Handbook for the Christian Faith: Essential Beliefs and Practices for Twenty-First-Century American Methodists and Like-Minded Protestants. A Book about Extraordinary People

By James M. Dawsey and John W. Wells

Is religion disappearing from American life? Less than 50 percent of Americans now hold membership in any religious institution, and even fewer attend worship services. The decline in Christian churches is especially pronounced among the young and cuts across all denominations.
But for Methodists and like-minded Protestants, concerns are deeper than shrinking denominational membership. Polls show disconcerting ignorance about religious and spiritual matters even among churchgoers. Our values as a society are in large measure molded by religion. What shape will Protestant Christianity take in the twenty-first century? And of Methodism? And beyond that, what kind of community will we be?
Dawsey proposes returning to the roots of Christianity. And with anecdotes and stories and a sweeping grasp of church history, he examines those essential practices and beliefs necessary to revitalize American churches. Key, he argues, is rediscovering Christianity as a philosophy of living. John Wesley characterized the practice of religion as first, doing no harm; second, doing good; and third, keeping the ordinances of faith. Loving God and God's creation--the doing of Christianity--marks the path for becoming the churches and individuals Christians were called to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Aug 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666798364

James M. Dawsey

James M. Dawsey is professor and Wolfe Chair of Religious Studies at Emory and Henry College, Virginia. He is an ordained United Methodist minister and author of The Lukan Voice: Confusion and Irony in the Gospel of Luke (1986), Peter’s Last Sermon: Identity and Discipleship in the Gospel of Mark (2010), From Wasteland to Promised Land: Liberation Theology for a Post-Marxist World (1992), and more than eighty other monographs, novels, and articles in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

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Handbook for the Christian Faith

Essential Beliefs and Practices for Twenty-First-Century American Methodists and Like-Minded Protestants. A Book about Extraordinary People

James M. Dawsey

foreword by

John W. Wells

Handbook for the Christian Faith

Essential Beliefs and Practices for Twenty-First-Century American Methodists and Like-Minded Protestants. A Book about Extraordinary People

Copyright © 2023 James M. Dawsey. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-6667-3808-7

hardcover isbn: 978-1-6667-9835-7

ebook isbn: 978-1-6667-9836-4

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Dawsey, James M., author. | Wells, John W., foreword.

Title: Handbook for the Christian faith : essential beliefs and practices for twenty-first-century American Methodists and like-minded Protestants. A book about extraordinary people / by James M. Dawsey ; foreword by John W. Wells.

Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2023 | Includes bibliographical references and index(es).

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-6667-3808-7 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-6667-9835-7 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-6667-9836-4 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Methodist Church—Doctrines—History. | Methodist Church—Doctrines. | Methodist Church—United States—Doctrines.

Classification: bx8331.2 .d37 2023 (print) | bx8331.2 .d37 (ebook)

08/10/23

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (NRSV), copyright © 1989 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Permission to use the Cross and Flame emblem of the United Methodist Church in grayscale granted by the legal department of the General Council on Finance and Administration of the United Methodist Church, April 1, 2022.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Longing for God

Chapter 1: The Human Condition

Chapter 2: Understanding God’s Commandments

Part II: The Door of Religion

Chapter 3: Repentance and Grace

Chapter 4: Conversion?

Chapter 5: Religion Itself: Progressing in Holiness

Chapter 6: Pietism

Part III: How Do We Know the Truth about God, Ourselves, and Our Intended Relationship with the World?

Chapter 7: The Scriptures

Chapter 8: Church History, Reason, and Christian Experience: Natural Theology

Part IV: Inclusion in the Family of God

Chapter 9: The History of Methodist Women

Chapter 10: The Ideal of Equality and History of Racism

Chapter 11: The LGBTQ+ Community

Part V: The Nature and Task of the Church

Chapter 12: Evangelism and the Great Awakening

Chapter 13: Missions

Chapter 14: Church and World

Chapter 15: The Church as Church

Conclusion

Bibliography

To Marshlea and Cy

I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. (Jer 29:11)

Foreword

For many years, Dr. Jim Dawsey has provided a high level of instruction for students studying religion at Emory & Henry. He has done so with a gentle but rigorous approach and his work here reflects that. For such a gentle overall discourse, the beginning of Dr. Dawsey’s book is a bit jarring. He outlines a rising secularism and points to the clear evidence of the decline of the Mainline Protestant tradition. While the description of decline is nothing new in contemporary studies of America’s religious landscape, having a blueprint for continued vitality is new and Dawsey gives us a sense that there are more resources for renewal and vitality than may at first appear. His book brings us realistic hope and a sense that there is more for the church to do. He walks us from the history of the Methodist tradition to the reality that though there is overall decline, we can recover as a denomination and as a community of faith. In the first half of the book, Dawsey takes time to explore the history of the Methodist movement and to point out that the pronouncements of despair have always been overstated.

