Category Archives: Wesleyan Theology

this year

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I am United Methodist by choice. I wasn’t born into the tribe called Methodist. I found my way into the denomination through a church that lived piety and practice. It got my attention.

First United Methodist Church in Pittsburgh took my family in when we were far from home with two young children. They helped me learn a living faith.

It wasn’t because their choir was the best or their preacher the most eloquent. They taught me incarnational church because in a time when AIDS was becoming scourge they were willing to stand in solidarity with those physically and spiritually devastated by loss upon loss. The church was unwilling to practice willful disregard.

I want to unpack that. By “willful disregard” I mean churches who see pain or disruption of creation around them and do nothing to reach into that pain with compassion and care; even the elemental care of naming and noticing.

I became a United Methodist because I saw what church can be and always I long for institutional United Methodism to recall its roots and grounding. The Wesleys taught, among other things, that faith is a practice meant to be lived and willful disregard is not the way of the gospel and not the way of the people called Methodist.

This year I want the church be a place where we will name the ache of racism and generational poverty grounded in racism. I’m praying for a movement that names the despoiling of creation and the devastation that results from the pillage of the sacred in the bodies of women and children and men and the earth. I’m desirous of leaders who choose to use their gifts to work with their faith kin to build low income housing and feed hungry children and provide access to education.

I can’t give much more energy to the soul-sucking debate over full inclusion of GLBT folk. Really, Jesus and the grace offered through him are sullied by the pitched slug-fest over a paltry number of lines in scripture. To squander the gift of the gospel through the barricading of grace is willful disregard.

I want to lead a discipling center where people know that we are not there to play church.

Rather, we are mindfully grounded in the teachings and practices and wonderings of faith and because we trust the invitation of our God and our own foibled and hopeful selves, indeed all things are possible.

All things.

All things.

helter shelter

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The anxiety is ramping in our lives and surely in my belly.

We have a signed purchase agreement on our home. All will be well and good pending a thorough inspection. Someone just spent five hours inspecting our 100-plus year old home.

Now we wait.

In Rochester, our realtor is fielding a counter-offer to the offer we made to buy a home. It was the first one we saw lo those many weeks ago, and it has lived and breathed with us since. We believe it is so very right.

Now we wait.

Oh but I am a crabby woman; thin of skin and jumpy-antsy because this thing called home is a morphing thing.

And in the midst of my crabby, I am chastened by awareness of my staggering privilege.

I have a larger-than-I-need home and I want to purchase same and what, oh what of all those who feel anxiety every day because they are assured of nothing in the way of home.

What of those who are children and teens and adults and elders who have no home?

Our church is working with an organization called Beacon in the metro area. Beacon is an interfaith housing initiative seeking to eradicate the all-consuming misery of soul and body that is homelessness. Through one of their programs called “Families Moving Forward” we will house four families at our church for a week.

It is a monumental undertaking. We are organizing to make sure that we have a welcoming space and food to offer and hospitality to bless but really, one of the most monumental things we privileged folk are undertaking is the willingness to face the reality that the families we welcome live without what we take for granted: home.

We have become willing to encounter our neighbors. We are a ministry outpost in the way of Jesus.

I know myself to be needful of perspective in these days.

I surely want to let go of the soul-roil engaged in fretting about the more-than-I-need.

Time is better spent in pondering what to serve our guests for breakfast on Saturday. Time is better spent thanking God for the volunteers who are committed to showing up. Time is better spent being open to what the Holy has for me to learn.

good news

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The United Methodist Church is in the news these days.

We are not in the news for the ways we reach into places where typhoons decimate and poverty gnarls, though we could be.

We are not in the news for the ways we have fought for justice through a conviction that we are called to “be in ministry for and with all persons” (Para. 161F, Book of Discipline),  though we long to be.

Instead we are in the news for the ways our church polity trumps gospel imperative.

At Richfield United Methodist Church we have sought to listen deeply to the heart of the Holy.  In our discernment we have turned to scripture, tradition, reason and experience to lead us to the recognition that we cannot collude with the barricading of grace.  We desire to welcome all families into a transformational relationship with Jesus the Christ.  We want to provide a church community through which people are held and known as they move ever deeper into communion with a God who welcomes and sustains love in all its manifestations.

Jesus welcomed all to the table of grace.  We believe we are called to do the same; in fact, we feel powerfully blessed to be able to do the same.

