sadly, Bishop Brown is not alone. Too many United Methodist bishops, for the most part, have shown little evidence of courage in promoting accountability to biblical teaching and our covenantal church policies among themselves. In fact, they unanimously elected Brown as the Council of Bishops president, for a two-year term beginning next year.

In related news, in the past year of Bishop Brown’s leadership, congregations in the California-Nevada Conference saw attendance drop by a whopping 9.2 percent.

Missional United Methodism for the 21st Century – Part 4 of 6: Personal Conversion

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California-Pacific Conference, Christ, John Lomperis, Methodism, salvation, United Methodist Church

It is quite ironic that the UM renewal event was held in a room with an adjacent office that highlights the very problem facing the denomination.

The following remarks were delivered by UMAction Director John Lomperis on June 15 at the annual lunch of Cal-Pac Renewal, the evangelical renewal caucus within the California-Pacific Conference of the United Methodist Church.

Emphasis on conversion: a life-transforming experience of repentance, trusting in Christ alone, and becoming disciples.

Article VII of the EUB Confession of Faith declares that “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God,” which echoes Jesus telling Nicodemus in John 3:3 that “no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.”

Whether or not we go to church or were born into a Christian family, every single one of us has the personal responsibility of responding to God’s call by repenting of our sin, trusting in Christ alone for our salvation, and beginning a new life of discipleship.

Whether or not you can point to the exact date you were saved, if you are truly a “new creation,” then there had to have been a definitive moment in which God transformed you from being a “child of the devil” to being an adopted “child of God,” to use the stark language of 1 John 3:10.

Meanwhile, all around us, people are dying in their sins, having never known the new life God wanted for them.

What could be a more important priority than God’s work of saving those who are perishing?

But as United Methodist evangelicals, do we really believe what we say we believe about this? How is this reflected in our priorities of time and money, as individuals, families, and congregations?

How do our congregations’ cultures spur Christians on to obey the Great Commission?  After the 2008 General Conference added witnessing as part of the sixth United Methodist membership vow, has your church accordingly updated the vows you have new members make?

How about the rest of the things to which we devote our time and resources?

My own United Methodist pastor has this great little sign on his desk which simply asks, “How will this make disciples?” We need to be asking that regularly of every event, program, and tradition in our churches. And if there is some activity for which we cannot answer this question, then it may be time to have the courage to stop diverting the church’s resources away from the mission of God.

And if we really want God to bring the lost through our church doors, then we need to stop acting like they don’t exist when they do show up.

More and more, those we need to reach are people with little to no church background.  We can no longer expect everyone to be able to recite the Lord’s Prayer from memory. We need to think carefully about how accommodating our Sunday services are for the presence of unchurched visitors. Is it clear where to go? Do visitors have the freedom to not participate in parts of the services without standing out too much?

And while the old socially respectable churchgoing model is fading, that still accounts for a lot of the people in our churches on Sunday, even longtime, active members.

The cruelest, most pastorally unhelpful thing you can do is to lull non-Christian people into spiritual complacency by helping them think that they are already Christians.  This includes prematurely rushing people into church membership.

Perhaps the most chilling passage of Scripture is Matthew 7:21-23, in which Jesus teaches that on the Judgment Day there will not just be a few, but “many” people will actually name Jesus Christ as Lord, will even be very “spiritual” seeming people who did all kinds of impressive religious works, and even did these in the name of Jesus, but to whom Jesus will give a devastating news flash: these professed Christians never actually knew Him in the first place! And then they will hear their eternal sentence: “Away from me, you evildoers!”

So we need to be very careful to stop speaking as if everyone is already a child of God. When in our worship services we keep using language of “we Christians this, we Christians that,” and not saying things like “if you are here today and have not yet surrendered your life to Christ,” we are misleading the two groups of unconverted people – unchurched newcomers and nominally Christian churchy people – into thinking that they have no need of conversion.

The great Methodist missionary E. Stanley Jones said that a church must “not only convert people from the outside to membership but also produce conversion within its own membership. When it cannot do both, it is on its way out.”