Not merely an academic book, Dawsey’s narrative does not leave us outside of the tradition of faith. We are reminded that through many years, and through many moments of identifiable difficulty, the Christian faith in general and the Methodist tradition in particular have found the resources for growth and recovery. He prescribes that we actually live the faith and take our social cues not from the broader culture but the rich Christian tradition that serves as a backdrop for our confession. This can best be done by forming small groups and once again discovering the familial power of small Christian gatherings. Being a minority religion should not be the harbinger of a life without faith. He reminds us that our faith is a gift and just because the broader culture has abandoned this gift does not necessarily mean that we must. By being reminded to be holy, examining and practicing those things that make us distinctive, and by returning to the lived experience of faith, we are able to be the light that we are called to be. Dawsey calls on the church to be inclusive, just as Christ was—always broadening the circle of fellowship. In short, Dawsey asks us to see Christianity as less of a cultural descriptor and more as a deep existential sense of our identity.

In a world where all that is solid seems to have melted into air, Dawsey calls us to a life of courage and compassion, not merely attempting to reinstate the religious fervor of the past but by finding new ways to have the deep experience of the mystery of faith. His words call us to both the past and future and in that sense his are words grounded in the Wesleyan tradition of moving on to perfection.

John W. Wells

President of Emory & Henry College, Virginia

Former Associate General Secretary for the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church and Executive Secretary of the National Association of Schools and Colleges of the United Methodist Church

Acknowledgments

What do I owe Methodists and like-minded Christians? Everything, perhaps. And that is not an exaggeration.

For how else to describe what it means to be raised in a household of faith? My earliest memories are from the mission field with Mother and Father doing the things Methodist missionaries do. They baptized, served the sacraments, buried the dead, and mostly told whoever would listen of Jesus’ life and death and God’s wonderful grace. They organized choirs and retreats and youth programs. They started Sunday schools. They raised a family. Life was an adventure. We lived in cities because that was where the people were. Mother and Father preached in rented halls, houses, in funeral parlors, and on street corners. They founded and built churches and organized social ministries. We lived in parsonages—and occasionally out of suitcases. There were daily devotions. I remember being surrounded by laughter, music, books, pets, and people—lots of people. We mixed with important people who lived in palaces and others who were important in God’s eyes only and lived under bridges.

Sometimes friends are surprised to find out that church work overseas is not so different than church work in the United States. The culture is different, and some problems are different, but people are people regardless of nationality and the cross is good news to people everywhere.

I read an old newspaper clipping that told of a South Carolinian named Thomas Dawsey who in the early 1800s was a successful trader and speculator in human cattle, but was converted to Methodism, reversed his thinking about slavery, and became a preacher. My great grandfather on the Dawsey side was a farmer from Aynor, South Carolina, and he also became a Methodist lay preacher. His son, my grandfather, was the first of his family to go to college. He attended Wofford, met my grandmother who studied at Winthrop, became ordained, and in 1914 the two were appointed by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South as missionaries to Brazil. My parents, three aunts, and two uncles also followed to the mission field, mostly in South America. My grandmother Dawsey is buried in Brazil. On a visit to Brazil more than twenty years after she died, I went to her gravesite to pay my respect and was surprised to see that someone that same day had laid cut flowers beside her tombstone. A couple of cousins were missionaries also in Africa and the Caribbean. Of my generation, eight of us attended theology school and seven took vows of ordination. If I could travel through time, I would like to thank those Christians who helped Thomas Dawsey leave slaving and take up the gospel.

My mother’s Cottingham side of the family was Methodist as far back as any can recollect. Like the Dawseys, the Cottinghams arrived from England well before the War of Independence and gradually migrated south. They too were farmers and eventually settled in north Florida. Mother’s home church, Rocky Springs church in Madison County, dates from 1842 and was founded by Cottinghams among others. Memories of my Cottingham grandparents are intertwined with Sunday activities—the cardboard paddle fans moving the summer air in worship; Mother singing a guest solo from the Cokesbury Hymnal; fried chicken, pecan pie, and dinner on the grounds; and lazy Sunday afternoons talking on the porch or going to the lake before MWF or Methodist Youth Fellowship. Papa and Grandma had a favorite pew. The preacher, often sporting his white linen suit and black string tie, would call on Brother Jimmy to lead with the morning prayer. My Aunt Genevieve played the organ and Aunt Mary helped with the children. Mother was the first in her family to receive a master’s degree. It was in Christian Education from Scarritt College in Nashville. As far I know, Mother was one of the first women in Florida Methodism licensed to preach.

When it came time for college, I attended a Methodist church-related Liberal Arts school in Lakeland, Florida, where I studied mathematics, physics, and economics. Dear churchpersons, Mrs. B. F. Wheeler Sr. and her daughter Claire Evans, paid for my scholarship and helped me with a part-time job for spending money. They passed their generosity to Mrs. Wheeler’s grandson, David Evans, who later served as a trustee of Florida Southern College and continued the Christian habit of sharing forward. I loved Florida Southern’s chaplain and often attended Annie Pfeiffer Chapel services because of the music and his sermons. There was a strong Social Gospel thrust to Reverend Price’s preaching. At the time, though, I had no ambition to follow my parents into church work. My goal was to be an oceanographer.

