Building beloved community
Special to United Methodist Insight
As we spoke in the United Methodist campus minister’s office, I noticed a photo on the wall of some thinker or theologian who had influenced him. While I don’t remember who was in the picture any longer, I can distinctly remember asking about the portrait. The campus pastor gladly told me how the person had influenced him. To avoid the embarrassing admission that I didn’t understand, I suggested that the person in the photo held the loyalty of the pastor. I offered it in the same spirit as one might identify a political loyalty, “Ah! A ‘Kennedy’ man!”
It was a jocular attempt to pivot to something else, but the campus minister didn’t remove his focus from me even as I shifted in my seat. He looked me in the eye, exuding warmth, and clarified, “Oh no, I’m a ‘Jesus’ man.”
It’s impossible to explain but in that moment a campus minister midwifed my call to ministry, birthed by the Holy Spirit, by the simple action of a unified gaze set simultaneously on me as a person in all my anxious, curious complexity and the person and work of Jesus Christ.
The UMC’s future is still about personhood, and nothing less.
The bulk of the ink of the covenant is spent with unflinching view toward the inclusion and elevation of all persons, and especially marginalized persons in the community of the United Methodist Church. In ways that will surely and by design not always be comfortable the Covenant commits to deep reflection at every level of the UMC. Its aspirations are searching, seeking to acknowledge and redress historic wrongs towards persons of color, LGBTQIA+ persons, Indigenous communities, and the socially and economically marginalized. It is worth noting that the covenant goes so far as to even see and extend mercy in the name of Jesus Christ to those who cannot agree with the practical conclusions it makes. The Covenant is understandably coming from an institutional construct and focused on structural issues, but without ever taking its eye from the reality that structural issues impact people. The message is clear, even if the UMC is distressingly enmeshed in processes reckoning with its past, the future of the UMC must be about personhood.
Remarkable are not only the practical efforts to extend a line of sight to persons who have been at best marginalized and at worst traumatized by the United Methodist Church, but how this work of recognition flows from a gaze also firmly fixed on the person and work of Jesus Christ as described in the baptismal covenant of the United Methodist Church. The importance of the vision of the UMC’s future being comprehensive of both cannot be overstated.
It is conceivable that United Methodists might attempt, as many other traditions have done, to fashion a future for themselves out of something other than who Jesus Christ is and what God is doing in him for the persons he came to reconcile and redeem.
An example of this kind of alternative approach comes to light in an address given by Timothy Tennent of Asbury Theological Seminary. In an effort to create a framework for excluding LGBTQIA+ persons Tennent invoked the Trinity. He explained how the nuclear family can be understood as an icon of the Trinity, a way of understanding the working of God. In so doing he certainly projected his own values and cultural norms onto God and not only pushed marginalized persons to the side, but the person and work of Christ aside as well. This is just the kind of tendency Kathryn Tanner warns against when she writes, “Human beings share in trinitarian relations as mere human beings with all the differences that finitude and sin appropriately make to those relations (...) human relations might hope to gain that height by being united with the trinity and thereby incorporated within its own life, as the trinity itself makes that possible by its coming graciously into the world to us in Christ” (Tanner 245-245).
As heirs of John Wesley, we are heirs as well to the astonishingly distinct theological premise that the person and work of Jesus Christ is not limited to only some persons but extends without qualification to every frail and finite being. Incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection are all terms that point us to the reality of God’s personhood united with human personhood in an irrevocable way. These actions of God in Christ not only include all persons in the life of God but open the potential for all persons to be elevated and transformed into ever deepening participation in the life and relationship of divine love which never ends.
While there are even now paradigms emerging in which something other than the person and work of Jesus serve as the well of inspiration, a theology with Jesus Christ and the individual persons he identifies and elevates by his action in the world at the center, is far preferable and the distinctly Methodist option.
Ultimately, a significant test of the UMC will be how faithful it remains to these intentions and the shape of theological reflection laid out in the NCJ’s Covenant. Will we be able to hold Jesus Christ as the center of our devotion and illumination in the works of discipleship, justice, and mercy in our time? Even as we tackle systemic issues, can we, by keeping Christ in view consistently also extend a warm recognition to the persons who come in search of Jesus?
In its gaze, set both on the personhood of people called, in search of God and the person of Jesus Christ the North Central Jurisdiction has helpfully reminded all that the UMC’s future is STILL about personhood, and nothing less. As a person who was found in the embrace of a vision mighty as this, I am stirred to hope the UMC has a future after all.
Tanner, Kathryn. Christ the Key. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK. 2010.