We must also make room in the life of our churches to celebrate when people do become children of God. It should not be uncommon in our worship services to see adults who have been saved giving their testimonies before everybody and being baptized if they were never previously baptized or else going through our hymnal’s ritual for reaffirmation of faith.

But if God has not yet done this in your church, have you asked Him? We all need to be regularly praying that revival will break out in our churches and our communities.

• Part 1: The Missional Landscape
• Part 2: Scripture
• Part 3: The Cross of Christ
• Part 4: Personal Conversion
• Part 5: Active Faith
• Part 6: Christian Perfection

If you would like to support the work of John Lomperis and UM Action, please donate here.

Missional United Methodism for the 21st Century – Part 3 of 6: The Cross of Christ

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Christ, Gospel, Jesus, Jesus Christ, John Lomperis, United Methodist Church

It is quite ironic that the UM renewal event was held in a room with an adjacent office that highlights the very problem facing the denomination.

The following remarks were delivered by UMAction Director John Lomperis on June 15 at the annual lunch of Cal-Pac Renewal, the evangelical renewal caucus within the California-Pacific Conference of the United Methodist Church.

Centrality in preaching and teaching of the cross on which Jesus Christ died for our sins. 

In the words of Methodist Article of Religion # II, Jesus Christ is “very God and very Man, who truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and buried, to reconcile his Father to us, and to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but for actual sins of men.”

Colossians 1:19-23a:

“For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation—if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel.”

Or as Jesus described His mission more succinctly in Matthew 20:28, he came not to be served but to serve and “to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Sometimes we see United Methodist leaders talking about the key to growth as looking to secular market research about what unchurched Americans want and value, and then eagerly declare that we will offer that. Unspoken assumptions here are that we should let the values of those who do not know Christ determine the church’s values, and that we humans are so capable of devising impressive, clever plans for church growth that we don’t need any help from the Holy Spirit, thank you very much.

But at the heart of the gospel is the sad reality that we live in a fallen world filled with fallen people whose beliefs and behaviors are pathologically out of line with God’s perfect truth.

Yet most everyone in our self-indulgent culture thinks of themselves as fundamentally GOOD people who deserve good lives here and hereafter.  As an unsaved young man, I never heard anything more fundamentally offensive than Romans 3:9-20 saying that not ONE of us is good, let alone that we all deserve eternity in Hell. Any advertising firm could have warned Paul that such messaging does not test well in focus groups.

Of course, we must be careful to always ultimately point to the Savior when we talk about sin. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that the fact that we need a Savior is not inherently offensive, especially to Americans today.

There is no way someone as prideful as me would have ever admitted my sinfulness and my need for a Savior if it were not for the supernatural working of the Holy Spirit in my heart.

And that is the scariest thing about Christian ministry: we can’t do it on our own! The ministry to which Christian laity and clergy alike are called necessitates living in daily dependence on God, to whom we must regularly, fervently cry out. Because by human standards the whole venture of having a Christian church just doesn’t make sense. It needs God’s supernatural support to survive and thrive.

So we must regularly pray for God to work through our preaching of the Gospel. And we must not put God to the test by expecting people He has sent to us to hear the Gospel elsewhere.

Clergy, as well as any lay people who ever preach, if you remember nothing else from my talk today, please remember this.

Make a deliberate point of working into every single one of your sermons a very clear presentation of the Gospel message that we are all sinners, that there is no hope for our own abilities to crawl out of the God-defying mess we have chosen for ourselves, but that God loved us so much that He came down in Jesus Christ to experience all the sorts of challenges and temptations that you and I face in this fallen world, that He remained without sin, and that while we were still sinners, He chose to suffer a tortuous murder on the cross to pay the penalty we earned for our sins, so that through His blood we might have the offer of new life in Him.

And if working that into your sermon means you need to preach a bit longer, all the better.  Little 15-minute sermonettes do not usually have room for the kind of exegetical depth, the kind of dealing with tough questions and real-life applications, that our people need to be fed on a regular basis. As my friend, the former Good News leader Jim Heidinger, says, “Sermonettes make for Christianettes.” But it has also been observed of churches successfully reaching large numbers of young adults: the longer the sermon, the younger the congregation.