But God throws curveballs and upon graduation I found myself pulled not towards the mysteries of the seas but those of the spirit. Candler, the United Methodist Theology School at Emory University in Atlanta, and the professors and staff were amazing. It was there that I more fully grasped the contours of what Jesus meant when directing that we love God with our minds. Again, church people paid for my studies. Being three years older than when entering Florida Southern, I not only was thankful but reflected much more on the responsibilities being entrusted to me through those gifts of tuition and room and board. While attending Bill Mallard’s course on the History of Christianity and Leander Keck’s course on the Gospel of Mark, I came to love theology. Will Beardslee, my doctoral advisor, more than anyone up to that time, helped me understand that Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount was practical advice—if we only dare look at it with different eyes. It is interesting, but I rarely remember the names of presidents or deans of schools I’ve attended, but professors and coaches have marked my life.

The city of Atlanta is special. My sweet Dixie and I were married in the chapel of the Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church in Atlanta. Family and friends were there. Our daughter Jennifer was born in Atlanta six years later while I was in the PhD program. While attending Emory, I was ordained a deacon and, after two years, an elder. I met Andrew Young in Atlanta—and Dale Murphy at a gathering of the Society of Biblical Literature there.

The first churches I pastored were in rural South Carolina and even though spending most of my teaching career in Alabama and Virginia, I maintained my membership in the South Carolina Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church throughout my ministry. That first appointment taught me how to be a minister, the nuts and bolts of it. The laity carries an important responsibility in mentoring young ministers into their calling. Being an effective minister is a learned skill.

One good thing that I did during that first appointment was to draw up a list of all my church members and make a point of visiting each at least once a month. Dixie would most often go with me. She is tremendous at hugging people. Building strong relationships is key in ministry. And I would apply that to the classroom as well. When the time comes to help, ministers and teachers need to have placed themselves in position to help. Our oldest, James, was born in Greenville, South Carolina. Dixie and I have always loved South Carolinians. Both of us to this day feel most at home in small United Methodist churches.

After finishing my PhD, I was hired into a first academic position at Auburn University in Alabama. At that time, I also continued pastoring churches in Alabama. And I have pastored churches off and on several times during my career filling charges where a colleague died or became sick or had to leave unexpectedly. Cribbing a practice from a friend who like me is ordained but also receives an academic salary, I’ve tried throughout my career to funnel any payments I received from the church back into places of need. United Methodist clergy work under appointments, so the South Carolina bishop technically each year has appointed me in extension ministry to my teaching positions in the classroom. In practical terms, this meant that I was expected to write and submit a report every year back to the conference’s Council on Ministries. Ministers take vows of obedience, and I’ve often wondered what I would have done if the bishop had decided to appoint me away from Alabama or Virginia where I was teaching back to a charge in South Carolina.

My academic appointment to Auburn University proved pure joy. Auburn is a marvelous Land Grant University with strong programs in engineering, architecture, fisheries, veterinary medicine, and many other fields. If we go back far enough in history, the university first came into existence as a Methodist related school. Could those pre-Civil War founders have visualized the good that would flow from their work? That good is immeasurable when it comes to poultry farming, agriculture, teachers, journalism, business, and the economy of the State of Alabama. But the university’s influence through the humanities has been pronounced also, and many have passed through the university’s College of Arts and Sciences. Our Religion Department was small and my closest friends on the tenured faculty were a Southern Baptist, a Presbyterian, and a Roman Catholic. Although from different denominations, in terms of spirit and theological differences, you could have fitted all of us into a thimble. My third book was co-authored with a congregationalist minister from Auburn’s Philosophy Department, and he too could have been pressed into that space with us. Christianity is more ecumenical than our cultural and political versions of religion allow.

I left a chaired appointment as Alumni Professor of Religion at Auburn University to accept a position at Emory & Henry College in Virginia in the mid-1990s. Emory & Henry’s attraction was its Liberal Arts heritage and its historical relation to Christianity and Methodism. The school was founded in 1836 when Presbyterians and Methodists from southwest Virginia joined forces to fill a higher education need in the region. Over the years, many Holston Conference and Virginia Conference United Methodist ministers have been Emory & Henry graduates. Bishop Walter Russell Lambuth who in 1914 first appointed my grandfather to the mission field was an Emory & Henry graduate, and John James Ransom who in 1876 founded the Methodist Church in Brazil was likewise an Emory & Henry graduate.

