Coming To Faith The Hard Way

For some time, Donald Haynes has been writing interesting and challenging columns for the United Methodist Reporter, a high quality denominational newspaper. In a recent piece, he details what he believes has gone wrong with the denomination's efforts to transmit its theological heritage effectively to its members. One assertion in particular is a real eye-poker, to the effect that emphasis on the development of character through "rational enlightenment" has been substituted for emphasis on the making of disciples through openness to the Holy Spirit. With respect especially to the nurturing of children in the church, conversion has been replaced by confirmation.

In this season of Confirmation Sundays in many churches, I have been thinking a lot about this remark. One of my own most memorable experiences of how confirmation can go wrong, in Dr. Haynes' sense, involved a family's surprise turn-up at the chancel rail during a worship service one Sunday morning. They came with with their 12-year-old daughter, whom I had received into membership the previous week with her Confirmation Class. As the family made its way with great dignity down the center aisle during the second hymn, a staff member raced in from the side to thrust a bowl of water into my hands and explain quickly that the parents had forgotten to mention before confirmation training began that their daughter had never been baptized, and that they had just revealed this fact as the rest of us were proceeding into the sanctuary with the choir.

It did not seem to me to be a big deal at the moment to shift into the baptismal liturgy and bring this newest church member's initiation experience to conclusion, even if in reverse order. But to our quickly intensifying consternation, the deal was big to her, although not in the way any of us could have expected. She --- I will call her Betsy --- looked at her parents with anguish, asked plaintively what she was doing up there, fidgeted when her mother reminded her that "we've been all through this," and then, with a little prodding from her dad, smiled sweetly as she answered the questions I asked her and as she let me drip water on her head.

After the service that morning, I tracked down Betsy in the Fellowship Hall to see if she would share with me what had been going on with her earlier. She told me that she had known that she was the only member of her Confirmation Class who had not been baptized, but that she saw no reason why this should get in the way of getting signed up for church membership with all of her peers. "After all,'' she said, "I got all my homework right." For a moment, I wondered if there might be any way to declare a baptism null and void.

But baptism is not the real issue here; conversion is. Not in the sense that Dr. Haynes uses the latter term. He seems to mean by it a personal experience of some sort, as a prerequisite to living the Christian life with some sense of accountability, and that encouraging it should be made something like a linchpin of the discipling process. I am not sure about this, and I will not accept his attribution "liberal" for not being sure about it. What I am sure about is that the Christian gospel does both speak of and call for conversion in the sense of a conscious decision to turn one's attitude, decision-making, behavior, and relationships in a direction imitative of Jesus', and that without conversion in this sense, we have at best only the outward form of faith, without the inner substance. Betsy finished confirmation training, as did her classmates, un-converted in this latter sense. And it was almost inevitable that she and they would do so, for the reason that Dr. Haynes cites: teaching people about things --- some of them even religious --- has become an easier way to bring and keep them in the church than praying for them to be converted.

I cannot agree with Donald Haynes that modern Christian education is the great spoiler of preaching enthusiastically for conversion and of learning truly about sin and grace. But I cannot agree with modern educational approaches that make Christian learning too easy, either. Censoring the Old Testament, apocalypticizing the Lord Jesus, and deifying the dogmas, by way of examples, make genuine conversion all the more difficult. The lonesome valley that leads to faith is one that each must travel alone, in part by asking all the questions we can think of along the way, and hoping sometimes against hope that there will be an educator or two turning up every now and then who knows the importance of not making the struggle too easy for us.

One More Time Around On Homosexuality

Recently, the United Methodist Church's General Conference reaffirmed the denomination's long-standing position that homosexual practice is "incompatible" with Christian teaching. In the minds of many, the harshness of this position can still be offset by holding to a distinction between personhood, orientation, and practice, and confining the condemnation (it amounts to just that, a condemnation) to the latter. But a conceptual distinction like this yields at best only a trembling foundation upon which to base the denomination's teaching on homosexuality.

The trembling must have been pretty evident throughout the most recent deliberations. What came to the Conference for action was the majority recommendation of a legislative committee to replace the traditional statement about incompatibility with a more irenic one acknowledging that faithful people disagree about homosexuality and that all together still seek a "faithful witness" on the matter. Eventually, roughly five delegates out of every nine agreed that there was no disagreement among the faithful on the matter, and then went on to reject the majority report of the committee and to vote to retain the current statement in The Book of Discipline. About four out of every nine agreed that there was in fact disagreement on the matter, and agreed to disagree with the majority who voted against the majority report, by voting for the majority report. (Are you getting all this? Not every delegate did.) So much for the search, together, for a faithful witness, until perhaps at yet the next General Conference, four years down the road.

Hopefully, whether "United" or not, Methodists will not wait this long. For there are a number of things to keep thinking about as a result of this recently concluded gathering. For one, I at least was pleasantly surprised at the extent of support for the recommendation to get rid of the incompatibility reference in the denomination's present statement on homosexuality. It suggests that a respectable majority of the next generation of General Conference delegates may be ready to acknowledge honestly the fact that there is disagreement, and a lot of it, among conscientious Christians everywhere on the issue of homosexuality. In light of this fact, any church's blanket declaration of its incompatibility with Christian teachings is premature, arrogant, and un-Christianly alienating.

Two other things happened in the midst of this latest debate that especially caught my eye. One was the very influential speech of Eddie Fox, the World Methodist Council's director of world evangelism and as fine a candidate for Protestant sainthood as I know. But even saints run amok theologically sometimes, just like the rest of us do even more often. On the issue of homosexuality, I have to part company with this much admired colleague in ministry. Eddie sees it as a violation of an "order of creation" which he believes Jesus enunciated at Matthew 19:4-6, going back to Genesis' account of God's creation of men and women and of the marriage relationship.

Dear friend in Christ, I know you take this whole passage as from the Master himself, but for the life of me I myself cannot reconcile it with Mark 10, according to which this same Jesus provided no escape clause from marriage of any sort, not even for adultery (contrast Matthew 19:9). I am not nit-picking here, my brother. These differences simply mean that we cannot settle big issues about human sexuality without a lot more work on understanding biblical passages, especially those in conflict with one another, contextually as well as normatively. And then, of course, there is the frequently overlooked fact that arguments from "the order of creation" can be and have been put to outrageous uses that include the justification of slavery, the oppression of women, and the prohibition of abortion, all the way to the refusal of blood transfusions for a severely injured child.

The second thing that caught my eye about the General Conference debate on homosexuality was its relatively tortured quality, compared to the ease with which another issue of human sexuality --- transgender identity --- slid by with almost no public attention at all. Remember reading about the United Methodist pastor who "transitioned" from female to male, and retained his pastoral appointment in the process? A lot of people were salivating over the prospect of the Conference's taking action that would have removed this (man) from the ordained ministry. I think the delegates are owed a round of applause for not doing so. The "order of nature" is obviously a lot more complicated than most people like to think it is, and it is especially complicated when the value judgments we make about sexual identity and sexual preference are at stake. One woman achieves the first by embracing her masculine side within herself. Another achieves it by embracing her feminine side within a same-sex relationship. To God, what's the difference?