Our conversations, prayers and deep listening prompted us to adopt the statement shared below*.

We pray that through this United Methodist Church the wildly inclusive love of God in Christ will be proclaimed, lived, shared and celebrated by all.

We would like for that to be good news of great joy.

How else would we live the gospel of Jesus?

RICHFIELD UNITED METHODIST CHURCH

Commitment to Marriage Equality

As a church in the Methodist tradition since 1854, Richfield United Methodist Church’s ministries are grounded in Jesus’ call to love both God and neighbor. We acknowledge that we have often failed to extend the radical hospitality that God asks of us, even as we continually strive to do so.

In 2007—seeking to open our hearts, minds, and doors—we publicly welcomed lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their families into full participation in the life and ministries of the congregation, and we continue to do so today.

We recognize that when two people come together to form a primary committed relationship, they often ask the church to bless their wedding. With due consideration, the church responds by celebrating, in the presence of their families and friends, the work of God’s Spirit in their lives.

We lament that in our time, so many courts, legislatures, and religious institutions still deny same-gender and transgender couples equal access to marriage and all the blessings, rights, and responsibilities thereof.

We rejoice that at this point in history, the arc of justice now bends toward equal recognition of marriage for all couples.

Today we affirm that God’s grace is open to all, and we witness to that grace through our commitment to justice and equality in our congregation, the state of Minnesota, the United Methodist Church, and the world. We will honor and celebrate the wedding of any couple, licensed in Minnesota, who seek to commit their lives to one another in marriage.

Approved by the Administrative Board of Richfield UMC

Signed on September 17, 2013 by

Sue Restemayer, Ad Board Chair, Nick Dewey, Trustees Chair, David Couillard, Lay Leader, and Rev. Elizabeth Macaulay, Pastor

*We are grateful for the work of Dumbarton UMC.  Our statement is patterned after theirs.

all saints

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dad paver

Every year the church pauses to name the saints who are no longer physically with us.

This year we will be shepherded into and out of worship by bagpipes. The blast of sound will serve as a musical rupture of the thin veil separating the living from the dead.

The service is so very alive. We name church members who have died in the previous year and project their faces onto our screen as we savor the ways they have blessed and changed us.

This year our church has been changed by 20 deaths. While the grief around their passing is so very real so too is the pleasure of saying their names and remembering their being.

The seminary that I attended offered an opportunity to memorialize beloveds through buying a paver for a newly finished chapel courtyard. Since my father was for a time adjunct faculty at UTS and since my heart longs for places and times where his name can be in the hearts of the now, it felt so good to create a reminder that once he was, even as he still is in the hearts of many.

And of course during this thin veil time, I wonder about my own death and the day when it will be my face on the screen, my name on the lips, my being bookended with birth and death dates.

Poet Mary Oliver asks : “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Tomorrow we name those who answered that question every day they were given.

And so it comes to us.

How is it we plan to enter fully the wild and precious gift that is life?

Mindfully or no, we live our answer.

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This past week Minnesota United Methodists gathered for our Annual Conference. It is a reunion and a marathon of meetings and always Annual Conference stokes my desire for fruitful ministry to a fever pitch. I serve a church pregnant with possibility and sometimes being patient is teeth gnash.

This year’s conference, like those preceding it, was marked by a speaking of how it is the larger church is so very wounded.

There are some eighty clergy in the conference (myself included), and over 1,000 across the United States who have signed a document stating that we will joyfully offer services of marriage to same sex couples. In Minnesota, it is now legal! And, this offering of grace routine to heterosexual couples is against the polity of our church. Persons violating said polity can be disciplined for facilitating the speaking of love and covenant.

I feel such grief. I feel grief for the judicatories in our system who are tasked with upholding policies they may not agree with. We are compatriots in the preaching of the good news of the nothing-can-seperate-us-from-the love of God in Christ Jesus. And, there may soon come a day when polity trumps grace and preachers are exiled by their kin in Christ. Surely God weeps.

I feel such grief because the expanse of grace opened to us by Jesus seems so jealously guarded by fear and surely, God weeps.

I feel such grief because this mother is watching her children and their compatriots turn from the Body of Christ known as the United Methodist movement. They cannot understand a denomination that barricades from some the very grace said to be offered to all.