The Liberal Arts emphasize rational thinking. Being passionate about the humanities, the physical and social sciences, and mathematics is nothing other than loving God with our minds. When giving expression to the imagination through literature, the visual and performing arts; through the study of history, languages, physics, biology, sociology, psychology, and such, humans become co-creators with God. Thinking critically, working to understand ourselves, the history of civilizations, and the mysteries of creation, being caretakers of the world entrusted to us, striving for mercy, justice, and a more perfect society are tasks set before us by God. They are what humans do, and they make us human.

The past serves as both caution and model for our own age. A John Wesley pamphlet from 1762 caught my attention because it included in its title the words Caution to Professors.¹ Did Wesley have some advice for me, this professor? I wanted to know.

Written after publishing Thoughts on Christian Perfection, Wesley addressed followers who misunderstood his thinking, and naively over-trusted their feelings. They had become enthusiasts for living a sinless life and wanted all Christians to experience the joy perhaps that they experienced being attached to Christ. Judging themselves superior to others, they had become self-righteous.

Now, not all Wesley’s topics fit the twenty-first century. But his advice here certainly does. Wesley urged:

•that we watch not to be overcome by pride;

•that we do not ascribe to God things not of God.

•that we do not think that because we have faith, we can set aside leading a holy life;

•that we do no harm to others, but instead do all the good we possibly can;

•and that we every moment seek to love God and love our neighbor.

Excellent. But it is a sixth caution in Wesley’s pamphlet that we perhaps most need now. Wesley urged Christians to avoid a divisive spirit. Place far away that touchiness and testiness that separate us from other Christians. Above all beware of schism, he urged. We should receive others with humility, meekness, and gentleness as brothers and sisters. And we should beware of tempting other Christians to separate from ourselves. We are thinking in a wrongheaded way, he wrote, if we understand our religion primarily as a set of affirmations that need be defended. As if God needs our protection! Rather, as Christians we are called to love, to do love. And beyond embracing unity in the church, we need to work more purposefully to unite the entire human family of God. In a world of discord and violence, religion can be, should be, a magnificent unifying force. We can’t retreat into our churches and bar the doors. The twenty-first century calls for people of faith to unite. We should be one because God is one.

Beyond the church, I express heartfelt gratitude to numerous students, colleagues, family, and friends who over the years shared themselves and their stories with me. The contribution of my Religion Department colleague and Methodism scholar Joseph Reiff was invaluable. His painstaking reviews, gentle prodding, criticisms, suggestions, and support made this a far better book. Friend and colleague, former Associate General Secretary for the United Methodist General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, also former Executive Secretary of the National Association of Schools and Colleges of the United Methodist Church, and current President of Emory & Henry College, John W. Wells wrote the foreword for the Handbook. Conversations with my brother and Alabama-West Florida Annual Conference delegate Cyrus (Sonny) Dawsey III and others, including Holston Conference minister Wil Cantrell, helped clarify discussions within the United Methodist Church concerning the proposed Protocol for Separation. Bill Rogers from the South Carolina Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church offered insight into the church’s understanding of sin and evil. (He teaches an excellent course on the topic.) Bill also helped my understanding of the key role that Susanna Wesley played in the formation of Methodism. Bill, his brothers Paul and Cy, and Paul’s wife, Sheila, all ordained United Methodist ministers, have fought valiantly beside many other South Carolinian Methodists to extirpate racism and gender prejudice from my South Carolina conference, and I am deeply grateful to them. I extend appreciation to my sister, professor and artist Suzanne DesLauriers, and my brother, social anthropologist John Dawsey, for their insights into Christianity’s mixed record with issues of social justice, and especially the battles that women have faced for full inclusion in the church. John and I attended seminary together, and there is a story in the book about gopher theology that we remembered near the same time independently. Others have read drafts of chapters. I thank the Reverends David Jackson, Dr. David St. Clair, and Paul Seay and the historian and Emory & Henry Provost Michael Puglisi for reading parts of the manuscript and contributing suggestions and support. I express appreciation to the library staff at Emory & Henry College. Jesse Knight Films out of Greensboro, North Carolina produced the audio version of the Handbook. Jesse is talented, a perfectionist with his work, and has a kind and generous heart to match. I reserve my greatest thanks to Dixie, my principal editor, lifelong companion, and love. At this point in life there is little that could come from me without Dixie’s loving embrace being part of it. Dixie, my children, James Ciro and Jennifer, my daughter-in-law, Malu, grandchildren, Sophie and Sarah, and all family and friends make life beautiful beyond measure.

1

. John Wesley, Cautions and Directions Given to the Greatest Professors in the Methodist Societies, in Outler, John Wesley,

298

–

305

.

Introduction

We’ve Reached a Changing Point

On the other side of COVID-19, we face one certainty: Society will be different. And that is true too of American Christianity.