At the end of it all, do you really believe that God is going to be pleased with your ministry if you were simply relatively more faithful than other ministers who were Unitarian Universalists in all but name? Or do you think God may want to know why you failed to offer a clear presentation of the Gospel to that non-Christian visitor He drew into your church that one Sunday, which ended up being the second-to-last day of her life?

In Ezekiel 3, the Lord told that prophet that if he failed to warn a man to repent of his sin, God would hold Ezekiel accountable for that man’s blood.

Preachers, God has charged you with preaching Christ crucified. You have a solemn responsibility to not row past those who are drowning without tossing them a clear lifeline.

Without understanding God’s justice and righteous wrath, we will have very little appreciation of His loving grace and mercy. Without acknowledging the depth of our sin, we can never truly celebrate the glory of the Savior.

And we must not delude ourselves into thinking that we can ever be safe from being misrepresented and demonized in a fallen world as long as some sins remain popularly endorsed.

But we must nonetheless take care to avoid snarky, self-righteous anger at non-Christians acting like non-Christians. We must let people see that we truly are more horrified by our own sin than by anybody else’s. When struck with man-made tragedies like 9/11, let’s seize those opportunities to reflect on how we each share the same potential for evil, and deepen our gratefulness for all that we have been saved from and the new life we have been saved into. We must be known as the people in whom there is no room for haughtiness, condescension, or pride. Our evangelism must look like, in the famous words of Sri Lankan evangelist D.T. Niles, “one beggar telling another beggar where to get food.”

• Part 1: The Missional Landscape
• Part 2: Scripture
• Part 3: The Cross of Christ
• Part 4: Personal Conversion
• Part 5: Active Faith
• Part 6: Christian Perfection

If you would like to support the work of John Lomperis and UM Action, please donate here.

Why Is the United Methodist News Service Following RMN’s Lead in Distorting the Truth?

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and Ritual (WATER), Bishop Jim Dorff, ethics, General Conference, goddess worship, Heather Hahn, homosexuality, Institute on Religion and Democracy, John Lomperis, LGBT, Mary Ann Kaiser, Reconciling Ministries Network, Rev. Tom Lambrecht, sexuality, Sophia-Wisdom, Southwest Texas Annual Conference, syncretism, Texas Freedom Network, Troy Plummer, United Methodist, United Methodist Communications, United Methodist News Service, Women's Alliance for Theology

Hopefully not a picture of the United Methodist News Service’s new understanding of its relationship to the Reconciling Ministries Network (Photo credit: MG Electronics)

By John Lomperis (@JohnLomperis)

Heterodox biases within official church agencies, funded by the apportionments skimmed from United Methodist offering plates, are sadly nothing new.

But it is striking to see United Methodist Communications, the official PR arm of our denomination (slated for $18.7 million of apportionments this year), through its United Methodist News Service (UMNS), report on denominational news in a way that dovetails very neatly with the media strategy of a boisterously disruptive gay activist group forcefully opposing our denomination’s core doctrine and key moral teachings.

Last year, angry, well-funded activists demanding the United Methodist Church’s endorsement of their own lack of sexual self-control failed in their all-out, any-means-necessary efforts, actually losing significant ground, so much so that the most prominent leader of the cause, Troy Plummer, soon left the United Methodist Church for a small, primarily LGBT denomination.

So the liberal caucuses closed their efforts at the Tampa General Conference not with a center-ring show of the first denominationally permitted homosexual union service (the original, optimistic plan) but rather an exhortation for remaining heterodox United Methodists to brazenly defy the church laws they cannot change, refusing to submit to any authority higher than themselves.

Since then, the Reconciling Ministries Network (RMN), which defends the morality of homosexual practice and other varieties of sex outside of marriage, has been busy working to build its grassroots network and encourage renegade United Methodist clergy to besiege and overwhelm our church at all levels, wearing our church down in a draining, destructive  war of attrition until they achieve a de facto reality of United Methodist clergy and churches violating biblical sexual boundaries with impunity, with those who stubbornly insist on following Scripture rather than secular Western culture getting fed up and leaving the denomination entirely in such activists’ hands.

