Missional United Methodism for the 21st Century – Part 6 of 6: Christian Perfection

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Entire Sanctification, John Lomperis, John Wesley, Methodism, Sanctification, 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.

Christian perfection

In the words of Article XI of the EUB Confession of Faith, “Entire sanctification” – another way of saying Christian perfection – “is a state of perfect love, righteousness and true holiness which every regenerate believer may obtain by being delivered from the power of sin, by loving God with all the heart, soul, mind and strength and by loving one’s neighbor as one’s self.”

Romans 6:14 – “For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.”

Near the end of his life, Wesley said that this doctrine – that all believers should desire the very real possibility of God so filling us with love for Him and our neighbors that we are no longer committing sin in thought, word, or deed – was “the grand depositum which God has lodged with the people called Methodists; and for the sake of propagating this chiefly He appeared to have raised us up.”

Like many here, I never heard about this in a sermon or in Sunday school. In all honesty, I initially recoiled from this landmark Methodist doctrine when I first learned of it.

But after a very long, arduous process of study and reflection which I do not have time to explain in detail, I came to appreciate Wesley’s very important nuancing qualifiers to this doctrine, and also to be compelled by his biblical, moral, and logical arguments that, in the words of Wesley scholar Billy Abraham, Christians need not be doomed “to live morally defeated lives.” There are all kinds of dangerous pitfalls to avoid with Christian perfection, but that is no excuse for refusing to pursue the holiness to which God calls His adopted children.

One of the greatest weaknesses in much American evangelicalism is the tendency to let the good focus on getting people saved make us lax in promoting sanctification. New converts without a firm grounding as mature disciples often find themselves ill-equipped to withstand the assaults of the world and the devil, let alone to raise Christian children in a hostile world.

But in the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus said to “go and make disciples of all nations” with the word “disciples” suggesting much deeper, ongoing commitment than the one-time-event suggestions of the word “converts.” Jesus went on, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” – which our theology understands as both imparting divine grace and uniting the baptizee with a body of other disciples. Jesus concluded that sentence: “and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

If we are to once again become a vibrant, truly Methodist, missional movement, we need to all study what the Scriptures teach about fully obeying God, read about the lives self-sacrificially committed Christians, and reclaim our Wesleyan ethos of social holiness.

One of the most glaring misrepresentations of John Wesley is when people selectively quote his phrase, “no holiness but social holiness” to defend devoting church resources to strident, divisive, and partisan political activism.

In context, what Wesley said in his 1739 preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems was “‘Holy solitaries’ is a phrase no more consistent with the gospel than holy adulterers. The gospel of Christ knows of no religion but social; no holiness but social holiness.”

In other words, what Wesley was talking about was discipleship in the context of loving community with other believers, especially within the intimate, accountability-focused small-group classes and bands which were the building blocks of early Methodism.

If we really want to help ourselves and our brothers and sisters know the joys of the deeper relationship God wants with them, and if we want realistic contexts for living out the “one another” commands of the New Testament, then let’s start new, single-gender, accountability- and encouragement-centered small groups in which members get into the word, confidentially share their moral struggles, and help redirect each other towards holiness.

Scott Kisker at Wesley Seminary and the aforementioned Kevin Watson are two United Methodist seminary professors who have written some good stuff about practical ways in which such reclamation of Wesleyan spirituality can be done. Or you may check out the “Covenant Discipleship” section of the General Board of Discipleship website, www.gbod.org

I believe that such depth of fellowship with God and with a few close, trusted Christian friends is something for which many people are starving. And how many of the sorts of high-profile scandals and everyday hypocrisies of believers which turn people off from Christianity may have been averted if the Christians being bad witnesses had been in such a holiness-promoting class or band?

In recent high-profile cases of United Methodist clergy and occasionally laity being formally called to abide by some basic moral standards, the horrified shock and outrage we see some express stems from the fact that for over a century, our denomination has allowed regular practices of communal accountability to become alien concepts.

Missional United Methodism for the 21^st Century  – In Conclusion

We have a daunting mission ahead of us. We face all sorts of pressures from inside and outside the church.  On our own, we simply can’t do it.