Is religion disappearing from American life? A 2021 Gallup poll showed that for the first time in United States history religious membership has fallen below a majority of the population.¹ Only 47 percent of American adults responded that they held membership in a church, synagogue, or mosque, down twenty percentage points since the turn of the century. Of the major religions, Christianity has perhaps been hit hardest. Another report published in October 2019 showed that the decline in Christianity in the United States is occurring at a dizzying pace, with only 65 percent of American adults even identifying themselves as Christians, down 12 percentage points over the previous decade.² Among White evangelical Christians, the decline over the last fifteen years has been truly precipitous. The 2020 Census of American Religion conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) showed that since 2006 the number of Americans identifying themselves in this group has dropped from 23 percent to 14.5 percent.³ That same PRRI poll showed a slight bump up for nonevangelical Protestants, but not enough to stem the decline that has been occurring over the last fifty years. The decrease has been severe among Protestants, from 62 percent of the US population in the early 1970s to under 48 percent today.⁴

Circa mid-nineteenth century, Methodism was the largest religious body in the United States and thought of as the quintessential form of American religion.⁵ Membership held steady through the first half of the twentieth century. But during the past fifty years, membership in the largest of the Methodist affiliated groups, the United Methodist Church (UMC), has plummeted from approximately 10.5 million, or 5.3 percent of the population, to less than 7 million, or 2.2 percent.⁶ Most notably absent from the pews are the young. While the pre-COVID median age in our American population was thirty-five, the median age of attendees at United Methodist Church services was fifty-seven.⁷ Though to my mind much exaggerated, a report by the denomination’s General Council on Finance and Administration estimated that if the same rate of decrease continues, US United Methodist membership will fall to less than 1 million by the year 2050.⁸

But our concerns in this book are deeper than the shrinking membership of Methodists and similar denominations. The values we hold as a society are in large measure molded by religion. What will become the shape of Protestant Christianity emerging in this new era? And of Methodism? And beyond that, what kind of community will we be?

Currently, our American community is wracked by COVID. The Greek historian Herodotus (484–425 BCE) wrote that the people of his time suffered more sorrows than the twenty preceding generations.⁹ And sure enough, the fifth-century BCE Greeks suffered not one but two massive invasions from the Persians; Athens was conquered and set on fire; the one-time hero Themistocles, who defeated Xerxes at Salamis, became a traitor and died in disgrace; Athens’s failure to open up grain shipments from Egypt led to famine; civil war broke out between Athens and Sparta; and the great governor Pericles and a multitude of others, including Pericles’s own sons, died in an ensuing plague. That was Herodotus’s reality.

But interestingly our history books look back on that period as a golden age in Greece, for Herodotus’s age was also a time that gave us Athenian democracy and many of the ideas that govern Western civilization to our day. The Parthenon was built during that time. The playwrights Sophocles (496–406 BCE), Euripides (480–406 BCE), and Aristophanes (446–386 BCE) lived then. It was a time and place when the sculptor Phidias (488–431 BCE) created Zeus at Olympia, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and Myron (480–440 BCE) produced the Discus-Thrower. In philosophy, it was the age of Anaxagoras (500–428 BCE) and Socrates (470–399 BCE).

John F. Kennedy used the word crisis as a trope for times such as ours. Both danger and opportunity are bubbling. I submit that our churches will thrive if we are true to our Christian roots; if we focus on Christ’s priorities and don’t shy away from the work necessary to meet them; if we let the mind of Christ hold sway over our own way of thinking; if we focus on the church as a community, the body of Christ, instead of an aggregate of individuals; and if guided by the Holy Spirit, we exhibit the persistence and the creativity expected of followers of Christ.

Rediscovering Our Roots

In a radio interview for Howard Cosell’s show Speaking of Everything, Alex Haley once described the work that went into writing his 1976 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Roots. The book was actually a fictionalized account where Haley had traced his own family history beginning with the capture and enslavement of his great ancestor, Kunta Kinte, and followed seventeen generations of his ancestors through Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and Reconstruction to his own birthplace in Henning, Tennessee, in 1921. As Haley described in the interview, the research had been exhausting, meandering from childhood stories told by his grandmother, through courthouse and census records, to deciphering Mandinka language clues that referenced his ancestral origin, and finally to traveling to the Gambia River in Africa and meeting with a tribal griot who recounted how the teenaged Kunta Kinte left his village to chop wood but was never seen again. Years of effort and expense spent on the project with no promises of success—or even publication!

Why did you do it? Cosell asked.

Haley paused. I did it to find out who I am, he said. Not who others say that I am, but who I actually am.¹⁰

Wisdom begins with recollecting one’s own deep identity.¹¹ Christianity is like a broad river with many currents and eddies. Two thousand years ago, when leaders on the Jerusalem Council became concerned about religious practices for their day, the Pharisee Gamaliel offered good advice: If of human origin, the work will fail, he said. But if it is of God, it will last.¹²

Has our religion come untied from its moorings? Are we deep water? That is, are we navigating where the essential beliefs and practices of our faith are found? Or are we drifting in the weeds? These are appropriate questions for Christians.