High-profile expressions of this strategy have been seen throughout the country, with the most recent relevant news centering on the bellwether Southwest Texas Conference. We have already reported the details of this case.

Since April, RMN has been publicly celebrating a young lesbian activist named Mary Ann Kaiser pursuing ordination in that conference while being open about her being homosexually active. According to Kaiser’s RMN bio, she formerly interned for a partisan political group devoted to fighting “the religious right in Texas” and for a feminist liberation theology group that promotes its own syncretistic religious rituals done in worship of feminine and feminized deities, including Amaterasu (the Japanese/Shinto sun goddess), a pre-Christian Celtic goddess, and, in many places, “Sophia-Wisdom.”

Earlier this month in the Southwest Texas Annual Conference, the clergy session accepted the Board of Ordained Ministry’s removal of Miss Kaiser from the roster of certified candidates, since she was open about the fact that she intends to legally “marry” her lesbian lover, with whom she currently cohabits, while our standards clearly forbid the ordination of “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals.” And of course, biblical and United Methodist teaching is also very clear that a perfectly heterosexual man is morally unqualified for the privilege (not right) of ordination if he is sleeping or cohabitating with his girlfriend.

Demonstrating that it was prepared for this well ahead of time, RMN responded almost immediately with a Twitter and publicity campaign, encouraging activists within and beyond our denomination to express outrage and to flood the inbox of the conference’s bishop, Jim Dorff.

The key elements of RMN’s strategy at this point appear to have been:

1)      Create the impression of a flood of outrage to intimidate United Methodists who may want to uphold our biblical standards;

2)      Shift the narrative away from the publicity-stunt tactics of RMN and its latest poster child to not-widely-accessible details of church law, while disingenuously professing concern for following the Book of Discipline; and

3)      Further shift the narrative by spreading the dishonest claim that Miss Kaiser was denied ordination for “simply identifying as a lesbian,” while ignoring the important distinction in both church law and this case of ongoing, unrepentant homosexual PRACTICE.

UMNS soon chose to jump into the fray, in a way that effectively, uncritically amplified RMN’s propaganda on all three points.

The title of the article by Heather Hahn makes a one-sided focus on liberal opposition to the derailing of Kaiser’s candidacy, and asserts that this rose to the level of “furor.” However, people who were actually there at the conference session dispute this characterization, reporting that the debate was rather civil.

The lengthy UMNS article goes into the weeds of the specific paragraphs of church law that are at issue in the liberal-requested episcopal ruling of law. It also uncritically passes on the laughable expression of concern for following the standards of the Book of Discipline suddenly now professed by Miss Kaiser’s “supporters” (if pushing someone else forward to pay a price you are unwilling to pay yourself counts as “support”).

Following RMN’s point #3 above, the UMNS nowhere in the 1,651-word article makes any direct mention of Kaiser’s being very openly homosexually active, not even in the brief quotes selected from an apparent interview with my friend, the Rev. Tom Lambrecht of Good News. Nor does it make clear that the issue for opponents of Kaiser’s candidacy was not that she simply experiences same-sex attractions but rather her voluntarily chosen lack of sexual self-control.

Instead, the UMNS article repeatedly follows RMN’s lead in misleadingly framing the issue as “whether a lesbian can be a certified candidate for ordained United Methodist ministry,” summarizing the orthodox argument as that Kaiser’s “candidacy should have ceased as soon as she identified herself as gay,” and claiming that “her sexual orientation” was “the reason” for the ending of Kaiser’s candidacy. It also passes along RMN’s dishonest words that Kaiser’s conference “remov[ed] her from ordination track [because] of her orientation,” without offering any direct rebuttal from another perspective. Furthermore, in noting the heterodox-dominated district committee on ministry’s support for Kaiser’s invalid candidacy, UMNS chose to report that Kaiser “told the body she is gay” and to omit the fact that she not only told them that “she is gay” but also about her current relationship.