But thanks be to God, we are not alone!

We serve an awesome, all-powerful triune God Who can raise the dead to life, and Who can bring revival, reform, and redirection to our beloved United Methodist Church.

Let’s go forth to draw closer to Him in prayer, fasting, and repentance!  Let’s devote ourselves to the kingdom work of reforming our denomination and reaching the lost within and beyond our churches, grounded in Scripture, emphasizing the cross of Christ, oriented for conversions, active in our communities, and seeking holiness in accountable community!

• 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 5 of 6: Active Faith

Tags

Christianity, Jesus, 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.

Activism: energetic commitment to doing the kingdom work of evangelism and combatting social ills in the name of Jesus

Methodist Article of Religion # X explains that “good works … follow after justification” and “cannot put away our sins” but “spring out of a true and lively faith” and “are pleasing and acceptable to God in Christ.”

Titus 3:14 – “Our people must learn to devote themselves to doing what is good, in order to provide for urgent needs and not live unproductive lives.”

I’m going to take a somewhat different tack with this one.

Our denomination already tend be very active, from the congregational level on up.

Kevin Watson, a professor of Wesleyan Studies at Seattle Pacific University – now approved for United Methodist seminarians – summarizes the problem with our current busy-bee habits:

“When we are most passionate, we are too often talking about what we have done for God, not what God has done for us.

It is not good enough to be in favor of doing nice things, even for God or in the name of God.

We are dying. And it is because we are not certain we believe the world needs Jesus. But if the world doesn’t need Jesus, it surely doesn’t need us.

The world doesn’t need us to do something for it. The need is far more desperate and devastating than that. We are not enough. We never have been enough, even in our glory days. The world needs – people need – a relationship with God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

Without a firm foundation for understanding why we do all of our activities in the world, we do not have much basis to trust that they are glorifying to God or even ultimately very helpful for our neighbors.

So a primary “activity” must be prayer – recognizing our own utter inadequacy and dependence.

But with a solid foundation of Scripture, the cross of Christ, and a zeal for conversion, our faith can and does drive us out into energetic cooperation in the mission of God, out of love for Him and the people in our communities, spreading the Gospel and helping make our neighbors’ lives tangibly better, all in the name of the Lord, Jesus Christ.

This work is so urgent that we need to look beyond the myopic, shrinking United Methodist and mainline bubble to learn about what’s working and who we can partner with in other churches. Even if they don’t agree with us on issues like dispensationalism, young-Earth creationism, or women’s ordination. If you actually believe what your Cal-Pac colleagues say about how y’all are so “ultra-conservative,” please prepare for some whiplash as you work with Christians who would view you as very liberal for how we may feel about those issues I just listed. But Dickerson identifies the “splintering and splitting” nature of American evangelicalism as one of its greatest weaknesses. And so many of our neighbors are dying in theirs sins and suffering in all kinds of ways that we cannot afford to avoid constructively working together in the mission of God with fellow believers, despite disagreements over issues that are important but still within the bounds of biblical orthodoxy.

And if an MFSA chapter can have a denominational outsider like Jeremiah Wright speak at its annual conference banquet, why can’t Cal-Pac Renewal, every now and then, invite a pastor of a thriving, non-mainline evangelical church in Southern California to speak at one of your future annual conference lunches?  Something to think about.

We must not let the secular world around us dictate our values or even our priorities for how we serve them. But especially in light of the growing distaste our secular neighbors have for evangelical Christianity, as Dickerson talks about in his book, it is all the more important for our congregations to be so active in loving their communities that at least many of our unchurched neighbors would see it as a great loss if we suddenly closed our doors.

• 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 4 of 6: Personal Conversion

Tags

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 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.

Missional United Methodism for the 21st Century – Part 1 of 6: The Missional Landscape

Tags

@JohnLomperis, California-Pacific Conference, 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.

This is an interesting time for us in our history as American members of the United Methodist Church.