As we might imagine, the General Social Survey, 1972–2018 showed an accelerating growth of Americans claiming no religious affiliation. Beginning about thirty years ago, a growing number of Americans began leaving Christianity. The graph below illustrates that from 1990 until 2018, the number of those identifying themselves as unaffiliated (atheists, agnostics, or nones) grew from approximately 8 percent to 23 percent.¹³

But the problem is not only that many are leaving the faith of their childhood. According to a Gallup report, while most Americans continue to identify themselves with the Christian faith, a whopping two-thirds of those self-reported to being only moderately or not at all religious.¹⁴

The data further shows that the crisis over roots is not so different among the adherents of the different Christian denominations—Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, Methodists, and other major American denominations. A U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, dated September 2010, from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, points to the repercussions of this religious indifference: American Christians know surprisingly little about their own faith, stumbling badly over such simple questions as identifying Bethlehem as Jesus’ birthplace and placing the exodus from Egypt with Moses; recognizing the religious figures of Martin Luther and Mother Teresa of Calcutta; and understanding the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith and the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. In fact, self-avowed Christians scored a disappointing average of half, 6.2 of twelve questions correct, slightly worse in the survey than did atheists and agnostics who averaged 6.7 correct.¹⁵ The results were substantiated by a broader Pew study What Americans Know about Religion (July 23, 2019) showing that only 51 percent of Americans can identify Jesus as the one who delivered the Sermon on the Mount; 58 percent recognize that the Golden Rule is not one of the Ten Commandments; and 54 percent know the Roman Catholic view of Purgatory.¹⁶

For Where Your Treasure Is

For where your treasure is, there will be your heart also (Matt 6:11). How important is our religion to us? It will require effort to ferret out who we really are as followers of Christ.

We are aware, of course, of the abuses of Christians for self-aggrandizement and personal gain.¹⁷ And by no means do we intend to minimize human frailty or the corruption that money and power have introduced into religion. It is sad but true: many have left the faith of their childhood because of the hypocrisy of Christians.

Human Frailty

Maybe you remember in high school reading The Canterbury Tales’s story told by a friar about the Summoner, an official in the ecclesiastical courts, who bested even the devil in extorting payments from pimps and wenches? Or again laughing at the Summoner’s bawdy payback tale about friars who despite vows of poverty went to great lengths to increase their own rich living?¹⁸ A favorite satire comes from the sixteenth century, Erasmus’s Julius Excluded from Heaven, where Pope Julius II tries to storm his way past St. Peter into heaven by bribery and use of armed soldiers while justifying his own pederasty and simony.

Such comedy comes to us from every age. It helps to laugh. And at a serious level the humor reminds us that there is a cultural religion at work in the guise of Christianity, undermining the teachings of Christ.

But let’s remember too that much of the ignorance and misuse of Christianity stem from more innocent circumstances. A vast majority of American churchgoers are well-meaning people of faith trying each day to live a moral life, wanting to be followers of Christ. We should never lose sight of this fact! People live busy lives with ever-decreasing time set aside for religious study, reflection, and meditation. Even before the COVID pandemic, the sacred and the profane had become so bifurcated in our society as to make the Sunday 11:00 a.m. hour a final bastion of religious time. Disappearing over the last 100 years were the Sunday morning Sunday school hour where young and old learned Bible stories and discussed Christian living; Sunday evening youth fellowship programs and preaching services; the Wednesday or Thursday evening prayer meetings; the prayers and meditations before meals; and the family prayers, hymn singing, and meditations before bed. Sermons and homilies had shortened from the forty minutes of yesteryear to the twenty or fifteen minutes of today. More importantly, pastoral in-home visitations had decreased. And then came the pandemic with social distancing!

Time on task is a catchphrase among educators. All professors and coaches know that true learning depends on the amount of time a student spends actively engaged in the learning process.¹⁹ The great basketballer Kobe Bryant’s practice workout included making 700 to 1,000 jump shots a day.²⁰ Not taking 700 to 1,000 shots, but making them. No wonder he was a great basketball player. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell estimated that even for those with great talent, it takes over 10,000 hours on task to become an expert on any given subject.²¹

There are no shortcuts to Christian identity. Much sometimes is made by the Christian Right of the 1962 ruling by the Supreme Court deeming school-sponsored prayer unlawful in public schools.²² More consequential, however, was the dropping of religion course requirements from the curricula of colleges and universities. Many well-educated people know a great deal about Christianity. But sometimes not. When history goes unread, it becomes easy to mistake and replace cultural religion for the deep-water affirmations of the Christian faith.

Let’s adopt a coach’s rule of thumb for our Christian living: know your playbook so well and practice so often that you react instinctively.

Considering Our Commitment

There are many other reasons beyond our busy lives for our loss of Christian roots: opportunities for service outside the church in charitable organizations; the politicization of everything, including churches, in our society; urbanization with the accompanying loss of a home church; the lessened involvement of the extended family in the lives of the young; the decrease in the size of the nuclear family, and so on.