Shortly after the article appeared, I respectfully emailed the author and other UMNS contacts about such concerns and received “read” receipts for my emails. I also sincerely told the author that “I would really, really like to be able to give [her] the benefit of the doubt here.” Nearly two weeks later, I have yet to receive a response or see UMNS correct its factual misrepresentations.

Thus on a high-profile case related to an internal United Methodist controversy, the United Methodist News Service is now choosing to report in a way that amplifies RMN’s propaganda efforts, uncritically echoes RMN’s dishonest distortions of the facts, and misrepresents faithful United Methodists who support our denomination’s core doctrine and established covenantal standards. And after being respectfully informed of the factual problems with the article, UMNS chooses to not take corrective action, instead leaving the article online while knowing that this is misleading readers.

How can UMNS expect to earn the trust of the wider United Methodist public with reporting like this?

Missional United Methodism for the 21st Century – Part 2 of 6: Scripture

Tags

Bible, Christianity, John Lomperis, Methodism, United Methodist Church

It is quite ironic that the UM renewal event was held in a room with an adjacent office that highlights the very problem facing the denomination.

The following remarks were delivered by UMAction Director John Lomperis on June 15 at the annual lunch of Cal-Pac Renewal, the evangelical renewal caucus within the California-Pacific Conference of the United Methodist Church.

Emphasis on the Bible as our final authority on all matters of doctrine and morals. 

In the words of Article IV of the EUB Confession of Faith, part of our denomination’s core Doctrinal Standards in Paragraph 104 of the Book of Discipline: the Old and New Testaments are “to be received through the Holy Spirit as the true rule and guide for faith and practice.”

In the words of Scripture, in 2 Timothy 3:16-17: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” And then a little later in that same epistle, verse 4:2, Paul instructs the young pastor: “Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.”

If we act like laughter or entertainment is the main thing we have to offer, then frankly, the folk we need to reach can find more high-quality entertainment elsewhere. We are long past the days when we could draw people to our churches and camp meetings in largely because there were simply not many recreational alternatives.

Furthermore, we are, not completely, but increasingly transitioning out of the days of the old, mainline Christianity model in which you could rely on cultural pressure pushing people into church for the sake of social respectability. Now people don’t need church for that, either.

Churches that only offer unimaginative echoes of secular culture do little to motivate people to drag themselves out of bed on Sunday mornings.

So let’s just embrace the fact that the one thing that Christian churches have to offer that people can’t find anywhere else in our culture is Scriptural Christianity.

Now how many of you have heard it said that the heart of Methodist theology is John Wesley’s quadrilateral of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience?

Since some myths won’t die, it’s worth stressing that Wesley was not the one who came up with this formulation.  The so-called quadrilateral was coined by twentieth-century United Methodist theologian Albert Outler, who later publicly regretted popularizing the phrase because of how it was misinterpreted to demote the authority of Scripture.  Outler correctly noted that Wesley indeed used church tradition, critical reason, and Christian experience (not just any sort of human experience) to evaluate truth claims – but all within the boundaries of Scripture.

In his “Thoughts Upon Methodism” John Wesley himself very directly identified the “fundamental doctrine” of Methodism as “That the Bible is the whole and sole rule both of Christian faith and practice.”

In my observation, the church in America, including but not limited to United Methodism, is suffering greatly not just from humanity-glorifying, supernaturalism-denying theological liberalism but also from widespread biblical illiteracy.

Today, we have to assume that the starting point for most of the people who show up in our churches is simple ignorance of what is actually taught in Scripture – aside from a few shallow and distorted references from pop culture.

Friends, we are guilty of an inexcusable dereliction of duty if our churches are not “equipping” our people with “thorough” knowledge of Scripture. Without this, they will lack a firm, lasting foundation for their faith. Without this, we cannot trust that they can have the immune systems to avoid poisoning from such influences as the media and secular friends. Without this, our people will not be sufficiently equipped to obey their obligation, in 1 Peter 3:15, to “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.”