I feel such grief because there is so much work calling to the people of Jesus: poverty and racism and ecological devastation and the people of Jesus are called to respond and heal and bless and while we natter on about who it is who ought be united in marriage by our pastors, the world continues to be wounded and about this I know God weeps.

I’m a United Methodist pastor. While my church is pregnant with possibility it so very challenged by its being as a United Methodist Church. We are a people meant to welcome Spirit breath and life transformation. We want to live in the way of Jesus.

May the God who weeps hold us in this time.

pillars

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This is a not-meant-to guilt post.

This is a shout-out to all those who come to church on the first Sunday of the New Year.

Today in worship we shared words and heart longings hundreds of years old. We shared a part of Wesley’s Covenant Service.  The thought is that when we are mindful of that which we seek, we are more apt to give ourselves over to it.

What we prayed about and recommitted ourselves to is living in a relationship of trust with the Holy.  We named our desire to let go of the worry nattering that clogs our soul-waves.  We named our desire to give our lives and our hearts over to God’s keeping.

And then we shared the meal of Jesus together.  It was a seemly first feast in this year we trust will be grace.

Wherever it is you find yourself on this day, the prayer is yours for the holding today and all days:

I am no longer my own, but thine. Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt. Put me to doing, put me to suffering. Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee, exalted for thee or brought low for thee. Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have nothing. I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal. And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it. And the covenant which I have made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.

Covenant Prayer From John Wesley’s Covenant Service , 1780

Let us be full, let us be empty according to God’s desire for our unfolding.

Happy New Year!

 

Marriage matters

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We are organizing to defeat the upcoming Marriage Amendment in Minnesota.

The “we” in this case are United Methodists.

Knowing that we are a part of a movement grounded in the teachings of Jesus that welcome all to the table of communal grace, we’re organizing.

Eight of us sat at table today to strategize.  It was a rollicking conversation, full of gratitude for our theological heritage.  As Wesleyans, we look to an ethical framework that considers scripture, reason, tradition and experience.  As Wesleyans, we are enjoined to consider the world our parish.  As Wesleyans, we celebrate a connection woven through grace and the sure belief that injustice is meant to be challenged by people of faith.

We’re planning gatherings across the state.  At those gatherings we’ll worship, share the theological groundings that impel our witness, and learn how to effectively converse with others in order that heart might be shared.  And, we’ll serve as a resource for kin in faith across the state who seek to speak for inclusion.

It is blessing to live in the state of Minnesota.  We have a heritage of speaking up around justice issues.

It is blessing to be United Methodists.  We have a heritage of speaking up around justice issues.

So, stay tuned.  And if you are passionate about insuring that those who are blessed by love for another of the same gender ought be accorded the opportunity to celebrate that love in church and state, join in!

 

engaged

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“The opposite of love is not hate.  It is indifference.”  Ellie Wiesel

Wednesdays are dense and luscious for me.

I begin my day at eight AM with a table full of wonderful men.  We gather together for Bible study.  They have been doing this for decades, these men.  They let me join in.

I learn much at that table.  We talk about many things (studying scripture does that) together.  We are diverse as can be.  Gender, generations and political ideologies stretch us to hear and understand in a way grounded in the power of the Christ.  We see each other in a more fulsome way.  We aren’t sword wielders for a cause, we are people full of holy passion for life and learning and we trust each other enough to share our sense of things in a way that invites listening.  At that table I am a deeper and finer thing than merely Pastor.  I am sister in Christ.

On Wednesday nights I meet with a wonderful collection of humans who come together to explore Christian discipleship.  We are exploring Wesleyan theology and what it means to be an accountable disciple in the way of John Wesley.  Wesley knew how we need each other in order to grow into our fullness.  On Wednesday nights, we are able to explore words that jangle and stretch:  sin and salvation, grace and justice.  The room hums with the power of the collected souls.  We are kin in Christ and the joy of our mindful seeking permeates the places of tired and despair that walk in us each.

There is much the church is not.  Sometimes people seize on the “is not” with a seeming glee.  Armed with conviction about the glaring flaws, distance is cultivated and tended.

But there are others.  Others who practice the engagement of being willing to hear the heart of another and in that hearing know the soundings of the Holy.

Indifference is a choice.

I’m moved by those who choose engagement.  My life and the lives the engaged are blessed to lead are the better for it.