But let me mention just two reasons peculiar to the development of American religion for our loss of roots. As American Protestantism grew following independence, adherents joined religious fellowships where they felt at home, where there were like-minded and like-hearted individuals. The act of joining was often simple, requiring little more than willingness to pledge cooperation and support for the church with tithes, time, and service. Sometimes, there was an added stipulation of a short course of study or catechism. The voluntary act of joining a church was respected as a private decision.

On balance, voluntarism, with its emphasis on persuasion, has been a liberating force. Dogmas imposed by authority must defend themselves in the public square. Dissent can be voiced without fear of life-threatening repercussions. Spiritual seekers are free to find their truth.

But other consequences also followed. Notably, theological emphasis fell disproportionally on free will, popularly translated as the choice of the believer. And the choice pertained to much other than responding or not responding to Christ. People worshiped where they felt most at home, with congregations becoming internally similar. There is a collective identity (or sameness) to American Protestant churches. For example, according to Michael Emerson and Christian Smith’s award-winning study Divided by Faith, about 90 percent of American congregations are made up of at least 90 percent of people of the same race.²³

Voluntarism

In The Lively Experiment, Sidney Mead pointed to features that were unique to institutional Protestantism as it developed during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries in America.²⁴ Different from European Christianity, American denominationalism was neither primarily confessional nor territorial. It had no formal connection with government power. Rather, an American denomination (or church, writ large) is a voluntary association of like-hearted and like-minded individuals.

The convention of supporting religious institutions by voluntary contributions of aid instead of government assistance certainly walks hand-in-hand with the religious freedom that is a hallmark of American society. In principle, all American religious groups stand on equal footing before the power of the state, while at the same time being independent of that power and independent of each other. In our society, a religious group has no coercive power in principle. A church cannot compel the acceptance of its beliefs and practices. It can only persuade.

But there is also a marketplace quality to American Protestantism. Church fellowships are in competition with each other, so-to-speak, vying for customers. And for their part, Christians become somewhat like shoppers, seeking what best matches certain predetermined expectations. Does the church staff a strong youth program for children? Is there a gymnasium in the fellowship center? Does the church offer daycare and preschool programs? Are the organist and choirs and musical selections to our liking? Is there a contemporary worship service? A traditional service? What are the facilities like? The comfort of the pews? The beauty of the stained-glass windows? What are the social standing, the educational standing, the business standing of those worshiping with us?

We do not want to minimize the importance of worshipers finding a church home. Collective identities provide meaning and belonging, group boundaries, and social solidarity. But we should also recognize the slippery slope of our church-shopping decisions. Some concerns are appropriate, others are not. The most important quality of church family is that we are one in Christ. Once baptized, we are clothed in Christ, the apostle Paul wrote. Divisions of race, social standing, and sex disappear as we become one in Christ.²⁵ Setting the self aside and having the mind and purposes of Christ is our true bond.²⁶

And the minister? Success has too often become quantified in terms of membership and budget, with a premium placed on preachers who have honed their persuasive abilities. Successful ministers are sometimes paid salaries in line with successful CEOs of secular organizations. So, it is unfortunate but not surprising that the prophetic voice from the pulpit has given way among many entrepreneurial evangelists, with the gospel message of taking up one’s cross morphing into divine promises of prosperity, good health, and wealth for the blessed adherents.²⁷ Hope without responsibility; good feeling at no cost. This is especially the case among self-appointed ministries. But even in established denominations, where there is oversight of ordination and credentialing and where the denomination appoints ministers to charges and restricts church salaries, ministers feel pressure not to say anything too controversial from the pulpit.

But let us ask: Doesn’t the loss of a prophetic voice undermine a main reason people go to church? That is, to hear what God has to say?

Insisting on Community and Nurture

Koinonia, fellowship with God and within the community of believers, is deep-water Christianity. In his book Early American Methodism, Russell Richey listed community along with order, brotherhood, and sisterhood as among the most important ideals of early Methodism.²⁸ But there is also something profoundly individualistic about the religious experience and the Christian’s walk with Jesus. Christianity both emboldens believers to give up the self in favor of becoming a member of the family of God and to affirm the self in favor of forming a personal relationship with Christ and neighbor. These are not contradictory. But there is a balance to be maintained.

More than any other groups, frontier Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians spread this concept of the church as a voluntary association of like-minded and like-hearted believers individually called into a personal relationship with Christ. Toward the end of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century, Methodist Christianity spread quickly through the efforts of itinerant ministers who filled their saddle bags with books and tracts and made their rounds among societies of the faithful, evangelizing from community to community. One of the more famous was Francis Asbury who over a forty-five-year ministry preached an estimated 16,500 sermons to gatherings on the East Coast from Staten Island to the Carolinas and westward to Tennessee and Kentucky, traveling 275,000 to 300,000 miles.²⁹ Although valuing learning, most of the itinerants and frontier evangelists, including Bishop Asbury, were not professionally trained. One of the reasons, in fact, for the success of these preachers was that they spoke the language of the people they encountered. Illustrating their sermons with everyday examples, the preachers convicted their hearers of their sins and persuaded them to give up their old life and take on a new one, clothed in Christ. And aided by the witness of those who already attended worship meetings Christianity grew rapidly among families, friends, and neighbors.