But the more the people in our churches know the Word of God, the more they can be used by God to spread His Gospel and grow our churches, the more they can know how to relate to others in a God-honoring way, and the more they can understand the character and the will of God in their lives.

So whether you are a pastor or a layperson, here are some practical changes you can promote in your congregation:

First of all, stop assuming that people already know and understand Scripture. Realize that even some of your strongest members often know the Bible less well and study it more infrequently than you or they would like to believe.

We all have an obligation, by teaching and example, of promoting a culture in all of our congregations in which members are expected to have DAILY times of at least 15-20 minutes of personal prayer and Bible study. Make a point of sharing with others what God has been teaching you in your daily quiet times and gently asking other professedly Christian members about theirs.

In the sanctuary, are Bibles placed on every seat for people to follow along during the sermon? If the only way people receive the Word of God in the service is by hearing someone else read it, think about what you’re training them to do. We need to promote the habit of looking into the Word with our own eyes, rather than just relying on what we hear others say.

If you are serious about reaching new people for Christ, is your church regularly stocked up on readily accessible Bibles to give away, free of charge, to anyone who needs one?

Look systematically at how your church programming gets members into the Word. Now I’ve learned a lot from also reading Wesley, Bonhoeffer, and Lewis.  But our churches are missing the point when we have all sorts of groups and gatherings to watch movies, learn about other religions, discuss interesting issues, read contemporary writers, and focus on anything and everything but the Scriptures we need to evaluate all of that other stuff.

Then there’s preaching. There was lots of good data in that report our denomination’s Call to Action Team did a couple of years ago. But perhaps the most frustratingly myopic part was when they asserted that “topical preaching” was a key “driver” of “congregational vitality” – based on treating lectionary preaching or some mix of the two as the only alternatives.

Now there may be times when pastors discern that their flocks really need a sermon on a particular issue.

But what about straight exegetical, biblical preaching, going completely through one book of the Bible for a sermon series? I have seen this done very well.  Preachers, after you select the books, alternating testaments and genres, this takes the pressure off of having to continually invent an extra-biblical foundation for each sermon. It will help your people have a richer understanding of Scripture, as over the course of several weeks they understand biblical teaching in context.

Most importantly, preaching through an entire book of the Bible protects the congregation from the pastor. A pastor’s job is to ground people in Scripture rather than in anyone’s personal ideas. We all have our blind spots. But preaching through an entire book forces pastors and laity alike to listen to what God has to say to us in not only the fondly familiar passages of Scripture but also in those challenging, counter-cultural passages we may prefer to avoid.

As evangelical United Methodists, we sometimes envy our evangelical neighbor’s churches when we see their leaders not compromising on some of the same high-profile issues on which we have sadly seen so many of our own leaders compromise. But on other issues, plenty of evangelical, non-mainline churches have blind spots which enable them to also follow the culture in opposition to biblical values.

When kids grow up in culturally compromised churches of one sort or another and then go off to their colleges and careers, they have already been conditioned to follow culture rather than Christ, if following Christ could risk personal sacrifice or breaking community norms. Given this foundation, it is sadly unsurprising to see many young Christians growing up to either completely abandon the faith or else still call themselves Christian while rejecting much of the biblical teaching with which they were raised.

So it is essential to teach the whole word of God, in season and out of season, not fearfully shrinking back from lovingly, humbly challenging our people on difficult topics.

One somewhat unique thing that United Methodism has to offer here is how our increasingly global nature has the potential for allowing Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Americans to all come together as members of the same church to lovingly help each other recognize our blind spots and become better, more counter-cultural, boldly biblical Christians in each of our respective contexts. Because the biblical Gospel is not the property of any race, country, culture, or class – it is GOD’s Gospel for all who would accept it, and thus stands apart from all fallen human cultures.

• Part 1: The Missional Landscape
• Part 2: Scripture
• Part 3: The Cross of Christ
• Part 4: Personal Conversion
• Part 5: Active Faith
• Part 6: Christian Perfection

If you would like to support the work of John Lomperis and UM Action, please donate here.