The soft-Christendom culture America once had is ending. Those claiming no religious affiliation are on the rise, while we see more and more neighbors of other religions. Recent events have highlighted the advanced disintegration of the civil religion on which previous generations relied to uphold broadly Judaeo-Christian values in public life. The mainline Protestant denominations, once so prominent in our culture, are now increasingly ignored and irrelevant as they shrivel at rates that will bring them close to extinction by the end of our century. Mainline Protestant churches are increasingly numerically overwhelmed by their non-mainline evangelical counterparts. From a different angle, the combined membership of the six mainline Protestant denominations, the former cultural mainstream of America, has now permanently dipped below the total of American Baha’is, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and adherents of non-Christian New Religious Movements.

But as the former mainline fades away, all is not a bed of roses for the rest of the body of Christ in America. Evangelical and Catholic churches are also being challenged with similar pressures towards the secular cultural conformity and theological shallowness which make for personal Christian affiliations with little staying power. In his new book, The Great Evangelical Recession, Pastor John Dickerson argues that our nation is entering a spiritual recession, citing ominous signposts about the erosion of evangelical churches’ cultural influence, financial support base, membership retention (especially among young adults), reputation with outsiders, and ability to keep up with population growth. He points out U.S. evangelicalism’s serious problems with misleadingly inflated numbers and with too much church growth coming from membership transfers rather than conversions.

Meanwhile, our ecclesial tribe, the United Methodist Church, is at its own turning point. On the one hand, we have long been so eager to keep up with “respectable” secular culture and more “respectable,” culturally mainstream churches that we have forgotten what is distinctive about us. Throughout this room, we know the experience of seeing children and other family members either drift away from church entirely or else migrate into traditions that are at least clearer about what they believe. If California-Pacific Conference leaders continue the same trajectory as the first decade of this century, your conference will lose about half of your current attendance and be down to a mere 36,000 members by the middle of the century.

Now how many of you have heard fellow United Methodists claim that our denomination’s disappearance here in the Western Jurisdiction is just an inevitable result of the secularizing culture around you?

But here’s some news: vibrant, growing Christian ministry can and is being done in even the most secular areas of our country. God is doing that in other churches and He can do that in ours, too, if we would faithfully follow Him. In a recent list of the five fastest-growing churches in America, three were located within the bounds of our Western Jurisdiction.

Enough decades have passed and we have lost enough millions of members to conclude that our prideful experiment of acting like a theologically liberal, culturally conformed, secularized, mainline Protestant church has failed – it has failed the members to whom we should have been ministering, it has failed the lost we should have been reaching, and God is not blessing it!

On the other hand, our denomination is now finally climbing out of the liberal mainline bandwagon. I realize that this may be hard to see in liberal annual conferences with which I have been associated, like New York, New England, and Northern Illinois, let alone here in Cal-Pac. But it is a demonstrable fact that if you look at recent General Conferences, votes on key theological issues, including but not limited to sexual morality, are trending in an increasingly orthodox direction. Adherents of theological liberalism feel like our denomination is, in the words of a leader of the Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA), “slipping away” from them. Informed observers now realize that if they want a church which in its official policies accepts the values of the secular American Left, especially on homosexual practice and/or premarital sex, they will have to look somewhere other than our denomination. The Machiavellian, Golden-Rule-rejecting antics which the liberal caucuses cynically used to tie the last General Conference in dysfunctional knots will not be perpetually tolerated by our denomination.

So what will the new orientation for our denominational identity be?

I am convinced that our members and the mission field of an increasingly post-Christian 21^st-century America will be best served by our church if we recover our historic identity as Wesleyan Evangelicals.

Many scholars of the international history of Protestant evangelicalism, of which Methodism was historically a part, cite the Bebbington Quadrilateral – from British historian David Bebbington – as offering a useful framework of four defining features of evangelicalism: high regard for the Bible as the final authority for faith and practice, centrality of the cross of Jesus Christ, emphasis on the need for personal repentance and conversion, and activism, energetically putting our faith into practice by spreading the love of God to our neighbors.

My argument is that these four elements of the authority Scripture, cross-centeredness, conversionism, and activism provide a helpful framework for grounding our own spiritual identity and serving our secularized American mission field – if we add a fifth, Wesleyan component: entire sanctification.

I will tackle each of these one at a time.

• 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.