Religion gained impetus through revivals. We will examine the Second Great Awakening more closely in chapter 12. While there were wonderful aspects to this early nineteenth-century Protestant movement, some of which we will mention, it also undercut a deeper understanding of Christianity. The awakening started with Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists on the western frontier of Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio and developed as a series of camp meetings where people would congregate from miles around for a couple of weeks of hymn singing, preaching, testimonies, and social activities.³⁰ Most of the participants were farmers and small-town people. The preachers’ fervent sermons were characterized by enthusiasm and appeals to emotion; their theology stressed the sinful state of those who attended and the need for immediate conversion in order to escape the terrible fate that awaited upon death. Many of the meetings were populated by millennialists who expected Jesus’ reappearance and the end of time soon. The urgency of saving souls that would otherwise be lost to eternal damnation was such that in the minds of some preachers it justified the use of just about any psychological technique to persuade sinners to confess Christ as Lord and Savior.

The popularity of camp meetings held during the summer months, when crops were planted but not yet ready for harvest, persisted (especially in the Southeast) well into the twentieth century. Springing from the camp meetings were the traveling, town-to-town tent revivals of self-supported Pentecostal preachers that began to appear in the early 1900s.

While producing explosive growth in frontier religion, revivalism, on the other hand, did much to undermine knowledge of deeper aspects of the Christian heritage. The evangelists for the most part knew little about church history or doctrine. They did read the Bible but often appropriated a hermeneutic that stressed selected passages while ignoring others; emphasized the guidance of the Holy Spirit through individuals rather than the church; ignored the historical context of the biblical writings; and yet tended toward literalism. The approach is best described as a type of naïve biblical authoritarianism.³¹

Revivalism also emphasized the individual at the expense of the community, with the unintended consequence of undermining the strong sense of community that Methodism cherished.³² Given the emphasis placed on immediate conversions, little time in the revivals was available for Christian nurture. The hope always was that the recent convert upon leaving the revival would begin to read the Bible, find a church home, and there receive proper instruction in the faith. And that happened. But not often enough. What more commonly occurred with those who remained Christians was an emotional connection with Christ. The converts accepted Christ into their lives. They came to describe Christ as entering their hearts or walking with them, supporting them as they faced the battles of life, and converted away from drunkenness, spousal abuse, or other grievous sins.

The hurried conversions of the revivals too often allowed the new believers to experience the emotional impact of God’s saving grace without committing to a life of discipleship or understanding more fully what such life entailed. Overcome with regret over past failings and the direction of their lives, converts went to the sinners’ bench or altar, begged for God’s mercy, and threw themselves into the arms of a forgiving Jesus. Revivalism offered the opportunity for contrition, to feel oneself washed in the blood of Christ, free of sin; but much less opportunity for taking first steps on the path toward more holy living. And it certainly gave little opportunity for understanding the essential beliefs and practices that are the deep waters of Christianity.

So, let’s pause long enough to recall how distant certain aspects of this frontier religion were from the Christianity Jesus preached in the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, where he emphasized not just a leap into faith, driven perhaps by momentary emotion, but the adoption of a radically new ethic and philosophy of life. In succeeding chapters, we will explore aspects of the Wesleyan societies that developed within the evangelical wing of the Anglican Church as a model for laypersons when committing themselves to a deeper, more personal walk with Christ. Although individual commitment was required, both nurture and participation in a community of faith were hallmarks of the movement. In earliest days, in Britain as well as in America, there was an expectation that participants attend class meetings up to six months before becoming full-fledged members. And that attendance of class meetings extended after membership, as members could be expelled from the Methodist Society for not attending the class meetings.³³

In Christ

In this book, we are going to appeal for Christians to adopt a philosophy of living. It is a minor point, but worth noting, that the image of Jesus as a personal support system that emerged from revival settings and is taken for granted by much present-day Christianity is much less radical than the concept of relationship perceived by the apostle Paul who liked to use the phrase in Christ when describing Christians. Entering a relationship with Christ required giving up the self to the extent of being subsumed into Christ. In Galatians

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, Paul referred to activities and dispositions as fruits of the spirit or the flesh. His list of virtues and vices provides examples of the qualities exhibited by those who have or have not given up the self and entered into Christ. Once baptized into Christ, the Christian’s life should be characterized by kindness, goodness, patience, and such: love.

The United Methodist minister Bill Rogers from South Carolina entitled a well-known sermon Blessings and Curses. And it certainly is true that what we sometimes perceive as blessings can turn into curses and curses can become blessings. Certainly, a blessing from the curse of social distancing forced upon churchgoers by the COVID-19